Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

Mrs Hunter coughed out of delicacy for the feelers extended in the direction of her silent daughter.

Dorothy said, after swallowing, ‘I do think, darling, they ought to get you another carpet. This one is threadbare in places, particularly at the door.’

Mrs Hunter gasped and frowned. ‘I haven’t noticed.’ Then she recovered herself. ‘They haven t told me.’ She began easing one or two of her encrusting rings. ‘I expect they’ve worked it out that I’m going to die — that it wouldn’t be worth while.’

Dorothy was making those pained sounds.

‘But I shan’t die — or anyway, not till I feel like it. I don’t believe anybody dies who doesn’t want to — unless by thunderbolts.’

‘Nobody wants to suggest you’re going to die, Mother.’

‘Then why does everybody come flying from the ends of the earth?’

‘Because you’ve been ill. Weren’t you?’ Dorothy was kicking at one of the legs of the bed: an awkward and useless gesture on the part of her otherwise flawless foot; she had never given up those classic Pinet shoes, and only the perverse would have denied she had been right in flouting fashion; again, only the perverse would have caught sight of the lubberly schoolgirl the Pinet shoes and her little Chanel camouflaged. ‘You can’t say you weren’t ill,’ she repeated through lips grown heavy with the sulks as she continued kicking at the bed.

Mother said, ‘Stop doing it, Dorothy, please. I don’t want my furniture ruined. You must learn to control your feelings.’

The Princesse de Lascabanes knew that her eyes were threatening to overflow: because the great, the constant grudge had been against her over-controlled feelings; when the showdown came, hadn’t he even accused her of being ‘frigid’?

‘I can only — well, I’d like to explain your flying out here as lack of emotional control,’ Mother was still bashing. ‘I expect they told you I had a stroke. In that case, you were misinformed. I only had a very slight — what was hardly a stroke at all.’

Dorothy Hunter plunged her hands as deep as she could into the bowels of the dusty old uncomfortable chair; she would stick it out.

‘In any case you flew — to make sure you’d see me die — or to ask me for money if I didn’t. Basil too.’

‘Oh God, Mother, don’t you allow for the possibility of human affection?’ The outraged daughter snatched back her hands from out of the depths of the chair: what her mother had said was the more cruel for being partly true. ‘I can’t answer for Basil. I never see him. Basil is capable of anything.’ That was so unquestionably true it did away with her own spasm of shame by drowning it in a wave of loathing.

No, it didn’t; she detested lies: most of all those half-lies she was sometimes driven to tell.

‘You’re so unfair !’ A whinge developed through a moan into a downright blub.

It was only now that Mrs Hunter felt they had reached the point at which they might become one. At the same time she was chastened, as well as impressed, by the emotional outburst it was in her power to cause.

There was no need to call Dorothy to her: their impulses answered each other. Here was that still skinny, perpetually tormented little girl screwing up the sheet by the handfuls, laying her head beside yours on the pillow. You were soon crying together, though softly, deliciously.

‘Anyway it did you good,’ Mrs Hunter said when their self-indulgence could no longer be excused.

‘What did?’ Dorothy exchanged her lumped-up position, half on the bed, for a less embarrassing, more comfortable attitude; while the Princesse de Lascabanes started administering a series of flat pats to her coiffure in one of the distant looking-glasses: she wasn’t consoled by her own reflection, nor by her mother’s implication that she had benefited by a ‘good cry’.

‘Well, I mean — the air of Sydney,’ Mrs Hunter selected out of the air. ‘Isn’t that why we came here? Your bronchitis. To escape from those severe winters at Gogong, after the burning hot summers.’

Knowing this was the official reason, Dorothy replied, ‘Actually I can’t remember much about the bronchitis. I expect I was too young.’

‘Basil will remember,’ Mrs Hunter said; it must have sounded complacent because she herself detected it. ‘Basil remembers the least detail.’

‘Basil is a genius.’ Dorothy no longer resented it; in her wrung-out condition it would have been too exacting; now she only passively despised.

‘I remember how quickly you revived in this balmy Sydney air. You never had bronchitis again.’ In fact, it was herself who had bloomed like a different flower on the same plant; how exotic, how naked her body felt when the southerly began to blow at the end of a sticky summer’s day, caressing her inside her dresses.

‘The Sydney climate was always unreliable: changeable, treacherous,’ the princess insisted feelingly. ‘That’s why the people are like they are.’

‘Oh, but they are so kind, hospitable— out -giving.’ Mrs Hunter came at it as though she were reading from a brochure of moral touristry.

Then perhaps because it was not clear who had won, Mother asked, ‘In the winter — in Paris — do you wear woollen vests, Dorothy?’

‘No.’ the princess replied. ‘Because indoors there are the — the salamandres. And when I go out I wear my fur coat. Fur boots too,’ she added for good measure; her argument would have satisfied any reasonable Frenchwoman.

‘But wool is best, Dorothy. And steak. My advice to any girl living on her own is to order steak — when she is invited out — by men.’

‘Bien saignant!’ Dorothy de Lascabanes laughed a rackety laugh. ‘But I’m no longer invited out, Mother, by men. Or not very often.’

Mrs Hunter appeared not to believe it, anyway of herself: she closed her mouth so abruptly; then she opened it and said, ‘There’s this man — what’s his name? Athol Something. I don’t like him. We met at some dinner party. Athol Shreve? After we came to live in this house. I definitely don’t like him. He’s in business, or something awful — politics.’

Dorothy wondered whether she could stick it out.

‘You haven’t told me about your flight. Did they feed you properly, darling?’ Mrs Hunter flickered her eyelids in the shallows of social intercourse.

Madame de Lascabanes was only too glad to accept the invitation. ‘Yes. I saw to that: I travelled Air France. The food is frightfully civilized: none of your Qantas plastic’

‘Oh, but darling — Qantas — the best in the world!’

The mother heard her daughter give what she interpreted as a French sniff: the French were so certain of their values, and here was Dorothy, always knotted to the point of strangulation, aspiring to be what she was not, because of that parvenu prince.

Mrs Hunter saw him: the groove in the lower lip, above the cleft chin, beneath the pink-shaded restaurant lights. She had ordered tournedos Lulu Watier. After the first shock of mutual disapproval, she felt that she and Hubert were enjoying each other. Alfred said, ‘Out with us, the food is plainer. We don’t feel the need to titillate our palates by dolling it up with a lot of seasoning and fancy sauces.’ He might have worsened the situation if she hadn’t kicked him under the table.

They had gone over for the wedding because the old princess insisted she could not travel out to ce pays si lointain et inconnu. It was the first occasion the mountain hadn’t come to Elizabeth Hunter: she couldn’t very well believe it; nor that she would overlook the fact that her little Dorothy was being received into the Roman Catholic Church. But you did: at the nuptial mass there was your plain little girl in the dress by Lanvin tissé exprès à la main à Lyon, and none of it could disguise the fact that you were prostituting your daughter to a prince, however desirably suave and hung with decorations. For one instant, out of the chanting and the incense, Elizabeth Hunter experienced a kind of spiritual gooseflesh. (Ridiculous when you came to think you had never felt in any way religious, except occasionally at puberty, on clear mornings, down along the river bank. No, there had been other, later, more secret occasions.) Then she was carried on by the sea of words ebbing and flowing round her child’s head. Her child ! The eyes of several elderly Frenchmen were directed at the mother of the bride, from out of their aura of distinction and smell of mothballs. And the eyes of that priest standing on the altar steps. She had never met a priest’s eyes, let alone felt them penetrate her: cold eyes can burn the deepest. She was glad of Alfred’s shoulder: her rock, if not always, at least when necessary.