Theodora, felt Huntly Clarkson, is an upright chair, a Spanish leather, in which an Inquisitor has sat, a shabby rag of skin passing judgement on souls. For a few moments he hated Theodora. The way you can hate something that is untouchable.
But the evening of the dinner for Moraïtis the shallower moments prevailed. The two diamond women took out the ragbag of conversation, their coloured snippets flew. And Paul Boileau watched his wife. He tried to read the answer to his own suspicions in the inclinations of her body, in the intonations of her voice. He looked at the Greek as much as to say: Are you the one who will provide the clue? Because the Greek happened to offer himself at the moment, a concrete object of suspicion.
The Greek suddenly walked, as if he had made up his mind, and sat beside Theodora Goodman.
‘They have put me in a room,’ he said, ‘where I cannot practise.’
The words that he suddenly found he took out with precision. He smiled to see.
‘It is all furniture,’ he said. ‘I cannot live in such a room. I require naked rooms.’
‘Bare,’ said Theodora Goodman.
‘Bare?’ said the Greek. ‘Naked is the word for women.’
‘Naked can be the word,’ said Theodora.
‘Bare,’ smiled Moraïtis, for a fresh discovery. ‘Greece, you see, is a bare country. It is all bones.’
‘Like Meroã,’ said Theodora.
‘Please?’ said Moraïtis.
‘I too come from a country of bones.’
‘That is good,’ said Moraïtis solemnly. ‘It is easier to see.’
He sat forward with his legs apart, his body crouched, his small muscular Greek hands clasped between taut knees. Theodora looked at his thinking hands.
‘You see, I am a peasant,’ said Moraïtis. ‘I am very conscious of the shape of the country. I come from the Peloponnese. It is rich, fat, purple country, but underneath you can feel the bones. Many people were killed there. Greeks die often,’ he said.
All the time he was thinking with his hands, feeling his way from object to object, and his hands struggled together to contain the mystery of death.
‘Greeks are happiest dying,’ smiled Moraïtis. ‘Their memorials do not reflect this fatality. All the Greek monuments suggest a continuity of life. The theatre at Epidauros, you have seen it, and Sounion? Pure life. But the Greeks are born to die.’
‘I have not seen it,’ said Theodora. ‘I have seen nothing.’
‘It is not necessary to see things,’ said Moraïtis. ‘If you know.’
But now he had left her. He had begun to take some fresh path. He pursued it, upright now, drumming and humming, sometimes looking out this way and that through the thicket of other people’s conversation, seeing and surprised.
Marion Neville looked at a little wristwatch set with small diamonds and rubies and said that they must go.
So it was time.
‘Good-bye, Miss Goodman,’ said Moraïtis. ‘I shall remember we are compatriots in the country of the bones.’
‘What is all this?’ asked Huntly Clarkson.
‘Nothing,’ said Theodora. ‘We were indulging in a flight.’
Huntly knew then that the door had closed. This, perhaps, was the extent of his relationship with Theodora Goodman. She closed doors, and he was left standing on his handsome mahogany interior, which was external, fatally external, outside Theodora Goodman’s closed door. Huntly Clarkson stood and wanted to overcome his humiliation, which he could not pay anyone to take.
The dinner for the Greek ’cellist was on the Friday. On the Tuesday there took place the first of the four concerts that Moraïtis would give, and this was variously described as brilliant, as a magnificent tapestry of sound and colour woven by a master hand, and as a feast for all music lovers. So that it was smart to talk about the Moraïtis recitals, and to learn the names of the pieces that he played.
Theodora had not been. She very much doubted whether she would go. Because, in thinking, she had become obsessed with Moraïtis, his words, his hands. It is not necessary to see things, said Moraïtis, if you know. It is like this, she said. And yet, for the pure abstract pleasure of knowing, there was a price paid. She remembered the Man who was Given his Dinner, the moment on the bridge, which was the same pure abstraction of knowing. But the exaltation was cold without the touch of hands, the breathing and stirring and waking of the tree in the snow.
Anyway, Theodora Goodman did not go to any one of the Moraïtis recitals. She waited, rather, to hear that they had passed, and that Moraïtis, whom she would not see, had gone. And like this, they were over. On the walls and hoardings the bills were already covered over by other wonders. She breathed. She felt exhausted, thin, after a long summer. Only Moraïtis did not go. He would remain, the papers wrote, for one more concert, as a guest artist, he would play the Such-and-Such Concerto.
Then, if that is how it is to be, decided Theodora Goodman.
‘Enjoy yourself,’ Mrs Goodman said, as if she were half afraid she might.
She remembered as a consolation that Fanny had been the musical one, whereas Theodora had often played an angular music that did not exist. Her thin, dark, struggling arms had filled Mrs Goodman with distaste.
At the concert, as at all concerts, everyone was rounded and well fed. Music filled out the lines and emphasized banality. It is not possible to listen to music without the body becoming a hump on a chair. Over the hall a great grey dumb organ hung and brooded, as it had over other similarly irrelevant occasions, of civic pomposity, or the paper folly of charity balls. Now an orchestra, playing an overture by a Russian, made the dust dance dimly on the organ’s face, stirred the dinners in stomachs on the chairs. Some of the chairs were still empty, the chairs of smarter people, who ate longer, later dinners, and who would arrive only in time for the name of Moraïtis.
Theodora Goodman sat close, but to one side, in such a position that she was an oblique assistant to the strings. But she could not listen much. She heard the slabs of music piled one upon the other. She waited for the heap to be made, till Moraïtis should come. And her bones were sick and brittle, her hands burned. Good-bye, Miss Goodman, Moraïtis had said, I shall remember we are compatriots. Taking it for granted there would be no reunion, but why, unless Moraïtis accepted the distances, in which case there was no need. Now she wondered about him, in the wilderness of preliminary music, where he stood, perhaps in a small brown, bare room with two large gilt mirrors of an unfashionable century, in which he stared at his blue chin, working together his muscular hands. Through the rain of distant music, in a comb of corridors, Moraïtis stood in the perspective of the brown room, which tried to contain him, but which failed, defeating its own purpose in reflections of reflections, endlessly. Just as Moraïtis himself defeated his own inadequate face, overflowing through the cavities, or thought eludes the skeleton of words. Theodora saw the reflection of Moraïtis suddenly pick up a tumbler of water from a tin tray, and all the reflections swallowed. Then the reflections gave a quick glance at their teeth. Each of these solemn acts was repeated by the mirror, and isolated, and magnified, without detracting from its privacy. Because Moraïtis was protected by some detachment of unconcern. He accepted the isolation. He retied his bow. The eyelids were contemptuous on the eyes.
At that moment people had begun to clap, and she knew that he had come. He stepped out on to the stage in the isolation which he had brought with him from the mirrors. His bald head shone like a bone. Moraïtis sat down and put his ’cello between his legs, and now you could see that his isolation fitted him closely, aptly, like an armour, which would protect in him some moments that were too delicate to expose. Theodora watched. He saw and did not see. Now she was closer. It was no longer a matter of intervening heads and chairs. She was herself the first few harsh notes that he struck out of his instrument against the tuning violins.