After she had bathed the foot, using a tin basin Mrs Macrory had first dropped, and Mog retrieved and filled, she disinfected the cut with a powder Janet fetched from upstairs together with lint and an assortment of grubby bandages.
When she had bound him, coldness took over again in his nurse. ‘There you are!’ She turned away, and confessed to Anne Macrory alone, ‘I don’t trust our own crude methods. I shall have to ring the doctor.’
But it was no longer the age when doctors could be summoned at will to ‘Kudjeri’; and that evening a sulky Macrory drove the Hunters to Gogong in the jeep.
The bronze version of Alfred Hunter had its back towards them as they flew across the railway lines approaching the township through the dusk. Basil nudged Dorothy, but she was in no mood to encourage family jokes. He must remember that his sister was essentially a solemn bore.
On the return journey, a long wait at the doctor’s made it easier for him to resist glancing at the sculpture of their father. They tore up into the hills, through an amorphousness of dark, in the smell of antiseptics which accompanied them. The sequence of events and the drugs he had been given made him feel light-headed. Dorothy’s hair had escaped: once or twice it touched his cheek. Macrory cursed the road, the dark. From time to time Basil and Dorothy in the back seat were thrown at each other and stirred together. They recovered themselves. They might have been returning from a country dance, separating the pleasures from the disappointments. Not quite drunk.
When they walked into the kitchen a hardfaced Mrs Macrory looked at her husband and said, ‘I thought you must have had an accident.’
Everybody was hungry by then.
Basil went to bed soon after what they were coming to recognize as the standard meal at ‘Kudjeri’. The inflated importance of the day’s events as they occurred, had begun subsiding: they would soon no doubt assume their actual, flat significance.
Dorothy escaped into the study with Father’s Charterhouse of Parma which she had only slight intention of reading: holding the book would be her safeguard against anybody’s intrusion on her thoughts. Again a fire was burning, but tonight it had been only recently lit: the room was cold and smelt of ash. After drawing up her legs beside her on the broken springs of the daybed, she lifted the Indian counterpane draped to disguise the cracks and deforming bulges in the leather. By stretching out she was able to peer into the space between the floorboards and sagging springs to confirm that there was nothing to fear. Settled back, she felt tolerably comfortable; if also, yes, deprived.
After a lifetime of luxurious isolation she had been left alone hardly at any point in this huggermugger day: her neck was sticky from children’s hands; under her nails she could feel grease and grit from the pans she had scoured that morning; her dress and an elbow were still stained with grass juices. Any attempts at washing or grooming herself had been slapdash gestures made out of obedience to habit: unconsciously, she could have been cherishing her patina of grime. Now as she lay turning the pages of a book she was not reading, increasing warmth from the fire intensified the burning in her arms. Normally she would have deplored a sensation which conjured up images of zombie women, their shrivelled, leathery faces, beside the road or driven in lorries. But tonight her own rather dry skin was prickling with life.
Of course the whole situation was thoroughly perverse, whatever Basil had persuaded himself he might get out of it. You would have to extricate him, not crudely, but in a few days time, after gently paving the way towards escape. From the squalor of this ugly, crumbling house, with which neither had any rational connection. Certainly not with the people at present living in it. Not even Anne Macrory your friend: that was what Anne seemed aspiring to be. That was why you ran to scour pans, feed her regurgitating baby, help raise the mother from the level to which she had been only half-willingly reduced.
By the brute Rory.
Madame de Lascabanes made the extra effort to concentrate on her book. She did not want Count Mosca to see her talking to Fabrizio. Unfortunate that the English language should transform a great work of French literature into a mock-Italian novelette. Still, it was in this version that Father had found consolation; so Mother implied.
Dorothy rested her cheek against the padded scroll of the daybed on which she was lying. She closed her eyes and willed the spirit of Alfred Hunter, his charity, his innocence, his essential goodness, to possess her. Without the innocence, would he have been so effortlessly good? like Arnold Wyburd, that other virtuous man; and neither of them memorable. Dorothy Hunter opened her eyes: better perhaps insignificant and good, than insignificant and bad.
No, you were not bad, only dishonest in socially acceptable ways, and then only slightly, out of necessity; it was a dishonesty inherited from Mother.
When it was Alfred’s charity Dorothy Hunter was determined to woo, she was most haunted by Elizabeth’s greedy sensuality, and in Alfred’s own room, where he had enjoyed chaste and manly discourse with his friend Arnold: of clocks, moreover. Dorothy glanced. There was no clock. She could not have been more helplessly exposed to Elizabeth Hunter’s influence. There was no doubt Mother, whatever she said, had desired other men: Edvard Pehl for one; more successfully, for certain, the owner of that cufflink lying under the bed. On the whole, though, Mother’s adulteries had probably been mental ones: to possess rather than to be possessed.
Why did Mother fill the room tonight? Had she perhaps died? Oh God, never! She was too cunning, cruel, to release you from your hatefulness by dying.
While listening for the telephone, that urgent ringing through a silent, country house, which suggests that the instrument is about to tear itself from the wall, Dorothy heard steps. She did not doubt it was Macrory: the sound was too heavy, too boorish, to announce anybody else. It was what she had been dreading. Would she be forced by terror to submit to her friend’s husband? Or by curiosity? she had time to wonder.
Then Macrory was knocking; after which, he barged in.
Scorn for a man who knocked on doors was followed by a feeling of outrage that he had not waited for her invitation. She must have looked idiotic besides, stretched out rigid on the daybed, stiffly raising her head to stare at the intruder.
Macrory giggled, his eyes too brilliant, his lips moister, fuller than she could remember.
‘Took you by surprise, did I?’
‘Why should I be surprised?’ Madame de Lascabanes mumbled back.
He did not answer, but crumped down in Alfred Hunter’s leather chair.
Basil would save her if she needed saving. Though she did not want Sir Basil Hunter to see her so much as talking to Rory. (She was contemptuous of herself for letting the name enter her head.)
‘Isn’t it late?’ she suggested; and was vain enough to add, ‘Won’t your wife be wondering where you are?’
‘I often prowl around the house at night, knock back a drink or two, and think things over, after she’s gone to bed.’
She could see he had knocked back the drink or two. His less evident thoughts he would not, or more likely, could not share. In their absence she visualized them as trussed and writhing, a bundle of instinctive snakes, or no, hairy caterpillars. Her cynicism made her draw down the corners of her mouth, lower her eyelids, not so far that she could not contemplate one of her own limply dangled wrists: with or without jewellery wrists had been among her assets.