Dictation (4 page)

Her mother broke into weeping, and Lilian felt relieved; she was not callous, but she was used to her mother's tears, and preferred them to the subject of a marriage that would never be.

***

In her bed in the tiny flat in the Blessington Road, Lilian lay listening. She had hung a tall looking-glass on one wall to give the cell-like room an illusion of breadth, and from her pillow she could contemplate her reflection. She saw the white pillow behind her; she saw her head on the pillow. She saw her white face, dim in the half-dark, and (she fancied) ghostly. But she was not a ghost—she was ordinary flesh, as kneadable as dough, a woman's body alone in a bed, with her hand on her breast. A woman's hand, which no one had ever stroked—only that evanescent grazing at Mr. James's door, and that oddly enthralling caress across the tearoom table. Theodora had taken her hand and turned it over and over, and then comically pretended to read her palm, like a gypsy seer; and then she plaited her own hand through Lilian's, and looked at her ... how to say it?—cannily, almost tantalizingly, as no one had ever looked at her before; as if some unfathomable purpose were pulsing between them. Out of her pillow voices were rising, known and perilous voices: all week she had labored beside Mr. Conrad, capturing the slow windings of the voices as they came twisting out of his viscera, or else hurtled out in violent tornado coilings, so that her fingers had to fly after them, rattling the Machine, rattling the lamps, rattling Mrs. Conrad's porcelain figurines. They were the very voices she had carried that day to the Reform Club—the heart of a tale still uncompleted, not yet named. The voices were in her ears, in her throat, in the whorls of her fingers.
My double. My second self. My feeling of identity. Our secret partnership. My secret sharer.
The voices shook her, they frightened her, and when Mr. Conrad broke off at last, she saw how spent he was. She too was spent. He took out his flint lighter and put it back in his pocket. He wasn't getting it right, he told her, not even the title, and who knew when the thing might be ready for print? He would not smoke now—he was flushed and sickly and untidy, as though he had been vomiting all afternoon.

She lifted her hand from her breast, and with her other hand delicately, tentatively tapped it, patted it, smoothed it, ran her fingers along the knuckles and under the yielding arch of the palm—just so had Theodora played with her hand in the teashop, making a toy of it, and then,
then
—raising it, smiling and smiling, as if about to put the curious plaything to her lips. That knowing smile, and the surprising small shudder that crept along her spine—a woman seeming almost to wish to kiss a woman's hand! It stirred and troubled her—the sensation was so much like ... that moment once, or moments, when, turning too hastily from the Machine to pass the day's sheaf of typed sheets to Mr. Conrad, a flurry of papers slipped from her, loosed and strewn, landing on the carpet, the two of them plucking and stooping and kneeling ("a pair of coolies in a rice paddy," he growled), their heads close and their hands entangled ... The ends of his fingers were hard, and the veins in his wrists were thin blue ropes under her eyes: a sailor's worn claw, and the unforeseen movement of it, its gritty touch, rocked her and affected her with a kind of thirst. And there was Mrs. Conrad in the doorway, looking in angrily, and it was only Mr. Conrad holding out his hand to help Miss Hallowes up from her knees.

From the alley below her bedroom window—the filtering panes that sheathed her in a dusky mist of almost-light—Lilian heard a sharp clatter: a metal trash barrel overturned. The fox again, scavenging. A sly fox out of a fable, a fox that belonged in a wood—but there are sightings of foxes in the outlying streets of London, and once, coming home in the winter night from her mother's, she had glimpsed a brown streak under the lamppost; and then it was gone. And another time, in the early morning—the woman and the animal, both of them solitary, two stragglers separated from the pack, transfixed, staring, panicked into immobility. The fox's eyes were oddly lit, as if glittering pennies had got into its sockets; its ears stood straight up; its white tail hung low, like a shamed flag; its flanks trembled. A nervous wild thing. It twitched the upper muscle of its long snout—she saw the zigzag glint of teeth, the dangerous grin of ambush. How beautiful it was!

And the voices in the pillow persisted, growing louder with every repeated cry:
my double, my secret self, our secret partnership
... In her dry-hearted bed Lilian held up her two hands and matched them one against the other, thumb to thumb, and observed how persuasively, how miraculously, they made an almost identical pair.

***

What was most remarkable was that there was never a contest between them. They were not destined to be rivals or champions of rivals. In her very first note Theodora had insisted on this. The note was also an invitation: was Lilian fond of theater, and would she be willing to accompany Theodora to the Lyceum Tuesday next, to see Mrs. Patrick Campbell as Lady Macbeth? Lilian had promised to have dinner with her mother that evening, and how could she disappoint her? But she did, and her mother wept. Similar disappointments followed, until her mother's mood hardened still more, and her tears increased: it was nearly like losing another child, she said, since she was left to be abandoned and alone, with that unfeeling Mr. Conrad claiming Lilian's nights as well, and what a cruel waste of a young woman's life!

It was so jolly to be with Theodora—she truly was like a sister. In the theater, at the most shivery instant, when Lady Macbeth was gazing at her bloody hand and muttering "Out, damned spot," Theodora drew Lilian into her arms to shelter her from the fright of it, and this time really did kiss her, on her left temple, on her cheek, on her chin, and almost, almost on her lips. And Theodora had so many ideas for outings, some of them (or so it struck Lilian) just on the edge of risk or even threat. It became a teasing commonplace between them that Theodora was bold and Lilian was faint-hearted—though it was only Theodora who did the teasing, as if Lilian's reticence were merely a sham, since of course Lilian was the daring one: hadn't she agreed to come ice-skating, when she had never skated in all her life before? Teetering on the ice, Lilian's unaccustomed feet seemed to belong to someone else—the blades skittered uncontrollably, and her heart in its unfamiliar cavern vibrated madly—but Theodora's strong saving embrace was firm at her waist, and the warmth of her breath was feathery under her ear, laughing: "Oh my brave Lily, you're so red in the face you look positively painted!" It was the first time Theodora had called her Lily; she did not protest. After this, an excursion to the New Forest, where freshly falling snow obliterated the paths, and ownerless horses roamed free and untrammeled, sidling toward the human intruders and sniffing after crumbs with their dark vast smoldering nostrils and yolk-colored eye-whites and rolling imbecile eyeballs and gigantic mindless heads, as menacing as the massive mechanisms of train wheels seen too close.

There were parts of London Theodora knew, shadowy corners Lilian had never ventured into, and incense-stung cellars where motley strangers squabbled in raucous remote accents, like hotheaded revelers at an incomprehensible carnival. And sometimes the carnival turned up in Theodora's rooms at the top of an old row house, with a skylight, and on the black-papered walls murky blurry paintings that looked as if they had been dropped in a tub of water and got smeared all over. Women in rippling shawls, gripping the strawlike stems of wine glasses, moved stubbornly from painting to painting: each fiercely stained rectangle seemed an argument to be won. But at length these fearsome women went away, and Theodora said, "All this nice chardonnay left, and you haven't had a drop. I hope you haven't been brought up Temperance, Lil!"

"Mother and I used to take a beer or so with Warren, but never since. And Mr. Conrad, when he's not in company with ladies, prefers ... well, the other sort."

"I won't ply you with whiskey, my dear, we'll leave that to the men, but wine you must have. One glass to gladden your heart, two to gladden mine."

Lilian obeyed and drank, with small hesitant sips. The moon was in the skylight, and the inky walls with their perplexing daubs pressed against her spine. She felt she had been lured to a far lighthouse built on a rock in the middle of a treacherous estuary. It was plain that Theodora had concocted all these unusual scenes and adventures to amuse and thrill her; she understood this—but why?

"Say Teddie and I'll tell you," Theodora commanded.

Lilian looked into her glass—the wine made a kind of mirror, a gathering of morning dews, and her eye lay dreaming there, pale as a lily and unexpectedly lovely, a tiny round calm pond lazily twirling, and unnaturally lit, like the fox's eye.

"Teddie," she said faintly, and let Theodora kiss her again, in her strange new way. She did not really like this—she did not like it at all—but she had a secret trick, a hidden lever at the back of her brain that she could raise or lower, nearly at will, whenever Theodora kissed her with that wary slow incautious kiss, as though unlatching a forbidden room. The trick was dangerous (everything that derived from Theodora was dangerous): Lilian touched the secret lever in her mind, and immediately Theodora became Mr. Conrad. Now and then a glowering unwelcome apparition wearing the face of Mrs. Conrad erupted on the underside of her tongue, and then Theodora was again Theodora; but most often Theodora's insistent mouth was wickedly transformed into Mr. Conrad's —she could almost decipher his puzzling primordial Polish whisperings, and sense the wiry brush of his mustache.

The wine was drained; the moon too was drained from its surrounding glass. Under the blackened skylight Theodora was smiling her heralding smile. "You will remember," she said, "my admission the afternoon we met—"

"When you ambushed me," Lilian said.

"Yes, yes, you brazen thing, call it what you will. I've explained all that, and aren't you glad? We are friends, and sisters, and very soon we shall be sharers in a glorious act. It has only been a question of courage, of aspiring to courage, and there can be no aspiration without training. You recall," Theodora pressed on, "how I trained myself to become worthy of Mr. James. I wished to be the companion—yes, the companion!—of the greatest writer of the age."

Lilian said flatly, "Mr. Conrad is the greatest writer of the age."

"This will not be our quarrel. We shall have no quarrel at all. I believe I can boast that I have made you braver than you were—as one guides a lily afloat on a leaf into unknown waters. You have grown accustomed to the unaccustomed—even to a modicum of shock. You have been enrolled, you have been tutored, you have been apprenticed. I am happy that I have sometimes astonished you. But you must be braver now than you have ever been, if we are to have our success."

"To sit beside Mr. Conrad, and hear his voice each day of my life, is the only success I have ever desired."

"Lily, there is more. Much, much more."

"I want no more than I have."

"You do, Lily, you do. And you deserve more."

"I am merely an amanuensis. Why must I deserve more?"

"Because," Theodora said, "more is already in the power of your grasp. There is more to be had, if only we dare to take it. Please note that I say 'we.' It cannot be achieved save in partnership. We are warp and weft, you and I. You are the lily, and I am the leaf that carries you."

Lilian took a breath; she was famished for air. Theodora was proposing ... what? That she become an accomplice of sorts, but toward what impenetrable end? Her pulse was quivering as it had quivered on the ice, but she hadn't really been frightened then, or in the theater (it was only Mrs. Patrick Campbell and some red stuff), or when the wells of the horses' nostrils blasted their steamy fumes, or among the Wiltshire steles in twilight, or in those cellars ... Everything Theodora had led her to was untried and unnerving and curiously beautiful, even when it was repellent (she thought of the fox and its creamy dark gums glimpsed above the spiky teeth); she had never been afraid of any of it. She was afraid now, when Theodora, taking her hand, went on turning it this way and that, turning it as she had done in the teashop long ago, as if she could turn away her fear.

"Think, Lily," Theodora urged, "you deem yourself 'merely' an amanuensis. Merely! I dislike this 'merely,' yet let us examine it. In all the past, has there ever been an amanuensis who has earned immortality? Who leaves a distinguishing mark on the unsuspecting future? One who stands as an indelible presence?"

Lilian withdrew her hand as if Theodora had set it on fire; she jumped up. "Is this a game?" she cried. "I am Mr. Conrad's secretary! Merely his secretary! It's Mr. Conrad who is immortal! His force, his vision! Why do you try to equate us, why do you trivialize?"

"Sit down, my silly Lily. You are too impatient—I am attempting to engage you in a profundity. I do not trivialize. We are speaking of the generations. If your Mr. Conrad should be venerated as far into the time to come as, let us say, the twenty-first century, then I concede he may be counted among the immortals. And Mr. James unquestionably. But are they interchangeable, these likely immortals? You must know Mr. James's belief—I hope I don't offend—so he once put it to me—that Mr. Conrad's novels on occasion take on the aspect of huge fluid puddings—"

"And for my part," Lilian retorted, "I have heard Mr. Conrad tell Mr. Wells that Mr. James's tales simply evade, that they leave behind no more than a phosphorescent trail—"

"Enough! And never mind. There will be no competition—I insist on it."

Lilian softened. Theodora was genuinely not looking to provoke. In her most teasing affectionate sisterly way, hadn't she called Lilian "my silly"?—the tenderest sort of chaffing. Besides, Mr. James and Mr. Conrad were indeed not interchangeable, Mr. Conrad being so much the superior. What Mr. Conrad knew of the sea, and of the ambivalence of men's souls! Whereas Mr. James was ...
American.
Theodora was threatening nothing—it was one of her larks, an innocuous game after all, a frolic, no different from that eccentric play of the kisses, or those confounding moments in the Stonehenge dusk once, when Theodora masked her face with her gloved hands and spread the fingers and peered through them as though each one were a small upright stone pillar, and ground out a mocking phantom Druid liturgy made up of coarse guttural lunatic syllables—so that Lilian, taken aback, had a little scare, until Theodora's laughter burbled out and left her feeling stupid. "It's your mother," Theodora chided, "your lugubrious mother—she's stunted you with all that gloom. She leaves you no space for mischief. Oh my poor Lily, when will you learn to play?"