Incredulity rather than grief had moistened Sir Basil’s eyes. (Dorothy thought her brother’s expression made him look foolish.) ‘How did she die?’ he was also foolish enough to ask.
‘I don’t know,’ Mrs Macrory sobbed.
The Princesse de Lascabanes pleated her brows and lowered her eyelids to accuse her brother’s tactlessness and advertise her own formal grief. ‘She would have died peacefully, I expect, in her sleep. That is how it takes old people.’
She failed to prevent a whinge rising, which she tried to pass off as a wheeze; either way, it fanned her friend’s distress.
‘How sad for you!’ blubbered Mrs Macrory.
To disguise her shame for her hand in Mother’s death and to celebrate an innocence which exists, if only in others, Dorothy embraced this poor woman. ‘So tenderhearted! I do appreciate your sympathy.’ In fact Anne Macrory’s innocence justified one’s bursting into tears.
Scorn for Dorothy’s hypocrisy might have blazed up in Basil. (Or does a woman desperate for self-respect, reach a point where she can Christian Science dishonesty?) In any case, he had his own, more important part to play: that of the son.
So Sir Basil tensed his calves; he began striding, stamping (excusable on a freezing morning) digging always deeper into the pockets of his robe, which, since their visit to ‘Kudjeri’, he realized incidentally, equalled in sleaziness the garment decent Anne Macrory herself was wearing. It didn’t deter him: with the twitch of an eyebrow, he raised his profile against the window (it faced east, and the sun was rising from behind the hills) to deliver his awaited speech.
‘I imagine everybody would agree that Mother had from life all she could have wished for: beauty, wealth, worldly success, devoted friends, and—friends. We would do wrong, surely? in mourning her. Nor can I feel that, after living her life to the full, she would have regretted dying,’ (appalling if he had been weak enough to settle for ‘passing away’; he might have fallen if it hadn’t been for Dorothy) ‘if she was conscious of death at the time. It could happen, I suppose, that one who has led a materialistic life does become afraid at the last moment. I hope Mother was not afraid.’ He glanced at Dorothy, who had been frozen into listening regardless of whether she wanted it.
Her grief had dired: perhaps Madame de Lascabanes anticipated an item of which she might disapprove, or it could have been because Mrs Macrory was doing the crying for all of them.
Anne appeared genuinely moved. ‘Whatever else, it’s so terrible for the children!’ Most of her own six had crept up by dribs and drabs and were standing behind her in a loose queue.
It made Dorothy realize that bereavement could become a luxury; she squeezed her friend for showing her what she personally would never enjoy.
Sir Basil frowned; he hadn’t finished. ‘Well, nobody, not even her greatest admirers, can deny that Mother was materialistic. And vain. Shall I ever forget—the night of my arrival—the Lilac Fairy! Laughter revived the golden timbre for which his voice was famous; it conveyed a bounty rather than bitterness, as he heard it.
‘Poor darling,’ Dorothy began to twitter in short sharp laughs, or coughs, ‘alone in that house with all those women! How they imposed on her! Luckily she was able to see the comic side. Mother had a certain superficial streak which is probably what kept her going. But her aloneness was pitiful.’
Mrs Macrory blew her nose on a crumpled mauve tissue she found in her pocket. ‘I didn’t know her,’ she remarked: she might have preferred to keep her vision of a dazzling figure descending from a car at the steps of ‘Kudjeri’.
Sir Basil was composing his last words. ‘For all her faults, she was an enchantress.’ He would not look at Dorothy. ‘I’m fortunate to be her son.’
Dorothy would not look at Basil. The paddocks were coldly steaming by now. She chafed the backs of her own hands, and glanced at her travelling-clock. ‘We must pack our things,’ she announced to the room in general. ‘It wouldn’t be fair to Mr Wyburd to delay getting there. I can imagine his distress: my parents were his close friends, and only incidentally, clients.’
Her excluding him from the relationship may have piqued Basil. ‘To any solicitor over a certain age, death must become just another formality. I shouldn’t worry about the Wyburd: he’s drawn up far too many wills.’
The abrupt descent to reality reminded Mrs Macrory, ‘I ought to be getting your breakfast.’
Sir Basil lowéred his voice, ‘Nothing elaborate,’ he begged, ‘on such a morning;’ and contracted his crow’s-feet at her.
Though a person of serious intentions, Anne Macrory was already enjoying the pleasures of melancholy retrospect. ‘I don’t know what the girls will do without you! The sewing lessons!’
Dorothy had begun the meticulous organization of her crocodile dressing-case: a present from Mummy and Dad. ‘At least we’ve fitted everybody out for the summer. And shan’t we write to one another?’ she suggested vaguely as Anne left, trailing after her the string of children.
The topics they should choose, time would decide, or dispose of, along with other superfluities.
Quenched by anticlimax Sir Basil had gone into the dressing-room, and was throwing his things into his case. ‘Don’t you think, Dorothy, you ought to eat a chop for the journey?’
It was too frivolous for her to answer. She must concentrate in future on those practical virtues her friends saw in her, some of which she had found she actually possessed. In any case, she would not accept to share the blame for any of her brother’s dirty work.
Till Mog, that rather disgusting, au fond frightening, fat child, appeared beside her. ‘What’s a kermode, Dorothy?’ she asked while chewing on a doorstep of bread-and-dripping.
Deprived of her title and her privacy, the princess snapped. ‘Really, I haven’t the faintest idea.’ But shivered.
‘He said she died on the kermode.’
‘Who said? And how do you know?’
‘I was listening when Mr—the solicitor—was telling Mother.’ Mog continued chewing and looking.
One could hardly protest, Go! Go! Leave me to my wretchedness! Instead the princess offered a smile to outdazzle the frost. ‘Don’t you think you should lend a hand with the breakfast?’
Mog said no, it wasn’t necessary; but drifted off soon after, of her own free will, having seen as much as she wanted.
‘Poor old Arnold Wyburd,’ Dorothy called to the adjoining room, ‘he must be upset—for his famous discretion to let him down: to babble about a commode—to a stranger—on the telephone!’
Basil had come to the doorway. ‘I don’t understand.’ She could not believe in him: he was holding his head at too humbly suppliant an angle.
‘Didn’t you hear? Mother died on the commode!’ She would have liked him to join her in a private laugh, herself already racketing in that direction.
But Basil remained serious, she saw. ‘Dorothy,’ he was advancing on her, ‘nobody will ever know what we know. That makes us dependent, doesn’t it? on each other. For kindness.’
She fended him off. ‘There are plenty of others, I should have thought, who’ll dispense kindness more professionally.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘only because they don’t know me as we know each other.’
He waited for a change of heart, which did not occur, or no more than by a flicker of horror.
‘I don’t understand what you’re getting at, Basil.’
‘It seemed understandable enough last night.’
‘Don’t bring it up! Ever! I want—ohhh, to forget about it!’ If only she could lock a door, lose the key, and never again open.
He had, in fact, heard her locking him out.
So they continued their separate preparations, the dividing wall safely between them.
Her husband had put petrol enough in the car to see them as far as Gogong, Mrs Macrory mentioned at breakfast; Rory was sorry: he had left to repair a broken gate he had come across the evening before on the far side of the property.
Mog giggled softly into her tea. ‘On a kermode!’
After their release from table, Sir Basil remembered to distribute coins.
The children brightened; while the mother grew tearful. ‘It’s been so wonderful getting to know you both. It’s been like—almost—one’s first experience of the world.’
Thinking of the risks simple people may never be called upon to run, and the deceits they will not recognize, the eyes of the Princesse de Lascabanes moistened.
She looked for her handbag, but seeing it out of reach, consoled herself instead by giving her brother advice. ‘Are you sure, Basil, you’ve forgotten nothing? Your pyjamas, for instance. Hubert always used to leave’, it was too late to prevent its escaping, ‘his pyjamas under the pillow.’
Basil mumbled, ‘No longer wear ’em.’
Mog burst: a mouthful of milky tea flew back into the cup she couldn’t stop fiddling with.
After the kisses and the promises, everyone else stood shivering in the yard as the Hunters were leaving. Tactfully, with the tip of her tongue, Madame de Lascabanes tried to feel whether any of the porridge on the baby’s cheek had come off on her restored lips.
Sir Basil and the princess sat looking out through the car window. By leaning forward and pressing himself against his sister’s shoulder, and by her withdrawing into a more rigid, oblique version of Dorothy, it was possible for him to be seen to advantage. While they all persuaded themselves it had happened. In spite of their dreamy, lingering smiles, the Hunters were probably the most disbelieving of any.
Sir Basil trod on the accelerator, and they jumped forward too jerkily for dignity. Then the princess put out her arm and gave a single long wave. A sword of light from the risen sun clashed with the rings she had not been wearing while at ‘Kudjeri’.
They were driving away.
She couldn’t stop moving around turning over from on her side knees practically up to her chin to on her back the legs stretched unnaturally straight stiff pointing into darkness. For the rest of the night. She was prepared. Began counting how many times she had changed from one side to the other but started her count too late. At a stage when she must have been not sleeping, lying (never sleeping is what She goes on about) she had hurt the cartilage (like Mrs Hunter) in one ear crushed it felt it would stay bent. (Shall I massage it for you dear? No thank you Sister it will pass.)
HUNTER, Elizabeth, widow of … Mr Wyburd will put it in the Herald. Not tomorrow it is too late but the day after. Amongst the names. Some of those real ones are good for a breakfast laugh when you’ve the time. Death is only something to believe when it has happened in the DEATHS to people you don’t know it has to happen to some to parents who again you hardly you never knew. Or patients a certain percent. Patients in the end though real you also luckily don’t know. Till HUNTER, Elizabeth … at her home … peacefully …
She reached for the lamp to switch the light on. Topheavy thing knock it over wouldn’t be worth it. She gave up. Turned.
Ought to properly swab the mouthpiece from Badgery calling taxis after scrambled egg peugh might infect the lot of you oh yes Doctor Doctor Gidley is it? (Who else but fat silky smarmy Gidley?) This is Sister Manhood speaking Doctor I have to report my patient—Mrs Hunter—has died.
Said he would come right over. (Gidley favoured the American language, except in Mrs Hunter’s presence, when he became more sort of English.) Sounded excited. So he might be over the death of a wealthy senile woman.
Ow-eugh— this ruined ear! Fully awake, Flora Manhood massaged her cartilage. There was nobody else to do.
She had flung off the pillows from under the body laid on the bed. She stretched the limbs as straight as they allowed. She closed what had been Mrs Hunter’s eyes. As she went for the cotton wool the furniture was wobbling, toppling, almost meeting overhead, before righting itself. She arranged the wool pledgets, dampened so that they would sit steady on the lids. (Betty Hunter in other days might have turned cranky and thrown off ‘a lot of unnecessary rubbish’.) Would all be neat enough for St Mary who must surely come?
Flora longed for Sister de Santis. What she desired more than anything was a feeling of continuity which, in Mrs Hunter’s absence, de Santis might restore. Turning those cowey eyes on you: to forgive. Elizabeth Hunter never forgives: she lines you up for more of the same; which can amount to the same thing.
Between looking at her watch, expecting Gidley or de Santis, Sister Manhood remembered Mrs Lippmann ought to be told. Though unpleasant in some respects, it would be a mission of sorts. She went along the passage to what had been the maids’ quarters, where an illuminated crack outlined the housekeeper’s door.
‘Mrs Lippmann?’ She knocked formally, twice; the doors in the servants’ quarters were a thinner, cheaper timber as opposed to the owners’ indestructible cedar.
After a pause, Mrs Lippmann answered, ‘I cannot see you, Flora.’
‘But I have something important to tell you.’ She opened.
‘You need not tell me. The whole house already knows.’ Lotte Lippmann was sitting on the floor of her narrow room, against the chest, directly opposite the doorway. ‘Unser Alles ist uns genommen worden.’
Dishevelled by her dance, Mrs Lippmann’s hair was still hanging in loose tails, her face the colour of damp ashes, except for the eyelids and the lips, by nature darker, like brown figs, and down the cheeks, yellow weals scored with scarlet.
‘If you know, then,’ Sister Manhood’s intention petered out; surprise had at least tidied up her nerves and poised her on the balls of her feet in the doorway.
Over the mirror on the rickety chest the housekeeper had hung a towel, which stirred as she rocked the chest with her head, in turning first one cheek, then the other, to press against the drawers behind, and retreat farther, if possible, from an intrusion on her nakedness. The handles on the drawers were shuddering.
It was all foreign enough to bring out the bossy nurse in Flora, when she had meant to be kind. ‘Tt-tt, you’ve torn your dress!’ she had to remark on noticing what was so obvious.
A wonder the dress had survived at all. Time and the more recent frenzy of the dance had certainly reduced it to a state of final tatters; but this did not account for a wilful, passionate rending, downwards from the yoke. Mrs Lippmann’s breast had been laid bare by the destruction of her inherited dress.
All the while she kept her cheek turned, but the sounds she made were like as if you heard the cattle trucking through the night to market, up the coast.
In different circumstances it could have tickled Flora; or again, you might have given way to something deeper in yourself, that you preferred to hide; but were now too pressed and responsible, already the front-door bell ringing. If this was Gidley, he had got here so quick he must have been sitting waiting for Mrs Hunter to die.
So she too made it brisk. ‘I advise you to get up off the floor. You’ll regret it, Lot, if your joints set.’ Fairly pleased with herself for upholding a tradition, she added, ‘Later on I’ll give you something for your face;’ but stopped.
The contusions of the grey skin, with its open pores, had a look of pumice, but a pumice which was breathing and choking, while the head stirred the tinny handles on the drawers, against which the Jewess continued to press and rock. You might have got the creeps if it hadn’t been for running down to the hall, to open and let Gidley in.
Because here was this creep of a doctor: no amount of Badgery salestalk would ever disguise the fact, or that Jessie herself, in falsies and interlock combs, was a sucker for doctors, and teaplanters, and actors’ voices.
Since that first telescoping instant when she discovered that it had happened, Sister Manhood had salvaged something which looked like dependability. Her reflection in the
hall glass was convincing: pretty, too. She bashed a shade more hair from under the veil to hang above her forehead: not for Gidley, for God’s sake! for her own morale, and it could have been what She would expect.
The fat slob of a doctor was standing in the porch under the light she had switched on before opening the door. He was carrying his medical bag as usual. He appeared no different, except that his eyes were shining. Probably an attempt to assume reverence for what was a sad as well as an important occasion had given him the guilty air.
Dr Gidley said in his fat-manly voice, ‘Lucky you caught me. My wife and I were out at one of those silly cocktail parties. We’d just got home.’
(‘My wife’ must be something of a pressed flower.)
‘She died quietly—behind my back.’ Sister Manhood was glad to find it coming so easy.
‘I don’t expect she’ll regret it.’ He sounded a bit thick and awkward till realizing the drink inside him helped. ‘Eighty-four, wasn’t it?’
‘-six.’ It gave the nurse greater confidence, not to say power over the doctor, to be able to correct him. ‘She was in her best form tonight. All for make-up and jokes. The housekeeper danced for her.’ The doctor’s lower lip was unable to accept that part. ‘Then she asked to relieve herself.’ The nurse was leading the way upstairs. ‘She was dead when I went to take her off.’
‘Caught napping for the first time in her life!’ The nurse didn’t seem to appreciate it.
The idea of Mrs Hunter, more than the old woman herself, made her feel superior.
They went in to what was, incredibly, a body laid out on Mrs Hunter’s bed. The damp pledgets prevented you seeing what was underneath, whether human eyelids, or slits cut out of a painted mask. The green shadows on the cheeks had been emphasized by the nurse’s tying up the jaw with a bandage and removing the teeth. A thick black line surrounding the lips had melted and overflowed into the cracked crimson, making the mouth look like a stitched seam, and increasing the mask effect.
The Eye of the Storm Page 60