The Eye of the Storm (78 page)

Alfred my dearest dearest you are the one to whom I look for help however I failed,

And know that I alone must perform whatever the eye is contemplating for me.

To move the feet by some miraculous dispensation to feel sand benign and soft between the toes the importance of the decision makes the going heavy at first the same wind stirring the balconies of cloud as blows between the ribs it would explain the howling of what must be the soul not for fear that it will blow away in any case it will but in anticipation of its first experience of precious water as it filters in through the cracks the cavities of the body blue pyramidal waves with swans waiting by appointment each a suppressed black explosion the crimson beaks savaging only those born to a different legend to end in legend is what frightens most people more than cold water climbing mercifully towards the overrated but necessary heart a fleshy fist to love and fight with not to survive except as a kindness or gift of a jewel.

The seven swans are perhaps massed after all to destroy a human
will once the equal of their own weapons its thwack as crimson painful its wings as violently abrasive don't oh
DON'T
my dark birds of light let us rather—enfold.

Till I am no longer filling the void with mock substance: myself is this endlessness.

From the bathroom window Sister Manhood could see the moon had risen: it was full, or almost (the moon is always less than perfect the moment after catching sight of it).

Her breasts gathered on the sill, Flora Manhood was humming very slightly, down her nose, against her teeth. She would have offered her love if it had been asked for—not sensual love: no
men,
for God's
sake!
but in support of some objective, or idea. Unfortunately she was short on ideas, as Col had hinted on and off, except the one she had refused to entertain, and which Col had insisted he would nourish in her. She laughed lazily (not sensually) from between relaxed lips. Shriven by her menstrual blood, she was reconciled, she believed, to what had been a shaky vocation, and was anxious for Mary de Santis to arrive, so that she might impress her, not with crude zeal, but with what St Mary would surely recognize as altered vision.

In a minute she would return to her patient and together they would celebrate this change. She would wipe the old thing's bottom with a tenderness it had never before experienced, and surely Elizabeth Hunter, with her gift for scenting weakness in others, was not such a cynical bitch that she would laugh in your face and tear your intentions to shreds. She could, though.

Was it the bell? Not the tinkled ascent of silver notes but thin tin crumpling and a tongue abruptly flattened out into silence.

Sister Manhood left the window so quickly the sash shuddered, the panes rattled.

When she reached the bedroom the muslin curtain was waving from its rod as it did whenever a wind rose behind your back. The swollen curtain was filling the room. It could have upset the little bell, now lying on the carpet.

For that matter, it could have upset Mrs Hunter.

The nurse rushed to shut the window. ‘It's the climate!' she cried. ‘You don't stand a chance!' (Actually Flora Manhood had never given the climate a thought till Princess Dorothy had started drawing everybody's attention to it; otherwise a climate is what you are born to, and accept because you can't avoid it.) ‘The draught wasn't too much for you, was it?'

Mrs Hunter had slipped sideways on her throne while still hooked to the mahogany rails. One buttock, though withered, was made to shine like ivory where the rose brocade was rucked up. The eyes were mooning out through the mask which was the apex of her acolyte's creative skill.

‘Mrs Hunter?'

Never had the nurse felt so powerless, so awkward, as in slewing this totem into its orthodox position.

In spite of the several corpses she had dealt with, it was Flora Manhood's first death, and for this reason she walked backwards and forwards awhile, hissing and gulping, and trying to remember where to go from here.

She knew of course. The books tell you. The lectures. And Sister:
remove any jewellery Nurse it may fall into the wrong hands.
And practice: block every hole so that nothing
nothing
escapes.

Though the mind can become as functional as the digestive tract after your feelings have been minced up fine, it did not prevent her touching the body several times when she had laid it on the bed, not expecting evidence of life (she was too experienced for that) but illumination? that her emptiness, she ventured to hope, might be filled with understanding.

As for knowing what to
do,
the nurse was already turning back her sleeves in preparation for the unpleasanter duties she had been trained to perform. Her arms were strong rather than shapely. The carpeted landing was creaking and thundering around her as she advanced on the telephone, to report to the doctor that their patient was dead, that he should pay his last visit and confirm that her responsibility was ended.

A
T HIS LAST
dozing Basil had willed himself to wake early, to avoid any possible Macrory invasion, but on opening his eyes next, he was in some way conscious of having failed. It was early enough: in fact the sheets of spent moonlight still showed their random inkblots. Then why this shock of cold terror? He covered parts of himself as though his parents were standing at the bedside.

And Dorothy waking, crumpled, crushed. Hadn't she been supporting a weight? But smiling for Basil.

While prolonging the smile, Dorothy closed her eyes again. Less pressed for time in that the bed was officially hers, she could afford the extra snooze.

Till she too fully awoke to the same reverberating terror. The sheet hissed as she snatched up an armful of it to hide her breasts.

‘The telephone!' Whichever of them had uttered the word, it echoed the other's fears: ringing and ringing through a cold house; and ringing.

When the ringing stopped it was impossible to tell whether the telephone had given up, or whether somebody had intervened.

To escape from the clinging bed Basil tore himself out with such violence his balls tangled painfully. He was nothing less than skedaddling into the room beyond, resentful of a wind which was streaming past his nakedness. Nobody was exclusively to blame; though instinctively, he might have liked to hold Dorothy responsible.

Either exhausted or appeased she was slower to react. She could have been lingering amongst some of her more disreputable thoughts before clothing them for ever in convention. She lay nursing the bundle of grey, early-morning sheets and ailing blankets. The terror with which she had been flooded by the telephone had
almost ebbed before she threw them off. She glanced along her nose at her own distantly exposed limbs, which became, more distantly still, in Hubert's voice,
ton corps qui se réfuse aussi passionément que d'autres se donnent.

The Princesse de Lascabanes shot out of bed and put on her mouth before anything else. There was nothing she could have done to hide from that cold increasing light the cruel slashes in her cheeks. Her general gooseflesh, her flapping sinews, she was able to clothe effectively before the sound of slippers reached her door.

‘Entrez done!'
the princess called in a rational voice, ducking at the glass to know the worst about her hair; her heart would become visible, she felt, beating inside the gown she had swathed too tightly.

Mrs Macrory should have made the perfect messenger for tragedy: manner direct; speech precise (Scottish at one remove); of moral integrity to ensure a respectful relationship with the audience she was about to shock as well as console. But this messenger could not rid herself of the mouthfuls of ugly words; emotions which she should have curbed with objective tact, left her eyes goitrous.

‘They telephoned,' she began, and was cut off immediately.

Not to improve matters, Sir Basil Hunter made an entrance from the dressing-room, adjusting the cord of a robe he had thrown on in a hurry, tamping with the palms of his hands the hair which sleep had tousled. In spite of these side activities the great actor did not withhold his generous attention: he would not be accused of trying to steal someone else's scene.

‘They rang,' the messenger began afresh. ‘Mr Wyburd rang,' she corrected herself.

‘Qu'est-ce que vous voulez nous dire, chère Anne?'
If she had not steeled herself with her second language Madame de Lascabanes might have imitated the lamentable mouthing of her friend, whose hands she took out of charity to chafe and comfort.
‘Allons, voyons, n'ayez pas peur'
The princess half looked to Sir Basil to interpret, but saw him refuse; it would not have mattered greatly to any of them if he had accepted.

To Anne Macrory it mattered least of all: she was too high on
disaster. ‘Mrs Hunter, your mother—died,' she said, ‘yesterday evening.' It was so perfectly clumsily final the messenger sprayed the princess with the end of her line.

Incredulity rather than grief had moistened Sir Basil's eyes. (Dorothy thought her brother's expression made him look foolish.) ‘How did she die?' he was also foolish enough to ask.

‘I don't know,' Mrs Macrory sobbed.

The Princesse de Lascabanes pleated her brows and lowered her eyelids to accuse her brother's tactlessness and advertise her own formal grief. ‘She would have died peacefully, I expect, in her sleep. That is how it takes old people.'

She failed to prevent a whinge rising, which she tried to pass off as a wheeze; either way, it fanned her friend's distress.

‘How sad for you!' blubbered Mrs Macrory.

To disguise her shame for her hand in Mother's death and to celebrate an innocence which exists, if only in others, Dorothy embraced this poor woman. ‘So tenderhearted! I do appreciate your sympathy.' In fact Anne Macrory's innocence justified one's bursting into tears.

Scorn for Dorothy's hypocrisy might have blazed up in Basil. (Or does a woman desperate for self-respect, reach a point where she can Christian Science dishonesty?) In any case, he had his own, more important part to play: that of the son.

So Sir Basil tensed his calves; he began striding, stamping (excusable on a freezing morning) digging always deeper into the pockets of his robe, which, since their visit to ‘Kudjeri', he realized incidentally, equalled in sleaziness the garment decent Anne Macrory herself was wearing. It didn't deter him: with the twitch of an eyebrow, he raised his profile against the window (it faced east, and the sun was rising from behind the hills) to deliver his awaited speech.

‘I imagine everybody would agree that Mother had from life all she could have wished for: beauty, wealth, worldly success, devoted friends, and—friends. We would do wrong, surely? in mourning her. Nor can I feel that, after living her life to the full, she would
have regretted dying,' (appalling if he had been weak enough to settle for ‘passing away'; he might have fallen if it hadn't been for Dorothy) ‘if she was conscious of death at the time. It could happen, I suppose, that one who has led a materialistic life does become afraid at the last moment. I
hope
Mother was not afraid.' He glanced at Dorothy, who had been frozen into listening regardless of whether she wanted it.

Her grief had dired: perhaps Madame de Lascabanes anticipated an item of which she might disapprove, or it could have been because Mrs Macrory was doing the crying for all of them.

Anne appeared genuinely moved. ‘Whatever else, it's so terrible for the children!' Most of her own six had crept up by dribs and drabs and were standing behind her in a loose queue.

It made Dorothy realize that bereavement could become a luxury; she squeezed her friend for showing her what she personally would never enjoy.

Sir Basil frowned; he hadn't finished. ‘Well, nobody, not even her greatest admirers, can deny that Mother was materialistic. And vain. Shall I ever forget—the night of my arrival—the Lilac Fairy! Laughter revived the golden timbre for which his voice was famous; it conveyed a bounty rather than bitterness, as he heard it.

‘Poor darling,' Dorothy began to twitter in short sharp laughs, or coughs, ‘alone in that house with all those women! How they imposed on her! Luckily she was able to see the comic side. Mother had a certain superficial streak which is probably what kept her going. But her
aloneness
was pitiful.'

Mrs Macrory blew her nose on a crumpled mauve tissue she found in her pocket. ‘I didn't know her,' she remarked: she might have preferred to keep her vision of a dazzling figure descending from a car at the steps of ‘Kudjeri'.

Sir Basil was composing his last words. ‘For all her faults, she was an enchantress.' He would not look at Dorothy. ‘I'm fortunate to be her son.'

Dorothy would not look at Basil. The paddocks were coldly steaming by now. She chafed the backs of her own hands, and
glanced at her travelling-clock. ‘We must pack our things,' she announced to the room in general. ‘It wouldn't be fair to Mr Wyburd to delay getting there. I can imagine his distress: my parents were his close friends, and only incidentally, clients.'

Her excluding him from the relationship may have piqued Basil. ‘To any solicitor over a certain age, death must become just another formality. I shouldn't worry about the Wyburd: he's drawn up far too many wills.'

The abrupt descent to reality reminded Mrs Macrory, ‘I ought to be getting your breakfast.'

Sir Basil lowéred his voice, ‘Nothing elaborate,' he begged, ‘on such a morning;' and contracted his crow's-feet at her.

Though a person of serious intentions, Anne Macrory was already enjoying the pleasures of melancholy retrospect. ‘I don't know what the girls will do without you! The sewing lessons!'

Dorothy had begun the meticulous organization of her crocodile dressing-case: a present from Mummy and Dad. ‘At least we've fitted everybody out for the summer. And shan't we write to one another?' she suggested vaguely as Anne left, trailing after her the string of children.