The Eye of the Storm Read online

  The person she was addressing suddenly felt most unhappy, neither the Princesse de Lascabanes, nor yet Dorothy Hunter: no more than a visitor on a chair. If she could at least have remembered Dr Gidley from out of the legion of retainers, he might have given her a sense of belonging; but she couldn’t.

  Mother had not heard, or had chosen to overlook her nurse’s remark. ‘Tell me about something, Dorothy—but something. Everybody flying here and there; I want to be brought news.’

  Dorothy tried, but could not for the life of her think.

  ‘That mother-in-law of yours—is she alive?’

  ‘No, she—died. I wrote you about it.’

  ‘I thought she was probably dead.’

  ‘She suffered from bronchitis.’

  ‘She hadn’t the will to live.’

  ‘Not everybody has, or there would be too many of us.’

  ‘And that other woman—the one with the goitre—Eulalie?’

  ‘She died too. I told you.’ Madame de Lascabanes turned in extremis to her mother’s nurse. ‘That was my English aunt-by-marriage. At least, she was French, but married an Englishman who left her for the Côte d’Azur.’

  Sister Badgery was entranced. ‘My husband was an Englishman—a tea planter from Ceylon. We passed through Paris, once only, on our honeymoon to the Old Country. Gordon was a public-school man—Brighton College in Sussex. D’you know it?’

  The princess didn’t. Sister Badgery couldn’t believe: such a well-known school.

  ‘Sister Badgery, isn’t it time Mrs Lippmann gave you your tea—or whatever you take—Madeira. There’s an excellent Madeira in the sideboard; Alfred developed a taste for it.’

  ‘You know I never touch a drop of anything strong.’

  ‘I want to talk to my daughter—Mrs Hunter—privately,’ Mrs Hunter said.

  She knew from the sound of the knife-edged skirt that she had offended her nurse. That made two presents she would have to give: Mrs Wyburd and Mrs Badgery.

  When the nurse had closed the door the princess felt imprisoned, not only in the room, but in her own body. In her state of foreboding she reached out for the glass of barley water Sister Badgery had removed, and tried to find comfort in sips of that mawkish stuff. She could see herself in one of the looking-glasses with which her blind mother still kept herself surrounded. If the princess had not been so terrified of what the next moment could hold, she might have noticed that her own eyes were deep and lustrous: beautiful in fact; but in the circumstances her mind could only flutter through imagined eventualities.

  Actually Mrs Hunter was enjoying the luxury of being alone and perfectly silent with somebody she loved. (They did love each other, didn’t they? You could never be sure about other people; sometimes you found they had hated you all their lives.) This state of perfect stillness was not unlike what she enjoyed in her relationship with Sister de Santis, though in essence it was different; with the night nurse she was frequently united in a worship of something too vast and selfless to describe even if your mind had been completely compos whatever it is. This other state of unity in perfect stillness, which she hoped she was beginning to enjoy with Dorothy, she had experienced finally with Alfred when she returned to ‘Kudjeri’ to nurse him in his last illness. There were moments when their minds were folded into each other without any trace of the cross-hatching of wilfulness or desire to possess. Yet at the same time all the comfort of touch was present in their absorption. At least that was the way you had felt, and believed, or hoped for the same in someone else.

  Mrs Hunter coughed out of delicacy for the feelers extended in the direction of her silent daughter.

  Dorothy said, after swallowing, ‘I do think, darling, they ought to get you another carpet. This one is threadbare in places, particularly at the door.’

  Mrs Hunter gasped and frowned. ‘I haven’t noticed.’ Then she recovered herself. ‘They haven t told me.’ She began easing one or two of her encrusting rings. ‘I expect they’ve worked it out that I’m going to die—that it wouldn’t be worth while.’

  Dorothy was making those pained sounds.

  ‘But I shan’t die—or anyway, not till I feel like it. I don’t believe anybody dies who doesn’t want to—unless by thunderbolts.’

  ‘Nobody wants to suggest you’re going to die, Mother.’

  ‘Then why does everybody come flying from the ends of the earth?’

  ‘Because you’ve been ill. Weren’t you?’ Dorothy was kicking at one of the legs of the bed: an awkward and useless gesture on the part of her otherwise flawless foot; she had never given up those classic Pinet shoes, and only the perverse would have denied she had been right in flouting fashion; again, only the perverse would have caught sight of the lubberly schoolgirl the Pinet shoes and her little Chanel camouflaged. ‘You can’t say you weren’t ill,’ she repeated through lips grown heavy with the sulks as she continued kicking at the bed.

  Mother said, ‘Stop doing it, Dorothy, please. I don’t want my furniture ruined. You must learn to control your feelings.’

  The Princesse de Lascabanes knew that her eyes were threatening to overflow: because the great, the constant grudge had been against her over-controlled feelings; when the showdown came, hadn’t he even accused her of being ‘frigid’?

  ‘I can only—well, I’d like to explain your flying out here as lack of emotional control,’ Mother was still bashing. ‘I expect they told you I had a stroke. In that case, you were misinformed. I only had a very slight—what was hardly a stroke at all.’

  Dorothy Hunter plunged her hands as deep as she could into the bowels of the dusty old uncomfortable chair; she would stick it out.

  ‘In any case you flew—to make sure you’d see me die—or to ask me for money if I didn’t. Basil too.’

  ‘Oh God, Mother, don’t you allow for the possibility of human affection?’ The outraged daughter snatched back her hands from out of the depths of the chair: what her mother had said was the more cruel for being partly true. ‘I can’t answer for Basil. I never see him. Basil is capable of anything.’ That was so unquestionably true it did away with her own spasm of shame by drowning it in a wave of loathing.

  No, it didn’t; she detested lies: most of all those half-lies she was sometimes driven to tell.

  ‘You’re so unfair!’ A whinge developed through a moan into a downright blub.

  It was only now that Mrs Hunter felt they had reached the point at which they might become one. At the same time she was chastened, as well as impressed, by the emotional outburst it was in her power to cause.

  There was no need to call Dorothy to her: their impulses answered each other. Here was that still skinny, perpetually tormented little girl screwing up the sheet by the handfuls, laying her head beside yours on the pillow. You were soon crying together, though softly, deliciously.

  ‘Anyway it did you good,’ Mrs Hunter said when their self-indulgence could no longer be excused.

  ‘What did?’ Dorothy exchanged her lumped-up position, half on the bed, for a less embarrassing, more comfortable attitude; while the Princesse de Lascabanes started administering a series of flat pats to her coiffure in one of the distant looking-glasses: she wasn’t consoled by her own reflection, nor by her mother’s implication that she had benefited by a ‘good cry’.

  ‘Well, I mean—the air of Sydney,’ Mrs Hunter selected out of the air. ‘Isn’t that why we came here? Your bronchitis. To escape from those severe winters at Gogong, after the burning hot summers.’

  Knowing this was the official reason, Dorothy replied, ‘Actually I can’t remember much about the bronchitis. I expect I was too young.’

  ‘Basil will remember,’ Mrs Hunter said; it must have sounded complacent because she herself detected it. ‘Basil remembers the least detail.’

  ‘Basil is a genius.’ Dorothy no longer resented it; in her wrung-out condition it would have been too exacting; now she only passively despised.

  ‘I remember how quickly you revived in
this balmy Sydney air. You never had bronchitis again.’ In fact, it was herself who had bloomed like a different flower on the same plant; how exotic, how naked her body felt when the southerly began to blow at the end of a sticky summer’s day, caressing her inside her dresses.

  ‘The Sydney climate was always unreliable: changeable, treacherous,’ the princess insisted feelingly. ‘That’s why the people are like they are.’

  ‘Oh, but they are so kind, hospitable—out-giving.’ Mrs Hunter came at it as though she were reading from a brochure of moral touristry.

  Then perhaps because it was not clear who had won, Mother asked, ‘In the winter—in Paris—do you wear woollen vests, Dorothy?’

  ‘No.’ the princess replied. ‘Because indoors there are the—the salamandres. And when I go out I wear my fur coat. Fur boots too,’ she added for good measure; her argument would have satisfied any reasonable Frenchwoman.

  ‘But wool is best, Dorothy. And steak. My advice to any girl living on her own is to order steak—when she is invited out—by men.’

  ‘Bien saignant!’ Dorothy de Lascabanes laughed a rackety laugh. ‘But I’m no longer invited out, Mother, by men. Or not very often.’

  Mrs Hunter appeared not to believe it, anyway of herself: she closed her mouth so abruptly; then she opened it and said, ‘There’s this man—what’s his name? Athol Something. I don’t like him. We met at some dinner party. Athol Shreve? After we came to live in this house. I definitely don’t like him. He’s in business, or something awful—politics.’

  Dorothy wondered whether she could stick it out.

  ‘You haven’t told me about your flight. Did they feed you properly, darling?’ Mrs Hunter flickered her eyelids in the shallows of social intercourse.

  Madame de Lascabanes was only too glad to accept the invitation. ‘Yes. I saw to that: I travelled Air France. The food is frightfully civilized: none of your Qantas plastic’

  ‘Oh, but darling—Qantas—the best in the world!’

  The mother heard her daughter give what she interpreted as a French sniff: the French were so certain of their values, and here was Dorothy, always knotted to the point of strangulation, aspiring to be what she was not, because of that parvenu prince.

  Mrs Hunter saw him: the groove in the lower lip, above the cleft chin, beneath the pink-shaded restaurant lights. She had ordered tournedos Lulu Watier. After the first shock of mutual disapproval, she felt that she and Hubert were enjoying each other. Alfred said, ‘Out with us, the food is plainer. We don’t feel the need to titillate our palates by dolling it up with a lot of seasoning and fancy sauces.’ He might have worsened the situation if she hadn’t kicked him under the table.

  They had gone over for the wedding because the old princess insisted she could not travel out to ce pays si lointain et inconnu. It was the first occasion the mountain hadn’t come to Elizabeth Hunter: she couldn’t very well believe it; nor that she would overlook the fact that her little Dorothy was being received into the Roman Catholic Church. But you did: at the nuptial mass there was your plain little girl in the dress by Lanvin tissé exprès à la main à Lyon, and none of it could disguise the fact that you were prostituting your daughter to a prince, however desirably suave and hung with decorations. For one instant, out of the chanting and the incense, Elizabeth Hunter experienced a kind of spiritual gooseflesh. (Ridiculous when you came to think you had never felt in any way religious, except occasionally at puberty, on clear mornings, down along the river bank. No, there had been other, later, more secret occasions.) Then she was carried on by the sea of words ebbing and flowing round her child’s head. Her child! The eyes of several elderly Frenchmen were directed at the mother of the bride, from out of their aura of distinction and smell of mothballs. And the eyes of that priest standing on the altar steps. She had never met a priest’s eyes, let alone felt them penetrate her: cold eyes can burn the deepest. She was glad of Alfred’s shoulder: her rock, if not always, at least when necessary.

  ‘Considering how uncomplicated Alfred was, it is surprising he never seemed surprised at anything that happened,’ Mrs Hunter said. ‘The Bullivants, Dorothy—will you be seeing the Bullivants?’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘But Cherry was your great friend. And the Bullivants took you to Paris that—that time—Daddy decided to send you. He had such faith in Charles and Violet—a reliable wing to protect you in foreign parts.’

  ‘Are you blaming the Bullivants?’

  ‘I’m not blaming anybody.’

  ‘I’m relieved. It’s only I who was to blame.’

  Mrs Hunter thought she detected a masochistic tone of voice; she wondered whether she might take advantage of it.

  ‘Well, I expect you’ll see Cherry. She’s married to a nice man. So I’m told—I haven’t seen him: a stockbroker or something. They live up the North Shore. That can’t be helped. Cherry’s happy.’

  An ambulance was screeching down Anzac Parade, or was it a fire engine? Madame de Lascabanes had not yet learnt to distinguish between the different Sydney emergencies.

  ‘Dorothy, dear, I’ve been trying to understand why you shouldn’t settle down in this house. Comfort each other. An excellent cook. Of course I had to take her in hand—pass on what I know—Mrs Lippmann. Have you met my housekeeper?’ Dorothy was palpitating.

  ‘In your old room. Practically as you left it. One has to respect what other people are—essentially—even when they try to destroy themselves. But I offer you your room—your latchkey—financial security—if only you will realize that badly heated Paris apartment is—so—so pernicious.’

  Dorothy de Lascabanes had flown to her mother’s bedside to pronounce an ultimatum, a brutal one if necessary, and here she was, her head literally so heavy she had to support it with her hands. ‘I don’t know, Mummy!’ she muttered from behind her wrists.

  ‘Think it over, darling. Nothing can be decided in—you know I would never let you want—and for that reason.’

  They had lapsed. Both of them. The princess might have been sunk in a lake of mercury, but Mrs Hunter was probably born of that substance.

  ‘Tell me, Dorothy—because you haven’t told me—about your flight from Paris. Was the weather?’

  In Madame de Lascabanes’s experience most old people were deeply involved with the weather: an involvement which expressed itself superficially in a lament for rheumatics and colds, whereas on another level the hostile natural elements were charged with supernatural terrors, even if these were rationally laughed away or curtained off behind an apparently thick skin.

  So it was no surprise when Mrs Hunter inquired almost fearfully, ‘Was it rough?

  ‘No. That is, it wasn’t most of the way. Except for one patch over the Bay of Bengal. Yes. Then it was.’

  Again Madame de Lascabanes found herself guarding with one hand her pearls, with the other her coiffure. She need not be ashamed, of course, because Mother could not see. In any case the old thing was lost in what appeared a state of exhilarated anticipation rather than fear.

  ‘It became so bumpy, so terribly rough, I was frightened more than I have ever been. I got beyond the stage of thinking how late the storm would make us in Sydney. I went on to visions of crashing in the sea. When a man sitting beside me gave me a sort of courage.’

  ‘How?’ Mrs Hunter had closed her eyes again; her question was followed by one of those waking snores; after which her mouth remained open as though expecting to receive some life-restoring draught.

  ‘Simply by what he told me,’ the princess replied, her private smile breaking up her face into something related to beauty.

  ‘What?’ Mrs Hunter snored back inexorably.

  Madame de Lascabanes had been congratulating herself that none of the polyglot passengers surrounding her wished to tell their life stories. The sounds of flight made by the laborious machine gave cover, she liked to think, to her own more obsessive thoughts. On the whole, when travelling, she preferred anonymous company, till on
this occasion the storm they entered whipped her nerves to screeching point.

  Once or twice before now she had glanced, no more than formally, hardly out of interest, at the elderly man beside her on the aisle: neither French, nor English, she guessed; White Russian? the profile was not sufficiently irregular or blurred; too self-contained, probably materialistic. When, to kill time, her neighbour started ruffling the leaves of his passport, again she glanced—not exactly inquisitive—perhaps also to kill time. He was a Dutchman, she saw on the page.

  This was to some extent a consolation: at least to her Australian soul steeped in the ethos of the white, the clean; though her French self grew bored and snooty. It was only after the storm took hold of them in earnest, and fear united the disparate halves of her entity, that she truly began to appreciate the Dutchman’s presence.

  Physically square set, his body was hard, she knew from lurching against his shoulder. The hands too, were square, hard-looking, and although no longer youthful, suggested a supple strength. At the same time she sensed an uncommon spirit, one probably prepared to overstep the physical limits most others submit to. He had something austere, monastic about him, nothing of the conventionally regimented ecclesiastic such as her mother-in-law used to collect; rather, you saw in the Dutchman some soul-ravaged, freethinking pastor.

  While she was letting her thoughts wander, persuaded that his elderliness permitted her the freedom of her fantasies, the passengers were suddenly thrown as high as their safety-belts allowed.

  ‘Ah, comme j’ai peur!’ The Princesse de Lascabanes moaned and smiled, still half to herself.

  ‘You are not frightened?’ the Dutchman asked in round, correct English.

  ‘Well, not really—or just a little,’ Dorothy de Lascabanes replied, to be on the side of virtue; and after she had recovered a fundamentally Anglo-Saxon tone, ‘I’m only afraid we shall be late’; she coughed because her eyes were smarting.

  ‘It is probably a typhoon,’ the Dutchman composed for his new acquaintance.