These years had the roselight of morning, but there were also the afternoons, in which the serious full white roses hung heavy, and the lemon-coloured roses made their cool pools in a shade of moss. There were the evenings when red roses congealed in great scented clots, deepening in the undergrowth.
‘Where are you going, Theo?’ they asked.
‘Nowhere,’ she said.
She ran, slowed, walking now alone, where she could hear a golden murmur of roses. Above her she could see the red thorns, and sometimes she reached, to touch. She felt on her cheek the smooth flesh of roses. This was smoother than faces. And more compelling. The roses drowsed and drifted under her skin.
‘Theodora, I forbid you to touch the roses,’ said Mrs Goodman.
‘I’m not,’ cried Theodora. ‘Or only a little. Some of them are bad.’
And they were. There was a small pale grub curled in the heart of the rose. She could not look too long at the grub-thing stirring as she opened the petals to the light.
‘Horrid, beastly grub,’ said Fanny, who was as pretty and as pink as roses.
Theodora had not yet learnt to dispute the apparently indisputable. But she could not condemn her pale and touching grub. She could not subtract it from the sum total of the garden. So, without arguing, she closed the rose.
Altogether this was an epoch of roselight. Morning was bigger than the afternoon, and round, and veined like the skin inside an unhatched egg, in which she curled safe still, but smiling for them to wake her, to touch her cheek with a finger and say: I believe Theodora is asleep. Then she would scream: I am not, I am not, and throw open her eyes to see who. Usually it was Father.
Or else you waited for Father to come out from behind his door. It was a solemn and emotional event. Your father is not to be disturbed, said Mother, which gave to his door a certain degree of awfulness. But Father himself was not awful. He was serious. He sighed a lot, and looked at you as if he were about to let you into a secret, only not now, the next time. Instead, and perhaps as compensation for the secret that had been postponed, he took you by the hand, about to lead you somewhere, only in the end you could feel, inside the hand, that you were guiding Father.
The room where Father sat was the side the pines were. It was plain as a white box, but filled with a dark murmuring of boughs, and the light was green and shifting that fell through pines. There was a little lamp that stood on Father’s table. It had a thick green-glass shade and a shiny brass stand. It was a reading lamp. Your father is a one for books, sighed Gertie Stepper, as the flour crept up her arms and her face grew red from squeezing so much dough. The tone of Gertie Stepper’s voice made it something sad and incurable, almost as if it were an illness, what Father did with books. And old books, foreign books, Gertie sighed; in this house it is always books, your mother too, only it is different in a lady. So you walked past Father’s door with a sense of awfulness, especially as it was that side of the house, where sometimes the pines, when the wind blew, flung themselves at the windows in throaty spasms.
If you went inside, Father was sitting with his chin on his chest, looking at books. He would sit like this for many hours, only his breath lifting his beard, as steady as a tree. Really Father was not unlike a tree, thick and greyish-black, which you sat beside, and which was there and not. Your thoughts drifted through the branches, or followed the up and down of the breathing that lifted Father’s beard. He had grey eyes. Above the heavy grey-black thicket of the beard the eyes were light and clear. But they did not always look.
‘You must come in, Theodora,’ Father said finally. ‘You must come in whenever you like, and take to books.’
‘Better a girl than a man,’ said Gertie Stepper. ‘No one never lived off gingerbread.’
Which of course was silly. Gertie Stepper could talk rubbish, although she also Understood Life, and had been in seven situations since a girl. When Father asked you into his room and invited you to take down books, it was something to make you feel solemn.
If you could not understand the words of books, the names, the names sang, and you could touch the brown, damp paper with your hands. There were the foreign books too, which Father, Gertie said, used to read all the time. There were Herodotus and Homer. You asked, and Father said. He told you something funny. It was the bird that sat in the crocodile’s throat. Fanning his larynx, Father said. Herodotus wrote this in a book. It was both funny and strange. And the crocodile lay in a river called the Nile, which flowed not far from Meroã.
‘But at Meroã there is only a creek,’ Theodora said.
‘There is another Meroã,’ said Father, ‘a dead place, in the black country of Ethiopia.’
Her hands were cold on the old spotted paper of the complicated books, because she could not, she did not wish to, believe in the second Meroã. She could not set down on the black grass of the country that was called Ethiopia their own yellow stone. In this dead place that Father had described the roses were as brown as paper bags, the curtains were ashy on their rings, the eyes of the house had closed.
‘I shall go outside now,’ Theodora said.
Because she wanted to escape from this dead place with the suffocating cinder breath. She looked with caution at the yellow face of the house, at the white shells in its placid, pocked stone. Even in sunlight the hills surrounding Meroã were black. Her own shadow was rather a suspicious rag. So that from what she saw and sensed, the legendary landscape became a fact, and she could not break loose from an expanding terror.
Only in time the second Meroã became a dim and accepted apprehension lying quietly at the back of her mind. She was free to love the first. It was something to touch. She rubbed her cheek against the golden stone, pricked by the familiar fans and spirals of the embedded shells. It was Our Place. Possession was a peaceful mystery.
At Our Place, wrote Theodora Goodman on a blank page, there is an old apricot tree which does not have fruit, and here the cows stand when it is hot, before they are milked, or underneath the pear trees in the old orchard where the cottage has tumbled down. I see all these things when I ride about Our Place, with my Father. Our Place is a decent size, not so big as Parrotts’ or Trevelyans’, but my Father says big enough for peace of mind.
‘Fetch your pony, too, Theo,’ Father called, ‘and we shall ride round the place.’
So you did, riding just above the yellow grass, under the skeleton trees. Theodora sat straight, riding round Our Place with Father. She listened to the clinking of the stirrups, and the horses blowing out their nostrils, and the heavy, slow, lazy streams of sound that fell from the coarse hair of their swishing tails. Theodora looked at the land that was theirs. There was peace of mind enough on Meroã. You could feel it, whatever it was, and you were not certain, but in your bones. It was in the clothes-line on which the sheets drooped, in the big pink and yellow cows cooling their heels in creek mud, in magpie’s speckled egg, and the disappearing snake. It was even in the fences, grey with age and yellow with lichen, that tumbled down and lay round Meroã. The fences were the last word in peace of mind.
Things were always tumbling down. Some things were done up again with wire. But mostly they just lay.
And in this connection Theodora Goodman discovered that Our Place was not beginning and end. She met for the first time the detached eye.
‘Meroã?’ said Mr Parrott. ‘Rack-an’-Ruin Hollow.’
Which Theodora heard. She was waiting for Father, in-town, under the long balcony of the Imperial Hotel. She hung around, waiting, and there were men there. She could smell their cloth, and the smell of drying horse sweat that left their leggings. The men stood in the shade of the Imperial Hotel. They spread their legs apart because they were important. They owned cattle and land. There was Mr Parrott, and old Mr Trevelyan, and Alby Poynter, and Ken Searle.