Algebra, she felt, with Lou, would remain her chiefest torture.
‘Tell me something, Miss Goodman. Tell me the truth. If I could have loved Katina Pavlou just as she leapt from your imagination, clothed in white, and all the nostalgia of what has never happened, then it might have been different.’
But now Theodora trembled for the dark. Now the garden raised its swords. She avoided Wetherby, but Wetherby pursued.
‘Perhaps in different circumstances I would have lain with my head in your lap, and discussed Tennyson and Morris. But the escalators have carried us apart. And now, Miss Goodman, the times have turned sour. I think I am right in saying of love that the most one can expect is the logical conclusion.’
Theodora laughed. Now she could not control her dark moustache. It was a fierce and hateful thing. But the eyes of Wetherby were clear as mirrors.
‘Not that one does not continue to hope,’ he said. ‘I am obsessed.’
‘Yes, you will continue,’ Theodora laughed. ‘You will love your obsession. You will love the faces of mirrors. You will love your own anxiety.’
Sitting on the bench in the jardin exotique, Theodora Goodman and Wetherby looked at each other, like two people coming out of a tunnel, rediscovering each other’s features, as if there had been no exchange of darkness. He was a pale young man in a tweed coat. She was a sallow spinster of forty-five.
Wetherby looked at his wrist.
‘Soon it will be time for the postman,’ he said. ‘I am expecting a letter from Muriel Leese-Leese. She keeps me here, you know, ostensibly for my health, though actually so that she may enjoy the pleasure of torturing herself by correspondence. She is lost without her daily twinge.’
‘And after that,’ said Theodora, ‘you will find it is time for lunch. How the morning passes.’
Wetherby folded the Daily Mail.
‘I shall not be here for lunch,’ he said. ‘I am going to walk along the coast with Katina Pavlou, to the round tower which has some connection with Napoleon.’
‘It has, they say,’ Theodora said.
The tower to which the Demoiselles Bloch walked occasionally, in strong boots and overcoats. Theodora herself had never been as far as the tower, but she suspected it. Especially now. She suspected the dark smell of damp stone and possibly a dead bird. She loathed the folded body of the dead bird, and the maggots in its eyes.
Disgust knotted her hands.
‘All right. It was no choice of mine,’ Wetherby said. ‘None of it.’
As if he had noticed the twitching of her dark moustache.
Alone, Theodora listened to the morning pass. She walked in the garden. She would have chosen an acacia, of which the green shade covers with superior benevolence, but the garden did not cater for emotional states, least of all desperation. The garden encouraged exposure, and then contained it, with all the indifference of zinc.
There were greater commotions too. There was the commotion of the electric current. Miss Grigg stood in the hall. She held the electric iron. She held it for Monsieur Durand to see, as if it might explain something of which exasperation was incapable. Miss Grigg said that in no hotel of any standing, in no hotel in which she had ever stayed, had the electric current been cut off quite so frequently. Miss Goodman would bear her out, that such things did not happen in hotels. It was not possible for ladies to press their slips.
Monsieur Durand looked sadly at Miss Grigg’s iron, which did not after all explain, any more than words.
‘It is the municipal power,’ said Monsieur Durand, ‘that does not for the moment circulate, but which will circulate again.’
In the lounge, under the pink lampshade, a hand was practising a gavotte, each note white and separate that it picked up.
Do you know, Miss Grigg, Theodora wanted to say, the music has not begun yet?
But it was not possible, just as it is not possible to convince certain faces that a murder is being done in the next room.
So instead she said, ‘Yes, Miss Grigg. It is just as Monsieur Durand says. He is not the municipal power. And the current will circulate again.’
So that Miss Grigg was cut. She was left holding her inarticulate iron. Her face was flat and functionless.
‘But all the same, one expects,’ she said, ‘to find what the prospectus puts in words. In the best ’otels. In the ’Otel Excelsior, at Chamonix, they even ’ad an electric device for pushin’ the snow off the window sills.’
Theodora listened to the hand, round the corner in the lounge, pick up each white, separate note of the gavotte. Each note trembled tentatively, fell, was gathered again, to glisten. The music flowed into a surer music, whiter and lighter.
‘Katina,’ called Miss Grigg. ‘You remember the ’Otel Excelsior? And the little trouts? Trouts with their tails in their mouths.’
‘No, Grigg, it was the Hôtel des Alpes,’ said Katina Pavlou round the corner in the lounge.
The voice blurred, as the music doubled on its underwater self, with the glistening surety of snow water, a bluish white, joyful and perpetual as mountain water. Katina Pavlou lifted her hands and the music fell, sure, and pure, and painfully transparent. So that any possible disaster of age or experience must drown in music. Disasters, the music implied, are reserved for observers, the drowning drown. Caught in this iciness of music, Theodora felt the breath stop in her throat. She went inside the little wintergarden and closed the door.
‘It is difficult to escape from music. Music pursues.’
It was General Sokolnikov, of course, who sat beneath a palm. In the steamy atmosphere of the little wintergarden the palm relaxed in rubber strips, as the General ponderously licked a postage stamp.
‘You must realize, Ludmilla, that you cannot close doors.’
It was true. Even in the little wintergarden music sluiced leaf and frond. It trembled in distinct drops on the pots of maidenhair.
‘You must realize, General,’ said Theodora, ‘that something has happened, or will.’
She held her front, afraid that her dress might not ultimately contain her agitation.
‘As if I didn’t,’ said Sokolnikov. ‘The municipal authorities have cut the municipal current. It is a habit that they have.’
Then it is not possible, Theodora knew, it is not possible to tell.
And now the General was engaged in the act of extraction. He was easing the stamp from his tongue.
‘I was writing to my ex-wife, Edith,’ he said.
Not without some distaste for his tongue, some suspicion of fish. Carefully parting the leaves of a begonia, Alyosha Sergei Sokolnikov spat.
‘We have adopted this peculiar convention of two people exchanging letters,’ the General said, past an excess of tongue. ‘We describe our digestions and the weather. In this way we cherish what remains of an unfortunate relationship. In this way it is easier to impose the reality one chooses.’
‘Then, there are many?’ said Theodora.
‘What questions you ask! Though you, of course, are different.’
His voice hesitated to disperse air. He made her thin, though she was, she realized. Her dress stirred only in a wind of music and words.
‘Yes,’ said the General softly. ‘You, Ludmilla, you are an illusion. You died years ago in the forests of Russia.’
She was almost ready to agree.
‘Then, thank you, Alyosha Sergei,’ she said, ‘thank you for accepting this illusion.’
‘Oh, illusions are necessary. It is necessary to accept. I shall tell you a secret. Incidentally. I was a major once. Also a colonel. Perhaps.’
‘Then you have deceived us, Major?’ Theodora said.