Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

‘I knew you would.’

‘Why?’

‘You were always such a fretful thing. And in a club bed. Those women in the dining-room must have frightened you stiff.’ Dorothy was about to protest, when her mother asked, ‘How did you pass the night if you couldn’t sleep?’

‘Oh, I read — and thought.’

‘What did you think about?’

‘I don’t know. Business matters. People I’ve known.’ Dorothy progressed with caution.

‘Money and lovers,’ Mrs Hunter corrected dreamily; then she laughed. ‘Or non-starters.’

The pearls the princess was wearing could have been billiard balls: they cannoned so deafeningly off one another.

‘Tell me what you read last night.’ Mother could never leave well alone.

‘The Chartreuse ,’ Dorothy replied tout court.

‘It was your father’s favourite book— The Charterhouse of Parma .’

‘Oh? But he wasn’t a reader. How do you know?’

‘I found out a lot of things when I got to know him. He’d been reading books. This one in particular: there were crumbs between the pages, coffee stains. He admitted he loved it. We read it together the weeks before he died. He loved that woman.’

‘Who-Clélia?’ she hoped.

‘No. The other — the duchess. He admired her brilliance.’

‘I find her dishonest in some respects.’

Dorothy looked for signs of exhaustion in her mother, but this morning the mummified head seemed filled with steel wheels.

‘Everyone is more or less dishonest. They may not murder, or forge cheques — dishonest with themselves, I mean. This — Sanseverina was no more dishonest than any other beautiful woman, or — or jewel. An emerald isn’t less beautiful, is it? for the flaw in it?’

It was Dorothy who was exhausted; she mumbled, ‘I can’t think.’ In fact, her thoughts, her aspirations — which were also her dishonesties — were rattling round inside her like the loose seeds in a maraca.

At least the state into which she had been plunged gave her the opportunity to hate her mother more honestly.

‘How do you find Arnold? Do you think he’s deteriorating?’

Why Arnold? Yes, Dorothy hated her mother.

‘Not in the least deteriorated,’ the princess answered primly. ‘Now Mr Wyburd is a man who is completely honest, I’d risk saying.’

Mrs Hunter laughed. ‘Upright.’

And Dorothy hated her mother for reviving in her the milky white caress she had experienced in her half-dream the night before.

It was a relief that Sister Badgery should appear with a tray.

‘Better late than forgotten completely! Here’s our egg, Mrs Hunter — our lovely, coddled egg — topped with cream and a pinch of herbs — and all prepared by me because poor Mrs Lippmann broke her bridge and had to rush off to the dentist.’ Sister Badgery gave the princess such a look she wondered whether this odious nurse wasn’t more than her accidental ally.

Mrs Hunter said, ‘You know how I hate egg.’ She clamped her jaws to show she would resist.

‘You like brandy, don’t you, dear? There’s brandy in the coffee for those who eat the eggs that are good for them.’

As the jaws were unclamped the aged child’s lips began filling with desperation; they looked blistered. ‘But I need the brandy.’

‘You need the good eggs that nourish.’ Sister Badgery arranged the bib.

‘I need fire — when the fire’s almost out.’

‘Whatever for? It’s summer, dear.’

‘To inspire me.’

‘If you eat up your egg, that will be inspiration. Think of the phosphorus.’

‘All nurses are the same,’ Betty Salkeld gulped through a splather of forced egg. ‘Kate Nutley’s wouldn’t allow her the toffee on the caramel custard if she didn’t pick the fish’s head.’

‘Phosphorus again!’ Sister Badgery, who always knew when she was right, celebrated her own wisdom by driving in another spoonful. ‘You never told me what became of this Kate Nutley.’

Revolving the egg mess on her tongue, Mrs Hunter spluttered, ‘I — don’t — know. Well, of course, I really do. They must have driven her — nutty.’ At least the nurse and her charge had a giggle.

The Princesse de Lascabanes was by now so revolted she got up. Her elastic was eating into her; influenced by other behaviour she dragged it down by ugly handfuls.

‘Coffee, mad- dahm, if I fetch a second cup?’ the much-occupied nurse managed to call over her shoulder.

‘Thank you, no — Sister.’

‘Dorothy’s going to the lavatory,’ Mrs Hunter whispered, and watched the right direction.

It was such an unexplained exit it might have suggested just that: which was what the princess hoped. She had even considered pulling the chain at a certain stage, but decided against wasting time on realistic detail as you couldn’t wholly depend on the nurse’s continued dedication to the egg ceremony. So the princess went racing down to where her serious business lay. As she hurried, steadying herself on a rail which was burning her hand, she already heard in her mind’s ear, a tray pursuing her down the stairs with empty or rejected crockery jumping and stamping on it. However important it was for her to investigate, it would be equally important for Sister Badgery to observe.

So the Princesse de Lascabanes’s pearls bounced, and Dorothy Hunter’s eyes were set in an anxious glaze, as they reached the hall Of course it was ridiculous in a house where you, not the German-Jewish housekeeper, not the boiled nurse, not even your senile mother, were mistress; and what you now heard in actual fact, was something crashing in the room above, subsiding in waves of porcelain fragments, and finally, instead of slaps, ripples of united giggles. Sister Badgery would almost certainly never be your ally.

Since the whole house was against her, in spite of the claims to which she was entitled from having spent her childhood in it, Dorothy de Lascabanes stalked more warily than before. Somewhere she brushed against a very old raincoat. A parasol she upset in passing, fell between her legs and might have brought her down, but she saved herself, and it, carrying the parasol along to use in her support.

The kitchen, the pantry, all the offices, were at least spotless: trust the German creature. The belle-mère herself could not have looked so keenly into cupboards; yet there was not a scrap of incriminating evidence, until, in the scullery, a bowl with a growth of green-to-bluish fur. The princess slammed the door on an obscenity; before it struck her that probably everybody has their basin of fur.

For the moment directionless as she revolved on the shining linoleum, Dorothy Hunter tried to persuade herself: remember the light through leaves, the movements of birds, a sweaty but honest pony plodding homeward under casuarinas, Stendhal the laser beam; while she continued hearing the trit-trit of a hollow maraca.

‘O mon Dieu, miséricorde !’ Instead, you are losing touch with all the positive signs and your own better intentions; you are led in the direction of the garbage bin, to tip the lid with the ivory ferrule of Mother’s dilapidated parasol.

Then the Princesse de Lascabanes began to rootle, in the practical, but joyless tradition of domestic bloodhounds, stirring up an inevitable stench: of coffee grounds, cabbage stalks, a whole alphabet of grey potato peelings, and the damp rot which sets in when newspapers fulfil their other function. To rootle was the real reason for her descent to the kitchen, the princess herself almost had to admit. To create a stink. Which she now managed. She brought it out, skewered to the ferrule of the lace and ivory parasol: as much as two whole kilos of good filet de bœuf on the point of putrefying.