‘What is it, Dorothy? Is anything wrong?’
‘No. Nothing to speak of. Well, I do have a wretched head.’ She turned a wince into a smile. ‘I’ll take something I’ve got with me.’
Helen would no doubt have been prepared to dredge up a generous ration of the sympathy which seemed to be her stock in trade, but Dorothy feared to run the risk of accepting it, with a white sun staring at her, and those angry cliffs.
Behind the shutters of her narrow cabin of a room, after the tablet had begun to take effect, she was to some extent soothed. She lay wondering at the helicopter pilot with the bird-watching wife, and Helen Warming’s husband in that rank-smelling stockman’s shirt he had worn to meet them; she wondered at the law which decrees that almost everybody shall desire some other human being. She could not have desired the lean, gauche young pilot, or for that matter, any man she had known or could imagine, least of all Hubert de Lascabanes, who had been her husband, and still was in the eyes of God.
Mother could be heard at a distance charming her hosts with an impersonation of the character generally accepted as Elizabeth Hunter, involved for her present purpose in some mock-dramatic situation. Through the cracks in the floorboards the threads of children’s voices were interwoven in conspiracy. All always conspire. None so secretively as waves. But you were laid to sleep in them at last.
And woke, not refreshed, but the despair wrung out, the children clattering chattering along the veranda outside. The room had darkened by now; it smelt of stuffiness, damp sheets, and what was probably dry rot.
She ought to face the children.
When she had touched herself up, she went outside, and smiled at them, and said, ‘I believe you have something to tell me.’
They looked embarrassed, not to say frightened, and she realized she must have put it badly; mutual understanding did exist at another level, if the children would admit to it.
She tried to improve her position. ‘I heard you underneath the house. Playing?’ She looked at them, not too significantly she hoped.
The boy was the first to respond, looking away, his voice rapt for the scene he saw or was dreaming. ‘There was somebody murdered here in the beginning. They were wrecked on the island. The blacks killed the men and made the woman their slave.’
Though it was hardly night, Sara was already wearing the promised gold-and-turquoise chain. ‘They undressed this woman,’ she said, ‘till she was quite naked.’
‘It’s supposed to have happened down there.’ John pointed with a wishbone gesture at the striated cliffs; his arm must have been double-jointed.
Sara said, ‘But we think it was here,’ stamping with bare foot on the veranda boards.
‘Why?’ asked Dorothy Hunter, not intending to question their belief: she hoped they would allow her to share their myth.
‘Because—underneath the house—there’s the smell of dead bodies, sort of,’ John explained.
Sara added, ‘There’s the oyster shells the blacks left.’
The children began to giggle, but not on account of the murders: she suspected they were laughing at the person who was a princess, and it made her unhappy again; she wanted to be one of them.
While everything was in the balance, she looked out along the coast where the light had dwindled, and saw a man approaching. He had beached a dinghy, evidently. He was wearing no more than a pair of faded scarlet trunks.
‘Do you see that man?’ she asked the children. ‘Who is he?’
‘That’s Professor Pehl.’
‘He’s staying with us.’
‘He’s—Norwegian.’
‘They invited him, but I don’t think they like him much.’
‘They felt they had to ask him.’
Dorothy looked in the direction of the unwanted Norwegian. From that distance it was difficult to estimate his age; but he had not yet gone to seed. The streaky hair had been bleached lighter by the sun, and arrested in the chaos wind and salt water create. Not adapted to the climate, his skin looked shabby: except that it was almost of the same complexion as his faded trunks, it reminded her of dried cod hanging from the ceiling chez l’épicier.
‘At least he must be interesting,’ she ventured, ‘a professor—and a Norwegian.’ She could not remember ever having met a Norwegian; perhaps as a Frenchwoman she was proud of it.
The children were hardly encouraging.
‘He’s all right.’
‘He doesn’t come out of his shell all that much.’
‘He writes in an old notebook.’
‘And picks his nose.’
‘And lets breezers, as if he didn’t know there was anybody else in the room.’
The children burst, Sara more violently than John, to show her appreciation of a coarse masculine joke. Though they wandered off soon after, the princess person tried to persuade herself she was already more acceptable to them than the professor could ever become.
In the kitchen Mother was peeling potatoes. As one of the characters it amused Elizabeth Hunter to project for sympathetic strangers, she was wearing an apron. There was a scent of gin.
‘“Pehl”—did you say?’ There had been giggling in the kitchen too.
‘Yes. Don’t think I’m running him down, will you? He’s not bad, only serious. And I’m really all in favour of serious men.’ Helen realized the (ex-) Princess Hubert de Lascabanes had intruded on their cosy conversation. ‘Oh, Dorothy, do help yourself to drink.’ After doing her duty, she altered course automatically. ‘I only wish, Elizabeth, you hadn’t insisted on peeling potatoes. Potatoes are half the ruin of my hands.’
‘I’m wholly a ruin without potatoes.’
Elizabeth and Helen sighed: they had been interrupted.
The Princesse de Lascabanes helped herself to a generous squirt of soda. She folded her arms like a thin man.
While peeling a grave potato, Elizabeth was assuring Helen, ‘Scandinavians are clean. I can’t bear those French lavatories—footprints!’ Helen and Elizabeth became convulsed. ‘Helen—you won’t believe—I knew a woman who dropped her passport down the—hole— between the footprints!’ The friends cried with laughter. ‘At Montpellier!’ Elizabeth invited Helen to shriek.
In spite of a decision to suspend hate, Dorothy hated Mother.
‘What is Professor Pehl’s subject?’ the Princesse de Lascabanes cut in coldly.
In self-defence, Helen remembered almost too quickly. ‘Why, he’s a—a marine ecologist, Dorothy.’
‘Interesting.’ Elizabeth sighed.
Then there was the sound of a potato being peeled, and Helen hauling pots around the stove, and men’s voices, and water sluiced.
‘By the way, there aren’t any baths, not even a shower, because we depend on rain water,’ Helen explained. ‘When we become self-conscious about our dirt, we water ourselves with a jug. That’s what Edvard’s doing now.’
Mother said, ‘I came prepared to rough it, darling. It’s Dorothy who grows uppity if all the cons aren’t mod—living in France, too.’
‘Really, Mother!’
Dorothy’s irritation was not given a chance to develop: Jack came in, somewhat improved by an old tussore suit and a crimson cummerbund.
Elizabeth remarked, ‘I do like my men with a dash of colour.’ She had tired of peeling potatoes.
Jack laughed. ‘You should see old Edvard’s back. It’s almost the colour of this cummerbund.’
‘Did you say “Ed-vard”?’ Elizabeth asked.
‘Yes. With a “v”.’
‘Turns it into something different—quite attractive.’ Mother had raised her head, pursed her lips, as though tasting the Norwegian’s name.
It was a characteristic attitude, one probably intended to bear out the legend of a neck and throat. To hide her contempt, Dorothy took up the knife, and began peeling the three or four potatoes Mother was obviously not prepared to finish.
Jack lowered his voice. ‘With or without the “v”, he’s one colossal bore. Wish
ed on to us by somebody we thought our friend. If you don’t take care, Elizabeth, you’ll have him explaining benthic aggregations.’
‘You can rely on me to avoid anything of that description,’ Mother solemnly promised; merely by opening her mouth she made others laugh.
The moon was rising, full and red, a legacy from the flamingo sunset. Jack Warming had come round, seated himself on a corner of the table, and put an arm round his wife’s waist. Perhaps not altogether unconscious of the picture, Elizabeth Hunter’s still imperceptibly shrivelled lily offered its effulgence. Brumby Island appeared a world of harmony with which Dorothy de Lascabanes had been made to clash, and now, it seemed, Edvard Pehl; though she would not dare envisage him as an ally. In the circumstances she was humbly grateful for being allowed to peel potatoes.
Helen had started fussing, wondering where her children could be, and Elizabeth said, ‘Sara looks delicious in my chain. I hope she doesn’t lose it. Not that it’s of great value. Precious only because it’s practically the first thing I can remember.’
‘Lose it? God forbid!’ Perhaps it had been Mother’s intention that Helen should suffer. ‘I’ll go and round them up at once.’
‘Do let me go, Mrs Warming.’ The Princesse de Lascabanes had finished off her potato less meticulously than she would have wished; but she was again in danger of feeling desperate.
‘You wouldn’t know where.’
‘No. I’ll look around—I’d like to—and find them.’
Without waiting for considered permission, Dorothy escaped. By moonlight the house almost convinced that it had put to sea. Under the heavy red moon the distance undulated gently as her feet spanked along the deck. Silence had fallen in the galley. No other sound but the whirring of a bird somewhere between sea and land.
When a door opened and Edvard Pehl stepped out on to the veranda. In one hand he was carrying a towel, in the other, the pair of bathing trunks. Nor did darkness help clothe him; if anything, a phosphorescence emphasized his nakedness. She was conscious of the parting of his rather fleshy, though firm breasts; then her glance, decently averted, was drawn for a flickering instant—no, worse: she was hypnotized. Mon Dieu, des seiches! When in all her married life she had not allowed herself to notice.
That she did not collide compulsively with a monolith of flesh was due to the professor’s self-possession. He slightly swerved, not ungracefully considering the stolid first impression, rather as though playing a bull, and continued firmly along the veranda, or deck, or slatted nightmare. Though large enough to run the risk of wobbling, his buttocks looked hard as marble. She was compelled to watch them, and saw the moonlight glinting in a polished saucer as he disappeared inside the cabin next to her own.
Under her retreat the veranda swung groaned she might have been prising the slats wider open without giving thought to direction hadn’t she been directionless ever since coming to this island heels now trapped in mattresses of coarse hair or grass now bogged in wet sand. Logically, on arrival at the water’s edge, she should have taken the smooth path distance offered. Instead she turned, and walked or wallowed back, and was received into the room which was hers for want of another.
The walls might have been felt-lined: they were breathing at her. She bolted the shutters. Nothing could be done about the door: its lock was not provided with a key.
So Helen was able to break in and attempt to coax this troubled child. ‘Dorothy, darling, aren’t you coming for some dinner?’
‘No—thank you— Mrs Warming.’ She had not meant her voice to explode.
‘What, I wonder, can we do for you?’
It made Dorothy laugh cry. ‘Nothing, really—chère Hélène. Je vous en prie— Helen.’ All the more humiliating in that you were the prefect and Helen Warming the junior girl.
It was a relief to remember, ‘What about the children? Did they turn up?’
‘Yes. And Elizabeth’s chain is safe.’
Very slightly, Dorothy twitched; while the Princesse de Lascabanes guiltily allowed herself to be comforted by kind arms.
Prescribing sleep, Helen went away. Not sleep but spasms. Sewn into the silver to reddish sheet the worse than red the angry ejaculating moon shoots to kill ah non Hubert je suis dèjá morte d’avoir tant souffert Edvard may understand that basic aggravations breed at the greatest depth it is hope dead or alive which floats on the surface to be identified and gently netted.
Dorothy woke, still not rested, but surprisingly calm. Some intention, she was not sure what, had tautened her body while insulating her nerves. The light, when she opened the shutters, was of a silver so cool she did not quail at thought of the approaching blaze, or its white aftermath which would smoulder through the middle of the day. Cherishing her delicately balanced contentment, she tiptoed along the veranda as soon as she was dressed, to brew herself coffee (sans doute immonde) or at worst, a pot of Indian tea.
In the kitchen somebody else, alas, was already disturbing the pots.
‘I was thinking to boil myself some coffee,’ Professor Pehl explained in a thick and gloomy voice. ‘The Warmings have no liking for coffee.’
Dressed, she observed, in shorts and shirt, he had already started the operation.
‘I am lost without my coffee,’ she heard, not herself, but Mother preparing to deal with a man. (Well, why not? there was nobody to listen in.) ‘And I like it French,’ she added rather too stridently as she took possession of the pot.
‘Not French,’ Professor Pehl objected. ‘French is muddy. I favour the American style of coffee—since I am at San Diego.’
‘Are you, now?’ Dorothy tried to visualize the distance between Mother’s room and the kitchen; but she couldn’t; which distracted her. ‘San Diego—is it interesting?’ she asked, for safety’s sake, in a softer voice.
‘Interesting? That is where I am recently attached—for better or worse.’ The professor spoke through a crust of bread he had torn off and started chewing.
‘When you say “attached”, do you mean “engaged”?’ The princess enunciated very clearly in addressing this Scandinavian; while remaining distracted, vague.
‘I do not by any means mean “engaged”. I mean I am attached for my research to the University of California at San Diego.’
Imbécile que je suis! The percolator squealed, she dragged it so rudely across the stove.
‘I am formerly engaged to a young lady at Bergen. For a short time I entertained the idea of marriage, but decided it was early days: it would have interfered with my research projects.’
‘Your work must be fascinating.’ In the circumstances, the princess plumped for an insincerity she might have condemned in someone else.
When the coffee was ready, and herself prepared to pour, an inspiration whirled her round. ‘I know what I’m going to do. I shall make you an omelette.’ Even Hubert had complimented her on her omelettes. (Si tu es Française, chérie, c’est par ton talent pour faire les omelettes.) They sometimes stuck, however.
‘I take only coffee to my breakfast.’
‘But a man should start the day with something more substantial,’ she heard the Australian countrywoman in her.
Professor Pehl made no further comment: Mother may have known, after all.
Dorothy was elated to rediscover her lapsed art. The perfectly folded omelette shuddered as it settled on the plate, not so much from resignation as voluptuousness.
‘How is it?’ She would claim from his stolid lips the praise which was her due; though if she had achieved perfection, surely he would not have munched so?
‘It is good. It is only—for my taste—too much slime.’
‘Baveuse! That is how we like it.’ Her tone had sharpened. ‘And the French invented the omelette.’ Or had they? She was no longer certain.
‘Ah, the French!’ He laughed and forked in another yellow mouthful.
When he had swallowed, his looks returned; and she remembered what she liked to believe she had succeeded in hiding: bien
baveuse ma chere petite—Australienne—peur-euse. No, it was slime. How could she have been so depraved as to collaborate in depravity? She wiped away all trace of it, but could not rid herself of her disgust: it had festered and left a scar, visible only in a certain introspective light.
As he munched, Professor Pehl moodily stared at the maker of omelettes.
For her part, she wondered whether his eyes, trained to observe underwater life, would notice her skin leaping. She saw her hand as it would have lain, like a narrow, snoozing, white fish, in the pale hair, its thicket still sticky from salt and the shortage of rainwater; she avoided the phosphorescent pubics, recurring anyway only in one of the briefest flickers.
She went to her room to remove physical temptation and spare herself renewed mental shame, but knew she was listening for movements: ostensibly Mother’s. But Mother’s ‘insomnia’ allowed her the luxury of rising late, so there was not much likelihood that she would accuse you of chasing after a professor.
He returned to his room, on no more than a short visit. The Princesse de Lascabanes dismissed her reflection from the dressing-table glass: it might have ended by unnerving her. She heard what sounded like final departure. Recklessly casual, she opened her own flimsy door.
‘Are you working while you are here on Brumby Island?’ Would the increased volume of her voice impinge on Mother’s insomnia?
‘I am invited here for a holiday, but yes, you could say I am working. I always work.’
One after another, the planks were buckling under the weight of his descent. She followed him down with the same intention of disembarking. Arrived on shore, the professor was starting out on what he had obviously planned as a solitary trek along the beach in the direction of the striated cliffs she had noticed the evening before.
‘Shall I disturb you,’ she asked, ‘if I walk some of the way?’
The Eye of the Storm Page 41