Patrick White - The Aunt's Story

Then she looked out and said, ‘Look, Huntly, here is the quay already.’

‘I am stubborn,’ he said, but more to hold his own.

He was also tired. The streaming of the water had made him ponderous with age.

Lights floated in the sea-green darkness. Fantastic lake dwellings sprang from an electric swamp on glistening piles. The little boxed-in landing stage shuddered and braced.

‘You are avoiding answers, Theodora,’ said Huntly Clarkson as they walked through the crowd.

She walked stiffly past the pale faces of the sleepwalkers that the darkness lapped. Pushing to reclaim proximity, he would have touched her arm, to emphasize, but Theodora drifted in the crowd, and he heard his now ponderous breath, and the creaking of his starched collar and his gold-linked cuffs. An enormous distance of sleep stretched between himself and Theodora. He could not part the drifting bodies of the crowd.

‘I thought I had lost you,’ Theodora said.

As she turned and allowed him to return, his face, violet in a patch of light, had a strained kind of individuality, of waking in the crowd sleep.

‘I was just behind you,’ he said briefly.

They walked together into a labyrinth of tramlines and converging trams.

Huntly Clarkson did not altogether believe that Theodora Goodman would reject the yellow façade and the laurel blaze of his great stone house. Admitting at times that stone will crumble, at others he recovered his faith in its continuity and strength. He offered all this in return for some small mental service that he could not very well define, because, after all, perhaps it was not small, but great. Either way it was invisible and strange.

‘It is very strange indeed, Elsa Boileau said, ‘this hold that Theodora has over Huntly, a man who could go anywhere at all.’

To Elsa Boileau anywhere at all meant Government House, Romano’s, and the Golf Club.

‘But the point is, will she catch him?’

‘That is not the point at all,’ said Marion Neville, who was less physical and more detached. ‘The point is, will Huntly catch Theodora? That is what it amounts to, which makes it far more strange.’

Anyway, they went all of them that Easter to the Agricultural Show. Theodora wore a long, an oblong dress of striped brown silk. Her attitudes were those of carved wood, while the powdered, silky, instinctively insinuating bodies of Elsa Boileau and Marion Neville flowed. Their laughter flowed wonderfully over the shoulders of Theodora Goodman. Huntly Clarkson appeared undeterred. He wore a little scarlet parrot’s feather in the black band of his grey hat, which gave him a nonchalance, which made Elsa Boileau narrow her eyes, which she did when weighing up the physical possibilities. But Huntly Clarkson laughed, and talked to Ralph Neville and Paul Boileau, and seemed pleased and undeterred. As if this were his world, the world of chestnut bulls with mattress rumps, and jet trotters, and towers of golden corn. There were many faces that Huntly knew. They spoke with an eager deference.

But Huntly turned to Theodora and said, ‘You must tell me if you are tired or bored.’

And at once he had lost some of his strength that deference gave him, and the stud bulls.

‘You must not bother about me,’ she said.

‘But I do,’ he said. ‘You know.’

And at once the presence of the others was a pressure.

‘There is no reason why I should be anything but happy,’ said Theodora.

‘Really?’ he said, trying to be pleased.

But Theodora was happy. The glare had half closed her eyes. She wandered half alone in the tune her sun-thinned lips hummed, in the smell of the crowd, and the bellowing of bulls. There are times when the crowd and the sun make the individual solitude stronger and less assailable than bronze.

Soon after this Ralph Neville discovered the little shooting gallery, presided over by the female clownface, where the clay ducks jerked on the leather stream, and the kewpies and the chocolates gathered flies. Ralph Neville began to jingle the coins in his pocket, and to gather his audience excitedly, for what febrile exhibition he could not quite suggest, but it had to take place, some primitive, dimly apprehended tail-spreading by the red cock.

‘Come on, Paul, Huntly,’ Ralph called.

His neck was bursting in his collar, rich red. His hands gathered them in, and his eyes, watery blue from many bars.

The clowness yawned, preening, out of her white cloud, saying it was sixpence a pot, and high-class prizes for the winners, kewpie dolls for the ladies, wristlet watches, and boxes of lovely chocs.

Huntly, Paul, and Ralph took the little toy rifles to shoot at the jerking clay ducks, jerking on their leather stream to bob behind a painted waterfall. But Elsa and Marion were bored. They stroked their expensive clothes. With their beautiful-smelling useless fingers they smoothed their pasted lips. And all the time the emotional, hysterical, canvas-tearing voice of the little toy rifles as the men missed the clay ducks.

‘You men wouldn’t earn your living as cowboys,’ Marion said.

The clowness dusted a kewpie. She was a cloud, but fleshy, big, white, smelling of warm flesh and the hot flinty barrels of the rifles she handed back.

‘Ladies care to try their luck?’ the clowness asked. ‘Come on, girls, show the gents how.’

‘No, thank you!’ Elsa laughed. Now she had begun to be annoyed. She bit her purple upper lip.

‘I shall try,’ Theodora said.

‘Have you been hiding your talents, Theodora?’ Marion asked.

But Theodora took the rifle, closing her eyes to the glare. She stood already in the canvas landscape against which the ducks jerked, her canvas arms animated by some emotion that was scarcely hers. Because the canvas moments will come to life of their own accord, whether it is watching the water flow beneath a bridge, or listening to hands strike music out of wood. The Man who was Given his Dinner, and Moraïtis, for some, had already shown her this. Now she stood in the smell of flint and powdered flesh, from which the world of Huntly Clarkson had receded, and she took aim at the clay heads of the jerking ducks. She took aim, and the dead, white, discarded moment fell shattered, the duck bobbed headless.

‘Good for Theodora,’ Ralph said.

They all gathered, watched, spoke, but they were speaking now at a door that had closed tight, leaving them embarrassed and surprised. They did not know what any of this might signify. They watched the clay ducks shatter each time Theodora fired, and it was as if each time a secret life was shattered, of which they had not been aware, and probably never would have, but they resented the possibility removed. It was something mysterious, shameful, and grotesque. What can we say now? they felt.

‘The lady appears to be a crack shot,’ the clowness said. ‘Care for a kewpie, dear? Or chocs?’

But Theodora did not hear. Huntly Clarkson’s face was smiling, but grey.

‘Let us go on somewhere else,’ Theodora said.

They walked over the grass that feet had trampled dead green. At Meroã also, she remembered, the grass was dead, whether among the tussocks on the flat or along the flanks of the black volcanic hills; and she remembered, too, the swift moment of the hawk, when her eye had not quivered. It is curious, she felt, and now, that my flesh does not flap. She was quite distinct. She was as taut as leather, or even bronze. And somewhere behind, the others trailed in uneasy silences of best clothes. Huntly, who walked almost beside her, had become big and soft, with a band of sweat beginning to show through the broad band round his smart grey hat. An abject and sorry deference had begun to make Huntly soft. He was all acceptance, like a big grey emasculated cat, waiting to accept the saucer of milk that would or would not be given. Only Huntly had begun to know that it would not. In the circumstances, or any way at the moment, you could not say that he was sad, because it had to be like this, from the beginning. Behind them the others walked, half knowing, in their silence, ever since Theodora had shot the clay heads off the ducks, that she was separated from them for ever by something that their smooth minds would not grope towards, preferring sofas to a hard bench.