‘Comme je suis désolée d’avoir perdu mon petit stylo,’ her sister said.
Miss Grigg watched Miss Goodman hand the boy a note, in a manner she would have described as ‘without a blush’. Miss Grigg watched Alyosha Sergei Sokolnikov receive a communication from the moon.
It was nothing short of this, the General felt. He trounced Theodora’s modest message. To describe anything as simple when everything was desirably vast. Anyone questioning the vastness denied the existence of Sokolnikov. Sensing extinction the General frowned.
‘Vous voulez la bouchée à la reine?’ le petit asked.
‘Je désire tout, tout!’ The General frowned.
Theodora sipped her wine. Her veins had begun to flow in great sounding rivers. She heard the cardboard castle of the bouchée à la reine crumble and crash beneath the General’s fork. It was obvious now that clocks were keeping another time. Swords and braided ancestors hung on the dark walls, and a large landscape of cupolas almost obscured by soot. From the saints’ corner she could hear the descant of gold and silver. Holy faces stared with one brown expression above a fluctuating ruby.
‘Everything, everything,’ said Aloysha Sergei, tracing on the face of the table, in the slops, past the welts of candlewax, his thought. ‘When I was a little boy, Ludmilla, I imagined I might some day put it in a box. Then when I was a young man, a youth in my teens, at the Military Academy, to be precise — I can remember my moustache — I discovered that this might not be feasible. Because everything is nothing, I said. For a long time it spoiled my appetite.’
Theodora heard her boots on the bare boards. She sat with her legs apart, like a man, on equal terms with the saints. Sometimes, very late, when the darkness was full of clocks, the world was a little crystal ball that she could hold in her hand, and stroke and stroke.
‘Everything is nothing, and nothing is everything.’
As if it were necessary to grumble, at that hour. She could hear his voice falling, and the skeins of smoke, and the intermediate silences, and snow. She held her little crystal comfort in her hand.
‘Whereas, if nothing were nothing,’ his voice said.
‘Go to bed, Alyosha Sergei. It is late. And you begin to repeat yourself. You are drunk,’ Theodora said.
‘Drunk? In a moment, Ludmilla, you will talk to me about religion.’
‘I shall not be so unwise,’ she said.
But she knew, and smiled, because the world was a little crystal ball.
‘But you believe in God,’ said Alyosha Sergei.
‘I believe in this table,’ she said.
‘A vulgar yellow thing that we have because we have nothing else.’
‘But convincing,’ she said. ‘It has such touching legs.’
And because she knew, she smiled.
‘Ludmilla,’ he said, leaning forward, ‘what a beautiful, luminous thing is faith.’
He held his head to prevent it bouncing.
‘Do you also believe in the saints?’ asked Alyosha Sergei.
‘I believe in a pail of milk,’ said Theodora, ‘with the blue shadow round the rim.’
‘And the cow’s breath still in it?’
‘And the cow’s breath still in it.’
‘Ludmilla, I love you,’ said Alyosha Sergei. ‘Even when you are a sour, yellow, reasonable woman, who rumbles after camomile tea. Even when you are yourself. But when you are your two selves among the saints, then Ludmilla, I love you best.’
And he bent forward and touched her moustache, and she noticed there was dirt beneath his fingernails, but it did not revolt her.
‘Vous ne voulez pas de bouchée à la reine?’ le petit asked, weaving willow between the tables.
No, said Theodora, she did not want. At the same time she avoided the General’s face, from which he was sweeping pastry crumbs with his enormous rubber hand.
Miss Grigg said you never knew with pastry, it was always something in disguise. The girl looked out of the window, the side the sea was, where men were hauling nets, and the fish were silver as caught water lying in the men’s hands.
‘Où est Madame la Comtesse?’ asked the young man who came and stood in the doorway, his face shaped like a scooped bone, though seen flat on it was not unlike a ’cello.
‘Madame la Comtesse,’ replied le petit, ‘est partie, on ne sait jamais où, avec un paquet de sandwiches et sa liberté.’
‘Of course. She told me,’ said the scooped bone.
But twice told, it did not mitigate the strain. He went away, leaving a patch of silence by the door.
‘Comme je déteste ce petit maquereau,’ the General said.
‘They say ’e’s a poet,’ said the square woman.
‘I cannot help that. I am upset,’ the General said. ‘Either it is the indigestion, or …’
Theodora Goodman read his face. She saw many midnights look into mirrors in doubt, stumble down the corridor, and turn the key.
‘It is the indigestion,’ the General said.
But soon, she knew, he would unlock his solitude. Soon he would not bear the loneliness. He would look out.
Mademoiselle Marthe said that he should try hot water.
‘With a squeeze of lemon,’ added Mademoiselle Berthe.
‘I shall try nothing,’ said the General peevishly. ‘And if that woman is a countess I am a cook.’
‘Which woman?’ asked Theodora.
‘You would not know,’ said the General. ‘It takes a lifetime to unravel the history of such impostors. And you have arrived by the morning train.’
She began to feel this without the telling. But it was something she had suspected all her life. Now she knew. She walked with her hat in her hands, the big straw with the unfortunate sallow ribbons, she walked to where her mother sat, saying in her small, horn, interminable voice: Here is Theodora, we were discussing whether, but of course Theodora would not know, Theodora has just arrived.
‘It is often a virtue,’ the General said quickly.
As if it were their own problem, and here they had solved it in secret session. The General was glad for something. So that Theodora was also glad.
But now the doors had begun to be thrown open, from some distance, you could hear, many doors. You could hear the opening bars, the rather stiff overture muffled by the velvet through which it played, the heavily encrusted bows just scraping the wreaking gut. Even le petit put away his scorn. His body grew softer, listening. He had a child’s amazed lips. So that you could hardly bear to wait for the last creaking of the last door.
‘C’est Madame Rapallo,’ said Mademoiselle Marthe.
‘Oui, c’est Madame Rapallo,’ said Mademoiselle Berthe.
‘This Mrs Rapallo,’ explained the square woman, ‘is always one for a late lunch. She’s a queer one. You’ll see.’
Theodora felt that she almost did not want to.
‘Who is Mrs Rapallo?’ she asked.
‘She is an American adventuress,’ said the General. ‘Of great ugliness, and great cunning.
‘Non, non,’ protested Mademoiselle Marthe. ‘C’est une femme douce, intelligente, spirituelle.’
‘Et qui souffre,’ said Mademoiselle Berthe. ‘She is most cruelly put upon.’
‘If you can believe,’ said the square woman, ‘if you can believe, she is the mother of a princess.’
‘Principessa dell’ Isola Grande,’ said Mademoiselle Marthe.
‘Donna Gloria Leontini,’ added Mademoiselle Berthe.