Patrick White - The Aunt's Story

‘There’s soap an’ all,’ she said. ‘Now come on, you kids. Leave the lady alone.’

Theodora began in the agreeable silence of the wash-house to wash her hands. She folded them one over the other. She folded them over the smooth and comfortable yellow soap. Her heart was steady. If all this were touchable, she sighed, bowing her head beneath the balm of silence contained in the deserted iron room.

Then she heard the pick, pick. She turned and saw the serene closed lips of the silent boy.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I thought you had all gone.’

He compressed his lips and picked.

‘And your name is what?’ she asked.

‘Zack,’ he said firmly, as if it could not have been anything else.

She could not read him, but she knew him.

‘Are you visiting with us?’ he asked.

Because she was a blank, he added, ‘Are you going to be here some?’

‘No,’ she said.

She shook her head, but it was the finality of sadness.

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘You will know in time,’ she said, ‘that it is not possible to stay.’

He looked at her queerly, with his mouth as much as his eyes, as she cupped her hands and spread her face with water from the enamel bowl.

‘What is that?’ he asked, touching the flattened gauze rose on her discarded hat.

She turned to see what, so that he saw her face, soft and shiny with water.

‘That,’ she said, ‘is supposed to be a rose.’

‘A rose?’ he said. ‘A black rose?’

Then he went quietly, and she watched him through the window walking alone through the stunted pines at the bottom of the dirt yard.

Although Zack had gone, Theodora continued to experience all the triumph of the rare alliances. And because the wash-house had contained the mystery of their pact, its darkness glowed. There was no form, whether of abandoned furniture or discarded clothing, that had not grown. Theodora wiped the water from her face. The rough, scorched towel was all virtue. She was touched by the touching shapes of the hugger-mugger room, but while admitted into their world, it was with no sense of permanence. She noticed from a distance an old distorted pair of women’s shoes that had sunk in mud once when there had been rain. To live with these, she knew, required a greater degree of indifference or else humility.

Outside, the sound, the sound of a car had begun to increase. Then the car itself drove through a scattering of speckled pullets into the yard. It creaked, the old Ford, steaming with distance, and white with dust. The man got down from out of the old car.

This, Theodora supposed, would be Joe.

He walked across the yard with the nonchalance of ownership. There was the banging of a wire door. Then a silence, as if something great and extraordinary were being explained.

Now Theodora could not bear to go out. She was isolated in a small room, but it was not desirable to leave it.

‘Guess you’re pretty hungry,’ said Mrs Johnson, breaking in.

Theodora had not thought, but she supposed she was.

‘We got noodles,’ said Mrs Johnson. ‘There’s no meat,’ she added, to flatten expectation.

Theodora did not expect. Not in the short passage. She expected nothing. The passage was not long enough. Brushing past several old coats, hanging stiffly from pegs, she was ejected brutally into comparative light.

‘Joe, this is Miss …? It is Miss?’ asked Mrs Johnson.

Theodora’s throat was tight with some new terror, that she could not swallow, in a new room. Her hands searched.

‘Yes,’ she said, bringing it out of her throat. ‘Yes,’ she said, but her hands could not find.

They waited. Her forehead pricked with sweat.

‘Pilkington,’ she said.

‘Glad to know you, Miss Pilkington,’ said Mr Johnson.

The room loosened. She felt Mr Johnson’s hand.

Theodora could have cried for her own behaviour, which had sprung out of some depth she could not fathom. But now her name was torn out by the roots, just as she had torn the tickets, rail and steamship, on the mountain road. This way perhaps she came a little closer to humility, to anonymity, to pureness of being. Though for the moment she stood under a prim pseudonym in the Johnson’s kitchen, waiting for the next move.

‘You just sit down and make yourself at home, Miss Pilkington,’ Mr Johnson said.

It should have been so easy, but she sat carefully on the edge of a rocker. At least Mr Johnson had decided to take much for granted, she felt, and for this she was relieved. Probably there was a great deal, anyway, that Mr Johnson took for granted. It was in his body, a casualness of stance inside the shabby dungarees. He was dark and physical. There was not much connection between Mr Johnson and his children, though they did match his casualness, standing in positions of half-attention in different quarters of the room, each with his own personal occupation, whether whittling wood, turning the leaves of a catalogue, or pulling the wings of a fly. If there was a subtler link, it was with the dark boy. Mr Johnson had the same habit of stressing with his full dark mouth the expression of his eyes. Only the child was already older than the father would ever allow himself to be.

‘Queenie says you come a long way,’ Mr Johnson said.

‘I have come from Europe,’ said Theodora.

‘We been to San Francisco once,’ Eunice said.

Nor could Mr Johnson quite visualize so far. He smiled, but it was for more familiar wonders. He shifted his position easily in the chance surroundings of his own room. Theodora knew how there must have been times when Mr Johnson threw himself in long grass, and chewed the fleshy grass with his strong teeth, and half closed his eyes. He had that ease in his body. Mr Johnson’s eyes were still full and blind.

‘Well, now, that’s interesting,’ he said. ‘They say there’ll be a war.’

It would happen, Theodora saw, to the ants at the roots of the long suave stalks of grass.

‘Probably,’ Theodora said, ‘unless God is kinder to the ants.’

She felt the eyes fix. On the mantelpiece there was an orange marble clock, which also had begun to stare.

At this point Mrs Johnson, her head held back, her sandy hair flying, in protest at the steam, brought a big white dish of noodles from the outer kitchen.

‘We’re gonna eat now,’ said the child Lily, who had touched Theodora’s garnet in the wash-house, and who now took her hand.

‘You shall sit by me,’ Lily said.

Then there was a great scramble, in which Theodora was caught up, whirled, and again isolated. It all revolved round the immense dish of steaming noodles, above which Mrs Johnson stood, wiping her freckled hands masterfully on her cotton skirt. When Theodora settled, she noticed that she was sitting opposite Mr Johnson and Zack. In the midst of so much sandy sediment, they were still and dark, like two dark, polished stones.

‘Gee, I do like noodles,’ Arty sighed, holding his head on one side and looking along the table.

But Eunice said, ‘I like cornbeef hash best.’

Mrs Johnson dolloped the clumsy noodles with great agility on to Theodora’s plate.

‘Guests first,’ Mrs Johnson said.

Mr Johnson broke bread. He ignored the masterful ritual of his sandy wife. But she bent towards him. The gesture of her arms was gentler as she passed the plate, poured coffee, pushed across a knife. Once the back of her dry hand brushed the skin of his arm. Then she bent her head and touched her hair. There was something quite humble about the masterful Mrs Johnson in the presence of her husband, or even before her children when they became a family.

Theodora swallowed the food. Very palpably she felt the presence of the Johnsons, their noise and silence. Their sphere was round and firm, but however often it was offered, in friendliness or even love, she could not hold it in her hand. So that she swallowed with difficulty the mouthfuls of warm smooth noodles, which to the Johnsons were just food. Everyone else ate the noodles, and, later, a pie, with dark sweet fruit.