Where physical hunger heightened by the crudest sentimental longing had prompted him to buy and guzzle the pie, now a deeper, more confused desire made him urge the car across the blinding plains towards this mythical house in which a real family was living. He anticipated flopping into bed, pulling up the sheet till it became a hood to intensify the darkness, curling as tight as his stubborn bones would allow, as he remembered possums, beans, a foetus in a bottle. Around him as he fell asleep he would hear the sighs, the muffled assertions of people living in the house from which he had run away in the beginning.
Intimations of frost reached them as they drove into Gogong. Sheets of fluctuating copper had replaced glass in shopfront and window. Barking dogs, thinner for the approaching cold, slavered and gulped at the silence. One little shit-coloured bitch, wearing a strap for collar, was threatened with drowning in waves of dust while chasing after this foreign car to head it off. All the watching faces looked curiously opaque, some of them blinded in addition by the spectacles they were wearing.
‘Gogong, eh?’ The metal had entered into Basil’s voice.
‘Yes, indeed! The same as all the other ghastly little towns.’ She knew it was not. ‘Let’s get it over.’
She had hunched herself sideways in her seat as though to take advantage of her brother’s protection, or if this were not forthcoming, to shoulder off any unpleasantness she might not be able to endure.
They were nearing the point on the outskirts of the town where the road forked, one branch stretching unequivocally north, the lesser straggling over the hills to ‘Kudjeri’. In the cleft between the two roads a clump of dark conifers had survived the larger design for a park; drought and neglect had done for the rest; though at its insignificant most, the park would never have become more than the background to a monument in bronze, which no doubt had been the original intention.
From the newspaper cutting Mother had sent years ago Basil knew what to expect. So he slowed down. Whether Dorothy, too, was in the know, he had never heard; the way she was turning her back to the thing she was probably unaware the monument to Alfred Hunter existed. But he had to look. And was fascinated by this ugly marriage between civic bombast and innocent human purpose and achievement; for if the head, the chest, the stance aspired to the heroic, the wrinkles in the bronze waistcoat and pants dragged the attempt back to earth and a hand which might have been propped on a bamboo occasional table instead of the horn of a merino ram.
Basil could have lingered, grinning and squinting up at ‘Father’ if Dorothy’s fist had not started drumming on his thigh. ‘Go on—do! I can’t bear it!’
So that he accelerated, and they spurted forward, shot over the level crossing, and bumped their heads on the roof of the car.
He thought he would not mention the statue which his mind was busy resurrecting; when Dorothy murmured, ‘He wasn’t like that.’
‘Can you honestly remember?’
‘Oh—yes—no—not distinctly.’
It was his own recurring predicament.
To cheer them up, he shared a malicious fantasy, ‘I wonder Mother didn’t insist on their working her into that deathless group.’
‘On a chaise longue!’ Dorothy’s laugh dropped like a stone.
After that they fell silent, driving through the hills this side of ‘Kudjeri’. By the light of dusk, paddocks were thrown wider open; on the other hand, rock and scrub were double-locking themselves against intruders. The car ranted on, over grit, and potholes filled with a thin mud. A sky drained as shallow as a sheet of colourless waxed paper had resumed its cyclic promises: all of them mysteries which strangers drowning in their purple: depths must fail to solve. Perhaps the car would at least stall: it stuttered and faltered enough at times to encourage hopes. Then in the darkness of a hollow, opening out ahead and below, the house you could remember only by flashes or in dreams, was pinpointed as a cluster of lights, flickering and failing through a great mushroom-clump of trees, before becoming fixed by the car’s approach.
Dorothy said, ‘This is what I dreaded—arriving at nightfall.’
Basil too, if he would have admitted.
Doubts failed to discourage the car: willows were swooning round a river bend; then the sweep of Portuguese laurels, battered by age, animals, and children. At last, the oval of a rosebed.
‘I’ve never felt more frightened,’ Dorothy chittered and giggled; ‘not even on my wedding night.’
Basil knew his lips were trembling with the smile he would normally compose with confidence, to take a call, or to impress those he was meeting for the first time.
As they got out, people were coming down the steps towards them.
However it might strike their hosts, Dorothy ducked back, looking for some something—anything—roses, a rose! She trampled the edge of the unkempt bed, and came across one or two autumn buds, cold, tight, pointed, which would dry on their stems without opening. She had torn her wrist, but that was the least of the situation.
‘Come on, Dot!’ Basil was chivvying his awkward sister.
Then the Hunter children were holding hands, by whose choice they would not have known, prepared to face a music which was bursting on them, agonizingly clear, but discordant.
‘… you’ll just have to get used to it. It won’t be what you remember—will it, Rory? do you think? Children, don’t make a nuisance of yourselves
By degrees they might furnish the house with their memories. For the moment it looked bare: the Macrory establishment did not run to comfort, let alone luxury. In the hall Sir Basil caught his toe in a rent in what must have been an oriental rug before dust and decay had taken over. Beyond the rug, there was simply a sound of feet grating over grit, in corridors, on stairs, and in some cases, whole rooms.
Halfway up the stairs Mrs Macrory paused and gasped, ‘It must seem odd to find strangers living in your house.’
Basil could at least turn the Voice on. ‘Hardly ours. We left too young.’
Dorothy had for protection her authentic upper-class stridency, as well as the legend of nobility, both of which worked as a rule. ‘We were sent back for part of the holidays,’ she blared, ‘almost always. To our father.’ The mystic word troubled her more than when it cropped up in her prayers.
‘Gosh, yes, those were holidays!’ Basil had a brief glimpse of himself as juvenile lead, carrying a tennis racquet, in a farce.
He felt at once that the line had misfired: they were possibly expecting the tattered crimson of a grand manner, but he was too exhausted, too travel-sodden for histrionics; nor was it any advantage that one member of his audience had her back to him, and the other coming behind with the baggage was little more than a heavy breathing. If Mrs Macrory were to turn, he would win her over with that infallible moist stare; but she would not.
It was he who turned, to introduce some business into the scene in which they were stuck. ‘Anyhow, I see no reason why I shouldn’t carry my bag.’ He might have matched heartiness with a wide gesture, but the stairs cramped his style: in the play he made for possession of the suitcase, his hand slithered ineffectually past an unresponsive, hairy arm.
Macrory made a devious lowing sound, and continued mounting. His wife would do the answering.
She looked over her shoulder laughing somewhat automatically. ‘Physical exertion is Rory’s speciality.’ Finding she had embarrassed herself, she showed them her back as before, and brought them shortly to the landing.
Mrs Macrory—‘Anne’ in her reply to Wyburd’s letter—was a woman neither young nor old, her distraught hair prematurely grey, or dusty in keeping with the state of her house. If she had not been in the middle of a pregnancy, her cheeks might have looked less gaunt, her eyes less hollow and flannel-edged. By nature coldly explicit, the voice would have carried conviction if it hadn’t sounded permanently surprised. Anne Macrory had the air of a social worker trapped in a life she had warned against.
As the party reached the landing, various children on whom
the social worker had not been working, appeared in doorways in bitty costumes, while one or two were still stumbling up the stairs in the wake of the invasion. Some of the children were already tall and thin, with knobbly wrists and noticeable salt cellars, but the mother had not yet shown herself in the little stumbling tumblers, tripped by curiosity and their hems.
Anne Macrory showed the Hunters into what Dorothy remembered, at first scarcely, then with repugnance, as their parents’ bed- and dressing-rooms.
‘I hope you’ll be comfortable.’ Mrs Macrory looked around what was a room in her own house, and touched a towel hanging on the rail at the foot of an enormous Hunter bed.
The Princesse de Lascabanes murmured and blushed: she would have liked to help her hostess out of an embarrassment, but lacked the skill.
Macrory dumped the bags in the suite the visitors would occupy. (Basil gloomily supposed he must settle for the stretcher and the dressing-room.)
The younger children seemed drawn to their father. They clustered round him. The youngest began climbing up one of his legs, but was thrown off just before grabbing a handful of crutch.
Rory Macrory was a physical man. Black, wiry hair made him look younger than his gaunt and dusty wife. But he might not have been. He was crude, perhaps deliberately so: shirt open almost to the navel to advertise his opinion of a famous actor and a princess. Though his smile was impressively white, and he flashed it often enough, it did not express pleasure.
Dorothy found herself remembering Brumby Island: it was the smell of sweat.
‘Think you can doss down here?’ His body thrown into a spectacularly plastic stance, Macrory dared all takers.
‘Why ever nn-n-ott?’ Sir Basil caught himself stuttering.
The Princesse de Lascabanes returned out of an apathy. ‘We are the ones who should apologize for complicating such busy lives.’ The stalactites of charm dripped and glittered in this cavern of a room.
It was too much for the musclebound Macrory, who staggered out, smiling his joyless smile, strumming his exposed chest as though it were a hairy guitar.
Anne Macrory was the one who did the talking, in a voice she must have refurbished for the benefit of the princess: her words were formed so cleanly, however confused their sense of direction. ‘Oh dear,’ she started sighing when the guests came down, ‘I meant to lay the table in the dining-room, but have fallen behind—as you see—with everything—tonight.’ A used saucepan she was clutching escaped from her hands to bounce on the kitchen floor. ‘Timing is essential, isn’t it?’ She opened the door of one of the ovens in a fuel range and let out a smell of burning fat. ‘That is not what it seems,’ she explained; ‘mutton is more digestible if overdone.’ Though a forthright opinion, it was haunted by a waning spirit; while almost simultaneously, a precarious mountain of unwashed pans slid crashing into the sink, and a middle girl appealed to her mother for help with a stringy hair-ribbon.
Sir Basil Hunter welcomed the idea of eating hi the kitchen: it would save both time and trouble, and they would get to know one another quicker. The princess, who had noticed the marmalade smears on the table, was more niggardly with her enthusiasm. It cheered her only slightly to think she might give the oilcloth a wipe while their hostess was dealing with the burnt mutton. But the children would be watching, and children’s eyes daunted Madame de Lascabanes.
Just before dinner, Basil nipped out for a pee, in a darkness full of animals. From the veranda edge he became part of the conspiracy: his water and the frost hissed together. A beast stopped cropping at the grass, but saw fit to start again.
Basil stood listening and shivering awhile. To be passively accepted by your natural surroundings is only temporarily gratifying. What he craved was confirmation of his own intrinsic worth as opposed to possibly spurious achievement. Which might not be forthcoming, however. The darkness continued to offer the kindly indifference of nature at its domesticated fringes, while the house behind would probably never share its secrets with one who had renounced life for theatre.
Upstairs, a child began to cry, then a man to comfort in broken resonances. It worked in spite of, perhaps because of, the absence of technique, in a scene in which Sir Basil did not take part.
He broke away after that, back into what was more simply a darkened set where in accordance with some rule of nightmare he had been denied the opportunity to rehearse. He barged on, without exactly panicking, his person the victim of knobs and corners and low-hung lintels, before catching sight of a crack beneath a door. He had to reach this splinter of light, and did, after grazing his heels on a downward flight of steps, and thumping the flags with an abruptness which numbed his kidneys, took away his breath, and let off fireworks inside his skull.
When Sir Basil made his entrance with a real limp instead of that mannerism which passed for one, he advanced a shoulder, exorcised the wrinkles from his brow, exposed his jaw, and waited for the recognition he was not accorded. Again he found it was not his scene.
Anne Macrory was launched on a speech regardless of the colander she was holding, and from which the cabbage water was dripping in runnels down her skirt. Dorothy (a bad actress) had borrowed an apron and was standing frozen by the kitchen table. On and off she touched the cutlery to imply she had laid the places. A child positioned at the sink was running her finger round the brown at the bottom of a basin of fat; a smaller child was seated on floor L.C. pulling the legs off a toy horse.
Dorothy Hunter suddenly realized somebody had mistimed an entrance. She frowned ferociously, not at a star actor, but at her tiresome brother.
Anne Macrory did not care: hugging the colander, she continued, ‘… that was after our first child. Until then, Rory wasn’t accepted. Could you blame them? Only a stockman.’
‘We were told the overseer.’ Dorothy remained engrossed in the patterns she had made with cutlery: however exact, she might improve on them.
‘Never an overseer.’ Anne spoke with a candour she must have developed in facing the crises of life, at the same time exploring her skirt where it was sopped with cabbage water. ‘Or only after they decided they’d better accept the whole situation. When he’d got me pregnant for the second time.’
Dorothy glanced at the children. Either they did not understand, or knew it all by heart.
Basil plumped down at the table, to wait for the meal in this play to which he didn’t belong. Dorothy, it seemed, had wormed her way in with the management: considering her lack of talent, nothing else could explain their acceptance. Well, he would go on waiting, protecting his eyes from the crude lighting, and hope that his Swiss wristwatch and signet ring would not discredit him further by being so blatantly out of keeping.
Anne Macrory continued, her voice pitched clear and high, like a girl’s. ‘Then Daddy came good. He bought us “Kudjeri”.’ Anne and Rory had moved from ‘Kirkcaldy’: ‘Kirkcaldy’ was Anne’s myth, her ‘Kudjeri’. ‘Of course I love “Kudjeri”. But it isn’t the same. You’ll appreciate that, I’m sure.’
Dorothy said yes she did; though pudding spoons were more important since she had discovered them. ‘You can’t have been here so long,’ she said, polishing one of the spoons on her apron. ‘None of your children looks very old, though there seems quite a number of them.’
I’ve been here a lifetime. You’d believe it if the children were yours.’
‘I never asked to be a child,’ said the girl who was cleaning out the brown dregs of dripping.
Her mother shushed her. ‘Robert is sixteen. He’s the eldest. He’s away. Yes, it must be fifteen years since we took over “Kudjeri”.’
Now it was Dorothy’s lifetime which did not add up. ‘But what happened here in between—between your coming and my father’s death?’
‘Surely you know better than I? Your mother put in managers, didn’t she? Though she didn’t like to come here, she tried to keep it, I think, for sentimental reasons. Didn’t your father love the place?’
‘I expect he did.’ Dor
othy blushed. ‘I don’t know. One was out of touch, living in Europe.’ She looked to Basil, hoping he would either know, or else share her ignorance.
‘Oh, yes—vaguely. Yes—I knew.’ When he hadn’t a clue.
What he did know for certain was that he would like to get the mutton over: food would fill a gap. He would probably never discover the point in time at which he had taken the wrong turn. It might have helped if he could have spoken some lines from one of the parts he had played, but his memory had become a blank.
Nor did Macrory improve matters by coming in with a whiskey bottle a quarter full. ‘Would you care for a drop, perhaps?’ He seemed to defer the moment of addressing the princess by name.
Dorothy took pride in refusing.
Macrory poured for Hunter and himself. ‘My wife is a saint. She doesn’t drink.’
‘The best saints were the greatest drunks,’ Mrs Macrory snapped, and tipped the colander of flopping cabbage into a brown-chipped tureen.
‘How do you mean, Anne?’
But she wouldn’t answer her husband. She went on scraping the colander with a big iron spoon so as not to waste any of the cabbage.
Macrory laughed. ‘My wife is educated,’ he complained; he was already half gone, on whiskey taken in advance to avoid wasting the stuff on guests.
‘I’m educated, aren’t I?’ asked the girl who had been at the dripping; her fat cheeks aglow with it.
She came smoodging up at her father, and he answered, but gently, ‘Yes, Mog;’ and kissed her. ‘Yes.’
He improved a little; and his wife put on a better face. ‘Rory’s tired by evening,’ she explained. ‘The work’s exhausting.’ She brushed against her husband in passing.
When other children had been called or sent for, and all were seated, the father began to decimate the mutton, the mother to dole out the pale cabbage as well as some grey-complexioned potatoes.
Speaking through a mouthful, casting up his eyes, corrugating his parti-coloured forehead, the host asked of the actor bloke, ‘Tough, isn’t it?’ hopefully.
Sir Basil smiled. ‘You must give me time to get my teeth round it.’
The Eye of the Storm Page 51