What did they call it? Dettol? Cool, anyway. Sterilizing. Was it better this way: to be sterilized out of existence? I don’t mind dying, Dr Gidley, but I do expect my nurses to protect me against worse than death: such as the visitants you do not conjure up for yourself, worst of all the tender ones.
‘Shall I be strong enough, I wonder?’
Holding her patient’s wrist, Sister Badgery found it unnecessary to answer: the pulse was remarkably strong.
When they were both shocked, if not positively alarmed, by an interruption to their celebration.
The door opened.
‘Sister, can she be seen?’ It was Mr Wyburd in something too loud for a whisper and less than his usual grammar. ‘The princess has arrived. Her daughter.’
As if this were not enough, a second figure was pushing rustling past the one at the door: for Mrs Hunter it was sound perfume joy despair; whereas Sister Badgery saw a tall thin hatless woman, somewhere around fifty (to be on the kind side) her dress unsurprising except for its simplicity and the pearls bounding about around her neck, and on her bosom, as she half ran half staggered.
A princess shouldn’t run, the nurse recovered herself enough to disapprove; and she shouldn’t have a horse face.
But Dorothy floundered, imperviously, on. ‘O man Dieu, aidez-moi!’ she gasped, before assuming another of her selves, or voices, to utter, ‘Mother!’ and lower, ‘Mum!’
Then, by act of special grace, a blind was drawn over the expression the intruder was wearing for this old mummy propped up in bed, a thermometer sticking out of its mouth; if life were present, it was the life generated by jewels with which the rigid claws were loaded.
The princess fell against the bed, groping through the scents of Dettol and baby powder, to embrace, deeper than her mother, her own childhood.
Rejecting the thermometer with her mouth — lucky it didn’t break off — Mrs Hunter was smiling, whether in bliss or fright it was difficult to tell.
Till she giggled through her flux of tears, ‘Too much excitement! I think I’ve wet myself.’
Madame de Lascabanes had felt her anxiety, together with a morbid craving for acceptance, turn to rage, as she endured the humiliations of the airport.
The man said, looking through her passport, ‘“Princess Dorothy de Lascabanes”, eh? French subject. Born at Gogong, Australie. Waddayerknow!’
The princess glared back along the ridge of her white nose. Her rather flat breasts were heaving beneath the uncomplicated little dress she had chosen for the journey: her faithful old Chanel; how would she manage when it wore out?
‘What business is it of yours where I was born?’ The unaccustomed language was making her spit.
‘Only reading what’s in the passport.’
‘I should have thought my birthplace beside the point — in the circumstances.’ The rustiness of her English made it sound ruder, which was what she had intended after all.
‘That’s what comes of offerun friendship. But we won’t hold it against yer, lady. Welcome to yer native land!’ The man laughed, and handed back the passport.
‘I’ll report,’ she began; but to whom? and for what?
She was by now more humiliated by her own ill temper than by what had been only questionable insolence in the passport official.
It might have been worse at the customs if she had not clenched her jaws, after deciding to answer any questions as briefly and coldly as she knew how: French economy in fact.
The surly youth in an official’s uniform who began stirring up the two bags packed by herself with such practical ingenuity, immediately put her to the test. Again, in rummaging through the case in which she carried her make-up, her tissues and so forth, as well as a few jewels, he provoked, but failed to draw her; not even when running his hands through the jewels with a cynical air of estimating their value. (They were certainly an impressive lot: some, gently lustrous, others, by the grubby airport light, imperiously brilliant. Her spoils. If she had not been so well-informed in the details of Hubert’s private life, she might have lost the battle for the jewels; but cette créature vulgaire, cette infecte Australienne simply knew too much for her former belle-mère, the old Princesse Etienne, to launch a successful offensive.
At least the customs official’s lack of respect was not expressed in words; she might not have borne it otherwise. Silently she hid her gall as he silently poured a few of her sleeping pills into his hand; and when he left his fingerprints on her books, as he scuffed up the pages, always ferretting, almost breaking the spine of her precious Chartreuse de Parme.
He only opened his mouth to mumble, while sticking a plastic strip on her violated luggage, ‘Bet you get a good read out of some of these French books of yours.’
For a moment she regretted insisting that nobody should meet her, and that she had avoided travelling by the line she thought Basil most likely to choose. All she could do now was ignore, lower her discreetly smeared eyelids, dust down the coat she was carrying (her rather mature Persian lamb) and stalk behind the barrow on which her bags were being wheeled away. The briefest glance at her own reflection ought to restore her confidence if it were to falter. As it did. And her impeccable reflection let her down.
Dorothy Hunter’s misfortune was to feel at her most French in Australia, her most Australian in France. Sometimes she wished she had been born a Finn: she might not have felt so strongly about it. She had only met a couple of Finns; but Australians — here they were, teeming around her, the older men like mattresses from which the hair was bursting out, or those younger, more disturbing ones, hipless, and over-articulated; the women, either in loud summary shifts, apparently with nothing underneath, or else imprisoned in a rigid armature of lace, shrieked at one another monotonously out of unhealed wounds. Some of the women looked as though they would expect to die in hats.
The Princesse de Lascabanes pushed her way between the bodies, using her hands united in an attitude of prayer inside the lumped-up coat she was carrying. Protected by this fur buckler, Madame de Lascabanes shoved on, to arrive beside the queue of infiltrating taxis, where she overtipped (one of the principles of ‘poverty’) the unsuspecting, decent man her porter — or whatever he was: she had all but forgotten her native language.
As she entered the cab she was on the verge of crying; in fact she did drop a tear or two after bumping her head and giving the address, ‘The Queen Victoria Club.’
After very little correspondence the princess had been elected an honorary member of this irreproachable institution to which she now intended to drive. Go to Mother’s later in the day, after resting. She was too écoeurée at the moment to risk being dragged under by the emotional demands of a domineering old woman. Carried along an impersonal expressway from the airport she would not allow herself to think of Mother, least of all ‘Mummy’. Were you really rapace as your belle-mère had insisted? Were you a SNOB? as every second Australian seemed to accuse: the bursting mattresses, the hipless Gary Coopers of your youth, not forgetting the fe-males, blue-glaring out of their wounded leather.
Dorothy Hunter might have had a good cry if, on opening the wrong bag, she could have found her tissues. I have never managed to escape being this thing Myself.
Instead she addressed the driver’s neck, ‘ Voyez—’ coughing for her lapse, ‘I’ve changed my mind. Take me to Moreton Drive, will you?’ adding, strangely, superfluously, ‘To my mother’s house.’