The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  ‘I’m so glad, Cherry, your mother is happy at the Thorogood Village.’

  The ladies only vicariously involved were standing almost at attention as they waited.

  ‘Mummy died a few weeks after being admitted, but Matron assured me she appreciated what Douglas and I had done for her.’

  Dorothy’s heart was bounding in her side.

  Then a gust of apprehension seemed to blow amongst the silent ladies; and Mrs Cheeseman’s voice suggested, ‘Don’t you think it’s time to go down to the boys?’

  So they did.

  Downstairs the men might not have had enough of talking bawdy and money, except for Brian Learmonth and the Australian Writer, who had ganged up in a corner, and who looked a case of two people too much alike, who had exhausted their stock of malice, and were bored with each other. When Mrs Cheeseman led in her retinue of women, all with the bland eyelids of those who have recently exchanged confidences and flushed the lavatory, the Australian Writer announced to his companion, ‘This is where I help myself to a stiff one.’

  After dinner was more intimate than before, if also more tedious. The novelty of a French princess, who was only an Australian underneath, had already worn thin. The detergent knight at one stage was unable to contain a fart. While Christian names of absent acquaintances were being flicked back and forth as light and hollow as pingpong balls, Dorothy was allowed to withdraw inside her thoughts, as though she had really been speaking a foreign language and everybody was exhausted by their own smiles and efforts to communicate.

  Only the wife of the detergent knight would not leave well alone, but came and sat beside her new friend. Tm going to ask you a favour,’ old Lady Atkinson begged; ‘if one day you will visit me, my dear, and I’ll make you some of my pumpkin scones.’

  The princess thanked the kindly old thing, and immediately asked Mr Learmonth to find her a glass of water.

  ‘Nothing wrong, I hope?’ Lady Atkinson anxiously asked.

  No, there was nothing wrong, Dorothy assured; actually, it was the murder she had been contemplating, and was pretty certain to commit since her visit to the house of one who had brought it off successfully.

  Ever since dinner Cherry had been, not avoiding her, merely too busy pouring coffee and urging her guests to get drunker on liqueurs. At times you caught glimpses of a hectic eye, a back less powdered than before, as Mrs Cheeseman circulated with noticeable heaviness.

  When suddenly she appeared to force herself to approach the Princesse de Lascabanes, and bending over her, offer a personal message, however indistinctly delivered. ‘Drink this, Dorothy; it will do you good,’ as she stood a brandy balloon, more than half filled, on the table beside her guest.

  Because Mrs Cheeseman moved away at once, Madame de Lascabanes hadn’t time to refuse: not all the brandy in the world would have melted the sobriety in which she had been frozen by Cherry’s earlier admission, not to say her recognition of a capacity for treachery equal to her own.

  While Lady Atkinson continued smiling: at the balloon; for the generous hand which had poured such a quantity of brandy for a friend; for her own good luck at meeting and being accepted by such a distinguished lady as this princess. The old woman was beginning to weave around their relationship a cocoon of the same golden threads from which, as she told it, her marriage had been spun, and by which she was joined to her beloved grandchildren. Lady Atkinson was most anxious for the princess to visualize these children in their perfection, and had already dashed off a water-colour or two when Dorothy felt she must escape from the old woman’s delicately tinted world in which she was a harsh impostor.

  At first she tried making excuses for herself. ‘I’ve been neglecting my mother. Tomorrow I must spend more time—the whole day with her. We never succeed in dealing with all we have to talk about.’

  Lady Atkinson was charmed. ‘She’ll love that, dear, I’m sure. It’s hard for anyone old and helpless to kill time.’

  Finally her own hypocrisy spurred the princess into going in search of Mrs Cheeseman to say goodbye. At least nobody interfered, or offered to help: either she had gone about it too discreetly; or was she unlikeable? she wondered at the mirrors she passed. Certainly her mouth had grown thinner from preoccupation, her cheekbones chalkier and more exposed. So she moistened her lips and reminded herself that her friend had arranged this dinner out of affection for her. She hoped her eyes, her best feature, would not let her down while expressing in return the grateful affection she ought to feel.

  She found Mrs Cheeseman lying on the bathroom tiles, crumbs of plaster in her hair.

  ‘What on earth happened?’ Knowing perfectly well did not prevent an increase in Dorothy’s desperation.

  ‘Nothing happened. I fell down.’ For somebody so huge and purple who had suffered a recent fall, Cherry did not sound unduly plaintive. ‘I fell, Dorothy. And the curtains came—with me.’

  When her friend had heaved her as far as the bed, again Mrs Cheeseman wheezed, ‘Thank you, darling. You’re a real—ppal,’ each word flickering inside a fume of brandy.

  Dorothy thought she was entitled to feel virtuous. ‘Would you like me to send your husband?’

  ‘Oh, husband! Husbands aren’t any use—they know too much.’ Cherry’s head was rolling uncontrollably in the rucks of ice-blue satin. ‘And you, Dorothy—I let Ethel Atkinson bore you—ad naus …’ She coughed the rest of it away.

  ‘But Lady Atkinson was sweet! She was telling me about her grandchildren.’

  ‘Nasty little bastards! Last week they pulled the legs off a clutch of live chickens, and poked out their eyes with sticks. But that isn’t what Grannie sees.’

  Through her own nausea, Dorothy was clinging to a hope that Mother—but Elizabeth Hunter always saw: she saw the worst in everyone.

  Then Cherry Cheeseman, who had closed her eyes, opened them wide at something she appeared to have discovered. ‘Why do you hate your mother, Dorothy?’ ‘How can you be so cruel, Cherry?’

  Fortunately she was saved from further interrogation: her friend passed out.

  As Madame de Lascabanes fled, snores pursued her from out of the ice-blue satin. If there was no running away from herself, she must at least escape from the Cheeseman house, with its implications, and downright accusations. But more was prepared for her, it seemed. On an antique sofa, in an alcove halfway down the stairs, the Australian Writer had arranged himself, or perhaps more accurately, had been arranged, in an attitude more decorative, though no less drunken, than Cherry Cheeseman’s on the bathroom floor. He could have been put there on the sofa expressly for the discomfiture and humiliation of the Princesse de Lascabanes, on whom his eyes began to focus purposefully. As she slipped past the unavoidable alcove, his mouth was working to expel the words it was loaded with.

  ‘Only turn me on, princess,’ was what she heard; ‘I love everybody.’

  Naturally she paid no attention, but was horrified to see him fling himself from his sofa at what he judged the level of her knees, as though she were a footballer whose evading tactics he had set out to queer by a flying tackle.

  The princess was almost crying her relief to find herself slightly ahead of the thud the Australian Writer made with the banisters. She ran on, clutching, not the ball, but her intention of getting away as quickly as possible from the Cheesemans and their guests, her furs streaming, the tails of sables galloping behind her on the stairs.

  She ran out into the night, through the more emphatic, at the same time liquid black poured around her by trees, till she reached the suburban street, slower now, and holding her temples. Above her were stars she might not have noticed since—oh, too long—since ‘Kudjeri’. If only the lid could be lifted from her head to let out the bursting rockets of thoughts alternating with evil smog, she might see more clearly; but clear vision, she suspected, is something you shed with childhood and do not regain unless death is a miracle of light; which she doubted.

  Although she was walking, her mind continued runn
ing.

  Since Sister Manhood thought up her idea she had become pretty obsessed with it. Actually she couldn’t claim to have thought of it in the sense of reasoning it out; she would probably never learn to reason as people did in books, or famous doctors, or even a comparatively ordinary man like Col Pardoe; her idea, it seemed, had been lying quietly somewhere inside her till the time came for it to spring into her head. She liked to believe it was what they call an ‘inspiration’.

  The day Flora Manhood felt her embryonic inspiration ready to convert itself into a positive event, she had woken early, but drifted a while longer, enjoying the ripeness of her intention. She lay glowing and expansive on what was normally the Vidlers’ unyielding convertible lounge, but which this morning responded to her form with an almost sensual recognition of their possibilities, so that she had to smile and rub one cheek against a shoulder, and enjoy lazily scratching a flank; the smell of her hair and her flesh was so delicious she thrilled with an unusual sense of her own power. But wasn’t she, anyway, about to take her fate in hand? In the circumstances, she only faintly frowned at the stench of fowl manure intruding through the open window in opposition to her own drowsily voluptuous scents.

  No more than four hens, in any case, and not all that much shit: Vid was too clean (cleanliness was Vid and Viddie’s life). And so decent, not any of the neighbours would have dreamt of lodging a complaint with the Health Inspector: they thought of other reasons for their asthma; or how they might scrounge a handful of manure for the aluminium, plant. If anybody was to complain, Flora Manhood knew, it could be herself in one of her nursier moments: didn’t you have to prove your status from time to time, to other people? But with Vid and Viddie so decent, never ever had she complained. She was fond besides, she thought perhaps she loved, certainly she depended on them more than any other person (her parents dead; Snow Tunks in the dyke racket; and there was no one else, thank you).

  Flora Manhood opened her eyes so suddenly and wide there was a distinct scratching sound. Although she could have lain in bed most of the morning as she mostly did, she got out of it quicker than usual. She would take her time, though, on such a day: do her nails, run the bath later on, make herself extra nice before afternoon duty at Moreton Drive. One pyjama leg had hitched up around a thigh, which she sat a moment stroking in the way someone exceptional, chosen for the important part he must play, would most likely-caress (none of that take-you-for-granted stuff). Her skin was smooth, hairless, suntinged, except for the two white cups, and lower down, less than a triangle, a line. She had thought how she might give up pyjamas (cut down on laundry apart from anything else) but Viddie walked in one morning, so shocked to see what was only another woman’s breasts, you hadn’t taken to sleeping starkers.

  The girl stood, rather abruptly. What makes people grow up decent? she wondered while washing the sleep out of her eyes. It could be from not wanting anything enough. Like Vid and Viddie, and Mr Wyburd, and de Santis, and Lottie Lippmann, even binding Badgery, though Badgery put on dog and liked to be thought better than she was. Not the Princess Lascabanes, from what others had to tell. Or Sir Basil Hunter.

  Flora Manhood soaped her armpits. After she had rinsed them, she got out the pale lipstick and clothed her mouth: her lips looked healed, and neat, and meek. Yes, you could thank the pale lipstick for meekness.

  And Mrs Hunter: nothing meek about old Betty; she wouldn’t be selected for the Decent Team. Trample you when she felt like it. Even at her oldest, most pitiful, feeblest. Because Elizabeth Hunter, judging by the studio portraits, and the oil painting, had been a beautiful, a passionate woman. And that, together with money, was power, wasn’t it? Power couldn’t resist trampling. Not even while mumbling a prayer through bluish gums. Was it prayers Elizabeth Hunter mumbled on? or dreams of her own beauty—and men? All together, they had given her the power which can’t help trampling. Doesn’t God? On whole nations, as well as decent inoffensive individuals like Vid and Viddie; they must have it coming to them as sure as any Vietnamese.

  Flora Manhood—‘Flo’ as she had been to Mum and Dad, and someone else more recent, but as dead, ‘Florrie’ to Snow Tunks; made you fetch up only to remember—looked in the glass and wondered if she had gone too far. She was not irreligious, she didn’t think. Right down from the banana days and the miracle that wasn’t—vouchsafed? she had more than respected, she needed God.

  So virtue plumped out her lips as she went into the kitchen she had the use of (together with cons) her bare feet this moment enjoying the cleanliness, the reliability, of Viddie’s lino. Indeed, she stamped once or twice, to drum her pleasure into her soles, before taking the Magic Wand and making the gas explode around the burner.

  Presently Viddie came in from cleaning: front path, doorstep, and hall were the first details on her schedule. ‘Early for you, isn’t it?’

  Flora said, ‘It’s an important day.’

  Seated at the shining laminex table, she was still no more than warming her lip on the steam from the cup. For once her appetite for food had left her, though if she had wanted, there were eggs with dates on them, gifts from Vid, from his four hens.

  ‘Is it to do with Mrs Hunter?’ Mrs Vidler asked. ‘About what you told me? It’s a scandal!’ Whenever she was outraged, something of Yorkshire rose up Viddie’s throat, until, as it overflowed, it was joined by a sound like as if the adenoids hadn’t been taken from her. ‘Her own flesh and blood!’ she gasped.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sister Manhood, sipping her cooler tea, ‘it’s a shame.’ She must try to feel it more deeply; she did: only Elizabeth Hunter her sleeves embroidered in gold thread and pearls in that studio portrait on the desk turning her flower her face in all the radiance of its arrogant beauty holding it up coldly to the light or camera made you concentrate on an old munching skull if you were to raise sympathy—and there you were back at a geriatric case no more than a job.

  ‘I’m thinking of giving it away,’ she said.

  ‘Giving away what, dear?’

  ‘Nursing Mrs Hunter.’

  ‘But if they send her to the Thorogood Village, won’t the job terminate—automatic ?’

  ‘She may be dead by the time they finish talking about it. They’ll talk all right. Sir Basil and the princess see themselves as highly civilized.’ She laughed through her nose, but didn’t convince herself.

  Nor Viddie Vidler. ‘Must be that, I’d say. They’ve had all the time and the money. And Sir Basil—he’s a great actor. Anyway, they made him a Sir.’

  ‘He’s a gorgeous man. Going a bit in places. But lush. How civilized I wouldn’t like to bet. Personally, I don’t think any man is all that civilized.’

  Viddie sucked her teeth; she was picking non-existent fluff out of a broomhead. ‘What thoughts you have, Flora! You ought to settle down, dear—marry—have some kiddies.’ It was a great sadness in Viddie that she had none of her own.

  ‘I could do with a kid,’ Flora went so far as admitting. ‘Yes, I’d love a little child.’ She gulped so greedily at her tea she choked; the tears came into her eyes.

  Again the Yorkshire rose up Viddie’s throat to unite with that sound of adenoids. ‘You wouldn’t have one without the other—would you, dear?’ she gasped.

  Flora rinsed her cup and saucer. She flung the leaves from the pot, she realized too late, into the bin reserved for scraps suitable for hens; but Viddie didn’t notice that.

  ‘Expect I’ll be late in tonight,’ Sister Manhood told her landlady.

  ‘Enjoying yourself, are you, dear?’

  ‘I’m going on the streets.’

  Viddie laughed, but grudgingly, at one of Flora’s off jokes. ‘And what shall I tell Him, if he comes, or phones?’

  ‘Tell who?’

  ‘Why, Mr Pardoe.’

  ‘I’m not his property, am I?’ She was so enraged.

  ‘Nobody is anybody’s property, dear.’

  ‘Not if I can help it, I won’t be!’

  ‘I was only asking,�
� Viddie complained.

  So the irritations began collecting as early as early like real fluff you can’t pick out of a broomhead what ought to be a solid permanent core the too tidy too-decent-by-half Vidlers spilt the varnish doing your nails on their old convertible moquette oh dear oh God the green the best straining at your just about every direction how would you look if you ever got preggo the genuine bloaterbella to stare at climbing on buses now it’s only greed it’s Lottie’s lunches too much of what should have been today the dreamiest Stroodle if she hadn’t burnt it only slightly bloody Badgery crooking her finger my husband as per usual a public school man of Brighton College Sussex England never accustomed his ear to the Australian twang.

  When the nurses had finished their lunch, or ‘luncheon’ as Badgery called it, to copy Mother Hunter and put on extra dog, Lottie said, ‘I apologize for the Strudel, if it has burnt itself frightfully.’

  ‘Mmm. Didn’t notice.’ Sister Manhood scraped hard so as not to lose the merest flake.

  ‘It was delicious.’ Sister Badgery might have invented the word; she smiled the kind of smile which rewards, but which knows better at the same time.

  ‘It is burnt,’ said Mrs Lippmann with a simplicity which emphasized the tragedy. ‘I have planned this Strudel during several days, but on the morning did not reckon with the plumber.’

  ‘You’ve had the plumber?’

  ‘The cloakroom lavatory has been blocked—by somebody throwing superfluous matter down the hole.’

  Sister Badgery lowered her eyes. Mrs Lippmann’s clouded expression was directed, only incidentally perhaps, at Sister Manhood.

  ‘Don’t look at me, Lottie! And anyway, if the plumber unblocked it.’

  ‘Oh, it is nothing. The plumber unblocked it.’ It was nothing and everything.

  Sister Badgery hoped to put an end to the post-mortem, for herself at least. ‘After nursing several cases in the country—all of them prominent graziers—I would never dare throw anything foreign down a toilet. Septic tanks taught me my lesson.’ That was final; so Sister Badgery got up.