It was like this, to Theodora, watching her mother’s face in the grey light of morning, through which cold hoofs clattered, and the milkman’s bucket. But she could also hate. Love and hate, felt Theodora, are alternate breaths falling from the same breast. And now her own breath was choking and knotting inside her.
If I were to open my mouth, she said, as wide as it will go, and scream from the bottom of my stomach to the top of my voice. Aaahhhhhhhhhhh!
But she did not do it. She trembled for the idea.
She began to walk about the house to avoid her thoughts, but it is not possible to avoid thought, it will not be cut.
She went into the kitchen. Outside there was a wind sawing and rasping, a thin gritty wind of morning, blowing off concrete and damp brick. The light was so thin in the kitchen that it was not quite moonlight, not quite morning. It glittered on the zinc. The skins of the onion rustled.
Theodora took up the thin knife, very thin and impervious, from where it lay in the zinc light. Now she remembered most distinctly the last counsel Jack Frost had held with the meat-knife in the kitchen. She remembered him standing by the dresser. She could see the black hairs on his wrist as he weighed the pros instead of biscuits.
But this, she trembled, does not cut the knot. She threw back the thin knife, which fell and clattered on the zinc, where it had been put originally to be washed. There was the cup too, which the knife nosed, the empty cup which Mrs Goodman held to her chin and its trembling beard of white skin.
It has been close, felt Theodora, I have put out my hand and almost touched death. She could see its eyelashes, pale as a goat’s, and the tongue clapping like a bell.
Bells rang across the bay for morning. Theodora Goodman went upstairs. She paused on the landing, halted by the wave of her mother’s unarrested sleep. Light slashed the face of Theodora Goodman to the bone. I am guilty of a murder that has not been done, she said, it is the same thing, blood is only an accompaniment. She went on to her own room, away from the act she had not committed, while her mother continued to sleep.
‘Theodora, you look as if you have seen a murder,’ said Mrs Goodman when she woke.
‘I did not sleep, Mother. I shall take an aspirin.’
‘Ah, where would we be without aspirin!’ Mrs Goodman said.
When we have drained the last emotional drops from a relationship, we contemplate the cup, which is all that is left, and the shape of that is dubious. So neither Mrs Goodman nor Huntly Clarkson had survived in more than shape.
‘I seldom see you now, Theodora,’ Huntly said.
‘If I had anything further to give you, then you would see me,’ said Theodora. ‘But we have both survived a phase.’
‘Surely you are making your necessity mine?’
By this time he was able to laugh.
‘Let us call the necessity a common one,’ she said.
Though her defence of it was firm, and even brutal, she had not yet discovered what this necessity was. Her days were endless. But at least I am an aunt, said Theodora, when her hands trembled in the grey light, waiting for bells. It had both a close and a distant sound like the letter from Lou:
Dear Aunt Theo,
I wish you were here. Blossom had a calf among the buttercups, I saw her lick it with her blue tongue. The calf is mine, and the boys have theirs. If you would like a calf and will come, I would like to give you mine. I have called her Plum. George got a boil. They put on bread poultices and it made him scream. I hope that I never get a boil. I draw a lot. I will send the pictures that I drew to you and Grannie Goodman when I have got tired of them. I have drawn a house where seven children live. I have drawn a yellow thunderstorm. When you come I will play you my piece, it is the Snow Queen, I am not very good, and Mummy says the piano is not for me. Sometimes I get my nuckles rapped, and it hurts when there is frost. Frank has learnt to make some new faces. They are awfully funny. He will make them when you come. See then what a lot you will get, I shall be surprised if you do not find it tempting.
With love from
Lou
‘If you would like to go, Theodora,’ Mrs Goodman said, ‘there is no reason why you should not. I have the utmost faith in Dr Gilsom, and I can always call in Connie Ewart if anything should happen.’
So the relationship between Lou Parrott and Theodora Goodman remained both close and distant. Paper, from long holding, becomes warm in the hand. This way Theodora was warmed. She carried the letter from Lou, she carried it even in the street, secretly, in her glove.
In the streets in which Theodora walked at dusk the sky was restless. Its fever fluctuated. The violet welts and crimson wounds showed. The trams gushed sparks. All along the streets the hour was fusing even the fragments of unrelated lives, almost of Theodora Goodman. The faces clotting at corners were not so very obscure in this light. The veins were throbbing with the same purple. It was about this time that Theodora noticed the big white flower, glittering and quivering with pollen, grow slowly from the pavement, sway and bend, offering its thick arum skin.
Theodora felt the warm gusts of the white woman. She felt her eyes. She saw the wet lips that many nights had pulped. Such a glittering progress, that was both lovely and obscene, turned her own skin to bark under her brown clothes.
How did you feel
When you captured your ideel?
the woman sang.
Her teeth were gold, and her voice as thick as blotting paper, that you began to read, the yellow writing in reverse. Theodora held the woman’s voice before the mirror, and the glass was hung with golden plaits, heavy as harvest on the dining-room carpet. Out of the past Pearl fell.
‘Pearl!’ said Theodora. ‘It is surely Pearl!’
‘Pearl?’ said the white woman, as if doubting an echo.
She held her head on one side against the screaming of the trams.
‘Yes,’ said Theodora, ‘yes. Pearl.’
She came closer to touch the woman’s hand, to confirm that what was fat and white had once been cold and red, from washing in the yard.
‘But of course,’ said Theodora, ‘even I am forty-five.’
‘If a day,’ said the woman coldly.
Because now she suspected a plant, some new game the johns were trying on. Her face hardened to resist.
‘But you have lasted, Pearl,’ said Theodora. ‘How beautiful you are still.’
‘I’m no bloody corpse,’ the woman said. ‘So they tell me anyways. But who are you, with your Pearl, Pearl?’
Now it was not so much a plant that her voice feared, as somebody trying to open a cupboard of which she had thrown away the key.
‘Come on,’ she urged, her white forehead cracking in a black frown. ‘I ain’t got all night. I got an appointment with a friend.’
Then her face began to open up. It was as clear as morning. Pearl Brawne stood trembling in the yard.