Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

Then the Princesse de Lascabanes succeeded in taking over. ‘Yes, Cherry, Mother is well — old though. You can’t say anybody old is altogether well. To some extent, I suppose, if their minds are active. And Mother’s mind is certainly that. She takes an extraordinary interest in what goes on around her.’

This was where Cherry Cheeseman cut in. ‘Activity, you see? That is what old people thrive on. That is why we got Mummy into the Thorogood Village.’

From the way she looked at you, Cherry must have had an inkling; more, you might be sharing a secret.

‘And she enjoys it?’ Dorothy asked.

‘She adored it from the beginning: the company of others her age, the discussions — the flower gardens, my dear! There are certain beds planted with perfumed flowers specially chosen for those whose eyesight is failing.’ Cherry Bullivant aimed an extra significant look at her friend Dorothy Hunter.

‘I’m so glad, Cherry, your mother is happy at the Thorogood Village.’

The ladies only vicariously involved were standing almost at attention as they waited.

‘Mummy died a few weeks after being admitted, but Matron assured me she appreciated what Douglas and I had done for her.’

Dorothy’s heart was bounding in her side.

Then a gust of apprehension seemed to blow amongst the silent ladies; and Mrs Cheeseman’s voice suggested, ‘Don’t you think it’s time to go down to the boys?’

So they did.

Downstairs the men might not have had enough of talking bawdy and money, except for Brian Learmonth and the Australian Writer, who had ganged up in a corner, and who looked a case of two people too much alike, who had exhausted their stock of malice, and were bored with each other. When Mrs Cheeseman led in her retinue of women, all with the bland eyelids of those who have recently exchanged confidences and flushed the lavatory, the Australian Writer announced to his companion, ‘This is where I help myself to a stiff one.’

After dinner was more intimate than before, if also more tedious. The novelty of a French princess, who was only an Australian underneath, had already worn thin. The detergent knight at one stage was unable to contain a fart. While Christian names of absent acquaintances were being flicked back and forth as light and hollow as pingpong balls, Dorothy was allowed to withdraw inside her thoughts, as though she had really been speaking a foreign language and everybody was exhausted by their own smiles and efforts to communicate.

Only the wife of the detergent knight would not leave well alone, but came and sat beside her new friend. Tm going to ask you a favour,’ old Lady Atkinson begged; ‘if one day you will visit me, my dear, and I’ll make you some of my pumpkin scones.’

The princess thanked the kindly old thing, and immediately asked Mr Learmonth to find her a glass of water.

‘Nothing wrong, I hope?’ Lady Atkinson anxiously asked.

No, there was nothing wrong, Dorothy assured; actually, it was the murder she had been contemplating, and was pretty certain to commit since her visit to the house of one who had brought it off successfully.

Ever since dinner Cherry had been, not avoiding her, merely too busy pouring coffee and urging her guests to get drunker on liqueurs. At times you caught glimpses of a hectic eye, a back less powdered than before, as Mrs Cheeseman circulated with noticeable heaviness.

When suddenly she appeared to force herself to approach the Princesse de Lascabanes, and bending over her, offer a personal message, however indistinctly delivered. ‘Drink this, Dorothy; it will do you good,’ as she stood a brandy balloon, more than half filled, on the table beside her guest.

Because Mrs Cheeseman moved away at once, Madame de Lascabanes hadn’t time to refuse: not all the brandy in the world would have melted the sobriety in which she had been frozen by Cherry’s earlier admission, not to say her recognition of a capacity for treachery equal to her own.

While Lady Atkinson continued smiling: at the balloon; for the generous hand which had poured such a quantity of brandy for a friend; for her own good luck at meeting and being accepted by such a distinguished lady as this princess. The old woman was beginning to weave around their relationship a cocoon of the same golden threads from which, as she told it, her marriage had been spun, and by which she was joined to her beloved grandchildren. Lady Atkinson was most anxious for the princess to visualize these children in their perfection, and had already dashed off a water-colour or two when Dorothy felt she must escape from the old woman’s delicately tinted world in which she was a harsh impostor.

At first she tried making excuses for herself. ‘I’ve been neglecting my mother. Tomorrow I must spend more time — the whole day with her. We never succeed in dealing with all we have to talk about.’

Lady Atkinson was charmed. ‘She’ll love that, dear, I’m sure. It’s hard for anyone old and helpless to kill time.’

Finally her own hypocrisy spurred the princess into going in search of Mrs Cheeseman to say goodbye. At least nobody interfered, or offered to help: either she had gone about it too discreetly; or was she unlikeable? she wondered at the mirrors she passed. Certainly her mouth had grown thinner from preoccupation, her cheekbones chalkier and more exposed. So she moistened her lips and reminded herself that her friend had arranged this dinner out of affection for her. She hoped her eyes, her best feature, would not let her down while expressing in return the grateful affection she ought to feel.

She found Mrs Cheeseman lying on the bathroom tiles, crumbs of plaster in her hair.

‘What on earth happened?’ Knowing perfectly well did not prevent an increase in Dorothy’s desperation.

‘Nothing happened. I fell down.’ For somebody so huge and purple who had suffered a recent fall, Cherry did not sound unduly plaintive. ‘I fell, Dorothy. And the curtains came — with me.’

When her friend had heaved her as far as the bed, again Mrs Cheeseman wheezed, ‘Thank you, darling. You’re a real — ppal,’ each word flickering inside a fume of brandy.

Dorothy thought she was entitled to feel virtuous. ‘Would you like me to send your husband?’

‘Oh, husband! Husbands aren’t any use — they know too much.’ Cherry’s head was rolling uncontrollably in the rucks of ice-blue satin. ‘And you, Dorothy — I let Ethel Atkinson bore you — ad naus …’ She coughed the rest of it away.

‘But Lady Atkinson was sweet! She was telling me about her grandchildren.’

‘Nasty little bastards! Last week they pulled the legs off a clutch of live chickens, and poked out their eyes with sticks. But that isn’t what Grannie sees.’

Through her own nausea, Dorothy was clinging to a hope that Mother — but Elizabeth Hunter always saw: she saw the worst in everyone.

Then Cherry Cheeseman, who had closed her eyes, opened them wide at something she appeared to have discovered. ‘Why do you hate your mother, Dorothy?’ ‘How can you be so cruel, Cherry?’

Fortunately she was saved from further interrogation: her friend passed out.

As Madame de Lascabanes fled, snores pursued her from out of the ice-blue satin. If there was no running away from herself, she must at least escape from the Cheeseman house, with its implications, and downright accusations. But more was prepared for her, it seemed. On an antique sofa, in an alcove halfway down the stairs, the Australian Writer had arranged himself, or perhaps more accurately, had been arranged, in an attitude more decorative, though no less drunken, than Cherry Cheeseman’s on the bathroom floor. He could have been put there on the sofa expressly for the discomfiture and humiliation of the Princesse de Lascabanes, on whom his eyes began to focus purposefully. As she slipped past the unavoidable alcove, his mouth was working to expel the words it was loaded with.