Dorothy shut out the voice; her ears whammed. If Basil had been there, they might have held hands, felt the warmth flow between them as reassurance of affection. She longed for this affection: its label carried the only convincing guarantee against a cold old age.
It was splitting cold tonight in the upper storey of this damned house. After leaving the fugbound kitchen and mounting the stairs, Basil could practically feel the chilblains opening in the backs of his hands. He had suffered from them as a little boy. They painted his watery sores with balsam of Peru, and gave him mittens to wear. Tonight on the stairs and in Alfred Hunter’s dressing-room he was trailing this wintry scent of chilblains. Put the mat on the bed, on top of the blankets; the weight might help keep the shivers down. Supposing his bladder, victimized by age and the climate, returned him to little-boyhood, would the Macrory woman scold to find a map on the floor? Yes, she was a scold. His almoner-daughter Imogen was the only one who might offer comfort. But she wasn’t his. If she were, by blood, there could be a Goneril lurking in her; Cordelias are too hard to get.
Where the hell was Dorothy? He often wondered what women do in bathrooms, to spend so much time locked up in them.
He went into their parents’ room. ‘What are you doing, Dorothy?’ Whether she was there or not, he had to hear the sound of his own voice.
She was in fact standing in the middle of the room beneath a shadeless bulb, which still appeared to be streaming strings of crystal beads from Elizabeth Hunter’s reign. Arms round her ribs, Dorothy herself stood streaming and glittering with misery, her bony nose clogged and swollen.
At first he would only allow himself to admire her virtuosity; but as a pro, he could not avoid taking his cue. ‘What’s worrying you, darling?’ His cavernous, his ballooning, his deflating voice was horribly, sincerely convincing.
They were grappling shivering with each other in what might become the performance of their lives.
‘Oh, Basil!’ She was deafening him; and smelt — they both probably did — of mutton fat. ‘What have we got unless each other? Aren’t we, otherwise — bankrupt?’
‘Are we?’ He was pretty sure she had come up with a wrong line; or else his memory was letting him down.
More important the discoveries they were making, which were not quite grief, passion, despair, horror, but something of them all, under the threadbare Macrory blankets, in the great bed. Elizabeth Hunter had specialized in spacious beds: so much of her life was spent in them, and still not spent; her children might go before her, bones broken by their convulsions on this shuddering rack.
If, instead of passing from one room to the other, he had thought of saying his prayers. But to whom, after all this time? Himself?
Now there was nothing to be done about it. Perhaps the grater instinctively loves the cheese. Wives don’t love: they swallow you. And most mistresses are in it for calculated reasons.
But Dorothy! ‘Dorothy?’ He might have suspected the reality of this rather thin human substance he was — embracing? If he had been drunk at least; but Macrory had seen to it that each of them was sober.
‘What is it, darling?’ Sobriety can become more obsessed than drunkenness; she was too absorbed to more than mumble.
It seemed to her that if she had been fond of, instead of trying to love Hubert, he might have responded. Love can freeze the limbs; affection thaws the instincts.
So she and Basil were comforting each other.
Somewhere in the night he rejected their drowsy nakedness. ‘Do you realize, Dorothy, they probably got us in this bed?’ Such thoughtless candour poured them back into their separate skins: to turn to ice.
Till she felt she must tear open a darkness which was at the same time stifling her.
This stick-woman was staggering, tripping, lashed, he could just see, before she reached the curtains and started snatching by handfuls, at last wrenching the window up.
The moon was at its highest and fullest above the ring of mineral hills. Her exertion, and the icy draught from the opening window, flung her back. She might have fallen if he had not been there behind her to support and comfort her nakedness with his own.
‘You’ve got to admit it’s beautiful.’ It was her brother looking over her shoulder at the landscape at ‘Kudjeri’.
‘Oh God, yes, we know that!’ she had to agree; ‘beautiful — but sterile.’
‘That’s what it isn’t, in other circumstances.’
‘Other circumstances aren’t ours.’
It rent him to touch with his hand the hair his sister had screwed up in a knob for the night.
She let him lead her back to the bed. It had become an island of frozen ridges and inky craters. They lay huddled together, and he tried to conjure their former illusion of warmth, under a reality of wretched blankets.
Eleven
‘IS IT COLD, Sister?’
‘Yes, dear, it’s cold,’ Sister Manhood replied, ‘or cold for here.’
At the sandier end of the park, people were tramping, exerting their bodies in the kind of makeshift clothes worn for a cold snap in a climate which is officially warm. Clothes and sand were making the going heavy for the walkers; every one of them looked middle-aged; when probably the majority, without clothes and exposed to summer, would have turned out young and aggressively athletic.
Sister Manhood was glad of her woolly. Pink and fluffy, it made her look bulky. It couldn’t be helped: she ought to be thickening.
‘The bed’s cold,’ Mrs Hunter complained.
‘You feel warm. You’ve got the hot-water bottle. And your jacket and socks. Your feet are warm.’ The nurse was unscrewing her dried prawn of a patient from the position a nap had left her in
‘Oh, it isn’t the body! I had a dream.’
‘Wasn’t it a nice one?’
‘No. It wasn’t. I was in my bed. I don’t know where my husband was. Perhaps he had died. No. It was worse than that. He had gone off leaving me alone at “Kudjeri”—with my children Basil and Dorothy — before they were born. Were they twins, though?’
Sister Manhood could hardly stick it. (What if it was twins inside herself?)
‘In the dream, yes,’ Mrs Hunter said. ‘But in life, I can’t remember. Were they, Sister?’
‘You’re the one who ought to know. You had them.’ For God’s sake!
‘In the dream they wanted to be twins. I could hear them calling from inside me — blaming me because I prevented them loving each other.’
Sister Manhood shoved a chair aside so hard she overturned it: she had just about had this old sod.
‘That isn’t uncommon,’ Mrs Hunter remembered. ‘People who aren’t capable of loving often blame someone else. I did from time to time. I blamed Alfred. That’s why he must have gone away and left me with my hateful children. They weren’t his, you know.’
‘I never heard that before.’
‘Oh, I got them from him. But I made them into mine. That is what the children resent — already — why they are protesting inside me.’
‘At that rate, by your own argument, Mrs Hunter, you are the one to blame.’
‘Who knows?’
Mrs Hunter must have sensed she had started something in her nurse: her hand began soothing, and she asked in a voice the nurses used, ‘Are you well, Sister? You seem well.’