But it settled down into being one of those relationships it is difficult to explain, a kind of groove in which minds fit, though not visible from outside. This persisted for some years.
‘Theo and Mr Clarkson see quite a lot of each other,’ hesitated Mrs Ewart hopefully.
‘Theodora and Mr Clarkson,’ said Mrs Goodman, ‘are friends. Though why, it is difficult to say. Theo is an admirable girl, although I am her mother, but not of Huntly Clarkson’s world.’
Oh, no. Mrs Goodman, even at her age, sat erect. She sat perpetually at a dinner table. She could have acted so many lives so much better than the actors. For this reason she resented the voice of Huntly Clarkson asking for Theodora on the telephone.
If reasons were not within the grasp of Mrs Ewart or Mrs Goodman, nor were they altogether apparent to Huntly Clarkson or Theodora Goodman themselves. I suppose, said Theodora, if I responded to clothes it would be something the same. All the rich and sinuous sensations of silk and sables would not have been unlike the hours spent with Huntly Clarkson, which smelled of cigars, and brilliantine, and leather. The sensations that Huntly Clarkson gave were no less voluptuous for being masculine.
‘Theodora,’ Huntly Clarkson said, ‘let us go to the races, let us lunch at a hotel.’
She watched them stand champagne in silver buckets.
‘I believe you are not impressed,’ said Huntly Clarkson.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I am the soul of shabbiness.’
But her mouth denied what sometimes she would have accepted. The world was plated, after all.
If Huntly Clarkson invited Theodora again, and often he said he would not, that it gave no return, he invited her because of some indefinable uneasiness and discontent, a sense of something that he had not yet achieved. This was in no way connected with what the eager and the innocent would call love. Shaving himself in his undervest on those clear, fine aggressive mornings, when the flesh feels firmer, less fat, Huntly Clarkson laughed. It was not love. Huntly Clarkson had loved as far as he was capable, and finished. Love and Theodora Goodman were, besides, grotesque, unless you were prepared to explore subtler variations of emotion than he personally would care for. Standing in his well-planned bathroom, he shaved his face thoughtfully. He listened to the rasp of the razor on the surface of his skin and admired the clean passage it made through the soap.
Huntly Clarkson did not go to church. He collected pictures, for their value. Sometimes he listened to music, but as a logical stage in developing the evening after dinner. If he experienced malaise, he usually put it down to physical condition. He took things for it. But when, in the midst of his well-planned bathroom, on a clear, clean, sharp morning, shouting with nickel taps, his mind pursued the foggy paths, out of the sun, in all elusiveness, he did not turn to bottles. He chose the telephone. I shall go when I have shaved, he said, and subject myself once more to Theodora Goodman. I shall catch on to the dry thread of her voice, that does not compensate. I shall subject myself, he said, that is the word. But if he felt less complacent, he also felt relieved.
Sometimes on the telephone he still attempted even to buy her with brilliance.
‘And by the way,’ said Huntly Clarkson, ‘you will come on Tuesday. To dinner. To help with Moraïtis.’
From behind her diffidence Theodora said she would. It was touching and amusing, though unconvincing, to be reminded one is indispensable. But this, she said, is the convention in which Huntly lives. The same voice would speak the same words to Marion Neville and Elsa Boileau, summoning them to some imaginary rescue, and this was commonly called charm. So Theodora armed herself with irony. She would go. She would sit just outside the blaze of diamonds, assisting at a social function, the dinner for Moraïtis, who would give a series of four concerts, to which Marion Neville and Elsa Boileau, who loved music, would go. Theodora probably would not. She had entered a stretch of years in which she chose flatness.
When she arrived at the house, in which all the lights had been lit, so that it was quite hollow, she knew that the dinner would take place in spite of Moraïtis. He was a small dark man, opaque, bald, and physical, who smiled the propitiating smiles for words only half understood. Already Moraïtis had begun to hope that it would soon be over.
Marion Neville had a cousin, she said, who had been on a cruise to Greece, and had brought back some very beautiful embroidery from one of those islands, she forgot which, where the sanitation was quite appalling, and everyone got tummy troubles, though Esmé was fortunately provided with some indispensable pills, she forgot what.
Greece was a primitive country, said Moraïtis.
But he made it a sad virtue. He was a Greek with sad eyes. He waited for the women to talk about music, because women, a certain kind, do talk about music, and these were they. He looked in rather a tired, dispassionate way at the body of Elsa Boileau, which was passive, and brown, and almost fully exposed. Moraïtis waited for what she was bound to say.
‘Of course we are all looking forward to your concerts,’ Mrs Boileau said. ‘Because we get very little that is good. So seldom the real artistes. We had D’Alvarez, of course. Most striking. She changed her dress I don’t know how many times during the performance. By the way, Marion, Sybil is wearing what I said she was. Madeleine’s model, which isn’t. Such a scream.’
Paul Boileau listened to his wife with the apologetic-dog expression of a man who suspects his wife is a bitch, only he is just not sure. He had to pull himself out of her words, to remind himself he had something to tell, and this was from the stock exchange. He would take Huntly and Ralph Neville into a corner. Ralph especially liked to be in on things. He spent a great deal of his time getting in. Consequently he dropped his voice frequently when speaking, whether it was some story of political graft or just the price of eggs.
Oh, dear, said Marion Neville, if only I could remember if it is a violin or a ’cello the wretched little fellow plays, oh, dear, these dagoes have funny eyes. But she would ask him to her house and get him to autograph a celebrity tablecloth.
Huntly’s table was smouldering with red roses, the roselight that Theodora remembered now, of Meroã. She swam through the sea of roses towards that other Ithaca. On that side there were the pines, and on this side Moraïtis. His hand begged for mercy, fingering a crumb. And Theodora granted it. They did not speak much.
Except once when his voice swam up, as if remembering, and said, ‘The roses …’ turning to her to offer his discovery.
‘We lived once in an old yellowstone house,’ she said. ‘Old for here, that is. And one side was a thicket of roses. A tangle. I tell myself I can remember roses reflected on the ceiling, in the early morning, when I was a child. Do you think this can be a fact, or just absurd?’
‘Yes?’ he said doubtfully.
But although he did not understand, she knew that there was much that he would. In the eyes of Moraïtis there were many familiar objects. He held things with humility, his glass, or knife. Altogether there was little correspondence between Moraïtis and what was going on now round Huntly Clarkson’s table. He stood in the reflected roselight.
At the end of the dinner they brought with the dessert some very expensive crystallized fruits, which were no longer fruit but precious stones, hard, and their sweetness had a glitter. This was the apotheosis of the meal, in which the light brandished swords. You forgot the flat words in the glitter of glass and diamonds, the big crystallized stones that hung from Marion Neville’s body, and the angelic straps on Elsa Boileau’s brown shoulders. The whole of Huntly Clarkson’s life lay there on the table, crystallized, in front of Theodora Goodman, and she knew at such moments that there was nothing more to know.