The Eye of the Storm (36 page)

He could feel his mask grinning up at her, the teeth grown jagged in its mock flesh: that of the Second Conspirator. Or was it the First Suicide?

Anyway, here he was as a result, in this other sunlight, dazed by it as he lolled in the cavorting taxi, prickling with grit, streaming with sweat in spite of his recent bath and shave. He was feeling fine: not the shadow of a conscience for keeping them waiting, old Arnold the Wyburd and the bloody princess, probably three-quarters of an hour. It was hardly his fault, was it? if the
Herald
and the A.B.C. chose to ring, one after the other, just as he was making a dash for it.

So he was determined to relax and enjoy this whizzing vision of a city which had grown out of his childhood recollections: of a Pitt Street peopled only by acquaintances, all of them converging on the Civil Service Stores. Though he had played no active part in his city's transformation, though he had rejected it in fact, he accepted some of the credit for it. He had to share his recovered self-respect with this self-important metropolis. However late in the piece, he offered his love to its plate glass and neo-brutal towers; at the heart of it, his old mother. He would forget his horror of the lilac wig, the deliquescent smile: these dismissed, he could love the whole idea of mothers, as of Sydney. (Recall the horrors later if you are short on ruthlessness. Remember to send the better suit for pressing, for your interview with the telly girl of the mellow-'cello voice.)

Mr Wyburd glanced at the clock. Unpunctuality was one of the vices which roused him to anger, an ugly and intemperate emotion, though perhaps not as deplorable as unwillingness to forgive the offender; and the Hunter children had both failed to keep an appointment made for eleven. One of them could have been involved in an accident, but not both, surely? unless they had shared a taxi, and there was not love enough between them for that. A regular churchgoer (he had kept it up as an example to his own children, then found it had become a habit), the solicitor would
have liked to conjure a material banner embroidered with the concept
CHARITY
to hold between himself and his clock, to prevent the anger rising again, peculiarly physical and bitter-tasting, out of his stomach into his mouth. Or in any event, he must dissociate his irritation from the face of a clock for which he had a longstanding and sentimental attachment.

It was a carriage clock, and had been sent him by Mrs Hunter as a memento and token of esteem after her husband's death. The clock had belonged to the late Mr Hunter. Arnold Wyburd could remember exactly where it used to stand on the library mantelpiece at ‘Kudjeri'. He remembered, not from that first brief stay when he had arrived unsuitably dressed, timid as a boy, bringing for signature the agreement to their purchase of the block in Moreton Drive, but from later visits, by which time he had proved himself worthy of his clients' trust, and could unbend sufficiently to take pleasure in their hospitality. His respect and affection for Mr Hunter grew, until (it had been something of an ice-breaking) he could be included among those who addressed him as ‘Bill'.

Under the carriage clock, in the library at ‘Kudjeri', Bill Hunter and Arnold Wyburd would sit talking: each had a respect for functional objects such as clocks, telescopes, razors, barometers, as well as for acts of God; often they were content simply to stare into the fire. Arnold Wyburd wondered how many of those present at Bill Hunter's funeral had noticed him crying, and how many still remembered. He was half ashamed of it himself. He hadn't thought about it for years, till this morning Bill's pestiferous children gave him the opportunity. Had Bill loved his children? You didn't believe he could have, then felt guilty at thinking such a thought.

Standing beside the devotedly accurate carriage clock on the bookcase in Arnold Wyburd's office was a framed studio portrait inscribed in Bill's angular hand (it reminded the solicitor of arrowheads) To
Arnold Wyburd—in affectionate friendship—Bill.
Several years before her husband's death, this, too, had been sent by Mrs Hunter, almost as if she wished to suggest the inscribed photograph were one of her own little inspirations (though wives usually do up
the parcels). She had enclosed a note in her familiar, awful scrawl (she must have started writing large as an affectation, then found it came naturally) …
an exceptionally good likeness I consider and as you more than anyone else Arnold love and appreciate Alfred you must be the first to have one
… She hadn't inscribed the photograph herself, but you could see her standing over him with advice. It embarrassed you still to remember the wording of her note. What, Arnold Wyburd sometimes wondered, did Mrs Hunter understand as ‘love'? For that matter, he wasn't too clear what he understood by it himself: probably, from personal experience, many years of honourable conjugal affection interspersed with decently conducted sexual intercourse.

The solicitor coughed. On top of everything else that morning, he couldn't help resenting Mrs Hunter's intrusion on his memories of Bill.

To restore mental order, he moved one or two objects on his desk. There was no question of settling down to work. Avoiding the eyes of the photograph he might have glanced again at the infuriating clock if Miss Haygarth hadn't appeared with the cup of pale, milky tea
(normally
she brought it earlier) and the two biscuits he seldom touched. Miss Haygarth went away.

No need to look at the clock: his mind was keeping pace with it. Rage, he had told himself, is generated by those of unreasonable temperament, and leads to the courts. As for irritation, simpler, though more often than not, perverse, it could bring on stomach ulcers, when his health, apart from appendicitis at the age of thirty-seven, had remained exceptional all these years, thanks to regular habits, plain food, and a prudent wife. Yet now, all seemed threatened, if not by rage or irritation, by an uncharacteristic restlessness. He had spent a most disturbed night; and at breakfast Lal had joined him in one or two cynical remarks (unlike either of them).

‘Poor Dorothy—I'd be curious to see her again—to find out whether a plain girl can make a glamorous princess.' Then she laughed, and her teeth looked—no, not really. 1 expect she can,
because underneath I'm a bit of a snob.' The honesty of her admission together with too large a mouthful of corn fritter made her cheeks bulge: his reliable Lal.

‘Yesterday she said she'd love to see you.'

‘That's what they say.'

‘Oh, Dorothy will come—unless there's too much of her mother in her.'

They had such a laugh together he promptly suffered from a fit of disloyalty to the Hunter family. He stabbed the sausage on his plate. Lal bought beef because they were more economical, and less greasy, but even so, when he pricked the skin a jet of liquid fat shot out on to his waistcoat. He covered the stain with his napkin in case she should notice and feel she must do something about it before he left for the office. For his additional discomfiture, the napkin, he realized, was one of a good Irish set the Hunters had given, on no formal occasion, simply as a spontaneous gesture between Easter and Christmas. (Because it was Mrs Hunter who must have thought of the napkins, it made him feel almost as guilty as when she had referred to his ‘love' for Bill.)

Now Miss Haygarth was returning, not to remove the cup and saucer and the two rejected biscuits, but to announce with unusual enthusiasm (she was a rather phlegmatic, though efficient girl, from Bexley North), ‘It's the princess—Miss—Miss Dorothy Hunter.'

At almost the same moment the Princesse de Lascabanes came pushing in. What the solicitor suspected of being worldly abandon, perhaps inspired by her inexcusable unpunctuality, seemed to have replaced the reserve, the diffidence of the day before. If her manner was still harsh, recklessness had tempered it. She approached, hatless, taking off her gloves, smiling a smile, some of which had come off on her teeth. It surprised the solicitor that a princess should not be wearing a hat, and considering the gloves; though lots of ladies, even the older ones, went hatless nowadays. (He wondered whether Mrs Hunter, if she had the strength to rise from her bed, would have broken into his office hatless, and started dictating to him from the leather chair.)

‘I'm not horribly late, am I? I expect I am,' Madame de Lascabanes opened in a voice loud enough to cause a sensation in the outer office.

The solicitor formed the word No, but it sat soundless on his pale lips as he unnecessarily rearranged a chair.

Dorothy observed, ‘My brother is late at least;' and could have been drawing attention to one among many other flaws.

She could not have been better pleased: things were turning out as she had planned, when she imagined she had botched it all by her expedition, however rewarding, to the kitchen and the housekeeper's bedroom.

‘I'm so glad.' Her sigh was perhaps too little-girlish.

For a moment her diffidence returned as she reflected that the solicitor might plunge her abruptly into business matters. What she had wanted by forestalling Basil was to talk, not to a solicitor, but to an elderly man, one old enough to be her father. It had been her intention originally to ask about the father she scarcely knew, but she had changed her mind at some point since waking from her dream of the night before.

‘Are you comfortable at the club?' Mr Wyburd kindly inquired.

‘The beds are comfortable.' She blushed, and added, ‘Yes, I am comfortable—thank you.'

She thought she would begin, after all, by discussing her one and only father. ‘I believe you and he were very close friends;' she was launched well into it before she realized: too intense, but there was nothing she could do about that; she was only grateful for the unusual impetus. ‘So you must have understood him, Mr Wyburd—as we never did. My brother was certainly too selfish, too much concentrated on his own ambitions; I, too shy—and yes, too stupid'; on a different occasion she would have been ashamed to make any such admission, but now she was offering a wise and consoling confidant what she hoped he might recognize as virtues; whether he did, there wasn't time to calculate before she fired her last and most necessary shot, ‘as for my mother, she never allowed herself to understand anybody in case it might interrupt what she liked to
see as her own continuous triumph. Mother specialized in slaves, of whom Father was the most valuable. She must have tortured him cruelly.' Dorothy Hunter looked at the solicitor and begged—no, not this morning; this morning, for some reason, she was the Princesse de Lascabanes, brave enough to command this man to become her ally.

But in his position of trust Arnold Wyburd was above alliances; and even if he hadn't been, he imagined prudence would not have allowed him to desire one; so he wet his lips, and answered, ‘I can't remember your father ever referring to Mrs Hunter in the conversations I had with him, except formally, in legal matters, and—oh, you know the kind of jokes men make about their wives!'

The princess was rather put out. ‘No, I don't, exactly,' she had to admit; then she blurted, ‘But what on earth did you talk about all those years?'

‘Well, business. Wasn't I his solicitor?'

It infuriated Madame de Lascabanes. ‘But a relationship isn't only business! There must have been other, personal topics.'

The solicitor had a brainwave; he smiled mildly. ‘We shared an interest in clocks.' Not avoidance when it was a fact. ‘You see the clock on the mantelpiece? That was one of Bill's. Your mother very thoughtfully presented me with it after his death. And there's your father's photograph beside it.'

Dorothy got up, handbag, gloves and all. ‘Oh, yes!
Dad!'
when she hadn't meant things to go this way.

She hadn't wanted to be moved by her dead, though actual father, only morally roused on his behalf; whereas here were lines of kindness round eyes as mild as the solicitor's own, and a mouth too sensitive to be associated with rams—or Elizabeth Hunter. She must concentrate on the absurd collar of an in-between period and the laughably conventional photographic pose. But the inscription, in a hand as stiff and awkward as some of her worst moments, was convincing enough to make her regret this confrontation more deeply.

She turned and said, Tm afraid nobody—
none of us—
loved him as he deserved.' While expressing her own inadequacy, it should at the same time have paid the solicitor out.

He didn't reply.

When they were once more seated, she noticed his hands clasped in front of him on the desk: they were older than she would have liked. But he probably hated her. Everybody hated her.

Madame de Lascabanes opened her handbag, looked inside it, and closed it again.

She held up her head, and smiled a bright forgiveness. ‘Tell me—didn't you have a little girl called Heather? I seem to remember measles. Or was it
chicken
pox?'

Miss Haygarth came in and whispered in her farthest from Bexley North, ‘Sir Basil Hunter.'

Dorothy was seated with her back to the door. Would her pearls, her coiffure, help her after all endure the presence of her unspeakable brother? Before anything else, she did not think she could bear his laughter: for herself, as she remembered it, the rattle of a metallic shutter clashing with her most private thoughts; for others—the grown-ups—dreamy rippling chuckles delighting by what passed for uninhibited boyishness.

Now only silence in this steel and concrete cell, in which the paraphernalia of another age, in sagging leather and buckled pasteboard, collaborated with austerity to make it appear more sinister. She looked to the solicitor to protect her from the calculated brutality of the blow which must be preparing for her; Basil's malice was capable of the greatest accuracy.

Arnold Wyburd had stood up, himself a party to the silence: lips twitching, but silently; eyelids flickering rather foolishly she thought, showing their blue veins and unnaturally white wrinkles. It was as though the silence had isolated and exaggerated this decent man, no longer solicitor, pseudo-father, least of all the mysterious lover whose dream flesh and silky testicles had caressed her thighs in the club bedroom, but a mediocre actor continuing to mime his part during a break in the sound track. He looked particularly
unconvincing as he pretended to accept from across the flickering silence of the Keemis and Wyburd office apologies for late arrival which would in any case have sounded insincere.