Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

After this perfectly ghastly night in the cheery bedroom Dorothy swallowed an aspirin and considered whether she ought to confess. But to whom? in Sydney. Some anonymous Irish peasant would scarcely appreciate her spiritual bruises, and might even despise her for her educated voice. She had never thought anonymity in the confessional more than a dubious, theoretical comfort for special occasions. But wasn’t this a special occasion? Yes, but she personally, on all occasions, preferred acquaintanceship with the hand which strokes the soul. Moist-eyed, she lay regretting her beloved Abbé Passebosc, then grew haggard remembering her mother. Mummy would somehow worm out that shameful dream. Dorothy lashed the sheet around her. Never! Better to suppurate.

After she had rung for coffee, and innocently drunk a draught of unmistakable essence, what she had been dreading the day before began to happen: the white telephone exploded.

‘Good morning, madame. I haven’t learnt your habits, so you must forgive me if I’m disturbing you.’

On identifying the solicitor’s punctiliousness, the princess was in fact disturbed; she avoided her own reflection in the glass opposite. What to say? Their bodies had already communicated with greater expressiveness than words could offer.

‘… the meeting I want to arrange — yourself and your brother — to discuss Mrs Hunter’s situation. What are your plans, madame?’

Her plans? Ever since leaving Mother for Europe, she had hoped somebody, some man, would materialize to make them for her. If an elderly, not to say fatherly, solicitor could not, who then would?

To disguise her own ineptitude she heard herself suggest in a high bright voice suspiciously like the Queen of England’s, ‘I do wish you’d call me “Dorothy”—won’t you? Mr Wyburd?’

He sounded understandably gratified, but did not make a reciprocal offer, because after all, he was quite a bit older-desirably so; instead he said, ‘Thank you, Dorothy. I’ll be glad to. As a matter of fact I’ve always — my wife and I, that is, have been in the habit of referring to you by your Christian name, for old times’ sake.’

None of this meant he wasn’t still expecting to hear her plans; he fell silent waiting for them.

‘Well,’ she began desperately, ‘I had better pay my mother a short, early visit — before she has tired.’ The shortness of the visit would ensure that you could not initiate your real, your infernal plan, on this occasion. ‘Any time later in the morning — I know nobody, and have nothing else to do — I shall be at your disposal.’

The solicitor was too discreet to react in any way emotionally to her admission; but she had impressed herself by the pathos of her nothingness.

Mr Wyburd suggested eleven-thirty at his office provided Basil also.

‘Yes, yes, provided Basil — naturally,’ Dorothy earnestly agreed.

But was it ‘natural’ that she should confer with her brother at any time about their mother’s affairs? Basil’s character was such that he must accept without hesitation the most ruthless details of her design. And had the solicitor perhaps smelt the crypto-plan? Bad enough; but worse if he had some more convincing, legal solution to share with his client’s long-suffering children. He could be the wily Wyburd in fact.

Madame de Lascabanes felt desolated as she put down the phone, not so much because the good solicitor might turn out to be yet another dishonest man, but because, when a victim of injustice, she preferred herself as the sacrificial lamb rather than the justified crusader in burnished, many-faceted armour; brilliance at its best is a quality of heartless jewels, at its worst, of supple, ultimately self-destructive intrigue. So she forgot the solicitor for seeing herself in an ignominious light.

She forgot the whole issue when the white telephone went off again, far too soon. ‘Is it the princess — the Princesse de Lascabanes?’ Not a bad attempt at it.

‘Yes. It is.’ There was no escaping the caller, except through a downright lie; alone in the chintzy bedroom, there was no escaping yourself.

‘This is Cherry — Cherry Cheeseman — Bullivant that was.’

‘Why— Cherry !’ In the train of your false enthusiasm a dark pause filled with breathings: Cherry Bullivant Cheeseman sounded bronchial, or corseted, or perhaps she had taken the plunge too quickly.

The princess threw in something appropriately banal. ‘How clever of you to have tracked me down.’

‘Oh, but everybody knows — Dorothy. It’s in the papers.’

Dorothy de Lascabanes frowned. ‘I haven’t read one — not since I left Le Monde behind in Paris.’

It was Cherry who filled the current awkward pause. ‘You can buy it, Dorothy — at least I think so — all the foreign papers — from a stall outside the G.P.O. You remember the G.P.O., darling?’

Helpful Cherry could not have seen herself as the unwelcome revenant she was; ghosts are never so insubstantial that they don’t breed others, and strings of ghostly incidents, and odd, chilling, ghostly phrases. Cherry Bullivant had been present on too many first occasions: the First Meeting (accidental) in the Crillon lounge; first to see the ring after the improbable engagement; she should have played First Bridesmaid if Mrs Bullivant hadn’t been overcome by Methodist misgivings. A sweetly pretty girl, dark and glossy to match her name, Cherry was also practical: shouldn’t you ask for a settlement or something? it had occurred to her to ask. Born plain and shy, Dorothy Hunter, too, was of a practical, if more disillusioned nature: don’t you see Cherry I’m the one who’s expected to bring the settlement? If she had been less wealthy, though as luscious as Cherry Bullivant, she suspected even then that this desirable man would not have been enticed. No, she was born without illusions, about life anyway, and other people; instead she had been given determination which enemies saw as stubbornness, and Hubert failed to understand as love. Just as he could not believe in fastidiousness. It was her delicacy in sexual matters rather than his perversities which had ripped the ribbons off their marriage. Oh Cherry why did you make this telephone call? Dorothy Hunter, whose self-confidence began trickling away on her arrival as a bride at Lunegarde, glanced down as though expecting to catch sight of a last pool on the club carpet.

‘The point is,’ Mrs Cheeseman’s wheezy voice returned to insist from away down the tunnel of the telephone, ‘when are we going to see you, Dorothy dear? From all he has heard, Douglas would adore to meet you. I thought perhaps a little dinner — here at Warrawee.’

Mrs Cheeseman sounded comfortably middle-aged, and Dorothy de Lascabanes, still au fond a jittery girl, was grateful for it. ‘I’d love it, Cherry — just ourselves — so that we can talk;’ when to talk was the last thing she wanted, unless to be confronted with a whole battery of listening faces.

‘Oh, we’ll keep it small !’ Cherry Cheeseman lowered her voice to make her promise. ‘What about Thursday?’

All the way to Mother’s that morning Dorothy de Lascabanes was half conscious of a malaise from which she should not have been suffering: the steam of yesterday had lifted, leaving behind it a glossy morning; the taxi was diving, describing curves with such daring she could easily have claimed for herself expertise in living; she should have felt as free as she was ever likely to be on earth, returning to the country she knew through her instincts, but to which at the same time she was under no further obligation. Oh yes, she was free enough. Only the sickness persisted. Supposing. She had intended to have that check-up. Perhaps she should ask the advice of one of Mother’s army of nurses — while appearing not to, of course: you could look too foolish if the trouble wasn’t physical, as it more than probably wasn’t.