The Theoretical Foot (16 page)

He threw one long arm restlessly over his face and now his breath came faster.

I can say, Nan, will you dance with me? Or, Nan, may I have this dance? It's perfectly simple—I've often done this before. She'll say, Why of course, Daniel, and look up at me and her eyes will widen as she smiles so she looks almost like she is blind. Then I'll hold out my arms and she'll be in them, like smoke, like a flower, like the most beautiful body that I've ever dreamed of and there,
in my owns arms, she'll be and it will not be a dream. The music will rise around us like water, like passionate wings, hiding us, covering us.

There was a knock at the door and Daniel lay without breathing. The seocnd knock was louder. There was a pause, then he heard three bangs. He decided not to snore nor even open his eyes. He lay breathing quietly.

François opened the door and apparently stood looking at Daniel for a moment before he spoke. “I do not wish to disturb Monsieur Daniel,” he announced into the air,
“if he
is asleep; however . . .?” He paused to pick something up from the floor and to fling it scornfully into a corner. “Yesterday Madame Porter was most annoyed with me to find the room still unmade at lunchtime and what am I to do, I say to her, if young Monsieur Daniel is still in his bed? Should I clean around him as if he is a chair or perhaps a small insignificant tuffet?”

There was a silence. Daniel hid his face as he couldn't quite keep himself from grinning.

“Well,” François said, “I can only say that I have at least done my part to keep the peace. Now if Madame makes things difficult, I will at least be innocent.”

The door closed with the small but firm sound of his outraged nobility.

The old boy's right, Daniel told himself. You
must
get up. It looks like hell in here and how can he clean the room with me in it? People on the terrace can see in. Sara will be mightily peeved. I'll get up right now and take a shower.

But then in minutes Daniel was heavily asleep again, dreaming troubled but exciting dreams that made him sigh and cry out as if he were in pain.

ii

It was early when Honor first awoke that morning. Sun slanted low through the thin white curtains and a tender breeze sent them billowing, swaying their fat ruffles against the floorboards. The little fountain pouted and dripped right below her open windows. Birds sang frantically in all the trees. She felt happy as a healthy baby and in the same unthinking way.

As soon as she came to life enough to realize it, though, she was engulfed by a sickening wave of discouragement. The very thought of being alive was almost more than she could endure. The idea of another day, a whole day, to crawl through seemed vile to her. What would she do with it and with herself? And why should she do anything?

Perhaps she would lose her voice. She knew, though, that Tim suspected her from the last time of doing this to escape. It was so convenient but three times in one month would be overworking a good thing. She thought longingly of the blissful feeling of peace it gave her to sit in a room full of people knowing she need not answer any of their goddamned silly questions, that she needn't even listen to them.

Sara, of course, knew, as it was Sara who'd taught her how to escape in that way. Honor still remembered her own shocked outrage on that day when she'd been full of pity for her sister whose throat was too sore to speak, only to then have come upon Sara singing quietly to herself in the bathroom. Sara, who never mentioned it, never lost her voice again and this summer had never once shown that she knew what Honor's silences meant.

Honor wished Sara would, sometimes, engage. It would be good to be scolded or frowned at in displeasure instead of having her sister treat her always with such impassive courtesy.

She pulled a thin blanket up over her shoulders. The memory of her terrible dream made her uncomfortable and she shivered. She had only dreamed it a few times in her life, but now twice this summer the dream had sent her shaking and cold with sweat from her bed to sit half sick by the open window for the rest of the night.

She heard again—without wanting to—the dreadfully shrill screams of rage and filth that poured from her own mouth in those dream scenes and she felt the sting of her face where Sara slapped and slapped her, the blood under her own fingernails where she clawed at her older sister. It was awful. What made her dream like that? Should she talk to a psychiatrist when she went back to the university? Perhaps it meant she secretly hated Sara or maybe it was a revolt against too much of the famous “Tennant Reserve,” too many years of polite good manners. Yes, that was probably it—she should ask Timothy.

Perhaps if she got up now she'd find him drifting somewhere through the airy freshness of the rooms downstairs. She began to throw the covers off, knowing she would find him, understanding this so clearly it was as if she'd made a rendezvous with him. Go to the mirror, her mind said, and you'll find Timothy. Look into the mirror and he will come, just as he came the night she felt so lonely and had gone down for fruit and had found him standing in the window. I saw him in the mirror, she thought, and stood looking at his white hair glimmering, his eyes. Then he came to me without speaking and led me to the couch and put a shawl over me and soon we were drinking hot milk and brandy and talking about what we remembered from Sunday school. She'd meant to tell him then about the dream that had sent her down there but it had seemed unimportant.

Why bother him? she wondered now. Why go downstairs?

She lay in a sort of torpor, feeling the blanket becoming too hot but not being bothered to push it away. Soon Honor was asleep, her face becoming young and smooth again and her mouth growing soft and loving, no longer drooping brokenheartedly.

iii

It was much later when Honor woke the second time.

She got up blindly, went swiftly into the dressing room, and began her meticulous toilet. She knew from experience that if she started to think she would grow too miserable to face the day, falling back asleep again in order to put off for a little longer having to talk to anyone or to answer with a smile.

I should take the veil, she thought, wiping herself vigorously after her shower. There is surely a sisterhood that has vows of silence. But I would miss my perfumed bathoil and looking down there at the enamel on my toenails and putting a little brown on my eyelids and running this little white pencil under my too-brittle fingernails.

She looked in the long mirror, assessing herself expertly. All she needed, certainly, was an ostrich-feather boa to be like a naughty drawing of a
directoire coquette,
her feet in silly satin mules, her hair piled up silkily into a soft bun on the top of her head and nothing on in between. A
directoire coquette
through the wrong end of an opera glass, she said. God am I big. I am beautiful but I am so enormous, so
tall.
Maybe it's glandular, maybe this is why I'm so unhappy. Other people don't seem to feel so low and miserable and lost as I do. They seem to have more normal-sized emotions. All mine are oversized, exaggerated, like me.

She put on panties carefully, then a white tennis dress. She slipped her feet into high-heeled white shoes, admiring her long brown legs. She felt as clean, as sterile, as boring as a dairy lunch.

Standing at her window, looking into the treetops, watching smoke from her cigarette blowing about aimlessly, she wondered what she might do. She might write home . . .?

Just as she turned to the desk and her eyes caught a quick flash of yellow in the meadow, Honor brightened. She leaned far out, her mouth open to call excitedly to Nan, Darling Nan! Honor would run right down and pick flowers with her, she would carry her baskets.

But she didn't call. Was it worth changing her shoes? And would Nan even want her to be tagging along clumsily? What was the point of going clear to the end of the meadow, being bitten by flies, to pick flowers that would only wilt? She wasn't certain Nan even liked her.

I don't see how anyone could like me, Honor thought, with true bitterness, as I am a dull and sour woman, though I'm too young for this. I know this. I know I'm well on my way to becoming one of those ghastly boring neurotics who just adore to analyze themselves, thinking of no one else. But I am consumed—
consumed
!—by my despondency and truly hate the world. I am determined that the world hates me, which is simply a pity.

She looked with true disgust at her untidy bed, then left the room.

The stairs were cool and silent. Her high heels tapped lightly and she didn't bother trying to walk softly as she passed Daniel's room. What if she did wake him? It was late and he ought to be up. What if he was not there but was sitting on a wall watching the men work in the vineyards or was off talking with Tim and Sara? Honor's heart quivered with a small twinge of jealousy, but she immediately thought, Why should I care? How stupid. I say I don't want to be bothered with talking and am then envious imagining my brother having a conversation without me?

The living room was spotless and empty.

In the kitchen François saluted her with reserve. He hated her, she knew, because she refused to eat breakfast. She had hurt him irrevocably by leaving her tray untouched every morning until he finally came to believe her in her initial announcement that she
wanted nothing at all until lunch. She now smiled sweetly at him as she took a glass from the cupboard.

“Will Mademoiselle permit me to assist her?”

“No, thank you, François.”

“Very well, Mademoiselle.”

“Thank you, François.”

Honor started down the cellar steps, with her heels clicking loudly, hearing François bounding suddenly across the kitchen to stand at the top of the stairs.

“Mademoiselle!”

She turned slowly to look up at him. Do not
shout
at me, she thought irritably. “Yes, François?”

“Mademoiselle will not find Monsieur in the cellars.”

“Monsieur?” Her voice was icy.

“Monsieur Garton has disappeared. Everyone is searching for him. I simply wished to inform Mademoiselle. It is nothing serious, of course, but . . .”

“A minor disappearance, that is to say?”

“Mademoiselle is correct.”

“Thank you, François.”

“Not at all. At your service, Mademoiselle.”

Honor proceeded with elaborate dignity, hoping devoutly she would not trip at the bottom of the stairs as the man had in
The Diary of a Nobody.
She filled her glass with milk from the icebox and drank most of it. She didn't feel like going up through the kitchen again, having to listen to François's senseless interruptions.

Interruptions of
what?
she asked herself. My too-important thoughts? Do I even have any thoughts? Is
thinking
what I'm doing? She carried her glass upstairs cautiously, proceding through the kitchen with her head held so high and haughtily that she almost did not see that the room was deserted. François is like me, preferring my room to my company.

He is luckier than I am, though, in that he never went to school and had to learn about how
sensitive
he is, or how to be so egocentric and masochistic and so on and so on and more than anything
bored.

Honor stood in the door of the living room. Sun blazing in the smooth gravel of the terrace sent a hard light through the windows, glaring on the white walls. She pulled the heavy linen curtains part of the way along their rods and there they stood in straight loose folds, unmoving in the stillness of late morning. The light fell softly through, bars of mild blue and green and rose. Colors in the rooms all appeared to be mellower now. She picked up the glass she'd put down on the great dark table that was wreathed about with vine leaves. It was a lovely room. Sara could make anything lovely.

“Hello!”

She looked, quick as a lizard, into the empty mirror, before she turned toward the sound of Timothy Garton's voice.

“Hello,” she said. She felt confused and a little embarrassed, as if she'd just been caught out doing something idiotic.

“What are you doing?” Tim came into the room from the terrace and sat down on the shabby red tuffet. “Don't you know billard balls are made from milk?”

“What about it?”

“Well, if you don't eat something when you drink milk, it'll make a little billard ball in your belly. Cramps. Crisis. Hot water bottles. Doctor, who diagnoses appendicitis. Cold water bottles, so forth.”

“What should I do?” Honor asked as she sat down on the floor, leaning her back against the couch. For the first time that morning she felt easy, also a little excited, as if something extremely funny or wonderful might happen at any moment. Tim also made her feel so. She looked up at him and smiled.

Timothy, she said in the serious voice that resided deeply within herself, I love you. I could love you passionately, probably, but I don't because it's so good to love you this way, the way I do. You, with your odd spirit, are beautiful. I wish I were Sara.

“Where is everybody, Nor?” he asked.

“I like it when you call me that,” she told him impulsively. “It's only for a few people.” Then before he could answer she hurried on. “But ‘where are you?' is the better question. François informed me
with his customary air of mystery that you have disappeared, but if he thought he could use that news to crack my glacial calm he was bloody well fooled.”

“What would Lucy say to hear you using such words?”

“Bloody? Oh, she'd probably think that's all right as it's
English
! She's like most small-town Americans, a terrible anglophile. Anyway, I don't care what she thinks. She'd speak and I wouldn't hear her, really. Where
were
you, though? They're all out looking for you.”

Tim lowered his voice, leaned closer, his eyes dancing, and Honor was overcome with the sense of his delightful silliness though she knew that what he would now tell her might not be really amusing or exciting and probably not even wholly true, but the way Tim drawled with one corner of his mouth pulled up and his tired pale eyelids drooping made her feel like giggling before he even began to speak.

“You see . . . but here, don't you want to smoke? It'll help kill the taste of that foul milk. I got up early and picked some tomatoes in the garden and tickled around the edges of some lettuces. Then, really a bit dry, I went down to the celler and drank a bottle of beer and ate three stalks of celery and a pickled peach from the top of a jar marked
Not to be opened for three years from last July,
but for God's sake do not tell your sister! Then I went all over the house peeking through keyholes.”

“I don't believe that.”

“No?” Tim first leered like a satyr, then hugged his knees.

“No.”

“You had on a pale-blue satin shift, very décolleté, with a pretty silly little white lace heart stuck on your, um, bosom, am I right?”

Honor now looked coldly past him. “I think it's despicable that a man of your upbringing should stoop . . .?”

“What? A man such as I am is made for such pursuits and it's fun.”

“I disapprove but go on.”

“You see?” he asked. “Keyhole peeking appeals to everyone. Well, then I looked at Nan. She was right in front of the keyhole,
practically. Very pretty, my sister is blooming. Her hair was spread all around her and if I'm not mistaken she was sleeping raw.”

“
Nan
?”

“Well, maybe she had on something fairly diaphanous, a cobweb or two?”

And here Tim grinned and added, “I just skirted the edge of an ancient joke of great filth. I hope you didn't recognize it?”

“No, I don't know any filthy jokes. I don't like them.”

“Neither do I, though I happen to know hundreds, which probably proves we are different in some way.
I
don't know. I wonder and wonder about it. Human behavior is such a
mighty
peculiar thing, Miss Honor.”

And now she laughed in spite of herself as he sat waggling his large head solemly, to have her early-morning doldrums about Oh me and Why and How and Ah-me-how-sensitive-and-introspective-I-am flung back at her so neatly.

“Phooey,” she said.

Tim looked at her.

“No,” she said. “Not you. I was thinking about something else.”

“Well, we Continental generally say
pfui
!” Tim told her in his best kindly old-uncle tone. “But to continue—and kindly pay attention because it's here I disappear—I skipped downstairs after my far-from-brotherly peek and took a little squint at Daniel. Couldn't see much, the keyhole in that old door being in a most inconvenient place, but there was the general impression of vast disorder.”

“Mmmm,” Honor agreed. “Dan's room.”

“Then spent several enjoyable minutes gazing at the little white lace heart on your little blue bosom.”

“Tim, please tell me. How did you really know I wore that nightie?”

“I peeked, I'm telling you. I'm a peeping Tim. Then to calm myself after the sight of you, I gathered my fortitude and went to spy on Madame Pendleton.”

“Oh no!” Honor said, genuinely horrified. It seemed wrong to her—even if this was all an elaborate make-believe—that poor Lucy's ugly body should be spied on secretly.

“I know what you're thinking as your face is as transparent as water, my dear girl. But it's all right. There was nothing but a great expanse of chintz, all this moved and billowed about and very chaste. Just then, to my exquisite shame, François came tripping up the stairs and I sprang to my feet and as he started to speak I put my fingers to my lips to silence him, so he froze. I hissed,
I am invisible!
and with the man's usual quick and sensitive appreciation, which makes him a rascal and very nice to be with, he hissed back . . .?”

There was a silence and finally Honor asked: “What?” though she really did not care. Still it was so pleasant to have Tim here with her, to be sitting lazily on the floor beside him and to be listening to his quiet voice telling her these tales.

“Oh, I don't remember,” he said vaguely.

“I'll bet you were an awful liar when you were little.”

“Yes. They say it's an escape. Maybe. Lying's great fun if you're careful not to lie about anything that's real.”

“Yes, that's what Sara said.”

“Has she told you many things like that?” Tim looked at Honor curiously and she realized it was the first time he'd ever referred to their childhood and she laughed bitterly.

“She didn't actually tell us, I suppose. But she made it plenty clear when she either approved or disapproved of things. And in her own peculiar way she saw to it that we suffered.”