In the garden of the Athenian aunt, when it was night, when the small white charming cat elongated itself against the lilacs, even marble lost its substance, flowed, and murmured with its lilac throat. The Athenian garden of the Pavlou aunt was thick with white lilac and black trees.
‘Oh, I would like to fall in love,’ Katina Pavlou said. ‘I would like to marry a scientist, and sail with him up the Congo, and do something historical. But Mamma says I shall make a successful match. They are giving me so much to make it with. I shall not tell you how much, because I believe the British consider it vulgar to talk about such things.’
Under the white lilacs and the black trees in the garden of the Athenian aunt, people sat at an iron table discussing Balkan affairs and marriage. Theodora put up her hand to disentangle the big velvety moth whose feet had caught in her hair.
‘Say something,’ sighed Katina Pavlou.
‘I was thinking of Aunt Smaragda who lives alone in Athens,’ Theodora sai
.
‘Oh, Aunt Smaragda has the Great Idea. She says that as Greeks are born to die, then they can die best on the road to Constantinople. She prays for Byzantium. She prays for the day when the saints will blaze with gold.’
Heavy with gold and silver, the icon faces of many aunts smouldered with Ideas. Theodora remembered that she had forgotten to buy aspirin.
‘Mamma says it is fortunate that Aunt Smaragda has her Great Idea. Otherwise she’d be buried alone. That is why Mamma married Papa, so she says, so as not to be buried alone. Papa was a colonel once. Now they live in hotels. They follow the season, and Papa plays bridge.’
So that waiting with the child for the door to announce le lever de Madame Pavlou, Theodora knew pretty well what to expect.
‘Tes cheveux, chérie, sont à faire rire,’ said the dressing-table voice, smoothing a wrinkle off its own forehead.
Powder had scattered on the imitation buhl at which Europa’s Bull, the Colonel with the black eyelids and the moustache, considered the ace of hearts.
‘Do you know what, Mamma?’ Katina said. ‘The waiter at the third table on the left showed me how to squeeze an egg into a bottle.’
The Colonel hummed Meyerbeer and mopped the seltzer off the ace of hearts.
‘That may be,’ said the phoenix-mouth, flaming for the fifty-seven-thousandth time. ‘But normal eggs do not do peculiar things. You are here to learn from Miss Goodman that they are preferable à la coque, en cocotte, or beaten into an omelette. At Easter they are also dyed, and make a quaint and pretty present when handed by a young girl.’
‘Yes, Mamma,’ Katina said.
The Colonel’s moustache played Meyerbeer as convincingly as a French horn.
‘C’est ridicule de croire,’ said the voice of the astringent lotion, ‘qu’on s’ amusera à Deauville ou à Aix.’
‘Mais alors,’ said the Colonel, throwing down the card preparatory to picking it up again. ‘Allons à Baden Baden.’
It was as logical, of course, as the revolving doors of all large hotels. But it left Katina Pavlou sitting with the kitten in her lap. The kitten’s nose, smudged with first blood, sniffed at some fresh dubiousness in a revised universe.
‘You are not going?’ said Katina Pavlou to Theodora.
She spoke now with less conviction, and her body assumed the immobility of the leaves of the jardin exotique, which, from association, she had begun to imitate.
‘You will not leave me,’ Katina said.
‘No,’ said Theodora.
It was a cold stone, which she would have warmed if it had been possible, but her hands were as watery as promises.
‘No,’ her voice said, speaking the code language of human intercourse.
But even Katina Pavlou had begun to know that people are generally forced to do the opposite of what they say. She knew that the weather had changed, and that a wind which had started up from the sea was threading the grey paths. You could also hear the stairs protest beneath Sokolnikov.
‘Ludmilla,’ he called, ‘are you coming?’
So Katina Pavlou took the fact for granted.
‘I suppose I shall go and darn my stockings,’ she said. ‘Or I shall write a reply to a letter, in reply to a reply.’
And as it was more or less arranged, Theodora went towards the General’s voice.
‘Let us make this walk that will give no pleasure to anyone,’ said Alyosha Sergei. ‘Let us at least explore your perversity.’
In the hall he was huge, in his overcoat and scarves, and a flapped fur cap that he had fastened over his ears.
‘So that you will have to shout,’ he said, ‘and will think twice for the truth of what you say.’
Remembering Katina Pavlou, Theodora did not reply.
They began to walk along the street, along the asphalt promenade, on one side of which, protected by brick and stucco, glass and iron, life was being led. But the other side, the sea side, flowed. They had put an iron railing between the asphalt and the sea. But this did not deter any latent desire. It was as much a protection as theory is from fact. This was the evening air damply stroking, wind fingering the bones, the opening and closing of violet and black on its oyster-bellied self, the sound of distance which is closer than thought. The iron railing spindled and dwindled in the evening landscape. Sometimes faces looked through the openings in brick and stucco, from their pursuits behind glass, or under the blunt planes, or in the elaborate bandstand, looked out to wonder at the extent of their own charade.
But only to wonder at, Theodora Goodman noticed. The most one can expect from the led life is for it to be lit occasionally by a flash of wonder, which does not bear questioning, it is its own light.
‘You see, Ludmilla,’ said Alyosha Sergei, ‘it is the same as anywhere else, the same. In the window above the quincaillerie there is a woman who will have a child in December. I have watched her adding it up. When the post-office clerk from Marseille, who has seen his future in a mirror, cuts his throat in the bathroom of his wife’s father, who has invited him for fifteen days to tell him his faults, they will stitch silver tears on crêpe and pretend that it was insanity, so that they can give him a tombstone and curse his grave.’
‘But it will not affect the calendar of the woman who is having a child in December,’ said Theodora Goodman.
‘No,’ said Alyosha Sergei. ‘Unfortunately, no. She will have her child, some eventually spotty boy, who will hate algebra, and marry the daughter of Madame Le Bœuf, and be killed in a war. This Madame Le Bœuf, who is at the moment wrapping a stiff fish in a sheet of the Petit Marseillais for the curé’s supper, is chiefly obsessed by eternity. She would like to know that her soul will be wrapped stiffly in a sheet of paper and not expected to swim.’
‘Through eternity,’ added Theodora Goodman.
‘Alas,’ sighed Sokolnikov.
But Theodora did not reject the word. It flowed, violet, and black, and momentarily oyster-bellied through the evening landscape, fingering the faces of the houses. Soon the sea would merge with the houses, and the almost empty asphalt promenade, and the dissolving lavender hills behind the town. So that there was no break in the continuity of being. The landscape was a state of interminable being, hope and despair devouring and disgorging endlessly, and the faces, whether Katina Pavlou, or Sokolnikov, or Mrs Rapallo, or Wetherby, only slightly different aspects of the same state.
‘How beautiful it all is,’ said Theodora Goodman as she watched the motion of the lavender hills.