The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  Recognition was common enough for him not to feel embarrassed in normal circumstances; but in this instance, a grey stare acted like blow lamps (cold ones) on any hidden flaws. ‘A lot depends on the performance,’ he mumbled while looking at his hands, at a place scarred by a forbidden jackknife; he must have been seven, or thereabout, at—at ‘Kudjeri’.

  ‘Day or night a lot depends on the performance,’ she agreed. ‘There are nights when I sit for hours—locked.’ She smiled at him with understanding. ‘This is where I change buses.’

  Though nowhere near his destination, he got up and followed her down; they both seemed to find it natural, or at any rate she did not behave as though frightened; some women would have wanted to throw him off, star actor notwithstanding. It was simply that there was nothing sexual in their encounter; yet she was leading him, and he could feel himself more subtly possessed than he had ever possessed either Shiela Sturges or the Lady Enid, his official wives.

  Her long feet reached for the damp pavement. He was standing beside her. They did not speak again till after she had chosen their bus.

  When they were re-settled, she told him, ‘This house where I live—which I inherited—is too big, too demanding.’

  Was she after all making a proposition?

  She didn’t seem to be. ‘Still, it’s where I’ve got to live, and I don’t normally complain—only that my dependents make it impossible for me to lead my life wholly at night.’

  ‘You have a large family?’

  ‘Not family in the usual sense: various old people, women mostly, dotted all over London—who won’t die—and at home, animals.’

  He thought he wouldn’t inquire into the animals; he didn’t care for them, except as an English theory he had adopted, and as engravings.

  Instead he rounded on her with what might have sounded like reprehensible enthusiasm. ‘Now that I come to think of it, I haven’t any dependents—one of a kind, a pathetic failed actress to whom I pay what is necessary—no need to the other—nor to my well-balanced, committed daughter. I have no one. I ran away from my family, my country, to become an actor.’

  She was waiting.

  ‘I’ve done what I set out to do,’ he insisted, he felt, modestly.

  She didn’t disagree. ‘You were knighted by the Queen,’ she reminded with appropriate gravity.

  When it wasn’t his achievement he wanted to recall, but his childhood, from which Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear, together with other paler apparitions, had sprung, out of the least likely drought-stricken gullies, brown, brooding pools, and austere forms of wind-tattered trees. Only the bus was not the ideal place in which to begin his invocation; and for once the sound of his famous voice would have made him wince.

  ‘I’ve seen some of your performances,’ she was telling, ‘though I don’t make a habit of going to the theatre. I remember your Lear—and I’ve been to the present thing.’

  This drew him. ‘Will you admit it isn’t as bad as they said?’

  ‘No, not bad—in fact good, in its stunted way.’

  He could feel himself inwardly bridling; perhaps vanity was the source of his greatest sensual pleasure.

  ‘But might have been better if you had dared give yourself.’

  ‘How do you mean “give”?’ He could hear the anger in his voice; and he looked at her afresh, wondering whether this old bag was leading up to what would materialize as an unmade bed.

  ‘Nothing physical,’ she formed the word with almost prudish care. ‘I don t doubt you’ve given yourself physically, night after night, in the parts you’ve acted—to the wives you mention—mistresses probably (I know nothing about your private life because I don’t read newspapers). And I don’t mean creatively either, because that’s unconscious where it isn’t disciplined physical labour. Nor do I mean what used to be called “spiritual” before we shed our illusions. Perhaps I should say you haven’t yet given yourself “essentially”.’

  His mind felt numb, his skin clammy. Was she preparing to introduce him, not to the unmade bed with its coffee stains and importunate ageing flesh, but to a far more daunting prospect: the other side of that grey screen, or backcloth, he had seen in his boyhood as standing between himself and nothing; and which he resurrected even now in times of flux and fallibility. So he armed himself with scepticism against anything else she might have to say.

  ‘Why I don’t go to the theatre more often,’ she continued, ‘is because it exhausts and irritates me to watch a set of cast-iron figures trying to drag their weight around in a disintegrated world. Since our conglomerate existence became less conglomerate, less controllable, more fluid, how can we express, or become part of it, unless we flow too, by giving—or losing—ourselves “essentially”?’

  Cock, he resisted answering; I have been able to control my own life ever since I learnt the technique of living, which is also the technique of acting; my gift, which is myself, is something no critic, no ratbag witch, no banana skins, only senility or death, can destroy. But what she had said stimulated him to the extent that he would have been tempted to flow with the darkness and the rain, and beyond them, if she was prepared to show him how.

  Instead, the bus jolted and stopped. ‘This is where I get out,’ she said, looking younger for the moment and unexpectedly shy. ‘My name is Mitty Jacka.’ It could have accounted for the shyness.

  She got up lugging a string bag filled with awkward, lumpy parcels, which had been lying on the seat beside her. Again he tagged along; at some point on their nightride they had come to an agreement.

  The rain had stopped, or rather, he could feel only an occasional flurry of moisture, fine enough to have been shaken in his face by plant tendrils, or out of human hair. The glistening pavement they were mounting rose sharply enough for Mitty Jacka to sound breathless, though she looked more youthful for her breathlessness whenever the lamplight showed her up. He too was breathless, from the strangeness of what he was letting happen.

  ‘My house will put me to shame,’ she said, and you knew that she was being no more than formally truthful. ‘Other people find it dirty.’

  ‘Other people? I imagined you leading the life of a recluse, apart from those dependents “dotted about”.’

  ‘Oh, no. They pour in. Droves of them. At all hours of the day. That’s why I prefer the night. Night is for the elect.’

  Though she gave no direct sign of including him amongst the chosen, he was moved by vanity for the second time since their meeting. He brushed against her, partly by losing his balance, if also a little by intention. She didn’t appear to notice, unless awareness was the reason for a sharp clout he received from the loaded shopping bag.

  Soon after, they arrived at a gate in a flint wall at which a cat was on the lookout, back arched at first in anticipation of danger, then subsiding into a serpentine blue glimmer.

  The cat’s purring and the drip of moisture from branches lifted in a gentle breeze made the sound of his voice an inept and impertinent intrusion on their dark surroundings. ‘What’s its name?’ he asked, stroking air instead of fur.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know—Cat! It was called something in the beginning, but I forget. We’re always together, so a name isn’t necessary, is it?’

  After identifying him on the bus, she hadn’t addressed him by name, and he felt pretty sure he would never venture to call her by hers.

  All around them were wet, needling branches, patches and trailers of faintly moonlit ivy; he caught sight of an irruption of fungus on the scaly torso of a tree. Here and there he had to stoop, not always successfully, to avoid being hit in the face. She too, was tall, but there the difference began: she had been initiated into the ways of darkness, while he might remain the blundering intruder.

  As soon as her key grated in the lock, there were sounds from inside the house: of scuffling, and snuffling, and a pop pop popping. Then, by light, a brace of pugs had begun to seethe around them, laying their faces flat against a stranger’s ankles, squeaking joy for t
hose they were re-discovering.

  Mitty Jacka was no demonstrative dog lover; she allowed devotion to flow around her, which it did: her pugs were ecstatic. After his experience with the cat Cat, he suppressed an impulse to ask their names. Instead, he was learning to adapt himself to the flow, if not to the smell of rubber hot water bottles and peanuts, evidently the distinctive smell of pug.

  He sat with a glass she had brought him, filled with something sweet, unacceptable, finally insidious, while she went about her animal business. Around him smouldered an upholstery of garnet plush, against panelling which looked like ebony, but couldn’t have been. At least it was an ebony pedestal on which a figurine stood holding its curve under an ivory parasol. He found he had begun smiling into his sweet and fiery drink, while the voice of Mitty Jacka in the distance flung a few ritual ‘darlings’ to her animals.

  He realized she was with him again on seeing her drop a piece of paper about the size of a visiting card into an urn on the shadowy outskirts of the room.

  ‘What was that?’ The drink inside him made him feel less brazen than spontaneous.

  ‘Oh—an idea I might decide to use.’ She sounded unwilling, even a bit sour.

  Then she was gone, followed by her anxious retinue. He continued sitting. Perhaps the smell of raw liver she left behind deterred him from investigating her ‘idea’. Instead he waited: for what? His future as an actor of some importance no longer seemed relevant.

  When she returned, not to settle—her behaviour suggested she might never do that, anyway during the hours of darkness—she freshened up his drink, more of which he had meant to refuse. As she moved about the room a cigarette she had lit for herself trailed its streamers of smoke, or described more elaborate arabesques as she stopped to look at and sometimes re-arrange objects she might have been seeing for the first time. She smoked so furiously that he was more drugged by her cigarette than drunk by whatever was in his glass.

  From adding up a couple of her remarks he decided to risk her displeasure again. ‘I gather you write.’ Carefully composed, the words shot out of his mouth like a handful of independent marbles.

  She drew harder on her cigarette. ‘I hammer away.’ The smoke she blew looked peculiarly solid. ‘Sometimes it takes a recognizable shape—or one which I can recognize, though more often than not it isn’t what it was intended to be. Yes, I write verses,’ she added, by way of obeying a social convention. ‘And all my life I’ve been putting together I don’t know what you would call it—a work—which will convey everything there is to express—if I can extract and compress it—or if in the end I don’t find it has melted down of its own accord into the word I started with.’

  Surrounded by the smoke with which she had been filling the room, he began telling, ‘When I was a boy—I forget how old, but quite young—I had an illness—no, I must have broken my arm: I can remember the sling, and the clammy feeling of my skin from the arm strapped against my unwashed body—in bed. They had fixed me up for the night—tried to make me comfortable. My father lit one of the night-lights left over from when we were smaller. And stood a screen across one corner of the bedhead—to keep the draught off, I imagine. During the night this screen began to terrify me. The fall—the broken arm—must have left me a bit delirious. As the night-light flickered I kept trying to turn—the strapped arm made it agony—to watch the screen. It was of a pale grey, or some nondescript colour, with the skeletons of trees stencilled on it. Or that was how the light made it appear. As the night dragged on and I became more desperate, I longed to look behind the screen, but was too afraid of what I might find. I was running with sweat. I suppose I fell asleep in the end.’

  Nor did the wine, or whatever the Jacka woman had poured, help him decide whether he had been speaking or dreaming. She had come and was sitting beside him on the couch, in a heap of drowsy pugs. She could have been smiling as she watched him, while stroking the rise and fall of a pug’s exposed teats.

  ‘This screen—how it’s continued cropping up. So solid and real—as real as childhood.’ He laughed uneasily for his discovery. ‘I’ve built speeches round it, rehearsing parts which have worried me. It’s always protected me from the draught.’ He sniggered, sipping the drink which had let loose his confession. ‘This screen thing—it materializes again when you feel you’re beginning to slip—in musty provincial theatres—a piece of disintegrating silk stretched on a ricketty, tottering frame. You’re less than ever inclined to look behind it. And you’re pretty sure that if it blows over, you’re lost.’

  His lips were almost paralysed. He was no longer aware of her as a face but as a smile beneath water. What else he told he could not have unravelled for sleep in a white dress streaming light from the top of the stairs. Did she touch his forehead?

  Towards morning he needed to relieve himself, stumbled through the curtains of smoke and plush, and against a low, object-laden table, but reached the garden, where cold and a sprinkling of rain revived him. A sweet scent, cold too, rejoiced him as he did his business. This piercing scent of night flowers was threaded through the smell of damp rot which finally predominated.

  Returning to the house, he looked up, and caught sight of Mitty Jacka seated by a naked light, in an upper room, either ‘hammering away’, or, more likely, ‘locked’: for the moment she was perfectly still, her expression desperate by that searching light.

  He felt so sober burrowing back into the darkness where he had slept, it occurred to him to investigate the urn in which she had dropped her slip of paper. He made light, put in his hand, and skimmed the surface of an urnful of similar slips for what was probably the most recent: there were traces of raw liver on it, as well as a bloody fingerprint or two.

  Sceptical this morning, not to say cynical, he opened the folded paper to read:

  … an actor tends to ignore the part which fits him best his life Lear the old unplayable is in the end a safer bet than the unplayed I …

  His breath sharpened as the words blurred. He didn’t have with him the glasses he used, not to read (he seldom did) but to study a part. So he held the paper at arm’s length. After the first attempt to focus on words too perfectly formed in a severe, anachronistic hand, he saw he might as well give up. Depressing the way his sight had deteriorated: after shock for instance, or abusive letters, selfish performances by the vindictive young, and especially after alcohol. Considering how the Jacka had dosed him the night before, it was no wonder half the message was lost. He was glad to re-fold her squalid paper, and toss it back into the urn, where it couldn’t remind him of physical decay.

  Then he proceeded to arrange himself again on what had become an uncomfortable unsprung sofa. He drew himself into an appropriate form, only it wasn’t: he realized he had taken on the shape of a prawn, and that it was too TIGHT. When sleep seeped back shallowly around he was lashing and kicking, more transparent than the words in which he was netted.

  His hostess brought him a cup of coffee at a most untheatrical hour. After she had dragged the curtains back, a grey light touched their reunion with fatality. Even so, Mitty Jacka, all gooseflesh and shivers now that day had succeeded her elective night, would have liked to float on the surface.

  She said too hastily, ‘Poor you—you must have been uncomfortable! The sofa’s a disaster. It belonged to a great-aunt.’

  She stood chafing thin and elderly arms; while he sat muttering approval of the sofa into his coffee. The cup, a once sumptuous Empire, had a brown chip as large as a thumbnail.

  ‘We’ll keep in touch,’ she predicted, looking out uneasily through the amorphousness of a wet garden, ‘because I know we’re meant to write a play together.’

  She had him at her mercy: she could attack him at the theatre where he was playing; whereas he had neither her number, nor address—nor did he want them.

  ‘Plays cost money,’ he replied, showing her his smile, which she ignored.

  ‘It can always be raised from somewhere. What about this old rich invalid
mother?’

  What had he told her in the night? He wasn’t aware he had mentioned Elizabeth Hunter.

  ‘She’s pretty tight,’ he mumbled, staring at his white knuckles. ‘Oh, she’s generous enough, I must admit—in little handouts—from time to time.’

  ‘Wouldn’t a personal appearance make a difference?’

  ‘Not worth it. Too many others waiting to jump in the moment you leave the West End.’

  ‘Money is worth it. Money is power, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, but it’s hers!’ As though he believed.

  ‘Only if her life justifies her keeping it.’

  ‘Aren’t the lives of beautiful women works of art? They deserve the fortunes men pay for them. And Elizabeth Hunter is a great—an incredibly beautiful woman.’ Now he honestly believed in what he saw: himself as a youth deriving from this radiance.

  ‘She had a stroke.’ Mitty Jacka sounded her coldest. ‘Mightn’t she die?’

  More than this voice, he had begun to detest himself. ‘Not on your life! Or anyway, not in a hundred years. Nothing will persuade Elizabeth Hunter to die.’

  He must get up; he must move; or succumb to slow poisoning. He felt as though not a skerrick of live flesh had been left clinging to his thought-infested skull.

  Mitty Jacka might have tried persuading him some more if her blue cat had not forestalled her. It strolled in out of the garden flicking the tip of its tail, carrying in its jaws a folded thrush: a corpse judging by the lolling head, resigned eyelids, and a necklace of blood against otherwise decent feathers. The cat flattened itself and growled, to warn off possible intervention, then glided under the sofa.

  The mistress had bared her teeth. ‘Ohhh!’ she cried, whether distressed or elated by the enactment of her argument, it was difficult to tell. ‘There’s nothing one can do. Isn’t it natural,’ she insisted, ‘that some should die for others to live?’