But Mother had not embarked. Her world had always been enclosed by walls, her Ithaca, and here she would have kept the suitors at bay, not through love and patience, but with suitable conversation and a stick. Mother would have said in the end: Oh, here you are, and about time too, I was bored. What, you have seen witches and killed giants? Ah, but Ianthe, a good cook, though a horrid girl, has beaten an octopus a hundred and forty times on a stone and simmered it for eight hours in wine, and I have offered a calf to Aphrodite if she will produce six yards of purple out of the air.
Instead of all this, the more carnal Mrs Goodman said, ‘I shall read. I shall read this library book that has been forced on me by Connie Ewart. Though why? Why Connie thinks I should read the latest dirty book.’
‘It is not necessary, Mother,’ said Theodora. ‘There are plenty of clean ones in the house.’
‘No. I shall read it. I shall read the book that Connie so inexcusably brought. It is dirty. It is quite foul. But it is interesting as a commentary on modern life.’
Mrs Goodman read many books. This was her life, with tea, and bezique, and conversation. Her years piled up, finically, like matchsticks on the knottier logs of time, while outside the novels from the library, history was telling a story, only faintly at first, but growing in importance and alarm, until they had begun to put it in the morning paper, in serial form.
‘What do you think?’ people asked. ‘Will it be bad? What does Theodora think?’
‘Why should Theodora think?’ said Mrs Goodman. ‘Theodora is only a girl. She has had no experience. My solicitor tells me it is most serious. I remember once seeing the Kaiser in Berlin. Theodora, I asked you to leave the window open, and you shut it.’ ‘You asked me to shut it, Mother.’
‘You always misinterpret what I say. Yes, as I was saying. In Berlin. And I shuddered then. Ah, but you don’t know Berlin. It is full of chariots with rearing horses. And the men shave their heads.’
Now, for Mrs Goodman, the chariots moved, the horses reared higher, out of the moment in which they had been sculptured, the shaven heads were set in motion, as she sat in her room remembering her personal distaste. It was always largely personal. The horrors of war touched her in theory. She knew what expression to wear on her face. But it was for something that would remain outside her experience, in Europe, where her age and income precluded her admission. She was glad. I am old, she said, as if she had bought her way out of any further responsibility.
But Theodora walked in the streets. There were flags in the streets. There was crying. There was crying on the wharves, and in the upper rooms, where the bed ached, under the electric light which had been forgotten. Its bright bulb made little headway against the general shapelessness that was taking possession.
Once under a lamp-post there was a drunk sitting, whose face was a green lozenge, who called to Theodora from the kerb, and said, ‘You are walkin’, sis, as if you didn’t expect no end.’
‘I was thinking,’ Theodora answered from the darkness.
‘That is the trouble,’ said the man, ‘if you’ll excuse me, missus, is it? Thinkin’ leads to all this perpendicular emotion. You must listen to your belly and the soles of your feet. That’s what I been doin’, sis. An’ my bloody stomach tells me there’ll be a bloody end.’
‘I hope you are right,’ said Theodora Goodman.
‘It stands ter nature. You can fill a man up, sis. Up to a point. But ’e’ll spew it out. An’ then ’e’ll be right as rain.’
She began to be tired of the man’s face, and not altogether convinced by philosophy. She began to move, because she did not know what ėlse to do.
‘You goin’?’ he said. ‘Thought we was havin’ a talk.’
‘Good night,’ she called. ‘I shall think about what you said.’
‘Cripes, no,’ said the man. ‘It don’t bear it. Buy yourself a drink on Bert Kelly.’
The long green shape of his face sprouted from the kerb, yearning outwards, after some unseen rain.
‘Oh, mummy, mummy,’ sighed the m
n, ‘I feel as sick as sin.’
The next day Theodora Goodman got herself a job in a canteen. Whether she listened to them or not, the soles of her feet ached, which was preferable to the aching of darkness. She stood under the girders, amongst the urns, and sometimes a face searched her for more than change, the clear faces with the bronze eyelids, or thick white drooping faces with secretive, porous skins. Under the girders the urns exhausted themselves in steam. The air was as poignant as the air of railway stations. There was, of course, the same coming and going, the same solitariness even in a crowd. One man showed her a picture he had taken from a Hun. It was a photograph of two girls, two sisters, of whom the elder was wearing a locket. Staring and smiling out of the cracks of the soldier’s hand, the faces of the girls expressed a belief in continuity, at least up to the moment when the photographer had squeezed the bulb. Theodora remembered the picture, and sometimes wondered at what point the illusion of individual will had succumbed to the universal dream.
‘Theodora is wearing herself to a shadow,’ confided Mrs Goodman.
There was not so much pity in her voice as a horrid suspicion that a shadow might escape. This kept Mrs Goodman breathless with anxiety. She would sit. She would sit and think, and listen for Theodora’s key, and her long step, which would make her irritable. She sat and longed to be made irritable again.
‘It is all very well,’ Mrs Goodman said. ‘But at this hour, I thought something must have happened.’
‘A ship arrived,’ Theodora said.
She had begun to hate their thin house. You could open the compartments of the house and know, according to the hour, exactly what to find, an old woman grumbling at her combinations or laying out a patience, a young woman offering objects of appeasement, or looking out of the window, or switching off the light. It was better in darkness. Theodora was less conscious of her mother’s eyes. Because when there was nothing left to say, Mrs Goodman could still look.
This is my daughter Theodora, Mrs Goodman did not say, but looked, my daughter Theodora, who is unlike me either in behaviour or in body, and who at best was an odd, sallow child in that yellow dress which was such a mistake. If it were Fanny, ah, Fanny is different, who wore pink, and married well, and is a bright young woman. I remember a morning when she pricked her finger, embroidering a sampler, and I sucked the blood oozing from her little finger. Fanny was my child. But Theodora ran away and hid, or sulked about the country with that rifle, which made us all ridiculous. Theodora hides still, in the darker corners of the house, amongst the furniture, or she hides her face in a silence and thinks I cannot see. Now that her sense of duty to the world sends her to work in a canteen, she hopes that this may absolve her from duty to her mother. But I think and hope that she will not be so heartless. If I could be certain. Life would be simpler, neater, more consoling, if we could take the hearts of those who do not quite love us and lock them in a little box, something appropriate in mother-o’-pearl. Then I would say: Theodora, now that you are hollow, my words will beat on your soul for ever so that it answers regularly as an African drum, in words dictated by myself, of duty and affection. As it is, you are a hard, plain, egotistical young woman who will never interpret the meaning of love.
Instead Mrs Goodman complained, in words, into the darkness. ‘Theodora, why must we sit without the light?’ Her words were soft, and old, and hurt.
‘Because it is more soothing,’ said the voice of Theodora. ‘I was tired.’
‘Just as you think,’ said the old soft voice of Mrs Goodman. ‘I wonder where Fanny is,’ it sighed.