They smiled in common knowledge.
‘But it will keep,’ she said.
She was still dazed from the train. Pink rocks had hurtled through the early morning. She was as exhausted, at sudden moments, as if she had been listening to music, some echo of Moraïtis from his country of the bones.
‘I have all these bags,’ she said hopefully, but in doubt, wondering whether, for the Hôtel du Midi, she had brought too little or too much.
‘Oui. Henriette!’ called Monsieur Durand. ‘Sais-tu où est le petit?’
‘Comme si je savais jamais où est le petit!’ said Henriette.
Taking the bags, because it seemed that in any situation in which le petit was involved it was not logical to wait, Henriette shifted with flat feet over the linoleum squares. It was obvious that these had been polished for many years by the feet of Henriette.
‘Mes valises sont assez lourdes,’ suggested Theodora.
‘Elles sont lourdes. Ouai,’ said Henriette.
Henriette, who was half deflated, the swollen leather of her face, accepted all things, or almost. What the things were that Henriette did not accept Theodora could not decide, as she began to follow. She followed through the dark smell of olives, deeper into the hotel, where green light fell ponderingly through hanging plants and water ran in some hidden cavern. Henriette moved comfortably enough, unconsciously, neither young nor old. She moved as if the toes of her flat feet were splaying over sand. She moved with the friction of calico and brown skin. Her body smelled of nakedness and sun.
Theodora gasped behind the fine ease of nakedness, the superior agility of her porteress in climbing a sudden escarpment of stairs. She looked for now, but did not find, her bags poised on the head of Henriette. I must remember the lay of the land, said Theodora, crossing a small ridge of steps, though without compass she did not expect to accomplish much.
‘Nous voilà,’ said Henriette.
She kicked open with her foot the small but agreeable room, in which confort moderne glared from a corner, but dog-eyed from weeping taps.
‘C’est pas mal,’ said Henriette. ‘But you cannot bell. Voyez? It is broke.’
‘Thank you,’ said Theodora. ‘I am fairly independent.’
She stood holding her practical handbag, which was a travelling present from Fanny, and which had compartments for extraordinary things. Now she held it as if she had just found it, and looked to see what her embarrassment would discover. Somewhere a man’s voice, singing a tango, was brick-warm, supple as a cat.
‘Merci,’ said Henriette.
But she listened, distantly, to the singing voice. Henriette’s leather face, which would never admit much of what was sewn inside, swallowed a trace of bitterness. Still listening to the voice, she scratched her left armpit and went.
Perhaps it is the implication of the tango, decided Theodora, which Henriette does not accept.
She began to turn in her small room. Maroon roses, the symbols of roses, shouted through megaphones at the brass bed. Remembering the flesh of roses, the roselight snoozing in the veins, she regretted the age of symbols, she regretted the yellow object beside the bed which served the purpose of a chair. She could not love the chair, or rather, she could not love it yet.
Still with a hope for the future of her small room, she continued to turn in it. She snapped the fasteners on her luggage and took out objects of her own, to give the room her identity and justify her large talk of independence to Henriette. She put a darning egg, and a pincushion, and the Pocket Oxford Dictionary. Her damp and melancholy sponge, grey from the journey, was hung in a draught to dry. All these acts, combined, gave to her some feeling of permanence. And she put on her bedside table the leather writing case which she had been obliged to buy on the Ponte Vecchio, and in which, she supposed, she would write letters to relations. Lying on her back, in the dark, in sleeping cars, and the bedrooms of reasonable hotels, she had recalled the features of relations. These did give some indication of continuity, of being. But even though more voluble, they were hardly more explanatory than the darning egg or moist sponge with which she invested each new room.
Now in this one, more formidable because it was the latest, her hopes were faint. Encouraged by the thought of the garden, she could not escape too soon from the closed room, retreating from the jaws of roses, avoiding the brown door, of which the brass teeth bristled to consume the last shreds of personality, when already she was stripped enough. She would go down, at once, hoping her anxiety would not be noticed in the passage, or her sweeping skirt heard. But there were no faces. Only, in the concealed cavern, water could still be heard falling, and the damp hair of ferns trailing from wicker baskets touched her cheeks.
‘Vous cherchez notre jardin exotique. It is straight through and at the back,’ said Monsieur Durand again.
She suspected he had been waiting to repeat just this information, but his smile was blameless as water.
‘In the warm evenings,’ Monsieur Durand said, and smiled, ‘the ladies sometimes take their coffee in the garden. It is agreeable. Our climate is so mild.’
The thin voice of Monsieur Durand hesitated, withdrew, over the pebbles his boots, but the voice still politely dusted down the little once-green iron chairs for the skirts of ladies anxious about the dust or dew.
Theodora Goodman went on. Holding back the sun with her hands as she stepped out, she hoped that the garden would be the goal of a journey. There had been many goals, all of them deceptive. In Paris the metal hats just failed to tinkle. The great soprano in Dresden sang up her soul for love into a wooden cup. In England the beige women, stalking through the rain with long feet and dogs, had the monstrous eye of sewing machines. Throughout the gothic shell of Europe, in which there had never been such a buying and selling, of semiprecious aspirations, bulls’ blood, and stuffed doves, the stone arches cracked, the aching wilderness, in which the ghosts of Homer and St Paul and Tolstoy waited for the crash.
Theodora crunched across the sharp gravel, towards a bench, to sit. The air of the jardin exotique was very pure and still. Shadows lay with a greater hush across its stones, as if the abstracted forms to which the shadows were attached could only be equalled by silences. The garden was completely static, rigid, the equation of a garden. Slugs linked its symbols with ribbons of silver, their timid life carefully avoiding its spines.
Notre jardin exotique, Monsieur Durand had said, but his pronoun possessed only diffidently. It was obvious enough now, Theodora knew. This was a world in which there was no question of possession. In its own right it possessed, and rejected, absorbing just so much dew with its pink and yellow mouths, coldly tearing at cloth or drawing blood. The garden was untouchable. In the white sunlight that endured the cactus leaves, Theodora looked at her finger, at the single crimson pinhead of her own blood, which was in the present circumstances as falsely real as a papier mâché joke.
Walking slowly, in her large and unfashionable hat, she began to be afraid she had returned to where she had begun, the paths of the garden were the same labyrinth, the cactus limbs the same aching stone. Only in the jardin exotique, because silence had been intensified, and extraneous objects considerably reduced, thoughts would fall more loudly, and the soul, left with little to hide behind, must forsake its queer opaque manner of life and come out into the open.