‘It is most important to believe that relations do exist,’ said Theodora desperately.
‘Oh, but they do. Always,’ Mrs Rapallo said. ‘Don’t their letters tell us so?’
But Theodora was uncomforted. Mirrors also expressed doubt. We like to believe that we believe was multiplied in glass.
‘Theodora Goodman, I sense that you are melancholy,’ accused Mrs Rapallo on the threshold of her own room. ‘When I was a girl we took champagne. The gentlemen expected it.’
‘That is the difference,’ Theodora said.
‘Yes,’ sighed Mrs Rapallo, her finger on the light.
She hesitated before some final act of sincerity or nakedness. Then the light shone. It began to penetrate the jungle, the triumphs and disasters of Elsie Rapallo’s reckless room. This was quite full. Theodora edged. Although she was uninvited, she knew she was expected. She could see the magenta mouth pursing to confess. She could feel the tangle of the undergrowth, feathered, musky, tarnished, putting out tendrils of regret and hope, twitching at her skirt. Most distinctly, and with a shudder, she felt the touch of plush.
‘These are my things,’ Mrs Rapallo said.
‘Then I am a nun,’ said Theodora Goodman.
Because it seemed as if her own life had narrowed to a cell.
‘It all depends what you need,’ said Mrs Rapallo.
She exhaled, as deeply as red plush, so that dust flew, spiralled, and resettled. Theodora edged farther, avoiding as much as she could avoid the music boxes she might set off, the peacock feathers, and the tremulous fern. In Mrs Rapallo’s room the moment apparently lay where it fell. She walked, she saw, on the upturned faces of received envelopes, sly, animal switches of hair, and the crumbs of a rubber sponge. There was no hope in the stiff smiles of photographs that they might eventually be released. These had become resigned to smile or frown away their vanities, yellow as autographs, whether Mussolini, or Edgar Wallace, or Queen Marie of Rumania. They stared and stared, out of the haphazard and rococo growth of spoons, bells, bonbonnières, baby’s coral, china eggs, biscuit figurines, and silver toys encrusting several occasional tables, Moorish, Second Empire, and Art Nouveau. This then, was Mrs Rapallo’s room. Corners confessed physical secrets. And a great crimson chair, alter ego of the cape, offered with its lap not so much rest as the restlessness that rushed, hesitated, coiled and uncoiled among the bric-à-brac.
‘Pourquoi tu te caches? Viens, mon cœur,’ Mrs Rapallo called.
As the shadow fell, she braced her arm, reinforced by her will, to catch. There formed, first, fur and eyes, then a slightly shabby monkey.
‘Embrasse Maman,’ Mrs Rapallo coaxed. ‘Tu as froid. Je te chaufferai. Fais-moi la bibize, fais la bibize a ta mé-mère.’
Whether it was cold or not, she warmed the shabby fur, trying to revive in it her own ghost of passion.
‘Elle s’appelle Mignon,’ she said. ‘C’est un être doux, qui mourra, quand même.’
Theodora did not deny that this was a possibility, breathing the stale air, that smelt of dust, and eau-de-Cologne, and animal excrement. She retreated from the monkey’s paper hands.
‘That is not kind,’ said Mrs Rapallo.
‘One is not always kind. Once I almost did a murder.’ Theodora said.
‘That is different,’ said Mrs Rapallo. ‘That is also different.’
She stroked the monkey’s hood with her gloves. It was a matter of solemnity.
‘Mignon, dis, c’est autre chose,’ she said, not altogether asking. ‘Either courage or inspiration is required for murder. But for kindness … Although he was kind. He was as kind as silence, and as unkind. Silence is slow, soft, kind, sometimes also terrifying. For instance, eating a boiled egg.’
Theodora saw that this was true. She saw the back of his neck. She saw the dark hairs above the dressing gown, the hairs of his neck, still and dark. She saw the neck bend, as the face approached the mouthful of egg. The face she did not see. She had never seen the face.
When Mr Rapallo came into the room, motion reached the point where it becomes a still. Theodora was invariably caught with one absurd hand stretched above her head, or she was raised on her toes in pursuit of some goal that she no longer dared pursue. Mr Rapallo made the humbler gestures ridiculous. He wore a dressing gown of black brocade, on which silver parrots were dimly embroidered. There was also a hole that had been burnt once by a cigar. Watching his cigar poised, you waited for the next ash to drop, from the hand that almost did not tremble. He had a persistent habit of contracting the gristle on the back of his dark neck, but the movement never reached convulsion. In Mr Rapallo the tension remained tension, and unexplained.
‘Soon he will go,’ whispered Elsie Rapallo. ‘This is just a formality. It’s always brief.’
Elsie Rapallo was at her creamiest in morning gowns, deep, white, heavy as magnolias, beneath the thick black heavy hair from which Theodora had brushed the confidences. Raising her arm at the window in the face of silence, to part the curtains, to invoke a morning caller, sighs fell steamily from her lace, back from the elbows and the moss-green knots. There was a richness, an overpowering richness about the morning gestures, and in the afternoon, horses would paw at the gravel, bringing the Duchess or Nana Trumpett to tea. The visible details of Elsie Rapallo’s life were scattered like the visiting cards of important persons, on a silver salver, to be noticed. But there were also the private regrets, by which she was devoured. Silence ate at the magnolia flesh. Elsie Rapallo was half spent.
‘He has gone,’ said Theodora Goodman.
‘He has gone,’ said Elsie Rapallo. ‘Then we can rattle. We can fill our lives. We shall forget our debts and our failures.’
She held out her hands to receive something immaterial and childish.
‘But, above all, our debts. He says that the pearl collar will meet the bill. It was always hateful, anyway. That pearl collar cut. Look, Theodora, look, and you will see the scar.’
But Theodora did not look long. She knew from experience those occasions when banality is balm.
So she said instead, ‘You shall tell me the cute, sweet things that Gloria says and does.’
‘Gloria,’ said Elsie Rapallo, ‘has gone to the Champs-Élysées with her bonne.’
But in her absence the light was full, soft, yellow, filling the lap. The cheek was rounder. The chair was softer to the body.
‘Yes, my cute, sweet Gloria,’ Elsie Rapallo settled, sighed. ‘My little Gloria says: Give me your diamonds, Maman chérie, I shall put them on and pretend that the President has asked me to breakfast; I shall go as a shower of diamonds, chère petite Maman. Gloria says, she says: I am my second-best in diamonds, and a third in sapphires, but emeralds is unlucky so I can’t say that they suit at all. So I say to Gloria, I say: Why, Gloria, now why, if diamonds is only second, whatever is first? She says. Now wait, Theodora, this will kill you. You must admit that Gloria is cute. She says: Why, Maman chérie, if Gloria wants to look her best she’ll go in her own white skin. There, Theodora! There! Can you beat Gloria?’
‘No,’ Theodora said.
‘But wait, Theodora, wait. Gloria’s learning about religion. It’s time, I thought, and you’ve got to somehow bring in God. Jesus loves Gloria? she says. Of course, I say, of course, gentle Jesus loves us all. And Maman loves Gloria? Well, I kind of guess she does. Oh, says my Gloria. Why, I say, isn’t that enough? Oh, she says, it all helps, but if no one does, it don’t matter, Gloria can love herself. Can you believe it, Theodora? All as serious as pie.’