8
SEVERAL times during the afternoon, as the shadows coldly consumed, and the Demoiselles Bloch debated from a window whether woollen shawls would be wiser, Theodora heard the young man whose face when seen full on was a ’cello, walking about the garden, walking and calling a name.
‘Lieselotte! Lieselotte!’ his voice called.
His shoulders were thin, grey, scarcely more than cloth amongst the fuller, fleshier forms of the garden. Theodora remembered a man whose braces hung down, a man in a window in Pimlico. She had looked down unseen out of her own superior isolation, into the unsuspecting soul of a thin, kneeling man, whose braces hung, swung, in time with his meek prayer, as he prayed and picked his nose. So she had watched the machinery of desperation function desperately. And now the young man, the ’cello or the scooped bone, swung with this same pendulum, calling the obsessive name.
‘She has not come yet,’ Theodora said.
‘How should you know?’
‘I know that nobody likely has come,’ said Theodora.
‘Sometimes she is hideous,’ said the young man.
He spoke with an air of having worked this out accurately. He broke off an ear of iceplant, and watched it bleed. But to Theodora the act of destruction was not complete. She still heard the name, to which his voice had given small, quivering, distinct beauty, like a sudden snowdrop, green-veined.
‘I suppose I should introduce myself,’ said the young man. ‘My name is quite ordinary. It is Wetherby. I am from Birmingham, where my widowed mother still lives in a brick house. My father needless to say, was a clergyman. He was a shy, dry man, to whom I never found anything to say. We were happiest when we could close the separating door. But my mother, she is a different matter. She invariably wears blue. At the minor public school to which I was sent, I used to apologize for her protruding teeth. To deny her beauty was exquisite. I used to lie in bed at night and think up methods of torture, and cry as I anticipated their effect on her unsuspecting blue.’
On the trunk of a cactus, flies had discovered a wound. Theodora watched their black invasion of the cactus sore.
‘I do hope you won’t mind my telling you all this,’ said Wetherby. ‘It does me good.’
‘For a long time now,’ smiled Theodora, ‘I have been an ointment. I was also an aunt once.’
Her blue hands fingered fairy-tales in braille. She tiptoed in switching off the light.
‘I was a schoolmaster,’ said Wetherby. ‘For a while.’
‘And a poet,’ said Theodora.
‘Yeees.’
In the garden the silence swung backwards and forwards waiting for the moment to strike. When it does, felt Theodora, either he will be destroyed, or perhaps he will stand there whole.
‘Yes. A poet,’ he said. ‘The label was originally stuck on by a Mrs Leese-Leese. She had a country house in Suffolk, and her voice had died. But her suggestive powers were immense. Sitting in her oval drawing room, surrounded by her good taste, she persuaded many of us that we were poets, painters, actors. In this way she hoped she would create her own posterity, although she might ruin us for anything else. Oh, she was very subtle. I can smell her now, the gusts of eau-de-Cologne. Her garden was full of obscure walks, unexpected statuary, and brown leaves. Walking with us, slowly, because she had a hump, or again in the oval drawing-room, she encouraged us to talk on significant subjects, to discuss ourselves, and God. But more particularly ourselves, because in creating our ego by her own will, God became a minor influence, the power was hers. If one rejected her invitations, she wrote letters. These scented out one’s vanity. They stroked it from a distance. Even in what one thought was the security of one’s own room, with its ugly, haphazard furniture, one was never altogether safe from Muriel Leese-Leese.
Listening to the history of Wetherby, unfolding as logically as a shadow from the root of a cactus, Theodora was not aware that it was meant for her. Rather, she was some haphazard cupboard in his comparatively secure, ugly room, in which he proposed to arrange his thoughts. In the circumstances her shoulders grew angular from expectation. She composed her grain.
‘There is a peculiar honesty about the thoughtless kind of furniture,’ he said.
She listened to the ticking of the brick house in Birmingham. She listened to the thoughts of Wetherby sluicing the fumed oak.
‘I am writing a poem,’ he said. ‘It is the first time it has been written. It has all the ugliness of truth, going in, and in, and in. It will be praised for its Penetration in the Sunday Times.’
‘There is a letter, dear,’ said the Perennial Blue, with some diffidence of teeth. ‘A letter with a Suffolk postmark.’
Lacking the intuition of furniture, she did not grasp that this was more than a letter, the garrotter’s handkerchief and the umbilical cord. She held it in her unsuspecting hands, that the close of a century had designed for charitable acts.
‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘But I am working. And it will keep.’
As if it really would. He waited painfully, till the door, till he could hide his weakness, but less successfully from the peculiar honesty of furniture. Through her narrow brown face, Theodora watched his hands breaking a letter.
… that Saturday was your day, and we waited, though sensing our defeat. Why are you so cruel, Wetherby, when you can afford to be kind? I can only think that this is the privilege of genius. Now it is Monday, and the others are all gone. The garden is full of absence and burning leaves. I lie here on the terrace, with the old grey shawl covering my knees, and have been reading Proust to steady my nerves. Mais ça m’ énerve plus. It is a great ball of wool. I have been remembering, in contrast, your poem, the one that I like to think mine, because it was the fruit of that long and trying afternoon when you accused me of destruction, and said that you preferred to be smothered by feather pillows. Quite often I speak it to myself, my poem. Today, after Proust, it was a sword. My dear, it is brutal, but I am proud. I tempered you …
After he had read letters Wetherby always tied them in a bundle, so that some day, someone with devotion and tact might fit together the pieces of the puzzle. He put the bundle in a cupboard. Theodora felt her stomach turning and turning to digest.
‘I am a poet,’ Wetherby said.
In the brick house in Birmingham Theodora heard his mouse picking at ideas.
‘Or a sword,’ he said, ‘hacking at a pylon.’
He rather liked that.
But the jardin exotique was all spines. He touched a cactus with repulsion.
‘Perhaps you should forget to think,’ said Theodora Goodman, whose shoulders were quite stiff.
‘You are as bad as Lieselotte,’ he said. ‘Lieselotte says I am not an artist. But it is Lieselotte’s passion to destroy. She says I am not even nothing. If I were nothing I would be magnificent, she says, and then she could love me.’
Now Wetherby began to cough as if he could not breathe the air of the garden, and Theodora could hear his bones. She realized he was all bones, and his breath was spiked. Somewhere inside him fluttered his sick self, trying to break free from the cage of bones.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I meant, rather, that man is not a sewing machine.’
‘Are you a Communist?’ asked Wetherby.
‘That is the second time I have been asked since I arrived,’ said Theodora, ‘and I do not think I know what it is.’
‘I could tell you, but it would take a very long time. And it would not be convincing. Communism is an act of faith. I am a Communist.’