The Eye of the Storm (57 page)

The white of the throat was mottled with green to golden reflections as the wine she was holding floated in the glass. ‘Isn't it a bit sweet?' she asked. ‘That slight
Spritz
is interesting, however.'

Perhaps she had overdone it; she threw back her head and more than sighed, she whimpered, ‘That poor child!'

‘Which child are you referring to, Mrs Hunter?' The professor was gouging the last revolting fragment of jelly out of a fish's skull.

‘Why, the Warmings's of course! That boy who's developed God knows what—polio? leukaemia even!'

‘Oh—no!' Dorothy dug the points of her elbows into the table: she was weeping not only for the good Warmings's innocent child, but for her own intransigent, and worse still, Mother's possibly compassionate nature.

Professor Pehl remained more equable than either of them. ‘It is very unfortunate, that is for sure. But medicine is making all the time remarkable advances.' He licked the juices from his knife, and having cleaned it, propped the blade against the edge of his plate.

He saw there was a pineapple to come. Mrs Hunter had torn out the flesh, and returned it to the shell, and replaced the crown of stylized leaves. Now when she lifted the lid, an insidiously sugared perfume mingled with the somewhat hostile smell of bruised fennel and the stench of charred, oil-tinctured fishskin.

For some reason Mrs Hunter and her daughter barely touched the pineapple, while watching Professor Pehl feasting on its jagged flesh.

Tonight the moon was glinting green above black water, the princess noticed, and could have lingered, brooding over this capricious image, together with the injustices to which a sensitive human being is inevitably subjected.

Till Dorothy, in redemptive mood, jumped up and as good as insisted, ‘Why don't you let me do the washing up?'

Elizabeth Hunter made the appropriate murmurs by which acceptance is disguised as protest, while the professor, as replete male of some importance, could see no reason for dismissing the suggestion. So, when he had finished picking his teeth from behind a formal hand, he bowed, and followed Mrs Hunter, not without actually sidestepping the visible thoughts of this Princesse de Lascabanes who had already taken up her duties at the sink.

Mother's voice on the veranda floated like the flamingo scarf with which she had waved the Warmings to their son's sickbed. ‘Obliging of the moon always to do the right thing in landscapes like these.'

By the time the princess had finished the washing up (which failed to purge her of her spleen as she had hoped) the piano was at work again, though with a masculine authority, if not male heaviness. Hardly musical herself, Dorothy could only guess at Brahms, by the clotted chords, and what she recognized as an unmistakeably Germanic-skittish
brio,
as she slung the dishes around, and wiped a fleck of offending detergent off her upper lip. As a Frenchwoman she was bound to condemn the Germanic; as an Australian daughter she was contemptuous of a mother who could lie by moonlight on a chaise longue (where else would Elizabeth Hunter have chosen?)
flicking her ankle at the music whenever she thought about it, making the tuberose tones come and go in her naked feet.

Her martyrdom folded, or stacked to drain, Dorothy went outside. The screen door clashed harshly with the mood Elizabeth Hunter would have wished to invoke. Her daughter hugged her fish-scales and a patch of sticky pineapple juice: they were honest humiliations at least. She went and sat on the higher ground outside the bunker where the Warmings stored their wine.

If he failed to scent you out by your fishy fumes, you would identify him by his characteristic reek and the sound of blunt toes exploring the formless surroundings.
Here I am—Edvard—your skiapod.
Not surprising he should hesitate; and still clogged besides, with Brahms.
My which is it you say?
Laughter—by courtesy of Mother (you can't dispense with her entirely.)
Fish shadows are more substantial than they seem—as you, an expert, must know,

He did. Her own no more than shadowy innuendo of a body had been pinned down, flattened flatter surely, by his substantial weight.

Dorothy de Lascabanes had so appalled herself that she sat up holding her elbows, while the grass, starved and vindictive, continued tilting at her thighs through her dress. Brahms must have stuck somewhere in mid-actuality; voices had broken out instead, in the kitchen, only a short distance from where she was aching on a hummock.

In different circumstances, Dorothy felt, she would not have allowed herself to eavesdrop. Now she was too frustrated to resist. There was a barrel, moreover, visible amongst the stilts on which the house was raised.

It did occur to the Princesse de Lascabanes: what if I topple off the barrel? tear my leg on a rusty nail?
Quelle horreur—
tetanus at least! But hearing, and eventually seeing from eye level as she clung to the sill, reinforced her limbs with steel.

Without his shirt, Edvard Pehl was seated astride a kitchen chair, arms folded along its back, one cheek resting on a forearm, eyes closed in what the expression of his face suggested must be bliss.
The princess almost whinged in anguish: there, standing over him, bottle in hand, was Elizabeth Hunter, anointing this peeling, though still inflamed Viking with what appeared to be calamine lotion.

‘Don't you find it soothing, Edvard?'

The professor answered, ‘Yes,' or barely: it reached Dorothy as
‘esss',
the pearly tips of his little-boy's teeth for a moment visible in his man's flaming face.

She was infuriated. But of course Mother was to blame.

Elizabeth Hunter must have had faith in her own healing powers: she was radiant with charisma. ‘You poor dear!' she murmured, as she stroked the scruffy, burnt back. ‘Somebody should have attended to you before. Before the worst.'

Edvard Pehl did not answer, but snuggled visibly against the chair.

And Elizabeth Hunter poured herself another pink handful, and clapped it, but ever so gently, between the suffering shoulderblades. ‘There's nothing like calamine for driving out the fire.' Now it was she who closed her eyes, as she raised her face, willing the inflammation to subside.

The Princesse de Lascabanes was so incensed she could feel the barrel tottering under her, and did not care.

‘You will tell me if I'm hurting you, Edvard?' Mother commanded, but her little boy only sighed, and smiled out of the cushions of his own dreaming flesh.

After that there was the clop clop of renewed handfuls of calamine lotion.

As Mother stroked and soothed, her white, classic form poised at an admirably cool, though unconvincing, parallel distance from the body to which she was ministering, you could tell from her face that she was preparing to outdo the night, with its background of sea and moon on the one hand, and on the other, scrub stirring, wings brushing, frogs croaking out of damp-leather throats (also, alas, the creaking of a barrel). Dorothy could tell that Mother was about to change the slide in her magic lantern, and trembled to discover what its successor might be.

Click! Here it was, as the face revealed, and the raised voice commented, not on a single image, but a whole series, while preserving a tone both velvety and dark.

‘Do you know, Edvard, there's a dream I dream—on and off;' and her hand encouraged a deeper participation in this recurring velvet. ‘Naturally the details vary, but always in my dream I am walking on the bed of the sea.'

She paused until her fellow sleeper stirred.

‘I expect those clever people who
know,
would accuse me of all kinds of obscene desires. But there—I can't avoid telling the truth—and the truth was always beautiful,' the hand insisted.

Whether she had put her patient into such a dead sleep that her dream narrative would be wasted on him, it looked unimportant to Elizabeth Hunter, herself once again walking on the sea bed.

She had grown so luminous even Dorothy, perched on her barrel, was precariously spellbound.

‘What I remember in particular from each of these dreams is the light I found below—sometimes flowing around me—like water—then, on other occasions, as though emanating from myself: I was playing a single beam on objects I thought might be of interest.'

Without opening his eyes or shifting position, Professor Pehl announced in his most direct voice, ‘Many deep-sea animals are provided with luminescent organs, you know, to enable them to produce the light they need. Some fish use this light to attract their prey.' Still without opening his eyes, the lines around them deeply engraved by the seriousness of the subject, he asked, ‘Were you, in the dreams, a fish, Mrs Hunter?'

Mother looked only fairly amused; nor could Dorothy blame her, but would not go so far as admitting they might have united in a ‘good laugh' at the expense of this turgid male—or human turbot (the princess quietly sniggered at her own conceit).

When Elizabeth Hunter continued. ‘How can I say? One is always rather fluid in a dream. Or if I took on a form, I don't believe I was ever more than a skiapod.'

Dorothy was breathless with resentment for what she herself
could no more than half-remember, had perhaps only half-discovered—on the banks of the Seine? in dreams? as part of that greatest of all obsessions, childhood? and how could Elizabeth Hunter have got possession of anything so secret? Only Mother was capable of slicing in half what amounted to a psyche, then expecting the rightful owner to share.

Professor Pehl also seemed surprised: his eyes had flickered open. ‘A what did you say, Mrs Hunter?'

‘Oh, a kind of shadowy fish, but with a woman's face. The face was not shadowy. Or some of it at least was painfully distinct. I saw it years ago in a drawing, and it stayed with me. You couldn't say the expression looked deceitful, or if it was, you had to forgive, because it was in search of something it would probably never find.'

The Princesse de Lascabanes heard her own dry gasps; possibilities were shooting, like minute, brilliant, electric fish, in and out of her sunken skull; she heard her ribs fluttering against the equally frail boards of a rickety house; but the professor closed his eyes again because Mrs Hunter had led the conversation outside his sphere of interest.

‘There
were
fish of course—real ones. I was often surrounded by them. Enormous creatures. All the fish I saw were in fact much larger than myself. It should have been frightening. But I don't think I was ever frightened.'

The professor remained equally calm, as might have been expected on his own ground. ‘A characteristic of some deep-sea fish is the enormous mouth. It makes it possible for them to swallow prey much larger than themselves. A very practical arrangement: meals are few and far between.' Because it was meant to be a joke, he laughed.

Though Dorothy doubted whether this turbot of a man, eyelids again closed, could possibly have seen the point of his own remark, she was rejoiced: her equilibrium had been restored.

Mother only smiled as she drew her hand back and forth, very slowly, three or four times, across the small of her patient's back; if you had not known more, she might have been wiping him off.

The professor suddenly opened his eyes, their expression so concentrated the tone of their blue was that of anger. ‘Did you ever come across any interesting invertebrates at the level to which your dreams have taken you?'

‘No. Definitely, no. I was never interested in invertebrates.'

Professor Pehl looked momentarily incredulous. ‘They are the most greatest interest in my life,' he confessed. It is remarkable,' he added, ‘that a woman of your intellect have been born with no inclination to science. I would be happy if you would grant me time to acquaint you at least with my special subject. That way is it only possible for you to get to know me,'

Elizabeth Hunter may have been temporarily daunted by the prospect of a walk hand in hand with Edvard Pehl amongst the invertebrates, for she altered course. ‘Poor Dorothy,' she suddenly said, out of her conscience, ‘where can she be? She's so good. I do hope she hasn't taken offence. She's going through a difficult time, you know.'

‘So I've noticed.'

They both slightly laughed for the knowledge they shared.

Dorothy felt sick from the physical distaste this peeling Norwegian roused in her, as well as morally disgusted by a mother's perfidy. Though Professor Pehl was prudently buttoning up his shirt, you did not believe that a man
au fond
so stupid, however ‘distinguished', could avoid providing Elizabeth Hunter with her next meal. If he had survived courtship by calamine lotion, and that floodlit tour of the sea bed, it was because she was saving him up: to blind him with the first glimpse of her still formidably sensual body.

The Princesse de Lascabanes could not spider down quickly enough from off her barrel; she did not care who might overhear its creaking; she already looked too abject, worse in her own eyes than in the eyes of others. Lust and disgust are one, she suspected, the same shooting pain in both mind and body. Love: she must learn love. Tearing off some leaves, she plastered them on her forehead; if she could only have parcelled her entire head in leaves, and dropped
it in the sea, together with all memories of husband ‘lover' mother
SELF
.

So she continued blundering around in despair, as well as through the actual dark, till restrained by thought of the wild horses galloping along the beach. It would be wiser to return, she decided; I hate to be hurt.

Once during the night the horses might have galloped past: again her feet were taking root in sand, and the arms offering protection trussed their common fear tighter.

She did not wake from what could hardly be called sleep. Somebody—Mother, was it? yes, Mother had come to spy.

‘Dorothy? I've been worried. I had to satisfy myself you're here.'