‘Tea, then. I adore tea.’
Madame de Lascabanes stuck to her pans. She often surprised in herself a practically mystical attitude towards the ordering of chaos, even in its more squalid manifestations. In different circumstances, she might have made a devoted and uncrushable femme de ménage. Strange that it was her French self which abounded in humility, while the Australian in her aspired to a place among the ‘happy few’.
‘Has she come to live with us?’ asked Mog, the fat girl who had scoffed the dripping the night before.
The mother was too distracted to attempt an answer. Before each of her children who had appeared in the kitchen, she set a plateful of burnt porridge. For the recalcitrant princess she managed to slide a cup of tea in amongst the litter at the sink.
The tea tasted bitter and stewed. It thrilled the Princesse de Lascabanes, as did her own consummate industry and the tongues of frosty air licking at her through the yard door.
‘What about Sir Basil?’ Mrs Macrory thought to ask, and became more distracted than before.
‘No idea. You know, I hardly know my brother.’ Indeed, Madame de Lascabanes was more intimate with the inside of this pan she was scouring.
It was too immoral for poor Mrs Macrory. ‘We were a close family.’ She sighed, and drifted to the screen door, and warmed her hands in her soiled sleeves, and returned uncomforted. ‘Rory’s gone to fork out the silage to the calves. He’ll be back later on, and we’ll see what plans he has for entertaining Sir Basil.’
The Princesse de Lascabanes narrowed her eyes, her lips, at the saucepan lid she had finished. She was holding it like a buckler between her self and the unspeakable Macrory; or herself and Basil, even; Hubert might not have existed; Father was at least dead; Fabrizio, a character she saw differently at successive readings, offered the greatest difficulties because substantially affected by the climate at waking.
Half opening in her, this dream of the night before was a wound more exquisite than any she had yet experienced.
By the time Sir Basil Hunter woke the frost must have thawed. The light reflected on the bare walls was suggestive of glossy, yellow-green apples. It had probably been a child’s room before the visitor turned him out: in one corner stood a toy cart. Early in the night Basil had grown resigned to the stretcher: he was too tired to sulk at discomfort. On waking, he was still tired and stiff, as though he had been on a journey in his sleep far longer than their drive to ‘Kudjeri’. Now he continued lying curled in the shape he had been longing to assume: that of a sleeping possum, or a bean before the germinal stage, or a foetus in ajar. He might snooze some more if nobody came to scold him. Each of the women in the house was a scold. If it were that thug Macrory he might have a knuckle duster with him. None of it greatly mattered to Basil in bed.
In fact nobody bothered about him. He shaved unevenly in cold water, and tried to decide which of his unsuitable clothes to wear for ‘Kudjeri’. His mind was beginning to grope around amongst its surroundings regardless of what the Macrorys had reduced them to. The physical context should not matter; but it always did. He patted his face in the flawed, deal-framed mirror. He wasn’t too bad, considering. Reassured, he roughed up the foulard at his throat, and wondered what Dorothy would be wearing.
When he went down he was surprised to find her in the kitchen, looking far less incongruous than he expected. She was arranging things in cupboards as though she had taken possession of the house.
Because of the march she had stolen on him, he asked with some severity, ‘Where are the Macrorys?’
‘She is starting the children on their lessons. He’s out around the place, doing something occupational, but will be back shortly to entertain you.’
Only then she looked at him, to give him the opportunity to grimace.
He took it, and at once felt annoyed with himself for having fallen into the trap: he was no longer sure which side Dorothy was on. She had tied up her hair in a Roman scarf, as though she were again a child dressing up on a wet afternoon. The scarf made the face fend for itself, which it did by not communicating. Her arms, he noticed for the first time, were not only lean, but leathery and muscular. No doubt her hands, with their long nails which usually exempted them from any form of drudgery except boredom, had already acquired a film of household grime, not to say kitchen sludge. No, he could not be certain which side Dorothy was on; when he needed her on his.
‘What do you want for breakfast?’ she asked.
‘There you’ve got me. Whatever they have.’
‘Men eat charred chops,’ Dorothy reminded him with every sign of gravity.
She even produced from out of a fly-proof cupboard a dishful of drought-fed, mutilated chops, and held one up, not for him to laugh at, mercifully he realized at the last moment. ‘Rory himself does practically all the outside work,’ Dorothy told; and let the chop fall back on the pile.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ll have a chop, if that’s what you advise. Or two.’
The Princesse de Lascabanes actually knew what ought to be done. Not only was she grilling the chops, so the stench told him, she was melting a lump of dripping in an enormous blackened pan, to fry up a mound of grey cold potato laced with ribbons of pale cold cabbage.
The blue fumes, the spitting, then the revolver firing a blank at memory, brought the image jerking to life. ‘You know—’ he wanted somebody to share it, ‘we might be on tour — in digs up north — doing for ourselves. Before anybody knew we existed.’ Encouraged by the fug of sentiment, he moved in on her and squeezed a buttock.
The princess did not like it. ‘Watch the grill!’ she shouted. ‘See if the chops are far enough gone.’
They looked infernal. ‘They should be. They’re writhing.’
In her irritation, she pushed him aside, to stoop, to peer, to frown: her recently contracted partnership with life made her as damn humourless as she had been when a girl. ‘A tough chop is easier to swallow if frizzled,’ she announced with bossy assurance.
Her opinion of him was probably as low as Shiela’s or Enid’s. Faced with his trio of contemptuous women, what he desired most, as ageing man and precarious actor, was respect rather than admiration.
Dorothy at least handed him a plateful of food, all the better for being primitive and mountainous: he tucked in, devouring with particular appetite the charred fat round the edges of the chops and those bits of the fried-up veg which had stuck to the pan. He had forgotten something, and Dorothy pushed the bottle at him to test his reaction to ritual. She stood watching obliquely, and only turned away, whether hissing or sighing it was difficult to tell, on seeing him consecrate amorphous matter, first with a turgid clot or two, followed by an ejaculation of authentic, plopping red; while the act transformed him into a boy, greedy for life as much as food, as he watched an old rain-soaked drover still sitting in this same kitchen chewing the greasy mass of tucker a boss’s cook had doled out as charity.
Macrory appeared too suddenly, as though bursting in might deliver him from a predicament by intimidating a pair of impostors.
He ignored the woman and jerked his head at the actor bloke. I’m gunner muster this mob of ewes we’re sending in.’ He showed his teeth in the ambiguous smile. If you’d care to come,’ the offer was a grudging one, ‘we’ll make tracks as soon as you’ve put away yer breakfast.’
Macrory drove his jeep at such a bat he might have been prepared to sacrifice himself if it would dispose of Sir Basil Hunter. On the back seat stood a bleached and matted kelpie, whinging old womanishly and draping a purple tongue over the driver’s shoulder.