The Eye of the Storm (68 page)

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.' Dorothy 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.'

‘It has the authentic flavour. Delicious.' Dorothy despised the words she had chosen, but did want to contribute something.

‘You can only call it tough—to tell the truth.' Macrory looked at his wife; he wanted to hurt somebody, and in doing so, himself.

‘But it's not bad, Dad.' One of his boys, who did not understand, was trying to help him.

‘To you it isn't.' The father sighed; he was considerate of his children.

They were all eating the gristly meat, some of them genuinely loving it, others persuading themselves. The Hunters looked at each other with unforced tenderness.

‘Will anyone have some more?' Anne was enunciating again so bright and clear she might have been fresh from ‘Kirkcaldy'.

This would be the test. Some of the children accepted; the guests declined with sugared smiles.

Macrory could relax again.

Now it was Anne who carved the mutton. ‘And what about Rory?'

Cocking his head, lowering his eyelids, his lashes so thick they
looked as though they were gummed together, or fringed with flies, he agreed delicately to accept another help of mutton.

Anne brought it. Again she brushed against him; while arranging the plate, she leaned over his shoulder lower than she need have. The Macrorys tended still to communicate by touch; words were the dangerous weapons some malicious daemon from time to time put into their mouths.

During the pudding a child began wilting and moaning. I'm sick of spotted dog, Mum!'

‘Eat it up! When I was a little girl at “Kirkcaldy” spotted dog was my favourite pudding. Certainly the spotted dog was lighter. I don't pretend to be a cook. But you can't say it isn't wholesome. We had a professional cook at “Kirkcaldy”.'

‘At “Kirkcaldy”! At “Kirkcaldy”!' The husband bowed his head. ‘Everything was lighter, sweeter—better class. Only the fences were the same. Barbed wire never changes.'

Anne was not going to be caught. ‘Isn't it a weakness everybody suffers from to some extent?' She looked from Dorothy to Basil, who smilingly agreed not to disagree.

Rory was addressing his knuckles, white except where one of them was scabbed. ‘Any “Kirkcaldy” I knew was only ever from the wrong entrance.' He rinsed his mouth with what remained of the whiskey, and left them.

His wife murmured, ‘Rory's tired.' She was at her gauntest, her saddest, the social worker whose job has got the better of her.

The Princesse de Lascabanes suggested that everyone was tired: her revenant certainly felt exhausted.

‘Oh, but I must show you!' Anne revived. ‘Rory had the idea of turning your father's study into a private sitting-room. So that you can escape from children—and think your own thoughts.' She had got up. ‘I believe he's lit a fire. Come and see.'

The Hunters followed her warily. It was obvious that Anne wished to rehabilitate a delinquent husband. But what sort of ambush had the husband prepared? Or did he reason that your own thoughts in Father's room would be dynamite enough?

Basil had some difficulty in remembering their father's study, except as a scene of embarrassment and lockjaw. As in the rest of the house by this stage there was hardly any furniture: a burst, leather armchair; a day bed, probably burst too, if it had not been draped with a faded Indian counterpane, scorched in places by an overheated iron; general collapse among the books on sparsely tenanted shelves.

‘Don't you remember your father's chair?' Anne Macrory was daring them to let her kindness down.

‘Why was the chair left here, if, as you say, Mother was so determined to do the right sentimental thing?' Dorothy's voice had begun hammering again.

‘She let it stay because it was too old, I expect. She made us a present of a number of things. We were glad of them.' Anne tried draping the counterpane into more artistic folds. ‘Books, too. Though we're not readers. There isn't time.'

Dorothy was particularly outraged by Mother's abandoning the books: apart from their sacredness as literature, books are the most personal possessions. Basil did not care: he had dragged the chair closer to the fireplace and two great smouldering knots of wood. He sat smiling down at the fire.

Dorothy pounced at the bookshelves. Tm sure none of these were my father's.'

Anne offered proof. ‘Here's his signature in one.'

‘The Charterhouse of Parma!'
Dorothy turned on Basil. ‘It was his favourite. She told me. She could leave his favourite! And mine!' She was chafing the book between her hands. ‘No one can accuse us of heartlessness.'

Basil could not care. ‘I never read it—
The Charterhouse of Thing.'
He was too drowsy: couldn't read a book in any case, unless a play, if it had the right part in it.

Dorothy was so engrossed in their father's book, in checking the text, shaking out the crumbs, fingering a tea stain (or was it faded blood?) Anne Macrory must have withdrawn. Dorothy herself must have sat down on the washed-out cotton counterpane. She
must have been, anyway half-reading, half-drifting, in their sitting-room.

While Basil must have half-dreamt he had grown old, as people do in life; you can't afford to grow old in the theatre. Perhaps if he sat long enough over the murmurous fire the most calamitous events might seem inevitable, even become acceptable: his wives; his non-child Imogen; the attempt to prolong what he and Dorothy understood as living by condemning their mother Elizabeth Hunter.

He opened his eyes wide. Her legs drawn up on the decrepit daybed, the open book dangling from her fingers, not as book but as artifice, Dorothy was staring at him, and not. What reminded him of their mother he could not think, or did not want to.

Still looking at him Dorothy said, ‘That little, decent man struggling to escape from an unnatural bronze attitude. Which she imposed on him. The most grotesque idea Mother ever conceived! Say if we're not justified?' She was looking wholly at her brother, in the ruin of their father's room which had been made over to them.

He would have liked to close his eyes again, but as she would not allow it, he had to use the socially approved channel of evasion, ‘Don't let's talk about it;' yawning, stretching his comfortable drowsiness to its full extent. ‘We didn't come here, I feel, simply for that purpose.'

‘For which other, I'd like to know? unless to wallow in discomfort.' She laughed. ‘We must admit it's the rock bottom, darling.'

‘We can slip away when we've had enough.'

‘Yes, we can always slip away.' Sunk in an apathy of sagging leather and faced with the pleasures of martyrdom, she wondered if she would be able to.

Overhead, voices were wrenched and slamming rather than talking.

‘Listen to them!' Basil said.

‘Poor wretches!' Dorothy murmured dispassionately.

‘Perhaps we should go to bed,' Basil suggested. ‘That appears to be what the Macrorys have done.'

Unexpectedly, Dorothy awoke to a morning filled with explicit forms, after a night disordered by equivocal thoughts and suspicious, finally not unpleasant, dreams. She had woken once already, during the hours of darkness, to a sensation of being surrounded. She had switched the light on. Basil was snoring in the next room; beyond them silence was heaped on silence. She browsed here and there in
The Charterhouse of Parma,
She thought she might get to hate Macrory; although she had renounced men, at her age, she found his physical presence disturbing. She read, but could not become involved with this pale ghost of the novel she knew. Not that it was lost for ever: she could invoke its flesh and blood by reading it again in the original; thus her vanity was satisfied.

Sometimes at night Madame de Lascabanes allowed herself a touch of brilliance which should have been hers. Under the sheet she crossed her still estimable legs, an involuntary legacy from Elizabeth Hunter, and thought how she would enslave others, Anne Macrory for a start, and perhaps one or two of the children, simply by using her eyes. Her Sanseverina wandered after that into deeper velvet. One of several presences was entangling almost tripping before fitting her closer than a skirt. It could not be called adultery: Anne Macrory herself had confirmed it was the parents' bed. Love which has been imprisoned a lifetime in this tower which is also incidentally a body can only be the purest noblest occurring with a delicacy Stendhal cannot realize till Fabrizio breaks open his bronze and there is the knuckle with this one ugly scab oh Basil Bas Ber Bazzurl
tu es le seul à me comprendre.

Dorothy Sanseverina woke. Again it was dark, Basil snoring in the next room. Supposing she had called out, as women do, she had read, in their ecstasy? She was relieved Basil continued sleeping. She could not have explained such an exquisitely elusive pleasure to her brother, or any of the others who came to mind:
that monument her father; the disgusting man with shirt open as far as his navel; less perhaps to Mrs Macrory; least of all to a vengeful Elizabeth Hunter, whose bed it was.

So Dorothy slept uneasily.

And got up too quickly: she had heard it was dangerous for people beyond a certain age to jump out of bed on waking; but had meant to rise early, to introduce some sort of order into the ghastly Macrory kitchen. Instead, here she was, listening to her anxious breathing as she bumped around in a grey light amongst the scant furniture.

Nor could she enjoy her own virtue to the utmost for finding Anne already in the kitchen, fire roaring in the flue, and beside the sink, additions to the unwashed plates. On the range stood a black pot, from which porridge had dribbled down to burn. In spite of the range it was cold in the kitchen at that hour. Through the rent in a fly-proof door, Anne was throwing chopbones to a pack of dogs in the yard beyond.

Anne said in her frostiest ‘Kirkcaldy' voice, ‘I hope you slept. I hope Rory and I didn't disturb you. We were not quarrelling. We were discussing whether to send some old ewes to market. My brothers say Rory hasn't a business head. That was my father's opinion also.' But suddenly Anne Macrory descended from her mythical-pastoral level, and exclaimed quite passionately, ‘Come away! Whatever are you doing?'

‘Preparing to wash up these pans and dishes.'

‘But you mustn't! We wouldn't hear of it—Princess.'

‘Truly, once I've drunk my coffee—and I can do that comfortably standing at the sink. How else shall I spend my time?'

‘Oh dear, that's not for you!' moaned the social worker
dérangée.
‘And we don't have coffee.'

‘Tea, then. I adore tea.'

Madame de Lascabanes stuck to her pans. She often surprised in herself a practically mystical attitude towards the ordering of chaos, even in its more squalid manifestations. In different circumstances, she might have made a devoted and uncrushable
femme de
ménage.
Strange that it was her French self which abounded in humility, while the Australian in her aspired to a place among the ‘happy few'.