The Theoretical Foot

by M. F. K. Fisher

  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 i
f 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.”

  Honor was sorry now that they’d begun to talk about Sara, as it hardly seemed fair to speak of her to her lover, of times before he’d known her. Honor felt that it might give him an advantage over her sister, but now it was too late. She heard words that she had not before put together into sentences rushing from her.

  “Oh yes, Sara was never one to spare us if she thought we’d done sonething wrong or bad or sneaky. She never touched us but she made us wretched, simply wretched, with her silent disapproval and I don’t know exactly how. And she was terribly stuffy and rather Girl Scouty at the time, all about our doing a good deed daily and brushing our teeth and playing the game and so on.”

  “Really?” Tim looked highly amused.

  “Oh yes! And table manners! And being seen and not heard when out in public, things such as these. But mostly she was stern about sneaking around and being a tattletale, that sort of business, which she simply abhored. That’s what’s so surprising now.”

  Honor’s voice now died away. Oh God, she thought, how can I have been so indiscreet? Oh, Tim, forgive me!

  He looked at her for a moment then, with a calm and speculative eye, asked, as if conversationally, “You mean about our not being married?”

  Honor nodded. She was filled with misery.

  “For heaven’s sake, you look like a kicked puppy! You might have said something long ago. You Tennants are too damned discreet for your own good, you know? It’s too bad, too, for a few people that Sara and I are not legally married. We will be as soon as we’re able. With people like us, those who’ve known one another for a long time and have liked each other for all this while, it really doesn’t matter. But I think most people probably ought to get married. So I don’t think I advocate promiscuous cohabitation or all that damned foolishness. In fact, I abhore it.”

  Honor still said nothing.

  “So does Sara,” Tim added.

  She frowned, then said crossly: “I don’t need you to tell me that. I know my sister.”

  “Well, please don’t snap at me. Here, have a cigarette, though you do smoke rather too much for a girl your age.”

  They smoked. They sat without speaking for a time. Upstairs they could hear the somnolent padding of François’s tennis shoes and the occasional bump or clatter as he cleaned Nan’s room. Once they heard Lucy Pendleton’s painting chair being scraped across the floor. Once a train shrilled and rumbled distantly along the lake. Finally Tim slid off the tuffet and sat close to Honor on the floor, carefully not touching her.

  “Are you in love?” he asked.

  Honor didn’t mind his asking, she was startled to realize. The very thing she would not even let her own self ask was all right being asked by him.

  “Yes, I am. I am in love.”

  How queer it was that her voice did not crack, that she did not cry out, that instead she sounded as calm as if she were saying, “Yes, I’ll have some tea. I’d like lemon, please.”

  “But how do you know?” Tim looked at her curiously again. “How does anyone ever know? I was in love several times before Sara and still I don’t know.”

  “Well . . .?” And now Honor hesitated. She was thinking hard. She wanted to tell Timothy as clearly as possible so he would know. He would help her. “Things like dreams,” she said, “and all that and then that awful feeling of uncertainty and doubt and sickness and worry over it. People who say love’s wonderful are saps, actually.”

  “It sounds like the real thing. Don’t think I’ll be flip about this, dear sweet Honor. That’s my trouble in talking about terrible things, that we’re all so afraid we’ve reduced them to trivialities, at least as far as intonation goes, but this does sound real.”

  “Yes, it is. He’s a Jew, which complicates it all the more.”

  “You mean in your having children?”

  “Not so much that but that Jews are double haunted now. That they are so hypersensitive, if you get me?”

  “He’s being noble, you mean?”

  “God no. He doesn’t even know how I feel about him. He’s just being noble about humanity in general, as if he were another Jesus.”

  “One’s enough, I always say. And you don’t want to be another Mary waiting around for the Holy Ghost. Tell the man. Talk to him. Pull him off his high horse.”

  “Dan knows, a little, not much. Dan says such things as, ‘Oh, one of my best friends at university is Jewish, you know . . .?’ I sometimes think my brother has the soul of a big-time politician.”

  “He is probably too intelligent for his own good.”

  That’s right, Honor thought. My brother’s not like Jacob—Dan is cautious. He might seem adventurous but he’s secretl
y afraid of pain and hunger and public shame. Dan’s the good kind to marry, not the poor and tortured soul like Jacob, not the outcast.

  “He went to Vienna with money for refugees,” Honor said. “He went disguised as a British art dealer; he did look quite the part. But that was four weeks ago. Now I’m afraid for him.”

  Tim rubbed his eyes as if he were tired and asked: “Tell me, Honor. Does he love you?”

  “Yes, he does,” she said, “but he doesn’t want to love me. He hates me because . . .? Well, because I’m healthy and I’m clean and I haven’t suffered. And because I wear nail polish. I asked him what difference that would make in the fate of all the poor people if I suffered, too, but there’s no changing his mind. He hates me for who I am, hates himself, too, for loving me instead of one of them, his own, one of the refugees.”

  She sighed now remembering the painful silence that would fall on Jacob’s friends in a café when—earlier in the summer in Dijon—he’d take her with him to a meeting. The men would be crudely, horribly courteous, while the women laughed at her behind their hating eyes.

  “But I like to be clean,” she said. “In a revolution or a war I’d get dirty, I’m sure, but for now I prefer to be clean.”

  (You great full-bosomed beauty, Tim thought. You firm-bodied girl, keeping yourself, waiting to bear children, where will you find them? Will some desirous little soapbox revolutionist deign to impregnate you? Will you accept the caresses of an unwashed soldier who stinks? Where is the quiet home for you? Where can you hide the children you don’t yet have? The best to hope for you, dear Honor, is the artful contraceptive passion of a neurasthenic professor. He will certainly use mouthwash and perhaps a dash of aftershave in the armpits. No, there is no danger here of your bearing great strong farmer sons. I congratulate you, Madame, on your sterility, on your fine thighs, your strong round breast, useless, meaningless, except for causing you your own secret pain.)

  “Perhaps you should bring him here?” Tim asked. “We could fatten him up and he could see that though we take showers on a daily basis we still have some faint comprehension of the vast extent of human misery?”