He said that it was time the dam filled, looking still at the lighted house.
Oh, God, she would have said, go, go, or stay, let us throw aside words. Now she felt that only the hands tell. To take in her lap the palpitating moon.
She heard spurs.
‘I must go in and see the others,’ Frank was saying.
But awkwardly, as if he would not leave her, as if he needed help, and she could only sit straight and impotent as the tree.
‘Very well,’ she said. ‘You will find them. I shall stay a little longer. Until it rains.’
She heard his spurs disappear slowly through the grass and into the house. Then a bird flew through the air. Then a dog barked. Then it was Frank’s horse completing a circle as he cropped closer. But it was all motion subtracted from motive. Even when the rain fell, the heavy, spreading drops, covering her forehead and her hair.
‘This is what we have been waiting for,’ she said: ‘The rain.’
But it did not convince.
‘You see, Theo?’ Frank called. ‘The rain!’
He had come out of the house and was taking his horse. His voice was very loud through the soft, fleshy splashing of the big rain.
‘So long, Theo,’ he called. ‘It’s a soaker.’
And now he was a long streak of metal down the road.
Theodora went inside, under the sound of rain on the roof. She began to unstick her hair from her forehead, when Fanny came through the lamplight into the room.
‘Theo, darling,’ Fanny said. ‘I have something to tell you, Theo. Frank Parrott has asked me to marry him, and I have said yes.’
Fanny sat on the edge of the bed.
‘Oh, yes, Fanny dear,’ said Theodora. ‘Frank asked. Why, yes.’
No gong could have beat louder.
‘We shall take our time,’ Fanny said. ‘I don’t dislike long engagements.’
Theodora Goodman puffed out her hair that the rain had wet. In her left temple, in the rather yellow skin, there was a long blue vein. She had to look at this vein. For the moment it was the most significant detail of geography. She could not stare enough. If only not at her own eyes.
‘Long engagements,’ said Theodora, ‘give one an opportunity to collect.’
‘Of course,’ said Fanny.
She was very lovely, soft, and thoughtful. You remembered the flesh of early roses, but under the skin you could read arithmetic.
‘Mother is very pleased,’ said Fanny. ‘Because it is really quite an event. Something for the district, I mean.’
‘Why, here,’ said Theodora, ‘is Mother’s little silver paperknife.’
And it was. On the dressing table.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, as she took it in her hand to say good night. ‘You see. You were right.’
‘Yes,’ said Mother, ‘I was right.’
She looked up. There was never any question. It could not have been otherwise. It was like this between mother and daughter. Mrs Goodman took up the paper-knife in her small hand on which the garnets shone.
‘I would be very sorry to lose that little paper-knife,’ she said thoughtfully.
Theodora waited. She waited to see if there was anything else she would be expected to give. She had come for this purpose. To her mother.
‘Fanny told you?’ asked Mrs Goodman.
‘Yes,’ said Theodora, ‘she told me.’
‘I am glad. It is an excellent match,’ said Mrs Goodman. ‘Our Fanny Parrott. You will have to keep my spirits up, Theo dear.’
Her lips were dry on Theodora’s cheek.
Frank Parrott went away after that, to Victoria, to buy a bull. But it did not matter whether he stayed or went, after the accomplished fact, because Fanny had much to think about, to enjoy. Sitting late in her morning gown, she was big with the future, you would have said, she already felt its shape. So that Frank Parrott, the man who was responsible, was no longer so very significant. He was allowed to lapse after the act. Fanny wrote to Victoria, but it was not so much a letter to Frank Parrott as a kind of automatic writing which the future inspired.
‘Theodora,’ Mrs Goodman said, ‘has grown thin and yellow.’
‘Yes,’ said Theodora, ‘it has been a trying summer.’
The hills were burnt yellow. Thin yellow scurf lay on the black skin of the hills, which had worn into black pockmarks where the eruptions had taken place. And now the trees were more than ever like white bones. Out of all this exhaustion formed the clear expectant weather of autumn, smelling of chrysanthemums and first frost. Theodora filled the house with the gold chrysanthemums. Their stalks snapped and ran strong sap in her hands.
Father sat against the windowful of pines, with a plaid across his shoulders for the cold that had not yet arrived.
‘Theodora,’ he said, ‘in the end I never saw Greece, because your mother would not come. She said it was a primitive country, full of bugs and damp sheets and dysentery. So we went to Vienna.’
Father’s voice complaining was the voice of an old man, and, of course, because Father was old, his beard was white. Even so, it had just happened.
‘I have been nowhere,’ Theodora said.
She bent and kissed him. She was kissing, she felt, not Father, but an old man. An old man complaining in a Greek play. And she felt sad. She was sad for Meroã. Because it was coming to an end. The play would finish, after the blaze of gold.
Soon, in fact, the house was full of the smell of dead chrysanthemums, which are more than dead flowers, they are the smell of death. Only statues can resist the smell of dead chrysanthemums.
So that when Theodora woke in the night she heard that it was happening. Her heart was cold. Heavy skeins of smoke fell from the lit candle. The folds of her nightgown fell from her like folds of falling wax, from which her hair streamed. She was walking in the passages of Meroã, a reflection walking through mirrors, towards the door which had always been more mirror than door, and at which she was now afraid to look.
Inside the room, of which the windows were open, Father lay on the couch. He was close, closer than her own thought, and at the same time distant, like someone in a public house. This was also George Goodman, a decent cove, educated, but weak and lazy, said the men in the street outside the Hotel Imperial.
Now this George Goodman looked at her a little bit puzzled. But her own close thought spoke to her from his mouth and said, ‘I am glad that you have come, Theodora. I thought that you would. Because I know I am going to die.’
She streamed out beside him on the carpet, kneeling, touching his knees. Her breath was hoarse. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not yet, Father. No’
His voice was as pale as the grey light that now sucked and whispered at the pines.
‘But there is no reason, my dear Theodora, why I should go on living. I have finished.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘not yet.’
She would throw her strength against this stone that he kept rolling on her mouth.
‘And we are close,’ he said. ‘It is not possible for us to come any closer.’
But it was for this that she buried her face in his knees. Time spread out before his almost extinguished voice, a great shiny metal funnel on which her hands slipped.
‘In the end,’ his voice said, out of the pines, ‘I did not see it.’
Then Theodora, with her face upon his knees, realized that she was touching the body of George Goodman, grazier, who had died that morning.
She walked out through the passages, through the sleep of other people. She was thin as grey light, as if she had just died. She would not wake the others. It was still too terrible to tell, too private an experience. As if she were to go into the room and say: Mother, I am dead, I am dead, Meroã has crumbled. So she went outside where the grey light was as thin as water and Meroã had in fact, dissolved. Cocks were crowing the legend of day, but only the legend. Meroã was grey water, grey ash. Then Theodora Goodman cried.