Because why leave off her shoes? In Helen Warming’s case, it was from force of habit and living in a hot climate. But Elizabeth Hunter had done it to impress, if not to seduce. She was sitting sideways at the table, sipping the wine she had brought up from the bunker, exposing her slender, miraculously unspoilt feet from beneath the white, raw-silk hem. Her feet had the tones of tuberoses.
(Why are others given the physical attributes which belong to your true, invisible, hence unappreciated self?)
The white of the throat was mottled with green to golden reflections as the wine she was holding floated in the glass. ‘Isn’t it a bit sweet?’ she asked. ‘That slight Spritz is interesting, however.’
Perhaps she had overdone it; she threw back her head and more than sighed, she whimpered, ‘That poor child!’
‘Which child are you referring to, Mrs Hunter?’ The professor was gouging the last revolting fragment of jelly out of a fish’s skull.
‘Why, the Warmings’s of course! That boy who’s developed God knows what — polio? leukaemia even!’
‘Oh — no!’ Dorothy dug the points of her elbows into the table: she was weeping not only for the good Warmings’s innocent child, but for her own intransigent, and worse still, Mother’s possibly compassionate nature.
Professor Pehl remained more equable than either of them. ‘It is very unfortunate, that is for sure. But medicine is making all the time remarkable advances.’ He licked the juices from his knife, and having cleaned it, propped the blade against the edge of his plate.
He saw there was a pineapple to come. Mrs Hunter had torn out the flesh, and returned it to the shell, and replaced the crown of stylized leaves. Now when she lifted the lid, an insidiously sugared perfume mingled with the somewhat hostile smell of bruised fennel and the stench of charred, oil-tinctured fishskin.
For some reason Mrs Hunter and her daughter barely touched the pineapple, while watching Professor Pehl feasting on its jagged flesh.
Tonight the moon was glinting green above black water, the princess noticed, and could have lingered, brooding over this capricious image, together with the injustices to which a sensitive human being is inevitably subjected.
Till Dorothy, in redemptive mood, jumped up and as good as insisted, ‘Why don’t you let me do the washing up?’
Elizabeth Hunter made the appropriate murmurs by which acceptance is disguised as protest, while the professor, as replete male of some importance, could see no reason for dismissing the suggestion. So, when he had finished picking his teeth from behind a formal hand, he bowed, and followed Mrs Hunter, not without actually sidestepping the visible thoughts of this Princesse de Lascabanes who had already taken up her duties at the sink.
Mother’s voice on the veranda floated like the flamingo scarf with which she had waved the Warmings to their son’s sickbed. ‘Obliging of the moon always to do the right thing in landscapes like these.’
By the time the princess had finished the washing up (which failed to purge her of her spleen as she had hoped) the piano was at work again, though with a masculine authority, if not male heaviness. Hardly musical herself, Dorothy could only guess at Brahms, by the clotted chords, and what she recognized as an unmistakeably Germanic-skittish brio, as she slung the dishes around, and wiped a fleck of offending detergent off her upper lip. As a Frenchwoman she was bound to condemn the Germanic; as an Australian daughter she was contemptuous of a mother who could lie by moonlight on a chaise longue (where else would Elizabeth Hunter have chosen?) flicking her ankle at the music whenever she thought about it, making the tuberose tones come and go in her naked feet.
Her martyrdom folded, or stacked to drain, Dorothy went outside. The screen door clashed harshly with the mood Elizabeth Hunter would have wished to invoke. Her daughter hugged her fish-scales and a patch of sticky pineapple juice: they were honest humiliations at least. She went and sat on the higher ground outside the bunker where the Warmings stored their wine.
If he failed to scent you out by your fishy fumes, you would identify him by his characteristic reek and the sound of blunt toes exploring the formless surroundings. Here I am — Edvard — your skiapod. Not surprising he should hesitate; and still clogged besides, with Brahms. My which is it you say? Laughter — by courtesy of Mother (you can’t dispense with her entirely.) Fish shadows are more substantial than they seem — as you, an expert, must know,
He did. Her own no more than shadowy innuendo of a body had been pinned down, flattened flatter surely, by his substantial weight.
Dorothy de Lascabanes had so appalled herself that she sat up holding her elbows, while the grass, starved and vindictive, continued tilting at her thighs through her dress. Brahms must have stuck somewhere in mid-actuality; voices had broken out instead, in the kitchen, only a short distance from where she was aching on a hummock.
In different circumstances, Dorothy felt, she would not have allowed herself to eavesdrop. Now she was too frustrated to resist. There was a barrel, moreover, visible amongst the stilts on which the house was raised.
It did occur to the Princesse de Lascabanes: what if I topple off the barrel? tear my leg on a rusty nail? Quelle horreur— tetanus at least! But hearing, and eventually seeing from eye level as she clung to the sill, reinforced her limbs with steel.
Without his shirt, Edvard Pehl was seated astride a kitchen chair, arms folded along its back, one cheek resting on a forearm, eyes closed in what the expression of his face suggested must be bliss. The princess almost whinged in anguish: there, standing over him, bottle in hand, was Elizabeth Hunter, anointing this peeling, though still inflamed Viking with what appeared to be calamine lotion.
‘Don’t you find it soothing, Edvard?’
The professor answered, ‘Yes,’ or barely: it reached Dorothy as ‘esss’, the pearly tips of his little-boy’s teeth for a moment visible in his man’s flaming face.
She was infuriated. But of course Mother was to blame.
Elizabeth Hunter must have had faith in her own healing powers: she was radiant with charisma. ‘You poor dear!’ she murmured, as she stroked the scruffy, burnt back. ‘Somebody should have attended to you before. Before the worst.’
Edvard Pehl did not answer, but snuggled visibly against the chair.
And Elizabeth Hunter poured herself another pink handful, and clapped it, but ever so gently, between the suffering shoulderblades. ‘There’s nothing like calamine for driving out the fire.’ Now it was she who closed her eyes, as she raised her face, willing the inflammation to subside.
The Princesse de Lascabanes was so incensed she could feel the barrel tottering under her, and did not care.
‘You will tell me if I’m hurting you, Edvard?’ Mother commanded, but her little boy only sighed, and smiled out of the cushions of his own dreaming flesh.
After that there was the clop clop of renewed handfuls of calamine lotion.
As Mother stroked and soothed, her white, classic form poised at an admirably cool, though unconvincing, parallel distance from the body to which she was ministering, you could tell from her face that she was preparing to outdo the night, with its background of sea and moon on the one hand, and on the other, scrub stirring, wings brushing, frogs croaking out of damp-leather throats (also, alas, the creaking of a barrel). Dorothy could tell that Mother was about to change the slide in her magic lantern, and trembled to discover what its successor might be.