The Eye of the Storm Page 6

  ‘Thank you. She’s keeping pretty well. We hope you’ll come to see her.’

  ‘That will be charming—charming.’ Doubly stupid: the words she used half the time were not her own; but one skates more smoothly shod with platitudes. ‘See the children—and grandchildren.’

  The solicitor was so far encouraged as to launch into Wyburd history; but stopped when he saw she was not interested.

  She was though, she was: she remembered a picnic smelling of trampled grass when she had stuck her face in a freckled neck and thought she would have liked Mrs Wyburd as mother; till Basil stole the solicitor’s wife, as Basil stole everybody. I’ve been reading Lady Windermere’s Fan don’t tell my mother Mrs Wyburd. Basil always impressed and nobody ever seemed to guess when he was being dishonest. Have you Basil and is there a particular part you think you’d like to play? Fancy Mrs Wyburd lapping it up; or was she too, dishonest in her way? Oh no nothing big interesting enough in Lady Windermere I’ll only ever want the great roles Lear particularly. Mrs Wyburd seriously saying you’ll have to wait a long time for that hut I expect you’ll play it in the end if that’s what you’ve decided. She hated Mrs Wyburd almost as much as she hated her brother, who never looked in her direction unless to make faces or persuade her she was a fool.

  ‘There’ll be a number of business matters we’ll have to discuss. Not these first days of course,’ the solicitor was reminding her. ‘You’re not in any hurry now that you’re here.’

  Why did he have to take that for granted? She looked at him suspiciously.

  ‘Your brother’s delayed—did you know? at Bangkok. He’ll arrive this evening, according to the telegram.’

  ‘How extraordinary!’ She adopted the tone used in social intercourse. ‘Bangkok! Where I changed planes. I didn’t run into him,’ she added, and giggled on realizing the inanity of her remark.

  She was glad the solicitor was old enough to be her father, equally glad he was not nearly as old as her mother. She wished she had known her father better; probably her mother had not allowed it: Mother was the mouthpiece through which they addressed one another (even Basil fell for that) all so helpless how would you manage I wonder if I weren’t here?

  Dorothy Hunter, long-legged and shy, almost of the same shoulder height as the solicitor, confessed with an abruptness which surprised him, ‘Some day I want to talk to you about my father.’

  He became as abrupt, expressed the opinion that Alfred Hunter had been a fine man, and announced that he ought to be going along to the office to see what was happening there.

  Which of them had made the break it was difficult to decide, but the Princesse de Lascabanes was at liberty to shut herself up in Dorothy Hunter’s room.

  It was very little changed, it seemed at first: a chaste, girl’s room, fairly narrow and predominantly white. There was the glass in which she had tried massaging her face into a more desirable shape. The cupboards opened on naphthalene and emptiness. Still arranged on shelves, books she remembered, some of them anyway: The Forest Lovers; Salammbô; A Man of Property; Winnie-the-Pooh; Confessions of an English Opium Eater (a grey book when she had hoped for purple).

  Across the bed was arranged a rug she could not remember from her own reign of chintz; it was made from, probably, some kind of native fur: bumpy, humble, yet soft, soothing to the cheek, seducing the body, surprisingly, through dress and two-way stretch. She wallowed in it, hardly bothering to imagine what a sight she must look sprawled on the fur cover and enjoying it with every part of her; when normally she was not a sensual woman.

  Even in the early days, while her marriage was still officially considered a success, she might have dismissed sexual love if it had not been for the sense of gratitude a rare climax produced in her. So she loved a husband almost old enough to be her father; she admired while fearing the cynic and dandy in this man so expensively acquired; at times she admitted to herself she found him physically luscious, the skin tones and the whorled rosettes of the nipples faintly seen through the monogrammed shirts she bought him at Sulka. But she dreaded many of his replies, the quirk at the corner of his mouth, one eyebrow lifted noticeably higher than the other. No, I am not laughing, my darling, only interested to find Australians can behave as perversely as anybody else. She brooded badly. Criticism made her squint: the sun might have been striking at her as she jogged homeward on Taffy under the dusty casuarinas; when here she was in her white, actual skin, the formal helmet of her lacquered hair, and the sapphire brooch the old princess had surrendered during the engagement as a gesture towards notre petite Australienne.

  She had never been theirs, alas. She was not la petite Australienne, not even, perhaps, an Australian, except on damp piercing nights at Lunegarde, or in moments of expatriate despair alone in the Paris apartment. Sometimes Dorothy Hunter suspected she existed only in the novels of Balzac and Stendhal and Flaubert, the plays of Racine.

  Naturellement la littérature française est un héritage considérable. She would have liked to encounter someone whose attitude to books was passionate rather than dutifully respectful. Could it be that her French ‘family’, her ‘husband’, saw in her fossicking through their literary cupboards a form of immorality? They knew the prodigious cupboards were there, but preferred to keep them closed, anyway to foreigners.

  So she too had closed, whether in the Paris apartment where she and Hubert led their more intimate life, or in their wing at Lunegarde, from which they took part in the family rituals of the Lascabanes. (So much for theory; in fact neither of them participated, though each withdrew differently.)

  Mon fils adore la chasse, the belle-mère had dared her daughter-in-law to misunderstand.

  Almost all evenings at Lunegarde seemed to close in mist. Wherever a fire was lit, it smoked. The old princess rattled with bronchitis laying out her patience, as you waited for the guns to return: first the sound of men’s voices as logical as typewriters along the paths, then their boots in corridors of stone. Should you run to greet? The belle-mère at her patience did not look up, but was watching to see the wrong thing done. So you chafed your gooseflesh, till here he was, kissing the hand you offered, winking for some sacrilege he hoped to provoke you into committing, but in which he most likely would not take part, in his mother’s salon, amongst the painted furniture, the faded tapestries, and mould. By contrast, Hubert smelled of thyme, woodsmoke, healthy exertion, and perhaps you imagined—blood. At least the bundles of bloodied feathers and dangling fur were carried into the court to be sorted, some for the vaulted kitchen, inferior stuff for the cottages.

  Once Dorothy de Lascabanes had slipped on the cobbles in the dark, on a patch of what she afterwards identified as blood, and grazed her knee. She bound the knee; she would not tell—not even when she was dying, probably, of blood poisoning.

  There was a lot she hid, and her secretive air was sometimes mistaken for worldliness. Elle est admirable, vous savez—votre femme, said the aunts, cousins, and the few friends, equally glacial and exalted, who foregathered at Lunegarde. She soon realized to what extent she was admirable: that money may be overlooked provided there is enough of it; and that a talking dog offers temporary social distraction. Though a few of them liked to try out their English, the majority preferred her to risk her French, which remained bad enough to pass for amusing, eccentric, even chic, along with the exotic ‘Dor-rô-ti ’. She had, too, the gift for entertaining aged men, which most young girls fail to discover in themselves, and prettier, more assured women do not think of squandering. Mainly by listening and applying an invisible ointment, she revived in her ancients an illusion of youth. They appreciated what they saw as kindness, when she wasn’t kind, or not very. Protected by the armour of a happy marriage she might have snubbed the lot of them. Instead, after Hubert left her, she clumsily rejected the four or five creaking boars and arthritic tortoises from whom she might have chosen a lover if that had been her fancy.

  The name she had acquired remained her compensation, as well a
s a recurring reflexion of the marriage in which she had failed to please. Most desolating were those evenings the belle-mère had envisaged for them: when Dor-rô-ti and Hubert wish to be alone. Herself in a state of sick tension, he with glittering eye and a mock flamboyance, they fled the little huggermugger salon the family used for comfort; while the belle-mère continued laying out her patience, Oncle Amédée pasting in his cuttings, Tante Eulalie (the Hon. Mrs Scrymgeour-Talbot: he deserted me my dear during the male menopause) devoting herself to astrological research, and Tante Daisy de Pougues to the sinuses which tortured her, but for which she lived. Every eye in the room was paying attention from beneath disinterested lids; doubtless after the door had closed the assembly would start listening instead, down reverberating corridors, through panelling in which more than the beetle ticked.

  In their own quarters, a cupboard had been equipped as a kitchen. Le Butagaz, the old princess explained, est si commode—et vraiment pas cher. The will to succeed made a plausible cook of the bride, though on nights of dreadful anticipation her omelette truffée was inclined to stick; there was a manque de liaison about her sauces; there was the suicidal smell of Butagaz. While Hubert did not seem to care: tu es si gentille ma chère petite de te donner tant de peine. What should have been proof of her serious intentions he was only concerned with reducing to bed level: by lip flattery, by hand, by every dishonest means. Worse than his indifference his lechery: ton omelette bien baveuse m’inspire—this time Dorothy we shall do things more interestingly. When her most rigid submission was a torment, except in half languorous, half surprised, and wholly grateful retrospect. But to behave ‘interestingly’ was beyond her capacity: non Hubert je ne veux je ne peux pas.

  Sometimes falling asleep her prince farted as though in disgust.

  Perhaps she had never loved Hubert: that would explain everything; she had only almost drowned in admiration, for his title, his flesh tones, his insolent assurance, his French-ness, and the white sideburns rising to slicks of still black hair, in which the lights would begin to glow after he had drenched it with eau de Portugal and slashed rather than brushed it into shape.

  Mon fils adore la chasse; if the old princess had dared her daughter-in-law to misinterpret, la Cousine Marie-Ange had taken it upon herself to keep his second wife informed. For there had been a first (nobody had hidden her: far from it) la pauvre Madeleine cette fille si douce qui est morte en couches on n’a pas pu sauver l’enfant non plus. (Classic interlude in the life of a man who happens actually to be your husband.) Hubert was desolated. (Why not? Why not?) The teeth of Marie-Ange, yellow-looking and brittle, still tasted her cousins grief: the more touching in that Hubert was by nature such a coureur de jupons—et pas difficile! The cousin had a laugh to match what she saw as the less savoury peccadilloes. But you understand Dor-rô-ti I only tell you out of frankness and—amitié. A woman can so much better hold her husband if she understands his mœurs.

  Marie-Ange herself remained unmarried. The aigrette she wore in her perennial hat was shuddering with expectation the day she brought the Australian news of the American, une personne très commune née à Cincinnati le père a fait fortune dans le margarine. The cousin’s lips were shining, not with margarine, but the superior unctuousness of best Norman butter. Comme je vous plains ma pauvre amie. The hot black glove fingering your cold skin. Mais ça ne durera peut-être pas vous savez bien qu’Hubert a toujours eu besoin de distractions on a même raconté qu’il avait tâté des garçons. The cousin could hardly restrain her spit. Il paraît qu’il a eu une aventure avec un gondolier l’année passée …

  Grinding her cheek into the soft unidentifiable fur (remember to ask Mother) Dorothy Hunter tried to invoke the Spirit of Games, who might have coached her, though too late, in holding a scabrous husband’s interest.

  When somebody started knocking on her thoughts. ‘Mad-damm? Ma-darm?’ Must be that boiled nurse.

  ‘Yes?’ Her own voice depressed her in one syllable.

  ‘Mrs Hunter—madam—is ready to receive you in her room.’ The nurse sounded as though she must be smiling the other side of the closed door she was addressing so elaborately.

  ‘Tell her I’m coming. Thank you. I’ll be there. Thank you, Nurse.’ Or was it ‘Sister’?

  Beyond the window of her girlhood a landscape was returning: under the skyline of convents and araucarias, a geometry of concrete and brick she could not remember ever having seen before. She stood a moment wondering whether it gave her further cause for resentment.

  On closing the door of her refuge behind her, Dorothy Hunter followed the beaten track, along the landing, down the passage, to her mother’s bedroom. She was glad she had the de Lascabanes pearls for company. Faced with making any kind of rational comment, she could only hope for inspiration, which almost never came. In her best moments she did not act: necessity started working in her; but now a part she had learnt, after long and exacting rehearsal, possessed her as she entered the room, and she repeated automatically, ‘I must hand it to you, darling! Isn’t she miraculous, Sister?’ In the French tongue, it might have sounded more convincing.

  For the mummy’s head balanced on the pillows, the structure of bones arranged beneath the sheet, denied the human miracle; though the spirit was preparing to tilt, the princess uneasily sensed.

  ‘Miraculous what?’

  ‘I think your daughter—Princess Dorothy—means: what a wonderful old lady we all find you.’

  ‘Wonderful old lady—ugh!’ Mrs Hunter ground her gums together. ‘Wonderful old bagpipes!’

  ‘What is it you said, darling?’ Dorothy trembled in making contact with this thing: her mother’s wrist.

  Mrs Hunter had not decided how to reply to her poor her Dorothy daughter, when she was led—yes, positively led, in a direction she had not foreseen.

  ‘That day I went with your father to see Mrs—Mrs Hewlett. She was living at—Wilberforce? Yes, there was a river which used to flood, but the Hewletts were on higher ground. Your father was drinking his cocktail, when a bird flew and settled on his shoulder. It was a—a—what was it, Dorothy?’

  ‘A canary?’ The princess had seated herself in a lopsided chair the nurse had drawn up for her.

  ‘I don’t know. I ought to remember. Today I can’t. I almost can. Yesterday we had cabbage, and it was nasty: she had put something in it—cumm—coomm?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mummy. Tell me about the bird, though. Was it a songbird?’ The daughter had leant forward, neck anxiously stretched, herself an expectant swan; she wanted their reunion to be a success.

  ‘Oh—you know— of course—it was a lovebird!’

  The Princesse de Lascabanes exposed her teeth in a giggle, becoming the schoolgirl who was never long absent from her.

  The nurse suggested sotto voce, ‘May I tempt you to a drop of this?’ At the same time she was pouring something opaque out of a glass jug. ‘It’s so refreshing. It’s your mother’s favourite: barley water.’

  ‘Thank you, Nurse.’

  ‘You know I don’t. You force it on me,’ the patient protested.

  ‘Thank you. Yes, Sister, I’d adore a glass of barley water. Tell me, Mummy, about Mrs Hewlett’s lovebird.’

  ‘That’s what I’m telling. It settled on Alfred’s shoulder—climbed down his arm—on to a finger of the hand which was disengaged—and up again. I can see it distinctly.’ Mrs Hunter was in fact looking straight ahead, intently, into and through the misted glass. ‘Mrs Hewlett was so afraid for her bird she had a gardener stationed outside the window with a gun.’

  ‘Really? Whatever for?’

  ‘You won’t let me tell you. She was afraid the bird might fly out the window into the orchard—and that a cat might be waiting in the long grass—to pounce.’

  ‘Now who would have thought—a gardener with a gun! Can’t have done too much gardening, waiting for cats to pounce on the boodgy. Can he, Miss Dorothy—mad-dam?

  Dorothy sipped her barley water. Nobody really ex
pected her to give an opinion, just as they will ask, but don’t expect, an opinion from a child. This, and the cool innocent stuff she was drinking, made the princess feel fulfilled rather than bored.

  ‘All the same it’s a most unusual story,’ Sister Badgery allowed.

  While Mrs Hunter drifted on another plane, outside her skull probably, where vision cleared, above the orchard grass.

  ‘Mrs Hewlett loved her lovebird. That’s why she went to such trouble. And was a bit jealous, I think—the bird flirting like that with Alfred.’

  ‘And what happened, Mother? Did the bird fly out the window?’

  ‘No.’ The eyes staring, thoughts exploring even deeper into the past. ‘Not on that occasion. They say it did at some—oh, later date.’

  ‘I bet it gave Mrs Hewlett an anxious time. Did they manage to catch it, Mrs Hunter? Or did the cat?’

  ‘No. I believe the gardener shot the bird.’

  ‘ohhhh!’

  ‘Oh, ma-darm! Look—let me take it: you’re spilling your barley water.’

  ‘I can’t—I won’t believe it, Mother. Do you, really?’

  ‘They found his body on the river bank—the blood still fresh in his neck feathers.’

  Mrs Hunter thought she no longer believed in the situation herself, though Dorothy apparently did: she was appropriating the death of Mrs Hewlett’s lovebird as something she might have prevented personally; that is the way all good myths are born.

  Dorothy had sat forward again. ‘But was the gardener—mad?

  ‘Who knows? Was the Russian lover mad who murdered Lilian Nutley in Manchuria or—wherever?’

  Dorothy saw Sister Badgery had pursed up her lips till they were an only slightly pinker protuberance on her otherwise flat, colourless face; at the same time the veil was flicked so purposefully it suggested an attempt at semaphore. ‘We’re expecting Dr Gidley—only as a precaution—in the unusual circumstances,’ she managed finally to whisper.