The Eye of the Storm Page 5

  ‘Aren’t you well! Aren’t you active today!’ The nurse was genuinely impressed. ‘It’s your daughter’s arrival.’

  ‘Oh, the tale of jewels!’ Mrs Hunter knew her acolytes must often have caught her out telling her once blazing, if now extinct, beads.

  Whatever her own feelings Sister Badgery would never be caught out in any popish act: no one would guess how she adored, for instance, this pigeon’s-blood ruby, or that she was capable of worshipping an ancient idol for its treasure.

  To deflect the wrath of her forebears by a display of down-to-earth professional skill, the nurse announced, ‘We’ll prop you up a step or two, shall we? Whoopsy-dey, Mrs Hunter!’ as she hoisted.

  And there was the idol propped against the pillows, the encrusted fingers outspread as though preparing to play a complicated scale on the hem of the sheet.

  To introduce a touch of warmth, the nurse inquired, ‘Would you like your maribou jacket, dear? Or the woolly stole, perhaps?’

  ‘Thank you. The stole.’ Mrs Hunter barely breathed: physical exertion had exhausted her.

  Sister Badgery draped the stole; she could not have treated a saint with greater reverence, though she did not believe in saints, not, at any rate, those Roman Catholic ones: ugh!

  ‘Wouldn’t you like me to choose you a necklace seeing as it’s a great occasion?’

  ‘Not a necklace. Not before luncheon. Not for Dorothy.’

  Sister Badgery accepted reproof. ‘Gordon gave me an amethyst pendant.’

  ‘Gordon?’

  ‘My husband. Don’t you remember me telling you?’

  ‘I ought to.’

  ‘Well, Gordon gave me this pendant. It’s in exquisite taste. I wear it still—only when I visit friends, or to the Nurses’ and Residents’ Ball.’

  Though Mrs Hunter had never distinctly seen Sister Badgery’s neck, she imagined it thin, white, and well-soaped: fitting support for the amethyst pendant.

  ‘Perhaps I never told you—’ Sister Badgery was treading familiar ground, ‘I met Mr Badgery—Gordon—on my way to the Temple of the Tooth. I was visiting Ceylon for pleasure—between cases, that is. What did you say, dear? Mrs Hunter?’

  Mrs Hunter was not coaxed into repeating, but they used to call them ‘the Fishing Fleet’: the Australian women who went up to cast their nets in Ceylon waters; instead she confessed to a weakness of her own. ‘For years I kept the children’s baby teeth in a bottle. Then one day, for some reason, I threw them out.’

  ‘I was telling you about my trip to Kandy. My friends’ car got a puncture, and a tea planter who happened to be passing fetched a native to do the necessary. The planter was Mr Badgery. He kindly invited us to take refreshments—which was how everything started. Shortly after, he retired from tea and followed me by P. & O. to Sydney.’

  ‘He died, didn’t he?’ As if you didn’t know; but his widow liked to be asked.

  ‘Yes, he died. But not before we were married. That was when he gave me the amethyst pendant.’

  Mrs Hunter wondered momentarily whether she should give Mrs Badgery something from her jewel box; it was easier to give presents than to waste emotions you were storing up against some possible cataclysm: as time ran on you did not know what you might have to face.

  ‘What is this weird ring I’ve never seen before?’ Sister Badgery was asking. ‘The one on your right thumb.’

  The old girl was lolling there, her smouldering fingers scarcely part of her, and on that thumb a nest of plaited gold surrounding what might have been a cross, but out of plumb; the whole effect was thoroughly heathen.

  ‘That is an Ethiopian ring,’ Mrs Hunter explained. ‘It’s the only thing ever sent me by my son - apart from letters asking for money.’

  Sister Badgery sucked her teeth. ‘And Sir Basil a great man! That’s what the papers tell us.’

  ‘I suppose, when they’re not being great, great men are as weak as the insignificant ones.’

  Because of a tone of perversity and sadness, Sister Badgery changed the subject. ‘I expect your daughter—Dorothy—has lots of exquisite jewels: a lady in her position.’

  ‘She came off badly when he left her—though she was the innocent one. Still, she did manage to extract a jewel or two from her husband’s atrocious family.’

  Sister Badgery was delighted to hear of this material success. She brought a brush and began stroking her patient’s hair.

  ‘I don’t believe you know my daughter’s name.’

  ‘Well, “Dorothy”, isn’t it? I’m no good at those foreign names.’

  ‘I shall teach you,’ said Mrs Hunter, her lips inflating as though she were tasting a delicious food, her nostrils filling with what could have been a subtle perfume. ‘“Princesse de Lascabanes”’; she laid on the French pretty thick for Sister Badgery’s benefit. ‘Let me hear you say it.’

  The nurse obliged after a fashion. ‘But what shall I call her?’ the voice whined despairingly.

  ‘Nothing more elaborate than ‘“Madame”.’

  ‘“Mad-damm, mad-damm,”’ Sister Badgery breathed in imitation, and a more sonorous variant, ‘“Ma-darm!”’

  Mrs Hunter sensed she had got her nurse under control, which was where she wanted her; she also suspected Sister Badgery would refer to ‘Princess Dorothy’ to please herself and impress her friends.

  ‘“Mad-damm, ma-darm”!’ Happier for its new accomplishment the voice went clucking in and out the golden morning.

  Mrs Hunter was so soothed by clocks and brandy it seemed unlikely that anybody would arrive; if they did, it might even be undesirable: her life was too closely charted.

  ‘Open mouth! Mrs Hunter?’ It was that Badgery again. ‘Whatever happens, we must take our temp, mustn’t we?’

  What did they call it? Dettol? Cool, anyway. Sterilizing. Was it better this way: to be sterilized out of existence? I don’t mind dying, Dr Gidley, but I do expect my nurses to protect me against worse than death: such as the visitants you do not conjure up for yourself, worst of all the tender ones.

  ‘Shall I be strong enough, I wonder?’

  Holding her patient’s wrist, Sister Badgery found it unnecessary to answer: the pulse was remarkably strong.

  When they were both shocked, if not positively alarmed, by an interruption to their celebration.

  The door opened.

  ‘Sister, can she be seen?’ It was Mr Wyburd in something too loud for a whisper and less than his usual grammar. ‘The princess has arrived. Her daughter.’

  As if this were not enough, a second figure was pushing rustling past the one at the door: for Mrs Hunter it was sound perfume joy despair; whereas Sister Badgery saw a tall thin hatless woman, somewhere around fifty (to be on the kind side) her dress unsurprising except for its simplicity and the pearls bounding about around her neck, and on her bosom, as she half ran half staggered.

  A princess shouldn’t run, the nurse recovered herself enough to disapprove; and she shouldn’t have a horse face.

  But Dorothy floundered, imperviously, on. ‘O man Dieu, aidez-moi!’ she gasped, before assuming another of her selves, or voices, to utter, ‘Mother!’ and lower, ‘Mum!’

  Then, by act of special grace, a blind was drawn over the expression the intruder was wearing for this old mummy propped up in bed, a thermometer sticking out of its mouth; if life were present, it was the life generated by jewels with which the rigid claws were loaded.

  The princess fell against the bed, groping through the scents of Dettol and baby powder, to embrace, deeper than her mother, her own childhood.

  Rejecting the thermometer with her mouth—lucky it didn’t break off—Mrs Hunter was smiling, whether in bliss or fright it was difficult to tell.

  Till she giggled through her flux of tears, ‘Too much excitement! I think I’ve wet myself.’

  Madame de Lascabanes had felt her anxiety, together with a morbid craving for acceptance, turn to rage, as she endured the humiliations of the airport.

  Th
e man said, looking through her passport, ‘“Princess Dorothy de Lascabanes”, eh? French subject. Born at Gogong, Australie. Waddayerknow!’

  The princess glared back along the ridge of her white nose. Her rather flat breasts were heaving beneath the uncomplicated little dress she had chosen for the journey: her faithful old Chanel; how would she manage when it wore out?

  ‘What business is it of yours where I was born?’ The unaccustomed language was making her spit.

  ‘Only reading what’s in the passport.’

  ‘I should have thought my birthplace beside the point—in the circumstances.’ The rustiness of her English made it sound ruder, which was what she had intended after all.

  ‘That’s what comes of offerun friendship. But we won’t hold it against yer, lady. Welcome to yer native land!’ The man laughed, and handed back the passport.

  ‘I’ll report,’ she began; but to whom? and for what?

  She was by now more humiliated by her own ill temper than by what had been only questionable insolence in the passport official.

  It might have been worse at the customs if she had not clenched her jaws, after deciding to answer any questions as briefly and coldly as she knew how: French economy in fact.

  The surly youth in an official’s uniform who began stirring up the two bags packed by herself with such practical ingenuity, immediately put her to the test. Again, in rummaging through the case in which she carried her make-up, her tissues and so forth, as well as a few jewels, he provoked, but failed to draw her; not even when running his hands through the jewels with a cynical air of estimating their value. (They were certainly an impressive lot: some, gently lustrous, others, by the grubby airport light, imperiously brilliant. Her spoils. If she had not been so well-informed in the details of Hubert’s private life, she might have lost the battle for the jewels; but cette créature vulgaire, cette infecte Australienne simply knew too much for her former belle-mère, the old Princesse Etienne, to launch a successful offensive.

  At least the customs official’s lack of respect was not expressed in words; she might not have borne it otherwise. Silently she hid her gall as he silently poured a few of her sleeping pills into his hand; and when he left his fingerprints on her books, as he scuffed up the pages, always ferretting, almost breaking the spine of her precious Chartreuse de Parme.

  He only opened his mouth to mumble, while sticking a plastic strip on her violated luggage, ‘Bet you get a good read out of some of these French books of yours.’

  For a moment she regretted insisting that nobody should meet her, and that she had avoided travelling by the line she thought Basil most likely to choose. All she could do now was ignore, lower her discreetly smeared eyelids, dust down the coat she was carrying (her rather mature Persian lamb) and stalk behind the barrow on which her bags were being wheeled away. The briefest glance at her own reflection ought to restore her confidence if it were to falter. As it did. And her impeccable reflection let her down.

  Dorothy Hunter’s misfortune was to feel at her most French in Australia, her most Australian in France. Sometimes she wished she had been born a Finn: she might not have felt so strongly about it. She had only met a couple of Finns; but Australians—here they were, teeming around her, the older men like mattresses from which the hair was bursting out, or those younger, more disturbing ones, hipless, and over-articulated; the women, either in loud summary shifts, apparently with nothing underneath, or else imprisoned in a rigid armature of lace, shrieked at one another monotonously out of unhealed wounds. Some of the women looked as though they would expect to die in hats.

  The Princesse de Lascabanes pushed her way between the bodies, using her hands united in an attitude of prayer inside the lumped-up coat she was carrying. Protected by this fur buckler, Madame de Lascabanes shoved on, to arrive beside the queue of infiltrating taxis, where she overtipped (one of the principles of ‘poverty’) the unsuspecting, decent man her porter—or whatever he was: she had all but forgotten her native language.

  As she entered the cab she was on the verge of crying; in fact she did drop a tear or two after bumping her head and giving the address, ‘The Queen Victoria Club.’

  After very little correspondence the princess had been elected an honorary member of this irreproachable institution to which she now intended to drive. Go to Mother’s later in the day, after resting. She was too écoeurée at the moment to risk being dragged under by the emotional demands of a domineering old woman. Carried along an impersonal expressway from the airport she would not allow herself to think of Mother, least of all ‘Mummy’. Were you really rapace as your belle-mère had insisted? Were you a SNOB? as every second Australian seemed to accuse: the bursting mattresses, the hipless Gary Coopers of your youth, not forgetting the fe-males, blue-glaring out of their wounded leather.

  Dorothy Hunter might have had a good cry if, on opening the wrong bag, she could have found her tissues. I have never managed to escape being this thing Myself.

  Instead she addressed the driver’s neck, ‘ Voyez—’ coughing for her lapse, ‘I’ve changed my mind. Take me to Moreton Drive, will you?’ adding, strangely, superfluously, ‘To my mother’s house.’

  The driver did not seem to find it odd, ‘Been away long?’

  ‘Oh, years—years!’ She heard a wheeze from deep down in her reply; and coughed again.

  But felt fulfilled: it was like the sensation of settling yourself inside a cotton frock, between licks at an ice-cream horn, while voices droned on about weather, the wool clip, and the come-and-go of relatives.

  ‘Dear dear! Aren’t we unfortunate? These terrible accidents!’ Sister Badgery had hurried to the bedside to disengage her patient from a too emotional embrace; intent on professional duties, her least concern was a princess.

  While Mrs Hunter, curled on her side in something like a foetal position, was grinning up at her daughter. ‘Don’t worry, Dorothy. It’s not as bad as you might imagine. There’s the macintosh.’ Relief drifted over her face as the water spread inside her bed: for the moment she would not have to think of what to talk about to this stranger; better disgraced by the body than by the mind.

  She sighed and said, ‘You’ll have to go into the nursery, Kate, play with the dolls—though mine aren’t as good as yours;’ then listened cunningly for the sound of Kate’s boots tapping across the boards.

  Kate Nutley was altogether too simple. Betty Salkeld had never cared for her friend, any more than for Kate’s glacé buttonboots; the Nutleys were wealthier than the Salkelds.

  Dorothy Hunter was rent as the nurse dragged the sheet back too quickly and her own babyhood was exposed. Its smell of pitiful flannel and the painful prickling of a rash invaded her far more ruthlessly than the memory of that adult ordeal: the trek through a chain of icy salons to the cabinets at Lunegarde; the door which wouldn’t open at first and which wouldn’t shut on the screech of urine, while the belle-mère snored, and Oncle Amédée slit the night and the newspapers with his scissors, cutting out reports of incidents which might be interpreted as Communist conspiracy.

  Confused by this collision between her still passive babyhood and some of the most painful steps she had taken in what remained a gawky-schoolgirl marriage, she was relieved to hear a man’s voice. ‘We’d better leave them to it. I dare say they’ll fetch you when everything’s in order.’ She had forgotten the solicitor.

  Arnold Wyburd led her out along the passage towards the landing. He was the sort of person you take for granted: a nice bore; so reasonable and honest there is no need to be on your guard against him. She felt remorseful for never having sent a New Year card to the one who had managed their affairs all these years. He appeared dry enough not to look for sentimental attentions from a client. Or so she hoped.

  On the other hand, he had known her as her other self: Dorothy Hunter.

  He was so kind she might have been recovering from an illness. ‘I expect you’ll want to potter about the house—quietly—by yourself.’
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  The Princesse de Lascabanes was restored to health, when it should have been Dorothy Hunter.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, returning his kindness with a kind smile. ‘Isn’t it ridiculous of me—I’m dying to see my old room!’ She settled her pearls with a practised hand. ‘I believe rooms actually mean more to me than people.’ That was not entirely true, and she hoped it had not sounded shocking to somebody as good as the solicitor.

  Looking at her he suspected her of having more of her mother than they credited her with: a horse-faced version of Elizabeth Hunter.

  ‘They got your room ready for you, if you care to change your mind.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said in her highest voice, ‘I couldn’t impose to that extent—on the housekeeper person. And besides, they have a room for me at the club. Wasn’t it civil of them to make me an honorary member for my visit?’

  They looked at each other. Perhaps he did not consider it a visit; he saw her gummed up in the web of nostalgic associations and forced to witness the great conjuring trick to which her mother must soon lend herself. A gust of renewed panic made her determined to cling to her not altogether satisfactory life in Paris: the underfurnished apartment at Passy; a pretence of meals prepared by herself over a leaking gas stove; her art of making expensive dresses continue to look expensive; the rationed sympathy of practical friends (her folly had been to value the friendship of those who respect rentes). All this might change of course, but how quickly? Her flight to the bedside could decide. She had never been a skilled beggar, perhaps because it was only late in life that there had been any need to beg; the alternate solution was something she must not think about, though she often did in terrifying detail.

  Making a great effort, and still at a considerable distance, Madame de Lascabanes inquired, ‘How is dear Mrs Wyburd?’ At once she hoped her smile allied to the borrowed adjective would not strike the solicitor as fulsome; and come to think of it, she did have a genuine affection for his wife; in fact, as a child she had loved Lal.