‘Christ, strike a bloody light! Let us see,’ said Pearl. ‘It makes you feel sick. It makes you feel queer. Theo Goodman, eh?’ she said. ‘How about a drop to buck us up? Just one before they close.’
Theodora Goodman went with Pearl Brawne into the public house. It was no longer odd. She followed Pearl beyond the rasping of the frosted glass.
Pearl said two ports. She said it would warm the cockles.
Though the air was already suffocation hot. It swirled grey. At the bar a man with a mulberry nose had a talent for eating glass. He was munching slowly at his tumbler. It did not seem odd, though somebody screamed.
‘Makes you think they was loopy,’ Pearl said.
Theodora did not see why.
Because object or motive had achieved a lovely, a logical simplicity. She had found Pearl. She touched the stem of her frail glass. Things were as plain as the notes of a five-finger exercise played in the frost.
‘Well, Theo, tell,’ said Pearl, arranging her big white hands in front of her bust.
‘There is nothing to tell,’ said Theodora.
‘Go on, Theo,’ Pearl said, ‘there is always everything to tell.’
‘I am forty-five,’ said Theodora, ‘and very little has happened.’
‘Keep that under your lid, love. It is something to forget,’ said Pearl, knitting her hands.
‘I am an aunt,’ said Theodora. ‘I suppose there is at least that.’
‘I could have guessed it,’ said Pearl.
‘Why?’
‘Now you are asking,’ Pearl said.
She laughed. It was not unpleasant. She was kinder than kindness. Theodora’s body bloomed under the kind rain of Pearl. She touched her small purple glass. She loved the glasseater’s purple nose.
‘Two ports,’ Pearl said. ‘No? Well, I shall have another. For me health, dear. Does you good.’
Theodora wondered how the purple world of Pearl, that was so close, eludes other hands. Life is full of alternatives, but no choice.
‘When I went from yous,’ said Pearl, ‘I had a little boy. He died.’
‘That was sad, Pearl,’ Theodora said.
‘No,’ said Pearl, ‘it was not sad.’
She blew a big white funnel of smoke, and it was logical, but not sad.
‘It just happened that way,’ said Pearl.
‘And Tom Wilcocks?’
‘Why Tom?’
‘I wondered.’
‘Phhh, I never cared for Tom!’
Her breath emphasized.
‘I had everything I wanted,’ Pearl said. ‘I had friends. I had silk gowns and gorgeous lingerie. Nobody hates Pearl. Hey, Dot, give us another port. For the sake of old times.’
Now the port flowed in a powerful purple stream.
‘When I was a kid,’ said Pearl, ‘I used to want an alarm clock. I was scared these was somethink I might miss.’
‘Yes,’ cried Theodora, ‘I know, I know.’
‘You!’ said Pearl. ‘What do you know? Garn, you!’
Her mouth tipped. Pearl had descended deeper than the port could reach. Theodora did not suggest that she had perhaps plumbed the same depths. She did not feel capable.
Instead she said in the voice that people were accustomed to accept as hers, ‘You are right, of course. I know very little. Still.’
‘You poor kid,’ cried Pearl in her big white blotting-paper voice that craved for moisture. ‘I had a friend who could say off bits of the cyclopaedia. You couldn’t ask a question without he knew the answer. You couldn’t carry on a conversation. Made me nervous in the end. My bloody word! As bad as your Dad, Cyril was. Remember your Dad, Theo, eh?’
But Theodora would have blocked her ears with wax. She could not bear to face the islands from which Pearl sang. Now her veins ebbed, which had flowed before. Almost overhead hung an almost stationary electric bulb. Pearl saw this too. She huddled. Her white face was streaky grey.
‘Sometimes it winks,’ Pearl said. ‘Sometimes it just looks.’
‘Then it is time,’ said Theodora. ‘I must leave you.’
‘What did you expect’ said Pearl. ‘I got an appointment with a friend. A commercial gentleman from Adelaide.’
Outside the night had ripened. It was big and black. Pearl began to look all ways. Pearl was lost.
But Theodora had the strength of childhood.
‘Good-bye, Pearl,’ she said, and she kissed the big white face from which the wind was blowing the powder. ‘Good-bye, Pearl.’
As poignantly and relentlessly as if the cart were waiting in the back yard.
‘So long, dear,’ said Pearl.
She began to sway away, glass now, her large flower, but cut glass. She could have broken. Her big white powdered scones moved, but only just, on their stately cut-glass stand.
‘Don’t tell me I’m shickered,’ she said. ‘Now where’d that bugger say he’d be?’
Then the night gulped, and she was gone.
Theodora Goodman did not tell her mother that she had seen Pearl Brawne, because it was far too secret.
‘Where have you been, Theodora?’ Mrs Goodman asked.
‘Walking, Mother.’
‘And whom did you see?’
Mrs Goodman flung her grammar like a stone.
‘I did not see a cat,’ said Theodora.
Mrs Goodman looked at her daughter, who giggled before she left the room.
At this point, Theodora sometimes said, I should begin to read Gibbon, or find religion, instead of speaking to myself in my own room. But words, whether written or spoken, were at most frail slat bridges over chasms, and Mrs Goodman had never encouraged religion, as she herself was God. So it will not be by these means, Theodora said, that the great monster Self will be destroyed, and that desirable state achieved, which resembles, one would imagine, nothing more than air or water. She did not doubt that the years would contribute, rubbing and extracting, but never enough. Her body still clanged and rang when the voice struck.
‘Theo-dor-a!’
I have not the humility, Theodora said.
But on a morning the colour of zinc old Mrs Goodman died.
Theodora took the paper, pushed under the door by the man in braces, and which began all mornings. Her feet were flat in the hall. There had been a murder at Cremorne, and some vehemence about the throwing of a cricket ball, by one cricketer at another, in a match somewhere. On the top stair, which had frayed, Theodora bent to pull the thread. After many years this patch had gone too far. Theodora pulled, but, bending, began to listen to the silence in the house. It was the silence of silence that her heart began to tell. Her fingers ripped the coarse thread from the stair. Holding her breath for a wrench of hiccups that did not come, she went into the room. She is dead, she said, she has died in her sleep. Old Mrs Goodman had died, of course, without her teeth. Her lips had sunk in on her gums, leaving her with a final expression that was gentle, and prim, and uncharacteristically silly. Theodora folded the hands of death. Her breath fell stubbornly, thicker, faster, into the room. She did not cry. On the contrary, she ran downstairs, so fast that she was afraid her body might hurtle ahead. When she stood on the back steps, she was still not sure what she would do, whether it would be something ridiculous and shameful, or tragic and noble.
‘Mornin’, Miss Goodman,’ said Mr Love, who was tying an intervening vine on his side of the common fence.
‘Good morning, Mr Love,’ said Theodora Goodman.
Mr Love had some kind of pension, and a rupture, and a nephew in New Guinea, and a fawn pug with brown points called Puck.
‘There has been a vile murder in Cremorne,’ said Mr Love.
Mr Love was quiet, and he almost always wore sandshoes, so that his sympathy, Theodora knew, would be reverent and rubber-soled.