‘I knew you respected Sister de Santis,’ she was continuing when almost run down. ‘And I was so shocked that they could even contemplate discarding this pitiful old creature, I suppose I didn’t stop to think I had been told in confidence.’
‘Stop to think? After all these years—not to be—ethically conditioned?
She looked as though she expected him to dash his napkin in her face.
He had never seen Lal crying convulsively before; not even after Heather’s premature baby died. Her present anguish was streaming from a source far less rational than death because more unexpected. She was at her plainest. And Arnold Wyburd knew that he would not have wished her otherwise. Nor did he attempt to hide his own few spurts of tears: in that way, Lal and he completed each other.
He only removed himself while she was blowing her nose without thought for her table napkin. He went, as coldly as the undertaking demanded, to the upstairs telephone; not that there was much point in telephoning pretentious people at that hour. Indeed, at the Onslow, Sir Basil Hunter was not receiving calls; and the Princesse de Lascabanes had left the club for dinner with friends. So he was frustrated; or saved up.
That night the Wyburds went to bed earlier than usual. There were no confidences after lights-out. Instead, they were clutching at a flawed reality they had been allowed to discover in each other, perhaps even taking upon themselves the healing of a wounded conscience.
It was an occasion when it did not occur to Arnold Wyburd to regret the snoring sound he made as he approached an orgasm.
It was the night of the Douglas Cheesemans’ dinner for Princesse de Lascabanes: one of the club maids had read an announcement in the Telegraph. As the evening approached Dorothy increasingly regretted her too hasty acceptance. She had always practised social deferment at the risk of suffering for it: from being ‘hard to get’, she was gradually forgotten. Now, she thought, she would have given anything to be dropped by one who was never more than a casual girlhood acquaintance. If Cherry Bullivant had been proposed as bridesmaid it was because Dorothy Hunter had not been encouraged to form close attachments; she had never had what is called a Best Friend. In any case, if it had been expected of her to go in search, she might not have known how to find. So, whatever her legend and her weapons, she dreaded her entrée into Cherry Cheeseman’s world.
After receiving her mother’s cheque Dorothy had considered splurging some of it on an important dress: an armature to intimidate any possible adversary, and to warn off what could be worse, an importunate admirer. But on sending for a statement almost immediately after paying the money into the bank, she thought she could not bring herself to reduce such a lovely round sum; she would make do with her trusty Patou black enlivened with a jewel or two. Moving back and forth as far as the club bedroom allowed, she felt temporarily safe, acceptable to herself, which after all, she had decided, is more important than being acceptable to others; and as she moved, she slightly and indolently rocked, grasping her shoulders, the bank statement pinned to her breast by her crossed arms; she derived considerable consolation from the chafing of this toughly material paper.
On the night, then, it was the Patou black, of such an urbane simplicity it had often ended by scaring the scornful into a bewildered reassessment of their own canons of taste. And the diamonds; everyone must bow to those: their fire too unequivocally real, their setting a collusion between class and aesthetics. These were some of the jewels the colonial girl had been clever enough to prise out of her husband’s family by knowing too much. If they had been more than a paltry fraction of the realizable de Lascabanes assets, and if she had not detested all forms of thuggery, Dorothy Hunter might have seen herself as a kind of female Ned Kelly.
She was standing at the dressing-table mirror massaging the lobes of her ears before loading them with moody de Lascabanes pearls encrusted with minor de Lascabanes diamonds. The ear-rings made her suffer regularly, but it was all in the game of self-justification. As she pulled on the long skins of gloves, she noticed the mauve tones in the crooks of her thin arms, in her salt cellars, and at her temples; she was not displeased with her angular looks—for that moment, anyway.
The princess licked her lips, and rang down for a hire-car; then, on second thoughts, remembering the round sum in her account, she changed her mind, and asked them for a taxi instead.
The night through which she was being driven seemed on a curve, as a bow is strung, herself the arrow shooting out of it, into the heart of the North Shore, which was where—who were they? the Douglas Cheesemans, lived. The princess could not recollect ever having crossed the bridge, and would have preferred not to be doing so now. She saw herself lying propped up in bed with an oeuf à la coque on a tray, and bread and butter as thin as only nuns know how. Instead, she was allowing herself to be driven, because by now it could not be avoided. (Unless she told a really super lie, one which even bread-and-butter nuns might not condone.)
So the expressway curved, flaunting rival but spurious jewels, past the windows of some unidentifiable club, above pavements darker for the tongues and maps made by the pissing of slanted sailors. The taxi drove her at that other curve, the great bridge, and here the north-easter tore in through the crack above the glass threatening the composition of her hair. Her first impulse was to close the window, to shut out the marauding wind, when the sense of her ultimate powerlessness returned, and she sank back inside the taxi, inside her Paris dress, her stole (not less modest for being sable), inside her own ruffled skin, shivering like a bitch temporarily parted from her owner (whoever that might be) on a railway platform.
She only vaguely and too suddenly realized the arcs of speed, the explosive missiles of light, had diminished, and that the taxi had pulled up on an ellipse of raked gravel: where Dorothy Hunter would have chosen to remain, encapsulated.
Mr and Mrs Douglas Cheeseman lived in an impeccably maintained, shamelessly illuminated, fairly recent Colonial mansion, surrounded by European trees and Japanese shrubs at a stage in their development which suggested they must have increased their rate of growth in an effort to keep up with their owners. The perfectly tended garden was not more personal for the attentions it received, except in parts of its thickets where nature had intervened, leaving an impression of assault and battery. Some of the deciduous trees had begun to colour in keeping with the season, but their leaves looked as though jaded by peroxide rather than thrilled by autumn. There was a smell of something: blood and bone, Dorothy seemed to remember it was called.
No time for more, except to invoke her de Lascabanes self: a man had pushed past the white blur of hovering servant, and was opening the taxi door.
‘Doug Cheeseman—Cherry’s husband.’ Haste and alcohol had stunted whatever he may have prepared by way of an introductory speech. ‘We were beginning to worry about you.’
The princess unsheathed her voice as though it had been a sword. ‘Don’t tell me I’m late! Your wife said eight-thirty, didn’t she?’
‘I expect she did.’ Mr Cheeseman laughed; he was one of the stringier males, of a freckled, reddish persuasion.
‘Eight-thirty, I’m positive.’
‘Yes, yes,’ he mumbled out of his good nature. ‘Cherry sometimes makes a mistake.’
Since she had settled the matter in her own favour the princess narrowed her eyes and gnashed a smile at Mr Douglas Cheeseman as a reward for his being reasonable. He appeared dazed, but delighted.
Dorothy was surprised to find it so easy. She would often surprise herself, and could not think why there were those other moments when her skill left her; if only she could have remained in permanent control of her de Lascabanes technique she might have rivalled Basil as an actor, or a hoax.
‘So charming—quite charming? The princess was taking notice of what were only too obviously Antiques as her host brought her through the chequered hall. ‘I do congratulate you.’ She reined in her kindness just this side of sincerity, because to have admired such ghastliness wholeheart
edly, would scarcely have been honest, would it?
Again Mr Cheeseman’s sounds and glances expressed delight. ‘It’s one of Cherry’s hobbies. She took a course in home decoration.’ He had those paler eyelids, intensified by rimless glasses; the back of his neck was as wrinkled as those of other Australian males of the same age and complexion: saurian, but defenceless.
Douglas Cheeseman’s neck made Dorothy feel she must keep a tight hold on herself: she might easily topple over, not into compassion—self-pity. She must rely on her sword of a voice, and remember that the face can be transformed into a visor by narrowing the eyes. (She had practised that one in the glass to defend herself against her late belle-mere the old Princesse Etienne.)
In the Cheeseman salon— or whatever their own word for it—there was a galaxy of personages, a shimmer of pastels, a simmering of frustrated, but rearoused expectations. Square men in black alternated with others more demonstrative and decorative in ruffles and plum to midnight velvets. The women must have emptied their jewel cases, while one or two exposed invisible tiaras last worn for royalty.
The Princesse de Lascabanes narrowed her eyes at it all, and the smiles of some, she could see, commended her for her humble spirit, adding pity for myopia, together with forgiveness for the sin of unpunctuality. That she was in fact terribly late Dorothy had to admit to herself, for several of the company were swaying on their heels, the level of alcohol in the Georgian tumblers clamped against their waists, tilting, and in one case, spilling down a pale blue front.
The pale blue lady, crimson to purple in the cheeks, was her hostess, Dorothy de Lascabanes saw: pretty, glossy Cherry Bullivant swollen into a festive turkey.
Mrs Cheeseman’s nerves rose in her for an instant, but were sucked back at once into the sea of brandy in which they had been conveniently submerged. As she plunged forward, her garnish of jewellery and tulle bobbing and frothing round her thickly powdered neck and shoulders, her lips preceded her, to express a warmth her hand certainly impressed, even through a glove, deep into the comparatively chilly fingers of her former friend, a princess: Mrs Cheeseman could hardly believe in her own luck.
‘Dorothy!’ she moaned and glugged for everyone to hear.
The princess was so close to it she could only give in. While Cherry Bullivant Cheeseman wheezed and expostulated against her cheek, about time and life and other comforting complaints, Dorothy Hunter de Lascabanes nuzzled and whinnied her way back to fillyhood, till both were again standing corrected in the Crillon lounge, two young girls bedazzled by a real prince one of them was daring enough to imagine she had fallen in love with.
Her major gaffe reminded Dorothy of the minor trials she had to face in the present, so she withdrew from Cherry’s rather too adhesive embrace with one last, isolated, high-strung giggle. Madame de Lascabanes was so embarrassed at herself, she blushed; though from the glances exchanged by some of the older ladies present, they were impressed to discover signs that Dorothy Hunter hadn’t lost her Australian ‘warmth’. If an ambush was to be expected, the princess scented it in another quarter: several girls, stunning in their pant-suits and their youth, were smiling sceptical smiles, as though they understood too well, or misunderstood more dangerously.
To allow them to share in her triumph and pay homage, Mrs Cheeseman led her guests on a somewhat uncertain course towards the objective. They tottered, or stomped, or tittuped, or swayed past: the blue and the pink, the pink and the blue, the double-barrels and the knights, Rotarians who squeezed your glove till they had practically emptied it, those op deceivers whose naked faces and mermaid hair disguised ambivalence as innocence, the lissom younger men, who might have been longing to take you to their ruffles.
‘And this is Zillah. She’s an actress.’
‘How is Sir Basil? the actress whispered in professional tones out of an expert mouth; a hairless kangaroo-rat of a woman, she vibrated in basso from deep down amongst the Iceland poppies stencilled on her velvet shift.
Mrs Cheeseman explained that Zillah Puttuck was dedicated to serious drama, and had played all the major Chekov roles—in North Sydney.
The hostess was entranced to reveal her own artistic connections. ‘And Brian Learmonth.’ She gave her wheezy giggle. ‘If you re not careful, Brian will write you up for his paper.’
The princess saw she had been written up already.
When suddenly Mrs Cheeseman reverted to more important matters, and spun round, a topheavy top. ‘Is there time for her, Doug, to knock back a teensy one? Or will that bloody woman walk out if we keep dinner waiting any longer?’
To which her husband replied, ‘Don’t work yourself up, Treasure. If a crash comes, it comes. To start expecting one, gives a person blood pressure.’
The princess was persuaded to accept a drink they did not want to give her, and which she did not want. As nothing would have moistened her by now, she slid her glass behind the lavishly inscribed photograph of somebody in tights called ‘Bobby’.
At dinner she was sat between her host, and, she was alarmed to discover, an Australian Writer she hadn’t heard of. It was perhaps his increasing awareness of this which made him slash at the wings of his Dickens hairdo, while glancing in the mirror opposite at the woman who continued to exist in spite of her incredible deficiency.
‘Don’t you read?’ he inquired, when he could no longer leave her unmasked.
‘Not adventurously,’ she admitted. Tm reading La Chartreuse de Parme for I think probably the seventh time.’
‘The who?’ The Australian Writer could not have sounded more disgusted.
‘The Charterhouse of Parma.’ Repetition made her throat swell as though forced to confess a secret love to someone who might defile its purity simply by knowing about it.
‘Oh—Stendhal!’ He gave her a rather literary smile; and slashed at his Dickens wings; and turned to his other neighbour to explain—again a waste of intellect—how he was adapting the Gothic novel to local conditions.
At least Mrs Puttuck was appreciative of the Australian Writer: she leant across the table to inform the ignorant princess which awards and grants he had received in the name of brilliance; though if the actress continued to lean across from time to time it was usually in honour of herself: to tell what Larry had said of her Arkadina, or Sibyl’s praise of her Madame Ranevsky. Once she observed in her most vibrant basso, ‘Coral would be mad to attempt Lubov Andreyevna. She’s petite—and like all Chekov’s major women, essentially feminine.’
In the course of it all, and the changes of dishes, Dorothy poked at something on her plate, and found that by coincidence Cherry had chosen roast turkey as the piece de résistance of her dinner.
Noticing what could have been a repugnance, Mr Cheeseman remarked, ‘Bit dry, isn’t it? Turkey’s always a bit of a sell.’ He would have liked to do something for their guest of honour, and had an idea, which he popped on her plate from his own. ‘Liven it up with the parson’s nose!’ Better than that he couldn’t think of; a tip for the stock market might have offended such a pernickety princess.
He was so pleased with what was obviously his sacrifice, she had to eat the fatty morsel; but behind her smiles of ‘gratitude’ lurked the sense of guilt which little acts of unpremeditated kindness on the part of others roused in her.
Again, after dinner, while the ladies were rinsing their teeth under the taps, and reconstructing their faces, and telling their fellow masons what their husbands did to them, or didn’t, the old and crumbly wife of a detergent knight detached herself from the others, approached the strangers, and revived the theme of kindness.
‘I do think it’s good—so kind of you, to honour us this evening,’ she began to quaver.
That the old lady, herself obviously innocent and kind, could yet be so wrong, threw Dorothy momentarily into a panic of despair. ‘Oh, but I am not kind!’ she blurted in a loud voice through painful laughter.
The old lady, faced with such unaccountably odd behaviour, could only smile
tremulously, crumble some more, and murmur, ‘I know, dear, you have a modest nature. Anybody can see you are kind. And it must be a great joy to your mother—to have you here: such a kind daughter.’
Which Cherry Cheeseman overheard. ‘Why, yes, darling, your mother—is she well? How shabby of me—forgetting to ask.’
The others had by now scented something peculiar: their faces were turned towards the princess while awaiting the revelation they craved.
For this agonizing instant you might have seemed odd, if you hadn’t been too much yourself your little-girl’s voile damp with evening crumpled tortured by hot hands resisting Your Own Good Dorothy dear you’re running the risk of a relapse if you don’t come in out of the damp there’s salmon loaf you know how you love and caramel custard they stick in your throat like kindness in your ears the truth as Mother playing the piano she likes to when she remembers playing and talking at the same time if I’m to tell the truth Dorothy you’re going out of your way to develop a warped character tinkle ping.
For this split instant of anguish Dorothy saw that the knights’ ladies, the pant-suits and the op mermaids, all here gathered watching in the Cheesemans’ ideal-home bedroom, were probably agreed.
Then the Princesse de Lascabanes succeeded in taking over. ‘Yes, Cherry, Mother is well—old though. You can’t say anybody old is altogether well. To some extent, I suppose, if their minds are active. And Mother’s mind is certainly that. She takes an extraordinary interest in what goes on around her.’
This was where Cherry Cheeseman cut in. ‘Activity, you see? That is what old people thrive on. That is why we got Mummy into the Thorogood Village.’
From the way she looked at you, Cherry must have had an inkling; more, you might be sharing a secret.
‘And she enjoys it?’ Dorothy asked.
‘She adored it from the beginning: the company of others her age, the discussions—the flower gardens, my dear! There are certain beds planted with perfumed flowers specially chosen for those whose eyesight is failing.’ Cherry Bullivant aimed an extra significant look at her friend Dorothy Hunter.
The Eye of the Storm Page 31