‘But there must be something,’ he said. ‘Or an illusion of something. Ludmilla, if you love me …’
‘Yes?’
Her head lolled.
‘If you love me, there is still one beautiful act to be done. In the room of this American adventuress, this mother-in-law of pomposities and insolence, there is a nautilus that she stole. I do not wish to repeat the act. But let us look, just once, together, at this lovely shell. Ludmilla, if you love me, you will fetch it. You are less resonant than I. You do not bounce at inconvenient moments. Bring, bring the nautilus.’
Theodora saw no reason why she should not. She was herself by now as vibrant and transparent as a shell. And at the same time she began to be obsessed by the same obsession as Sokolnikov, to hold the nautilus, to hold, if it is ever possible, to hold.
‘I shall most certainly try,’ she said as she got up, propping herself with two wooden fingers on the surface of the table that was thick with carcasses. ‘I shall most certainly try.’
‘My excellent Ludmilla,’ cried the General. ‘I have every reason to believe that you will execute this mission.’
But she did not bother to consider whether the room contained certainty of action, or just a steamy Slav. On the whole, she thought, certainty did not inhabit the rooms of small hotels. But she began to cross the floor. She observed a row of empty boots. She observed a door, waiting miraculously to receive her exit.
Then the passage was darkness. Darkness flowed, whether up or down she did not know, but soft as dandelions to blow. If I have not blown out the darkness before noon I shall have reached Mrs Rapallo, said Theodora Goodman. She watched the darkness for a monkey combing hair. Mignon, she mumbled, recoiling from the paper hands of darkness, but at least it did not examine its dandruff in public, or had not done so yet.
A light stood in a saucer in Mrs Rapallo’s room.
Elsie Rapallo is afraid of the dark, said Theodora Goodman.
Though why, she did not know, for the light fingered unmercifully. It exposed the considerable mineral deposits in Elsie Rapallo’s abandoned skull.
Theodora stood in the doorway and considered which path to pick. They all wound. Sometimes it was the perplexed objects of darkness which obstructed, sometimes a dream stirred and threatened to form. Walking at random, she heard her feet bruising the faces of old letters. Tactical foresight made her avoid Queen Marie of Rumania, whose autograph had hands.
It is an exceedingly long way, Theodora sighed.
‘It is an aquamarine,’ said Mrs Rapallo, in quite a distinct voice.
Her cheek rubbed against some greater depth of sleep. And there was le petit paquet sur la commode en marbre. Of course. As Henriette had said. Mrs Rapallo had finally dissolved the marble groups that waited beneath the Veronese, spoons poised above the ices, for cardinals to pass.
Theodora advanced. She was somewhere near the little table in marquetry which threatened to erupt music if she touched. She held her skirt. She dreaded the stiff music that Mrs Rapallo’s boxes must contain.
I have come here, she said, for the nautilus.
Though now she had begun to doubt whether she could reach. Whether the pampas of the darkness would allow, and its great clouds of grass, heavy as breath, that she parted with her ineffectual hands. She also doubted whether the nautilus was substance enough, or whether it would blow.
Just then Theodora slipped on satin.
‘Nous avons pris le thé chez Dodo,’ Mrs Rapallo said.
Many agonies righted themselves on many tables. There was a gingerbread heart on which Theodora read Ich liebe dich, in dust or sugar.
But she was there also, she saw. Her hands could just touch an article of furniture, ugly and involved with carved game, on which the nautilus stood.
Above the bed, on its brass branch, Mrs Rapallo’s hair had begun to chatter.
This is a possibility that I had forgotten, Theodora said.
She had forgotten also the feel of monkey, the kind of orphan intimacy of monkeys’ hands. Launching out of the darkness with one purpose, the monkey sat against her neck. The monkey touched a pulse, and touched, and touched. A terrible nostalgia for skin to inspire its monkey finger.
‘Mignon, I am touched,’ Theodora said. ‘But now I am in no mood, in no mood at all, for monkeys.’
As if Mignon were prepared to hear. Mignon was all sadness. Mignon held her ear close to Theodora’s skin, counting the murmurs, as if for monkeys the promised land is flesh.
Mrs Rapallo stirred, and scratched her scalp.
‘Mignon. Pretty Mignon. Va-t’en!’ Theodora said.
But she could not shake the monkey’s heavy sadness. Mignon clung.
Something desperate must happen, Theodora felt.
In the semi-darkness of Mrs Rapallo’s room, furred and clammy as monkey skin, with the same distinctive smell, she looked for some event. But in Mrs Rapallo’s room events were past. They hung from hooks, or littered the chairs with discarded whalebone. Nothing would ever disturb the dust, except a finger aimlessly writing a name. Gloria Leontini, the finger had written, on the small undecorated space of oak on which the nautilus stood. Principessa dell’ Isola Grande, garlanding the foot of the compotier.
But the compotier was hope, the wax oranges and nectarines, from which a mouth had already taken bites. Theodora seized with love this child’s game of fruit. She took the small, pocked orange, with its sallow bite. She rubbed it on her sleeve.
‘Look, Mignon, my love. You will go and fetch the orange, or stay, whichever you wish.’
She heard the orange bump, thump, dangerously into darkness. She heard the monkey’s feet scratching, spattering the faces of old letters. Somewhere in darkness Mignon transferred her melancholy to a wax orange. At least she did not return.
Theodora took the nautilus. Spikes pricked her breast. Her hands were water.
‘Ahhhh,’ sighed the mouth of Mrs Rapallo, its slack skin opening far too close to the surface of sleep.
Then Theodora made the darkness move. It was released. Her skirt flowed. Ferns shook. The dull and usually unresponsive tails of pampas grass flumped against her fixed eyes. She was walking down the passage with the nautilus.
Somebody, who was it, flew downstairs, Theodora remembered. She was not surprised.
‘It is not surprising at all, Alyosha Sergei,’ she said.
‘On the contrary, it is fantastic,’ said Sokolnikov.
Impatience had made him swell. He filled the door. She could not see his detail, but there was no mistaking his bulk.
‘My lovely shell,’ he said, out of a long distance and a congested throat.
‘That is all very well,’ said Theodora. ‘Your lovely shell. But who will put it back?’
His face drained the nautilus.
‘You have the irritating vice of practical and virtuous women, Ludmilla. You think too far ahead. Anything may happen,’ he said.
It might, of course, it might. And now she knew that it must. It had as good as happened. She heard her own cry through her still closed mouth. Her heart turned in her side, because, she knew, the nautilus is made to break.
‘Will you not look, Ludmilla?’
Soloknikov was holding it in his hands. His faced oozed long opalescent tears.
‘Do you remember, when we were children, the moon was transparent? You could watch it pulse like the skin on an unhatched egg. Then it began to solidify. It became as opaque as a dragée at a christening.’
Alyosha Sergei, you foolish child, Theodora could not say, this is a crisis in which even I cannot protect you, and as for your moon, it is lost.
‘Somebody is a thief,’ Mrs Rapallo said.
She stood in the passage without her hair. Her words were blunted by her gums.
‘Sokolnikov we knew. But you, Theodora Goodman! And intoxicated too.’
Her hands explored without design the tatters of an old lace gown. Out of magenta she was pale.
‘Of course I am all that you say, Mrs Rapallo,’ Theodora replied.
She could not explain. She could explain nothing, least of all her several lives. She could not explain that where there is more than one it is inevitable always to betray.
‘Do not let her deny you, Ludmilla,’ the General fumed. ‘It is not possible to steal what is not her own.’
‘But it is,’ Theodora said.
‘It is mine,’ said Sokolnikov.
‘I know,’ Theodora cried.
Silence fell solider than wax.
‘You are drunk, Ludmilla,’ said the General.
‘I have never seen more clearly,’ said Theodora slowly. ‘But what I see remains involved.’
Mrs Rapallo had begun to move.
‘I have my shell,’ she said. ‘General Sokolnikov, it is all I have got.’
And the nautilus became a desperate thing of hands. Theodora heard the crack of bones. Hands were knotting the air. Then, hands were hands.
‘Then it has happened,’ Theodora said.
She looked at the shivered shell. Mrs Rapallo had turned.
‘I guessed that it would,’ she said.
‘A murder has been committed,’ the General cried.
‘Go, hang out your soul to dry. You Russians were always damp,’ replied Mrs Rapallo.
Theodora did not know if the General slammed his door then or later, or where the retreat of Mrs Rapallo began, grating on the darkness her slow and solemn rags. Now the night was denser. Emotions had trodden into the carpet the slight white rime which was what remained of the nautilus. Theodora herself felt considerably reduced.