The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  Of them all, the drunken, sick, or possibly only aged man continued gently, unsteadily, on his undisturbed progress.

  ‘How can they?’ How dirty, smelly, frightening, so many old people are: the Princesse de Lascabanes felt more virtuous than ever.

  While the driver remained appropriately incensed. ‘The Council sweeps the rubbish off the streets, and leaves the half of it behind! Eh?’

  Dorothy Hunter’s sick sick not sickness only a malaise returned: herself potentially a murderess.

  At Moreton Drive peace was pouring in a bland golden flood out of the park opposite. There were birds in Mother’s garden. Somebody had put out seed for them in a little terracotta dish suspended from the branch of a tree. Sparrows and finches were fluttering, flirting; a rain of seed scattered from the swaying dish. From the lawn at the foot of the tree, a flight of blue pigeons took off clattering, and away.

  Oh dear, this is what I must keep in mind, at all times: the light, the movement of birds. Climbing the path, the princess knew she was giving herself a piece of hopeless advice: as if you can possess the moment of perfection; as if conception and death don’t take place simultaneously.

  It wasn’t the housekeeper, it was that boiled nurse who answered the doorbell. ‘Isn’t this a priceless morning, mad-dahm? Priceless,’ she repeated, evidently proud of her adjective. ‘Let’s hope it’s the end of the humidity. Your mother would be so relieved. The old backs do play up when there’s any humidity around.’ Sister Badgery oozed professional sympathy, not only for her patient, but for a caller she suspected of being, behind the voice and the fal-lals, a neurotic inexperienced girl.

  Dorothy coughed drily; she didn’t think this was the nurse she would pump for information on the symptoms and whereabouts of cancer in women of a certain age. ‘I see you’ve been feeding the birds.’ A feeble comment, and the more annoying in that Sister Badgery was so obviously stupid.

  ‘That is Sister de Santis. She puts out seed for them before she goes off duty. It’s quite a little ceremony. Sister de Santis is so good.’ Though Sister Badgery’s gold-rimmed spectacles radiated approval, you couldn’t help feeling that any admiration she had for her colleague was strictly theoretical; just as ‘goodness’ was probably a theory, one that you were supposed to get sentimental about.

  So Sister Badgery beamed, and stood aside for her patient’s daughter to enter.

  ‘Is my mother well?’ Nervousness gave the question an exaggerated emphasis; it sounded ominous, Dorothy thought.

  ‘Never better. Mrs Hunter is unexpendable.’ Sister Badgery laughed so gaily leading the way upstairs; if her calves looked strained, her step was springy.

  All of this helped increase a gloom gathering in the princess. ‘Such a ridiculously large house for one old woman to be bedridden in!’ She sighed. ‘I know from experience how unpractical. So much work for everyone involved.’

  ‘It isn’t work when your heart’s in it,’ Sister Badgery reminded rather breathily from over her shoulder. ‘And I think I’m safe in saying we’re all devoted to Mrs Hunter.’

  ‘That isn’t the point. The housekeeper alone must be run off her feet.’

  ‘Mrs Lippmann’s such a grateful soul—after all she’s been through—she wouldn’t begrudge her services. No, she wouldn’t begrudge.’ Sister Badgery never ran out of breath though she seemed permanently on the point of doing so. ‘And then she has the help of Mrs Cush—that’s the cleaning lady—two mornings a week. Though sometimes she doesn’t come. Today—if she comes—is Mrs Cush’s day. But Mrs Lippmann has gone to the dentist.’

  One less to face, Dorothy Hunter was relieved to think; besides, her French self, overlooking the housekeeper’s Jewishness, disliked her automatically as a German.

  ‘Poor Mrs Cush! Her husband is an epileptic.’

  Perhaps after all you could ask Sister Badgery, though prudently, about the cancer symptoms and the check-up.

  But epilepsy!

  Sister Badgery said, ‘I think today Mrs Cush more than likely won’t be coming—considering she isn’t here already, and the hire-car sent to Redfern to fetch her.’

  ‘Qu’est-ce que ce …? The hire-car?’

  ‘Yes. Mrs Hunter believes—in the goodness of her heart—the least she can do is send a car for poor Mrs Cush—what with the varicose veins and the epileptic husband.’

  But is my mother mad? Madame de Lascabanes fortunately prevented herself exclaiming in her most disapproving voice: outside the bedroom door too. Instead she remarked weakly, ‘Epilepsy must be frightening—quite frightening,’ and touched her pearls.

  Then Sister Badgery opened the door, and she was allowed into the sanctuary, where the shrunken head was still lying on the pillow as she and Hubert had seen it at Assisi. (That night he had been unusually kind, simply holding you in his arms, stroking, in no way sensually, but with that same reverence you were conscious of sharing earlier at the shrine.)

  Mrs Hunter opened her eyes. ‘Leave us, Badgery,’ she commanded; ‘I want to talk—confidentially—to my daughter, the Princesse de Las—ca—banes?’

  The nurse looked pained, but did as told.

  Dorothy felt weak at the knees. For a moment she feared she might be forced down on them, but succeeded in staggering as far as the bedside chair.

  ‘Mummy!’ she began mouthing in a genuine attempt at affection. ‘I should have brought you something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A present.’

  ‘Don’t be silly! It’s too late. I’m too old. Though that doesn’t mean I’m going to die.’

  ‘Did you have a good night?’

  ‘Oh-dreaming.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘My husband.’

  ‘Won’t you share him with me as my father?’

  Mrs Hunter ignored it.

  ‘I hope at least they were pleasant dreams,’ her daughter persisted.

  ‘Yes, and no.’ She began wheezing like a bellows. ‘Oh, Alfred—oh, his face! His teeth—or throat—suddenly clicked. That’s how I knew he was dead.’

  Boiling tears were pouring down the dry canyons of Dorothy de Lascabanes’s face.

  ‘I’ll tell you something,’ Mrs Hunter’s voice warned the listener not to expect an abstract confession. ‘For many years I couldn’t love, only respect him. Then I—well, I never loved enough. In all our life together, I didn’t touch his penis. To touch would have shown, wouldn’t it?’ Hands moved on the sheet as though to gather a rare flower; lips twitched back, exposed naked gums. ‘Or would it have seemed—whorish?’

  The Princesse de Lascabanes was horrified; she couldn’t answer: her best intentions were destroyed at every move.

  But she tried again, making conversation with what after all was only a dotty old woman. ‘As a matter of fact, I too had a bad night.’

  ‘I knew you would.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You were always such a fretful thing. And in a club bed. Those women in the dining-room must have frightened you stiff.’ Dorothy was about to protest, when her mother asked, ‘How did you pass the night if you couldn’t sleep?’

  ‘Oh, I read—and thought.’

  ‘What did you think about?’

  ‘I don’t know. Business matters. People I’ve known.’ Dorothy progressed with caution.

  ‘Money and lovers,’ Mrs Hunter corrected dreamily; then she laughed. ‘Or non-starters.’

  The pearls the princess was wearing could have been billiard balls: they cannoned so deafeningly off one another.

  ‘Tell me what you read last night.’ Mother could never leave well alone.

  ‘The Chartreuse,’ Dorothy replied tout court.

  ‘It was your father’s favourite book—The Charterhouse of Parma.’

  ‘Oh? But he wasn’t a reader. How do you know?’

  ‘I found out a lot of things when I got to know him. He’d been reading books. This one in particular: there were crumbs between the pages, coffee stains. He admitted he loved
it. We read it together the weeks before he died. He loved that woman.’

  ‘Who-Clélia?’ she hoped.

  ‘No. The other—the duchess. He admired her brilliance.’

  ‘I find her dishonest in some respects.’

  Dorothy looked for signs of exhaustion in her mother, but this morning the mummified head seemed filled with steel wheels.

  ‘Everyone is more or less dishonest. They may not murder, or forge cheques—dishonest with themselves, I mean. This—Sanseverina was no more dishonest than any other beautiful woman, or—or jewel. An emerald isn’t less beautiful, is it? for the flaw in it?’

  It was Dorothy who was exhausted; she mumbled, ‘I can’t think.’ In fact, her thoughts, her aspirations—which were also her dishonesties—were rattling round inside her like the loose seeds in a maraca.

  At least the state into which she had been plunged gave her the opportunity to hate her mother more honestly.

  ‘How do you find Arnold? Do you think he’s deteriorating?’

  Why Arnold? Yes, Dorothy hated her mother.

  ‘Not in the least deteriorated,’ the princess answered primly. ‘Now Mr Wyburd is a man who is completely honest, I’d risk saying.’

  Mrs Hunter laughed. ‘Upright.’

  And Dorothy hated her mother for reviving in her the milky white caress she had experienced in her half-dream the night before.

  It was a relief that Sister Badgery should appear with a tray.

  ‘Better late than forgotten completely! Here’s our egg, Mrs Hunter—our lovely, coddled egg—topped with cream and a pinch of herbs—and all prepared by me because poor Mrs Lippmann broke her bridge and had to rush off to the dentist.’ Sister Badgery gave the princess such a look she wondered whether this odious nurse wasn’t more than her accidental ally.

  Mrs Hunter said, ‘You know how I hate egg.’ She clamped her jaws to show she would resist.

  ‘You like brandy, don’t you, dear? There’s brandy in the coffee for those who eat the eggs that are good for them.’

  As the jaws were unclamped the aged child’s lips began filling with desperation; they looked blistered. ‘But I need the brandy.’

  ‘You need the good eggs that nourish.’ Sister Badgery arranged the bib.

  ‘I need fire—when the fire’s almost out.’

  ‘Whatever for? It’s summer, dear.’

  ‘To inspire me.’

  ‘If you eat up your egg, that will be inspiration. Think of the phosphorus.’

  ‘All nurses are the same,’ Betty Salkeld gulped through a splather of forced egg. ‘Kate Nutley’s wouldn’t allow her the toffee on the caramel custard if she didn’t pick the fish’s head.’

  ‘Phosphorus again!’ Sister Badgery, who always knew when she was right, celebrated her own wisdom by driving in another spoonful. ‘You never told me what became of this Kate Nutley.’

  Revolving the egg mess on her tongue, Mrs Hunter spluttered, ‘I—don’t—know. Well, of course, I really do. They must have driven her—nutty.’ At least the nurse and her charge had a giggle.

  The Princesse de Lascabanes was by now so revolted she got up. Her elastic was eating into her; influenced by other behaviour she dragged it down by ugly handfuls.

  ‘Coffee, mad-dahm, if I fetch a second cup?’ the much-occupied nurse managed to call over her shoulder.

  ‘Thank you, no—Sister.’

  ‘Dorothy’s going to the lavatory,’ Mrs Hunter whispered, and watched the right direction.

  It was such an unexplained exit it might have suggested just that: which was what the princess hoped. She had even considered pulling the chain at a certain stage, but decided against wasting time on realistic detail as you couldn’t wholly depend on the nurse’s continued dedication to the egg ceremony. So the princess went racing down to where her serious business lay. As she hurried, steadying herself on a rail which was burning her hand, she already heard in her mind’s ear, a tray pursuing her down the stairs with empty or rejected crockery jumping and stamping on it. However important it was for her to investigate, it would be equally important for Sister Badgery to observe.

  So the Princesse de Lascabanes’s pearls bounced, and Dorothy Hunter’s eyes were set in an anxious glaze, as they reached the hall Of course it was ridiculous in a house where you, not the German-Jewish housekeeper, not the boiled nurse, not even your senile mother, were mistress; and what you now heard in actual fact, was something crashing in the room above, subsiding in waves of porcelain fragments, and finally, instead of slaps, ripples of united giggles. Sister Badgery would almost certainly never be your ally.

  Since the whole house was against her, in spite of the claims to which she was entitled from having spent her childhood in it, Dorothy de Lascabanes stalked more warily than before. Somewhere she brushed against a very old raincoat. A parasol she upset in passing, fell between her legs and might have brought her down, but she saved herself, and it, carrying the parasol along to use in her support.

  The kitchen, the pantry, all the offices, were at least spotless: trust the German creature. The belle-mère herself could not have looked so keenly into cupboards; yet there was not a scrap of incriminating evidence, until, in the scullery, a bowl with a growth of green-to-bluish fur. The princess slammed the door on an obscenity; before it struck her that probably everybody has their basin of fur.

  For the moment directionless as she revolved on the shining linoleum, Dorothy Hunter tried to persuade herself: remember the light through leaves, the movements of birds, a sweaty but honest pony plodding homeward under casuarinas, Stendhal the laser beam; while she continued hearing the trit-trit of a hollow maraca.

  ‘O mon Dieu, miséricorde!’ Instead, you are losing touch with all the positive signs and your own better intentions; you are led in the direction of the garbage bin, to tip the lid with the ivory ferrule of Mother’s dilapidated parasol.

  Then the Princesse de Lascabanes began to rootle, in the practical, but joyless tradition of domestic bloodhounds, stirring up an inevitable stench: of coffee grounds, cabbage stalks, a whole alphabet of grey potato peelings, and the damp rot which sets in when newspapers fulfil their other function. To rootle was the real reason for her descent to the kitchen, the princess herself almost had to admit. To create a stink. Which she now managed. She brought it out, skewered to the ferrule of the lace and ivory parasol: as much as two whole kilos of good filet de bœuf on the point of putrefying.

  ‘Quelle salope! Que les gens deviennent de plus en plus malhonnêtes!’ Dorothy de Lascabanes could hardly breathe for having justified herself: in exposing the immoral unbalance of her mother’s crazy economy. If Mother hadn’t spent a lifetime hacking into the defenceless, yourself included, you might have been moved by a different horror on discovering that her parasites, the artistic housekeeper, pampered cleaner, and frivolous or over indulgent nurses, were sucking her dry without her knowing. As things were, the princess stood a moment by the bin to taste the flavour of an ironic outrage which was also her own triumph, while the wrist of the hand holding the parasol twitched to her thoughtfulness, and as it twitched, the beef fillet revolved limply, a silent klaxon attached to the ferrule.

  If she allowed the meat at last to subside, it was because it had such a horrid smell, and because, if you came to think, the solicitor was probably more than anyone to blame; though you couldn’t expect a man, however watchful and devoted, to conceive of the self-interest, the want of conscience, the cunning of such a gaggle of women. No, you would have to absolve poor Arnold Wyburd who, you had been made to realize, was such a dear, not to say a comfort.

  The princess firmly scraped off the lump of putrid meat on the edge of the bin; the lid clattered back into place, too loudly perhaps: Dorothy was afraid Sister Badgery might suspect an intruder; when she still had to carry out an even more daring detail of her plan.

  So she went barging out, again too loudly, clumsily, and up by what used to be referred to as ‘the servants’ stairs’, an exp
ression probably discarded along with the luxury of professional servants. The bare, though scrubbed boards, sounded alarmingly frail as she climbed; the air was as dense as felt in this claustrophobic, matchwood and plaster tunnel. She regretted her foolishness now, but had to continue as she had begun.

  And arrived on the landing, at the passage leading to the cells of the released prisoners. The doors she tried opened on rooms which must have been unoccupied for years, except by their wire stretchers, deal chests, and the corpses of moths; till in the last, the most imposing cell, intended for some more important, semi-responsible inmate, she found signs of life; for the housekeeper’s spirit lingered in it, together with the scent of her facepowder (understandably cheap) and a few visible possessions such as ground-down, yellow-bristled hairbrushes, a hare’s-foot stained brown, the framed snapshot of a woman and a young man enlaced against an empty bandstand, in front of an expanse of white sea.

  For a moment the Princesse de Lascabanes suspected herself of having committed an indecency, and her expression in the dressing-table glass looked pained—then worse: it was that of a flogged and panting horse, nostrils pinched, veins in relief on the saturated skin. Till the past excused her: she had always been fascinated by the maids’ bedrooms, by their mysterious otherness, above all by a suspicion of what was talked about as Love. Dorothy had lowered her fringe over Nora’s birthday book, and was honoured to write her name in it.

  Now there was time for little more than to fling open the ricketty wardrobe, to discover the balding silk hat, the tails with their accretions of mildew, greasepaint—oh God, whatever else. And leaning in one corner, the imitation malacca cane: its tinny, dented knob.

  Forgetting why she had come there, unless to add to the housekeeper’s moral reprehensibility, Dorothy Hunter slammed the wardrobe shut, then the room (she hoped) and ran, the whole passage shaking and creaking; till she reached the world of carpets and her shoes began to glide again, decently and prudently, towards her mother’s door. Emotions which a moment before had exploded in her in a burst of anarchic madness were stilled by the silence of old, sumptuous, superfluous furniture: impeccable intentions can always warp, given the wrong climate at the right moment. Recovered from her sentimental aberration in the housekeeper’s room, Dorothy de Lascabanes was persuaded she had a more lucid understanding of her mission.