‘And what are your plans, Theo?’ asked Frank.
‘I shall probably go away.’
‘Good heavens,’ said Fanny, ‘where?’
Freedom was still a blunt weapon. Theodora did not answer, because she did not know.
‘Anywhere. Or everywhere,’ she said at last. ‘Except that the world is large.’
Theodora, blushed Fanny, is quite, quite mad.
‘It is very awkward for me,’ she complained, ‘when people ask me your plans.’
‘But that is nobody’s business,’ Theodora said.
She wiped her mouth with her handkerchief. Strength had at last made her weak. And now, for a moment also, she touched with the ball of the handkerchief the humiliating fringe of her moustache. Perhaps, after all, she would remain the victim of family approval and her upper lip.
‘Theo is quite right,’ she heard the thick voice of Frank.
She was surprised, and grateful, but controlled, as if treading on a doubtful plank.
‘She may even find a husband,’ the voice continued. ‘At her age. With her money. In Europe,’ it said.
He looked at her for the first time since coming into the house, so that she felt the weight of it. His resentment was colossal. She saw the lips above the brown teeth, and she heard the laughter that did not come, but which should have burst thick and obscene, like the laughter of men that breaks through the frosted partition in a public house.
‘Don’t be a fool, Frank,’ said Fanny, disposing of her husband. And then in the appropriate key of sorrow, ‘What time is the funeral?’ she asked.
‘At ten o’clock in the morning,’ said Theodora.
Now Frank yawned, and stretched, to show by physical pantomime that he had not lost face. He would look up Bags Browne at the club. And dear, dear, remembered Fanny, there were the overcoats for the boys, before the shops shut.
‘I don’t want an overcoat,’ said George.
‘You’ll get a whipping, my man,’ his father said.
Afterwards, young Frank hoped, they would buy ice creams, and he would choose a sundae with marshmallow and chopped nuts, which last time made him sick, but it was good.
‘I shall stay with Aunt Theo,’ Lou said.
It was too unimportant for even Fanny to object, or maybe it was that Fanny, aiming her displeasure at vaster targets, was exhausted. Anyway, she ignored an opportunity. She looked at Lou and agreed, deciding at the same time that she was yellow, scraggy, and unattractive. She had been christened Marie Louise, but circumstances and the child herself had conspired.
Then they had all gone, and the light became merciful.
‘There was an old woman in the train,’ said Lou, ‘had her things tied up in a leopard skin. She had a photo of her married daughter, and three cold mutton chops. Her daughter’s name is Mavis Forbes.’
‘It is possible,’ said her Aunt Theodora Goodman.
So that a great deal remained remote, and upstairs a hideously shiny wooden box endeavoured to contain a mystery.
‘Did Grannie Goodman want to die?’ asked Lou.
And again Theodora could feel the thin bone of an arm pressed against her waist.
‘I expect she felt it was time,’ she said. ‘There was nothing left to do.’
‘I don’t want to die,’ said Lou.
‘There is no reason why you shall.’
But Theodora, talking of reason, drew in her mouth for her own oracular glibness, suddenly taking it upon herself to dispose of life and death, as if they were presents wrapped in tissue paper. She looked at the child’s face. How far it was deceived she could not discover. It was a still, dark pool that for the moment did not reflect.
‘Tell me about something,’ said Lou, the words warm in Theodora’s shoulder. ‘Tell me about Meroã.’
‘Meroã?’ said Theodora. ‘But my darling, you have heard it, and there is very little to tell.’
She had told the story of Meroã, an old house, in which nothing remarkable had taken place, but where music had been played, and roses had fallen from their stems, and the human body had disguised its actual mission of love and hate. But to tell the story of Meroã was to listen also to her own blood, and, rather than hear it quicken and fail again, Theodora smoothed with her toe the light on the carpet, and said, ‘But, my darling, there is very little to tell.’
2
IT was flat as a biscuit or a child’s construction of blocks, and it had a kind of flat biscuit colour that stared surprised out of the landscape down at the road. It was an honest house, because it had been put up at a time when the object of building was to make a house, a roof with walls, and the predominant quality in those who made it was honesty of purpose. This is something that gets overlaid by civilization, in houses by gable and portico, in man by the social hypocrisies, but sometimes it survives in the faces in old photographs, beside the palm, and it was present too in Meroã, which was what someone had called the house before the Goodmans came.
Someone had called it this, and no one in the district remembered why. It had been accepted along with the other exotic names, Gloucester, Saumarez, Boscobel, Havilah, Richmond, and Martindale, that have eaten into the gnarled and aboriginal landscape and become a part of it. It was the same with Meroã. No one ever debated why their flat daily prose burst into sudden dark verse with Meroã in their mouths. Meroã, they said, in their flat and dusty local accents. Although the word smouldered, they were speaking of something as unequivocal as the hills. Only the hills round Meroã had conspired with the name, to darken, or to split deeper open their black rock, or to frown with a fiercer, Ethiopian intensity. The hills were Meroã, and Meroã was the black volcanic hills.
Up towards the house the flat swept, the tussocks grey in winter, in summer yellow, that the black snakes threaded, twining and slippery, and the little unreliable creek, whose brown water became in summer white mud. The house looked over the flat from a slight rise, from against a background of skeleton trees. But there was no melancholy about the dead trees of Meroã. They were too far removed, they were the abstractions of trees, with their roots in Ethiopia. On the north side of the house there were also live trees. There was a solid majority of soughing pines, which poured into the rooms the remnants of a dark green light, and sometimes in winter white splinters, and always a stirring and murmuring and brooding and vague discontent.
This was the north side of the house, but on the south side there were roses, an artificial rose garden so untidy that it looked indigenous, and which was made because Mrs Goodman wanted one. She said from her sofa, let there be roses, and there were, in clay carted specially from a very great distance. For a moment it gave Mrs Goodman a feeling of power to put the roses there. But the roses remained as a power and an influence in themselves long after Mrs Goodman’s feeling had gone.
Theodora, lying in her bed, could sense the roses. There was a reflection on the wall that was a rose-red sun coming out of the earth, flushing her face and her arms as she stretched. She stretched with her feet to touch the depths of the bed, which she did not yet fill. She felt very close to the roses the other side of the wall.
‘Theo,’ they called, ‘it is time. It is time you washed your neck. It is time you went to the piano and practised scales.’
‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘I’m coming.’
But she lay in the warm bed, remembering sleep, and drifted in the roselight that the garden shed.