‘Then we shall see something of each other,’ Mrs Goodman commanded. ‘I shall expect you at our house.’
So it had come to that. On the balcony. In the afternoon.
‘He is my solicitor,’ said Mrs Goodman to Mrs Ewart and the gold-toothed Miss Stevenson. ‘He is Dolly Armstrong’s nephew. He is rich. He is a widower. Yes, I believe it was sad. Quite young. But there you are. He has everything else in life. His house is full of exquisite things.’
‘Tell us, Julia, now,’ asked Mrs Ewart, ‘is Theo interested at all? Poor Theo. It would be nice.’
‘I am too discreet to ask,’ Mrs Goodman said. ‘But Theodora is a fool. She is a stick with men.’
Miss Stevenson tweaked at the top of her glove. Her position had grown delicate.
‘I only thought,’ said Mrs Ewart, ‘it would be so nice.’
‘But what would Mr Clarkson want with Theodora?’ Mrs Goodman asked.
‘If you would come,’ said Mr Clarkson, ‘I would show you my fox terriers. I would ask you to lunch.’
Doves drowsed in the afternoon, in the sea glaze. This, felt Theodora, should be delightful if one knew how.
‘You are very kind, Mr Clarkson,’ she said. ‘Shall we go inside?’
And they did. They walked back into the conversation of the old women, behind which Theodora hid her indecisions. Then, saying something about a handkerchief, she went to her room, and stayed while voices combined in the hall, dawdled, and diminished.
The door banged twice, the permanently loose letter-box, before Mrs Goodman called, ‘Theo, where are you? Going off like that. Everyone wondered if you were ill. You are a strange girl.’
In her mind Mrs Goodman had already roughed out several landscapes, in which a younger, more exquisite version of herself stood in the foreground, holding Huntly Clarkson’s arm, whereas, in fact, she sat on her drawing-room sofa and thoughtfully moistened her lips. Reality struggled with her fantasy. She was consumed.
‘I went up to my room,’ Theodora said, ‘because I was bored.’
‘If that is the case, it was rude,’ said Mrs Goodman.
But because she did not believe, she burned.
‘An odd impression it will make on Mr Clarkson.’
‘Mr Clarkson asked me to lunch.’
‘You will go of course,’ said Mrs Goodman.
She could not wait for the answer, to feel her anger or contempt.
‘I don’t know yet,’ said Theodora, ‘whether I shall go or not.’
She would have liked to repay his kindness with a frank gesture of acceptance, the kind of gesture that Huntly Clarkson would expect, and get, from some woman of complexion, shadowless in a blue dress. The kind of woman who would receive a diamond brooch in a velvet box without a performance of gaucherie, who would press the hand that gave. Theodora remembered Huntly Clarkson’s hands, which were large and clean. The hands had rested on the stucco balustrade, waiting to give. But she could not, she thought, take, and regret rushed at her, so that she had to write:
Dear Mr Clarkson,
If you will forgive my failure to accept, I would like to come when you suggest.
Theodora Goodman
In this way Theodora Goodman went to the house of Huntly Clarkson, which stood in a blaze of laurels, a rich house, full of the glare of mahogany and lustre. The floors shone. There was an air of ease that disguised the industry which achieved this state. The servants were silent and well oiled. If they did not speak, it was because they had learnt their functions too well. They had a kind of silent contempt for anyone who did not understand what these functions were. So the servants of Huntly Clarkson looked at the shoulders of this woman helping herself to a cutlet, and condemned her as she tried to thank. Her glance was indication of her income and her status. She was a woman of no account, whose clothes were not of this or any fashion, whose face was ageless in appearance, though they would have put her somewhere in the thirties.
‘I did not ask anyone else,’ said Huntly Clarkson, ‘because you didn’t suggest you wanted them.’
‘How not suggest?’ she said, dazed by the noises the silver made on the table. ‘At the time I was a blank. You have read things off me that were never there. Really. I assure you.’
But there was a kind of ease between them. She began to think that it might be a pleasant thing, a friendship with Huntly Clarkson, if she could resist his house, his servants, and his furniture. These were all magnificently assured. They fixed time in the present. Even the old things inherited from grandfathers and aunts, even these pandered to Huntly Clarkson and the present, as if they began and ended as part of his upholstery. She looked at the rich, shining, well-covered body of Huntly Clarkson and wondered if he would exist without his padding.
‘When you are not the solicitor I know, what do you do?’ she asked.
‘I enjoy myself,’ he said. ‘It would be tempting to do this all the time. If one hadn’t a kind of puritan misgiving. But outside this I succeed very well. I eat rich food. I smoke cigars. I go on an average of once a week to the races. I give dinner parties, which are sometimes boring, but there is always the spectacle of smart women with bare shoulders and diamonds.’
‘I have never done any of these things,’ said Theodora. ‘I wonder why you have asked me?’
‘That is why,’ Huntly Clarkson said.
He laughed, but as if he were a little puzzled by his cleverness. As if he had thought that he knew, and then discovered he did not.
‘I collect,’ he said, ‘unusual objects. I have the signatures of four English kings. I have the breviary of Maximilian of Mexico and a ball of hair that was cut out of the stomach of a cat.’
Then she laughed, too, because he made her warm and dashing, almost as if her shoulders were bare, and she flashed like a spray of diamonds.
‘I see,’ she laughed, ‘there is very little you haven’t got.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘And the odd part of it is, I am perfectly happy.’
He bent forward to confide, so that she looked into his well-shaved skin, and smelled the smell of rich, urbane men, which was new to her. Huntly Clarkson described happiness, and it was something you could touch. She drew back a little, almost afraid he might expect her to. But it was very delightful, and afterwards, sitting on the veranda, in a lull of wine, when the little fox terriers came, jumping, flirting, flashing, worrying, and prancing on their thin white wooden legs.
‘I hope you will come often,’ Huntly Clarkson said. ‘I would like you to meet my friends.’
It brushed cold along her skin. To sit alone in the drawing-room surrounded by the bare, diamond women.
‘I would never be very good at these things,’ said Theodora Goodman.
‘Just as you think,’ he said.
But she was sad, because she could feel that he had sat back.
And he had. He felt that he had eaten too much. He was bored by dogs, and the prospect of the office, and Theodora Goodman. Why had he asked Theodora Goodman to his house? If it was out of pity it was praiseworthy. He often did praiseworthy things. But he was tired of himself. He wanted to loll right back and listen to something extraordinary as he fell asleep.
‘Have you ever seen a volcano?’ she asked. ‘I would like to sail past in a ship, preferably at night.’
He opened his eyes.
‘Why, yes,’ he said. ‘I have seen Vesuvius and Etna. And Stromboli. That from a ship. They were not so very extraordinary. None of them,’ he said.
The green blaze of laurels crackled. Now she knew that she would go. It was easier to escape than she expected, from where she had never belonged.