In Theodora’s world a wet finger could have pressed the cardboard church, and pressed, until the smoking sky showed through. Sometimes an iron tram careered quite dangerously along the spine of a hill. People mopping their heads wondered uneasily into what they sank in Theodora Goodman’s eyes. People casually looking were sucked in by some disturbance that was dark and strange.
It was after the war some time, a year or two perhaps, that people began to talk about the tragedy of Jack Frost. Frost was a pastrycook. He kept a shop in George Street to which people went, the people who had names and good addresses, but Jack Frost himself lived in a street in Clovelly which was just a street. One Sunday Jack Frost cut the throats of his wife and three little girls. Just like that. Then, when he had locked his house, he walked to Central Station, where he was taken, asking for a ticket to a place of which he had forgotten the name.
The Jack Frost case caused quite a stir. People talked. They saw the shop. It was painted a dark green. And inside the window cakes stood on stiff stands, puffs blowing clouds of cream, and tarts high with black cherries, with paper doilies underneath. When the Jack Frost tragedy occurred, people were reminded of themselves in the shop, buying the murderer’s cakes, and passing the time of day. But it was horrible. Always so decent and polite, under it all Frost was mad, to kill his wife and three little girls. Unhinged by the war, of course. He had served, the papers said, in France. And Truth, which people began to buy, not from their newsagents, but over the garden fence, Truth had a full account, with photographs. It had a letter which Jack Frost wrote in his madness before he did the deed.
Dear All (wrote Jack Frost),
It come to this. I come home this evening, I seen your faces Winnie, Evelyn, Thelma, and Zoë, I see us all sitting round the table buttering our scones for Sunday tea. I saw as you didn’t know what was in the next room. Then I say to meself I will pin up them smiles so as we can all walk out, though maybe the Judge won’t agree.
Dear All, you will forgive me, yes I know, because it is already done, and now, my dears, we shall see.
Your ever loving dad and husband,
Jack Frost
It was terrible, they said, and indecent, to print madness for the public to read. People were moved far more deeply than they were by the bodies of lumpy girls, which appear so monotonously and anonymously on wasteland in the suburbs. The Frost case was worse, they said. They felt his cakes in their stomachs. They saw the dark hairs on his wrist as he handed back the change. The Frost case was very close, and for that reason they felt sick, and could not understand.
They were discussing it in the drawing-room, Mother, and Mrs Ewart, and a Miss Stevenson with a gold tooth, who had been brought for the first time. There was also Mr Clarkson, who had been recommended to Mrs Goodman by the Parrotts as solicitor.
Miss Stevenson with the gold tooth shuddered, and fingered the top of her glove. She always avoided murders, she said. There were so many nice things in the world.
‘But to think,’ said Mrs Ewart. ‘Those three little girls. They looked such nice little girls. The three. If only it had been one. Or even two.’
‘That, Connie,’ said Mrs Goodman, ‘is irrelevant detail. We were discussing the ethics of the case.’
Mr Clarkson said the whole incident had been distorted out of its true proportion, and the room listened, because he was a man. The Jack Frost murders had struck a chord of mass hysteria, which was always waiting to sound, and now particularly, since the war, since people had been left high and dry by other horrors. Now the individual was free to take the centre of the stage again and dramatize himself.
‘Don’t you agree, Miss Goodman?’ asked Mr Clarkson.
He was a bald man, with strong, clean hands.
‘Partly,’ said Theodora. ‘It is very personal. I find it difficult. Quite honestly. Difficult to discuss. I have thought about it. And it is still so close. Like something one has done oneself.’
Mrs Goodman cleared some phlegm from her throat in an exasperated, throaty spasm.
‘Theodora, Mr Clarkson, sometimes has pretensions to be unusual,’ Mrs Goodman said.
‘It is understandable that Miss Goodman should feel as she does,’ said Mr Clarkson.
And he straightened a pearl that pinned his tie.
Theodora did not hear this, as she had gone out on to the balcony. In the room she had been disturbed, by its various undertones, and Mr Clarkson, he was the most disturbing of all, because kindness wears an expression that expects truth. Now she stood by herself on the cramped lower balcony, from which it was barely possible to see the bay. The landscape at which she looked was quite devoid of complexity. There was a smooth breeze in the big Moreton Bay fig. The afternoon was, in fact, as settled as the voices of middle age that murmured through the glass door, except that Theodora continued to see Jack Frost’s irreproachable façade, through which Frost himself had finally dared to pitch the stone.
Then Mr Clarkson came outside. Miss Goodman, he could see, was in a state of nerves. Her skin jumped.
‘I came out here to get the air,’ she said.
Her silence added that she hoped she would be left. But Mr Clarkson, who had the smooth texture and the smoky smell of rich, thick-set men of forty, did not hear silences.
‘I like your view, Miss Goodman,’ Mr Clarkson said. ‘It is my view reversed. If I stand on my balcony I can see yours. There, you see, the yellow house, beside the church.’
And he pointed at a square of stone, in a blur of trees, on the ridge that formed the opposite arm of the bay.
‘You must come one day and see for yourself.’
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I go out very little.’
‘All the more reason then.’
His voice compelled her to make the balcony her universe, outside which the sound of trees swam, words in the room, and the ripple of a dove. It would be very easy, she felt, to allow the kindness, the affluence, the smoky voice of Mr Clarkson to engulf. But because of this she resisted. She could feel her neck, under its lace frill, stiffen into bone. She hoped, with both her hands, to take refuge in her ugliness. Now she summoned it up from all the reflections that had ever faced her in the glass.
‘You will not find me very good company, Mr Clarkson,’ said Theodora Goodman’s mouth.
That she turned on him, her dark lips, that made a thin seam in the yellow skin. There were moments, said Huntly Clarkson, when Theodora Goodman was no longer scraggy, her head a strange dark flower on its long stem, but defensive, with a strange dark smell, like a lily that folds its lips secretively on a fly.
‘This question of company,’ he said, ‘is something for me to decide. The people who love us have a habit of sticking on labels that are never acceptable, and very seldom correct.’
‘Oh, and this is my daughter Theodora,’ Mrs Goodman had said. ‘Of course, you will know my younger girl, Fanny Parrott. At her mother-in-law’s. Fanny is a great favourite. With everyone.’
Mrs Goodman had let all this escape through her veil, in a last gasp of breath, the first morning, after the stairs. She wanted, she said, advice on many little things, none of them important, but still, it is always comforting to know that there is somebody to ask. Mrs Parrott had suggested, implied Mrs Goodman, that Mr Clarkson would offer that comfort and advice. Mr Clarkson agreed, amiably, above his desk, which was prosperous and broad, and at which he could already feel the tyranny of Mrs Goodman aimed. He noticed that she was a small, neat, hateful woman, with small, neat, buckled shoes, and many rings. She sat in the light and kept her ankles crossed. But her daughter sat in shadow, and drew with her parasol on the floor characters that he could not read. The daughter’s face was shadow under her large and timeless hat. Her clothes were quiescent and formalized as stone.