The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  One of them thought to call, ‘Diana’s sure she’s pregnant. She thinks she took the seasick pills instead.’

  A male guffawed.

  That old bawd Babs Rainbow was grinning above her ginny-boo. ‘Diana must leave it to Auntie Babs’; while Madge and Dudley, childless as far as you could remember, smiled rather thin, trying to show they were with it.

  It was here that Janie rolled over and started fingering the clock on his sock. ‘Possibly you don’t know—I was at school with Imogen—your daughter.’

  He swallowed half a tumblerful.

  ‘Imogen and I were chums,’ she added.

  Not unlikely: two coarse-boned girls, equal in age; only Imogen hadn’t Janie’s plastic face: her missionary zeal would not have allowed it.

  ‘Imogen sometimes asked me home. Shiela was ghastly, and Imogen always wonderful to her.’

  He drank the rest of the whiskey in his glass. ‘She isn’t my daughter, you know. No blood offspring, I mean.’ Why was he telling this young thing with the swinging hair and partially revealed twat? Honesty? Or masochism?

  ‘I hadn’t realized.’ Some prude ancestor forced her to lower her eyes; a closer influence made her suck on her glass.

  ‘Oh, no—definitely no!’ he was emphasizing. ‘Shiela admitted—out of spite. She made use of Len Bottomley, the most bloody uninteresting actor in the profession—butlers, friends, courtiers, all that—because she was jealous of me. She took Len as her stud, and Imogen—my “daughter”—is the result.’

  Janie Carson looked as though she hadn’t wanted to hear about it: confessions, when not launched as amusing details of gossip, can become embarrassing.

  One of the burnt-up young men, Garth by name, was smouldering at him with what looked like contempt.

  Janie said, ‘What an awful time you’ve had, Basil, what with all that, and now your mother.’ She delivered her line in a level tone of voice, except at the point where she swooped on his Christian name.

  But he wasn’t interested in the reactions, the preoccupations of Janie Carson or any of the present company. Although it boiled up in him at times, he was not interested in the past, or the messes he had made in certain corners of a successful career. What obsessed him was the future and its threats.

  Again he was speaking to this girl, not because she offered him more than a token sympathy, but because her slight interest might help him give shape to some of his more shadowy thoughts. ‘When I spoke of my mother’s “deathbed” I was exaggerating—I think. I don’t believe she’ll die till she wants to. And I suspect she doesn’t want to. What makes any strong-willed old person decide to die is something I’ve never worked out.’ He looked round at the other faces, none of which, with the possible exception of Janie’s, was giving attention to what he had to say. ‘I haven’t had much experience of the old and senile; in fact I’ve always gone out of my way to avoid that sort of thing.’

  Good old solemn Dudley was dutifully automatically sleepily pouring you another drink. It was a relief to sink your mouth afresh; and no one had accused you of ignoble intentions.

  ‘I must admit that when I’ve had a study I’ve longed for the star girl to drop dead.’ Janie shook her hair and giggled at her glass.

  ‘Not death again!’ The word had broken through to Madge at the other end of the room; she was holding her chin too high to stretch the wrinkles in her throat.

  Garth, the dark thin young hawk, had raised his beak; his eyes were contemplating no one else but Sir Basil Hunter the famous ham. ‘Did you ever hear—sir,’ he coughed for a word he used unwillingly; words probably made him feel awkward unless they were handed to him in lines: then he knew how to kindle them, ‘I think I read it—that fear of sex underlies an obsession with death?’ It was uttered with a seriousness so intense it fell wide and heavily.

  ‘No. I hadn’t heard it.’ Sir Basil smiled the smile which had vanquished many.

  Garth the hawk flushed darker, but wasn’t vanquished. Gathering his shinbones inside sinewy arms, he sat and glowered.

  Babs Rainbow blew one of her ripest raspberries. ‘Tell us what’s on in life for a change. Haven’t you a nice play, Bas? Something old-fashioned and plummy?’

  ‘I have a play.’

  This was more in everybody’s line, even the morose amongst them.

  ‘Tell us!’

  ‘The play!’

  ‘Not old-fashioned. And if there’s a plum, it’s mine.’ He hunched himself in mock apology. ‘Aren’t I an actor?’

  Garth looked down his eyelashes and curled a lip.

  Sir Basil Hunter drew in his nostrils. ‘A sour plum, to shrivel the mouth.’ You could feel their imagination catching.

  Janie Carson had rolled over and was lying propped on her elbows. ‘And who’s written this frightening play?’

  ‘It’s not written—or not entirely. The greater part will be improvised.’ To expose his daring was making him drunk.

  ‘Darling,’ Madge Puckeridge warned, ‘you’ll end up naked, and in the round.’

  ‘Got to take the plunge, haven’t we?’

  Dudley, Madge, Babs, all old old; yourself, the high-diver, probably older than any of them, but from the tower on which you had climbed even the armoured young looked defenceless.

  ‘It’s only an idea—as yet.’ There might still be time to throw the beastly thing off.

  ‘But who’s writing it? Who? This play—or idea.’ Janie was rocking on her elbows, insisting.

  ‘Mitty jacka.’

  ‘Never ’eard of ’er.’

  Their ignorance might have deflated him if what they hadn’t heard of could have been in any way important.

  Then Madge remembered something. ‘The woman who lives somewhere out—Beulah Hill?’

  ‘That’s where she lives.’

  ‘Oh, but she’s old! She’s older than us.’ Madge couldn’t take it seriously. ‘Writes poetry and things.’

  ‘Mitty isn’t old; she’s ageless.’ He believed it, and it frightened him.

  ‘Has she got hold of you, Bas?’

  ‘He’s having a thing with a mummy.’

  ‘The death wish more like it.’

  ‘But at least tell us,’ Janie Carson was insisting with her elbows, what’s the idea behind this half-written non-play?’

  ‘My life, more or less. Acted out with a company of actors. According to how we—the actors and audience—choose, it could go this way or that—as life can—and does.’

  There! He was sweating. His glass was empty. This time Dudley didn’t fill it.

  Babs screwed up her face till the mouth disappeared and the glaring eyes and the dimple in the chin were her predominant features; then she said, ‘No part for me, Bas, in any old non-play—swingin’ me tits all over the auditorium—fartin’ in the aisles. No thanks! No harm in a little embroidery here and there, but at my age I like a few lines to hang on to.’

  There were visions in the faces of the others: Dudley Howard shorn of his reliability; Madge Puckeridge divorced from the affectations she depended on to disguise her thinness; Janie and Garth had slithered together, and could have been mounting on a wave, but of their own inspiration. So that he was again alone. All foresaw his downfall, he could tell, not by their smiles, but from the shadows under the cheekbones, their parted lips, as they watched the naked knight’s exposure: the pendulous, vulnerable testicles.

  Madge recovered first. ‘It could be a perfectly marvellous idea. I only wonder—Mitty Jacka.’

  Dudley, who grew earnest in drink, got you into a corner to warn you against a poison which could end in professional suicide.

  Babs and Madge were not exactly quarrelling. Garth leaned over and began bathing Janie’s cheeks with a spate of whispered kisses; his lips looked enormous, but no longer hostile; her hair, fallen to either side of her face, might have been dipped in water.

  Suddenly you remembered. ‘That flaming plane!’

  Dudley took up the phone because it was his room a
nd his responsibility as the equivalent of host. After the clicks, the polite voices, the re-connections and the explanations, he burped, and reported, ‘They give it another three hours.’

  It didn’t surprise you by now; anything else would have seemed unlikely.

  Everybody yawning mumbling mouthing the ice in empty tumblers.

  You said you were imposing and would impose less in a public lounge if there was.

  The key in which nobody said goodbye you would meet again if you didn’t it didn’t matter.

  Known faces begging for forgiveness for past sins or to be loved in the indeterminate future.

  He saw Janie Carson determined to pick up what must be the duty-free bottle. He could visualize her face as that of an old woman: a guarantee in the young—of? of?

  Hands falling apart; the succulent kisses.

  Long putty-coloured corridors smelling of soy sauce above refrigeration. Janie disappeared behind a door with Garth.

  He went on through the cool but stale corridors looking for a hidden lift: well. Found its cage just as the air started beating at him.

  It was Janie the swinging bottle swashbuckling legs underwater hair. She took him by the hand, and it seemed natural: they had dropped their ages.

  ‘ … why you should get a stiff neck in an armchair in a lounge.’ Instead she was unlocking 365.

  ‘Hospitality plus,’ he foolishly and wearily contributed, but she gave no signs of having noticed its lack of sparkle.

  Walking amongst the furniture (nineteen twenties pink modernistic) she had begun taking off the little she was wearing. She was shaking and folding her shift. She lay on the bed having gooseflesh.

  All the while the refrigerator was clonking over continuing continuously.

  ‘Bed’s pretty narrow, but ought to adapt.’

  Reminded of what he was expected to do, he started taking off his own clothes but out of time with the airconditioner.

  ‘Which parts are you playing?’ he brought out from inside his shirt.

  ‘Oh,’ she sighed. ‘Hero—Lady Montague—Gwendolyn. Gwendolyn’s rather fun.’

  ‘A compendium of females!’ He wrenched himself pompous idiotic out of the tearing shirt.

  The trousers clinging fashionably were more difficult. What if he toppled over?

  ‘You know why I’m here? I’ve got to raise the money for this damn play. Even if she doesn’t die she may come good with a few thousand.’

  ‘I’d like to be in your peculiar play.’

  ‘We’ll im—provise it!’ Tearing off the last of the trousers.

  Why not? Mitty Jacka the master mind must have planned a few incidental harpies to tear into his nakedness.

  Janie Carson almost didn’t glance; she switched off the light soon after. It was thoughtful of her. His nervous shanks might tremble less in the dark, the slacker skeins of flesh not swing. Balls too.

  When he reached her he lay along her let her at least feel his weight while dabbling his lips in her mouth. It would have swallowed him if he had stopped.

  She gulped once. ‘What I’d really like, terribly,’ she spat him out, ‘will you have me one day for your Cordelia?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve never understood exactly what Cordelia’s about. That’s what makes her exciting.’

  ‘I’ll have you for Cordelia—if you—when we’re both ready.’ He had to think of something to do—some business— between now and his apotheosis.

  ‘That makes all of this madly incestuous, doesn’t it?’ Wriggling giggling under him didn’t convert his limpness into enthusiasm only increased his shame.

  ‘A dead loss tonight,’ he apologized, before leaning off her into the dark somewhere in the right direction to do what he hadn’t done for years.

  ‘Sordid old brute! Vomited almost over me—anyway all over the carpet.’

  ‘Serves you bloody right for tampering with old men.’

  ‘But you won’t understand, Garth. I’ve got to experience everything.’

  ‘I guess you’ve experienced some of it, then.’

  Janie a silk flame beside male body hair and white briefs: this one snapshot before you were acting the corpse you felt.

  ‘Looks like the old bugger’s passed out.’

  ‘Let’s move my things. That’ll make the room more sort of his—as well as the vomit.’

  The room did become yours as far as sleep could persuade a vast black chamber in which naked tumblers were playing a scene from birth to death it was the only scene in the play Mitty explaining for that reason fairly elastic somebody pulls your frightened prick to remind you the tumblers have formed a womb out of their stacked bodies through which you were expected to crawl under the encrustations of swallows’-nests out between the mare’s legs whether Mitty approved of her Primordial Baby’s interpretation you couldn’t tell nor look to see whether Mother

  The air had stopped flowing past him as he woke rigid on the narrow bed searching for some

  The Flight!

  ‘Flight 764 departed already one hour,’ the sweet sleepy telephone voice informed.

  ‘Then I must find—do you hear? a seat on another. As little delay as possible.’

  Escape from this room, from Sir Basil Hunter his vomit. Thank God for your clothes: nothing like costume for security.

  As he reached the upper terrace, his mother’s house rose above him, black against the green-flickering sky, and almost as enormous as the houses of childhood: the dark had evolved a kind of beauty out of the pepper-pot turrets, dormers and bull’s-eyes, fretwork canopies and balconies. At his return by half light, the same house had appeared a joke; now he had to take it seriously.

  Respectfully he wiped his feet on the mat outside the door he had left ajar. From inside, sounds of cutlery and glass transformed his hopes into confidence, till he suddenly remembered he had to face another actress. It made him creep through the living-rooms, withdrawing his feet as though from a stickiness wherever a lamp had formed its pool of light. The portraits on the walls were passing judgment, his own disgusted little-boy’s face the most relentless.

  Someone had arranged decanters and glasses on a marquetry table in what had been known officially as the ‘study’. He was glad of a couple of hairs of the dog before making his entrance for the scene with the housekeeper. He experienced as usual a faint excitement mixed with misgiving at the thought of playing opposite a woman whose work he didn’t know, who had been chosen for him perhaps ill-advisedly, or even out of malice.

  Then the housekeeper herself was standing in the doorway. ‘Your dinner is served, sir, if you wish and it is not too early.’ The opulent house filled with superfluities overemphasized the austerity of this stone figure.

  ‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to eat.’ He began moving with a grace which came easily when he was in his best form; he smiled, and the lights in his head were refracted in a glass hung above the fireplace. ‘Basil Hunter,’ he added unnecessarily, he hoped kindly, to put her at her ease.

  But she must have been overdazzled: her lips, her chin, were in trouble to reply, ‘Lotte Lippmann.’

  Then she turned and began to lead him with as much seriousness as her black dress, her white crochet collar and scraped hair, had learnt to command; but her neatish bottom waggled, he noticed, because she couldn’t help it.

  Arrived in the dining-room, she indicated his chair with a languidly formal gesture, her eyes potentially communicative, though for the moment preoccupied with some irony of her own.

  They had to get it over, so he said, ‘My mother mentioned that you’re an actress.’

  As he sat down she was pushing at his chair from behind. ‘Achhh! Mere Tingeltangel—Tingeltangel, Sir Basil.’ Her sigh expiring behind her as she left the room seemed to echo the sentiments of old honky-tonk pianos.

  So he was invaded by her, or rather, by their common melancholy: of darkened theatres, or clubs where the stained tablecloths would be bundled up in the light of m
orning. The middle-class pomp of Moreton Drive gave no protection.

  By the time she returned with a tureen, its lid rising to a climax in a miniature viridian cabbage, he had manufactured a whole arsenal of bread pellets, appropriately grey, to defend himself against a repetition of the hours they had both undoubtedly experienced.

  ‘This Tingeltangel was my only talent.’ Lotte Lippmann released the steam from the contents of the bulging tureen.

  He would neither interject, nor hurry her towards the big speech for which, he sensed, she was holding herself in reserve.

  She ladled out for him one of the German soups afloat with meticulously moulded Knödeln, the whole smelling a bit obscene of must or puffballs. ‘Na— you like it?’ She was asking for praise out of her dark scar of a mouth.

  The Englishman he had become, replied, ‘Mmm—excellent—yes!’

  They were laughing together in conspiracy, though she lowered her eyelids and withdrew soon after, out of discretion.

  Outside, the thunder had begun. He could hear branches whipping the air. What might have been rain was still only the sound of attached leaves streaming in a wind.

  He had come home to a foreign country. On the other hand Enid had once said, after one of the daily rows marriage privileged them to indulge in, when we misunderstand each other Basil I must remember you are a foreigner we may speak the same language but we interpret it very differently. Lady Enid Sawbridge, his second wife and the Earl of Burlingham’s intellectual daughter, amounted to five volumes of verse besides a monograph on Aphra Behn, three novels, and the Travels in Asia Minor, in Outer Mongolia, and in Micronesia; with such a scholarly mind it was surprising the grasp she had of the facts of life.

  He couldn’t think why he had married Enid, unless to consume more of the unlimited flattery she appeared to offer, and for the doors she opened to allow him to indulge his lust for sociability. As a wife she was one long squabble. After the first week, in which they continued to share the triumphs of knowingness, they realized that beyond their few points of agreement, each knew something better and different. All through the quarrels Enid would smile: she had the grin of a borzoi bitch about to snap. The most amicable thing about their marriage was their parting. They agreed not to divorce for the moment, and the moment became permanent because it seemed as though no other arrangement would suit them better. Lady Enid Hunter was still about town: sometimes she made an appearance in his dressing-room, and they would rub cheeks and exchange endearments, perhaps go on to supper and have a good laugh at somebody’s expense; it took the sting out of what they knew about each other. Possibly Enid liked to think of these occasional meetings as one of her many contributions to civilized living; in his own case they were the outcome of a fatal weakness, his inability to say no.