Then Dorothy de Lascabanes sank back and closed her eyes. For the first time in weeks, months, perhaps in a whole lifetime, she had achieved a state where nobody could force her to behave as a character of their own conceiving, quite unlike the one she recognized as hers. She even thought she might have reached that point of impersonality she had liked to believe attainable: protected against disorder, directed towards a logical destination, saved from desire (oh God yes — beyond reach of importunate bodies, clutching hands).
She whimpered once or twice with relief, and rubbed her head against the antimacassar before remembering her coiffure. At once she started rearranging herself more practically. It composed her mind as well, to sit obliquely, calves pressed against the case in which she carried her jewels.
When she had laid hands on those inherited from Mother, she must see about having them re-set; though it was doubtful whether many of them would be wearable. She would keep them as sentimental tokens: because the worst mothers in the flesh do not necessarily destroy the touching concept of motherhood. (What sort of mother would you have made if fate had dispensed a child? Madame de Lascabanes was thankful her new impersonality would not be required to work out an answer to that one.)
How she would occupy herself in her state of spiritual (and economic) emancipation was more to the point. For a start, she thought, she would go through her cupboards and drawers, but ruthlessly. She would make inventories. She would restock only with the very best quality, necessary clothes, preferably in black; though she looked well in green: amande ou tilleul, plutôt qu’un vert trop criard. And shoes: she might indulge, not in an orgy, but give way to her weakness for what can be an elegant means of disguising the ugliest member. She saw her shoes, of the style she had always worn, and which outlast ephemeral trends in fashion, tilted in methodical rows on the brass rails at the bottom of her armoires. Before any, she cherished a shoe in matured leather, of a patina she had created herself by long and devoted polishing.
Dorothy de Lascabanes was filled with such an exaltation she glanced round to see whether anyone else had noticed. But the light dictated by those stern angels watching over their welfare had forced her fellow passengers into varying stages of dormancy. In the seat next to her, a Pakistani was turning yellow. The princess edged closer to the aisle.
And books. In the library more than anywhere an inventory is essentiaclass="underline" that volume of Pascal the Cousine Marie-Ange, personne d’autre, had carried off, more for the binding, one suspected, than the argument. The princess nursed her reverence for the French classics and the years of pleasure she promised herself in their company. (Weed out the books: Bourget, Bataille — all one’s mistakes; Maurois? on attend.)
And men. Because all that was finished, it did not mean that some elderly, distinguished connoisseur might not occasionally offer to share the subtleties: of Stendhal, Odilon Redon, poularde demi-deuil, a bottle of Chassagne-Montrachet en tête à tête.
In reassessing worldly pleasures, it occurred to the princess she might also change her spiritual preceptor. She visualized an unknown hand, sensitive though masculine, writing on the fresh white sheet it was in her power to become. Enraptured by her own pious ambitions, she flung back her head regardless of the grubby antimaccassar. Aidez-moi, mon Dieu, she insisted, je recommence ma vie. Then in the name of prudence, Sainte Marie, mère de Dieu, priez pour nous pauvres pécheurs, maintenant et à l’heure de notre mort.
For the plane had started to shudder and roll. From inside the rug with which he had shrouded his head, the Pakistani moaned. Rejecting as far as possible this evidence of human frailty, Dorothy regretted her Dutchman who had experienced the eye of the storm, as he insufficiently told during her flight to Mother’s bedside.
The weather which had just struck them hardly amounted to a storm, little more than a disagreeably personal nudge. Supposing the hostile forces rubbing against these fragile walls ordained disaster, death would be the least part of it. What she dreaded was the moment when the soul tears free, no bland Catholic balloon automatically patted on its way, but a kind of shrivelled leather satchel, as she saw her original Protestant soul, stuffed with doubts, self-esteem, bloodymindedness, which Catholic hands, however skilled, might not have succeeded in detaching from her.
If her Dutchman had been seated beside her instead of this bilious black, she felt sure she would have found the courage to clutch his knee, and demand the impartial view of one who has passed through the eye of the storm. If it does not remain in the eye of the beholder.
And Mother: what could Mother have told of her experience on Brumby Island? She was senile by the time you might have asked. But could anything of a transcendental nature have illuminated a mind so sensual, mendacious, materialistic, superficial as Elizabeth Hunter’s? (Poor Mummy! it is wicked to malign the dead: Sainte Marie, mère de Dieu, priez pour nous pauvres pécheurs, maintenant et à l’heure de notre mort. Amen.)
It is to some extent calmer the nameless street you are walking down these are yours the hopefully lustrous shoes the new Balenciaga habit this the church you have been searching for bundles of pale-green spaghetti as columns dark water in the leaden stoup never touch the syphilitic water sign yourself with air my knees are old and cold offering 15-deniers in the name of faith how frightfully hard religion is on stockings the priest the surely no this Protestant expression which refuses to distinguish sheep from goats these Dutch-coloured fingers offering not the nice hygienic wafer but a chalice of qu’est-ce que vous me faites mon père spilling the stain will never come out rubbing spreading the unspeakable oh OH
Head lolling, the Princesse de Lascabanes mingled her moans with those of the Pakistani.
rub and run escape the Dutch anathema can’t you see c’est moi mon père MOI God will understand I am real my soul is no Catholic balloon Protestant satchel I am this flying shoebox the prayers rattling inside grâce à Dieu on atterrira à Orly à 07h 05
Sir Basil Hunter refused his plastic dinner; if they had offered him a real one he might not have had the appetite for it. Instead, he told the hostess, he would like a second little bottle of Scotch: he held his fingers just so far apart to make it look tinier.
She was a sonsy piece: if it had been the sort of thing you were looking for. He wasn’t. No return flight had ever caught him feeling older: just the part for which the lavatory mirror had cast him.
Could it be that when Mummy dies, the age hidden in her little boy floats to the surface? Balls of course. He was all whimsy tonight: the Scotch was bringing it out. And in any case he had never really cared for — well, he had been fond of her, on and off — as a safe exercise, from another hemisphere. She had been there: always as an abstraction, sometimes as a positive enjoiner.
Or flesh: at a distance she was still visible, palpable, out of respect for sensuality perhaps, or the acting profession, hesitating, it seemed deliberately, at the head of the stairs (all beautiful women stage-manage their entrances, either intuitively, or more likely after endless rehearsal on feeling the first tremors of power in their green girlhood) then this woman is descending, not yet revealing her full radiance, keeping it veiled in false modesty, at least as far as the tip of her nose, because her lips are already faintly faintly smiling to herself as she glances at her feet (that shortsightedness which is neither confessed nor denied) till about the fourth stair the light breaks from inside around her, it is the moment you never catch in a flower however determined you are to witness the miracle of exploding petals, that is exactly what happens as this being descends, in a burst of sensuous joy she needs to share with those standing in comparative darkness below, controlling their breath, their blood, their amateurish attitudes, while her sun beats down on them, the rustle of her skirt, her fall of jewels promises relief from their drought of waiting, from their yes Mrs Hunter no Mrs Hunter how well you’re looking at their last gasp they are not relieved they are made drunk.