Patrick White - The Aunt's Story

‘No,’ said Theodora, quickly wreaking her brown shadow.

Her feet began to move about the room, allowing her to perform the various simple acts of arrival.

‘What shall we be expected to do?’ she asked.

‘Nothing today,’ said Grace. ‘It is the first afternoon.’

Una Russell continued to look at Theodora, out of her experience, which could find no possible explanation.

‘You’ll get used to Theo,’ laughed Fanny. ‘She has her ways.’

Life very soon became a ringing of bells, unlike the silent drowsing days at Meroã, where time just slid along the yellow stone, rested, slid, with the lizards and the sun. Because nothing ever happened at Meroã, you could watch the passage of time, devote a whole morning to the falling of a rose. But at Spofforths’ time jerked and jangled. Time was a bell. The hours were Music and Sewing and Geography and French. Only at evening, time would ease up; the bell was still, and you could hear an apple thump the earth somewhere in the long grass at the back. Then the world would begin to revolve again, like the great sphere that it is, not a coloured papier mâché thing that jerked and squeaked under Miss Emmy’s hand. But the days mostly wore the papier mâché face. They were masked by the Improvement that the three Miss Spofforths dispensed.

‘And now Theodora Goodman will explain habeas corpus to us,’ Miss Emmy smiled.

It was a horror, but a bright horror, in Miss Emmy’s voice, because Miss Emmy smiled and smiled. Miss Emmy’s smile filtered through her face, out of her pleated mouth, her spectacles, and her crumpled skin. It was a smile that had lost its direction long ago. Miss Emmy would have smiled at death.

It was better with Miss Belle. Several girls, sitting in the evening at the open window, soft with the kindness of dusk, said that Miss Belle was lovely. They sighed and peeled grapes. It was as if life had stood still on the threshold of experience. Whether lovely or not, Miss Belle was lovelier. She wore brown velvet ribbons and a cameo. Her hands, though freckled, lingered emotionally over music. She could not leave a chord. When Miss Belle sat beside the lamp and sewed, it was good to sit beside her, to smell verbena, and to borrow her scissors in the shape of a stork. Her hair was rather vague, it strayed, as she talked about the galleries of Florence and Rome, to which she had had the good fortune to accompany a cousin of her mother’s. Once a girl called Lottie Littlejohn had pressed some lily of the valley in a Bible, and in the holidays she had sent the lily of the valley with a letter to Miss Belle. Miss Belle put it in a rosewood box in her quiet room, with the other pressed flowers, the pansies and violets and mignonette, she had received from other girls.

There was the crumpled Miss Emmy, who smiled, and plaited leather for a hobby, and the drifting, musical, travelled Miss Belle. There was also Miss Spofforth, who was the eldest, the headmistress, and the name.

‘Tell me about Miss Spofforth,’ said Mrs Goodman. ‘About Miss Spofforth you never speak.’

‘We don’t see her very much,’ said Theodora. ‘It is difficult to tell.’

‘She seems a most superior woman,’ Mrs Goodman said.

‘She is horrid,’ said Fanny.

‘Why?’

‘She is so ugly. And so strange.’

Mis Spofforth was an opaque square. Her hair was dark grey, and her skin was thick and brown. The headmistress read prayers, and signed letters, and asked questions about individual welfare if the opportunity occurred.

‘Theodora,’ she said, ‘are you quite happy here?’

It was on the stairs.

‘Yes, thank you,’ said Theodora. ‘I am well enough.’

If she had answered a question in a sermon she could not have felt more unwise.

Miss Spofforth was murmuring. She had not discovered the secret of unlocking other people, because she herself had never really opened.

‘You must come and talk to me,’ Miss Spofforth said. ‘If there is ever anything you want to know.’

To walk inside one of the dark rooms in which Miss Spofforth lived, to sit among the dark, sponged plants, to say: If I could give expression to something that is in me, but which I have not yet hunted down. This is what Miss Spofforth invited, although it was not possible to accept.

Theodora waited for her to go. The meeting on the stairs, which should have been transitory, had stuck. The headmistress was fumbling with a thought that she could not bring out. So that Theodora felt hot, and looked away to hide her own guilt.

Then Miss Spofforth decided, it seemed, to give up, to move. The moments had begun to flow again. And the square dark face looked down and said, ‘They must not put so much polish on the stairs. Somebody will slip.’

Theodora listened to the strong boots of Miss Spofforth squeak away across the polished floor. The distance increased, but it had been great upon the stairs. Sometimes the distance is very great.

I shall never overcome the distances, felt Theodora. And because she was like this, she found consolation in the deal mirror in the room for four. When she was alone she spoke to the face that had now begun to form, its bone. Since she had come to Spofforths’ Theodora Goodman had begun to take shape, for what, if anything, she had not yet discovered, and for this reason she could sometimes suffocate. Her breath dimmed the mirror-face, the dark eyes asking the unanswerable questions. Because it was the face to which nothing had yet happened, it could not take its final shape. It was a vessel waiting for experience to fill it, and then the face finally would show.

‘For goodness’ sake, looking in the mirror!’ said Una Russell, coming in.

Una Russell hated Theodora. She could not understand her silences.

‘Yes,’ said Theodora. ‘I do not like my face.’

‘But you look,’ said Una.

‘I sometimes wonder.’

‘My mother once knew a very ugly woman who married an Englishman. He had a large house in the country. She did very well.’

‘I don’t want to marry,’ said Theodora.

‘Why ever not? There is nothing else to do.’

‘I want to do nothing yet. I want to see.’

‘If you are not careful you will miss the bus,’ said Una Russell, not that it really mattered if Theodora Goodman should become what she would become.

Una Russell went out of the room, and her bangles expressed her contempt.

Theodora had begun to accept both the contempt and the distances. Because there were also the moments of insight, whether with Father, or the Man who was Given his Dinner, or even with the Syrian. And sometimes the hawthorn tree invaded the room. Its greenish light lay on the boards, and the room was lit with boughs. This made it more than tolerable.

Evenings, the others went out into the garden, where the dusk was full of hot laughter, and the fuchsias smouldered. The girls strolled through the long grass, coiled, and knit together by their words and arms, and the solid swirl of their skirts mowing the grass. But Theodora remained behind on the steps, a finger thoughtful on her mouth. She would go down soon, not now, but later. And it was not unpleasant on the steps, to smell summer at a distance, with perhaps Miss Belle playing Schumann through an open window.

One evening Theodora saw the girl who was called Violet Adams slip through the trees. She saw her blouse amongst the apple trees, and she had sometimes noticed that Violet Adams stayed alone. In the darkness her blouse would dwindle, or suddenly stand out, farther, and then closer, like some note that Miss Belle could not bear to let escape into the darker background of the music. So the white blouse recurred. And finally there was Violet Adams’ face.

‘What,’ said Violet, ‘you still there, Theodora?’