‘We have a number of interesting personalities I shall be glad for you to meet, Theodora Goodman,’ said Elsie van Tuyl. ‘But just at present, poor dears, they are out amusing themselves.’
She smiled to cover a pause. She touched her pearls.
‘Oh, and this, by the way, is Mr Rapallo,’ she said.
Theodora did not turn because she knew that Mr Rapallo would not possess a face. She accepted his dark hand. No one remembered Mr Rapallo’s face. He was Niçois perhaps, or even a Corsican. Mr Rapallo, you felt, would disappear.
Everything else in the house was sure, substantial, silver. The buttons strained and kept the upholstery down. Elsie van Tuyl looked a million dollars, in white satin, by Sargent, over the dining-room mantelpiece.
At night when the older women, who had played their cards, sat amongst the whatnots in their diamonds talking of Europe, and the older men, quite grey and gnarled from minting money, minted it still, in their conversation of steel and steam and supernumerary souls, music melted the gardenia trees for the glorious young, who were still hesitating to sell themselves. About this time of night, Theodora Goodman saw, Elsie van Tuyl could never remember which waltz she should save for whom.
‘You must help me, Miss Goodman,’ said the beautiful young man, creased and laundered, educated just enough, so as not to spoil the effect, of his clothes, of his perfectly shaven, rightly smelling, American cleft chin. ‘You must help me,’ he said. ‘Shall we shake on it? One Goodman with another.’
‘I am only a companion, Mr Goodman,’ Theodora said.
‘Sure,’ said Lucius, or Grant, or Randolph. ‘Isn’t that the point? Don’t you and Elsie write diaries together? And stick on the labels? And pull them off? Don’t get me wrong,’ said Lucius, or Randolph, or Grant. ‘Elsie’s the finest gal. She has ideals.’
But Theodora, in spite of adjoining bedrooms and the communicating door, even though she took the ivory brushes to smooth out of Elsie van Tuyl the tiresomeness of the conversations, holding the long, black, intimate, distant, vastly expensive hair in her own hands, always failed to discover just how far companionship went.
‘I am tired,’ sighed Elsie van Tuyl. ‘I have slaved at this season. Let us take our things and go to the shack. Just the two of us. Alone. We shall walk in the lanes, and gather blueberries, and feel the rain on us, and watch the emerald beetles. And, dear Theodora, I need your help and advice.’
Not that Elsie van Tuyl ever took what she asked for.
But they walked in the lanes, the little, sour, sandy lanes, where the emerald beetle staggered, and roots tripped, and the mouth contracted under sour fruit. They walked in the rain, linked, under the sodden trees, past the square white houses. In the morning they washed their faces in a bowl from which the enamel had cracked. In the evening they heard the fire spit, and the dark, sodden branches plastering the eaves.
‘I need your advice, Theodora Goodman,’ said Elsie van Tuyl. ‘I am going to Europe with, well, you know whom. It is wrong. It is crazy. You will tell me to do instead many right and necessary things, because you are stiff as a conscience. Now give me your advice, which I shall not take. I am rich. I can buy my way out. For a very long time. I can even buy off my conscience. Now give me your advice. But, dear Theodora, I have already gone.’
Mrs Elsie Rapallo, née van Tuyl, or what remained, and what had been added, contemplated her nautilus, as if this quite luminously justified the hard and bitter facts. The nautilus sailed on the bamboo étagère, now past, now present, materialized.
‘Incidentally,’ said Mrs Rapallo, cracking another walnut in her perpetual gloves, ‘incidentally, I have news.’
The wrinkles in her face opened and closed fearfully. You felt that her wounds had failed to heal. But she eyed the salle à manger without pain, waiting for someone to contradict.
‘News? News?’ said Mademoiselle Berthe.
‘Of course. Can’t you guess? It’s ’er Gloria,’ said Miss Grigg.
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Rapallo. ‘Her letter was waiting at the poste restante. Gloria will pay us a visit.’
‘When? When?’ asked Mademoiselle Marthe.
‘That is not yet fixed,’ said Mrs Rapallo. ‘It depends on her social obligations. They may refuse to part with her in Rome.’
‘But of course she will come,’ said Mademoiselle Berthe. ‘And does she suggest she will stay long?’
Mrs Rapallo fingered salt, reading in it some Arabian mystery that very likely she would not tell.
‘She will stay at Monte,’ she said at last. ‘She will drive over for lunch one day. Gloria, of course, has many friends.’
Le petit had brought a dish of very old marrons glacés, that were partly sugar, partly dust.
‘Gloria,’ said Mrs Rapallo to Theodora Goodman, ‘is my daughter. The Principessa. She made a brilliant marriage. My lovely Gloria,’ she said.
And she stroked the nautilus, as if she were touching a distance, a more transparent morning, in which she herself stood against the white columns and the yachts.
‘Enfin,’ she said, her basketwork creaking as she got up.
‘Madame ne mangera pas de marrons glacés?’ grinned le petit.
‘Oh, ça, c’est dégoûtant,’ said Mrs Rapallo, shaking the dust from a paper frill. ‘And besides, tu sais que je ne mange presque rien. Jamais. It is dangerous,’ she said meditatively.
She looked in the mirror at her own face, the crystallized mauve and crimson, from which time might soon take the final bite.
‘But you have your nautilus,’ said the girl, whom everybody had forgotten, because she was young.
‘Yes, Katina Pavlou, there is always that,’ said Mrs Rapallo. ‘My lovely shell. But it is very fragile. I am afraid.’
She went now, but without music. There was an opening and a shutting, an opening and a shutting. Then they were all going. Theodora heard. She could hear their skirts. There was a sound of dust.
One was a stranger then, standing in the fragments of walnut shells, which le petit, stripping himself of his white apron, would not bother to sweep up. Already, like the others, he was taking out from behind his ear, together with the cigarette, a new and still more secret life.
‘Vous ne sortez pas, Mademoiselle?’ le petit said.
‘Where?’ asked Theodora.
‘Il y a tou jours le jardin,’ said le petit.
There was. She had forgotten. Possessed by the dusty wax figures, the ritual of biography, Theodora had turned her back. Now she saw it was, in fact, the garden that prevailed, its forms had swelled and multiplied, its dry, paper hands were pressed against the windows of the salle à manger, perhaps it had already started to digest the body of the somnolent hotel. There is something to be done, but what, she said. She began to walk across the carpet through the walnut shells and the extinct smiles. Upstairs they had gone to sleep, unconcerned by the growth of the garden. Because it is something that happens and happens, sighed the bouchées à la reine. Theodora went outside into the dry, tolerant, motionless, complacent air of the jardin exotique. She would in time begin to accept. In the absence of miracles she would worship the stone obelisks with other Europeans. Now also the gravel told her that her shoes needed mending. She would have to ask Monsieur Durand to recommend a cordonnier who was both reliable and cheap.