Which of them had made the break it was difficult to decide, but the Princesse de Lascabanes was at liberty to shut herself up in Dorothy Hunter’s room.
It was very little changed, it seemed at first: a chaste, girl’s room, fairly narrow and predominantly white. There was the glass in which she had tried massaging her face into a more desirable shape. The cupboards opened on naphthalene and emptiness. Still arranged on shelves, books she remembered, some of them anyway: The Forest Lovers; Salammbô; A Man of Property; Winnie-the-Pooh; Confessions of an English Opium Eater (a grey book when she had hoped for purple).
Across the bed was arranged a rug she could not remember from her own reign of chintz; it was made from, probably, some kind of native fur: bumpy, humble, yet soft, soothing to the cheek, seducing the body, surprisingly, through dress and two-way stretch. She wallowed in it, hardly bothering to imagine what a sight she must look sprawled on the fur cover and enjoying it with every part of her; when normally she was not a sensual woman.
Even in the early days, while her marriage was still officially considered a success, she might have dismissed sexual love if it had not been for the sense of gratitude a rare climax produced in her. So she loved a husband almost old enough to be her father; she admired while fearing the cynic and dandy in this man so expensively acquired; at times she admitted to herself she found him physically luscious, the skin tones and the whorled rosettes of the nipples faintly seen through the monogrammed shirts she bought him at Sulka. But she dreaded many of his replies, the quirk at the corner of his mouth, one eyebrow lifted noticeably higher than the other. No, I am not laughing, my darling, only interested to find Australians can behave as perversely as anybody else. She brooded badly. Criticism made her squint: the sun might have been striking at her as she jogged homeward on Taffy under the dusty casuarinas; when here she was in her white, actual skin, the formal helmet of her lacquered hair, and the sapphire brooch the old princess had surrendered during the engagement as a gesture towards notre petite Australienne.
She had never been theirs, alas. She was not la petite Australienne, not even, perhaps, an Australian, except on damp piercing nights at Lunegarde, or in moments of expatriate despair alone in the Paris apartment. Sometimes Dorothy Hunter suspected she existed only in the novels of Balzac and Stendhal and Flaubert, the plays of Racine.
Naturellement la littérature française est un héritage considérable. She would have liked to encounter someone whose attitude to books was passionate rather than dutifully respectful. Could it be that her French ‘family’, her ‘husband’, saw in her fossicking through their literary cupboards a form of immorality? They knew the prodigious cupboards were there, but preferred to keep them closed, anyway to foreigners.
So she too had closed, whether in the Paris apartment where she and Hubert led their more intimate life, or in their wing at Lunegarde, from which they took part in the family rituals of the Lascabanes. (So much for theory; in fact neither of them participated, though each withdrew differently.)
Mon fils adore la chasse, the belle-mère had dared her daughter-in-law to misunderstand.
Almost all evenings at Lunegarde seemed to close in mist. Wherever a fire was lit, it smoked. The old princess rattled with bronchitis laying out her patience, as you waited for the guns to return: first the sound of men’s voices as logical as typewriters along the paths, then their boots in corridors of stone. Should you run to greet? The belle-mère at her patience did not look up, but was watching to see the wrong thing done. So you chafed your gooseflesh, till here he was, kissing the hand you offered, winking for some sacrilege he hoped to provoke you into committing, but in which he most likely would not take part, in his mother’s salon, amongst the painted furniture, the faded tapestries, and mould. By contrast, Hubert smelled of thyme, woodsmoke, healthy exertion, and perhaps you imagined — blood. At least the bundles of bloodied feathers and dangling fur were carried into the court to be sorted, some for the vaulted kitchen, inferior stuff for the cottages.
Once Dorothy de Lascabanes had slipped on the cobbles in the dark, on a patch of what she afterwards identified as blood, and grazed her knee. She bound the knee; she would not tell — not even when she was dying, probably, of blood poisoning.
There was a lot she hid, and her secretive air was sometimes mistaken for worldliness. Elle est admirable, vous savez — votre femme, said the aunts, cousins, and the few friends, equally glacial and exalted, who foregathered at Lunegarde. She soon realized to what extent she was admirable: that money may be overlooked provided there is enough of it; and that a talking dog offers temporary social distraction. Though a few of them liked to try out their English, the majority preferred her to risk her French, which remained bad enough to pass for amusing, eccentric, even chic, along with the exotic ‘Dor-rô-ti ’. She had, too, the gift for entertaining aged men, which most young girls fail to discover in themselves, and prettier, more assured women do not think of squandering. Mainly by listening and applying an invisible ointment, she revived in her ancients an illusion of youth. They appreciated what they saw as kindness, when she wasn’t kind, or not very. Protected by the armour of a happy marriage she might have snubbed the lot of them. Instead, after Hubert left her, she clumsily rejected the four or five creaking boars and arthritic tortoises from whom she might have chosen a lover if that had been her fancy.
The name she had acquired remained her compensation, as well as a recurring reflexion of the marriage in which she had failed to please. Most desolating were those evenings the belle-mère had envisaged for them: when Dor-rô-ti and Hubert wish to be alone. Herself in a state of sick tension, he with glittering eye and a mock flamboyance, they fled the little huggermugger salon the family used for comfort; while the belle-mère continued laying out her patience, Oncle Amédée pasting in his cuttings, Tante Eulalie (the Hon. Mrs Scrymgeour-Talbot: he deserted me my dear during the male menopause) devoting herself to astrological research, and Tante Daisy de Pougues to the sinuses which tortured her, but for which she lived. Every eye in the room was paying attention from beneath disinterested lids; doubtless after the door had closed the assembly would start listening instead, down reverberating corridors, through panelling in which more than the beetle ticked.
In their own quarters, a cupboard had been equipped as a kitchen. Le Butagaz, the old princess explained, est si commode — et vraiment pas cher. The will to succeed made a plausible cook of the bride, though on nights of dreadful anticipation her omelette truffée was inclined to stick; there was a manque de liaison about her sauces; there was the suicidal smell of Butagaz. While Hubert did not seem to care: tu es si gentille ma chère petite de te donner tant de peine. What should have been proof of her serious intentions he was only concerned with reducing to bed leveclass="underline" by lip flattery, by hand, by every dishonest means. Worse than his indifference his lechery: ton omelette bien baveuse m’inspire — this time Dorothy we shall do things more interestingly. When her most rigid submission was a torment, except in half languorous, half surprised, and wholly grateful retrospect. But to behave ‘interestingly’ was beyond her capacity: non Hubert je ne veux je ne peux pas.