‘It is lovely, Mrs Rapallo,’ Theodora said.
‘But it is not always like this. Sometimes it is a nothing. I hate its paper.’
For a moment of terror she was afraid she might have lost her passport, and groped across the commode en marbre to hear the rustle of the petit paquet.
‘Sometimes,’ Mrs Rapallo smiled, now that she was reassured.
‘Sometimes also you sleep,’ Theodora soothed.
‘She does by fits and starts,’ said Mrs Rapallo, her same slack smile.
She settled the sheet, that seemed to stir with a separate will.
‘Dors, mon cœur,’ she coaxed. ‘Dors, Mignon.’
She held herself tenderly, smoothing the invisible recalcitrance.
‘The hands of monkeys, Theodora Goodman, are what you would call inquisitive,’ Mrs Rapallo said.
Theodora Goodman finally left what remained of Mrs Rapallo. She herself felt the monkeying of sleep. Her face was drawn out. She could not lie too soon on her own narrow bed, stretched thin and straight as a dead saint.
Sleep stretched the thin grey passages of the Hôtel du Midi, or rounded them into grottoes, of which the walls lapped elastically. Skin is after all no protection against communicating bedrooms. Ouai, Mademoiselle, c’est la peau qui m’ échappe, la peau que je ne touche jamais. Ouai, Henriette, et qui n’existe plus, because, chère vache, it is a tango pure and not so simple. Monsieur Durand has also discovered this. It is a tango that whips with its braces as required, the meeker shoulders, waiting whole mornings to wince. Non, non, non, je n’en peux plus, mais, si, si. In this way muscular candles sweat. Not the poreless skins of paper. Vous voyez, Mademoiselle, comme je souffre, comme je suis lié à mon propre brochure, que toutes les saisons ont le même air d’enfer. They also offer plates.
Theodora Goodman’s feet touched the brass bar at the bottom of her bed at approximately 11:35. She confirmed this by the oddly familiar face of a little travelling clock she had inherited from her mother.
There are still whole slabs of sleep, said her dry mouth, whole slabs to be consumed.
She lay and listened to the stirring of the wallpaper, the mouths of paper roses open and close.
‘Lamplight changes you,’ he said. ‘I can watch your heart beat.’
‘Like the ingénue in the tower?’
Lieselotte’s laugh stripped the silence.
‘No, Wetherby, no,’ Lieselotte laughed. ‘Let us accept our bodies as they are.’
‘She, at least, had the decency to be impressed.’
‘She does not yet know herself. She has not explored her own depths.’
‘Your trouble, Lieselotte, is that you hanker continually after a lost innocence you will never find. I have watched you paint a picture. I have seen you grope after some original shape that you have almost forgotten. Don’t go. Why should you be afraid?’
‘I am afraid,’ said Lieselotte, ‘that I may do you violence if I stay.’
Hell has its words, Theodora heard, as she trod deeper water beneath her brass bar. But it is too late to hate, she sighed, it is far too late. Far away a mouth of glass bit the darkness. This way words finally shatter, or the envelope that protects human personality.
‘Miss Goodman, oh, Miss Goodman,’ Theodora heard.
Words sucking her back to the surface struck her with a dry gust. She sat up straight in bed. She was oblong and straight. Suddenness had made her function on a hinge.
‘Miss Goodman, something has happened,’ said Lieselotte. ‘You must come.’
But she was still hinged.
‘You must come at once. Something terrible,’ Lieselotte said. ‘You must come quick.’
How beautiful she is now, Theodora saw. As if some terror has melted wax. Fear flowed in Lieselotte’s transparent face. Her gestures and her hair streamed. But her eyes were a dark, fixed terror. Then it is, said Theodora, something terrible and strange. And the air is branching, she saw.
‘Yes, do please come quickly,’ Lieselotte cried. ‘Do not you understand? I tell you, I tell you there is a fire.’
Now, in fact, you could touch the grey branches of the air. Paper roses were dying on their stems. Theodora felt for conviction and her slippers.
‘Can’t you see?’ Lieselotte cried. ‘The fire!’
Terror was streaming on her wax hair. But Theodora’s gestures were wood. She watched the revival of roses, how they glowed, glowing and blowing like great clusters of garnets on the live hedge.
‘Oh, please, please, let us do something,’ Lieselotte said.
‘Have you informed the pompiers?’
Because Theodora Goodman had not yet caught. She was filled with a solid purpose. Her handkerchief sachet must be reached. Whether or not the pompiers, and Lieselotte’s recitative.
‘I have never seen fire run,’ Lieselotte cried. ‘It ran across the carpet. If I could find him. After the lamp broke. If I could see his face. After the words smashed, in a moment of glass. After the fire. And now, Wetherby, Miss Goodman, Wetherby is dead. I have killed him.’
Theodora Goodman had to reach the handkerchief sachet.
‘There is a garnet ring,’ she said, ‘that was left me by my mother.’
She took in her hand the small cool stone.
‘Then we can do nothing?’ asked the dead voice of Lieselotte.
Her voice was grey smoke.
‘Do? Yes, we shall do. Lieselotte?’ Theodora called.
We shall do, Theodora heard her own thin voice promising smoke. But where and who was Lieselotte was also problematical.
Theodora trod through smoke.
‘Lieselotte?’ she called.
But she was calling fire.
She was alone now, in the passage of a hotel, of which wallpaper rejected a long imposed flatness. Walls whipped. All the violence of fire was contained in the hotel. It tossed, whether hatefully or joyfully, it tossed restraint to smoke. Theodora ran, breathing the joy or hatred of fire. She was not certain where. She heard the desperate cockroach pop under foot. Her own report, she supposed, would not be so round or, authorities said, final.
Then the night was thick with quiet stars.
‘Ahhhhh,’ said the voices. ‘En voilà encore un.’
Theodora suspected regret.
She saw the white faces, or the crowd face, breathing the fire. There are moments when faces are interchangeable. It was one of those. Sparks shot and fell. The flat, flower faces bent on their emotions, swaying to receive some strange pollen of fire.
‘Il n’y a pas d’ enfants lá-dedans?’ asked the crowd.
Because children are best.
‘Il n’y a pas de mères?’
When the wind ran, they shivered with regret or fear.
Theodora Goodman put the garnet ring on its usual finger, below the joint which showed signs of stiffening with arthritis. It was rather an ugly little ring, but part of the flesh. In the presence of the secret, leaping emotions of the fire she was glad to have her garnet.
‘Mademoiselle Good-man! Mademoiselle Good-man!’ she heard.
Then the crowd still had its personal moments. It was the Demoiselles Bloch. They were wearing identical raincoats, and their hair.
‘We have lost everything, everything,’ said Mademoiselle Marthe, as if she took a pleasure in confirming what had always been bound to happen.
‘But you have yourselves,’ suggested Theodora.
‘Oui, c’est vrai,’ Mademoiselle Berthe said, perplexed. ‘Mais vous savez, quand on perd ses affaires …’