‘I can’t — I won’t believe it, Mother. Do you, really?’
‘They found his body on the river bank — the blood still fresh in his neck feathers.’
Mrs Hunter thought she no longer believed in the situation herself, though Dorothy apparently did: she was appropriating the death of Mrs Hewlett’s lovebird as something she might have prevented personally; that is the way all good myths are born.
Dorothy had sat forward again. ‘But was the gardener—mad?
‘Who knows? Was the Russian lover mad who murdered Lilian Nutley in Manchuria or — wherever?’
Dorothy saw Sister Badgery had pursed up her lips till they were an only slightly pinker protuberance on her otherwise flat, colourless face; at the same time the veil was flicked so purposefully it suggested an attempt at semaphore. ‘We’re expecting Dr Gidley — only as a precaution — in the unusual circumstances,’ she managed finally to whisper.
The person she was addressing suddenly felt most unhappy, neither the Princesse de Lascabanes, nor yet Dorothy Hunter: no more than a visitor on a chair. If she could at least have remembered Dr Gidley from out of the legion of retainers, he might have given her a sense of belonging; but she couldn’t.
Mother had not heard, or had chosen to overlook her nurse’s remark. ‘Tell me about something, Dorothy — but something. Everybody flying here and there; I want to be brought news.’
Dorothy tried, but could not for the life of her think.
‘That mother-in-law of yours — is she alive?’
‘No, she — died. I wrote you about it.’
‘I thought she was probably dead.’
‘She suffered from bronchitis.’
‘She hadn’t the will to live.’
‘Not everybody has, or there would be too many of us.’
‘And that other woman — the one with the goitre — Eulalie?’
‘She died too. I told you.’ Madame de Lascabanes turned in extremis to her mother’s nurse. ‘That was my English aunt-by-marriage. At least, she was French, but married an Englishman who left her for the Côte d’Azur.’
Sister Badgery was entranced. ‘My husband was an Englishman — a tea planter from Ceylon. We passed through Paris, once only, on our honeymoon to the Old Country. Gordon was a public-school man — Brighton College in Sussex. D’you know it?’
The princess didn’t. Sister Badgery couldn’t believe: such a well-known school.
‘Sister Badgery, isn’t it time Mrs Lippmann gave you your tea — or whatever you take — Madeira. There’s an excellent Madeira in the sideboard; Alfred developed a taste for it.’
‘You know I never touch a drop of anything strong.’
‘I want to talk to my daughter — Mrs Hunter — privately,’ Mrs Hunter said.
She knew from the sound of the knife-edged skirt that she had offended her nurse. That made two presents she would have to give: Mrs Wyburd and Mrs Badgery.
When the nurse had closed the door the princess felt imprisoned, not only in the room, but in her own body. In her state of foreboding she reached out for the glass of barley water Sister Badgery had removed, and tried to find comfort in sips of that mawkish stuff. She could see herself in one of the looking-glasses with which her blind mother still kept herself surrounded. If the princess had not been so terrified of what the next moment could hold, she might have noticed that her own eyes were deep and lustrous: beautiful in fact; but in the circumstances her mind could only flutter through imagined eventualities.
Actually Mrs Hunter was enjoying the luxury of being alone and perfectly silent with somebody she loved. (They did love each other, didn’t they? You could never be sure about other people; sometimes you found they had hated you all their lives.) This state of perfect stillness was not unlike what she enjoyed in her relationship with Sister de Santis, though in essence it was different; with the night nurse she was frequently united in a worship of something too vast and selfless to describe even if your mind had been completely compos whatever it is. This other state of unity in perfect stillness, which she hoped she was beginning to enjoy with Dorothy, she had experienced finally with Alfred when she returned to ‘Kudjeri’ to nurse him in his last illness. There were moments when their minds were folded into each other without any trace of the cross-hatching of wilfulness or desire to possess. Yet at the same time all the comfort of touch was present in their absorption. At least that was the way you had felt, and believed, or hoped for the same in someone else.
Mrs Hunter coughed out of delicacy for the feelers extended in the direction of her silent daughter.
Dorothy said, after swallowing, ‘I do think, darling, they ought to get you another carpet. This one is threadbare in places, particularly at the door.’
Mrs Hunter gasped and frowned. ‘I haven’t noticed.’ Then she recovered herself. ‘They haven t told me.’ She began easing one or two of her encrusting rings. ‘I expect they’ve worked it out that I’m going to die — that it wouldn’t be worth while.’
Dorothy was making those pained sounds.
‘But I shan’t die — or anyway, not till I feel like it. I don’t believe anybody dies who doesn’t want to — unless by thunderbolts.’
‘Nobody wants to suggest you’re going to die, Mother.’
‘Then why does everybody come flying from the ends of the earth?’
‘Because you’ve been ill. Weren’t you?’ Dorothy was kicking at one of the legs of the bed: an awkward and useless gesture on the part of her otherwise flawless foot; she had never given up those classic Pinet shoes, and only the perverse would have denied she had been right in flouting fashion; again, only the perverse would have caught sight of the lubberly schoolgirl the Pinet shoes and her little Chanel camouflaged. ‘You can’t say you weren’t ill,’ she repeated through lips grown heavy with the sulks as she continued kicking at the bed.
Mother said, ‘Stop doing it, Dorothy, please. I don’t want my furniture ruined. You must learn to control your feelings.’
The Princesse de Lascabanes knew that her eyes were threatening to overflow: because the great, the constant grudge had been against her over-controlled feelings; when the showdown came, hadn’t he even accused her of being ‘frigid’?
‘I can only — well, I’d like to explain your flying out here as lack of emotional control,’ Mother was still bashing. ‘I expect they told you I had a stroke. In that case, you were misinformed. I only had a very slight — what was hardly a stroke at all.’
Dorothy Hunter plunged her hands as deep as she could into the bowels of the dusty old uncomfortable chair; she would stick it out.
‘In any case you flew — to make sure you’d see me die — or to ask me for money if I didn’t. Basil too.’
‘Oh God, Mother, don’t you allow for the possibility of human affection?’ The outraged daughter snatched back her hands from out of the depths of the chair: what her mother had said was the more cruel for being partly true. ‘I can’t answer for Basil. I never see him. Basil is capable of anything.’ That was so unquestionably true it did away with her own spasm of shame by drowning it in a wave of loathing.
No, it didn’t; she detested lies: most of all those half-lies she was sometimes driven to tell.
‘You’re so unfair!’ A whinge developed through a moan into a downright blub.
It was only now that Mrs Hunter felt they had reached the point at which they might become one. At the same time she was chastened, as well as impressed, by the emotional outburst it was in her power to cause.
There was no need to call Dorothy to her: their impulses answered each other. Here was that still skinny, perpetually tormented little girl screwing up the sheet by the handfuls, laying her head beside yours on the pillow. You were soon crying together, though softly, deliciously.