‘Well, for goodness’ sakes!’
It was Mrs Johnson. Her sandy hair, hatless, blew at the window sill. Her colourless but anxiously friendly eyes shifted a little to avoid what she might have to see.
‘Oh, it is you,’ said Theodora, lowering the brush.
She could not help but love the practical face of Mrs Johnson, which for the moment, at least, was practically helpless. This was not a situation which Mrs Johnson could touch, or to which she could apply a poultice.
Then Mrs Johnson jerked her head, and laughed, and grasped the window sill, and said, ‘That was a nice thing you did, Miss Pilkington. Walking out on us. I’d got the sheets out, ready to fix your bed. You left your hat too.’
‘It was not very polite,’ Theodora admitted.
The sky was intensely blue and majestic behind Mrs Johnson’s pathetic head.
‘I should say,’ said Mrs Johnson without malice.
She took a breath and came round so that she stood in the doorway.
‘Lucky the kids spotted your tracks this morning. She’s gone further up the road, they said. So I said I’d run on up an’ see. Before I took the milk.’
Theodora got on her feet to match Mrs Johnson in an attitude of neighbourly intercourse.
‘That was kind of you,’ said Theodora. ‘But …’
‘Joe had a hunch you might have looked in here,’ Mrs Johnson said. ‘We hoped. For your own sake.’
She began to look round the room for something to tell her husband.
‘My, though,’ she said. ‘I guess you were lonesome.’
Theodora touched the gentle ash with her toe.
‘I made a fire,’ she said. ‘I am very happy in this house.’
Mrs Johnson frowned resentfully. She resented Theodora’s state of mind, because it was something that she could not understand. Now she shifted round for words, to resist the slow silence of the dead grass.
‘Maybe for a vacation,’ said Mrs Johnson with a tight bright laugh. ‘If your tastes lie this way.’
She looked round again at the exasperating house. She looked for some object, from out of the circle of her own life, with which to make an alliance, but all she found was the old iron bowl. This, in connection with Theodora Goodman’s obsessive act of scrubbing, was so obscene that her eyes retreated.
‘Well, now, Miss Pilkington,’ she said, ‘what are we gonna do? I got the milk to run to Martins’. Then I am at your service. I suggest you come on down to our place. It’s brighter there. And comfortable. I’ll fix some dinner for you. We got steak for dinner,’ she said.
All this was said and said, Theodora realized, because Mrs Johnson dared not stop. Mrs Johnson would not know the great superiority of stationary objects.
‘Oh, no,’ said Theodora flatly and kindly, and because she was touched by the suffering face of Mrs Johnson, she added, ‘Thank you.’
‘But you can’t stay here!’ said Mrs Johnson. ‘Alone. In this darned old shack.’
Theodora saw how Mrs Johnson’s soul would have winced and contracted in a similar situation. This was why Mrs Johnson had to protest, why she stood firm, with her bare, sandy legs slightly apart, and tried to wrench the soul of Theodora Goodman into her freckled hands.
‘I can,’ Theodora said. ‘I can stay here perfectly well.’
Because she firmly intended that this game for the soul of Theodora Goodman should be finally hers.
‘Besides,’ she said, ‘I expect that Holstius will come back, if not this morning, some time during the afternoon.’
‘Holstius? Who the hell?’ Mrs Johnson said. ‘Why, his name was Kilvert!’
‘I don’t know about that,’ said Theodora.
And it was unimportant.
‘Yes, Kilvert went out to the coast eighteen months ago. Shut up the place. Didn’t say when he was comin’ back. Folks in town heard that Kilvert died.’
Then Mrs Johnson stopped and turned something over in her mind.
‘We don’t seem to be gettin’ nowhere at all,’ she said at last.
Theodora lifted her eyes to see whether Mrs Johnson’s face was being sly. It had adopted that fatal flatness which is never quite a disguise.
‘Well,’ it said, ‘I got work to do.’
And Mrs Johnson was going out of the door. She walked with long steps over the grass towards the car, of which the bonnet still shimmered, its metal surface broken by a haze of heat. So that Theodora was alone. She embraced with love the silence of her own room. And soon Holstius would come.
‘Miss Pilkington?’
It was Mrs Johnson again. She came back. She was carrying a loaf of bread and a small iron can.
‘Guess you’ll need these,’ she said. ‘Whatever else.’
Theodora took the things, because it made Mrs Johnson better to give. She had a talent for freckled children. But some, it seems, turn out dark.
‘How is Zack, Mrs Johnson?’ Theodora asked.
‘Zack? Why, Zack’s okay. He’s a slow boy, but good.’
She had some difficulty with the door of the car, so that she had to raise her voice.
‘Not so quick by half as the other kids. Not so intelligent,’ she said.
Something occurred to her that never before. She turned on Theodora Goodman a look of dubious dismay, of sudden helplessness. Then she gathered her long legs into the car and drove off.
The mountain began to relax after Mrs Johnson had gone. It pricked with insects. A cone fell. You could hear the wings of birds parting the heat.
Theodora stood by the window. The struggle to preserve her own instrument for some final, if also fatal, music that Holstius must play, had been at times difficult and unpleasant, but at least it was preserved. She looked out. She was conscious of the immensity of her own possessions, her blaze of blue. Now she could eat the bread, as a concession to Mrs Johnson. She put the pieces in her mouth, wiped the crumbs off, drank the milk from the lip of the little can. But in performing these acts, she continued to look out of the window, at the secretive pines and the disappearing road. If she had had a watch she would have looked at it, to measure her anxiety. Because she was afraid that Holstius. She was afraid. She was afraid of something that Mrs Johnson had begun.
Presently she went down through the trees to the place where the spring ran. She sat beside the brown water which welled out of the rusty tin, full of frog spawn and the skeletons of leaves. She decided that she would wait here for Holstius, where the formation of the land gave her a certain amount of protection, where the light and shade, tree and grass broke her body into less obvious shapes. Anyway, out of the house. Now she suspected the house. Man would be very admirable within his own freckled limits, if it were not for his native slynesses, and, more particularly, his desire to strain perpetually after truth. It was this which had led him to fix the roof of the house, propped like a lid on a stick. Twitched from a distance by a cord, the stick would fall, and the lid imprison the unsuspecting victim. So Theodora avoided the house and the subtlety that Mrs Johnson had prepared.
She stirred the water, squinting through the light at her hand, which still wore its flesh.
‘Ah,’ she breathed sharply, shading her eyes, and the water ran startlingly over the surface of her hot skin.
She had heard the boots squeak among the trees. She saw the flash of the hat, because today he was wearing a Panama which still disguised his face. His clothes were the same stiff daguerreotype. His expression had not yet evolved out of the shadow of the hat.