The Eye of the Storm (61 page)

In their erratic and roundabout drive, while the foreman was forcing the truck's nose through, and sometimes over, freshly piled barricades of scrub, the stringy, -toothless fellow asked her, ‘Feelin' okay, are yer?' She caught a possessive tone in his voice, induced no doubt by their first meeting how many aeons ago in the rain forest; he had that over his boss, who was now merely the driver of the truck.

But she felt no desire to be possessed, by anybody. Like the black swans, she never had been, except for procreative purposes.

Suddenly she blushed for her self-indulgence; she thinned herself out from between her companions, to lean forward, to impress on them the urgent need for action.
‘I
forgot. There's a man—a guest
of Mr Warming's—Professor Pehl, who didn't return yesterday evening. He may have gone inland looking for shelter. He may have seen—he's a scientist—that a storm was preparing. We must start looking for him at once. No,' it was she who had taken command, ‘better drive on first to the camp so that we can brief as many men as you've got, and organize search parties. Or he may be dead,' she thought to add; ‘but we'll still have to find him.'

‘What—that Norwegian bloke?' the foreman shouted unnecessarily loud. ‘He walked over yesterday evenin', before the storm started up. Had 'is wotchermecallem—rucksack on 'im. Some of the boys were going across to Oxenbould. They took 'im along with 'em in the boat.'

‘Oh?'

Bumped roofwards in the leaping truck, Elizabeth Hunter chafed the gooseflesh on her arms. She was only saved up, whereas that deadly man Edvard Pehl, had been saved. Did he join his accomplice the Princesse de Lascabanes on the mainland? She speculated no more than vaguely on the possibility of it, because she was still too weak from the great joy she had experienced while released from her body and all the contingencies in the eye of the storm.

All the years she had spent lying on this mattress of warm moist sand the gulls had not deserted her. She had never been quite sure of gulls: even the stupid sooty kind, the noddies, are probably waiting to plunge their beaks and empty your sockets.

‘Mother? You're not asleep, are you?' Sea hunger, or continued use of the French language, had sharpened the voice. ‘You might give some thought to our suggestion. We don't want to rush you into anything you'd dislike—but time can trickle away when decisions have to be made—and we'd like to see you settled before we leave—for Europe.'

Dorothy feared her approach had not been resolute enough: too vague and womanly. Basil pretty certainly thought so: he shook off Mother's claw as though getting rid of it.

‘Yes. Dorothy and I shall have the practical side to attend to. This house—the furniture alone.' Movement helped him: his robes swirling and ballooning around him increased his confidence at every turn. ‘I imagine they'll allow you to take some of the things you're fond of. We'll ask the matron. If necessary we'll
demand
that you have your own furniture in your room. We must go up there and see them; why not tomorrow, Dorothy?' he looked at his sister from out of the figure eight he was cutting in the middle of the carpet, ‘to discuss the matter.'

Dorothy couldn't help feeling moved by her brother's famous voice.

‘Though of course,' he had to remind her, ‘we may find they haven't a vacancy for the moment.' He too was moved, by the warmth which collusion had brought to their relationship.

Mrs Hunter said, ‘If there isn't a vacancy, somebody will conveniently die. They must be dying all the time.'

It shocked her daughter. ‘Oh, darling! Now we're being morbid again.'

‘I thought we'd decided to be realistic,' Mrs Hunter said and laughed.

At the same time, something liquid, sticky—oh dear, ancient eye-muck, began to force its way out, first a drop, then a positive driblet, from under one of the mottled lids. No
tears!
In Dorothy de Lascabanes a sense of revulsion was trying to get the better of her own anguish. Mother, one should remind oneself, was able to cry at will; she had quelled rebellious maids with tears, so that they stayed on worse enslaved than ever.

Mother's weakening, if it was, had a more personal effect on Basil. Professionally, he had to guard against his excessive sensibility. He remembered advancing on an audience, his dead Cordelia (that lump of a Bagnall girl) weighing down his arms, himself snuffling, then blubbering. The audience loved it, while he and the cast (trust your fellow artists) were too aware that his generous emotional response was destroying the concerted tone of a performance.

Now his sensibility must resist this artful old creature, only
incidentally their mother, by calling short her attempt to invoke pity and drown their plan in mawkishness. ‘Remember,' he said, ‘that what we are doing will eventually be for the best, and for your happiness.' If his voice trembled, it was because it suddenly occurred to him how the old bag might hang on and see the two of them reduced to ashes.

Dorothy advised, ‘Don't upset yourself, Mother;'
and start my poor Basil wavering,
she did not add.

Dorothy de Lascabanes had never before scented the opportunity of underpinning a weak man: the prospect, though alarming, was exhilarating: to react to the tremors, taste the tears, of someone ostensibly stronger than yourself.

While Mother was explaining, ‘It's something to do with my ducts—an oversensitivity, Dr—Treweek, I think—told me.' She ungummed her gums to masticate a smile stored in the cavern behind.

Basil had forgotten the doctor: an uncouth G.P. who used to come out from Gogong to ‘Kudjeri', dandruff on his shoulders, and a smell of sweat from the leather band inside the hat he left hanging in the hall. Dr Treweek had a manner guaranteed to discourage the patient from ever falling ill again. Mother must have hated him.

‘I shouldn't have thought Dr Treweek sensitive to oversensitivity.'

‘Perhaps you're right. It must have been Gidley. He likes his patients to think him kind. Perhaps he is.'

‘Dr Treweek attended to my arm. Surely he's dead, isn't he?'

‘Who's dead—who's alive—I no longer know.'

But Basil was haunted by the smell of sweat, and of dusty casuarinas in the home paddock, and the scent of beeswax, at ‘Kudjeri'.

‘It was Dr Whichever who discovered about my hay fever. Did you know I am only ever infected in one nostril?' Sure enough, one nostril was in full flood: Mrs Hunter tried to guggle it back.

Écόeurant, mon Dieu!
In the absence of a nurse Madame de Lascabanes tore out a Kleenex and wiped the snot from the old baby's nose. She could have more than wiped: she might have
broken off what she remembered as a work of art as late as Brumby Island. Instead, she pinched the gristle together till it showed white, and thus prevented any tenderness giving her away by running out of her fingertips.

‘Whurr—err—urrh!'
Mrs Hunter went.

‘Are you off your nut, Dorothy? Can't you see you're hurting her?' Basil's protest was halfhearted; his memories of ‘Kudjeri' still possessed him: of pears in muslin of roses under tussore sunshades of children in gauze masks against the Spanish influenza there is no protection against poetry as perversely flavoured in the beginning as Isabellas damsons and Sevilles as much a secret vice as a first stream of sperm.

Dorothy stood looking at her brother. His sharp words had wounded her. She could have wept for the unhappinesses he might not allow her to share in.

But Mother had put on her social voice. ‘I do think it's sweet of you both to pay me a visit—to tell me what you're arranging for me. I so appreciate your kindness.' She coughed, and tussled with the sheet. ‘I'm ready to die when you want me to.'

Standing either side of the trussed figure on the great bed, the two avoided looking at each other.

‘I've experienced enough. Brumby Island alone would have satisfied anyone less—voracious. Now I've only got to work out how you stop the machinery.'

Basil whispered, ‘Tomorrow, Dorothy? I have a little rented car.'

‘Tomorrow? Mmyeh-ss …' Desperately searching for the other engagement she must have, Madame de Lascabanes could not find a convincing one.

Her essentials only cobwebbed by the fine sheet, Elizabeth Hunter looked as good as naked. She was so perfectly lulled, Alfred might have been caressing her breasts, her navel, the Mount of Venus, till suddenly she became contorted, as though her children were jostling, elbowing, fighting each other to be first out of the womb.

Dorothy shuddered; but Basil was again entranced. ‘“Kudjeri”, Mother—who lives there now?'

‘Don't ask me!' she moaned. ‘Oh, some—some McDonald or Mackay, I believe. Arnold knows. Ask Arnold. A girl married an overseer, and her father bought a place for them. He bought “Kudjeri”. I don't like to think how it must look nowadays. Scribble on the walls. Half-naked children sitting on their potties. The rugs threadbare. And a stench of pickled onions. Some people have a craving for them, because, I feel, they want to mortify themselves. I used to keep them to feed to that kind of person. I'd give them to Dr Treweek when he came out visiting my dear Edvard during his last illness.'

‘Edvard?' The hackles of Dorothy's shame and suspicion had risen: that grotesque, menopausal version of herself staring at her out of the glass. ‘But Edvard—we know too well—was the Norwegian we were stuck with on Brumby Island.' Her mouth stiffening, she could not elaborate.

‘Yes,' Mother agreed, ‘the one you were prepared to fall in love with—only you weren't in your right mind at the time—and he too self-centred.'

‘I
fall in
love?
with you preparing to carry on under my nose! That's why I made sure I shouldn't be a witness-why I sent for the helicopter—and booked on the first plane which would fly me back to sanity and Europe. Edvard Pehl, indeed!'
Que cette vieille garce créve sous mes yeux!

Mrs Hunter lay grinning. ‘Looking back, lust is always difficult to understand. And ugly. One's own is uglier than anybody else's. Edvard Pehl was in some respects, I suppose, a desirable man. But tedious. Frightened. He ran away that same afternoon. I thought he must have caught you up—and that was why you've never wanted to mention him.'

‘Oh, Martian?
Dorothy de Lascabanes opened her bag: if she knew what might help, she could not find it; she shut the bag; she wept.

Basil probably hadn't noticed: he had half-closed his eyes, and his nostrils had a pinched look, as though detecting a stench of pickled onions in shuttered rooms. ‘I'll ask the old Wyburd to
approach whoever they are and come to some agreement. I must see “Kudjeri” while I'm here.' Return to the source of things, and in doing so, perhaps even save yourself from Mitty Jacka and the death play.

But it did not allow him to forget that a future of any kind hinged materially on Elizabeth Hunter. ‘In the meantime, Mother darling, Dorothy and I shall investigate the Thorogood Village.'

His smile as he left the room looked irresponsible, Dorothy thought, like that of somebody falling asleep or setting out on an obsessive journey.

‘Dorothy, are you still with me?'

You became, inevitably, Mother's dutiful girl awaiting dismissal.

‘Kiss me, won't you? Before you go?' One of the organisms Elizabeth Hunter's skiapod depended on for nourishment, you let yourself be sucked in. ‘Come back tonight—both of you,' the mouth withdrew enough to bubble. ‘I'll get hold of an ambassador, or foreign professor. That's the sort of thing people seem to like. However perfectly foreigners use words, one can blame them for what one doesn't want to understand.'

Tear yourself away from this mouth, the underwater implications, from a simple dangerously illuminating beam, and from love, as Elizabeth Hunter understood it. (Could Mother have loved, ever? She loves offering herself for love, but that is a different matter.)

Madame de Lascabanes went: a woman of tensed calves and variable age, her handbag sealed to her ribs to avoid losing the keys and documents from which one cannot afford to become separated. Though anything really important, such as incriminating letters, can be more safely carried in a chamois bag pinned to the slip, in that sanctuary below the division of the breasts.

Walking quickly along the passage towards the landing, she intended to glance through a certain doorway at her own virginal sufferings, when she heard voices in the nurses' room, and caught sight of Sir Basil Hunter talking at that healthy, pretty nurse. Was it so late that the tea planter's widow had been replaced by the
gaudy strumpet? To distract herself from her twinges, the princess looked at her watch, which confirmed that everything was, in a broad superficial sense, in order; the details are what grow disorderly as they take it upon themselves to sprout in conflicting directions.

‘Basil?' she called in passing, in a high, light, deliberately disinterested voice. ‘We shall be late if we don't make a move.' Late for what, she could not have told, but continued down the stairs with an obduracy to convince anyone but herself.

If Sir Basil had heard his sister's warning, he delayed answering it. Unable to resist just a peep into the room where the nurses changed, he struck lucky: the little Manhood, already in uniform, was checking something, it appeared, in an exercise book. It was also obvious she had taken it up very recently and too quickly: the pages had not yet settled down.

Sir Basil had meant to close the door after stepping inside the dressing-room. Whether he did, he was not aware; in any case, his only reason for doing so would have been to avoid pandering to Dorothy's inquisitiveness. But he soon forgot his sister.

He was too intent, while too uncertain, how to behave now that he had a foothold in this room, with its closed cupboards and a scent of wych-hazel; but no doubt Sister Whatnot—his Primavera! would come up with his cue.