Like many plain women, she was vain. But wasn’t Macrory vain of his thoughts? Would he have dangled them otherwise? He might even have been wanting to suggest that his mind could outshine his effortless, but otherwise repulsive, body. Rory Macrory was a man who had not been designed for clothes: they emphasized all they were meant to conceal. Madame de Lascabanes made herself concentrate harder than ever on her own wrist.
‘You people have it all over us,’ Rory suddenly blurted, and his pants shot higher up his calves.
‘Which people?’ the princess bitterly asked. ‘And how do you mean “have it over you”?’
‘Anne “Kirkcaldy” Robertson — Sir Basil Hunter — and you.’ He would continue to punish her, she suspected, by refusing to address her by name, let alone title. ‘You’re all of you cold perfect, arrogant people.’
Poor stained Anne!
‘You love your wife, surely, to have made all those children with her?’
There was no logic in it, and Rory did not reply.
‘Whatever my own shortcomings,’ Dorothy hurried on in case he should absolve her, though he showed no signs of preparing to, ‘my brother is a most distinguished man — and great actor.’
Macrory said, ‘I’ve never been inside of a bloody theatre.’
It did not matter that she had never seen Basil act; no one, not even Mother, should accuse her of disloyalty, or of being stingy with affection; affection is a pure pleasure, and costs nothing, unlike the tortuous proposition, love.
But Macrory had other thoughts. ‘That book you’re reading — I had a go at it once.’ He was picking at the scab on his knuckle.
‘Well?’ Her faith in truth, as opposed to the orthodoxies, made her stiffen.
‘Seemed to me a fuss about nothing.’ Then, ‘I couldn’t understand it.’
This was where the Princesse de Lascabanes, surprised by a comparative humility, surrendered to him. ‘It is a “fuss”, admittedly;’ she realized she was perspiring at the roots of her hair, ‘but it is about something — whether we find out or not.’ The conviction she could not convey was distended painfully inside her; the broken springs of the daybed were driven into her straining back. (At least you can always close your eyes, but whether you like it or not, you have got to listen to a man’s breathing.)
Rory was as unmoved as the chair in which he was sitting. ‘I only ever believed,’ he said, ‘in what I can see and touch. I expect that’s why we get children. Did you have any kids, Dorothy?’
‘I’m childless.’ His use of her name made the admission sound more wretched.
‘And Basil?’
‘Also. No, he has, I believe, one child.’ ‘Imogen’ had never been convincing; less, in the present circumstances.
While Macrory was stung by his own dilemma. ‘You people can get away with it. You don’t need kids. You have the time — the nerve — to con yourselves — and others — with words and ideas.’
There was no reason why his rejection should hurt: all her life she had lived with her own emptiness. Macrory: his arms alone filled her with revulsion.
‘Time to spend a morning mooning round a dam! D’you know what? He was shouting something at the top of his voice. I couldn’t see him, but heard it from a distance. It sounded like bloody poetry. Why d’you suppose he was spouting poetry at nobody?’
‘How should I know?’ She was floating on her own breathlessness. ‘He was showing off, perhaps, to himself — listening to the sound of his voice.’ She had not intended to make Basil look foolish; it was this clod Macrory who had brought her to it.
Macrory laughed, like a boy. ‘I admire old Basil.’
Dorothy’s lips were at their thinnest, she could tell. ‘I thought you thoroughly despised us both.’
‘Shouting at the flamun air! He can get away with it.’
‘He ought to. Isn’t it his profession?’
‘And shoes! Those Pom shoes! He’s sharp — Basil!’
Dorothy said it was time she went to bed. Her arms were thin. She felt as though she had been trampled on, actually, physically, and for no good reason.
Macrory, who was kicking the fire together, called after her without turning, ‘Sleep good, Dorothy!’ If an inarticulate, practically retarded mind, his body was highly articulated; every muscle in his back worked.
Elizabeth Hunter was having the last laugh, in this dark, seemingly deserted house. The sound of her dress filled the draughty staircase. On the way up, on a half-landing, Dorothy leaned her head against a cedar post. She would have liked to cry on a shoulder if Mother had been more than a presence. At least Basil had not seen her talking to that boor; he had not heard her betrayal, nor witnessed an adultery of which Macrory himself remained unaware.
Some way back from the house, across a yard, the meticulously planned stables now fulfilled only a memorial function. A clock face pale amongst the ivy had long ago ceased to express time. But dogs liked to frequent the yard for snoozing and shitting; and hens to stalk, and peck between the pavings; and through an archway with which the clock-tower was pierced stood a slightly less neglected, because more utilitarian, shed. Built of iron and slab, with a reinforcement of solidified cobweb, the whole ramshackle barrack had taken on the colour of dust except where the weather had left on the iron a look of dried blood.
Basil Hunter had paid several visits to the shed, and was on his way again this morning in the leisurely fashion he found himself adopting for ‘Kudjeri’, where his responsibilities remained spiritual rather than technical.
On reaching the closed door he paused to pick a splinter or two from the slab wall, then to expend his splinters by plunging them one after another into the dust-cemented cobweb funnels. It achieved nothing, but he found the pastime as absorbing and consoling as any of the many rituals of childhood.
When he had finished he glanced round to see whether anyone had noticed: he could have deceived an adult by turning it into a joke, but a child would have recognized the dead seriousness of such behaviour. There was nobody looking, fortunately.
The great door creaked and staggered wide open once the wooden arm which held it had been withdrawn from the iron hasp. Instead of the door a curtain of spangled light hung protecting the secrets of the cavern beyond. He pushed through, needlessly stooping, for the swallows’ nests encrusting the lintel were several feet above his head. As on previous occasions, his heart was beating noisily for the pleasures of renewed acquaintance.
Stashed away in the shadows of the barn, all these implements and machines were by now more believable as sculpture, though here and there, traces of a practical function clung still to esoteric forms: soil to a ploughshare; grains of unsown maize in a row of wooden box-compartments; a faint pungency of fertilizer lingering where he had lifted a lid. From touching the scant remains of superphosphate his ephemeral fingertips became as shrivelled as the ageless grains of corn.
He was lured farther: to bounce on a harvester’s rusted though resilient seat, while walls of green fell before his progress down the river flat. He could feel the hand at his shoulderblades: to prevent young Basil falling off. Hating at the time this indignity of protective hands, you would have had them back long after shrugging them off for ever: strong but submissive, insensitive, while abrasively solicitous.
Mucking around always deeper in the shadow, Basil knew he was deliberately saving one corner till the last. Where most of the utilitarian machines had returned to being the bores they always were, nothing would dull his delight in what that far corner contained. He was trembling to such an extent he was glad to bend down and pick up a boot he could not remember noticing on other visits. A bloom of fungus on leather cast in iron wrinkles discouraged any normal foot from prising its way into the boot. Suddenly Basil was determined to wear it, and got it on. He was able to hobble around too, heel raised higher than the inturned toe. And was not handicapped more than he already knew: he could have been wearing this same unnatural boot on his walk to Dover.