Halfway up the stairs Mrs Macrory paused and gasped, ‘It must seem odd to find strangers living in your house.’
Basil could at least turn the Voice on. ‘Hardly ours. We left too young.’
Dorothy had for protection her authentic upper-class stridency, as well as the legend of nobility, both of which worked as a rule. ‘We were sent back for part of the holidays,’ she blared, ‘almost always. To our father.’ The mystic word troubled her more than when it cropped up in her prayers.
‘Gosh, yes, those were holidays!’ Basil had a brief glimpse of himself as juvenile lead, carrying a tennis racquet, in a farce.
He felt at once that the line had misfired: they were possibly expecting the tattered crimson of a grand manner, but he was too exhausted, too travel-sodden for histrionics; nor was it any advantage that one member of his audience had her back to him, and the other coming behind with the baggage was little more than a heavy breathing. If Mrs Macrory were to turn, he would win her over with that infallible moist stare; but she would not.
It was he who turned, to introduce some business into the scene in which they were stuck. ‘Anyhow, I see no reason why I shouldn’t carry my bag.’ He might have matched heartiness with a wide gesture, but the stairs cramped his style: in the play he made for possession of the suitcase, his hand slithered ineffectually past an unresponsive, hairy arm.
Macrory made a devious lowing sound, and continued mounting. His wife would do the answering.
She looked over her shoulder laughing somewhat automatically. ‘Physical exertion is Rory’s speciality.’ Finding she had embarrassed herself, she showed them her back as before, and brought them shortly to the landing.
Mrs Macrory—‘Anne’ in her reply to Wyburd’s letter — was a woman neither young nor old, her distraught hair prematurely grey, or dusty in keeping with the state of her house. If she had not been in the middle of a pregnancy, her cheeks might have looked less gaunt, her eyes less hollow and flannel-edged. By nature coldly explicit, the voice would have carried conviction if it hadn’t sounded permanently surprised. Anne Macrory had the air of a social worker trapped in a life she had warned against.
As the party reached the landing, various children on whom the social worker had not been working, appeared in doorways in bitty costumes, while one or two were still stumbling up the stairs in the wake of the invasion. Some of the children were already tall and thin, with knobbly wrists and noticeable salt cellars, but the mother had not yet shown herself in the little stumbling tumblers, tripped by curiosity and their hems.
Anne Macrory showed the Hunters into what Dorothy remembered, at first scarcely, then with repugnance, as their parents’ bed- and dressing-rooms.
‘I hope you’ll be comfortable.’ Mrs Macrory looked around what was a room in her own house, and touched a towel hanging on the rail at the foot of an enormous Hunter bed.
The Princesse de Lascabanes murmured and blushed: she would have liked to help her hostess out of an embarrassment, but lacked the skill.
Macrory dumped the bags in the suite the visitors would occupy. (Basil gloomily supposed he must settle for the stretcher and the dressing-room.)
The younger children seemed drawn to their father. They clustered round him. The youngest began climbing up one of his legs, but was thrown off just before grabbing a handful of crutch.
Rory Macrory was a physical man. Black, wiry hair made him look younger than his gaunt and dusty wife. But he might not have been. He was crude, perhaps deliberately so: shirt open almost to the navel to advertise his opinion of a famous actor and a princess. Though his smile was impressively white, and he flashed it often enough, it did not express pleasure.
Dorothy found herself remembering Brumby Island: it was the smell of sweat.
‘Think you can doss down here?’ His body thrown into a spectacularly plastic stance, Macrory dared all takers.
‘Why ever nn-n-ott?’ Sir Basil caught himself stuttering.
The Princesse de Lascabanes returned out of an apathy. ‘We are the ones who should apologize for complicating such busy lives.’ The stalactites of charm dripped and glittered in this cavern of a room.
It was too much for the musclebound Macrory, who staggered out, smiling his joyless smile, strumming his exposed chest as though it were a hairy guitar.
Anne Macrory was the one who did the talking, in a voice she must have refurbished for the benefit of the princess: her words were formed so cleanly, however confused their sense of direction. ‘Oh dear,’ she started sighing when the guests came down, ‘I meant to lay the table in the dining-room, but have fallen behind — as you see — with everything — tonight.’ A used saucepan she was clutching escaped from her hands to bounce on the kitchen floor. ‘Timing is essential, isn’t it?’ She opened the door of one of the ovens in a fuel range and let out a smell of burning fat. ‘That is not what it seems,’ she explained; ‘mutton is more digestible if overdone.’ Though a forthright opinion, it was haunted by a waning spirit; while almost simultaneously, a precarious mountain of unwashed pans slid crashing into the sink, and a middle girl appealed to her mother for help with a stringy hair-ribbon.
Sir Basil Hunter welcomed the idea of eating hi the kitchen: it would save both time and trouble, and they would get to know one another quicker. The princess, who had noticed the marmalade smears on the table, was more niggardly with her enthusiasm. It cheered her only slightly to think she might give the oilcloth a wipe while their hostess was dealing with the burnt mutton. But the children would be watching, and children’s eyes daunted Madame de Lascabanes.
Just before dinner, Basil nipped out for a pee, in a darkness full of animals. From the veranda edge he became part of the conspiracy: his water and the frost hissed together. A beast stopped cropping at the grass, but saw fit to start again.
Basil stood listening and shivering awhile. To be passively accepted by your natural surroundings is only temporarily gratifying. What he craved was confirmation of his own intrinsic worth as opposed to possibly spurious achievement. Which might not be forthcoming, however. The darkness continued to offer the kindly indifference of nature at its domesticated fringes, while the house behind would probably never share its secrets with one who had renounced life for theatre.
Upstairs, a child began to cry, then a man to comfort in broken resonances. It worked in spite of, perhaps because of, the absence of technique, in a scene in which Sir Basil did not take part.
He broke away after that, back into what was more simply a darkened set where in accordance with some rule of nightmare he had been denied the opportunity to rehearse. He barged on, without exactly panicking, his person the victim of knobs and corners and low-hung lintels, before catching sight of a crack beneath a door. He had to reach this splinter of light, and did, after grazing his heels on a downward flight of steps, and thumping the flags with an abruptness which numbed his kidneys, took away his breath, and let off fireworks inside his skull.
When Sir Basil made his entrance with a real limp instead of that mannerism which passed for one, he advanced a shoulder, exorcised the wrinkles from his brow, exposed his jaw, and waited for the recognition he was not accorded. Again he found it was not his scene.
Anne Macrory was launched on a speech regardless of the colander she was holding, and from which the cabbage water was dripping in runnels down her skirt. Dorothy (a bad actress) had borrowed an apron and was standing frozen by the kitchen table. On and off she touched the cutlery to imply she had laid the places. A child positioned at the sink was running her finger round the brown at the bottom of a basin of fat; a smaller child was seated on floor L.C. pulling the legs off a toy horse.