Undoubtedly neither of them would look at her again. Perhaps it was her loose hair. Or was she old? Or mad, perhaps?
Whatever it was, they respected it: the men were as reverent as a cloister of nuns.
‘I expect you live over at the forestry camp.’ A pointless remark, but one which she hoped might put them at their ease.
Yairs, they lived at the camp; they were employed by the Department.
‘I’m staying with the Warmings.’ It was too obvious, but she told. ‘They had to leave. One of their boys was taken sick.’
The men probably knew this: telephone lines in remote places are usually public property; but the hairy belly murmured, ‘Go on, eh?’ out of regard for convention.
They still would not look at her; to do so might have been irreverent.
In the end she could only ask, ‘Now if I start back in that direction shall I come out somewhere near the house?’
Yairs, they began to explain, their reverential arms making signposts, their blackened hands trembling from recent exertions.
Some of the hairy creature’s sweat flung off his jowl on to the back of one of her hands. He realized, and looked embarrassed.
When she left them, they were smiling, but at the ground.
The walk back was monotonous. She would have liked to put up her hair now, but there was no means of fastening it since she had thrown away the pins. She went on. Just before entering the carob scrub which fringed the beach, she licked the back of her hand, sucking up her own salt together with what she liked to think the axeman’s sweat, and went sweltering or weeping through the glare off sand and ocean. As it happened, she was not a great distance from the spindly house. She walked slowly, less than ever capable of explaining the gifts which were showered on her.
The house felt empty, though somebody had made use of the kitchen. It could only have been Professor Pehclass="underline" a sliver of corned beef fat on a plate and a scattering of crumbs on the oilcloth had been left for a woman to dispose of. The sulks, or else her migraine, would have prevented Dorothy contemplating food.
Elizabeth Hunter tore off a lettuce leaf, and cut herself a wedge of mousetrap cheese. Eating her blameless cheese she envied the Warmings their complementary lives; she even envied them their child’s illness. In a burst of sympathy rather than inquisitiveness, she marched along the veranda to their room. They had barely stopped living in it, leaving off as they had, in haste and anguish. Behind curtains dragged together at the last moment, there was still a smell of privacy: Helen’s powder on the dressing-table, Jack’s shirt rolled in a ball in a dark corner. Children’s faces looked at the intruder out of framed snapshots. Neither of her own children had looked her full in the face, either from photographs or in life.
It was really too irritating, not to say maddening.
‘Dorothy?’ When she reached the door which she knew must open to her, Mrs Hunter rattled the knob.
Now she was feeling old; she would be looking haggard: just how old and haggard Dorothy alone would see.
To get it over quickly, she sprang the door, and practically lurched into this narrow glaring box. Dorothy’s room was so empty it might never have been inhabited.
Elizabeth Hunter could not have hated Dorothy more than she did at that moment. More than Dorothy, she hated Edvard Pehl for having a part in her daughter’s defection. She was glad she had not washed up his insolent plate.
Till suddenly faced with her own insolence, her childishness, she returned to the kitchen, and scraped and washed the plate. The sliver of sweating fat, and the iron roof crackling at her in the language of heat, reminded her of the foresters, their misguided gentleness, and a reverence to which she was not entitled.
Because she was alone, she lay down and snoozed, or simply lay, during the afternoon. (If he was there at the other end of the house, he gave no sign.)
She was roused by hands, it seemed. No, by thin fingers twitching at the corrugated roof. Only wind after all.
She got up and washed herself as well as you can from a jug and basin. She powdered her revived skin. She annointed herself. Why not? Her life had been a ceremony. She put on the dress she had worn the night before. Though in fact old, age had not tarnished its splendour, nor blunted its fluting: like certain classic sculptures. the dress was designed not only to ravish the human eye, but to seduce time into relaxing its harshest law. Tonight she plaited her hair, and wound, or moulded it, into a crown; then bowed her head before slipping over it the gold and turquoise chain she had allowed the child to wear.
She dared only a quick look in the glass.
The wind had dropped. There was a breathlessness before sunset; irrelevant feathers of cloud were strewn on a white sky, just as she, at another level, was an irrelevent figure hanging around the veranda, living-room, kitchen, for no purpose she could think of, and in what was after all a ridiculous get-up. Well, she could cook something for the professor when he came: that would be purpose of a kind. She would make something simple, an omelette, say; though Dorothy had never approved of her omelettes. (You were not prepared to join your French daughter in the cult of slime.)
Waiting, she sat down at the piano and listened to her own affectation hammering part of its way through the Field nocturne she had played last night (it was the only one she could remember). She had been waiting then for a man to approach and recognize that she had control over more than this hackneyed, girlhood piece, over music itself, and the threads of a brilliant sunset, and experience in general. Whereas now the most she could expect was a dull Norwegian, to hammer at facts, as she was hammering at the warped keys, fetching the thrummed, disjointed phrases out of the salt-eroded, motheaten depths of the piano.
Thrumming. Drumming in the end. Until she was outdrummed.
She went outside, and there were the flying brumbies approaching down the beach, their veils of manes, and in the sky the cloud feathers more tenuous than before. The sun too, was curiously veiled and pallid above the single stretched black hair of the horizon. At least the brumbies were outrunners of life, and she was gratefully prepared to watch them stampede along the beach in the direction of the striped cliffs. But this evening the mob propped, wheeled, and broke off through the scrub, smashing and trampling as they charged at the hinterland.
Quite suddenly a bluish dark had possessed and contracted the landscape. She lit her gentle lamps. Out to sea a blue lightning tattered the sky, which gradually lost its paper flatness, becoming a dome of black, thunderous marble. The night below had begun to snuffle. From undulating at first, the wind slammed hard at the land. She saw trees recoiling, heels dug in as it were, like a crowd resisting physical prostration.
She ran down out of the house, possibly falling once, but thinking less of selfpreservation than of finding and shepherding her deadly companion. ‘Edvard!’ she called, then screamed into the wind, ‘ED-VARD!’ His stupidity was what worried her: all his science would not save his limbs from breaking.
Something flying could have been a board grazing her temple oh but sharp. For the moment a wound was less frightening than exhilarating the wind roaring into her lungs inflating them like windsocks. The bluest lightning could not make her flinch.
Till cold and sober, she saw black walls on the move across what had been a flat surface of water. She was blown back no longer any question of where twirled pummelled the umbrella of her dress pulled inside out over her head then returned her breasts rib-cage battered objects blood running from her forehead she could feel taste thinned with water a salt rain.
In this solid rain herself a groping survived insect a staggering soaked spider fetching up at what must be the bunker behind the house where they keep their wine.