Читать книгу The Theoretical Foot - M. F. K. Fisher - Страница 12

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Well, this is the damnedest place I was ever in, Susan thought irritably. I mean, I’m a guest here, after all, and people just keep disappearing!

She grasped the heavy linen curtain that hung by the steps and peered disdainfully about her. Not a soul, not even anyone asleep.

Then her face softened as she looked with a growing pleasure at the long high room. Like the rest she’d seen, this room had been plastered in rough white but here the wood was a dark gleaming brown, like the furniture, which she knew instinctively to be as fine as it was certain to be comfortable. Almost the entire side to her left was tall wide windows that stood open now, hung in thick linen striped softly in green and buff and blue, moving gently now in the noon breeze off the lake.

At the far end was the fireplace with a faded, sloppy red Moroccan cushion before it on the large gray-green rug. To the left an open doorway was curtained in the same striped linen as the one she held and through it she could see into what looked to be a green-tiled pantry whose walls gleamed with the rounds and ovals of stacked china and the soft shock of silver and pewter vessels hung on dark shelves.

On her right an enormous mirror, curved at the top like a great window into another room and framed in dull old gold, separated two long bookcases that quite covered the wall.

There were two couches and some chairs and the blue chaise longue where Honor had lain when they’d first arrived and a big rectangular table with grapes carved along its sides.

Sue sniffed absently, then walked quietly into the middle of the silent room. It was the most pleasant room she’d ever seen. And that mirror!

Colors looked more intense in the mirror, truer than life. It was like a beautiful dream, in which everything was more vivid than it usually appeared. And the room she saw in it was much clearer, somehow, than the real one. She stared into it, not even thinking to look at her own reflection so struck was she by all the rest.

There were the windows, past the green expanse of rug; the curtains swayed softly and the sunlight falling through them made a rosy yet cool light in the room. Through them she could see a blue much clearer and much more beautiful than the blue of the real sky behind her in the real windows.

And now coming though the middle opening was a man; his large eyes were much bluer than those of a real person, his hair certainly the bluish-silver she’d only seen in dreams. He walked softly toward her, moving his small light body in its white gleaming linen clothes as if he were a dancer, not gliding but with the grace with which all real people ought to move.

She watched him come silently toward her in the too-clear glass. Just as he was about to touch her, she turned around, blinking, and willed herself back into reality. It was not a shock, not even a slight disappointment as he still stood right there, smiling at her with his large blue eyes.

“Hello,” he said. “I’m Timothy Garton. Has everyone else deserted you?”

For the second time that hour, this time more strongly than ever before in her life, Sue felt she had never, but never, before seen such an attractive man. Oh, she gasped silently. He’s wonderful! He’s sophisticated, as if he’d really lived and suffered and . . .? He lived. She looked at him seriously.

(What a sweet child, Tim thought, and what a tiny one! She almost makes me feel like a tall man. Is this the way Daniel feels as he looks down at Nan? When Nan peers up at Daniel does she feel the faint sumission that’s in this woman’s eyes? I suppose she is a woman and not a girl and I suppose things as small as this have average-size emotions. Is it harder for them, perhaps, less ground taken up, less to racket about in? She’s extraordinarily sweet and so tiny too!)

Susan knew that if she didn’t speak now she never would. Help! she said to herself, trying to pull herself from the compelling sureness of his gaze as if she were coming up for a breath after being underwater. His gaze swirled around her like the cold comfortable waters of a deep pool. This won’t do, she thought now, with new determination.

“Hello,” she said. “I’m . . .”

“Yes, I know,” he said. “You’re Susan and I cannot tell you how we’ve been looking forward to having you here . . .”

That’s a lie, she thought. He’s never given me a thought except to perhaps wish Joe wouldn’t come barging in here dragging some girl like me, but I do rather like him for lying.

“And I’m really terribly sorry things are a little screwy for a few minutes and that we can’t put you up here for the night. My sister will be right down. Sara’s in the kitchen,” he added, as if this was an important postscript. “We’ll go through there but there’s no real use bothering her. Just follow me.”

He walked silently, with his great grace and ease, toward the wide door into the pantry. “That is,” he added, turning around and smiling at her in a secret way, “you’ll follow me if you know what’s good for you.”

Sue’s heart now pounded alarmingly as she followed him across the room.

Nearing the steps that led into the pantry, she began to hear small noises and once in the light she saw a little office lined with shelves and cupboards. Beyond it the kitchen lay as part of the living room behind the fireplace wall.

Sue followed in Tim Garton’s wary steps, noticing the great hood over the electric stove and a blue map of La Gastronomie Italienne on a cupboard door and the wide window beyond with one great white daisy in the Mexican jar upon the sill.

Sara was bent over the chopping board that was piled high with lettuces and did not look up as they came into the little room. “I hear you,” she said to Tim. “You sound like rats. Lunch is in seven minutes. Have one for me, will you, and get up here in time to help carry it all out.”

“Right,” Tim said. “I will. Take it easy, darling.”

Sue’s heart thudded as if it, for that instant, believed he’d spoken to her. His voice was almost impersonal, neither fervent nor glib, not like the way an assistant director at a Hollywood party might say, Dawww-ling! He’d certainly been talking to Sara, hadn’t he? Sue followed him down the cellar steps feeling lonely suddenly.

Would no one ever talk to her in that fond way? Would it always be the quick hot voice of passion or else nothing? I’m one of those women, she thought, who is made for lust, which is just my luck, and no one will ever say darling to me the way he just said it to Sara Porter, so easily, as if loving her were as simple as breathing or eating.

The thought made her gloomy.

As she sighed, she heard the wheeze in her breathing. She looked away, directing her gaze toward the walls on the sides of the cellar steps painted in the same plaster that had been painted a frolicking canary yellow with a thin green stripe at shoulder height to separate the yellow below from that white of the plaster above. A small light glowed in its feeble way at the bottom of the stairwell.

“Watch your step here, Susan,” Tim said. “Follow closely by me. I’d hate to have you get lost under a strawberry box or something before Nan even got to meet you.”

She followed him as he moved to the right through two different cellar rooms as cool as tombs and rich with the scent of ripening fruit and cucumbers and summer cabbages. She saw shelves filled with preserves put up in jars and in the next room the round gleaming bottoms of a thousand wine bottles. There, standing in the cold dim light of a single electrical bulb, stood Joe and Honor with Daniel Tennant.

Sue’s heart stopped, it seemed, and she felt her head swim slightly to see all three men who now seemed to mean so much to her there underground together. Of course there was Honor, too, who was with them, and as Sue stood watching her, Honor shivered and put down the little glass she was holding onto a wooden table, then wrapped her long arms around what looked to Sue like such an incredibly small waist. There was gooseflesh on her arms and her eyes were melancholy.

Then there was Joe, his face—with the bang of dark curls above it—looking young and thick and tired. He, too, held a small glass so tiny it was almost hidden by the size of his right hand. With the other he leaned carefully against the damp wall.

Tim Garton stood between Sue and Honor and Sue began to feel she could hardly look at him for the love she felt for his small lithe body and his beautiful blue-white hair and dark eyes and for the half-smile on his wide mouth. His mouth made her shiver for the thought of all the secrets it might tell.

I am, she thought, going a little crazy.

And there was also Daniel Tennant, taller than anyone, his thin body hung as loosely as if his joints were tied together with old string instead of living gristle and tendon. His head was small and finely proportioned and seemed to sit on his neck lightly with a proud, arched poise. He wore a soft blue shirt; gray flannel slacks clothed his long legs. His bony arms ended in big if slender-knuckled hands.

Oh, she thought, this is terrible, then looked at the familiar bulk of her Joe almost desparately before she turned her enormous eyes on Tim, who smiled at her reassuringly. She felt her lips moving stiffly as she tried to answer with a grin, but then she was drawn back as if helplessly by the presence of this terrifying boy.

Sue stared up at him in the hard poor light of the one bulb in the dank ceiling and Dan looked down at her, politely. He had the biggest nose she’d ever seen and the rest of his face seemed to express amazement.

“Hello, again,” she told him, hoping she didn’t sound quite that weak.

“You’ve met,” Honor observed, just as Joe and Tim began a jumble of now unnecessary introductions at which everybody laughed and then Dan bowed almost formally. He looked amazed or maybe cross, with his lips pulled tightly. Someone who will never love me, Sue thought sadly.

“You’d better hurry,” Tim said. “Sara’s whizzing around and I have no idea where Nan and Lucy are but lunch will be ready in make that six minutes.”

As he spoke he was shaking bitters into two of the tiny glasses, then filled them with gin. He put one in Sue’s hand and raised his own in a toast. “To happy days,” he said, “or something. Joe reports that at Oxford you now say chahs!”

They all raised their glasses solemnly.

Sue was not sure she wouldn’t choke as she’d never swallowed so much of anything quite so hot in one imitative gulp. She prayed she wouldn’t, then blinked happily as she now felt perfectly safe. She sighed and as she did a most delightful warmth flooded through her and swirled downward into the seat of all her fervent sadness and suddenly she was glad.

“I liked that,” Sue observed, now smiling at Honor, then looking shyly from lowered eyes at the silent Dan.

“Another?” Tim asked this eagerly.

“Oh, gosh, no! Tim,” Honor said, “we’ve got to go help Sara. Come on!”

Dan swept his eyes movingly over the various expressions of resignation and disappointment that followed Honor’s nearly violent statement. He sighed. For a moment Sue thought she would finally hear him say something aside from the untranslatable buzz of his exclamation in the bedroom door and he did now open his mouth. But then he shrugged, raised one shaggy eyebrow toward his carefully combed hair, put down his glass and—bowing slightly—passed in front of Susan and went out the door.

As she followed him out, Honor told him, “You’re too young to have two drinks of gin before lunch anyway.”

The boy finally spoke, “So’re you.”

To Susan his voice sounded like the mellowest notes from Benny Goodman’s clarinet, only more manly somehow. She sighed and listened with a kind of muted awe to the two Tennants speaking to one another as she and Timothy Garton and her now silent Joe, whose arm lay almost protectively on the smaller, more frail man’s thin shoulders, followed them through the cellars and up the narrow stairs.

“Who said I wasn’t?” she asked.

“What?”

“Too young,” she persisted.

“Nobody.”

“Well?”

“Well, it’s simply different for a man. A man can drink more. He can drink younger.”

“Oh no,” she said. “Not gin.”

“Yes,” he said. “Anything.”

“No,” she said. “Gin’s for women. It’s very good for the misery, for one thing.”

“Have you got the misery, then?” her brother asked.

“Not right now,” she said. “But I might get it and . . .”

Their voices, intertwining, went on quietly, each with its own undercurrent of mirth. It was as if they were saying something quite different but putting it into ordinary if somewhat oddly-sorted-out words, so as not to startle those around them.

I wish I had a brother who’d speak to me that way, Sue thought. A brother might be so comforting.

Sue blinked as she stepped out at the top of the stairs into the white airy brightness of the little kitchen. They were all apparently seized by the same violent briskness as soon as they came within range of Sara, who stood putting glasses on a pewter tray that was already piled with silver and plates. Without stopping her work Sara began to speak to them and her tone sounded almost cross.

“About time! Dan, bring up some beer, will you? And Nor, you take that tray out and fix a table on the terrace, please. Susan will help you. And Tim, will you please go up and tell Nan, for God’s sake, to stop writing and come down here. Lucy, too, of course.”

Sara scowled at the tray, then muttered, “Napkins,” then looked up quickly and cried sharply, “Oh wait, Tim, here’s Nan!”

There was a light soft sound of someone running across the living room and taking the pantry steps in one stride. Sue held her breath, thinking, What next? Who might this be? She was almost dizzy now with excitement and aspirin and gin and the beer she had at the casino.

She gave one look at the small figure that seemed to fly into the pantry and pose there, then felt everyone look at her as she gasped. “Oh! You’re Anne Garton Temple!”

Her cheeks were enflamed. She felt herself gaping, looking—she knew—like a moonstruck monkey, but she simply wasn’t able to stop it. Finally, after what felt like an eternity of staring at the newcomer, Sue turned to Joe and asked reproachfully, “You didn’t tell me?”

Then everybody laughed and Joe said, “Hell, Sue, I thought everybody knew Anne Garton Temple was Tim’s sister. And I hadn’t realized,” he said, now grinning at Nan, “that we’d finally be meeting you.”

Nan blushed and nodded and Tim walked quickly over and put an arm about her fragile shoulders.

“People usually say it the other way around,” Tim said. “That I’m Nan’s brother rather than she’s my sister.” He looked—quite without malice—into her upturned face.

They were the two loveliest people in the world, Sue decided, but the loveliest. She stood numbly as the introductions were made, then followed Honor out onto the long sunny terrace, Sue’s mind still thrilled with the vision of the tiny fair-haired woman with Tim’s arm lovingly around her.

How can anyone that famous be so little? Sue thought. Why she’s hardly bigger than I am. And she looks so young, as young as the pictures on her books. But she can’t be, Sue argued. I got my first book of her poems just as I’d finished Shelley, that was at least six years ago and I know she’s in all the anthologies of modernist poets at school. She had to be forty, more. But she can’t be, she looks no older than Sara. Oh dear, I wonder if I’ll have done anything to be so famous by the time I’ve lived that long?

She sighed, rubbed her forehead. She now felt suddenly very tired and so sleepy she could hardly move. Her eyes hurt when she looked toward the wide and glittering lake that lay almost at their feet, yet also far, far below. Beyond the lake the hard black bulk of the mountains on the other shore felt almost like a physical blow.

How could she act in a way that made her seem so light and silly with all this sound around her and such a bad cold in her head?

“I really had no idea,” she protested. Her own voice was now so husky it startled her.

“You mean about Nan?”

“Yes, that she was—that she is—what she is. I never thought I’d meet her. I have all her books. And plays! When I was in Chicago a year ago I saw Hunter, No More! four times. I thought it was wonderful!”

“Yes,” Honor allowed. “She’s swell. Maybe not quite Shakespeare but . . .?”

“Oh, some of those early sonnets, and anyway, no one’s Shakespeare except Shakespeare. And what other woman has ever written a play in verse that has run for weeks and months all over the world?”

“Okay, sure,” Honor laughed. “I’m just as enthusiastic as you are and wait until you get to know her. But . . .?” She looked hard at Sue, who stood leaning heavily against the table.

Sue was frowning under her thick dark brows, remembering those sonnets, those fine ringing lines.

“But, Sue,” Honor continued. “You look like you have a fever. How do you feel? Did you find those hankies?”

Sue nodded. She was still overwhelmed with bewildered awe that she was in the same house as was Anne Garton Temple. She shook her head, trying then to answer Honor’s question.

“No, really, I feel quite all right, thanks,” Sue said, but then she sniffed.

“Yes?” Honor asked, still examining her quizzically.

“Yes, really. It’s just that I forgot to eat any breakfast and now I’m in sort of a blur, with it’s all being so queer and exciting and . . .”

“Oh, HELL-OH-oh!”

The girls looked up. On the balcony that stretched across half the length of the long house, a woman leaned over who was now waving at them. She had a nice smile and Sue smiled back at the woman, who had thick light-brown hair that was piled messily into a tousle at the back of her head. This was a big woman, from what Sue could see, with heavy breasts and broad shoulders.

This can’t be the one who thinks I’m bad, Sue thought. She seems so friendly, so kind.

“Oh, hello, Lucy,” Honor called up to her, with more easy geniality than Sue expected of her. “Lucy, this is our friend Susan Harper. Sue, Mrs. Pendleton.”

“You poor child! Don’t stand there breaking your neck looking up at me, but then I would stand in the most uncomfortable place for everyone!”

Lucy Pendleton spoke so warmly, her mouth was wide, her eyes bright blue, and she seemed to smile with her entire face. “Isn’t it time for lunch?” she asked. “I’ve had such an absorbing morning but I’ll be right down and try to do something useful,” she said, then disappeared.

Sue looked at Honor, lifting her dark brows inquiringly. Honor was busy pushing deck chairs and arranging them around the table.

“She’s a painter,” Honor explained. “Watercolors. Friend of Nan’s. Pick a comfortable chair, Sue, and sit right down. Everything will be out in a moment. You really look like you could do with a little nourishment.”

Sue, after a moment of internal protest, did then sink gratefully into a chair. It felt so good to be sitting down. This was the first time she could remember being seated since, what? Was it two weeks ago on the train they’d taken to Munich? The thought of eating, though, made her feel a little queasy. She let her head lie back against the striped canvas back of the chair, pulling her feet up under her to sit on them, as she had as a child.

Honor now strode across to the gratings in front of the living room windows and called down, “Hey!”

“Yes, Mr. Kelly,” she said. “I called. And you can tell that to Mr. Timothy Garton, also that rat Daniel Tennant, and tell them Sara says lunch is almost over and she thinks this is a very strange way for a newly arrived guest to behave to say nothing of . . .”

“Yes, Miss Tennant!” someone called.

Then there was a bang, then the subdued scuffling of feet through the cellar and Honor laughed. “Having a quicky, I suppose,” she said aloud to no one in particular, then she walked over and sat down, then closed her eyes as if she were too bored to leave them open a moment longer.

Why does everyone here talk to Joe as if they know him better than I do? Sue wondered. She was without resentment, simply startled by the new ways she was seeing him in their having arrived at this place. There were tones in his voice she’d never heard before. She wondered why he was so different. She wondered also that she didn’t seem to care very much.

She opened her eyes at the sound of footsteps and was horrified to see the tiny Nan Garton almost tottering under the weighty bulk of an enormous salad bowl.

“Oh, Miss Garton!” she exclaimed as she scrambled awkwardly out of the deck chair and dashed across the terrace to help. “You musn’t carry all that! Please let me carry it!”

“Why, thank you, Susan,” she said.

Susan, she thought. She called me Susan. As she took the bowl from Nan’s hands, Sue felt almost overcome by the strangeness of this. Anxiety gripped her; had she taken the bowl too roughly from this woman? Never in her life had she seen anything so lovely, so fragile, as the woman who stood quietly and was now smiling at her. Her voice seemed to vanish. Had she really called her Susan?

“Oh, Lucy!” Nan Garton smiled affectionately at her friend who now approached. “How did it go today? Did you do good work?”

“A wonderful morning, Nan dear. And you?”

“I wrote hundreds of postcards,” Nan said, even gaily. “For the first time in my life I’ve had the courage to write, ‘Having a wonderful time! Wish you were here!’”

Susan smiled at the malicious way Nan Garton had rolled out the phrases that had never before sounded as silly as they did now, though they also sounded real.

“Ah, there’s Sara,” Lucy said, hurrying toward her as Sara walked carefully across the terrace with a tray of cheese on one arm and a great bowl of fruit held in the fingers of the other.

“Can I do something to help, Sara dear?” Lucy asked. “Or am I too late, as usual?”

“Never too late,” Sara said, dryly. “Yes, please take this tray, if you will. And do forgive me, everybody, for having lunch so late.”

She looked around and smiled impersonally just as Tim, followed by the two boys, all came to the table bearing rows of beer bottles.

“It’s our fault, I’m afraid,” Joe Kelly smiled, offering this in his softest voice.

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry. Joe Kelly, Mrs. Pendleton. Lucy, you remember my speaking of our friend who’s at Oxford this year?”

Lucy smiled at Joe. “I wonder,” she asked and as she was speaking she began helping herself to salad, then cutting a piece of the yellow-white cheese with great holes in it. “I wonder if you know any of the men who were at Balliol or Merton ten years ago or so? My nephew, you see . . .?”

Susan listened as this mild chatter went on all around her and to the steady splash of water from the old fountain. She tried to eat. She was surprised that she was hungry and that she would have enjoyed the food but that her throat felt not sore but stiff. She thought she might be feeling better or maybe it was only the excitement that was getting her to forget her cold.

She looked again at Nan Garton’s small and very vivid face in such contrast to the slow queenly Honor. Sue smiled to see them sitting side by side, the one’s feet barely reaching the ground, the other’s seemingly so long as to stretch halfway across the stone terrace.

Then she looked at the smooth face of Sara Porter, whose expression was remote. Her heart thumped suddenly at the thought that Sara might be able to help her, that she might tell Susan what to do. Of course, so far it had been rather hard to see anything of her but perhaps sometime during the afternoon there would be a few minutes. She would simply say, “Mrs. Porter, what do you think I ought to do? Joe and I really love each other, but Joe . . .?”

“More beer, Susan?” Tim was looking at her half-empty glass and was leaning forward with the bottle toward her, struggling slightly as he rose from his chair.

“Here!” Dan said, pushing Tim back, and without even moving his body he stretched one long arm across Susan with the bottle poised above her glass.

“Cuff or plain?” he asked.

Sue, who really doubted she could swallow another sip, was simply thrilled to her very marrow at the sound of his deep voice and said, if breathlessly, “Oh, cuff, but definitely!”

He poured. She raised her glass and smiled at Joe over its white foam.