‘Where should she be?’ said Theodora. ‘With her husband.’
‘There is no need to snap at me, dear.’
But now Mrs Goodman was consoled, now that she had been handed a photographic group. This was what she had been waiting for. Frank and Fanny Parrott on the steps. Frank had not enlisted of course. He had family obligations. He was buying a place. He would own many sheep and become a figure in the country. It was decided from the start that time would not stand still for Frank and Fanny Parrott.
Dearest Theodora (Fanny Parrott wrote in time),
It is just a week since we took possession at Audley, and everything is still so topsy-turvy I can scarcely collect my thoughts to write. There are packing cases in the hall, builders in the kitchen quarters, and shavings everywhere! But I must do my best to describe our place, I am so excited, it so far exceeds all that Frank had said. By this I mean the house, and not the land, because land is just land, and Frank says he is pleased with the stock, so I suppose he is. But the house, Theo, is so lovely, a new shiny brick, you would say quite new, with little balconies and gables, and shiny turrets like a medieval castle, and some of the windows are divided up by lead into those little lozenges. I feel I am in Europe! There is a fine gravel drive leading up to the porch, which gives a house an unusual air in the country, and there are neat rose-beds, really beautifully laid out, not like our higgledy-piggledy old rose garden at Meroã.
Inside there are several big and magnificent rooms which we shall not use, except when we entertain, and a study for Frank, and a little room which I shall call my boudoir and live in mostly. It was a stroke of fortune, such a house, with what Frank says is the right land, but sometimes it does give me the shivers, when I go through the rooms where they found Mr Buchanan, but they say he was alwa
s unstable, and once as a boy had opened his veins with a razor, now this tragedy with a pistol. They say he had a mistress, quite a common woman, who used to take baths in milk, like some empress, wasn’t it!
I forgot to say there are five spare rooms, and one room we shall use for a nursery — when! Dear Theodora, it will be such a joy, but of course there is plenty of time, and I am determined to enjoy my life, because you never know, and this sad war, we might have gone to Europe.
Now, what about you, Theo? Some time I mean to have a straight talk, because we both feel it is time you married, someone quiet and steady, not necessarily exciting, because this would not be the right kind of man, I mean the kind you like. So I am going to rack my brains, and then I shall insist.
Darling, I wonder if you would do something for me. I wonder if you would buy six yards of blue velvet to match the enclosed pattern of silk, if you can find it. This dreadful, ravaging war! The poor Hetheringtons have lost their second son. So sad.
Frank says I must get you to stay as our first visitor and ask over at the same time some good-looking young man.
My love to dearest Mother, I hope she is not bored, and to you, of course, Theodora, lots.
Your loving
Fanny
P.S. I saw that Una MacKenzie (Russell that was). She was quite green when she heard about my house, and that vulgar husband, they say he is on the booze!
P.P.S. Daisy Ritchie has had the Vice-Regals to stay. I am puzzling my head where she put them, it is such a very miserable house, with only recently a W.C., and the door of that doesn’t lock.
Reading the letter from Fanny, Theodora sat again on the bed. They were darning stockings, in midsummer, at Meroã, and Fanny was eighteen. This had remained her age. Fanny loved the glossy things, to take up by handfuls, and hold, and keep. Theodora touched the little square of pale blue silk, for matching which she would receive a husband. If Fanny did not forget, between altering the kitchen quarters and entertaining in the magnificent, ordinarily closed rooms. Although Fanny’s face was closed to her own reality, there were times when Theodora loved her, the child of eighteen, smooth and pretty as a square of pale blue silk. It is these little tangible moments, she felt, that make the blood relationships almost congruous.
‘What is that you have got, Theodora?’ Mrs Goodman asked.
‘It is a letter from Fanny.’
‘My girl doesn’t write to me any more,’ Mrs Goodman complained.
‘But it is the same thing. You may read it.’
‘I thought perhaps there might be something you did not want me to see.’
She took the letter that she would read once, twice, from her daughter Fanny Parrott, who spoke to her in words. Mrs Goodman read with pleased indifference of Fanny Parrott’s magnificence. Because her own day for this was done, she could not altogether believe that magnificence existed still. Though it would suit Fanny, when it would never have done for Theodora. Theodora, she said, is an old maid. And the sheet of paper tittered in her hand over Fanny’s nonsense about husbands. Men came to the house sometimes even now, and Theodora sat with them, but without the brilliance and deception they expect and need. Mrs Goodman listened to them take their hats and go, and she knew from their feet on the carpet they would go home undisturbed to bed.
But on the evenings when no one came, Mrs Goodman said, ‘Theodora, fetch the cards. Let us try a hand or two.’
Then Mrs Goodman would make marriages with Spanish pomp. She would tingle with hate and love in anticipation of the little kiss.
‘This fine lady,’ she muttered, ‘is waiting to be kissed. If he can get through. No, no, he won’t. He can’t!’
She held her cards in a firm fan.
Sometimes Theodora could feel the hatred in her mother’s hand. She could feel the pressure of the rings. Sometimes the mirrors swelled into the room, and the chandelier prepared its avalanche of glass. But mostly Theodora did not care.
‘Look, it is your game,’ she said.
‘It is no fun,’ said Mrs Goodman, ‘when one’s opponent does not try.’
Sometimes on these occasions she was like a one-eyed queen squinting for weaknesses.
‘I shall read till I feel sleepy,’ Mrs Goodman said.
But from the cover of her book her hand peered, diamond-eyed. She waited to snap the covers and say: You are caught, I saw you quail, I saw your soul gape open like a wound. It was the great tragedy of Mrs Goodman’s life that she had never done a murder. Her husband had escaped into the ground, and Theodora into silences. So that she still had to kill, and there were moments when she could have killed herself.
The day Theodora threw down her hat and said, ‘They say it is over, Mother. We shall have peace.’
‘Peace?’ Mrs Goodman murmured, studying its implications. ‘Then you won’t have to work in that canteen. You shall stay at home and rest.’
Her rings scraped on each other. She was the one-eyed queen, scanning a situation in which lay her last hope.
Theodora saw this, but more often than not it went on like a distant and rather wooden charade. She cultivated a vision of distance. The whole landscape became a distance, even when she walked close, under fire from scarlet salvia.
Summertime the whole air burned scarlet with salvia. She closed her eyes, let it become her smile, and in this airy disintegration there was some peace. To trail like the path of a hornet through the tasselled pepper trees. To mingle the glow of her scarlet parasol on the asphalt hill. Scarlet lit her face. It ran like blood beneath her brown skin. So that people stopped to look, sensing something strange, mopping their heads on the hot hill. But Theodora Goodman walked slowly through their glances, into the sound of the thin steeple, of the little spiky church, that stood protesting in the glow of summer.