Elizabeth Hunter may have been temporarily daunted by the prospect of a walk hand in hand with Edvard Pehl amongst the invertebrates, for she altered course. ‘Poor Dorothy,’ she suddenly said, out of her conscience, ‘where can she be? She’s so good. I do hope she hasn’t taken offence. She’s going through a difficult time, you know.’
‘So I’ve noticed.’
They both slightly laughed for the knowledge they shared.
Dorothy felt sick from the physical distaste this peeling Norwegian roused in her, as well as morally disgusted by a mother’s perfidy. Though Professor Pehl was prudently buttoning up his shirt, you did not believe that a man au fond so stupid, however ‘distinguished’, could avoid providing Elizabeth Hunter with her next meal. If he had survived courtship by calamine lotion, and that floodlit tour of the sea bed, it was because she was saving him up: to blind him with the first glimpse of her still formidably sensual body.
The Princesse de Lascabanes could not spider down quickly enough from off her barrel; she did not care who might overhear its creaking; she already looked too abject, worse in her own eyes than in the eyes of others. Lust and disgust are one, she suspected, the same shooting pain in both mind and body. Love: she must learn love. Tearing off some leaves, she plastered them on her forehead; if she could only have parcelled her entire head in leaves, and dropped it in the sea, together with all memories of husband ‘lover’ mother SELF.
So she continued blundering around in despair, as well as through the actual dark, till restrained by thought of the wild horses galloping along the beach. It would be wiser to return, she decided; I hate to be hurt.
Once during the night the horses might have galloped past: again her feet were taking root in sand, and the arms offering protection trussed their common fear tighter.
She did not wake from what could hardly be called sleep. Somebody—Mother, was it? yes, Mother had come to spy.
‘Dorothy? I’ve been worried. I had to satisfy myself you’re here.’
‘Satisfy yourself?’ It was a matter for laughter.
‘Why not? Aren’t I your mother?’
Dorothy’s laughter grew more rackety.
Till Elizabeth Hunter gave warning. ‘Ssh! You’ll wake him. Don’t you know he’s in the next room?’
‘Yes, I know. Officially he is! Isn’t he?’ She did not know; she knew she was babbling.
‘My poor darling, if only I could help you! If you would have confidence in me.’
Oh yes! But without confidence in yourself you could not have confidence in others, least of all your mum—Mother.
For a moment it seemed as though Elizabeth Hunter would try to insinuate her physical self into this void where trust should have been: she began stroking; she was threatening to hug; while Dorothy prepared to resist: she must not allow herself to be seduced by anyone so expert in the art—by anyone, for that matter.
‘Thank you—Mother. I am quite well—only tired. Thank you, I’ll see you in the morning.’ If she could he, so could you.
‘At least you’ll allow me, I hope, to kiss you goodnight.’
You submitted to it. She smelled still of calamine.
When her mother had gone Dorothy de Lascabanes lay and composed a schedule which had so far only erupted in her head by fragments. While through the wall a snore broke. A Norwegian snore could bore a hole. Her beloved, hateful Hubert had never succeeded in piercing her head.
But the princess survived the night, and on this morning forestalled Professor Pehl in the kitchen. That it was more than a forestalling, even this stupid, self-centred man must see. Anyway he kept looking at her with the eyes of a hangover, when he, a Scandinavian too, had not been in the slightest drunk. He was looking at her because, without being told, he had noticed she was dressed for better things; and what better than departure?
‘Professor Pehl,’ she began, ‘I have a favour to ask.’
A favour so evidently stern might have made a less phlegmatic man recoil.
‘I have been in touch with the mainland,’ she said. ‘The helicopter will come for me at ten. I would like you to drive me to the airstrip as soon as you have finished your coffee.’ She poured it for him; pas d’omelette aujourd’hui.
The professor could have experienced a shock. ‘You are leaving us, then?’
Without answering, she began picking over the things at the sink; till recognizing in her dry precision the movements of some bird, possibly a guinea hen, she gave up.
The professor had scalded himself on the coffee. ‘If we leave presently, as you wish, we will have the most of three hours to wait for this helicopter.’
‘I don’t expect you to keep me company in waiting. We might exasperate each other.’
He was so mystified, so anxious to please, he scalded himself a second time. ‘I do not understand what we have done to you.’ Coffee bubbled at his puzzled nostrils.
‘Nothing.’ She composed her lips in two strips which the hour and an absence of lipstick failed to make more communicative.
While they were driving down through the flickering trees and stationary ropes and trapezes of vines, he dared ask her, ‘Have you informed Mrs Hunter?’
‘No. And I must ask you not to tell her, Professor.’
‘But she is your mother,’ he groaned.
‘What of it?’ Then she shrieked, ‘I am not her doll, am I? Or am I?’
They were driving through the clearing in which the forestry workers were camped. Several of them had come out of the Nissen hut and were washing mugs and plates in a trough. Peering through the leather visors of their faces they had more than ever the air of zombies.
Were they expecting to be waved at? The Princesse de Lascabanes waved, describing an arc wide enough for men of a lower order to interpret as heartiness. The men did not wave back.
When the nonchalant car reached the airstrip, and the princess was standing beside her suitcase, holding the superfluous straw hat, she thanked Professor Pehl, and added, ‘My mother won‘t fail you: she’ll keep you entertained, I’m sure.’
Then Madame de Lascabanes sat down on a log at the edge of the field and began to spend her several hours. The heat had already begun pricking at the silence. The ants were climbing up her stockings. She opened her mouth, but the bitter drought inside was increased the more she sucked and gulped. Again she could feel Mother, rustling around her in the dark room, offering the suspect sponge people call affection. She saw the men standing in the clearing, not waving, but watching.
Thank God for the helicopter, though it would have the pilot in it; blessed the anonymity which would clothe her at last in the great plane flying her back with speed and discretion to Europe.
‘What was that man’s name, dear?’
‘Which man, Mother?’
‘You know—the Norwegian—when somebody invited us to an island.’
Standing at her mother’s window in Moreton Drive waiting for the brother who could not keep an appointment. Madame de Lascabanes was no longer sure she had reached the pitch of ruthlessness she had sensed that morning in her dressing-table glass. Certainly the several looking-glasses in Mother’s room, survivors from a heyday of vanity, disclosed nothing that might suggest vacillation. (Ah, but you know yourself better than any glass. And how much does Mother know? Whatever the old thing remembered of Brumby Island, she had handed you a whole armoury of weapons; if you had the courage to choose and use the most vicious of them.)
‘Pehl—Edvard Pehl was the name.’
Mrs Hunter kicked at the upper sheet. ‘I’m surprised you remember—after all this time. But you’re young, Dorothy—anyway, younger. And perhaps you were fond of the—ecologist?
Dorothy swallowed: keep your rage from exploding till after Basil’s arrival. 1 thought he was your interest, Mother.’
‘I had to do my duty by him, stupid though he was.’
Dorothy longed to reply: Women of seventy can’t afford to reject a man simply because of his stupidity; but
in spite of keeping Brumby in mind, she was not brutal enough; nor was Mother, who might have dealt a counterthrust: For a plain woman of any age, though especially while in her Frightful Forties, a man’s stupidity is a negligible fault,
Well, all that was over now: neither of you would ever be tempted again by a man. Or would they tempt Elizabeth Hunter’s mummy?
‘It was the island I loved, Dorothy. After you left I got to know it. After I had been deserted—and reduced to shreds—not that it mattered: I was prepared for my life to be taken from me. Instead the birds accepted to eat out of my hands. There was no sign of hatred or fear while we were—encircled. What saved me was noticing a bird impaled on a tree. It must have been blown against the sharp spike left by a branch which had snapped off. I think I was reminded that one can’t escape suffering. Though it’s only human to try to escape it. So I took refuge. Again, it was the dead bird reminding me the storm might not have passed. Afterwards I found out—the man told me—the bird was a noddy.’
So truth was beginning to seep through this vision of an island conjured up by a senile mind. ‘Who told you, Mother? If, as you say, you were deserted?’
It must have been the man driving the lorry.’
Madame de Lascabanes was so enraged by this piece of deceitful evasion she understood the urge to commit physical murder, when up till now the thought of gently prising a confused soul out of an exhausted body had been enough to cause an attack of moral misgivings. The voices she heard approaching from the other side of the door were, in the circumstances, godsent.
Whereas the nurse must have decided to forget the princess was lurking in her patient’s bedroom and to shut the door smartly on admitting the latest and far more acceptable caller, Sir Basil Hunter looked as though he could not wait to shake off his tedious guide and take his sister by the hands. This, and the expression of moist-eyed, hesitant inquiry Basil was wearing, surprised, then charmed Dorothy. In every other respect his appearance advertised masculine self-command: freshly shaven cheeks giving off gusts of an aggressive, though not disagreeably pungent lotion; hair cleverly trimmed to within an inch of Romantic excess; clothes pressed or laundered to a degree that the man of the world demands, then ignores.
At the reunion after their independent return, Dorothy had been disturbed on finding Basil reminiscent of Hubert. Now she was not at all reminded. In spite of the dreadful intimacies forced on her by the man with whom she still considered herself spiritually united, she had never arrived at the real Hubert. Each meeting might have been the first, in which hope of reciprocal love was dissolved by her breathless adoration, and moral qualms anticipated physical repulsion. None of which could enter into her relationship with a brother whose moist eye in the assured façade was a peephole she would not hesitate to use; in fact, she had already peeped, and found that this was a Basil she knew better than the mirror knew him. She knew him, she thought, as she knew her actual self, as opposed to the one which others saw. She even found herself warming towards their mother for having made a less animal version of identical twins: mutually appreciative siblings.
(Oh no, Mother must, of course, be resisted at every instant. Remember the island, the calamine lotion, the skiapod equipped with a mouth large enough to swallow an ecologist.)
Basil did not greet their mother, perhaps because guilty of arriving late and in a rush, though Dorothy preferred to take it as a sign that he meant business.
Till he shook her by asking, ‘Have you started anything, Dorothy?’ when nobody knew for certain that Elizabeth Hunter was deaf.
‘No. Why should I? Haven’t I been waiting for you?’ Her anger might have returned, but she could sense shudders appealing from the sibling conscience to her own.
Mother herself helped them out of their impasse. ‘I never saw you act, Basil. When there was the opportunity—after that de Lascabanes wedding—when we went across and spent a few weeks in London—I couldn’t bring myself to go to the theatre. You were in something at the time, too. You were clever enough always to be in something. But I just wasn’t brave enough to find out for myself.’
‘The only time you were not brave, I should say.’ Sir Basil Hunter had recovered his jewelled scabbard, his sleeves sumptuous with fur. ‘I expect you were busy, Mother darling, trying on hats, and patiently enduring all those fittings at the dressmakers’.’ A particularly splendid movement brought him from L.C. to bedside, C., laughter glistening on the points of his teeth.
Dorothy was reassured on finding the teeth pointed—if they were not false: that day at the solicitors, before Basil had her sympathy, she had decided some of them were false.
Elizabeth Hunter’s gums were grinning in her son’s direction. ‘Yes, the hats and dresses! You’re laughing at me. But hadn’t I my own art to consider? Admittedly a minor one.’ As she stirred, there was a faint rustling of stale perfumes; light clashed with light and was ground still finer, brighter; the air was swizzled. ‘What really prevented me going to the theatre,’ she sneezed as though memory had pricked her eroded nostrils, ‘was the thought that I mightn’t find perfection—which is what I have always looked for—wanted so desperately to find, in my children.’
Dorothy could no longer bear to look at Mother, but saw that Basil had been stung; which was all to the good.
When Mother played her next. ‘Your father went.’ A card they had not expected, it strengthened her hand by the love they had withheld from a man there seemed no point in knowing.
Basil was in the position of one who still cannot tell how deeply he has been wounded. ‘If Father saw me act, he must have given you a full report. Strange he didn’t come round after the performance—unless he found so little to approve of.’ On top of the social omission, an unenlightened judgment ruffled his actor’s vanity.
‘He didn’t go round, I expect, because he was shy. Nor did he report on the performance. I tried to pump him—because half of me was curious to know. Well, he didn’t utter a word. Alfred, you see, was a man of great delicacy.’
Basil licked the salt off his lips on deciding Mother’s game was less cunning than fortuitous.
‘They were both gentle, sensitive men, my husband and my father, and each died of his disappointments.’ Elizabeth Hunter’s eyes were staring like two saucers of frozen milk. ‘Do you think I could have prevented any of their suffering?’
Again playing for compassion, she might have won it if Dorothy had not remembered.
‘How can one tell? I hardly knew my father, and my grandfather was always only a name. Or a myth of failure and suicide. Oh, and one other thing—funny it should come back to me—that cuff link of his. Do you remember, Mother? The one I found under your bed. Rather an ugly object in brown agate, I think it was, in a heavy gold setting. Mother?’
Dorothy looked at Basil. Though he could not have known about her find, as her accomplice he must sense its importance, and that she should go carefully—or no, not even carefully now.
Mother’s head protested against the pillow. ‘No, I don’t remember, dear. Do I?’
‘Have you got your father’s cuff links? In your jewel case perhaps?’
A claw, without its armour this morning, fumbled at Basil’s hand for pity: Basil was the affectionate one. ‘No, I don’t know, Dorothy—whether I have them. There was too much to keep.’ Basil had accepted the claw. ‘As a matter of fact, I seem to remember, I threw the cuff link—into the park grass. You saw what an ugly thing it was.’
Dorothy looked away, and Basil knew it would be he who must drive the knife home: Sir Basil Hunter the Great Actor.
Seated beside the bed, still with the claw clasped in his experienced hand, against his breast (actually damned uncomfortable, on a little, tipsy chair, your guts pushed up into your thorax, the jockstrap pinching your balls) he began to blandish this ancient queen. ‘Such a welter of morbid thoughts, whatever they amount to! I can’t keep pace with them. Don’t you feel—Mother darling—living alone in this great house full of associ
ations, not all of them happy—does tend to make you morbid?’
Like a child at the dentist’s, Elizabeth Hunter had clamped her jaws.
‘What you must miss more than anything, I should have thought, is the company of your contemporaries. Which you could enjoy in some efficiently-run institution—or home, dear, home—such as I understand there is on the outskirts of Sydney.’
He looked at his sister. Who saw the sweat lying blue in the field of bluer, incipient stubble.
So it was her responsibility as well. ‘Yes, Mother. As Basil says. Sympathetic company in bright surroundings. There’s one place I’ve been told. And a garden. At the Thorogood Village. There’s a scented garden laid out specially for those whose sight isn’t of the best. I was told that by Cherry Cheeseman. You remember the Bullivants, Mother? Well, her mother …’ The Princesse de Lascabanes did not normally perspire.
‘I know, Dorothy. Violet Bullivant died at the Thorogood Village.’
‘That was sad,’ Dorothy admitted. ‘But everybody dies eventually. Let us at least be realistic’
‘And you, darling,’ Sir Basil added, carrying the blotched claw to his lips, ‘will not die before it is time.’
‘Not before my time,’ Elizabeth Hunter’s undamped jaws agreed.
To her children she had become an enormously enlarged pulse dictating to the lesser, audible valves opening and closing in their own bodies.
‘Something I found out,’ she panted, ‘on that island—after you had all run away—nothing will kill me before I am intended to die.’
If you could describe your storm; but you could not. You can never convey in words the utmost in experience. Whatever is given you to live, you alone can live, and re-live, and re-live, till it is gasped out of you.
So she lay gasping, as though the tide had almost fully receded from this estuary of sheets, while they watched her, she could tell, with their unregenerate, gulls’ eyes.
She had got up earlier that morning: it must have been a changed light, the latticework of bird sounds, then an enormous span of wings spreading creaking (or was it a car?) compelling her. She had taken to wearing a minimum of clothes on the island. Although she had scarcely been near the beach, sand which had collected in them set up a dry, cleanly friction with her skin as she was putting them on. Round her hair, unkempt by now, she tied the flamingo scarf, before deciding to discard it. Would that slab of a Norwegian, or worse still, would Dorothy have thought you were wearing the scarf for a purpose? As you might have been: which was all the more reason for undoing the knot.
The Eye of the Storm Page 44