Janet looked to Dorothy, whom she loved, and who must understand and save her; when Dorothy knew that the most she could do for Janet would be to trim her dress with a red ribbon, and from a distance, carry on a correspondence till it died of natural causes.
The mother sighed. ‘Red, then.’
Mog Macrory chanted from behind the dressmaker’s dummy,
‘Red red he went to bed
Silly blue she went too
But nobody wanted purpurl!’
At the last word, she stuck the scissors into the dummy, and a smell of must came out. It was disappointing. Possibly she had hoped for something better, like worms, or blood. She stabbed again, deeper — but nothing.
The mother seemed reconciled to defeat over the colour of the ribbon: she was free to give herself to other worries.
‘How late it is!’ she was amazed to find, standing at the window. ‘Rory drives off, and never tells us where he could be found if needed. Supposing there was an accident here at the house? Or for that matter,’ she had opened the window and was craning out, ‘he could overturn the jeep — kill himself. Well, we do know of somebody who broke his leg, and was found at last, lying out in the paddocks, in the frost. But Rory considers nobody — least of all his wife.’
The blaze of light and her obsessed relationship with her husband gave Anne Macrory’s grey face a resplendence. Dorothy tried not to envy her friend her gratuitous embellishments.
Mog murmured, ‘If I broke my leg I’d go to the Cottage Hospital and Matron and the sisters would make a fuss of me. There was a lady used to let me get into bed with her and cuddle, when I had my tonsils out. A broken leg would take much longer than tonsils.’
Janet would have liked to apologize to the Princess Lascaburn for her embarrassing family. As she did not know how, she could only wait for the princess to do or say something to loosen the tangle in which everyone was caught.
But Dorothy continued sitting at the table, and it was Anne who roused herself finally; she came and took their friend by the hands. ‘What you must think of us! And how you’ve put up with it all this time!’ For a moment it looked as though Anne’s hovering face was going to plunge into Dorothy’s.
Dorothy raised her shoulder: being kissed made her feel awkward; she had almost always tried to avoid it. ‘Is it so long?’ She broke away from Anne. ‘Of course, it must be. I’m ashamed.’
‘Truly that isn’t how I meant it!’ Anne moaned for her own tactlessness.
Pinned to the sewing-room door was a local chemist’s calendar, the leaves of which had been neglected after the first couple of months.
‘But it’s true!’ Dorothy’s insistence made her voice boom. ‘The calendar will prove it.’
In her determination to resist what she most desired, her chair groaned, then screeched, before falling over sideways, giving a bentwood bounce or two.
While arms were grappling, laughter straining, Mog shouted, ‘I’ve got her by the leg. Gee, she’s wiry!’
Janet put her cool, virgin hands over her friend’s eyes.
‘No, Dorothy darling, you’re ours! We need you!’ Anne struggled gasping to make her point. ‘Don’t you understand?’
But Dorothy only understood that she must reach the calendar, on the leaves of which flies had printed their sepia riddles. She must tear away the leaves one by one till she unveiled the truth.
She did succeed in tearing MARCH before they carried her, as part of their female Laocoon, past the door and on to a landing, all still writhing and laughing. Somebody was sobbing: or it could have been interpreted as that. Winter fire followed them a certain distance from the sewing-room window down the creaking stairs before being doused in the darker regions, with a noise of hissing, or anguished breathlessness.
Mog kept repeating, ‘She’s wiry! That’s how I’d like to be — a wrestler — or acrobat.’
When they reached the stone flags below, it was impossible to ignore the sound of a car driving into and pulling up short in the yard. The women composed their mouths, and began fiddling with their hair.
‘That’s Rory,’ Anne murmured religiously.
Mog continued to caper, showing her muscles. ‘Or boxer!’ Dorothy decided the child was subnormaclass="underline" another reason for throwing off the influence of ‘Kudjeri’.
‘Don’t listen to Mog,’ Janet appealed to her friend the princess.
Perhaps the telephone would break out; you never stopped listening for it to ring so frantically that it would tear itself off the wall.
Instead Anne Macrory, who had run outside, had met her husband and was bringing him in. Dorothy saw that Anne must have laid the wafer on his tongue: they both looked so meek, as though returning from communion. And Rory was working the last particles out of his teeth.
‘Dorothy has been helping as usual.’ Anne made it sound a pious afterthought.
Macrory went so far as to smile at their guest, but immediately after, coughed and swallowed.
The Princesse de Lascabanes announced that she would go and tidy up. She lowered her eyes. She might have committed a sacrilege: she felt pricked by pine needles; at the same time willow branches could have been paddled in her. And Basil her brother was not present to share her shame.
Mog Macrory bellowed, ‘Haw-haw-haw!’ as she ran her short-cropped head at the thighs of the princess.
In their preoccupation with each other the parents did not attempt to restrain or make apologies for their child; and Janet only winced for all that she sensed without entirely understanding.
After the episode in the shed Basil took care to keep to himself. The warm sun, conflicting with overtones of cold, heightened his sense of expectation. The climate was that of diminishing freedom, as on the day before returning to school, or in the half hour to curtain up. Even so, his will had never been less inhibited by design or demands of any kind; his lack of connection with anything happening in the lives of others had a delicious, if also sickening, immorality about it.
Around noon, after the sound of women’s voices had drained away from the kitchen quarters, he nipped in, tore out a handful of bread and broke off a lump of cheese, driven not so much by hunger as by habit. Swallowing the saltless bread, the insipid cheese, he fetched his book and hurried out before anyone could deprive him of the solitude which was his present need.
He found quiet intensified in what used to be the orchard, amongst espaliers turned from fillets into actual trees, in grass bleached by sun and frost, amongst the skeleton suckers of raspberry canes and naked gooseberry scrub. Here he lay to study, if not to understand, the Part. It was foolish of him to bring it to ‘Kudjeri’ to remind him of past failures; though better to fail in a part than as a whole: Lear rather than the Jacka’s threat.
So he rubbed his nose in it. Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts? Some of the lines were flung back at him like stones; others melted on his snoozing skin, I have one part in my heart that’s sorry yet for thee; or battered on his sleep, thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal. Stick to the text reality is a mad king not an aged queen whose crown won’t come off for pulling whose not quite fresh eyes live by lucid flashes as hard as marble.
Not even at the moment of waking could he remember his dream. Fish. The fishmonger? Or cemetery. Certainly the ground was hard enough in what had been the walled orchard. He would have welcomed the scent and sound of plums; instead, whips and thorns had been used against his whole length. The sun was on its way out, while lingering slightly in the rough surface of weathered brick. Though his sleeper’s clothes were crumpled and sweaty with anxiety and sleep, his body had tautened inside them. It was the cold coming. He got up. He put the book away in his pocket and began walking through this orange light to forestall anyone in search of him.