The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  The princess was rather put out. ‘No, I don’t, exactly,’ she had to admit; then she blurted, ‘But what on earth did you talk about all those years?’

  ‘Well, business. Wasn’t I his solicitor?’

  It infuriated Madame de Lascabanes. ‘But a relationship isn’t only business! There must have been other, personal topics.’

  The solicitor had a brainwave; he smiled mildly. ‘We shared an interest in clocks.’ Not avoidance when it was a fact. ‘You see the clock on the mantelpiece? That was one of Bill’s. Your mother very thoughtfully presented me with it after his death. And there’s your father’s photograph beside it.’

  Dorothy got up, handbag, gloves and all. ‘Oh, yes! Dad!’ when she hadn’t meant things to go this way.

  She hadn’t wanted to be moved by her dead, though actual father, only morally roused on his behalf; whereas here were lines of kindness round eyes as mild as the solicitor’s own, and a mouth too sensitive to be associated with rams—or Elizabeth Hunter. She must concentrate on the absurd collar of an in-between period and the laughably conventional photographic pose. But the inscription, in a hand as stiff and awkward as some of her worst moments, was convincing enough to make her regret this confrontation more deeply.

  She turned and said, Tm afraid nobody—none of us— loved him as he deserved.’ While expressing her own inadequacy, it should at the same time have paid the solicitor out.

  He didn’t reply.

  When they were once more seated, she noticed his hands clasped in front of him on the desk: they were older than she would have liked. But he probably hated her. Everybody hated her.

  Madame de Lascabanes opened her handbag, looked inside it, and closed it again.

  She held up her head, and smiled a bright forgiveness. ‘Tell me—didn’t you have a little girl called Heather? I seem to remember measles. Or was it chicken pox?’

  Miss Haygarth came in and whispered in her farthest from Bexley North, ‘Sir Basil Hunter.’

  Dorothy was seated with her back to the door. Would her pearls, her coiffure, help her after all endure the presence of her unspeakable brother? Before anything else, she did not think she could bear his laughter: for herself, as she remembered it, the rattle of a metallic shutter clashing with her most private thoughts; for others—the grown-ups—dreamy rippling chuckles delighting by what passed for uninhibited boyishness.

  Now only silence in this steel and concrete cell, in which the paraphernalia of another age, in sagging leather and buckled pasteboard, collaborated with austerity to make it appear more sinister. She looked to the solicitor to protect her from the calculated brutality of the blow which must be preparing for her; Basil’s malice was capable of the greatest accuracy.

  Arnold Wyburd had stood up, himself a party to the silence: lips twitching, but silently; eyelids flickering rather foolishly she thought, showing their blue veins and unnaturally white wrinkles. It was as though the silence had isolated and exaggerated this decent man, no longer solicitor, pseudo-father, least of all the mysterious lover whose dream flesh and silky testicles had caressed her thighs in the club bedroom, but a mediocre actor continuing to mime his part during a break in the sound track. He looked particularly unconvincing as he pretended to accept from across the flickering silence of the Keemis and Wyburd office apologies for late arrival which would in any case have sounded insincere.

  She sat frozen by Mr Wyburd’s impotence: deep frozen when unseen hands grasped her shoulders from behind in a display of familiarity, moulding, positively mauling; then she was nuzzled between her right ear lobe and the pearls.

  At the same time sound flowed back to assist the performance in a series of broken, not quite vibrato, amplified whispers. ‘Good—old—Dor-o-thy!’ Basil breathed down her neck; and she realized that she was faced with, perhaps not star-, but co-stardom, in this flawed film, in which she had hoped to play only a modest part, like the solicitor, and slip away without being blamed for her innate gaucherie as an actress or the vicious tendencies of the character she was supposed to represent.

  Instead, Basil her brother kept coasting round the somewhat sticky Keemis and Wyburd leather chair till their situation of reunited brother and sister was complete.

  As she looked at him she came to her own rescue. ‘Don’t you think we ought to get on with things? It’s late enough as it is, and Mr Wyburd may have a luncheon engagement.’

  No doubt Basil was struck by her amateurishness; he burst out laughing, and it wasn’t the metallic shutter of their youth, nor yet the dreamy chuckles which had charmed innocent adults, but a peal of vibrant organ notes: specially for her, she horrified herself by suspecting.

  ‘For God’s sake, Dotty—’ nobody had ever called her that, ‘allow me the pleasure of your eyes for a second or two.’

  It was perfectly ghastly. The few press photographs to come her way in the years between had shown several different men all of them either dimmed or distorted; till here she was faced with the lustrous truth: Hubert de Lascabanes himself had not appealed more disturbingly on the occasion of their first meeting in the Crillon lounge.

  As for her brother (it was her brother), he remarked, ‘You’ve improved quite a bit, darling!’ pursing up his lips, either in irony, or sharing with her an interesting secret.

  So she was helped recover her balance by being unable to interpret his attitude and words with any certainty.

  This was where Mr Wyburd came into his own, professionally, reliably: he opened the meeting as it were. ‘You will realize this is hardly what you would call orthodox procedure: for your mother’s solicitor and attorney to reveal any of the details of her private affairs. But considering Mrs Hunter’s advanced age and the state of her mind—not so far deteriorated that she isn’t determined to continue dictating general policy as well as giving decisions on many little personal matters—I am taking it upon myself to make you, her mature children,’ here he grew excessively grave, ‘acquainted with the line of management I have been pursuing, and so convince you—I hope—that your mother’s confidence in me has not been misplaced.’

  Only fretfully impressed by the solicitor’s periods, the princess was left brooding over the reasons for his failing her earlier on when she had needed his moral support. Instead she should have been studying the boring memos he had provided for them: a sheaf for each. The furrows in Basil’s forehead advertised the intensity of his concentration; several times over he ejaculated, ‘Quite, quite!’ the clipping of which showed he agreed with the substance, while not wishing to interrupt the flow, of the Wyburd monologue.

  Once, after riffling ahead through the typed evidence of the solicitor’s integrity, impatience almost shouldered aside his studied discretion. ‘Oh, I can see—it’s all here! You’ve done a superb job, old Wyburd.’

  The solicitor was not to be flattered or diverted.

  Dorothy wondered whether he had learnt his speech in advance. The fact that two men were taking tedious matters in hand had made her momentarily languid. Still looking appropriately serious, still listening, she opened her handbag and tilted the little mirror: she was curious to discover what Basil had found in her to inspire his peculiar remark about improvement; it might have explained an affection he had never shown her in the past. What she saw in the mirror pleased her no better than it usually did: she had a flair for general effect, but her details let her down—except perhaps the eyes; perhaps Basil admired her eyes; the possibility made them swim.

  She glanced up and he was actually looking at her over the typed sheets, through the solicitor’s reiterated jargon. Basil was looking, not at her eyes, which at their most appealing she liked to think liquid and gentle as a deer’s, but into her mind: he was sifting her thoughts, perhaps to confirm the reason for their meeting voluntarily in this office. He looked rather frightening; just as she knew that she could look frightening in her moments of indignation, frustration, or rage.

  However far he may have wormed his way into her mind, he sud
denly winked at her, then openly smiled; and she smiled back, or parted her lips enough to ratify an alliance.

  Basil Hunter half snorted, but gathered the other half into his handkerchief, as he recognized Horse Frightened by a Thunderstorm. A handsome horse: a Regan of a horse. Did it mean that he was to be cast as a drag Goneril? (Shades of Mitty Jacka and the ‘unplayed I’!)

  At least he and Dorothy both understood the purpose of their presence in Sydney. Now that it was made clear, he could unwind a little; he yawned; and when the solicitor finally came to the surface with a flash of pride in his old eyes, Sir Basil contributed a noncommittal ‘Possibly’. In the pause which followed, he held his head on one side, and the sunlight glittered on a wing of steely hair, folded casually enough if it hadn’t been for the marks of the comb which had sculptured it between his temple and his occiput. ‘Nobody can deny you’ve protected a client’s interests and administered her fortune with admirable devotion. So—if I suggest we’ve been considering the situation, until now, more or less in the abstract—Arnold—it in no way reflects on your irreproachable behaviour.’ His smile glistened, also by grace of sunlight from high above street and traffic. ‘But in fairness to everybody—including my—our mother,’ the princess acknowledged his civility with an awkward little jerk of her head, ‘I think we should review the position from another angle.’

  The solicitor lowered his eyelids, it could have been to protect his rather watery eyes from the glare.

  ‘What we have to decide is whether a person who has reached our mother’s age derives happiness and comfort from her half-life, in proportion to the elaborate and—and shockingly expensive machinery needed to maintain it.’

  Arnold Wyburd reminded, ‘You know from last night, Basil, when we only touched on the subject, that I believe Mrs Hunter enjoys her life even now.’ He wished he could have expressed himself more passionately, but cutting an emotional dash had never been his style.

  Basil Hunter screwed up his face so tightly only its rudiments were visible. ‘Surely she could continue to enjoy her life—if she does enjoy it—within a less pretentious framework?’ Then he allowed his face to fly open, and stared from the solicitor to his sister with a candour which should have won any but the most uncooperative audience. ‘The needs of old people, by the time they’re almost gaga, must be so simple: not much more than a comfortable bed, a kindly hand, and plenty of bread-and-butter custard, I should have thought.’

  ‘Though Mrs Hunter’s mind wanders at times, it always appears to be searching after subtleties.’ Arnold Wyburd was feeling his way. ‘I’d say she is still the most complex woman I know.’ He couldn’t confess the rest: she terrifies me as much as ever.

  The Princesse de Lascabanes stirred; she coughed as though trying out her voice, which had been lying, as it were, deep down with her sunken thoughts, and might not at first be flexible enough. ‘Personally,’ she began, and found she was up to it, ‘I think you are both shilly-shallying—avoiding issues—playing about with words and theories. You in particular, Basil.’ The accusation was cold enough to remind her brother that, although she had been bowled over on his first appearance, by the cleft in his lower lip, by the steely hair, the glowing complexion, and for a moment thought she saw the husband she had failed to devour, she was not on any account prepared to be carried away to the point of incest.

  Apparently disbelieving, Basil laughed and played with a pencil. ‘Tell us some more, darling.’ he coaxed.

  Dorothy ignored it. ‘I mean to say—I’ve already gone as far as making practical investigations of my own. One fact, for instance, of which you can t possibly be aware, Basil, though Mr Wyburd must, I imagine,’ she looked with regret at her dream lover of the night before, ‘is that Mother has given orders for a hire-car to be sent regularly to fetch the cleaning woman from Redfern. That, one might argue, is a caprice, and anybody old should be allowed a caprice here and there, to show them their will is still theirs to use. But I discovered something else about which she can’t have known, and if she had, would most certainly not have approved.’ The princess narrowed her eyes to fire her shot. ‘I went down this morning into the kitchen

  ‘You didn’t, Dotty!’ Basil sniggered.

  She closed her eyes for an instant to shut out the brother she had known, in spite of his deceitful overtures, to be as malicious and hateful as ever. ‘I went down and found in the dustbin at least two kilos of good filet de boeuf deliberately thrown away and already putrefying.’

  Sir Basil roused himself to renew his entente with his French sister. ‘Nobody can have known about that except the housekeeper. Who, I wonder,’ he looked at the solicitor, and looked away, ‘engaged a crackpot Central European cabaret dancer, or whatever she is, as our mother’s cook? That was madness on a grand scale.’

  ‘But she loves Mrs Hunter.’

  ‘Loves, does she? Then love in the kitchen ends, apparently, in the dustbin.’ He was pleased with that; and Dorothy was visibly impressed.

  ‘It’s the waste. Wastage’, the additional syllable made her feel she was giving birth to a word, ‘has always been immoral, but in an age like ours, it’s unpardonable.’ Almost as soon as she had said it, she wondered which of the immoralities she pardoned: at least you have no control over your dreams.

  Basil was preparing to lead the charge farther afield. ‘Whatever their professional skill, nurses are renowned for being unpractical creatures, unless, as private nurses, they find themselves in a position to fleece their wealthier patients. Then some of them become most realistic. Tell me, dear old Wyburd, where, for instance, does our mother’s army of nurses eat?

  ‘Naturally they’re entitled to a meal if they’re in her house at the time when the meal is usually eaten.’ He could see Dorothy Hunter’s eyes still trained on that chucked-out fillet. ‘If the night nurse eats a meal at an unconventional hour, it’s because she must feel hungry in the middle of the night.’ He was appealing to his prosecutors.

  Sir Basil nodded: that woman in the awful hat.

  ‘What I’m not altogether prepared to accept,’ the solicitor admitted, typing with nervous fingers on his desk top, ‘is that Sister Manhood should arrive in time to share Sister Badgery’s lunch before Badgery goes off. Manhood made the arrangement to suit herself—economically most desirable from her point of view—and difficult to put a stop to, now that the precedent has been established.’

  ‘Is Manhood the pretty one?’ Sir Basil Hunter asked.

  The solicitor drew in his mouth; he looked frightened; he nodded.

  Madame de Lascabanes hated her brother, even her pseudo-lover, not to mention that healthy nurse in skimpy shift patterned with palpitating colours, who had stood in the doorway yesterday watching her go down the path.

  ‘If the girl isn’t entitled to a midday meal, you, in your position of authority, should have told her so,’ the princess considered.

  ‘She’s Mrs Hunter’s favourite.’ The solicitor began to protest, then slightly hesitated. ‘She makes your mother up.’ He hesitated more noticeably. ‘I understand Sister Manhood took a course in—wig—management, for which Mrs Hunter paid.’

  Sir Basil clapped his hands above his head: a burst of percussion in their hitherto stately string music could not have startled his fellow artists more. ‘Good for Mum! As an actor I can hardly disapprove of her tendencies to theatre. Can I?’ It was one thing to arrive after many years and find a daubed mummy standing in for your real mother; but now Sir Basil was bored, and his vision of the Lilac Fairy tittuped deliciously amongst the law books and steel filing cabinets, her cupid’s bow strung for mirth. ‘Nor should I mind a pretty girl like Manhood slipping the bedpan under me.’ He took one of the two biscuits lying in the solicitor’s saucer, and shamelessly gobbled it up.

  Dorothy was revolted; she unclenched her jaws with an effort to mutter, ‘So much still to settle. I should have thought you might control yourself.’

  ‘Mmm. You are right, dear Dorothy.’ Basil re
ached for the second biscuit. ‘Only there’s a frivolous bum hiding in my soul of reason.’ He munched, swallowed ostentatiously, and might have been preparing to burp; but folded his hands instead. ‘Now I am—ready—to resume—our discussion, which is important enough, God knows.’ And looked at her for the approval she couldn’t very well withhold; and smiled.

  Why did he have to play the fool, and in so doing, make a fool of her? He seemed unaware that his coarseness might cause others to suffer. She couldn’t bear an elderly fool.

  Arnold Wyburd, who might have enjoyed a clash between his critics if he hadn’t been distressed by what he sensed as the same motive behind their different approaches, shifted and mentioned, ‘ What I think we must bear in mind is Mrs Hunter’s need to spend her last years in the house she knows, surrounded by dependents to whom she is attached.’

  ‘In the house she knew, Arnold, but no longer sees, not even the room in which she lies.’

  ‘What do you mean, Mr Wyburd, by dependents? Has our mother no obligation to her children? Elderly children, too!’ Dorothy de Lascabanes wrenched it out, and laughed, but mirthlessly.

  Basil stuck out his lower lip till it looked bulbous—tumerous. She would have seen him ageing before her eyes if she had looked at him, but she did not want to.

  Then, she heard, he had lightened his tone of voice, and was using a staccato delivery by which he no doubt hoped to hustle their opponent. ‘What I am unable to believe is that this apparently evolved city can’t provide some kind of asylum for the aged. Oh, I don’t mean the poor house—but a simple life in agreeable surroundings which a woman like our mother might accept.’

  ‘There’s the Thorogood Village,’ Mr Wyburd admitted. ‘A great many people of both sexes retire to it and enjoy one another’s company in a more bracing climate than ours. I think Mrs Hunter would not accept it,’ he added simply.