The Eye of the Storm (74 page)

Basil had continued looking past or into her, when the telephone shattered the whole house. Anne went slommacking to answer; she was wearing a man's felt slippers tonight. Dorothy opened her bag and took out the mirror, then was afraid to look in it. Nor did she dare look at her brother.

Anne was not gone for long. ‘That was Mrs Emmett again, to tell me nobody understands her, and couldn't I help.'

‘You can't 'uv thrown 'er much of a lifeline to be back so quick.'

‘I told her she'd better ring another number. We're out of business.'

‘Bankrupted!' Macrory beat so hard with the spoon on one side of his plate, a bit flew out.

‘Ah, dear!' Anne laughed; she pressed against her husband before stooping to gather up the piece; she said she was going to bed.

Basil too, left the kitchen: the telephone's false alarm had unnerved him; and Macrory lounged out, his slow gross manner emphasizing that neither his wife's silent invitation nor his guests' presence would influence his true, his secret life.

Ashamed for expecting deliverance by telephone, and for wearing her innocent white dress, Dorothy directed her anger at the ostentatiously unconscious Macrory long after he had left the room. Alcohol had intensified his insolence; it had glazed his eyes more brutally, and brought out the snakes of veins in the whites. His muscular attitudes were odious; she disliked his smell; body hair revolted her.

Her own sober breath was finally rasping.

Not only was she allergic to Macrory physically, she resented his memories of Mother: of Elizabeth Hunter revealing possibilities (to Macrory of all people) as she stepped from the car. (How much had Basil realized at the telling?) In a white dress. Had the glass been conscious of it when you put it on in Mother's room? Macrory had sat palming off those suggestions of Mother's nymphomania to mask his actual thoughts. Were you the Second Nymphomaniac? The one who hadn't found her feet? When God knew, everything in your experience of
that,
disgusted. Thoughts even. (What had Basil been looking at?) Thin arms are incapable of shielding anything vital.

Looking down, Dorothy found her dress exaggerated a nakedness which had never occurred to her before. (But Basil, a preoccupied, cultivated man—Shakespeare in his pocket, could not have noticed.)

Macrory would have.

The hall was not so dark that an oval rosewood mirror failed to reflect a steely light. The ugly mirror must have been one of the few bits of Robertson loot brought with them from ‘Kirkcaldy' to ‘Kudjeri'. It should have mocked a Hunter, but seemed instead to cajole: hips still impeccable; faintly mauve gloves of skin ending at the elbows; face wavering behind glass dissolving into water.

She was not drunk. It was most likely this glimpse of herself in
Mother's white which inspired Dorothy de Lascabanes to prove to Elizabeth Hunter she could play the game of generosity, or self-aggrandizement. She groped in her bag for the notecase. She could not remember its ever having been so fat: it was money from Mummy's gift cheque. It both thrilled and hurt Dorothy to take hold of so much ready money. She decided against counting. She would make a grand gesture. But after crumpling the notes in a careless handful, she could not resist confirming the extent of her generosity, and found that nobody would be able to accuse her of stinginess after this.

Though she could hear a crackling from the fire he had lit in the study, there was no sign that Macrory was still inside the room. She paused at the door, to listen; more irrevocably, she pushed it, however gently, from ajar to open.

He was lying on the hearth, his offside knee drawn up, so that his shoulders, his head were forced back, to help the other tensed leg balance his body. Though his eyes were closed, he was hardly relaxed: his Adam's-apple, which moved once after she entered, looked too self-conscious. She found herself glancing, by accident, at what she supposed they call the ‘crutch' of this repellent man, to whom she was in any case only about to discharge a debt.

‘Mr Macrory,' she began, when once or twice during their stay she had addressed him by his first name (not without ironic overtones) Tm afraid my brother and I have been imposing on you far too long;' only a lethargy descending on her prevented her adding,
sponging on you in fact.

As she spoke she stood squeezing the handful of notes; they should have dripped sweat, but were so dry, they could very easily have emitted sparks, or caught fire.

Macrory opened his eyes and looked in her direction. Did he notice the nakedness which the dress had revealed for the first time tonight in the kitchen? Or was he, rather, listening for echoes of Elizabeth Hunter as she stepped radiant out of the car?

Madame de Lascabanes blundered on. Td like you to accept this—from both of us—in appreciation of all you've done. Your wife too,
of course.' Macrory cocked an eyebrow, as though sceptical of Anne and Basil's part in it.

‘Please!' The princess heard herself trumpeting.

Macrory turned on what was, for him, an exceptionally agreeable look. ‘I never thought of friendship as something you pay for, Dorothy. Not like love.'

If he had left it at that, but he didn't: he carried on smiling at her, for an improbable proposition she had made, or worse, a professional service she demanded and he could only half-heartedly perform.

The Princesse de Lascabanes had never experienced a similar situation, except in her imagination. ‘I'm sorry to have explained myself, apparently, so crudely. I also realize I misinterpreted a metaphor you used at dinner.'

It was humiliating to have chosen a word the fellow might find laughable for never having come across it. Her double gaffe produced in her
a frisson
as though somebody had drawn a wire brush across her slackening skin.

Then she remembered to drop the handful of notes back into the darkness of her bag. It was in one sense a relief.

‘Such full lives,' the princess murmured, ‘and your children—you must find the children most rewarding.'

He was still looking at her; so she went.

Passing through the house she did not hear the sound of her own movements: it was Elizabeth Hunter in pursuit.
Whatever the name—Hubert Edvard Rory—didn't you know Dorothy it's the same man one chases?
With Mother forcing you to look back it was impossible to escape shame.
The frisson
revived on Dorothy's arms, along the passages, and up the stairs. Stairs are worse: the sounds made by comparatively modest garments will swell voluptuously when thoughts are attuned to them.
Nobody—least of all you Dorothy—likes to admit to all the names Arnold isn't one is it would be too ridiculous but what about
…?

Dorothy shut out the voice; her ears whammed. If Basil had been there, they might have held hands, felt the warmth flow
between them as reassurance of affection. She longed for this affection: its label carried the only convincing guarantee against a cold old age.

It was splitting cold tonight in the upper storey of this damned house. After leaving the fugbound kitchen and mounting the stairs, Basil could practically feel the chilblains opening in the backs of his hands. He had suffered from them as a little boy. They painted his watery sores with balsam of Peru, and gave him mittens to wear. Tonight on the stairs and in Alfred Hunter's dressing-room he was trailing this wintry scent of chilblains. Put the mat on the bed, on top of the blankets; the weight might help keep the shivers down. Supposing his bladder, victimized by age and the climate, returned him to little-boyhood, would the Macrory woman scold to find a map on the floor? Yes, she was a scold. His almoner-daughter Imogen was the only one who might offer comfort. But she wasn't his. If she were, by blood, there could be a Goneril lurking in her; Cordelias are too hard to get.

Where the hell was Dorothy? He often wondered what women do in bathrooms, to spend so much time locked up in them.

He went into their parents' room. ‘What are you doing, Dorothy?' Whether she was there or not, he had to hear the sound of his own voice.

She was in fact standing in the middle of the room beneath a shadeless bulb, which still appeared to be streaming strings of crystal beads from Elizabeth Hunter's reign. Arms round her ribs, Dorothy herself stood streaming and glittering with misery, her bony nose clogged and swollen.

At first he would only allow himself to admire her virtuosity; but as a pro, he could not avoid taking his cue. ‘What's worrying you, darling?' His cavernous, his ballooning, his deflating voice was horribly, sincerely convincing.

They were grappling shivering with each other in what might become the performance of their lives.

‘Oh, Basil!' She was deafening him; and smelt—they both
probably did—of mutton fat. ‘What have we got unless each other? Aren't we, otherwise—bankrupt?'

‘Are we?' He was pretty sure she had come up with a wrong line; or else his memory was letting him down.

More important the discoveries they were making, which were not quite grief, passion, despair, horror, but something of them all, under the threadbare Macrory blankets, in the great bed. Elizabeth Hunter had specialized in spacious beds: so much of her life was spent in them, and still not spent; her children might go before her, bones broken by their convulsions on this shuddering rack.

If, instead of passing from one room to the other, he had thought of saying his prayers. But to whom, after all this time? Himself?

Now there was nothing to be done about it. Perhaps the grater instinctively loves the cheese. Wives don't love: they swallow you. And most mistresses are in it for calculated reasons.

But Dorothy! ‘Dorothy?' He might have suspected the reality of this rather thin human substance he was—embracing? If he had been drunk at least; but Macrory had seen to it that each of them was sober.

‘What is it, darling?' Sobriety can become more obsessed than drunkenness; she was too absorbed to more than mumble.

It seemed to her that if she had been fond of, instead of trying to love Hubert, he might have responded. Love can freeze the limbs; affection thaws the instincts.

So she and Basil were comforting each other.

Somewhere in the night he rejected their drowsy nakedness. ‘Do you realize, Dorothy, they probably got us in this bed?' Such thoughtless candour poured them back into their separate skins: to turn to ice.

Till she felt she must tear open a darkness which was at the same time stifling her.

This stick-woman was staggering, tripping, lashed, he could just see, before she reached the curtains and started snatching by handfuls, at last wrenching the window up.

The moon was at its highest and fullest above the ring of mineral hills. Her exertion, and the icy draught from the opening window, flung her back. She might have fallen if he had not been there behind her to support and comfort her nakedness with his own.

‘You've got to admit it's beautiful.' It was her brother looking over her shoulder at the landscape at ‘Kudjeri'.

‘Oh God, yes, we know that!' she had to agree; ‘beautiful—but sterile.'

‘That's what it isn't, in other circumstances.'

‘Other circumstances aren't ours.'

It rent him to touch with his hand the hair his sister had screwed up in a knob for the night.

She let him lead her back to the bed. It had become an island of frozen ridges and inky craters. They lay huddled together, and he tried to conjure their former illusion of warmth, under a reality of wretched blankets.

‘I
S IT COLD,
Sister?'

‘Yes, dear, it's cold,' Sister Manhood replied, ‘or cold for here.'

At the sandier end of the park, people were tramping, exerting their bodies in the kind of makeshift clothes worn for a cold snap in a climate which is officially warm. Clothes and sand were making the going heavy for the walkers; every one of them looked middle-aged; when probably the majority, without clothes and exposed to summer, would have turned out young and aggressively athletic.

Sister Manhood was glad of her woolly. Pink and fluffy, it made her look bulky. It couldn't be helped: she ought to be thickening.

‘The bed's cold,' Mrs Hunter complained.

‘You
feel
warm. You've got the hot-water bottle. And your jacket and socks. Your feet are warm.' The nurse was unscrewing her dried prawn of a patient from the position a nap had left her in

‘Oh, it isn't the body! I had a dream.'

‘Wasn't it a nice one?'

‘No. It wasn't. I was in my bed. I don't know where my husband was. Perhaps he had died. No. It was worse than that. He had gone off leaving me alone at “Kudjeri”—with my children Basil and Dorothy—before they were born. Were they twins, though?'

Sister Manhood could hardly stick it. (What if it was twins inside herself?)

‘In the dream, yes,' Mrs Hunter said. ‘But in life, I can't remember. Were they, Sister?'

‘You're the one who ought to know. You had them.' For God's sake!

‘In the dream they
wanted
to be twins. I could hear them calling from inside me—blaming me because I prevented them loving each other.'

Sister Manhood shoved a chair aside so hard she overturned it: she had just about had this old sod.

‘That isn't uncommon,' Mrs Hunter remembered. ‘People who aren't capable of loving often blame someone else. I did from time to time. I blamed Alfred. That's why he must have gone away and left me with my hateful children. They weren't his, you know.'

‘I never heard that before.'

‘Oh, I got them from him. But I made them into mine. That is what the children resent—already—why they are protesting inside me.'

‘At that rate, by your own argument, Mrs Hunter, you are the one to blame.'

‘Who knows?'

Mrs Hunter must have sensed she had started something in her nurse: her hand began soothing, and she asked in a voice the nurses used, ‘Are you well, Sister? You
seem
well.'