Patrick White - The Aunt's Story

‘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.

‘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?’