So it is to take place then, Theodora knew. The picnic will disclose. There will be stuffed eggs, and conversation, and silences, and swords. But the picnic will be made. Already the little wintergarden could not contain the event. It pressed, it brimmed, rustling with the barely suppressed wind of excitement the brown bodies of dead flies.
‘A picnic?’ Mrs Rapallo said. ‘How queer. And how uncomfortable.’
She propelled her words outward like deliberate amethysts, which she then observed, with some pleasure and some distaste, from beneath bluish skin.
‘I was never one for the alfresco,’ said Mrs Rapallo. ‘Life was intended to be lived indoors. At its most intense it smells of gardenias.’
Since the night of the nautilus she had shrunk. But she came. She came to the picnic, still dubious whether grass offered much beyond moisture, and whether the elaborate machinery of the waves would soothe.
‘I shall put myself here,’ she said, patting an orange rock with scorn.
Mrs Rapallo had to settle her magenta, compose her crimson, tilt her great jaundiced hat, before she could suffer the sun, if only obliquely, from under her parasol.
‘There,’ she said. ‘There is now some design in nature.’
And she sniffed at the red trunk of an offending pine.
Soon the landscape had begun to fit. The air withdrew its obliviousness. It stroked. The sea moulded the human form into tolerant shapes. How far the sun condescended was seen in the face of Katina Pavlou, its open, golden petals, with the dark seeds for eyes. Theodora waited for Katina’s eyes to germinate. She watched for the expanding of some mystery that she had already guessed at and rejected.
‘If you open your hand I shall tell you a fortune,’ said Wetherby as he reached forward and took the fingers of Katina Pavlou.
‘No,’ she said. ‘There is still eating to be done.’
She withdrew her hand. She could not answer for the behaviour of her bones.
‘How right you are,’ Lieselotte laughed.
She lay on her back, chewing with her small teeth the sweetness from a piece of grass.
‘Wetherby cannot resist the telling of fortunes,’ Lieselotte said. ‘To tell his own fortune in other hands. He is the original interpreter of mirrors. Am I not right?’ she said, turned.
‘You are always right,’ said Wetherby.
But he did not propose to investigate the degrees of hate. Sun destroys self. For the moment he could accept his nothing. He wondered also, a little, at the hot skin, purple-stained, which had just escaped from his own hand.
‘Katina! Come on, Katina!’ Miss Grigg commanded. ‘It is your duty to see that guests are supplied with paper napkins and cardboard plates.’
‘Of course,’ Katina said.
She took from her skirt the hand that she had held clenched to contain her secret, and which, spread for a fortune, would have palpitated like a leaf.
Theodora put stones, one at each corner, to hold the tablecloth. It was a neat, solemn duty that she liked. There was a bounty hinted at, and a shape, even if ultimately unachieved by human intercourse. Man’s machinery fails, she suspected, beside the more sinuous reasoning of the waves. She heard the crimson protest of Mrs Rapallo’s parasol drowning in blue, and blue, and still deeper blue.
‘My eyes are not made for this,’ complained Mrs Rapallo. ‘I cannot see. What do you suppose has happened, Theodora Goodman? When I was a girl I could see the gum oozing out of bark. I could watch the red cabbage bugs playing at love. The sun was a ball of fire, at which I could stare without fear or discomfort.’
It is from long looking at a wall, Mrs Rapallo, Theodora would have said, but refrained.
So Mrs Rapallo sulked, and her eyelids oozed, and she tilted her parasol at the sun.
‘Let me press you to a sandwidge, Mrs Rapallo,’ coaxed Miss Grigg. ‘Or a croaky de poison. There’s nothing like food. And sea adds salt.’
Miss Grigg’s enthusiasm ran red under her white twill.
‘Picnics,’ she said, ‘are nice. When I was with the family of the late Colonel de Saumarez, M.B.E., at Winchester, picnics were the order of the day. We used to take our lunch into the forest, to Lymington. The late Colonel was a jolly man. ’E could tell a tale like nobody’s business. No one had shot so many tigers, or stuck such pigs, or ’ooked such wopping sharks. I was devoted to ’is kids, Lilian and little ’Enry, though ’Enry went to the pack.’
Miss Grigg fanned a fly away from the niceness over which she presided by right and nature, the egg sandwiches and sausage rolls, the chicken wings and pale aspic prawns. But nastiness always dares. So she frowned, and shooed, and protected the cloth, where her soul lay sliced and open on a cardboard plate.
‘Yes. Poor little ’Enry. ’Enry was a love. Used to like to chase the pigs. ’E said the pigs wore combinations. Would you believe it! At Lymington, of course, the wild pigs were tame, not like the ones the Colonel stuck abroad. And Lilian sat beneath the trees, as nice as nice. Lilian was lovely. She took a lord, and turned stout in the end. But what ’appened to ’Enry is something we shall never know. First ’e blows ’is fortune, then ’is brains, in a bedroom in Bayswater. All ’e left was a note on the washstand to say ’e was in ’is right mind. Tt-tt-ttt,’ sighed Miss Grigg. ‘Countess, can’t I tempt you to an egg?’
‘Thank you,’ said Lieselotte, ‘I have eaten.’
‘Lord!’ said Miss Grigg squarely. ‘I ’aven’t begun.’
But Lieselotte, Theodora saw, was engulfed in some personal disaster, that was also perhaps little ’Enry’s. Lieselotte read the letter on the washstand written in her own familiar writing.
‘The castle in which we lived was full of such events,’ said Lieselotte. ‘They were called a sacred German Pflicht.’
‘And what is this German Flick?’ asked Miss Grigg.
‘It is something that cannot be explained in any other language. It is a kind of upsurging of the German bowels.’
‘Well I never!’ said Miss Grigg.
‘But I failed to upsurge. Although Rudi handed me the gun himself. He called it the benefit of honour. I couldn’t. Even when he dictated the letter I should write.’
‘Your ’usband was a wrong ’un. Downright bad,’ said Miss Grigg.
Lieselotte fingered bread.
‘Only bread is good, Katina Pavlou,’ said Lieselotte.
Katina Pavlou did not hear. There was no reason why she should. Sun had undone her bones. Her body had learnt a suppleness of water. Suddenly she bent and mingled.
‘You are not eating,’ she said. ‘You are bored. But the best part is still to come. We have wild strawberries and sour cream.’
She blushed. She would have called him by some intimate name, touching without hands. But since discovering in a book that he was called Lionel Aloysius, she blushed. She was ashamed for him.
‘I?’ Wetherby asked.
He was not altogether sure. He turned his face. Now the sun was suspect.
Theodora Goodman smiled, knowing that for Wetherby the truth resided in Birmingham. She also heard the squirming of the paper rose. If I am to take and break this child, Wetherby would have said, the suffering will not be mine.
‘I was thinking,’ Wetherby said.
‘Of what?’ Katina Pavlou asked.
Oh, well, he supposed, if it was to happen.
‘I was thinking,’ he said, ‘that I had not noticed the two brown moles on the lobe of one of your ears.’
This is so easy, he said. He smiled at the sea. But it was not Wetherby. He smiled for the clerks in parks who expose themselves regularly, in words, on benches.
Katina Pavlou touched the crumbs. ‘I hate my moles,’ she said.