Sometimes falling asleep her prince farted as though in disgust.
Perhaps she had never loved Hubert: that would explain everything; she had only almost drowned in admiration, for his title, his flesh tones, his insolent assurance, his French-ness, and the white sideburns rising to slicks of still black hair, in which the lights would begin to glow after he had drenched it with eau de Portugal and slashed rather than brushed it into shape.
Mon fils adore la chasse; if the old princess had dared her daughter-in-law to misinterpret, la Cousine Marie-Ange had taken it upon herself to keep his second wife informed. For there had been a first (nobody had hidden her: far from it) la pauvre Madeleine cette fille si douce qui est morte en couches on n’a pas pu sauver l’enfant non plus. (Classic interlude in the life of a man who happens actually to be your husband.) Hubert was desolated. (Why not? Why not?) The teeth of Marie-Ange, yellow-looking and brittle, still tasted her cousins grief: the more touching in that Hubert was by nature such a coureur de jupons — et pas difficile! The cousin had a laugh to match what she saw as the less savoury peccadilloes. But you understand Dor-rô-ti I only tell you out of frankness and — amitié. A woman can so much better hold her husband if she understands his mœurs.
Marie-Ange herself remained unmarried. The aigrette she wore in her perennial hat was shuddering with expectation the day she brought the Australian news of the American, une personne très commune née à Cincinnati le père a fait fortune dans le margarine. The cousin’s lips were shining, not with margarine, but the superior unctuousness of best Norman butter. Comme je vous plains ma pauvre amie. The hot black glove fingering your cold skin. Mais ça ne durera peut-être pas vous savez bien qu’Hubert a toujours eu besoin de distractions on a même raconté qu’il avait tâté des garçons. The cousin could hardly restrain her spit. Il paraît qu’il a eu une aventure avec un gondolier l’année passée …
Grinding her cheek into the soft unidentifiable fur (remember to ask Mother) Dorothy Hunter tried to invoke the Spirit of Games, who might have coached her, though too late, in holding a scabrous husband’s interest.
When somebody started knocking on her thoughts. ‘Mad-damm? Ma-darm?’ Must be that boiled nurse.
‘Yes?’ Her own voice depressed her in one syllable.
‘Mrs Hunter — madam — is ready to receive you in her room.’ The nurse sounded as though she must be smiling the other side of the closed door she was addressing so elaborately.
‘Tell her I’m coming. Thank you. I’ll be there. Thank you, Nurse.’ Or was it ‘Sister’?
Beyond the window of her girlhood a landscape was returning: under the skyline of convents and araucarias, a geometry of concrete and brick she could not remember ever having seen before. She stood a moment wondering whether it gave her further cause for resentment.
On closing the door of her refuge behind her, Dorothy Hunter followed the beaten track, along the landing, down the passage, to her mother’s bedroom. She was glad she had the de Lascabanes pearls for company. Faced with making any kind of rational comment, she could only hope for inspiration, which almost never came. In her best moments she did not act: necessity started working in her; but now a part she had learnt, after long and exacting rehearsal, possessed her as she entered the room, and she repeated automatically, ‘I must hand it to you, darling! Isn’t she miraculous, Sister?’ In the French tongue, it might have sounded more convincing.
For the mummy’s head balanced on the pillows, the structure of bones arranged beneath the sheet, denied the human miracle; though the spirit was preparing to tilt, the princess uneasily sensed.
‘Miraculous what?’
‘I think your daughter — Princess Dorothy — means: what a wonderful old lady we all find you.’
‘Wonderful old lady — ugh!’ Mrs Hunter ground her gums together. ‘Wonderful old bagpipes!’
‘What is it you said, darling?’ Dorothy trembled in making contact with this thing: her mother’s wrist.
Mrs Hunter had not decided how to reply to her poor her Dorothy daughter, when she was led — yes, positively led, in a direction she had not foreseen.
‘That day I went with your father to see Mrs — Mrs Hewlett. She was living at — Wilberforce? Yes, there was a river which used to flood, but the Hewletts were on higher ground. Your father was drinking his cocktail, when a bird flew and settled on his shoulder. It was a — a—what was it, Dorothy?’
‘A canary?’ The princess had seated herself in a lopsided chair the nurse had drawn up for her.
‘I don’t know. I ought to remember. Today I can’t. I almost can. Yesterday we had cabbage, and it was nasty: she had put something in it — cumm — coomm?’
‘I don’t know, Mummy. Tell me about the bird, though. Was it a songbird?’ The daughter had leant forward, neck anxiously stretched, herself an expectant swan; she wanted their reunion to be a success.
‘Oh — you know— of course — it was a lovebird!’
The Princesse de Lascabanes exposed her teeth in a giggle, becoming the schoolgirl who was never long absent from her.
The nurse suggested sotto voce, ‘May I tempt you to a drop of this?’ At the same time she was pouring something opaque out of a glass jug. ‘It’s so refreshing. It’s your mother’s favourite: barley water.’
‘Thank you, Nurse.’
‘You know I don’t. You force it on me,’ the patient protested.
‘Thank you. Yes, Sister, I’d adore a glass of barley water. Tell me, Mummy, about Mrs Hewlett’s lovebird.’
‘That’s what I’m telling. It settled on Alfred’s shoulder — climbed down his arm — on to a finger of the hand which was disengaged — and up again. I can see it distinctly.’ Mrs Hunter was in fact looking straight ahead, intently, into and through the misted glass. ‘Mrs Hewlett was so afraid for her bird she had a gardener stationed outside the window with a gun.’
‘Really? Whatever for?’
‘You won’t let me tell you. She was afraid the bird might fly out the window into the orchard — and that a cat might be waiting in the long grass — to pounce.’
‘Now who would have thought — a gardener with a gun! Can’t have done too much gardening, waiting for cats to pounce on the boodgy. Can he, Miss Dorothy—mad-dam?
Dorothy sipped her barley water. Nobody really expected her to give an opinion, just as they will ask, but don’t expect, an opinion from a child. This, and the cool innocent stuff she was drinking, made the princess feel fulfilled rather than bored.
‘All the same it’s a most unusual story,’ Sister Badgery allowed.
While Mrs Hunter drifted on another plane, outside her skull probably, where vision cleared, above the orchard grass.
‘Mrs Hewlett loved her lovebird. That’s why she went to such trouble. And was a bit jealous, I think — the bird flirting like that with Alfred.’
‘And what happened, Mother? Did the bird fly out the window?’
‘No.’ The eyes staring, thoughts exploring even deeper into the past. ‘Not on that occasion. They say it did at some — oh, later date.’
‘I bet it gave Mrs Hewlett an anxious time. Did they manage to catch it, Mrs Hunter? Or did the cat?’
‘No. I believe the gardener shot the bird.’
‘ohhhh!’
‘Oh, ma-darm! Look — let me take it: you’re spilling your barley water.’