‘Aunt Theo hasn’t any children,’ said Lou.
‘Aunt Theo,’ said George, ‘has a moustache. I felt it. It was soft.’
‘I forbid you to speak like that!’ said Fanny.
Sometimes she smacked her children for the truth.
‘You must respect your aunt,’ she said.
Respect became something written in a book for children to learn, just as Theodora Goodman became the Respected Aunt. She could make a dancer with a handkerchief. She could tell about Meroã. And, falling asleep, they raised their hands, but respectfully, to touch the moustache that was black and soft, and warm and kind as dogs.
She was the Respected Aunt. She was also the Respected Friend. All these years the lives of Theodora Goodman and Huntly Clarkson had not diverged, or only incidentally. They looked for and discovered in each other a respect that overcame aversion. Though often he was dubious. Theodora remained obscure. He could not read her. And she made him conscious of this illiteracy, amongst his other limitations.
If he experienced aversion it was because she broke the corners off his self-esteem, the most brittle of his valuable possessions, and continually failed to repair the damage. I shall subject myself to Theodora Goodman, he had said, but for some reason she refused to take command.
‘Theodora,’ he said, making a further effort, ‘we shall take the steamer.’
They took the steamer to where, under the pines, they ate big whiskered prawns, and the revolving horses flared their scarlet nostrils, and the figure in pink tights beat with her little hammer on the bell. Theodora was delighted with the merry-go-round, because she did not expect much. But Huntly Clarkson, who expected more, though what, trod the empty prawn shells into the sand and trodden grass and tried to ease his neck out of his collar.
Huntly was glad when the little steamer rushed them back through the green night, full of the rushing of the green water, that smelled of salt and oil. He sat with his hat in his lap and about his head a recklessness of cooling sweat. These are the moments, he felt, when the tongue can take command, without the assistance of drink, when the body is no longer ridiculous, when it is possible to talk of poetry, and God, and love, without belittling or destroying. He wanted to speak to Theodora. He wanted to admit his inadequacy, which, for once, had become almost a virtue, like a thick hawser trailing in a white wake.
Theodora began to sense, through the engine’s oily agony, that soon it would be said. The darkness was green and close and moist. She preferred, and she turned in her mind to, the wooden horses prancing in unequivocal sunlight.
‘I shall take you to dinner,’ Huntly said.
Because there remained his inadequacy. Whenever he failed, she noticed, his instinct was to give.
‘You have already given me lunch,’ she said.
The green light made her gentle. Words were blown out of the mouth, blurred, and tossed back towards the luminous wake of the ship. At such moments of obliteration I can almost accept the illusion, she felt.
‘You give me so much, Huntly,’ she said.
‘You are a most difficult woman, Theodora.’
‘To myself I am fatally simple,’ she said. ‘But let us talk instead about the prawns.’
Time slipped past them with the water. Huntly Clarkson was surprised to hear his voice, astonishingly level, legal, and unsurprised.
‘If I were to suggest marriage, Theodora,’ apparently he said.
It flew back in the wake of other lost phrases. And now it was unwise.
‘It would be a supreme act of kindness,’ she said. ‘Even for you.’
Rationalized, his gesture was a little feeble. Huntly Clarkson was not pleased. But Theodora Goodman was grateful. The farce had not screamed.
‘I am forty-three,’ she said.
‘It is not a question of age,’ he replied. ‘I am older.’
But it was not a question that he was able to explain.
‘I am ugly,’ she said. ‘I have never done things well.’
But Huntly Clarkson could not explain, least of all his own greater humility and discontent.
Theodora Goodman listened to the intense and varied activity of the sturdy steamer, and smiled for an incident that probably had not occurred.
Then she looked out and said, ‘Look, Huntly, here is the quay already.’
‘I am stubborn,’ he said, but more to hold his own.
He was also tired. The streaming of the water had made him ponderous with age.
Lights floated in the sea-green darkness. Fantastic lake dwellings sprang from an electric swamp on glistening piles. The little boxed-in landing stage shuddered and braced.
‘You are avoiding answers, Theodora,’ said Huntly Clarkson as they walked through the crowd.
She walked stiffly past the pale faces of the sleepwalkers that the darkness lapped. Pushing to reclaim proximity, he would have touched her arm, to emphasize, but Theodora drifted in the crowd, and he heard his now ponderous breath, and the creaking of his starched collar and his gold-linked cuffs. An enormous distance of sleep stretched between himself and Theodora. He could not part the drifting bodies of the crowd.
‘I thought I had lost you,’ Theodora said.
As she turned and allowed him to return, his face, violet in a patch of light, had a strained kind of individuality, of waking in the crowd sleep.
‘I was just behind you,’ he said briefly.
They walked together into a labyrinth of tramlines and converging trams.
Huntly Clarkson did not altogether believe that Theodora Goodman would reject the yellow façade and the laurel blaze of his great stone house. Admitting at times that stone will crumble, at others he recovered his faith in its continuity and strength. He offered all this in return for some small mental service that he could not very well define, because, after all, perhaps it was not small, but great. Either way it was invisible and strange.
‘It is very strange indeed, Elsa Boileau said, ‘this hold that Theodora has over Huntly, a man who could go anywhere at all.’
To Elsa Boileau anywhere at all meant Government House, Romano’s, and the Golf Club.
‘But the point is, will she catch him?’
‘That is not the point at all,’ said Marion Neville, who was less physical and more detached. ‘The point is, will Huntly catch Theodora? That is what it amounts to, which makes it far more strange.’
Anyway, they went all of them that Easter to the Agricultural Show. Theodora wore a long, an oblong dress of striped brown silk. Her attitudes were those of carved wood, while the powdered, silky, instinctively insinuating bodies of Elsa Boileau and Marion Neville flowed. Their laughter flowed wonderfully over the shoulders of Theodora Goodman. Huntly Clarkson appeared undeterred. He wore a little scarlet parrot’s feather in the black band of his grey hat, which gave him a nonchalance, which made Elsa Boileau narrow her eyes, which she did when weighing up the physical possibilities. But Huntly Clarkson laughed, and talked to Ralph Neville and Paul Boileau, and seemed pleased and undeterred. As if this were his world, the world of chestnut bulls with mattress rumps, and jet trotters, and towers of golden corn. There were many faces that Huntly knew. They spoke with an eager deference.
But Huntly turned to Theodora and said, ‘You must tell me if you are tired or bored.’
And at once he had lost some of his strength that deference gave him, and the stud bulls.
‘You must not bother about me,’ she said.
‘But I do,’ he said. ‘You know.’
And at once the presence of the others was a pressure.
‘There is no reason why I should be anything but happy,’ said Theodora.
‘Really?’ he said, trying to be pleased.
But Theodora was happy. The glare had half closed her eyes. She wandered half alone in the tune her sun-thinned lips hummed, in the smell of the crowd, and the bellowing of bulls. There are times when the crowd and the sun make the individual solitude stronger and less assailable than bronze.