The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  A sense of anger began floating around her, and kept recurring hours after he had left. She tried to direct it at Sister Manhood, because if Flora had not been diverted from the hoped-for meeting, the young man would never have arrived, a knotty problem, on Mrs Hunter’s marble doorstep. Sister de Santis had gone in. The slammed door emphasized the silence of the house. She almost never slammed doors: that was more in Flora’s style.

  And here she was, hours after the chemist had left, standing in the study, Manhood’s equal in faithlessness. The house had never been less a shrine; and you less its guardian. She walked about recklessly, nudged once or twice by a leather arm against which she bumped. Her anger was partly increased by the harsh glare from woodwork and gilding in a room she seldom entered, partly from having to admit that Flora Manhood and her knotty—oh yes, her undoubtedly honest chemist, were nowhere near the reason for her agitation.

  In one of the many mirrors with which the house was overloaded, ‘the big white lily’ planted by Mrs Hunter the morning before, had begun swaying: all ready to be picked. As he bent her backwards with the smoothest, the most practised motion, her mind rooted through, her mouth lapped at, every detail in the catalogue: she drank through the pores of his just faintly bristling skin; dragged at the creases in tight clothes; inhaled the scents of brilliantine and stale tobacco; her fingers tangled with the grey-black (unfatherly) hair, laying open the bald patch she couldn’t remember, but which must have been there because here she was discovering it.

  Mary de Santis was flung into one of the huge leather chairs. It sighed, and sucked at, before settling around her. Whether she imagined it or not, it still felt warm. It smelled of. You mustn’t touch the basil Máro Papa has planted. She did, though; she crushed it between her hands, and the scent of basil invaded, finally emanated from her body. She was anaesthetized by her own scent of basil.

  Not entirely. Mary de Santis opened her eyes. Where two separate plants had been rubbing together so sweetly in bursts of glossy foliage and pointed spearheads of near seed, here was her knotty solitary self, trapped in the leather chair, in a distorting mirror. Not even Mrs Hunter’s ‘big lily’. Her anger broke around her. She began unbuttoning her uniform, tearing at the straitjacket beneath to free her smoothest offerings. Which he, or anyone, would have rejected, and rightly. Though dimpled under pressure, and arum white, their snouts pointed upward to accuse the parent sow.

  Around her on the carpet the wasted basil seed was scattered. If Mamma were preparing to accuse, Papa would not. Nor Mrs Hunter, along with acting Basil has made a profession out of disappointing.

  When St Mary de Santis was the disappointment. She heard her shoes chuffing as she escaped from the glaring room she had chosen for her self-exposure. All the way up the stairs the iron hedge, planted to protect her from space and the hall below, was catching at her skirt with iron thorns. In spite of buttoning her habit, she might arrive in the sanctuary stripped. In whatever state, she burst in. To fall on her knees at the foot of the bed. If not to recover what had passed for sanctity. She found herself pressing the palms of her hands together, in an arrowhead, as she begged (she had not been taught to pray) for grace.

  Four

  HER DELIRIOUSLY patterned dress, her gyrating Perspex earrings and orange bag didn’t count for much in the dark. Not that it was real dark. Night was still in its brown stage: the sound of feet was not yet divorced from plodding bodies; you could still read the makes of cars, whereas in another quarter of an hour, all would be swallowed up in a great rubbery volume of traffic. If the lit windows of houses offered a human belief in permanence, the oil refineries ablaze down Botany way suggested other worlds, other more demoniac values.

  Earthbound through her strong legs, her rather too thick, female body, Flora Manhood would have liked to destroy something tonight. She breathed deeply of the chemical air and hoped she was contracting lung cancer. What, she wondered, would happen if she picked up a stone and shattered the glass protecting one of these families seated at their monotonous meal? Rough hands; a bumpy ride in a police van; then Col would bail you out, explaining that he, more than anyone else, had the right to do so. Col’s unquestionable ‘right’: other people, amongst them many women, would no doubt see it as ‘fidelity.’

  Flora Manhood did stoop, to pick up, not a stone, but an empty bottle which had begun swirling round her ankles. She half-aimed it at a window, and it fell short; it plopped amongst the oleanders. She walked on muttering, smarting for a feebleness which overcame her at decisive moments. There were moments when she wondered what actual control she had over her own will, in spite of her latchkey, her training as a nurse, and her contempt for those who thought they would take advantage of her.

  Probably she felt contempt for everyone she knew, except perhaps Mrs Hunter: why not Mrs Hunter, when half the time she hated the old thing, she had not yet been able to decide. She admired, possibly, heights to which she herself could not aspire. Flora Manhood remembered how she and Col had once watched a rather boring documentary of some mountaineering expedition on which the climbers never quite made the highest peak; the last shots in the film, with a commentary you had stopped listening to long before, were of this half-veiled peak, sombre at first in the distance, then for a moment, as the sun struck, breaking through to blind.

  Of course it was silly really to connect this half-dead bed-wetting still spiteful old woman with a mountain, even though Mrs Hunter did at times break through the mists of senility and give you a glimpse of something else. You only hoped that one day she wouldn’t frighten you with such a glimpse as you feared she might.

  Down at the intersection the night closed in more grimly in spite of the noise, the traffic, the lights. At least from that level the refineries could no longer be seen, but the exhaust fumes thickened. It was frightening, all this lung cancer. She began breathing very lightly, tried in fact not to breathe at all, so as not to inhale the fumes. Along the pavement, in the shadow between lamps, a man was trying to pick her up, of what description she couldn’t, didn’t want to know. As she hurried along, the man followed on her darker side, mumbling half-intelligible words. A foreigner of some kind, which made it worse: foreigners were darker, and usually sober. To sleep with some hairy foreigner (Yes I did it Col with my eyes open I am my own mistress aren’t I knowing all the dangers—the risk of venereal disease which is actually what I have caught—syphilis has been diagnosed).

  By the next crossing at least she had shaken off the man. She was in the hell of a lather, though. Keep on along the same old everlasting stretch. Turn left, second right, and she would be ‘home’: Vidlers’ back room with use of kitchen and cons. Fry herself a couple of eggs. Women are lucky: they can live on eggs if need be. And cheese. And chocolate. Then a long hot bath if the system wasn’t playing up. She enjoyed her sleep: couldn’t get enough of it; and dreams. Sometimes she tried to choose her dreams. She would try to dream about Sir Basil Hunter.

  At 26 Gladys Street decency prevailed: the dwarf shrubs pruned to shapes in their green concrete surrounds; the composition path, which Mrs Vidler scrubbed and mopped all the way from gate to doorstep; the letter-box poised at the top of a stiffened chain (Mr Vidler, a handyman at all times, had his artistic side). Sister Manhood rooted around in her bag for the key. What if she had lost it? It wouldn’t matter all that much: Mr Vidler would let her in, into her own room, with its airless cleanliness, and lounge you converted into a bed. Mr Vidler would say, no trouble at all, Flo—just as if you was our own daughter. Mr Vidler was ‘Vid’, Mrs Vidler ‘Viddie’: they were such mates.

  Because kindliness can suffocate, Sister Manhood went away, back along the composition path, past the letter-box standing on its stiffened chain. She wasn’t going to Col’s, though. She would muck around for a bit. None of Col’s old chops and grease under your fingernails. If you wash the grill Flo soon as it cools off you won’t notice you’re doing it—not like if the fat sets. Oh, yeah? This was the kind of decisive
moment which always slipped away from her: it left her elbow-deep in grey water washing up Col’s greasy old grill, while Col played Mahler at her, or read out from some intellectual magazine opinions which confirmed his own. Then when you had hung out the damp, stinking towels, and you were what Col liked to call ‘mooded’ by the music, he would make ‘love’, he referred to it; and though you too, recognized it as such, you couldn’t very well have admitted. Love as she tried, but failed to imagine, couldn’t be so easy and cheap, or smelling of mutton fat and sweat.

  Col once read her thoughts and said, what if I’ve planted a baby in you Flo that’ll give us something for real. She downright panicked; she tried to remember how regular she had been with the pill; she couldn’t.

  Tonight she panicked, not for that reason, but for trying to come to the end of this street of deadly dolls’-houses, all painted up in emulation of one another, and behind their faces, either suffocating kindliness, or variations on her own theme of chaos. So her feet slapped the pavement. She almost broke her neck to reach the Parade: where a couple of blocks down she could read PHARMACY in crimson. She half expected to smell the chops he must have charred by now, for reading What’s-his-name—Oonermooner, or some equally unreadable nut.

  Flora Manhood crossed the Parade. She would go to Snow’s; it was surprising she hadn’t thought of it before. There was every reason why she should come to this decision: my cousin Mrs Hunter my only relative left has asked me to share her flat I only have to make up my mind Snow Tunks a bus conductress. Snow could be the answer: as good as a man without the disadvantages.

  Flora Manhood went spanking through the night towards ‘Miami Flats’ where her cousin Snow hung out. There was nothing to recommend the street, except its convenience: close to the bus, the delicatessen—and the chemist. ‘Miami’s’ barley-sugar columns were peeling; one of them had cracked; something, probably a runaway truck, had cannoned off a corner of the building and played hell with the roughcast. Just at the entrance a fluorescent light sat spitting at the top of its pole, so that all the potplants in the hanging gardens of ‘Miami’ were nickering sickeningly.

  But Flora Manhood was almost puking with relief: she might have been walking through the steady white glare, like in the old days, along the road which ran between the banana farms. Snow, an older girl, told how Ken Mathews asked me to go steady but you’re the one Florrie I’ll always love. It tickled Flora. Not that she hadn’t been, and still was in a way, fond. It was sort of comforting, close and easy, being cousins. But funny. Ken Mathews must have been simple or something to want Snow as a steady date. Even went into Coff’s Harbour and bought her a diamond baguette ring. While other boys were laughing: she was growing muscles instead of tits. Had white hair as far back as you were able to remember. Certainly Snow was strong: Uncle’s best hand about the place; no man, Uncle said, would ever regret his investment. Helped Auntie Ol too, with the goats; the boys at the Saturday dance said you could smell the buck on Snow. (What would Mrs Hunter make of that?) Then Snowy decided to leave. In spite of the baguette ring she said Ken Mathews was unnatural. She was going to the city to find a job. She did. She became a bus conductress.

  Though it was planned you should do nursing, so as to better yourself in life and perhaps get a doctor or other professional man for a husband, it couldn’t be for some years yet. Snow went first seeing she was that much older. The night before she left you clung together and snivelled a bit; you had never been closer. Because she was tense, Snow pressed her hard body in between your thighs, her flat tits against the beginnings of your cushiony ones, while the moonlight was rustling between the rows of bananas, and the bandicoots went frrt-frrt. You had a cry, because the future was too enormous to grasp, and the bandicoots would still be making their farting noise in the country around Coff’s Harbour long after Snow, or yourself even, had left.

  There was no lift at ‘Miami’ and the several flights of steps had a look of brawn. On one landing the smell of gas was so intense it added to Flora Manhood’s expectations: though she had never liked the idea of mouth to mouth resuscitation, being cousins could make it emotional, not to say heroic.

  The flat was a small one and Snow appeared soon after you rang the bell, after she had squeezed aside a pleated curtain and tried to see through the frosted glass.

  ‘Bugger me! Thought you must be dead, Florrie.’ Snow stood holding open the stained pitch pine door.

  Flora Manhood felt irritated. ‘If I was dead you would have been notified. Haven’t I named you as my next of kin?’

  Snow laughed, and something—it was the fumes of gin—shot out of her. ‘That’s correct. Arr dear, it’s lovely to see yer, love.’

  All the while Snow Tunks was narrowing her eyes and smiling at her cousin Flora Manhood; it irritated Flora worse, when she had wanted to feel warm. But here were the white lashes, the blast of gin, and Snow’s stomach sticking out, which she had eased by unzipping a hip since she came off duty from the depot.

  Still, you had to come up with an explanation. ‘It’s a long time, Snow, I know. But I’m tired out with this case—this old tartar of a woman. I often think about you, though.’ All considered, it was a necessary lie.

  They were passing under the pink-beaded lampshade, with the same fly shit on it, and along the narrow, pitch pine and parchment hall.

  ‘Arr dear,’ Snow said, ‘I reckon we oughter incinerate the old folks. What can they get out of it? You and me can’t complain, Florrie—all of ours passing on.’

  Flora Manhood hadn’t come about death; she decided to hurry things and put the question. ‘I’ve been wondering about the proposition—that suggestion you made—Snow—that I move in and share the flat. Does it still stand?’

  Snow sort of burped.

  Flora Manhood said, ‘A person can’t make up her mind without giving a matter thought.’

  They had reached the back, the kitchen, and its other half, the dinette, its benches upholstered in a floral cretonne which might have looked brighter before the grease got worked in.

  ‘You never ever gave me to understand you were so much as thinking of it,’ said Snow. ‘And now there’s my friend Alix. Alix was sold on the idea from the start. She’ll be home any moment.’ Snow looked at her wrist. ‘She’s a sales-lady—at Parker’s in the lonjeray.’ Again Snow looked at her wrist, freckled either side of the watch strap.

  She poured a drink for her cousin, who didn’t go much on gin, but explored its shifting, blue glaze with extended, pink lip.

  Flora knew by now she couldn’t have stood her cousin’s white-lashed lids, her protruding stomach, or her unzipped hip. Snow was sitting, knees apart, like a man sits, the cigarette hanging from the skin of her mouth. She had let herself go all right; you couldn’t remember any such crude deportment in the old days at home, or even more recently, after she got with the public transport. On top of everything else, you felt that Snow was probably jealous, not as a man, which is bad enough, but something left over from being born a woman.

  As they continued sitting on the cretonned bench, Flora said, ‘I wouldn’t want to butt in, Snow, on anybody’; testing the blue gin with her lip.

  ‘Well, I realize that,’ said Snow, looking up and down your wrists, your arms, your thighs—made you pull your skirt down—into the past perhaps, amongst the bananas, along the white road at home.

  ‘This Alix,’ Flora asked, ‘is she a close—an old friend.’

  ‘Well, she’s close. I can’t say she’s old.’

  ‘I mean, you’ve known each other a long time.’

  ‘A coupler weeks.’

  ‘No, you can’t call that old.’ Flora was determined not to show she was griped.

  While Snow grumbled, ‘You’ve gotter begin somewhere, haven’t yer?’

  They sat listening to the fridge. Snow was probably lit, from waiting for Alix who was late. Said Alix was first in as a rule, and put the tea on: that was what they were used to.

  Flora Manhood wondered w
hether she would be able to submit to Snow if Alix didn’t last a second fortnight. At least you came off duty too late to be expected to get the tea.

  Just then they heard a key feeling its way inside a lock.

  Snow laughed; her pleasure brought her out in strawberry blotches. ‘That’s her now,’ she said.

  Alix was a clotted-creamy woman, with the necklaces of Venus, and black hair built up high, which made her look taller than she was.

  ‘Alix is late, Butch,’ she explained unnecessarily. ‘But I know you’ll forgive her, won’t you, love?’

  Alix was less interested in Snow’s forgiveness than in someone she hadn’t been asked to meet; her eyelids, heavy with a load of shadow, or alcohol, were lowered specially for the stranger.

  Snow had decided on manliness. ‘We’re not gunner chew the rag all night over why you was late and nothing in the pot, because here’s my cousin Florrie Manhood dropped in as a surprise like.’

  ‘Oh, rurlly? You didn’t tell me you had a cousin. Or did you, Butch?’ Alix put on what she understood as a smile, and approached the gin by little steps. ‘Is she in business?’ she asked, squinting at the bottle.

  ‘Florrie’s a fully trained nursing sister.’

  ‘Rurlly? Perhaps she’ll give us some free advice.’

  Although she had already drunk, Alix was still thirsty; when she recovered her breath she asked, ‘Which hospital do you favour, Sister Manhood? looking down her own cleavage.

  Flora explained, while feeling too sober and too cool, that she was nursing privately at present.