She could breathe the soft light. She could touch the morning, already flowering heliotrope and pink, through which the leather men dragged brown nets bellying with luminous fish.
‘Beautiful!’ cried the General, grinding his ferrule on the asphalt. ‘It is as beautiful as a Sunday newspaper. It is an enormous crime.’
He spoke to the air, which, in its evening detachment, remained serene.
‘You remind me of my ex-wife Edith, of whom I have not yet spoken,’ the General said. ‘She made many such remarks, without thinking. Frequently she said: You’ll be the death of me. But my wife Edith is still alive. A cheeky, arrogant woman. A retired cook. I married her for her income, and for years ate mince. Yes,’ sighed the General. ‘In Kensington. Ah, Ludmilla, why is suffering so intensely personal?’
He paused, but not for an answer, more as if resting on the stairs to feel his heart. He looked back to accuse, Theodora saw, the figure of Edith, who stood deliberately buttoning her brown kid gloves.
‘If that is a dirty look, you can save it,’ Edith said. ‘Let me tell you from the start, Alyosha Sergei, all you suffer from is inflation. Wind, wind, wind, whatever the fancy name. Now I am going out to chapel. If you’re hungry, there’s mutton in the larder, and a prune shape.’
‘She was a practical but insensitive creature,’ the General said. ‘I hated her extravagantly. She slammed doors. Her bust was decorated with a cairngorm, which she inherited with her fortune and many hideous objects in bronze from Mrs Arbuthnot, an old lady whom she tyrannized. Edith was most herself when dusting bronze. She had a clock in the shape of the Houses of Parliament that she loved with passion. Her week begun and ended with the winding of her clock, which was protected by a glass dome. You should have seen, Ludmilla, the love and agility with which she removed the dome, as if she were baring her own bronze soul. The ritual was timed to take place just before the stroke of one. Afterwards, listening to her clock, in the middle of Sunday, on Mrs Arbuthnot’s Wilton carpet, Edith shone.’
Edith also snorted. Theodora saw that she had been poured right up to the lips of her kid gloves. Her cairngorm eye was fringed with pebbles, slate, and fawn, that never closed.
‘What you needed was a statue, Sokolnikov. To be married to a statue,’ Edith said. ‘But a statue with ’oles for eyes, that would cry and cry and cry. Never flesh and blood, and roast mutton on Sundays. Oh, no, no! Nor for Sokolnikov!’
Theodora heard the General swell.
‘You are an insolent woman, Edith,’ he said. ‘I don’t wonder Mrs Arbuthnot died.’
‘She was an asthmatic subject,’ said Edith. ‘In the end it got at ’er heart. I ’ave it in writing, Alyosha Sergei, if you are suggesting, if you are suggesting.’
‘I am not suggesting that you used a knife.’
‘You are mad, mad, mad!’ shouted Edith, who was pouring her gloves together in the hall.
‘Whenever the answer is not in bronze, that is the cry of the middle classes. Fortunately, Edith, you have got your clock. When you return to it after chapel, after singing your satisfactory hymns, you will find the duplicate key to your stained-glass door underneath the mat.’
The General ground the ferrule of his stick into the asphalt promenade.
‘And yet you say that all is beautiful, Ludmilla, speaking like a clockwork thing, or a Methodist hymn.’
‘Poor Alyosha Sergei,’ said Theodora Goodman, because his arm had asked for pity. ‘I suppose there was always the Victoria and Albert.’
‘I had mislaid my galoshes,’ he said, but more distracted by the present moment, as if this were focusing.
It was obvious the iron railing and the tamarisks surprised him, the way external landscape does surprise him, returning to position. The deepening hills were less solid than Sokolnikov. Even Theodora could not accept spontaneously the wire baskets which had been put by public spirit as receptacles for old newspapers, banana skins, embarrassing letters, and melancholy flowers. The wire baskets, she saw, were as surprisingly full as other people’s lives. But these did not convince as, side by side, she walked with the General in almost Siamese attachment.
This oneness made the moment of collision far more desperate, when Sokolnikov, gripping the rail, heaving like the sea, shouted, ‘Look!’
‘Is it an accident?’ Theodora asked.
‘No,’ replied Sokolnikov. ‘I suspect it to be part of a deliberate and peculiar plan.’
Theodora peered out of their common emotion, and began to see, commanding the distance, a flashing, dashing, crimson cape.
‘Why,’ she said, ‘it is Mrs Rapallo. How magnificent! But how strange!’
‘Everything is expected, nothing is strange,’ corrected the General wearily.
The same great nesting bird which had presided over lunch now flew through the evening, ruffling the pansies and the mignonette with its enormous wings. With beautiful glissando the crimson was advancing, flurrying, slashing, flirting with the wind. It moved outside the rigid Mrs Rapallo. The cloak was leading a life of its own. Sometimes it toppled, not so much from weakness as from pleasure. To test the strength of the wind, to toy, to flatter.
‘She will blow away,’ Theodora cried.
‘Never,’ said the General feelingly.
‘Oh, but she is a beauty,’ Theodora said.
And she clasped her hands for all that is gold, and crimson plush, and publicly magnificent.
‘Have you not heard her clatter? She is the soul of aluminium,’ the General sighed.
But contempt did not enlarge him. He had diminished sadly. He was half himself.
‘Ludmilla, I beg you. You will turn away. You will send this purple arrogance to hell.’
‘Now, now,’ called Mrs Rapallo, out of her crimson careering cape, over the wind. ‘I kind of guess, Alyosha Sergei, you are at it again. You are telling me off.’ Her crimson consumed a tamarisk, and flatly demolished the sea rail.
‘But at times I am buoyant, Miss Goodman,’ she insisted. ‘On some evenings I refuse to sink.’
Then they were all caught up, the three of them, in Mrs Rapallo’s cape, tulipped in crimson that the wind waved.
‘There now, you see, I will have you,’ Mrs Rapallo said. ‘There is no escape for some of us.’
Theodora laughed. Warmed by her own pleasure, she was also afraid that a piece of Mrs Rapallo might break. The motion of her limbs was audible.
‘You will please release me from your idiocy,’ the General said, serious now as compressed rubber.
‘If we choose to sing “Jingle Bells”, we choose,’ said Mrs Rapallo. ‘Some evenings, Sokolnikov, are quite definitely mine.’
But the General detached himself from the cape. Midway in the gesture Theodora heard with anxiety something tear.
‘I have had enough of enough,’ said Sokolnikov.
Discomfort was increased by grey grit which whirled in spirals off the asphalt and scratched at the eyes.
‘Even one’s own tenderest thoughts,’ he complained, ‘are not above suspicion. You, Ludmilla!’
It was very miserable. It was as sad as one bassoon. But also dignified.
‘Mrs Rapallo, I forbid you to persecute me further.’
‘Then his back was going, furred and flabby, returning along the asphalt promenade.
‘Oh, but you must not leave us,’ Theodora called, coaxed. ‘Alyosha Sergei! This is where we talk.’
Mrs Rapallo laughed, or rather she set in motion the mechanism of her laughter, letting fall a shower of serious teaspoons on to the pavement.
‘We talk? My, my! You are ambitious, Miss Goodman,’ Mrs Rapallo mocked. ‘With Alyosha Sergei it is a question of who winds the phonograph.’