‘No,’ she protested. ‘You didn’t tell — that is, I think I remember hearing — yes, about a storm.’
Somehow she must be spared: Mother must grant her this one concession.
‘If I didn’t write to you at the time, I must have been too annoyed with you — flying off like that — in a rage.’ Mrs Hunter sounded reasonable, calm, just. ‘It was when the Warmings asked us to stay on their island. They had to leave in a hurry. One of the children was sick, I think. Then you rushed away. You missed a lot of excitement — and made a fool of yourself.’
Mrs Hunter laughed gently; it sounded almost as though she still had those small but exquisite teeth. ‘What was the name of the professor man?’
Dorothy Hunter was frozen beyond answering. She shouldn’t have been; it had happened fifteen years ago.
‘Anyway, it was while I was on the island that this cyclone struck. Oh, I shall tell you — when I can find the strength. I can see the birds, just as your Russian said.’
If physical strength was letting her down, her capacity for cruelty would never fail her: to drag in Edvard Pehl. At her most loving, Mother had never been able to resist the cruel thrust. To have loved her in the prime of her beauty, as many had, was like loving, or ‘admiring’ rather, a jewelled scabbard in which a sword was hidden: which would clatter out under the influence of some peculiar frenzy, to slash off your ears, the fingers, the tongues, or worse, impale the hearts, of those who worshipped. And yet we continued to offer ourselves, if reluctantly. As they still do, it appears: to this ancient scabbard, from which the jewels have loosened and scattered, the blind sockets filled instead with verdigris, itself a vengeful semi-jewellery, the sword still sharp in spite of age and use.
She must try to define her love for her mother: it had remained something beyond her understanding.
And the cyclone: why was it given to Elizabeth Hunter to experience the eye of the storm? That too! Or are regenerative states of mind granted to the very old to ease the passage from their earthly, sensual natures into final peace and forgiveness? Of course Mother could have imagined her state of grace amongst the resting birds, just as she had imagined Mrs Hewlett’s escaped lovebird and the mad or distraught gardener. Though remembering some frightfulness the prince had forced on her mind more painfully than on her body, Dorothy de Lascabanes suspected the lovebird’s murder was not an invention.
Then the knocking, and in Sister Badgery’s voice, ‘Mrs Hunter? Here’s a lovely surprise for you, dear. Dr Gidley is paying us a visit.’
Brave or foolish, the nurse pushed the door open without waiting for encouragement, and for once her judgment seemed correct.
Her patient spoke up in the voice of a little girl who has learnt a lesson, though it could have been an unimportant one. ‘It is very kind of him,’ Mrs Hunter said.
‘We couldn’t very well not look in — not as we were passing — could we?’ The doctor was a large young man with a fatty laugh.
‘Not very well — not after promising Sister de Santis on the telephone.’
The doctor ignored it, while the duty nurse pursed up her mouth, her cheeks near to bursting for the wickedness of her precocious charge.
Then she remembered, ‘This is the — the daughter — Dr Gidley’; though her voice had a dash of acid, her eyes were radiating sunshine from behind the gold-rimmed spectacles.
‘Ahhh!’ The doctor recoiled, but put out his hand, sighing or hissing.
The Princess got the impression she was a rare disease he had not encountered before, and which he would have liked to look up furtively in a book; while avoiding his hand, she replied, ‘How do you do, Dr Gidley?’ Though recently grown up, the doctor would remain, for her at least, or at any rate for the moment, an enormous baby to whose somewhat featureless face had been added a pair of fashionable mutton-chops.
Apparently unconscious of a snub, he advanced on the bed, where he plumped his doctor’s bag (humbler than himself) beside him on the carpet. ‘How are we, Mrs Hunter? No strain on the Big Day?’ Without waiting to hear, he took up his patient’s wrist, which surprisingly she abandoned to him.
(Surely such enormous fingers would detect only a thundering pulse?)
‘She’s remarkable — truly remarkable,’ the nurse nattered sideways and superfluously to the daughter who was a princess.
The doctor frowned, and the nurse, recalled to duty, stood to attention like a frail private.
‘Normal enough.’ Dr Gidley finally complained out loud,
And so did Mrs Hunter. ‘Normal is the last thing I am — I hoped you might have gathered by now — Doctor — Dr Gidley.’ The corners of her mouth were struggling to perfect a half-remembered technique of malice. ‘Otherwise, what am I paying for? A — a dia-gnosis of my ordinariness?’
Dr Gidley flopped into the nearest chair, fingers dangling in clusters between wide-open legs. ‘Okay! Dictate your diagnosis, Mrs Hunter, and I’ll learn it.’ Mirth bumped the banana-bunches against swelling thighs.
Sister Badgery hummed with suppressed pleasure.
The strength of these two acolytes lay in their belief in the rightness of what they were doing and the wrong-thinking of others; which drew Dorothy towards her mother: at her most imperious, her most declamatory, Mother’s manner had suggested that the moment her will snoozed she might collide with some passive object or suffer buffeting by a directed one. Mother and daughter were both sleepwalkers, only their approach from opposite ends of the room ensured that their meetings should become, more often than not, collisions.
Now, faced with the forces of practical optimism, they were wearing identical smiles, while the opposition continued shining with the light of their mission: to prevent a human body dying, even if it felt like doing so.
In the circumstances Mrs Hunter murmured, ‘My daughter and I understand each other implicitly.’
If it were true, it ought to be kept a secret; so Dorothy muttered, and stirred in her chair, and almost put up a hand to avert an indelicacy.
While Mrs Hunter continued in her determination to hint at sweetness. ‘Before you disturbed us, we were enjoying a delightful conversation. She was telling me about her voyage out.’
‘Flight, Mother,’ Dorothy corrected; then blushed. ‘And it was not a very spectacular one.’ Her expression menaced Sister Badgery and Dr Gidley with her journey’s uneventfulness.
This should have consoled them, but the large young doctor looked uneasy: if he had obeyed convention he would have inquired at least about the weather, only the problem of the title prevented him addressing Mrs Hunter’s daughter.
Instead he made sounds,
Mrs Hunter slightly moved her head from side to side on the pillow, apparently about to start on a singsong, though when it came, the voice was thin, high and sustained, like the fine-drawn utterance of a single violin. ‘She was telling me about a charming Dutchman she met — and a hurricane which overtook them off Curaçao — quite a mystical experience.’
The doctor and the nurse laughed to express their interest or hide their disbelief. Everybody but Mrs Hunter was obviously feeling uncomfortable.
Sister Badgery tried to remind her patient of the physical realities. ‘Your pillows are looking lumpy, Mrs Hunter. Wait till I shake them up.’
While the nurse satisfied herself with the pillows Mrs Hunter was as much tossed by her own thoughts. ‘Yes. I remember the birds — the waves shaped like small pyramids — black swans nesting between them.’
Dr Gidley accepted the swans as his excuse for leaving. If there’s nothing we can do for you, Mrs Hunter, we shan’t interrupt your reunion with your daughter.’