The Eye of the Storm (11 page)

(Surely such enormous fingers would detect only a thundering pulse?)

‘She's remarkable—truly remarkable,' the nurse nattered sideways and superfluously to the daughter who was a princess.

The doctor frowned, and the nurse, recalled to duty, stood to attention like a frail private.

‘Normal enough.' Dr Gidley finally complained out loud,

And so did Mrs Hunter. ‘Normal is the last thing I am—I hoped you might have gathered by now—Doctor—Dr
Gidley
.' The corners of her mouth were struggling to perfect a half-remembered technique of malice. ‘Otherwise, what am I paying for? A—a dia-
gnosis
of my ordinariness?'

Dr Gidley flopped into the nearest chair, fingers dangling in clusters between wide-open legs. ‘Okay! Dictate your diagnosis, Mrs Hunter, and I'll learn it.' Mirth bumped the banana-bunches against swelling thighs.

Sister Badgery hummed with suppressed pleasure.

The strength of these two acolytes lay in their belief in the rightness of what they were doing and the wrong-thinking of others; which drew Dorothy towards her mother: at her most imperious, her most declamatory, Mother's manner had suggested that the moment her will snoozed she might collide with some passive object or suffer buffeting by a directed one. Mother and daughter were both sleepwalkers, only their approach from opposite ends of the room ensured that their meetings should become, more often than not, collisions.

Now, faced with the forces of practical optimism, they were wearing identical smiles, while the opposition continued shining with the light of their mission: to prevent a human body dying, even if it felt like doing so.

In the circumstances Mrs Hunter murmured, ‘My daughter and I understand each other implicitly.'

If it were true, it ought to be kept a secret; so Dorothy muttered, and stirred in her chair, and almost put up a hand to avert an indelicacy.

While Mrs Hunter continued in her determination to hint at sweetness. ‘Before you disturbed us, we were enjoying a delightful conversation. She was telling me about her voyage out.'

‘Flight, Mother,' Dorothy corrected; then blushed. ‘And it was not a very spectacular one.' Her expression menaced Sister Badgery and Dr Gidley with her journey's uneventfulness.

This should have consoled them, but the large young doctor looked uneasy: if he had obeyed convention he would have inquired at least about the weather, only the problem of the title prevented him addressing Mrs Hunter's daughter.

Instead he made sounds,

Mrs Hunter slightly moved her head from side to side on the pillow, apparently about to start on a singsong, though when it came, the voice was thin, high and sustained, like the fine-drawn utterance of a single violin. ‘She was telling me about a charming Dutchman she met—and a hurricane which overtook them off Curaçao—quite a mystical experience.'

The doctor and the nurse laughed to express their interest or hide their disbelief. Everybody but Mrs Hunter was obviously feeling uncomfortable.

Sister Badgery tried to remind her patient of the physical realities. ‘Your pillows are looking lumpy, Mrs Hunter. Wait till I shake them up.'

While the nurse satisfied herself with the pillows Mrs Hunter was as much tossed by her own thoughts. ‘Yes. I remember the birds—the waves shaped like small pyramids—black swans nesting between them.'

Dr Gidley accepted the swans as his excuse for leaving. If there's nothing we can do for you, Mrs Hunter, we shan't interrupt your reunion with your daughter.'

‘Oh, but there is something! There is! I want you to give me whatever will make me sleep.'

Doctor and nurse looked at each other; then Sister Badgery said in a voice of such exaggerated kindness she might have been going to gobble someone up, ‘But you do sleep, dear. You know you do—beautifully.'

‘I lie and—and ramble around in waking. Once years ago somebody prescribed something, and when I took this pill the effect was like slipping on the sides of a smooth funnel, then through the hole, into darkness.'

She was listening very intently.

‘Darkness is what I want,' she insisted. ‘I'm too distracted by the figures which come and go through the grey of the other.'

She must have heard the catch on the doctor's bag, for she began to look pacified. He was dashing away at a pad, a sheet of which he tore off and gave to Sister Badgery.

‘There's no reason, at your age, why you shouldn't have what makes you happy.' Dr Gidley spoke as though this moral prescription, on top of the medical one, had originated with him.

And Mrs Hunter seemed to think it might have: she was smiling up at the doctor with an expression of girlish gratitude; she might have received at least a kiss the moment before, whereas she was having to content herself with some clumsy handpatting.

When they were alone the Princesse de Lascabanes remarked, ‘I'm surprised at your having a doctor of Gidley's type. I expected somebody older and more experienced—Mr Wyburd as physician, if you see what I mean.'

Mrs Hunter laughed. ‘I know Gidley isn't much good as a doctor, but I can tell by the feel of him he's the kind of man I might have enjoyed as a lover.' She turned slightly. I've shocked you, Dorothy dear.'

Dorothy said, no, she wasn't shocked; even so she was glad of the blur which separated them: she could look more closely at her mother.

‘Don't think I made a practice of promiscuity. Oh, I was unfaithful once or twice—but only as a sort of experiment—and it did prove it wasn't worth it. For most women, I think, sexual pleasure is largely imagination. They imagine lovers while their husbands are having their way with them, but in their lovers' arms they regret what they remember of the husband's humdrum virtues.'

The princess sounded all expostulatory mirth. ‘I think you're tired, Mother, and are talking utter imaginary nonsense!'
She
was tired, anyway.

Mrs Hunter would have liked to see Dorothy as more than the blur she appeared, to decide whether she had ever had a lover.
Probably her trouble was that Hubert had been too much the lover for his wife to have experienced a husband.

‘So now I'm going to leave you for my club,' the Princesse de Lascabanes announced.

‘When we were expecting you for luncheon!' Mrs Hunter's recent wisdom shrivelled into a rag of skin. ‘My housekeeper—Mrs Lippmann—will give you a splendid luncheon—in the dining-room by yourself—or a snack on a tray, here with me.' Then she added, out of desperation it seemed, ‘You haven't met her, have you? Well, I mean, socially. Sometimes she dances for me. Are you surprised, Dorothy, at a dancing cook?'

‘By now, Mother, I am not surprised.'

Mrs Hunter could hear her daughter drawing on her gloves; in the end, stitched to the bed by steel threads, you can only persuade the past.

While they were kissing, and she was sure of escaping, Dorothy de Lascabanes decided to ask, ‘That fur rug in my old room—so soft—what is it?'

‘Platypus.'

‘But they're protected!'

‘Yes. They're protected. It was Grandfather Hunter who killed them. Alfred was gentle.' (Then she did at least recognize it as a quality in others.) ‘Alfred gave me the rug as one of my wedding presents. He thought that because it was so rare we might have had it on our bed, but I asked him to let me put it away. I didn't care for it as fur. I didn't care for
it.
When he was ill—when he was dying—he remembered the platypus rug and got me to bring it out. I used to arrange it over his knees—after we had sat him up in his chair—that last, bitter winter at “Kudjeri”. By then I don't believe we thought any more about the poor slaughtered little creatures, or if we did, they had become willing sacrifices.'

Her memory was so positive, only the silence could compete with it.

‘Dorothy?' Mrs Hunter asked, to confirm that her daughter had left.

Dorothy de Lascabanes was in fact stumbling down the stairs: dreams she remembered in which she was trampling recently-hatched nestlings swam into the actual waters of the sacrificial platypus. So she trampled and lurched. In the hall she found herself pushing at what? the only opposition was a void: and guilt, tenderness, desire, lost opportunities. She must never forget
Mother is an evil heartless old woman.
If you did forget, Basil would remember, himself Mother's only equal at driving the knife home.
Boo-hoo, poor you! if anybody ever told you they loved you you wouldn't believe that either now would you?

The thought that she still had to face her brother started her tearing at the hall door.

A
S THE
princess broke out there was the crunch of a key from the other side: a young woman had begun to let herself in. Each staggered while trying to decide who had the better right to the door. Of course Madame de Lascabanes knew that hers could not be denied, and to think that anybody might dispute it had started anger gathering behind her long face. Then her indignation and her sense of protocol left her. The girl was too young, too radiant, to be dispossessed; she was smiling besides, out of bland lips, on which was pasted a delicately aggressive pink suggesting ointment rather than lipstick, while her Perspex ear-rings cunningly gyrated, and a pattern of great suns on her pretence of a dress dazzled the beholder with their cerise and purple, particularly just off centre from the breasts. It was too physical a moment for speeches of apology. The half-smile the older woman had been induced to wear reminded her she had forgotten to restore her mouth: her thoughts had shed so much blood, she hadn't had the heart to resort to further crimson.

So the women passed each other smiling and murmuring, each suspecting who the other was, while avoiding confirmation. The princess tested the marble steps with wary feet, propping even more warily around the drastic swirl of path which would lead eventually to the gate and the taxi she had not ordered: to escape from the house was enough. During it all the relieving nurse was able to enjoy the luxury of a last look from her possessed doorway. Madame de Lascabanes did not glance back: it would not have been correct. Remembering her forgotten luggage (have Arnold Wyburd fetch it) she did not even pause. Carefully watching her classic shoes, she narrowed her French nostrils at the strange body-scent of Australian gumleaves, and sighed; while the nurse stood, legs apart, thighs radiating light and strength below the dazzle of minimal skirt.
She might have slammed the door at last, if she hadn't been trained to control her antipathies in the presence of the sick.

Sister Manhood walked through the hall swinging her orange plastic handbag. She went out to the kitchen where Mrs Lippmann would be dishing up lunch. Although it was agreed in writing that Sister Badgery should be given lunch before going off, it was never more than silently accepted that Sister Manhood should arrive in time to eat her share. Only reasonable, as Flora Manhood saw it.

‘So!
We thought you was going to be late, Floradora!' The housekeeper's solecisms went oddly with her civilized monkey's face: they roused Jessie Badgery's scorn—a scorn for all foreigners; but Flora Manhood was by moments at least something of an anarchist.

Now she nibbled at the housekeeper's unresisting ear. ‘Anyway, I saw Her—the Queen Maree Antoinette Mother of all the Russias the Princess Lascabum.'

The housekeeper shrieked, and scraped the pan harder than ever; she wagged her behind as though stroked by the long feathers of light which float out across the empty floor, out of darkness, the moment before the act begins.

‘
Wenn Mutter in die Manage ritt,'
Mrs Lippmann sang, and helped it along with the iron spoon.

‘What's all these jokes I'm not in on?' Sister Badgery called from the breakfast room, in which she was already seated, and where Mrs Lippmann served the nurses' lunch.

Surprisingly, Sister Badgery had an appetite, though in manoeuvring the food past her lips her fork implied disparagement, and she emphasized her disapproval with an occasional flick of her accurate veil. What she could not disguise was a stomach like a small melon under the starched uniform, or her opinion of her colleague, who had sat down in her street dress and was scoffing the scrambled eggs, slithery with too much butter, in their cornets of smoked ham.

There was cucumber too, in sour cream, under a pretty sprinkling of dill; and a chocolate
Torte
oozing on to a paper doily in a Meissen
dish. ‘Ooh! Yummy yummy!' Flora Manhood squealed, her eye on the
Torte.
‘You've given away the milshig-fleishig today, Lottie!'

‘No
milchig-fleischig,
' Mrs Lippmann muttered, from round what could have been an obstructive cigar. ‘Only when I am at my lowest. I don't know why I am not today. But I am not.' If she had been smoking that cigar, her nostrils would have blown two streams of the fiercest smoke.

Sister Manhood examined her thumb and what was a fleck of sour cream; then she slowly licked the cream off. ‘Can't think why you stick around here cooking for us and old Mother Swizzlestick upstairs.'

‘Poor Mrs Hunter! Such names!' Sister Badgery protested. ‘Why “Swizzlestick”, for heaven's sake?'

‘Because she likes to believe there's still a duty male, somewhere, drinking champers to her out of a shoe.'

Lotte Lippmann cackled. ‘That's why I stick around cooking for Mrs Swizzlestick!
Ich weiss auch was Liebe ist!
'

‘But the career and all, Lottie—how can you be content as a cook?' Sister Manhood's attempt at seriousness and gentility was sabotaged by her mouth closing on a forkful of
Torte.

Mrs Lippmann hawked up her reply.
‘Ach, die Karriere!
My art was a tiny, satiric one—to find what in all things is ridiculous—and all things are ridiculous if you look.' She laughed flat, and you could see her broad, purple tongue; you could see Lotte Lippmann tugging at the brim of her top hat, settling a cane under an armpit. ‘My art was destructive—and soon finished—prick! pouff! along with all that it had pricked—
alles so schrecklich komisch
! Do you understand, ladies?' The cook was staggering under the weight of her exposition.