‘And this chair was always uncomfortable,’ he said. ‘It has a little rail with two carved knobs which eat into the back. But perhaps you have not yet experienced this.’
‘Then I am an intruder in your house,’ said Theodora.
She sat meekly on her heels beside the fire, which had grown, it had begun to complicate.
‘It is yours,’ said the man.
He had not two thoughts on the matter, it appeared. Or else the decisiveness of his words was accentuated by his changing position, to extricate from his pocket a pipe, which he began to fill.
Theodora did not know what to do now, whether she should thank, or whether it was not expected. Whether even the man’s largeness of gesture might not be an instance of inverse imposture. But she got up off her heels, as her toes had grown numb. Outside, darkness was thickening, under the black pines, which would soon be solid with darkness, and in the shifting valleys. The little fire possessed the room of the house. It recreated the faces of Theodora Goodman and the man. She sensed her own, but she saw the face of the man, whose skin was ruddy fire.
‘My name is Holstius,’ he said, watching the fiery particles of his pipe, which he had lit with a stick.
Theodora touched the table for greater precision.
‘I have seen you somewhere perhaps,’ she said. ‘Somewhere on a railway station, or in a hotel.’
‘Possibly,’ he said.
But it was a possibility, it seemed, into which he did not intend to go. He drew deeply on his pipe, and the bowl flowered. He was greatly interested in this.
In spite of his detachment Theodora was not conscious of isolation. Looking at Holstius, she remembered the morning on the bridge at Meroã, watching the cold brown water flow, at the shaggy side of the Man who was Given his Dinner, and how at the time she had been infused with a warmth of love that was most thinly separated from expectation of sorrow.
‘They are very thinly divided indeed,’ Holstius said. ‘In fact, you might say that expectation of happiness is expectation of sorrow. The separating membrane is negligible.’
Theodora held the edge of the common table with her fingers. His voice moved her with a deep sadness. He was both detached and close. Because, although he spoke in abstractions, these answered the depths of her being. And what made these sensations of love and sorrow more poignant, actual, wonderful, was that she could have touched the body of Holstius, his thick and muscular, but quiet and soothing, hands, the ruddy skin, the indication of bones, the coarse greyish hair, the eyes, of which the expression was not determined by passion. Walking with her father on the frost at Meroã, or sitting with him in his room, in which the pines were never quite still, she had been impressed in the same way at times by a congruity, a continuity of man. But at times, at times, when expectation exceeded fact. Death had taken George Goodman and put him under marble. Fact corrected expectation. Just as the mind used and disposed of the figments of Mrs Rapallo, and Katina Pavlou, and Sokolnikov. And now Holstius. She watched the rough texture of his coat for the first indications of decay.
You suspect me,’ Holstius said.
He spat into the fire. She heard the strong hiss of spittle.
‘I suspect myself,’ Theodora said, feeling with her fingers for the grain in the table.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you have been groping that table like a blind thing for the last ten minutes.’
Then she began to hate the revealing honesty of his face. She dug her nails into the wood.
‘Why,’ she asked, ‘am I to be subjected to these tortures? I have reached a stage where they are not bearable.’
Her breath beat. The walls were bending outward under the pressure of the hateful fire. Then, when the table screamed under her nails, he said quietly, ‘Ah, Theodora Goodman, you are torn in two.’
‘What is it,’ she asked agony, ‘you expect me to do or say?’
‘I expect you to accept the two irreconcilable halves. Come,’ he said, holding out his hand with the unperturbed veins.
She huddled on the boards, beyond hope of protection by convention or personality, but the cloth on the legs of Holstius had the familiar texture of childhood, and smelled of horses, and leather, and guns. She rested her head against his knees.
‘You cannot reconcile joy and sorrow,’ Holstius said. ‘Or flesh and marble, or illusion and reality, or life and death. For this reason, Theodora Goodman, you must accept. And you have already found that one constantly deludes the other into taking fresh shapes, so that there is sometimes little to choose between the reality of illusion and the illusion of reality. Each of your several lives is evidence of this.’
Resistance had gone out of her as she lay, her head against the knees of Holstius, receiving peace, whether it was from his words, and she was not altogether sure that he spoke, or from his hands. His hands touched the bones of her head under the damp hair. They soothed the wounds.
Later it seemed to be morning where her head lay. There was a weal on her cheek where the chair had eaten, numb but not painful, for she was in no such inferior state to experience pain. Light was beginning. It was already yellow, but not yet strong. Theodora turned her head and saw the brown bird with the velvet eye. Even at close quarters it was not critical, and might even have perched on the rail of the chair, of whose inanimacy Theodora Goodman was still a mere extension. Only when she drew her legs across the boards to restore her body to its working shape, the bird lifted its immaculate feet, bunched, trod the air, still undecided whether to settle, drooped, gathered, flirted its wings, opened out, and flew through the door. Then Theodora made the additional effort and stood on her feet. The numbness of her whole body left her with intensely clear vision. The almost empty daylit room had a pleasing innocence of detail and shape.
Walking through the back door, which, she remembered, was the way Holstius had come, she went amongst the trees. They were of a deciduous variety on that side of the house, still green, but washed out, exhausted by the summer. Her feet sank in the soil before water, which trickled out of tufted grass, to fill and overflow from a rusted tin. She took the brown water, burying her face in hands and water, till it ran down, and afterwards, in rivulets, in devious directions, under her dress, against her skin. The water made her laugh. She looked at the world with eyes blurred by water, but a world curiously pure, expectant, undistorted. She could almost have read a writing on the bark of any given tree.
Later Theodora returned to the house, and in a fit of comfortable conscience brought an old iron bowl that she had seen on a shelf, to fill, to clean the floor of her house. Because Holstius would return some time during the day. She knew. In this she was positive. In fact, she shaded her eyes already against the blue smoke, rising from the valleys and creating a distance. She looked through the trees for the tree walking, which in time would become Holstius. She smiled to herself as she anticipated the recognition of his kind eyes.
But in the meantime she made a widening lake on the board floor of the house, spilling the water generously from the iron basin at her waist. Then without soap, she began to scrub the boards with an old brush. This way she had a certain affinity with the women in houses. She approached close, but respectfully, to the wood, so that she might appreciate its ingrained humility and painful knots. If Holstius had returned at that moment he would have approved, to see her as simple and impervious as a scrubbed board.
Instead, a car came, groaning over stones. Theodora sat on her heels, raising her arm and the scrubbing brush for protection. The car stopped. She heard its abrupt door. She could not sense that this was in any way connected with Holstius. There was anger and exasperation in the dead grass, also a slight diffidence, almost fear, as feet covered the distance to the house. Theodora sat with the scrubbing brush upraised, and her thin mouth. If they intended to break open her peace of mind, from curiosity, or out of malice, she was prepared to defend.