The Eye of the Storm (38 page)

‘What do you mean, Mr Wyburd, by dependents? Has our mother no obligation to her children? Elderly children, too!' Dorothy de Lascabanes wrenched it out, and laughed, but mirthlessly.

Basil stuck out his lower lip till it looked bulbous—tumerous. She
would have seen him ageing before her eyes if she had looked at him, but she did not want to.

Then, she heard, he had lightened his tone of voice, and was using a staccato delivery by which he no doubt hoped to hustle their opponent. ‘What I am unable to believe is that this apparently evolved city can't provide some kind of asylum for the aged. Oh, I don't mean the poor house—but a simple life in agreeable surroundings which a woman like our mother might accept.'

‘There's the Thorogood Village,' Mr Wyburd admitted. ‘A great many people of both sexes retire to it and enjoy one another's company in a more bracing climate than ours. I think Mrs Hunter would not accept it,' he added simply.

‘What about the nuns?' the Princesse de Lascabanes asked with appropriate reverence and a wistful smile. ‘I've known several old unregenerate ladies end their days very happily in convents.' Mother, who hadn't the rudiments of a religious faith, could not be expected to appreciate the spiritual balm the Church had to offer; it would be too tiresome if she refused to see the practical advantages of an organization to which she need only be superficially obliged.

Arnold Wyburd said, ‘I think Mrs Hunter would die rather than have her way of life dictated to her.'

‘To talk sense into her wouldn't be dictating.' Sir Basil's recent flight out of fog, to the indulgent air surrounding him ever since arrival, appeared to have made him drowsy: he stretched, and one of his shirt buttons flew off, which his sister and the solicitor pretended not to notice.

Dorothy de Lascabanes could hardly help being conscious of something so revolting as a glimpse of bodyhair through the gap, as well as ribs arching under a transparent fabric. At the same time it inspired in her parallels of languor. It is I who am revolting, she was forced unwillingly to decide.

While Basil had started kicking at her from round the corner of the desk; Basil was shouting, ‘You, Dorothy—you're the one who must talk to Mother.'

‘Why should I?' So precipitately jolted from her thoughts, she found herself shouting back.

‘Because you're the woman, aren't you?'

She was perspiring with injustice. ‘I like that! Why shouldn't Mr Wyburd—he's the solicitor—and Mother's—well, intimate—talk?' She struggled, gulping uglily, to get it out.

As for Arnold Wyburd, he realized he had lost his faith in words, when his life of usefulness had depended on them: they could be used as fences, smoke-screens, knives and stones; they could take the shape of comforting hot water bottles; but if ever you thought they were about to help you open a door into the truth, you found, instead of a lighted room, a dark void you hadn't the courage to enter.

Perhaps he had come closest to illumination in some of those talks with Bill Hunter in front of the fire in the library at ‘Kudjeri' after Mrs Hunter had gone to bed (you suspected her of being bored by the preoccupations her husband had in common with yourself). There was, in particular, the night Bill told about the earthquake he had been through as a young man travelling in Baluchistan, and which you were soon experiencing together, while the house shuddered and crumbled around you, smoke rising not only from the immediate hearth but from the shambles of rubble with its clusters of dark bodies lying limp or struggling calling sinewy arms stretched begging for mercy sometimes out of the cracks in the earth. After Bill had come to the end of his ‘story', you both remained precariously suspended, it seemed, while dark fingers still raked and clawed at your ankles from the smoking chasm. Words, as Bill had already realized, were pitiful threads to dangle above those whom actions had failed, and God was swallowing up. Even after you had been returned to the leather chairs in the library at ‘Kudjeri', you continued sitting in silence, daunted, but in some sense toughened, by what you had shared.

Basil had left his chair, and was insisting, as he stamped about the office, ‘Yes, I agree, Dorothy, the old Wyburd's the one who must persuade Mother. However well-meaning our proposal, Arnold's honesty has been proved. She won't have any doubts about him.'

If this building were to fall, we might, all three of us, be purified in the mass destruction, Arnold Wyburd hoped. He did truly long for Bill Hunter's earthquake, to save him the humiliation of an alliance with the Hunter children; or would the earth refuse to swallow him? His prayer lasted only an instant, because of course there were Lal, Marjorie and Heather, the girls' husbands (whether you liked the fellows or not) and children: the
grand
children; Jenny already dancing around with undesirable young men.

While Basil, holding on to the window frame as he stared down into the gulf, had begun declaiming what sounded like a speech, ‘My God, how it would crash, all this concrete and glass, and we—the insects—ground together with other insects. Well, there are worse ways. Worse to be picked out for your colour, or your spots, or unorthodox behaviour, and impaled by a pin—alone!'

‘Oh,
darling
—' Dorothy was surprised her insincerity could sound so warm, why be morbid on such a heavenly morning?' She was laughing incontinently; she was mauve gooseflesh along the visible half of her arms.

‘You're right. Why should insect life panic while it has the sun to flatter it?' But as he turned away from the window he mightn't have convinced himself: the arch-enemy could have confused his instinct for survival.

The solicitor remembered a duty still to be performed, and opened a drawer in his desk. ‘Mrs Hunter particularly wanted you to have these.' He came round, and handed each an envelope inscribed with full name, not forgetting the title.

The Hunter children were enchanted, feverish it looked, to discover the Christmas tree still existed. Dorothy hissed with surprise as she scrabbled at her envelope, but recovered her ‘breeding', and with it the approved functions of her long thin manicured fingers. Basil, on the other hand, tore an ugly handful out of the end, just missing the contents; the heavy breathing reminded the solicitor unpleasantly of what he would always have preferred not to hear: himself approaching an orgasm.

Dorothy was genuinely dazzled by the cheque signed for
Elizabeth Hunter by her attorney Arnold Wyburd. ‘Isn't that kind? So
kind!'
she kept repeating, as though kindness were a virtue she had forgotten about; she must really start practising at it herself: there was no reason why she shouldn't; except that the thought without the attempt was enough to make her feel virtuous.

‘Yes, very. Very generous,' Basil was mumbling over his cheque. ‘The old girl was always generous—if nothing else.' His voice had acquired a huskiness he was probably going to make the most of. ‘If one's wives had been half as generous.'

‘Oh, Mother was noted for being the soul of generosity: selfish, but generous in countless material ways.'

‘Must ring her up. Send some flowers. Look in later in the afternoon.' While exploring the range of his huskiness, Sir Basil was folding his cheque and putting it away.

The Princesse de Lascabanes would have loved to see how much it was worth. Not that she could complain. But out of curiosity. Had Basil come off better from being the boy?

The solicitor was relieved to find the cheques had cut short an argument which promised to prolong itself over weeks: the Hunter children were encouraged to leave.

As they passed through the outer office the princess walked ahead, smiling for Miss Haygarth, the typists, a spotty boy with sausage roll halfway to his mouth, and a junior partner emerging from a frosted booth. It was a vague, general sort of smile, but she couldn't have directed it: she felt too languid.

After her came Sir Basil Hunter, the shining actor, holding old Wyburd where his biceps would have been. ‘ … at the moment several irons in the West End fire—one especially exciting—but I can't go into that. How long I stay will depend on how quickly we clear up the matter we have been discussing—and on my mother's health. Don't want to exhaust the old lady, do we, Dorothy?'

She did not consider it necessary to answer, nor to speak again. As the lift closed, she raised her head, parting her lips to breathe some kind of wordless message at the considerate solicitor. How really grateful she was that they had Mr Wyburd: he was so
necessary; strange though, how the most necessary characters can be dismissed so easily.

When they were alone in the lift Basil made a vulgar noise with his tongue, and dug her in the ribs with a stiffened index finger. ‘It's my turn to be generous. What do you say to a spot of lunch? 1'11 shout you, Dot.'

‘Thank you,' she said, recovering her primness, ‘I have an appointment with a hairdresser.'

‘Where?

He couldn't possibly be interested.

‘Oh, some-where: I have it written down in my book;' and with her arm, she pressed her handbag deeper into her side.

She had lied, and he knew it, but neither of them could be bothered; in any case, there was nothing wrong with the social forms of dishonesty.

Outside in the street it was one of the days when all human beings are handsome: young, casually mooching men in lightweight light-toned suits; perfectly articulated girls, born to their brilliant shreds of dresses as to their own skins.

‘It's encouraging, Dorothy,' Basil was saying, ‘to know we're in agreement over Mother.' As they lingered on the pavement he was looking at her almost passionately; but of course it was only part of the Basil Hunter performance, to which, surprisingly, she found herself warming (you had to admit he had looks of a deliquescent, actorish kind, if none of the distinction of Hubert de Lascabanes her husband). So that when he moved in on her, and she found herself fitted to Basil Hunter, she was less surprised, or when he kissed her on the mouth: it was probably as close as she had ever come to spontaneous surrender.

‘We shall meet soon, I hope.' He spoke in what she recognized again as those nostalgic, husky tones of which he was the thrilling master, while looking at the hands he was holding—the rings more likely; but noticing for the first time whatever had attracted his attention.

The Princesse de Lascabanes toiled on alone up what had been till
recently a bland hill in a rural landscape. She felt emotionally squeezed out. She went and sat on a bench, amongst the statues and the salvia, in the Botanic Gardens, at her back a wall of succulent evergreen spattered with gold. There she crossed her ankles, and might have enjoyed contemplating her classic Pinet shoes if it hadn't been for a young couple stretched on the grass, in a bay scalloped from the evergreens. The young people were conducting themselves disgracefully, with the result that they impinged on the thoughts of the princess, till she too was writhing, upright and alone on her bench, in almost perfect time with their united, prostrate bodies.

It was ghastly.

For some reason she conjured up the image of the nurse: that Sister Manhood. To distract herself while the pseudo-Manhood was undulating with her lover in the scalloped bay, she took the cheque out of her bag, to re-examine, and confirm the sum. In spite of which, she had never felt so purposeless.

Turned at a sharper angle to exclude the lovers, she leaned forward, plaiting her long fingers together: there is something I must find out about, which is neither marriage, nor position, nor the procedures of formal religion, nor possessions, nor love in
that
sense. If I could only ask Mother; but Mother was always a greedy, sensual woman, and is now dotty with age.

She looked round to see whether the lovers had heard her thoughts. But they hadn't. ‘Ohhh!' she moaned in spite of herself.

The Princesse de Lascabanes ground her knife-edged buttocks into the park bench, till she was positive she had struck a splinter; and whom, in all this foreign city, would she ask to dig a splinter out of her behind?

Thinking to board a ferry and agreeably waste the rest of the day, Sir Basil meandered down towards the Quay after parting from his sister. First he bought a pound of cooked prawns. Then he decided against the ferry: in his boyhood the other side of the harbour had meant the other side of the world; and today, what
with his return, and the warmth, he was womb-happy. So he plodded back up the hill, plunging a hand intermittently into the paper bag, gorging himself on prawns: he was illustrious and foreign enough to make a pig of himself in public. Even so, many of those he passed, appeared to glare at him; their own suburban laws would not have allowed them to guzzle in the streets, and here was this stranger dragging them down to a level they might have been yearning for. He was not influenced by their unspoken strictures, but went on climbing, shelling prawns, stuffing them into his mouth and spitting out any fragments of shell, some of which lodged in the transparent shirt, in particular on the shelf his stomach was beginning to provide. From time to time he brushed off the prawnshell, but only half-heartedly.

On this day of vacillations, which are also details of the overall design, Sir Basil Hunter found himself walking through a side gate to the Botanic Gardens. He sat down on a bench, amongst the statues and the salvia, against a wall of evergreens, the other side of which the Princesse de Lascabanes had begun worrying about her splinter.

Sir Basil had no worries, or not for the moment; he was enjoying vegetable status in the city to which he no longer belonged. So he dragged down his tie. And stuffed in some more of the prawns. Around him the fortified soil, the pampered plants, the whiffs of manure, the moist-warm air of Sydney, all were encouraging the vegetable existence: to loll, and expand, fleshwise only, and rot, and be carted away, and shovelled back into the accommodating earth. He closed his eyes. He loved the theory of it. The palm leaves were applauding.