Uncle Theo had so much animal placidity and so few thoughts that he was just not very noteworthy, in the same way in which a spider in the corner might not be noteworthy. It was true that he behaved like an ill person, at any rate he spent an inordinate amount of time in bed, always taking breakfast and tea there, sometimes lunch and dinner as well. He talked a lot about familiars whom he called his 'viruses'. But no one had ever believed that Theo had any definite, indeed any real, illness. And although he was sometimes sharp-tongued and often morose his glooms had a positive slightly buffoonish quality which forbade their being taken too seriously. Theo also had a considerable gift for being physically relaxed. He seemed a totally non-electric, non-magnetic person. Perhaps it was this air of blank bovine ease which made his neighbours rightly so incurious. There was nothing to know.
Yet there were times when Mary favoured another and more unnerving theory according to which Uncle Theo's invisibility was something more like an achievement, or perhaps a curse.
At these times Mary apprehended his laziness and his relaxation not exactly as despair but as something on the other side of despair of which she did not know the name. It was as if, she thought, someone had had all his bones broken and yet were still moving about like a sort of limp doll. It was not that she caught, through the mask of Uncle Theo's behaviour, any momentary flash or flicker from some other region of torment.
There was no mask. It was simply that the ensemble of Uncle Theo's particular pointlessness could take for her the jump into a new gestalt which showed him to her as a man who had been through the inferno and had by the experience been deprived of his will.
Mary looked at Uncle Theo now as he was, by a familiar technique, exciting Mingo by sniffing over his fur with the audible eagerness of a terrier after a rat. Unlike his younger brother, to whom his resemblance was minimal, Theo was a gaunt man and rather tall. He was partly bald, with longish strings of greasy grey hair curling down his neck. He had a large brow but the features of his face were cramped and GICULUI 11aU aUJCIitly ULUWll L11CI11 U11 LUWa1U5 L11C V111L UI I11S rather long nose. So although he had a large head his face looked small and poky and canine. Mary could never determine, even on fairly close inspection, the colour of his eyes.
Tidying his room once she had found an old passport, and opening it to see what colour Theo himself considered his eyes to be, had found the description: 'Mud'.
Mary had been distressed to find her curiosity and concern about Theo lessening as time went on. Perhaps those invisibility rays were gradually killing her interest in him too and she would soon be just as indifferent as the others. Mary, who was accustomed to receiving confidences, had once or twice tried to question Theo about India, but he had only beamed in his dog-like way and changed the subject. She felt compassion for him and willed to help him, but her relationship to him remained abstract. The sad truth was that Mary simply did not love him enough to see him clearly. He repelled her physically, and she was one of those women who could only care deeply for what she wanted to touch.
'Will you make me some more tea please?' said Theo.
'Yes. I'll send Casie up with it. You must make peace with her. You really do make her unhappy.'
'Don't worry. Casie and I are good friends.' This was true.
Mary had noticed a sort of positive bond between these two.
'I wish you'd go up and see Willy,' she said. 'You haven't seen him for three weeks. Have you quarrelled or something?'
Theo closed his eyes, still beaming. 'You can't expect two neurotic egomaniacs like me and Willy to get on together.'
'Willy isn't a neurotic egomaniac.'
'Thanks, dear! The fact is I gave up Willy for Lent and then found I could do without him.'
'I'm just going to see him now and he's sure to ask after you.
Suppose he – needs you?»
'Nobody needs me, Mary. Go and make my tea, there's a dear girl.'
Mary went away down the stairs in a state of irritation with herself. I'm no good, she thought. These encounters with Theo, her inability to reach him or see him, often he brought on a sort of self-pity which rendered his image even more indistinct.
Mary depended, more than she might have been willing to admit, on a conception of her existence as justified by her talent for serving people. Her failure with Theo hurt her vanity.
Downstairs she found Casie, no longer tearful but furious, already banging together another tea tray for Theo. As Mary passed on toward the back door she could now hear Barbara upstairs beginning to play something on her flute. The piercing husky hard-achieved beauty of the sound wrought on Mary's nerves. Her own utter inability to remember any tune gave music a special exasperating poignancy for her. Barbara's flute, although the child now played it well, was almost an instrument of torture to Mary. She wondered where Pierce was and whether the boy, lying in his room or hidden somewhere in the garden, was also listening to those heart-rending sounds.
The summer afternoon was very hushed in the garden and the air, thick with sun and pollen, dusted Mary's face like a warm powder-puff. The agonizing sound of the flute grew fainter. Mary mounted the pebble path and let herself out of the gate in the wall and began to go up the hill between the high banks of the lane. The banks were covered in white flowering nettles, a plant which Mary liked, and she picked a few as she went along and tucked them into the pocket of her blue and white check dress. When she got to the shade of the beech wood she. sat down automatically, out of a compulsive afternoon languor, upon a fallen tree, sitting astride the tree and gently rustling its skirt of curled beech leaves with her sandalled feet. The tree was smooth and grey above, but beneath the level of the leaves it curved inward with the colour and consistency of flaky milk chocolate, and as Mary sat upon it and stirred its flanks it gave off a light fungoid odour which made Mary sneeze. She began to think about Willy Kost.
Mary had for some time now been conscious of a sort of mounting distress which she connected with her relationship with Willy. She felt with him something of the same exasperated sense of failure as she felt with Theo, only with Willy it turn pre-eminently toucnawe. tie arrivea at irescomoe Cottage when Mary was already well established as whatever she was established as at Trescombe House, and she had immediately assumed a special responsibility for him. 'How's Willy?' other members of the household would tend to ask her. She had at first taken it for granted that Willy would soon confide in her and tell her all about his past, but this had not happened. No one even seemed to know for certain where Willy had been born. Ducane said Prague and Octavian said he thought Vienna. Mary had no theory, coming at last to accept Willy's sad European mysteriousness as a sort of physical quality and one which racked her tenderness more than any positive knowledge could have done.
Mary constantly told herself how lucky she was to live with so many people whom she loved and that surely so much love was enough to fill a woman's life. She knew perfectly well, with her heart's blood as well as with her mind, that loving people was the most important of all things. Yet she knew too that she was deeply discontented and she sometimes suffered fierce feral moods of confused yearning during which it seemed to her that her whole life was a masquerade and that she was piously acting the part of a kindly affectionate serviceable woman who was just not herself. Yet it was not that a rapture or a glory which had once shone around her had passed away from the world. The rapture and the glory whose hauntings she suffered had never manifested themselves in her life at all.
Her love for men had always been somehow neurotic and unfulfilled, and this had been true even of her love for her husband.
She had loved Alistair very much, but in a nervous, plucking, plucked at way, and though both her body and her mind had been involved in this love they had never been in accord about it. She had never been filled with her love like a calm brimming vessel. She had rather suffered it, as a tree might suffer a cold wind, and the image of a coldness was somehow mingled with her memories of marital love. Mary did not believe in analysing herself, and she had left vague the notion that sometimes came to her that this anxious unfulfilled sort of loving was the only kind of which she was capable.
Her relationship with Willy Kost was unsatisfying and even maddening to her but by now it had become very important and Mary could quite rationally hope that it would in time become better, easier, fuller. She did not any longer expect any great 'break through'. She did not expect, as she had done at first, that Willy would suddenly seize her hands and tell her all about what it was like in Dachau. In a way she no longer even wanted this to happen. But she did hope that some shrewd little genius which watched over her strange friendship with this man would see its way to bringing them, in gentleness and tenderness, much closer together.
'Willy, may I come in?'
'Oh, Mary. Come in, come in. Yes, I was expecting you. Have you had tea?'
