Under the still skin of Katina Pavlou’s face the blood had not yet begun again to flow. Since yesterday, Theodora saw, the bones had come.
‘And what has happened in the meantime?’ Katina Pavlou asked, as they re-entered the territory of Dubonnet and Suze.
‘I doubt whether I am better informed than you,’ Theodora replied. ‘There was, of course, the failure of the municipal power. Here is Miss Grigg. Judging from her appearance darkness will reign.’
‘Yes, imagine, Katina,’ said Miss Grigg, who was standing squarely on the step. ‘How we shall manage to fork our food into our mouths is something only the Almighty knows.’
But Monsieur Durand said, ‘There shall be lamps and candles.’ And there were.
There were lamps and candles. There was the legendary light of oil and wax. There was the light of light. Now that Theodora had stitched her skirt, which had torn on a bush somewhere on a hillside, and washed away the dust, and the water had tightened round the edges of her face, she watched with pleasure the renewed objects of the dining-room. She did not eat much. She watched Katina Pavlou scooping the avocado. By lamplight, movement was smooth, the flesh as suave as avocados. The eyelids on Katina Pavlou’s face were still and golden, but uncommunicative. Tonight the faces at their separate tables did not communicate, and Theodora was relieved that they should remain contained, whether by exhaustion or some instinct for secrecy.
Only Mrs Rapallo’s table had not flowered. Here the light shrivelled into shadow and the upright box of Ryvita, with which normally Mrs Rapallo made havoc of silences.
‘Where is Mrs Rapallo?’ Theodora asked.
‘Elle n’est pas descendue,’ replied le petit. ‘Elle ne mange guère. Enfin, ça ne vaut pas la peine de descendre, et quand on risque de se casser la figure.’
Scarcely pausing in his saraband of plates, his body moved with the smoothness of contempt and custom. Le petit had pinched off a cigarette and stuck it behind his ear. He had a merciless continuity. And Mrs Rapallo’s Ryvita stood still.
‘Thank you. Yes, I shall take coffee,’ Theodora agreed.
Because to refuse le petit required daring. Or to dare the stairs, she considered, after the wry, medicinal coffee, the inhabited undergrowth of Mrs Rapallo’s room.
On the whole, she knew, there was less daring than duty in her knuckle.
‘Mrs Rapallo?’ she knocked. ‘It is Theodora Goodman. May I come in?’
Through some distance and the flat door she heard the sounds of revival.
‘Theodora who?’ said Mrs Rapallo. ‘Oh. Yes. You. Come inside, Theodora Goodman. I shall, of course, be glad.’
‘What is the matter, Mrs Rapallo?’ asked Theodora as her feet slid across the faces of old envelopes.
‘I am sick, Theodora Goodman,’ Mrs Rapallo said.
‘Oh,’ said Theodora. ‘Where?’
‘Nowhere in particular,’ Mrs Rapallo said. ‘That is to say, je suis ennuyée, je suis ennuyée un tout petit peu de tout.’
‘That is not fatal,’ said Theodora.
‘Well,’ replied Mrs Rapallo, ‘I am not sure.’
Mrs Rapallo lolled, both her head and voice. It is unusual, Theodora Goodman felt, for Mrs Rapallo, whose words are as stiff as biscuits. But it was not possible to deny the sinuous expression of floating in Mrs Rapallo’s eyes.
‘There are ways and means, of course,’ said Mrs Rapallo with a smooth smile, arranging her scalp where the hair had been.
Then Theodora remembered le petit paquet sur la commode en marbre.
‘There are ways and means,’ said Mrs Rapallo, ‘just as there are variegated tulips and facial surgery.’
Without looking on the commode en marbre, behind the silver bonbonniére, Theodora expected to hear the petit paquet rustle. Instinct suggested she should rescue, if the tulip-coloured stream had not already carried Mrs Rapallo out of reach. So she stood straight, and wrenched from her head a platitude once the property of Fanny Parrott.
‘Oh, but Mrs Rapallo, you have so much to look forward to,’ Theodora said. ‘And now that your daughter has arrived. Surely the Principessa will drive over one day soon in the blue Delage?’
Mrs Rapallo composed her skin.
‘It is time, Theodora Goodman, that you and I agreed that the Principessa does not exist.’
And Theodora remembered how the Canova group had intervened.
‘It is a pity,’ said Mrs Rapallo, ‘because Gloria had poise, and an epistolary style. Her use of words was almost plastic. After dropping the letters in the box, I could not bear to take away my hand. I was jealous of the iron flap that swallowed Gloria’s letters down. How I longed for them to return to me, as they did, of course, almost at once. On such occasions I would hide behind a tamarisk, between the post office and the papeterie, so that the trembling of my gloves would not be noticed. Gloria was lovelier then, far more brilliant than even I had conceived, in creating her. And unlike any child of the bowels, entirely mine.’
‘I cannot believe,’ said Theodora.
She had begun to doubt, in fact, whether Queen Marie of Rumania.
‘What do you believe?’ Mrs Rapallo asked.
‘I do not know.’
Because now that she swam in Mrs Rapallo’s tulip-coloured stream, reason and motive were rinsed out.
‘You must relax, Theodora Goodman,’ said Mrs Rapallo. ‘You must relax and float. You will find that figures will evolve, squares, chains, and galops. Sometimes you will place one hand on your hip, sometimes you will feel the hand of your partner in the small of the back. But believe me, the essential is to relax.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Theodora cried, made anxious by such gyrations in a full room. ‘But does Rapallo come in?’
‘Oh, yes, he does. Very definitely, yes. On a Thursday morning. They opened the door of the hall. He was selling a patent medicine. He undressed me with his eyes. I was not unwilling. I had fallen for his boots and his sadness. I fell. I fell.’
Mrs Rapallo’s teeth bit the pieces.
‘I came to ten years later,’ she said, ‘on an iron bedstead, in a cheap hotel in Munich. All he had left behind was a pair of yellow gloves, of which he had been proud, rolled in a ball on the carpet. It was a naked moment, Theodora Goodman, naked as hell.’
In self-preservation Theodora looked for some other object, stuffed bird or compotier, on which to concentrate till Elsie Rapallo was once more clothed.
‘However,’ Mrs Rapallo said, ‘as I had been endowed with physical agility and mental whalebone, I continued to appear dans le monde. I kidded this same monde into accepting me for my wealth and wit, though the one had disappeared, and the other had been damaged. In return I was allowed to suffer the knout in all the best drawing-rooms in Europe.’
She touched her bones under the sheet, as if she were surprised not to find them broken.
‘At a pinch I wrote my own invitations,’ Mrs Rapallo said, ‘and passed through many doors of which I should never have had the entrée. In this way I have heard the smiles open on the faces of royalty, and stood so close to the making of history that I have been suffocated by the stink.’
Elsie Rapallo dipped on her tulip-coloured stream that did not respect substance as it flowed. Theodora trod the sodden faces of old letters and the yellow smiles of photographs. Grazed by a random amethyst, dazed by the bobbing of a wax apple that would not drown, she accepted the cardboard collapse of Mrs Rapallo’s room. Since it was the natural thing to flow, she flowed.