A House Too Small: And Other Stories

Lady Dorothy’s Dilemma

161 LadyDorothy’sDilemma Hope has returned to the hearts of scores of millions of men and women, and with that hope there burns the flame of anger against the brutal, corrupt invader. And still more fiercely burn the fires of hatred and contempt for the filthy Quislings whom he has suborned. Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Sir Winston Churchill, delivering an address to both Houses of Congress in the United States of America on December 26, 1941 Oh yes, she had thought many times, in her ever-diminishing interludes of sobriety, my husband certainly spared no expense to allow his eye to fall more commonly on beauty than on ugliness. But that only applied to her immediate gentrified surroundings. Knight Commander of the British Empire . . . who disappeared from my life in England and beyond for long periods! That double-dealing, chauvinistic, racist bastard was “autochthonous ” (a word he loved to use, to confound me and blare his “superior education.” But, he did not know that I bested him during his restless bouts of drunken sleep when I learned of his “clandestine activities.” Yes, his “conscience” (if he had one?), his hateful out- A House Too Small 162 pouring of demonic fantasies came to my knowledge between snores, when he spoke in the language of devils! The columned house stood high on the suburban hill of Durban, South Africa, known as the Berea, not far from the university campus. In its white-painted luster, it topped the manicured terraces of the garden like the cardinal jewel in an emerald crown. Where she stood the woman had a splendid view overlooking the downtown buildings, the harbor, and the great mound structures of the sugar terminal in the port. “Carillon of the damned!” She muttered the words under her breath as the sound of bells came welling up from somewhere within the city that spread in irregular patches below her home. The church was lost to sight, absorbed within the urban sprawl. Lady Dorothy of Somerset, the childless widow of Sir Roland Gaylord, felt as if she were a mammal trying to breathe underwater, dragging cylinders of oxygen on her back along a road paved with coral. It led, she was certain, to an amorphous statue deep beneath the sea. Muffled and indistinct, her speech emerged as though in a cloud of bubbles. She wished that the utterances of her anguish would burst forth into the ether of significance. But it did not work that way. Instead, the slur of words tumbled in disarray as shards of partially chewed ice fell from her mouth. She raised her veiny hands to her lips, besmeared with waxy lipstick applied by shaky fingers. Then she plunged her fingers feebly into each ear as she tried to shut out the drifting, yet insistent, clangor. “Be gone!” she cried. Nobody heard the spluttered maledictions of a wasted dowager whose youth was but a distant memory, and whose titled status and aristocratic wealth had become the relics of a shrunken empire. Lady Dorothy preferred night to day, which seemed to lie in wait ready, to press-gang her into the idiocy of routine. She had not slept well last night. Nor the one preceding that. Indeed , she had not experienced true rest for a very long time. The lady was certainly in no mood for the insistent calls of Lady Dorothy’s Dilemma 163 the church. They served only to emphasize the chill of loneliness . Her companion had become the square bottle filled with a fermented extract of juniper berries, her music the tinkling indifference of ice cubes. Trying hard to focus properly through the netting of a severe headache, she stared down upon the rambling city below her vantage point on the wide verandah. The incongruity of her appearance, dressed in a flowing chiffon frock, alone and drunk before noon on the Lord’s Day, did not bother her. She began to sway as if to the vagaries of the warm and wet wind. On its way up from sea to sky laden with dense humidity, it brushed past the posh suburb straddling the hillside, dampening the stone floor as it went by. By force of habit she had positioned herself between the neat sections of light and shadow marked by the smooth support columns. They stood firmly, shining in sparkling white below the iron filigree of the roof eaves...