The Eye of the Storm Read online

  ‘Surely not!’ she answered as coldly as she could. ‘It couldn’t possibly reach us up here—or could it? I know nothing of the habits of typhoons.’

  ‘My experience is only of the sea.’

  She did not know why hearing this should have given her so much pleasure, but she breathed more deeply, and observed his hand with fresh interest.

  In the beginning he had inclined his head towards her shoulder, till discovering the angle and distance from which their voices might reach each other. Not once, even after establishing rapport, did the Dutchman turn to look at his neighbour. They were so private, at the same time so formal, Dorothy was reminded of the confessional, use of which was one of the more positive privileges she had acquired on marrying Hubert de Lascabanes. For a moment she was tempted to pour out she didn’t know what—no, everything, to this convenient ‘priest’, till persuaded by his manner that he might not have learnt any of the comforting formulas.

  She was only partly wrong, though.

  ‘Some years ago I was at sea—master of a freighter,’ the Dutchman was telling in his matter-of-fact, stubbornly enunciating voice, ‘when a typhoon struck us, almost fatally. For several hours we were thrown and battered—till suddenly calm fell—the calmest calm I have ever experienced at sea. God had willed us to enter the eye—you know about it? the still centre of the storm—where we lay at rest—surrounded by hundreds of seabirds, also resting on the water.’

  The airy rubble over which the plane was bumping became so inconsiderable Madame de Lascabanes was made ashamed; she was saddened, also, to think it might never be given to her to enter the eye of the storm as described by the Dutch sea captain, though she was not unconscious of the folded wings, the forms of sea-birds afloat around them.

  ‘Sure, we had to take another battering—as the eye was moved away—and the farther wall of the storm rammed us—but less severe. You could tell the violence was exhausting itself.’

  After that he closed his eyes. There was much she could have asked him, and perhaps would dare when he opened them. In the meantime, she sat half dreaming half thinking, her own eyes fixed on a full but tranquil vein in the back of one of this man’s hands.

  Actually, when he woke from his doze, he struggled out of his seat to visit the lavatory. Their paltry storm had passed, it appeared, though they were advised to keep their seat-belts fastened for the landing at Bangkok.

  So she did not speak again to the Dutchman, except in mumbles. They grunted, nodded and smiled at each other, amused, it must have seemed, by some shared secret, as they shuffled out of the plane at the airport.

  It was here that she joined the Australian flight. She lost her Dutchman, probably for ever.

  ‘Is that all?’ Mrs Hunter opened her eyes.

  ‘Oh, yes. I know I had nothing special to tell. Nobody would be impressed who hadn’t heard from this ordinary, yet in some way, extraordinary man. He struck me as being’—she was struggling through the wicked jungle of language—‘himself the soul of calm and wisdom.’

  Just then Dorothy Hunter was startled out of her memories by some of the former mineral glitter in her mother’s almost extinct stare.

  ‘Dorothy, didn’t I ever tell you of my experience in a cyclone?’

  Mother was daring you not to have known. She was standing at the head of the stairs, one arm outstretched, pointing, in a dress of blinding white such as had suited her best: cold and perfect in its way. And now a mere daughter, in spite of trial by marriage, the exorcism of a number of doubts, and arrival at perhaps a few mature conclusions, was frightened to the edge of panic by whatever revelation this vision of earthly authority might be threatening her with.

  ‘No,’ she protested. ‘You didn’t tell—that is, I think I remember hearing—yes, about a storm.’

  Somehow she must be spared: Mother must grant her this one concession.

  ‘If I didn’t write to you at the time, I must have been too annoyed with you—flying off like that—in a rage.’ Mrs Hunter sounded reasonable, calm, just. ‘It was when the Warmings asked us to stay on their island. They had to leave in a hurry. One of the children was sick, I think. Then you rushed away. You missed a lot of excitement—and made a fool of yourself.’

  Mrs Hunter laughed gently; it sounded almost as though she still had those small but exquisite teeth. ‘What was the name of the professor man?’

  Dorothy Hunter was frozen beyond answering. She shouldn’t have been; it had happened fifteen years ago.

  ‘Anyway, it was while I was on the island that this cyclone struck. Oh, I shall tell you—when I can find the strength. I can see the birds, just as your Russian said.’

  If physical strength was letting her down, her capacity for cruelty would never fail her: to drag in Edvard Pehl. At her most loving, Mother had never been able to resist the cruel thrust. To have loved her in the prime of her beauty, as many had, was like loving, or ‘admiring’ rather, a jewelled scabbard in which a sword was hidden: which would clatter out under the influence of some peculiar frenzy, to slash off your ears, the fingers, the tongues, or worse, impale the hearts, of those who worshipped. And yet we continued to offer ourselves, if reluctantly. As they still do, it appears: to this ancient scabbard, from which the jewels have loosened and scattered, the blind sockets filled instead with verdigris, itself a vengeful semi-jewellery, the sword still sharp in spite of age and use.

  She must try to define her love for her mother: it had remained something beyond her understanding.

  And the cyclone: why was it given to Elizabeth Hunter to experience the eye of the storm? That too! Or are regenerative states of mind granted to the very old to ease the passage from their earthly, sensual natures into final peace and forgiveness? Of course Mother could have imagined her state of grace amongst the resting birds, just as she had imagined Mrs Hewlett’s escaped lovebird and the mad or distraught gardener. Though remembering some frightfulness the prince had forced on her mind more painfully than on her body, Dorothy de Lascabanes suspected the lovebird’s murder was not an invention.

  Then the knocking, and in Sister Badgery’s voice, ‘Mrs Hunter? Here’s a lovely surprise for you, dear. Dr Gidley is paying us a visit.’

  Brave or foolish, the nurse pushed the door open without waiting for encouragement, and for once her judgment seemed correct.

  Her patient spoke up in the voice of a little girl who has learnt a lesson, though it could have been an unimportant one. ‘It is very kind of him,’ Mrs Hunter said.

  ‘We couldn’t very well not look in—not as we were passing—could we?’ The doctor was a large young man with a fatty laugh.

  ‘Not very well—not after promising Sister de Santis on the telephone.’

  The doctor ignored it, while the duty nurse pursed up her mouth, her cheeks near to bursting for the wickedness of her precocious charge.

  Then she remembered, ‘This is the—the daughter—Dr Gidley’; though her voice had a dash of acid, her eyes were radiating sunshine from behind the gold-rimmed spectacles.

  ‘Ahhh!’ The doctor recoiled, but put out his hand, sighing or hissing.

  The Princess got the impression she was a rare disease he had not encountered before, and which he would have liked to look up furtively in a book; while avoiding his hand, she replied, ‘How do you do, Dr Gidley?’ Though recently grown up, the doctor would remain, for her at least, or at any rate for the moment, an enormous baby to whose somewhat featureless face had been added a pair of fashionable mutton-chops.

  Apparently unconscious of a snub, he advanced on the bed, where he plumped his doctor’s bag (humbler than himself) beside him on the carpet. ‘How are we, Mrs Hunter? No strain on the Big Day?’ Without waiting to hear, he took up his patient’s wrist, which surprisingly she abandoned to him.

  (Surely such enormous fingers would detect only a thundering pulse?)

  ‘She’s remarkable—truly remarkable,’ the nurse nattered sideways and superfluously to the daughter who was a prin
cess.

  The doctor frowned, and the nurse, recalled to duty, stood to attention like a frail private.

  ‘Normal enough.’ Dr Gidley finally complained out loud,

  And so did Mrs Hunter. ‘Normal is the last thing I am—I hoped you might have gathered by now—Doctor—Dr Gidley.’ The corners of her mouth were struggling to perfect a half-remembered technique of malice. ‘Otherwise, what am I paying for? A—a dia-gnosis of my ordinariness?’

  Dr Gidley flopped into the nearest chair, fingers dangling in clusters between wide-open legs. ‘Okay! Dictate your diagnosis, Mrs Hunter, and I’ll learn it.’ Mirth bumped the banana-bunches against swelling thighs.

  Sister Badgery hummed with suppressed pleasure.

  The strength of these two acolytes lay in their belief in the rightness of what they were doing and the wrong-thinking of others; which drew Dorothy towards her mother: at her most imperious, her most declamatory, Mother’s manner had suggested that the moment her will snoozed she might collide with some passive object or suffer buffeting by a directed one. Mother and daughter were both sleepwalkers, only their approach from opposite ends of the room ensured that their meetings should become, more often than not, collisions.

  Now, faced with the forces of practical optimism, they were wearing identical smiles, while the opposition continued shining with the light of their mission: to prevent a human body dying, even if it felt like doing so.

  In the circumstances Mrs Hunter murmured, ‘My daughter and I understand each other implicitly.’

  If it were true, it ought to be kept a secret; so Dorothy muttered, and stirred in her chair, and almost put up a hand to avert an indelicacy.

  While Mrs Hunter continued in her determination to hint at sweetness. ‘Before you disturbed us, we were enjoying a delightful conversation. She was telling me about her voyage out.’

  ‘Flight, Mother,’ Dorothy corrected; then blushed. ‘And it was not a very spectacular one.’ Her expression menaced Sister Badgery and Dr Gidley with her journey’s uneventfulness.

  This should have consoled them, but the large young doctor looked uneasy: if he had obeyed convention he would have inquired at least about the weather, only the problem of the title prevented him addressing Mrs Hunter’s daughter.

  Instead he made sounds,

  Mrs Hunter slightly moved her head from side to side on the pillow, apparently about to start on a singsong, though when it came, the voice was thin, high and sustained, like the fine-drawn utterance of a single violin. ‘She was telling me about a charming Dutchman she met—and a hurricane which overtook them off Curaçao—quite a mystical experience.’

  The doctor and the nurse laughed to express their interest or hide their disbelief. Everybody but Mrs Hunter was obviously feeling uncomfortable.

  Sister Badgery tried to remind her patient of the physical realities. ‘Your pillows are looking lumpy, Mrs Hunter. Wait till I shake them up.’

  While the nurse satisfied herself with the pillows Mrs Hunter was as much tossed by her own thoughts. ‘Yes. I remember the birds—the waves shaped like small pyramids—black swans nesting between them.’

  Dr Gidley accepted the swans as his excuse for leaving. If there’s nothing we can do for you, Mrs Hunter, we shan’t interrupt your reunion with your daughter.’

  ‘Oh, but there is something! There is! I want you to give me whatever will make me sleep.’

  Doctor and nurse looked at each other; then Sister Badgery said in a voice of such exaggerated kindness she might have been going to gobble someone up, ‘But you do sleep, dear. You know you do—beautifully.’

  ‘I lie and—and ramble around in waking. Once years ago somebody prescribed something, and when I took this pill the effect was like slipping on the sides of a smooth funnel, then through the hole, into darkness.’

  She was listening very intently.

  ‘Darkness is what I want,’ she insisted. ‘I’m too distracted by the figures which come and go through the grey of the other.’

  She must have heard the catch on the doctor’s bag, for she began to look pacified. He was dashing away at a pad, a sheet of which he tore off and gave to Sister Badgery.

  ‘There’s no reason, at your age, why you shouldn’t have what makes you happy.’ Dr Gidley spoke as though this moral prescription, on top of the medical one, had originated with him.

  And Mrs Hunter seemed to think it might have: she was smiling up at the doctor with an expression of girlish gratitude; she might have received at least a kiss the moment before, whereas she was having to content herself with some clumsy handpatting.

  When they were alone the Princesse de Lascabanes remarked, ‘I’m surprised at your having a doctor of Gidley’s type. I expected somebody older and more experienced—Mr Wyburd as physician, if you see what I mean.’

  Mrs Hunter laughed. ‘I know Gidley isn’t much good as a doctor, but I can tell by the feel of him he’s the kind of man I might have enjoyed as a lover.’ She turned slightly. I’ve shocked you, Dorothy dear.’

  Dorothy said, no, she wasn’t shocked; even so she was glad of the blur which separated them: she could look more closely at her mother.

  ‘Don’t think I made a practice of promiscuity. Oh, I was unfaithful once or twice—but only as a sort of experiment—and it did prove it wasn’t worth it. For most women, I think, sexual pleasure is largely imagination. They imagine lovers while their husbands are having their way with them, but in their lovers’ arms they regret what they remember of the husband’s humdrum virtues.’

  The princess sounded all expostulatory mirth. ‘I think you’re tired, Mother, and are talking utter imaginary nonsense!’ She was tired, anyway.

  Mrs Hunter would have liked to see Dorothy as more than the blur she appeared, to decide whether she had ever had a lover. Probably her trouble was that Hubert had been too much the lover for his wife to have experienced a husband.

  ‘So now I’m going to leave you for my club,’ the Princesse de Lascabanes announced.

  ‘When we were expecting you for luncheon!’ Mrs Hunter’s recent wisdom shrivelled into a rag of skin. ‘My housekeeper—Mrs Lippmann—will give you a splendid luncheon—in the dining-room by yourself—or a snack on a tray, here with me.’ Then she added, out of desperation it seemed, ‘You haven’t met her, have you? Well, I mean, socially. Sometimes she dances for me. Are you surprised, Dorothy, at a dancing cook?’

  ‘By now, Mother, I am not surprised.’

  Mrs Hunter could hear her daughter drawing on her gloves; in the end, stitched to the bed by steel threads, you can only persuade the past.

  While they were kissing, and she was sure of escaping, Dorothy de Lascabanes decided to ask, ‘That fur rug in my old room—so soft—what is it?’

  ‘Platypus.’

  ‘But they’re protected!’

  ‘Yes. They’re protected. It was Grandfather Hunter who killed them. Alfred was gentle.’ (Then she did at least recognize it as a quality in others.) ‘Alfred gave me the rug as one of my wedding presents. He thought that because it was so rare we might have had it on our bed, but I asked him to let me put it away. I didn’t care for it as fur. I didn’t care for it. When he was ill—when he was dying—he remembered the platypus rug and got me to bring it out. I used to arrange it over his knees—after we had sat him up in his chair—that last, bitter winter at “Kudjeri”. By then I don’t believe we thought any more about the poor slaughtered little creatures, or if we did, they had become willing sacrifices.’

  Her memory was so positive, only the silence could compete with it.

  ‘Dorothy?’ Mrs Hunter asked, to confirm that her daughter had left.

  Dorothy de Lascabanes was in fact stumbling down the stairs: dreams she remembered in which she was trampling recently-hatched nestlings swam into the actual waters of the sacrificial platypus. So she trampled and lurched. In the hall she found herself pushing at what? the only opposition was a void: and guilt, tenderness, desire, lost opportunities. She m
ust never forget Mother is an evil heartless old woman. If you did forget, Basil would remember, himself Mother’s only equal at driving the knife home. Boo-hoo, poor you! if anybody ever told you they loved you you wouldn’t believe that either now would you?

  The thought that she still had to face her brother started her tearing at the hall door.

  Two

  AS THE princess broke out there was the crunch of a key from the other side: a young woman had begun to let herself in. Each staggered while trying to decide who had the better right to the door. Of course Madame de Lascabanes knew that hers could not be denied, and to think that anybody might dispute it had started anger gathering behind her long face. Then her indignation and her sense of protocol left her. The girl was too young, too radiant, to be dispossessed; she was smiling besides, out of bland lips, on which was pasted a delicately aggressive pink suggesting ointment rather than lipstick, while her Perspex ear-rings cunningly gyrated, and a pattern of great suns on her pretence of a dress dazzled the beholder with their cerise and purple, particularly just off centre from the breasts. It was too physical a moment for speeches of apology. The half-smile the older woman had been induced to wear reminded her she had forgotten to restore her mouth: her thoughts had shed so much blood, she hadn’t had the heart to resort to further crimson.

  So the women passed each other smiling and murmuring, each suspecting who the other was, while avoiding confirmation. The princess tested the marble steps with wary feet, propping even more warily around the drastic swirl of path which would lead eventually to the gate and the taxi she had not ordered: to escape from the house was enough. During it all the relieving nurse was able to enjoy the luxury of a last look from her possessed doorway. Madame de Lascabanes did not glance back: it would not have been correct. Remembering her forgotten luggage (have Arnold Wyburd fetch it) she did not even pause. Carefully watching her classic shoes, she narrowed her French nostrils at the strange body-scent of Australian gumleaves, and sighed; while the nurse stood, legs apart, thighs radiating light and strength below the dazzle of minimal skirt. She might have slammed the door at last, if she hadn’t been trained to control her antipathies in the presence of the sick.