Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

Looking at her he suspected her of having more of her mother than they credited her with: a horse-faced version of Elizabeth Hunter.

‘They got your room ready for you, if you care to change your mind.’

‘Oh, no,’ she said in her highest voice, ‘I couldn’t impose to that extent — on the housekeeper person. And besides, they have a room for me at the club. Wasn’t it civil of them to make me an honorary member for my visit?’

They looked at each other. Perhaps he did not consider it a visit; he saw her gummed up in the web of nostalgic associations and forced to witness the great conjuring trick to which her mother must soon lend herself. A gust of renewed panic made her determined to cling to her not altogether satisfactory life in Paris: the underfurnished apartment at Passy; a pretence of meals prepared by herself over a leaking gas stove; her art of making expensive dresses continue to look expensive; the rationed sympathy of practical friends (her folly had been to value the friendship of those who respect rentes). All this might change of course, but how quickly? Her flight to the bedside could decide. She had never been a skilled beggar, perhaps because it was only late in life that there had been any need to beg; the alternate solution was something she must not think about, though she often did in terrifying detail.

Making a great effort, and still at a considerable distance, Madame de Lascabanes inquired, ‘How is dear Mrs Wyburd?’ At once she hoped her smile allied to the borrowed adjective would not strike the solicitor as fulsome; and come to think of it, she did have a genuine affection for his wife; in fact, as a child she had loved Lal.

‘Thank you. She’s keeping pretty well. We hope you’ll come to see her.’

‘That will be charming — charming.’ Doubly stupid: the words she used half the time were not her own; but one skates more smoothly shod with platitudes. ‘See the children — and grandchildren.’

The solicitor was so far encouraged as to launch into Wyburd history; but stopped when he saw she was not interested.

She was though, she was: she remembered a picnic smelling of trampled grass when she had stuck her face in a freckled neck and thought she would have liked Mrs Wyburd as mother; till Basil stole the solicitor’s wife, as Basil stole everybody. I’ve been reading Lady Windermere’s Fan don’t tell my mother Mrs Wyburd. Basil always impressed and nobody ever seemed to guess when he was being dishonest. Have you Basil and is there a particular part you think you’d like to play? Fancy Mrs Wyburd lapping it up; or was she too, dishonest in her way? Oh no nothing big interesting enough in Lady Windermere I’ll only ever want the great roles Lear particularly. Mrs Wyburd seriously saying you’ll have to wait a long time for that hut I expect you’ll play it in the end if that’s what you’ve decided. She hated Mrs Wyburd almost as much as she hated her brother, who never looked in her direction unless to make faces or persuade her she was a fool.

‘There’ll be a number of business matters we’ll have to discuss. Not these first days of course,’ the solicitor was reminding her. ‘You’re not in any hurry now that you’re here.’

Why did he have to take that for granted? She looked at him suspiciously.

‘Your brother’s delayed — did you know? at Bangkok. He’ll arrive this evening, according to the telegram.’

‘How extraordinary !’ She adopted the tone used in social intercourse. ‘Bangkok! Where I changed planes. I didn’t run into him,’ she added, and giggled on realizing the inanity of her remark.

She was glad the solicitor was old enough to be her father, equally glad he was not nearly as old as her mother. She wished she had known her father better; probably her mother had not allowed it: Mother was the mouthpiece through which they addressed one another (even Basil fell for that) all so helpless how would you manage I wonder if I weren’t here?

Dorothy Hunter, long-legged and shy, almost of the same shoulder height as the solicitor, confessed with an abruptness which surprised him, ‘Some day I want to talk to you about my father.’

He became as abrupt, expressed the opinion that Alfred Hunter had been a fine man, and announced that he ought to be going along to the office to see what was happening there.

Which of them had made the break it was difficult to decide, but the Princesse de Lascabanes was at liberty to shut herself up in Dorothy Hunter’s room.

It was very little changed, it seemed at first: a chaste, girl’s room, fairly narrow and predominantly white. There was the glass in which she had tried massaging her face into a more desirable shape. The cupboards opened on naphthalene and emptiness. Still arranged on shelves, books she remembered, some of them anyway: The Forest Lovers; Salammbô; A Man of Property; Winnie-the-Pooh; Confessions of an English Opium Eater (a grey book when she had hoped for purple).

Across the bed was arranged a rug she could not remember from her own reign of chintz; it was made from, probably, some kind of native fur: bumpy, humble, yet soft, soothing to the cheek, seducing the body, surprisingly, through dress and two-way stretch. She wallowed in it, hardly bothering to imagine what a sight she must look sprawled on the fur cover and enjoying it with every part of her; when normally she was not a sensual woman.

Even in the early days, while her marriage was still officially considered a success, she might have dismissed sexual love if it had not been for the sense of gratitude a rare climax produced in her. So she loved a husband almost old enough to be her father; she admired while fearing the cynic and dandy in this man so expensively acquired; at times she admitted to herself she found him physically luscious, the skin tones and the whorled rosettes of the nipples faintly seen through the monogrammed shirts she bought him at Sulka. But she dreaded many of his replies, the quirk at the corner of his mouth, one eyebrow lifted noticeably higher than the other. No, I am not laughing, my darling, only interested to find Australians can behave as perversely as anybody else. She brooded badly. Criticism made her squint: the sun might have been striking at her as she jogged homeward on Taffy under the dusty casuarinas; when here she was in her white, actual skin, the formal helmet of her lacquered hair, and the sapphire brooch the old princess had surrendered during the engagement as a gesture towards notre petite Australienne.

She had never been theirs, alas. She was not la petite Australienne, not even, perhaps, an Australian, except on damp piercing nights at Lunegarde, or in moments of expatriate despair alone in the Paris apartment. Sometimes Dorothy Hunter suspected she existed only in the novels of Balzac and Stendhal and Flaubert, the plays of Racine.

Naturellement la littérature française est un héritage considérable. She would have liked to encounter someone whose attitude to books was passionate rather than dutifully respectful. Could it be that her French ‘family’, her ‘husband’, saw in her fossicking through their literary cupboards a form of immorality? They knew the prodigious cupboards were there, but preferred to keep them closed, anyway to foreigners.

So she too had closed, whether in the Paris apartment where she and Hubert led their more intimate life, or in their wing at Lunegarde, from which they took part in the family rituals of the Lascabanes. (So much for theory; in fact neither of them participated, though each withdrew differently.)

Mon fils adore la chasse, the belle-mère had dared her daughter-in-law to misunderstand.

Almost all evenings at Lunegarde seemed to close in mist. Wherever a fire was lit, it smoked. The old princess rattled with bronchitis laying out her patience, as you waited for the guns to return: first the sound of men’s voices as logical as typewriters along the paths, then their boots in corridors of stone. Should you run to greet? The belle-mère at her patience did not look up, but was watching to see the wrong thing done. So you chafed your gooseflesh, till here he was, kissing the hand you offered, winking for some sacrilege he hoped to provoke you into committing, but in which he most likely would not take part, in his mother’s salon, amongst the painted furniture, the faded tapestries, and mould. By contrast, Hubert smelled of thyme, woodsmoke, healthy exertion, and perhaps you imagined — blood. At least the bundles of bloodied feathers and dangling fur were carried into the court to be sorted, some for the vaulted kitchen, inferior stuff for the cottages.