The Eye of the Storm (56 page)

‘You'll only make it worse, dear, if you work yourself up emotionally. I advise you to go and lie down.'

‘That is something I have no intention of doing. Who knows—Helen may find she needs me after all.'

Her rage might have erupted ceilingwards if Jack Warming had not come in. Like Helen, he no longer saw these guests. He began tinkering with the phone, talking with the mainland, organizing. There was a promise of the helicopter, at Brumby airstrip, at two; this should allow them to join the afternoon flight from Oxenbould to the south.

Temporarily relieved, their host was able to concentrate on his guests' future. ‘Though we shan't be here, it needn't prevent you enjoying the rest of your holiday. There's food enough to see you through a couple of days. Ask the forestry people to help when you have to renew supplies; they'll ferry anything across from the mainland.' He showed them how to re-fill the two laborious kerosene refrigerators. ‘You'll find wine in the bunker, there, behind the house. I rely on you, Elizabeth, and Dorothy, both of
you, to be kind to the professor whatever your private opinions.' Jack even laughed.

In the circumstances it was a plan nobody could reject, and towards the time the helicopter was expected, Edvard Pehl, who had returned from his expedition, prepared to run the Warmings and their two silenced children down to the strip.

Elizabeth Hunter stood on the veranda waving a scarf. She called out they could rely on her—and Dorothy. It was a flamingo scarf, the colour also of sunsets, which made the gesture more nostalgic, if not fateful.

Because there was nothing else to do, the princess rested during the heat of the afternoon. In her room the other end of the veranda Elizabeth Hunter was no doubt resting too. If one could care. And Edvard Pehl?

Dorothy turned a cheek to the rather coarse gritty pillow its scuffed-up skin salt-smelling sea-rinsed that is where She had it over most others insomnia rinses out the wrinkles the tide of years erodes but only imperceptibly in her case not in a hundred.

A hundred eyelashes are distinctly becoming Dorothy Hunter. Never oh Lord anything but. She must have slept for she had dreamt of something if she could remember. She got up as the light was waning. The pillow had scored her face and left it looking like a washboard. After she had sponged it with soft though tepid rainwater from the jug, and put on a dress nobody could have seen before, she started on a walk, this time in a northerly direction, along the beach at first, then pushing inland through scrub, towards the darker rain forest. Till the trees began to frighten her. It was the light. She saw a man, nobody recognizable, in fact most improbable. Though there were the men up at the forester's camp. There was, she became convinced, a stench of man in the undergrowth.

After making her discovery she scrambled down, back to the beach, to return to the house. The sun was setting: this bronze tyrant lowered into the flamingo litter and encircling host of haze-blue trees. The splendours which were being enacted kindled
tongues of expectancy in her, for the dissertation he—Edvard, had promised for the evening. Though she also swallowed a giggle or two: what if his benthic aggregations should put her to sleep?

Then in the dusk she caught sight of an actual man, head down, crunching towards her, and from the thickset body, and the intense seriousness of his mission, knew it could only be Professor Pehl.

‘Ah, you are there!' The lightening of tone, she felt, was intended to convey pleasure. ‘I have come to bring you,' he announced while marching to a halt.

‘That is kind—thoughtful of you.' She was genuinely touched by this, after all, amiable Norwegian.

Walking beside her he proceeded to explain, ‘Yes, your mother has sent me. She has seen you walk along the beach, and now fears for your whereabouts.'

‘She needn't have worried,' the Princesse de Lascabanes replied. ‘I've managed to survive till now without help. However old and wise parents may grow, reasonableness is a virtue few of them seem to develop.'

She shut up at once, as though finding her own contribution to reason had curdled; but the professor showed no sign of having detected a prig.

‘I have caught some fish,' he was pleased to confess, ‘which Mrs Hunter will cook for us.'

(Wonder what Mother will make of the fish, beyond the big tra-la?)

They walked on, blissfully alone, through the forests of Norway. He was telling her about the birches and aspens; rowan berries were clustered overhead; cold air blew funnelling down from the glacier higher up, making her twitch closer the folds of a long heather-tinted cape.

When the actual beach over which they were squelching, began thundering behind, then around them, sand hissing, spirting, flying in great veils—whinnying, it seemed, finally.

‘It is these horses!' the professor called in a loud but unsteady
voice. ‘Oh, the brumbies of Brumby!' she shouted back between gusts of nervous laughter.

On reaching them the horses propped for an instant; a couple of them reared; others wheeled and spun into spiralling shadows; there was the sound of hooves striking on hide, bone, stone; a flash of sparks, and of teeth tearing at the dusk.

Edvard Pehl and Dorothy de Lascabanes stood supporting each other. She could feel his thick body breathing against her negligible breasts and palpitating ribs, while outside their physical envelops their minds flapped around in bewilderment and fright.

Then the brumbies had passed, lunging and stampeding farther down the beach, kicking up their heels, some of them audibly breaking wind.

‘Were you afraid?' his trembling voice laughingly inquired.

‘Nohh!' If she had been honest she would have answered: I was glad of you; I was glad even of your trembling; but would have been equally glad of someone else, provided that person was a man.

They walked on. He continued in possession of a hand he had grabbed hold of at a moment of crisis, until he realized; and dropped it.

They walked, and Professor Pehl started pointing. ‘There, you see, is a light.' It sounded as though he was spitting with excitement brought on no doubt by relief after fear. ‘Mrs Hunter has lit a lamp.'

‘I dare say. I'm surprised they haven't electricity. Lousy with money as they are.' In her case, relief had dredged up the slang of her youth. ‘Haven't you noticed how the very rich so often stint themselves of the obvious?'

The professor did not appear to be listening, or not to her. ‘Is she a musician—Mrs Hunter?'

‘No.'

‘I swear I have heard the Warmings' piano.'

‘Oh—well—when I say “not a musician”, I can remember her playing the piano—yes—when we were children. As a matter of fact, she was pretty awful at it.'

‘I was sure I have heard a piano.'

Now that she was warned, and reminded, Dorothy too, could hear. Somebody was very deliberately ‘playing the piano'. It came through the dark, sad and monotonous and maddening. It was Mother hammering away at that same old nocturne—whose was it?
(I got it from Miss Hands. Every Thursday they drove me into Gogong. I was to learn the piano, along with other accomplishments.)
Still hammering, she managed to intensify the ambivalence of a tropical evening. Her tenacity was remarkable: it explained not only her worldly success, but also perhaps her only slightly faltering beauty.

Elizabeth Hunter had opened up what was officially the living-room. Under Helen, they had congregated almost exclusively in the kitchen, in an atmosphere of fry and good-fellowship. Elizabeth's accession promised subtler nuances. She had stood a pair of candles on the old cottage piano, and further tricked it out with a piece of music, the banality of which, together with a certain hypnotic sweetness, partly accounted for its being a performer's first choice when shaking the dust off a long neglected talent.

She might have appeared to greater advantage if the piano had been a concert grand set in a waste of uncluttered carpet. As it was, however high she raised her head, exposing her famous throat, her lily neck, the size of the instrument and the rather warped, salt-cured keys, made it look more as though she were hunching her shoulders over some harmonium. There was her back though, white amongst the shadows, and light in her hair, and she had obviously dressed herself for an occasion, in a long white robe of raw silk, of unbroken fall if it had not been for a corded girdle, and faint flutings which gave her slenderness an architecture.

The dress was one Dorothy could not remember. She decided not to notice it again. Nor listen to the wretched hammered nocturne.

She said in her harshest voice, ‘Shall I fetch you a drink, professor? After being almost trampled to death I feel we need something strong to revive us.'

‘Trampled?
How?'
Elizabeth Hunter did not turn because she was having a fight with the treble.

Music seemed to excite Professor Pehl. ‘It is great chance, Mrs Hunter, that you have this gift, and can entertain us.'

She bowed her head, and broke off playing only then, ‘But how,' she asked, turning to face them, ‘were you nearly trampled?' A vague concern troubled her candle-lit surface.

‘It was these wild horses which galloped past us down the beach.' Professor Pehl got it over as briefly as possible. ‘But tell me, Mrs Hunter, you who perform the piano, what persuades you to waste your time on this mediocre composer Field?' He aimed his perceptiveness like a dart which the target must gladly suffer.

‘I play him because he is easy,' she admitted with exquisitely serious candour, before allowing the smile to come, ‘and leisurely enough to show off one's wrists.'

Dorothy went to get the drinks. When she returned, Mother was explaining the insignificance of her gift, while Edvard Pehl had developed an itch to discuss Brahms.

‘At least we have music in common,' Mrs Hunter said. ‘I shan't have to make a fool of myself trying to take an interest in—science.'

The professor laughed so vibrantly he made the candle flames shudder on their wicks.

Mrs Hunter modestly ignored her success. ‘Amuse him, Dorothy, while I go and cook the fish.' In passing, she draped herself for a moment on this difficult child. ‘The brumbies! How fortunate I sent you to fetch her, Professor.' Could some of Mother's concern have been sincere? ‘I was somehow told that danger was in store for Dorothy.' She kissed a bony cheek with what could have been tenderness.

Dorothy was silent; and Elizabeth Hunter, silent too, left for the kitchen. She was barefooted, her daughter realized with disgust.

What had brought on coldness in the Princesse de Lascabanes provoked a restlessness in Professor Pehl. As he roamed around the room guzzling his drink (many Norwegians, she had read, were incurable alcoholics) he asked while mopping the sweat from his forehead, ‘Has the temperature perhaps fallen? I think I hear a wind has arisen.'

‘Not that I've noticed.' She could not make it cold enough.

The professor announced he was going to put on a coat, and came back wearing a linen jacket, all creases, as though dragged straight out of a suitcase, or more likely, a rucksack. But the coat was Edvard Pehl's contribution to dressiness, and the colour, ultramarine, emphasized the blue as well as the clear whites of his eyes. (Bitterly, Dorothy visualized a figure equipped for a path winding round a fjord: the rucksack needless to say, hobnailed boots, woven tie, and a meerschaum.)

‘This is better!' As he settled his shoulders in the creased jacket he seemed to be angling for a compliment, which he did not get from the princess: she had been made too ashamed by her novelettish fantasy.

When the cook called from the kitchen, ‘Ed-
vard
? I shall call you “Edvard”, shan't I? These magnificent fish haven't been scaled, and I think-don't you? it's a man's job to scale the fish.'

So Madame de Lascabanes found herself alone. Only she had failed to dress in celebration of the fish caught by Edvard Pehl. Or was it the contingency which had brought all three of them together in this unlikely house beside the sea? Or simply, Elizabeth Hunter's voracious beauty and vanity?

Whatever else, Mother had transformed ‘Ed-
vard
's magnificent catch' into a work of art: she had grilled it, and laid it on a bed of wild fennel, and strewn round the border of a fairly common, chipped dish a confetti of native flowers.

On the wings of her second whiskey, the Princesse de Lascabanes was taken with a sombre glee. ‘Do you realize that for every fish cooked, a still life is sacrificed?' When she fell foul of her darker humours. ‘Or has it been said by someone else?'

Neither Edvard nor Elizabeth could give attention enough to affirm or contradict.

As though a martyr to the appetites of others, Mother was no more than picking at her fish; whereas Edvard frankly stuffed his mouth, then fossicked for bones with his fingers, lips grown shiny with gluttony and oil.

He cried, ‘The head is always best!' and seized the largest.

Though she lowered her eyelids, Elizabeth Hunter seemed prepared to accept whatever behaviour might demonstrate a man's rights.

If Dorothy too, only picked at her fish, it was for a different reason: she believed she could detect, between her teeth, traces of sand. Slightly appeased by this flaw in what should have been perfection, another thought kept recurring: that the cook might be practising her art, not for art's sake, but for immoral purposes.

Because why leave off her shoes? In Helen Warming's case, it was from force of habit and living in a hot climate. But Elizabeth Hunter had done it to impress, if not to seduce. She was sitting sideways at the table, sipping the wine she had brought up from the bunker, exposing her slender, miraculously unspoilt feet from beneath the white, raw-silk hem. Her feet had the tones of tuberoses.

(Why are others given the physical attributes which belong to your true, invisible, hence unappreciated self?)