Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

Madame de Lascabanes stripped off her gloves, dumped her bag: it tumbled off the bedside table, and lay; she seized the freckled claws, and asked, ‘Do they look after you, darling?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Rub your back regularly. Change you often enough. Keep you fresh.’

‘Why? Do I smell?’

‘Of course not! I was only inquiring generally.’

‘They spend far too much time messing me about. But that’s what they’re paid to do, isn’t it? Poor wretches!’

‘I shouldn’t have thought of them as “poor wretches”. They’re paid very well. The award’s ridiculously high.’

‘What do you know about awards?’

‘Only what I’ve found out.’

Overcoming her repugnance for the signs of human decay, the princess stooped to kiss the papery cheek, and was again victimized by the past. Oh Mummy can’t we stay together? can’t you come into my bed? To sleep blissfully secure. In this dress? do he sensible Dorothy you must know Mummy’s expected at dinner. The fingers as pink-tipped the dress as slippery scentful white as — what was it? Tuberoses darling somebody thought they were paying me a compliment .

Cling, for God’s sake, to the present. ‘Only what I’ve found out,’ Dorothy de Lascabanes repeated, and what that was could have been as distasteful to her as the body’s corruption.

Even so, screwed up for ruthlessness, she felt inside her a movement too physical to be ignored, as though conscience had become the baby sterility had prevented her having. Her lips seemed to grow thick and blubbery as she withdrew them from her mother’s cheek. She had to go quickly and stand looking out of the open window.

‘Basil will be here presently,’ she flung back over her shoulder as hard as she could.

‘I expect he will have found out a whole lot more.’

‘I doubt it. Basil has his gift; beyond that, I suspect him of being a wobbly, helpless male.’

‘Basil was the affectionate one.’

‘His manners were always flamboyant. And it’s an advantage to be a man, Mother.’ Dorothy’s mirth was so dry, she herself was reminded of a lizard, possibly a deadly one; again she felt guilty, no longer on this old woman’s account, but for the people she could see strolling through the park below, innocent of what might be in store for them, at any thicket, even in the open grass.

‘What was that man’s name, dear?’

‘Which man, Mother?’ As if your instinct for danger had not forewarned.

‘You know — the Norwegian — when somebody invited us to an island.’

Dorothy did not think she could bring herself to force it out from between her teeth; but Mother seemed to have lost interest since she had got her own back. If she had. Out of a haze of sentiment and tuberoses, she had conjured for you this solid land mass, or island of hate: its stinging sand, twisted tree-roots, and the brumbies snapping at one another with yellow teeth, lashing out with broken hooves as they stampeded along their invaded beach.

Dorothy de Lascabanes did not have to remind herself she had never hated anyone so bitterly as she had hated their mother on their brief visit to Brumby Island. She should remember Elizabeth Hunter’s treachery on that occasion could only make the most brutally reasonable plan her children might now conceive for her seem morally defensible.

Jack and Helen Warming were going on ahead to the island, to open up the house and get in some serious fishing before the arrival of their guests. The Hunters would fly up later from Sydney to Oxenbould, and there transfer to the helicopter Jack was chartering to take them across to Brumby. From the beginning Dorothy wondered why they were invited. The Warmings had never been more than superficial acquaintances living in another state. Though Helen and Dorothy had gone to the same school, Helen had been a junior when Dorothy was at the point of leaving. Then there was Mother, a most incongruous element: on finding this out for herself she would develop the fidgets, and start rearranging other people’s furniture and lives.

‘I know what’s on your mind, Dorothy. Don’t worry; I shall fit in. Though the island’s uninhabited except for a few forestry workers, the Warmings don’t pig it, so I’m told. In any case, I’ve never had a craving for luxury, and know how to pull my weight under primitive conditions.’ Her Edwardian man’s slang made it the more irritating.

The thought that the Warmings might be doing them a kindness started to fester in Dorothy. There she is Jack ditched by the Frenchman back on old Betty’s hands shouldn’t we do something about them only a couple of weeks won’t ruin the holidays. Becoming an obsession it nagged and throbbed, bringing on a migraine at times. Wouldn’t you think Jack the unfortunate Dorothy has probably reached the menopause it must be ghastly for her mewed up with that hideously successful ex-beauty of a mother. Till she looked to reason to rescue her from her thoughts: surely the Warmings would not have invited Mother if they had been taking pity on you? Dorothy knew that one of her worst faults was to suspect ulterior motives in others; and kindness always roused her suspicions.

Now, at the end of the journey, arrival practically upon them, everything smooth-running, so far no one specific to accuse, she felt afraid. It must be the helicopter. She was no good at this sort of thing: beneath them the straits burnished to silver by the heat; ahead of them the solid island trembling just perceptibly with the motion of their flight. If she could have heard a door closing behind her, and hidden herself, not only from strangers, but from kind friends. She had been wrong to come. Yes, to be perfectly truthful, it was the menopause, which Helen Warming would see, if she had not already guessed — or more likely, Mother told.

Seated beside her mother, Dorothy Hunter (still ‘de Lascabanes’, it might help to remember) pressed her hands together in her lap: held in the vertical position they would have suggested one of the Gothic attitudes of prayer; laid in her lap, they revealed too plainly the white pressure of nervous frustration, and by some law of architectural stress, helped to narrow her shoulders. By contrast the young pilot was relaxed, brown, naked it would seem, under his khaki shirt and shorts. Not that she was in any way impressed by this young man, only envious of his detachment.

As Mother would not have understood. Who was at the moment trying to burn her way into your thoughts using those blowtorches of eyes. You were not deceived, nor by the counterfeit smiles, the quirked corners of which were hung with webs of faint silvery wrinkles.

Dorothy looked away. She might have drawn comfort from the wrinkles if she had not imagined she could hear laughter trailing cool and indulgent through the noise and the suddenly torrid air. The pilot was bringing them down, she realized, on a strip of grey sand. Whether their landing would mean her mental release remained to be seen.

The women bowed their heads simultaneously as the helicopter touched down; its rotor, slashing at the light, collaborated with it in a whirligig of blue and green which scattered normally reliable values. In consequence Dorothy started throbbing again. On one side was the strait, flat and listless through a fringe of mean-looking mangroves; on the other, beyond pickets of eucalypts, rose the dark mass of a more esoteric rain forest which obscured, presumably, the ocean.

After climbing out of the machine, Dorothy’s legs felt as brittle and spindly as Mother’s looked.

But Mrs Hunter was not admitting to any of the physical shrinkage which can occur in lesser beings in exotic surroundings. ‘I must thank you for delivering us as sound as when we left the mainland.’ She advanced on the pilot while keeping him at a distance with an outstretched arm and white-gloved hand.