Why then, said Theodora Goodman, is this world which is so tangible in appearance so difficult to hold? Because she herself, in contradiction to the confidence of Mrs Johnson’s photograph, could not answer for the substance of the marble clock. She went nervously and touched the clock. Her hands slid over the surface, not of objects, but of appearances.
‘That clock was a wedding present from somebody rich,’ Zack said.
He had come and stood behind, and his face had opened, she noticed, to communicate.
‘It is a handsome clock,’ said Theodora, who was ashamed that her secret gesture had been observed.
‘I never liked the clock,’ said Zack.
‘Why?’ Theodora asked.
He stuck out his dark lower lip.
‘I never liked it,’ he said.
She went and sat on an ottoman, which obviously was not used much, both because it was hard and because it was covered in a stuff that was proud and formal, something for occasions.
Zack came and looked at her. Now he was very close.
‘You don’t want to stay with us,’ he said, looking at her straight.
She was close to his fringed eyes, which had approached, till his forehead touched hers, and she could feel the soft questioning of the lashes of his eyes.
‘Oh, Zack,’ she said, ‘you must not make it difficult.’
Because he had rubbed his cheek against her cheek. Their blood flowed together. Her desperate words, ordinarily dry, had grown quite suddenly fleshy and ripe. Their locked hands lay in solid silence.
‘If I go,’ she asked, ‘will you sometimes remember me, Zack?’
He hung his dark head.
‘Nothing much happens here,’ he said.
‘I shall remember this house,’ said Theodora.
She got up, ostensibly to escape the aching position on the ottoman, and went and pushed the wire door that opened on to the front porch. Zack was following, she heard, but he would remain on the steps. One of these moved slightly beneath her feet.
‘You have forgotten your hat in the wash-house. With that black thing,’ he said, ‘the black rose.’
‘So I have,’ said Theodora.
But she continued to walk on, away from the house in which she might not be able to make the necessary answers. She knew by this time that there was often a kind of surprise in people’s eyes, and this she was anxious to avoid. So she walked. Zack was taking it for granted. He bent and turned up a stone on a fresh phase of strange, slow life.
Theodora walked beyond the yard, beyond the dry flags of corn, and the gate upon which the red dog was stiffly lifting his leg. She walked to that point in the road where she had left off. She continued, climbing higher, where the road led, though this was less determinate. It wandered over rocks and sand, almost obliterated, or else its ruts cut deep where floods of rain had run, giving these scars the appearance of natural formation. Trees encroached too, the same stunted pine, bluish in sunlight or where dust lay, black in shadow. Although the Johnsons had already eaten, it was not yet late. The light had reached that metallic stage, of yellow metal, before the final softening. In its present phase it gave a greater tension. Theodora heard the crackle of the undergrowth. Sudden glimpses of the black trees struck cold. Then, there was a small plateau and a house, which she imagined must formerly have been the final objective of the faint road.
Theodora did not stop to investigate for signs of life. Her feet led deliberately. She went towards the house. It was a thin house, with elongated windows, like a lantern. The lower part was black slabs of logs with paler clay or adobe slapped into the interstices, but higher up the house became frailer frame, with the elongated windows, through which nothing showed of course, on account of the height. But the windows had also the blank look of the windows of deserted houses. Because there is nothing inside, they do not reflect. The glass coats up with dust.
This, then, was the blank house that Theodora found. But it did not deter. She went towards the house door, which was frame like the upper part, and a natural colour, darkened by the weather. All through the clearing where the house stood, the grass was yellow, dead. Fire would have run here. But the house itself in no way suggested that it might be carried away by the passions of fire.
Theodora found the padlock that the owners had left, presumptuously protecting their house with a seal of iron. Another time she might have been deterred, but not now. It was obvious that this must break. She had never been more confident. She picked at the screws of the hasp with her fingernails, and the screws came out easily, out of the old soft wood. The token padlock fell away from the house, so that she was able to walk in, into the smell of dust and animals.
The rough and awkward sounds of her motion yawned up through the house. The exterior had not deceived. There was not much inside. The objects that people had not valued. The things that were old or broken. And dust. The world was dim with dust through the coated windows, the glass of which normally would have had the amethyst tinge which is noticeable in certain light.
Theodora Goodman walked through her house with pleasure. She walked up the narrow, railed stairs to the upper part. There was the same space of emptiness, but the larger windows gave more light, the windows that she threw open now, and there the valleys flowed. In this light the valleys did flow. At the foot of mountains they moved in the soft and moving light, the amethyst and grey. They flowed at the roots of the black sonorous islands. All the time the light seeped deeper into the craters of the earth.
Seen from the solitude of the house the process of disintegration that was taking place at the foot of the mountains should have been frightening and tragic, but it was not. The shapes of disintegrating light protested less than the illusions of solidity with which men surround themselves. Theodora now remembered with distaste the ugly and unnatural face of the Johnsons’ orange marble clock. Because the death rattle of time is far more acute, and painful, and prolonged, when its impermanence is disguised as permanence. Here there were no clocks. There was a time of light and darkness. A time of crumbling hills. A time of leaf, still, trembling, fallen.
In the house above the disintegrating world, light and silence ate into the hard, resisting barriers of reason, hinting at some ultimate moment of clear vision. Theodora experienced a fresh anxiety. She doubted whether flesh was humble enough. She was afraid that the ticking of her eyelid might distort. She was ashamed of the inadequacy of the intermediate furniture. So that she went quickly downstairs, her feet and heart, to do the things she had seen women do in houses. She swept back white ashes from the hearth with an old broom that was still lying in a corner. Unbolting doors and windows she opened the house to the air. With some love she arranged a chair and table which at least were the essential of chair and table. Then she laid sticks and after breaking several matches, which she had in an emergency box in her practical handbag, she made the little tender tongue of fire that would soon consume a great deal of doubt.
Afterwards she sat back on her heels and looked towards the door, where she saw that a man had come, without coughing.
‘Evening,’ the man said. ‘It’s a steep climb up.’
He came and sat in the chair which Theodora had put.
‘I did not notice,’ she said.
‘It’s still a stiff climb.’
She heard his breathing, and saw the attitude of his body, both of which suggested he would stay. The man with the relaxed body might even have prior claim to the house.