The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  Certainly he had said it often enough to Shiela, but that was in the theatre: he couldn’t tolerate a bad, perhaps even worse, an intellectual actress, holding her stomach to simulate an emotion her head had ‘understood’. And yet in the beginning she seemed fired by intuitions, or was it the glow of youth, in the drab digs, the grimy Midland theatres? He had been in love with her—or the lines with which they wooed each other nightly. In any case, it was cosier for two to make the assault on the West End; whatever their ideals, that was their ambition.

  Outside the house in Moreton Drive the storm effects had become more controlled: the zinc thunder was rolled only intermittently; the wind must have died; he had forgotten rain could fall as straight or as solidly.

  He would have liked to continue listening to the rain, neither remembering the past, nor plotting the uncooperative future, simply being; but the housekeeper returned carrying a silver dish, molten it appeared, from her haste, and the sizzle of butter, and a considerable display of starched white cloth with which she was grasping the silver edges.

  ‘Du lieber!’ On the dish with which she smacked the sideboard lay a pair of flawless Schnitzel, the slices of lemon shaved to transparency, the anchovy fillets lovingly curled.

  ‘Don’t you find it tedious?’ he asked, to disguise the greed which had risen in him.

  ‘I enjoy myself to feed other people.’ The hands which withdrew in a flurry of scorched napkin were trembling.

  ‘But as a performer, I mean.’

  ‘Oh, Sir Basil Hunter, I was never more than a kind of compelled firework. Night after night I was let off, and fizzed—bang— and went out. Till at the end I hardly fizzed. My firework was a sodden one.’

  Inside its crust of golden crumbs her veal was succulent and tender. Instead of encouraging the housekeeper to reconstruct a life with which he would have to sympathize, he would have preferred his own company and thoughts. He was too much the victim of his own doldrums to be expected to enter anybody else’s.

  He could see from the corner of an eye that she was stationed by the sideboard, the hands below the white cuffs locked in an arrow pointing at the floor. The fact that she was standing guard made him conscious of the movements of his jaws and the silence he broke by masticating and swallowing. He was aware that one of his shoulders was raised, as if to ward her off across the intervening distance. She reminded him of some actresses, uncertain in their art, yearning towards an audience they feel they have not yet converted.

  He half turned to compliment her. ‘Whatever else, you’re a first-class cook.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ She laughed. ‘That is important too—isn’t it?’

  The air was passive around the sideboard; he could not tell whether he had offended her.

  ‘Cooks! Actresses! No one is all-important, unless the great artists: Mozart, Goethe, Bernhardt—Sir Basil Hunter!’ Her rather Jewish compliment had him wincing; or did she intend it as a side swipe? ‘If I could choose—if I could begin again—I would ask to create one whole human being.’

  ‘Literally?’ he asked, while knowing they were more or less agreed.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Or two. Myself. And one other—out of my body.’

  Though he had finished all but the rind of lemon and a thin ribbon of gristle, she did not attempt to clear away his plate or the quenched serving-dish.

  ‘Na, ja!’ she sighed from her formal attitude against the sideboard; ‘though the life of theatre is necessary for us—for you and me, Sir Basil Hunter. This drunkenness! This is why—when my family is murdered—the man who is my Lieb’ und Leib is lost—I still look to Tingeltangel— why, when I run out through the drenching lights, I can bear their worst laughter, their whiskey breath, afterwards the kisses, the praise and promises, the dirty gestures of both men and women. Even though these are only skulls, and false bosoms, and male vanity around the tables, I have to air my song—the little dance-step they expect—ein zwei drei.’ She demonstrated round the Hunters’ (four-leaved) mahogany table. ‘I have no voice. Except that of drunkenness. Which is what they have been longing for. It is their need—and mine. They laugh. They wish to touch my hat, my stick, my coat-tails of almond velvet. They aspire—to what? to be translated out of themselves? to be destroyed? Certainly, Sir Basil Hunter, there is nothing of this that you will not have experienced.’

  He was too humiliated to reply.

  ‘At a different height, it goes without saying.’ Her laughter made it sound more shameful, though unintentionally, he hoped. ‘They tell me you’ve played Hamlet, Lear: all the great German roles.’ As she went out with the empty dishes the housekeeper laughed quite recklessly. ‘So you must understand, Sir Basil!’

  He sat holding his head, staring at the place where his plate had been. To create one other being out of my own body. He had failed in that. Though Imogen his ‘daughter’ had shown herself willing to stand in. But with Shiela in the beginning, before the performance had set, he might have created a whole rather than a part. When all the parts were hanging from their pegs and out of sight, this whole might have reminded him that he was not wholly actor: he was also a whole human being.

  On the other hand, the ‘drunkenness’. Again this crazy Jewess was right. It is the next part which promises to bring the sum right. At the end another fly at Lear’s stony, perhaps unscalable mountain. He feared the prospect almost as much as Mitty Jacka’s non-play. Worst of all he dreaded the sound of projecting a tattered voice into a half empty theatre. In Glasgow during that last tour someone had thrown a banana skin.

  The housekeeper was returning to offer a crystal goblet; a perfume suggested peaches and champagne, together with a sickliness of almond? anyhow, inappropriate.

  She planked her offering in front of him. She was too excited; emotion could have destroyed the servant’s respect for a guest.

  Though he had no taste for sweets, he began stirring the contents of the glass, poking at the bobbing gobbets of peach. ‘Where did you learn this other art of seduction?’ he asked in a voice which belonged to a different scene.

  ‘Not from my old mother!’ She laughed cruelly. ‘I have learnt from a lover—no, we shall call him “protector”—a chef in Zurich. Berlin—Zurich—Haifa—Sydney: these have been my stations to date.’

  Her recollections made her furiously active in the present. The Lippmann had shed any pretence of passivity. If her feet didn’t go ein zwei drei the almond-green velvet of her coat-tails flew. Her hands looked younger for the shadows and her agitation.

  ‘I don’t blame!’ she protested. ‘Not this fat Swiss always smelling of the kitchen. Not any of the others. My one lover. My poor incinerated parents.’

  She dragged up a chair and thumped down at the opposite end of the ponderous mahogany table. ‘My parents, you see, are these liberated Jews who worship scientifically. Medicine, you might say, is their religion, their rabbi a physician, when not a psychiatrist. I, their daughter, must become a dietitian. I must study the Bircher Benner und so weiter. Right? But I cannot deny the drunkenness—which is also, by another light, my Jewishness. I run away to the Tingeltangel— certainly ein Rausch in its most unorthodox form—but drunk!’ She threw back her head till she was all throat, her laughter at its most convulsive.

  ‘And love!’ Her face had returned. ‘I love this one German—this goy! It is not desecration, as you perhaps, as certainly my dead parents, believe. There is no desecration where there is love.’ The housekeeper’s face at the opposite end of the table had grown old and terrible.

  ‘What became of your German?’ he hardly dared ask.

  ‘I left him.’

  ‘But others left together.’

  ‘We were not as others. I left him because I loved him.’ She got up, trying but failing at first to unlock her arthritic hands. ‘Or because—as your lady mother insists—I am the original masochist.’

  ‘No one ever knew better than Mother how to rub salt into other people’s wounds.’

  ‘But I lo
ve her!’ the housekeeper gasped.

  ‘How can you love what is evil, brutal, destructive?’ If he were to survive, he must persuade himself to continue believing some of this.

  ‘Yes. She is all you say,’ her housekeeper agreed; ‘but understands more of the truth than most others.’ As her hands fell away from the table she added, ‘And if I cannot worship, I have to love somebody.’

  Then she removed the goblet of sweetstuff, which, it appeared to both of them, had been an unnecessary prop.

  She brought him coffee in the study. She was again as self-effaced as she should have been in the role of servant: eyelids lowered; hands dutiful; bearing modest without trace of servility. When she had left him he scalded his tongue drinking her coffee, bitter-tasting, and strong enough to blow a safe let alone a human skull. But he forced himself to drink a second cup, because he must see his mother before leaving the house which, he had to remember, was only legally hers.

  The storm had moved away, he realized. These were his footsteps thundering on the soft stairs; no other sound, not even the racket of traffic, to profane a perfect silence.

  In the sanctuary the acolytes had created round the object of their apparent devotions, Sister de Santis sat writing with an old-fashioned, once elegant, gold-encircled fountain pen; on her knees a document, of no doubt esoteric significance, clamped to a board by a common bulldog clip. Seeming to take for granted that the intruder was of her persuasion, she looked up smiling as soon as he entered, then returned to her occupation. As in the garden earlier, the radiance of the woman’s eyes and the opulence of her breasts surprised him. He could not entirely accept her in the way she appeared to accept him. Of course nothing of this would ever become acceptable. What he might have longed for, against his rational judgment, he stifled under repugnance in this house become shrine, in which there was even a hint of incense, if only from cypresses rubbed up the wrong way by the storm withdrawing from the garden.

  By now the image on the bed was stripped of vestments and jewels, the festive paint removed from its face. What remained might have been a corpse if a fluttered breathing had not animated the shroud; and eyelids, otherwise like speckled seashells cast up on a beach by a storm, persisted in tremulous activity; and the light spun a nimbus out of the threads of dead-coloured hair. The total effect did not suggest a woman, less than any, his own mother: as the guardian of the relic may have wished him to believe. The shaded light, the scent of ruffled cypresses, the hypnotic motions of the fluttered sheet and tremulous eyelids, all invited him to share with the elect their myth of sanctity; when he had come here for his own and different purpose: his survival depended on the death a materialistic old woman had delayed too long.

  He was relieved the attendant nun did not expect him to participate in any of their rites; at the moment she was having trouble with her antiquated fountain pen. Only in his first move towards departure it was suggested, ‘Aren’t you going to kiss your old mother goodnight?’ Completely impersonal, impossible to identify, the voice was basically a woman’s. (Could conscience be a woman, perhaps?)

  At this point the night nurse raised her head, and he broke away, leaving her, he saw in one of the many mirrors, the token of a haggard smile, which she received with what he might have mistaken for an expression of pity or even selfless love.

  He ran downstairs, feeling his pockets for he couldn’t remember what, rang for a taxi, did remember his coat, the luggage he had brought with him from the airport, and the name of the hotel where they were keeping a room for him. The housekeeper did not appear again, and he was the happier for her avoidance. It also allowed him to fill his cigarette case from the full box he had found in the study before dinner.

  Then the taxi was honking outside.

  Sister de Santis did not approve of what she was doing: she got up, and cracked the curtains enough to watch Sir Basil Hunter leave. The moon had revived in the wake of the storm, but rode the sky groggily. From the house the garden below appeared a muzz of frond and shadow threaded with the serpentine path. Down the path the figure of a man was tentatively advancing, unequally weighted by a suitcase in one hand, an overnight bag and briefcase in the other. Sir Basil was made look older than when she had first met him at the gate; exhaustion could very well have shrunk him physically, without damage of course to his reputation. No, she didn’t admire this elder brother of the great actor less; in fact, he benefited by her pity: he reminded her a little of her father, whom she had respected more than any other man, even in his frailty.

  Down in the street the illuminated taxi was waiting for its passenger, its lights too brash beside the insinuating glimmer from the moon. Approaching the taxi’s beacon, Sir Basil could have been dazzled by it. At a turn in the path, where an abrupt flight of steps spoiled its serpentine flow, he put his foot in a pool of darkness, and began to topple. The bags completed his unbalance. He fell right over into a border of heliotrope and thyme under one of the smirking broken-fingered statues,

  Sister de Santis shoved the window as far open as it would go. She leaned out—to do what, she couldn’t for the moment conceive, though in her mind she was already bent over the body examining it for injuries. Wasn’t it part of her job? But her efficiency might have suffered from the scents of the garden. The heavy air was making her breathe too deeply; she could feel the sill cutting into her as she leaned out over the remembered face, from which she had banished any sign of disillusion or dissipation.

  The taxi door sprang open on the driver’s bronchial ribaldry, ‘No need to watch yer step, mate. That’s about the finest arse over tip I ever seen.’

  Together the taxi-driver and Sir Basil were gathering up Sir Basil and his bags.

  ‘Once you know you’re a goner, it’s better to let yerself go. And no bones broke. But I reckon you worked that out for yerself, eh? from experience.’

  She could not decode Sir Basil’s reply from its outburst of joviality overlaid by pique.

  The taxi-driver carried the bags out through the gate, his passenger limping behind him.

  ‘What is it, Sister?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve woken you, have I? It was so breathless—I opened the window to let some air in.’

  Through the window, you could hear the taxi driving away, alongside the silence of the park.

  ‘Basil left, then. I knew he would.’

  ‘He saw you were asleep.’

  ‘He didn’t want to say goodbye. Neither of us felt like it.’

  ‘He didn’t want to disturb you.’ Sister de Santis hoped it was true; she liked to think the best of people, and night duty allowed her to: faces asleep surrender their vices to innocence.

  ‘You know I never sleep,’ Mrs Hunter insisted. ‘Where is Manhood?’

  ‘Sister went off as usual, soon after I arrived.’

  They had met that evening in the dressing-room. Sister Manhood was in her slip. Under the colourless make-up she used, she was looking hectic.

  ‘Have you met him?’ she asked her relief.

  ‘Mr Wyburd introduced us as I was coming in the gate.’

  Sister Manhood was twirling: it emphasized her look of nakedness. ‘I think he’s gorgeous. Older men are so much more—distinguished.’

  ‘I haven’t met them all. And it’s too early to say of this one.’ Sister de Santis knew that she was not being strictly sincere, but Flora Manhood induced a show of principles.

  ‘Oh, aren’t you stuffy, Sister! So literal,’ she added gingerly, because it was a word she had learnt from Col Pardoe.

  Putting on her street dress she decided to provoke stuffy old Mary. ‘I wouldn’t mind sleeping with Basil Hunter.’

  Sister de Santis knew she was blushing, but managed to laugh coolly enough. ‘I expect he has the lot to choose from.’ She took off the hat she knew Flora Manhood despised.

  ‘Oh, it’s easy for you! Have you ever had—have you ever wanted a man?

  ‘Surely that is my affair?’ It should have sounded more casual, but Sist
er de Santis had pricked herself with a safety pin on sitting down at the dressing-table to unfold her fresh veil.

  Fortunately for her self-control, she remembered, ‘That friend of yours—the chemist—rang and left a message, Mrs Lippmann says. He expects you down at his place. He has some chops to grill.’

  ‘Like hell I’ll grill chops! I’m nobody’s wife, before or after the ceremony.’ Flora Manhood might have thrown a tantrum, with pouter breast and throat swollen to a goitre; but she thought better of it.

  She nudged Sister de Santis in the small of the back with the orange plastic bag. ‘Sorry, darls, for my indecent curiosity. I’ll leave you to the pure pleasures of night duty with Mother Hunter.’

  Because Sister de Santis was in no way given to frivolity, this duty would have been less a pleasure than a devotion. In her earnestness she was ready to forgive Flora Manhood her flippancy. She had tried before to explain away her colleague’s frequent scurrilous attacks on Mrs Hunter by seeing in them youth’s dread of the sacrosanct. She herself often feared the sudden slash or cumbrous intrusion of Mrs Hunter’s thoughts. But tonight, it seemed, the old woman’s weapons had been blunted in parrying the daytime intruders.

  Paradox and heresy mingled with the night scents and sickroom smells after Mary de Santis had watched Sir Basil leave. She was forced to invent insignificant jobs, to prove to herself she had not lapsed from the faith which necessity and her origins made the only possible one.

  ‘Már-o!’ in her mother’s despairing reed of a voice; ‘Mar-i-a?’ in her father’s basso; till both parents were agreed she could only become an Australian ‘Mary’.