Goodman was a decent fellow, said old Mr Trevelyan, and he shook his head, though it usually shook, it was like that. Yes, said old Mr Trevelyan. It was bad. And the fences fallin’ down.
‘All this gadding off to foreign places,’ said Mr Parrott. ‘Sellin’ off a paddock here and a paddock there. George Goodman has no sense of responsibility to his own land.’
This was awful. It made your stomach sick, to hear of Father, this, that you could not quite understand, but it was bad enough.
Then Father came out. He was wearing the old Panama hat. He was laughing at something good that had happened inside the Imperial Hotel. It was so good that Father had come to the surface, and his eyes saw. And she wanted to laugh too, but she could not. Her stomach was sick with the sense of responsibility that Father, they said, did not have.
‘So long, Ted, Alby,’ Father called, nodding and laughing to the men. ‘Theo, where are you?’
‘So long, George. So long, Mr Goodman,’ replied the men, as if nothing had been said.
It was all smiles. But Theodora Goodman was thin and yellow with shame.
‘Here I am, Father,’ she said. ‘I waited here in the shade. The buggy is round the side.’
They drove home high in the buggy, between the black wheels, listening to the stones that they lashed up. Theodora sat with knotted hands. She was oppressed by a weight of sadness, that nobody would lift, because nobody would ever know that she was shouldering it. Least of all Father, who was thick and mysterious as a tree, but also hollow, by judgement of the men beneath the balcony. Now she linked together what they said with remarks that Gertie Stepper made. I been all my life with practical people, Gertie said, punching at the dough.
The wheels of the buggy on the road from town thrashed the stones, and Father said, ‘Nothing to say, Theo?’
‘Why,’ she said, ‘no.’
There was nothing to say. His nearness and the flashing of his Panama hat were hard enough to bear.
It was true what the men said, it was quite true. They had sold Long Acre, and Nissen’s Selection, and Bald Hill.
‘I refuse to vegetate,’ said Mrs Goodman. ‘Let us go somewhere. Before we die.’
Her voice struck the dining-room door, beyond which lamps had just been lit, and the big hambone still glittered, and the apple peel Fanny had thrown across her shoulder lay coiled on the carpet.
‘It’s reckless, Julia,’ Father said.
‘Then let us be reckless,’ said Mother, and, the other side of the dining-room door, she must have tightened her mouth.
‘Let us be reckless,’ she said. ‘And die. We can sell a paddock. Let us go to the Indies.’
Mother’s voice burned the quiet air. It was stifling as an afternoon of fire.
Father laughed. ‘I suppose we can sell Long Acre,’ he said. ‘Old Trevelyan’s willing to buy.’
Then they were both silent, as if consumed by Mother’s fire.
‘The Indies,’ Mother breathed.
That was Long Acre. But there had been the other trips, to Europe twice, and to India, from which many things were brought back, in silk and glass and mahogany, as well as a brass filigree ball that the Indians used to fill with fire. When Father and Mother had gone, and the rooms of the house were shut, there was this to look forward to, the things that would be brought back. Sometimes the rooms were shut for a long time, and it was like living outside a house, into which you looked occasionally through a window at the frozen furniture. The shut rooms sound like music boxes that have stopped playing. You hold your ear against the sides, which contain a creaking, of music waiting to burst out as soon as somebody touches the spring. It was like this too with the closed rooms, waiting for someone to walk in and coax life from the furniture.
‘You must be good children,’ Mother said thoughtfully. ‘And behave. And brush your teeth. And practise your scales.’
She said it through her green veil, moistening her lips slightly with her tongue. The boxes had been locked that morning and sent to town in the spring cart. And now she sat putting in time, waiting for the buggy to come round. She turned her head this way and that. She touched the bow on Fanny’s hair. Mother did not kiss. Or not much. And then only Fanny. My pretty little parakeet. Mother liked better to arrange things, the ornaments in cabinets, or on little tables in the drawing-room, then to sit and watch what she had done.
Once there were the new dresses that were put on for Mother’s sake.
‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘Fanny, my roses, my roses, you are very pretty.’
Because Fanny was as pink and white as roses in the new dress.
‘And Theo,’ she said, ‘all dressed up. Well, well. But I don’t think we’ll let you wear yellow again, because it doesn’t suit, even in a sash. It turns you sallow,’ Mother said.
So that the mirrors began to throw up the sallow Theodora Goodman, which meant who was too yellow. Like her own sash. She went and stood in the mirror at the end of the passage, near the sewing room which was full of threads, and the old mirror was like a green sea in which she swam, patched and spotted with gold light. Light and the ghostly water in the old glass dissolved her bones. The big straw hat with the little yellow buds and the trailing ribbons floated. But the face was the long, thin, yellow face of Theodora Goodman, who they said was sallow. She turned and destroyed the reflection, more especially the reflection of the eyes, by walking away. They sank into the green water and were lost.
There were many bitter days at Meroã when the roselight hardened and blackened. The earth was hollow with black frost, and the grass lanced the air with silver spears. Then the hands stuck to the music, beating out the icy bars of a nocturne, which were stiff and blunt when they should have sailed out as smooth and continuous as a wedge of swans. Not this nocturne that beat its little glass hammer at Meroã.
Mother’s voice crackled at the fire. She warmed her rings. Her small head was as bright and as hard as a garnet beside the fire.
‘No, no, Theodora,’ crackled Mother. ‘Not that way. Where is your feeling?’ she said. ‘This horrible up and down. Can’t you feel it flow? Here, give it to me.’
As if it were a thing. But Mother sat down. She played the music as it should have been played. She took possession of the piano, she possessed Chopin, they were hers while she wanted them, until she was ready to put them down. Only, watching the hands of Mother, which always did what they wanted to, Theodora was not moved. The music had lost its meaning, even the meaning that lay in the stiff up and down, the agonizing angularity that Chopin had never meant to be, but which was part of some inner intention of her own.
‘The piano is not for Theodora,’ Mother sighed. ‘Fanny is the musical one.’
Fanny could play a piece, and it was a whole bright, tight bunch of artificial flowers surrounded by a paper frill. Fanny played her piece. And when she had played it, it was finished. She jumped up, and laughed, and was content.
Outside though, beyond the fire and the carpets and the last notes of Fanny’s completed piece, there was the long, black, bitter sweep of the hills. Theodora walked in the garden of dead roses. One of the hills, they said, which was now dead, had once run with fire, its black cone streaming, but now it brooded black against the white sky. Only if you walked on the side of the hill there was a last flicker of gold from the wattles, of which the bark oozed a deeper golden gum, so that the rock gave up some of its blackness, the hill melted and flamed still.