The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  The eyes of each were concentrated on the other’s knee; when the telephone went off, knocking their attention, as well as their bodies, sideways.

  Sir Basil handled the situation. ‘I’m not taking any calls tonight. I’m too exhausted.’ To prove it he closed his eyes, and smiled rather bitterly for the switchboard before dumping the receiver in its cradle.

  He was back in brisker form. ‘Nothing has been decided. It was an idea, only. And more than likely won’t get any farther, if everyone who pleads for my mother is so pretty and so tenderhearted.’ He squeezed her knee, very warmly, through the hose.

  Touched by a famous hand, Flora Manhood jumped up; she was on fire, and liking it. What was more, she hadn’t altogether ratted on old Mrs Hunter. So she was now free, not to enjoy the situation she had so carefully prepared, but to go through with it for the sake of the fruit it must bear.

  ‘If it was only an idea,’ she panted, ‘we’ve got that straight at least. But your other ideas may be as crook,’ she threw off in the brassier voice she used as one of her weapons of defence.

  Sir Basil would have liked to follow suit by standing up as quickly from the musical sofa, but could have felt a twinge in his back. His moody smile became a bare grin as he got to his feet, but he came on in the only possible direction: he too, had his plan to carry out.

  And grabbed.

  Probably on account of the twinge throwing him slightly off balance, he caught hold of a handful of flesh she wasn’t proud of (it was superfluous) above her right hip; and Basil Hunter looked angry that his technique should let him down, converting a smooth pass into what must look an act of vulgar clumsiness.

  Even so, they were thrown together on the edge of the room, and rebounded so abruptly off the pounding fridge they almost overturned a Queen Anne walnut veneer table with piecrust edging, the lot.

  ‘I should have thought,’ Sir Basil got it out while eating his way along her shoulder, ‘we understood each other, Sister Man—Clara, is it?’

  ‘Flora.’

  ‘Oh, yes—Flora! Perfect! Flora!’

  They were seeing eye to eye, both literally and figuratively: they understood each other’s inquisitive lust as it tempered and tried them out. How much else she understood of this ageing man, desirable, if only in bursts, she could not try to think. That he had no inkling of her real intention, she was a hundred per cent sure. Which gave her the advantage.

  So she collapsed somewhat in his arms and made no secret of her breathlessness. ‘Whoo! Aren’t you making the pace a bit hot?’

  It gave him an opportunity to pass the buck. ‘I’m hardly responsible—am I? Flora?’

  Having kicked free of her shoes, she walked across the carpet on practical, flat feet, and pulled herself out of her dress: the green.

  Sir Basil remarked, ‘Now that clothes have become so rudimenary, we can’t offer to help, can we?’

  It did seem to become increasingly practical, and solemn. Till there she was.

  ‘A genuine Botticelli!’ He glanced over his shoulder, half expecting some unseen spectator might have overheard his corny remark.

  ‘My what?’ she giggled as he stood out of his dressing-gown.

  The breasts of this elderly man—her lover—were developing relentlessly inside the fur bra.

  ‘Please,’ she screwed up her eyes, ‘must we have the lights—Basil?’ Mention of the sacred name seemed to add just that extra touch of obscenity.

  As he switched off the lights, she had a blinding vision of that old sightless woman his mother: Mrs Hunter would surely smell out the whole circus, and to make it worse, keep her dignity.

  You lay and felt Sir Basil limbering up: he might not be the artist you would have expected. Nobody is what you expect; and all great artists, you had read, suffer from nerves.

  ‘You don’ know what you’re denying me,’ he said in a sort of peeved voice, ‘insisting on darkness.’

  She grunted. She couldn’t very well tell him her idea might breed more fruitfully in the dark, though Sir Basil had already shown his approval of ideas, anyway his own.

  He was going on again a bit about his ‘Botterchelly Flora’.

  She would have liked to ask Col about this ‘Botterchelly’. She was so uneducated.

  ‘What is it, darling? Did I hurt you? Aren’t you comfy?’ He spoke with a tenderness which should have delighted any blessed Daddy’s girl.

  But she couldn’t play up to it. Instead, she choked what must have begun as a whimper, or turned it into a sigh.

  Which appeared to satisfy her lover.

  He was all over and around her: exploring. She felt she had stopped being a woman, to become a mountain range. She saw herself spread out, under a Technicolor sky, on a picture postcard: Greetings from the Sleeping Sister.

  He seemed to be trying, unsuccessfully, to drink her eyes. Then he climbed down. He kissed the soles of her feet. It tickled.

  ‘What’s the matter? Don’t you like it?’ He too, laughed, though he didn’t sound amused.

  Again, he was burning inside her ear. ‘Do you think you’ll be able to love me, Flora?’

  ‘What are we doing I’d like to know?’

  ‘Yes,’ he sighed, while undeceived.

  Because she might have sounded cranky, and because she owed him something in return, she must make the effort to deceive: perhaps deception was what an actor expects of life.

  So she put her arms around him; she must think about this child he was going to give her: the child who would be the embodiment of unselfish love. ‘Yes,’ she muttered. ‘I’ll love you all right. I’ve only got to get used to—the idea.’ And she crushed him with all her health and strength, as someone else had crushed, and mauled, and possessed her into a state of resentment.

  Sir Basil seemed to like it. He grew young and excited. Even if he slit her open, she must love it for the sake of this golden child he was going to plant inside her.

  So they were giving a great performance.

  Whereas at the beginning his supremacy had been assured by ambition, now it was she who had become the guiding force. It was this desire to create something tangible, her only means of self-justification: as she must make others understand. I’m not oh God oh Col I’m not the fucking whore you think, she moaned the shapeless words into her lover’s mouth. Col?

  ‘Mmmm?’ The getter of her child this pseudo-husband drove the word back into her she had wanted oh Col Col ohh she wanted her own her flesh her child ohhhhh.

  Sir Basil keeled over, finally, and slithered off her left flank. He lay beside her trying to show he wasn’t exhausted.

  ‘Have you,’ he panted, ‘everything you—need, Flora?’ He sounded anxious.

  ‘Yes.’

  She felt becalmed rather than calm, let alone fulfilled. There was nothing she needed beyond the certainty—she might even settle for the faint hope—of conceiving. She couldn’t visualize her child except as a burst of distant gold. Would Col bash her up? She would have to tell him to his face because the letters she wrote made her want to puke, and on the phone she was at her dumbest.

  Sir Basil Hunter was snoring. Although she would not have imagined she could fall asleep beside a man she didn’t know, and without his clothes, she must have snoozed to find herself walking it could only be with Col Pardoe amongst the green hummocks of Noamurra printed up large on a hoarding A NOAMURRA WELCOME TO MAN AND WIFE Col if it was it was his arm seemed pleased to confirm what he already knew.

  Basil woke. The surrounding darkness must have reached its lowest depths of black. He drooled for the glass of Alka-Seltzer he would presently brew, not on account of a hangover, but because it was a drink which soothed and restored him in the middle of the night; he slept more innocently, he liked to believe, after gulping this pristine draught. He scrabbled after, and found his watch, only to remember his eyesight was no longer up to reading the time on its luminous face. So he groped farther, till bumping the lamp he realized he ought not to switch it on: the
re was this girl, the nurse he had gone to bed with. He could hear her beside him, breathing in her sleep.

  He hankered after light more than before, to stare at the flesh which had given him such a surprising amount of unexpected pleasure; but he might not be dispassionate enough, and the nurse could return to her body and start bossing or abusing him.

  So he lay flickering his eyelids and thinking; there was no alternative in the trap in which he found himself. Oh Lord, if only he could kick her out and spread a bit; but in an effort to rearrange himself he found he had been brought closer, plastered to her ribs, almost part of the movement of her heart. He tried listening for signs of waking; but there weren’t any: if anything she was sinking deeper drawing him under with her a voice calling in his mind’s ear from a long way off BASIL his own slippery name nobody he could recognize not even the sex behind the voice only that it was persistent clearly articulated though faint. He shut it out at last by forcing himself full awake.

  His thoughts began steeplechasing, spurt after spurt, a string of competitive images. He looked his best in sombre, fur-trimmed robes: that photograph of Alvaro, the one from the Third Act. Nobody could deny you made a fine figure (in fact, there is always some bastard aiming a banana skin, but dammit). Fly back as soon as it is practically possible, and revive Malatesta perhaps, or The Master of Santiago. On the whole they preferred your Alvaro: an austere, destructive, while self-destroying soul—a noble inquisitor. Yes, revive The Master, with its shorter, cheaper cast; woman’s part not big enough for her to think she can rob the kitty or throw a tantrum. Impress anybody with some of those lines—and your voice: God neither wishes nor seeks anything. He is eternal calm. It is in wishing nothing that you will come to mirror God.

  Oh God, if only he could have switched the light on: he was driven to speak the remembered lines, address Alvaro in the mirror; but the damn girl; and on this narrow bed he couldn’t tear himself free of the adhesive skin. He was stuck with her.

  So he sank back. What he had never been able to understand was how he had moved them in certain scenes night after night while wanting and getting everything, the whole jackpot, for himself, and not believing in ‘God’ Every night the faces stirred, the breathing rose out of the darkness. Only the author was unmoved, a cantankerous, hostile Frenchman arriving unannounced to catch you out. When the critics had more than hinted that his play was corn. Some of the lines were; everything depended on the voice which spoke them. But the Frenchman couldn’t forgive himself his own corn, so he wanted to hold you responsible.

  It was becoming the nurse’s play. Rolling violently, she was trying to throw off her dream, get her lines out. ‘Donthigkbecolsidoancallyoudarligidoanfeeloralway—sfelt.’ Well, you would have expected her to love somebody, probably the whole pack: this Botticelli, not so much vulgarized as pop slanted.

  He was unable to resist stroking the surface of her dream. The hot skin responded to his fingers without her waking. He felt a bit guilty for doing her so easily, and considering what she had given in return: she had made him see and hear himself again, moving with authority under the weight of his winter-toned, fur-trimmed robes. Perhaps this Alvaro was a little more in love, sensually, with his Mariana than the text demanded. Not an easy part to cast, herself always too much the sheath to his sword, particularly in that last duet:

  MARIANA. O rose of gold! Face of a lion! Face of honey! At your feet! My forehead on the earth before Him whom I feel!

  ALVARO. No, rise up higher! Rise up more swiftly! Drink and let me drink of you! Rise yet more!

  MARIANA. I am drinking and being drunk of, and I know that all is well.

  Sister Thing—Flora Manhood—was stirring. He, too. Without her knowing, she was filling him with more than pleasure, poor girl: positive joy. He had to impress it on her whether he woke her or not. She gave no formal sign of waking, but this time they were more gently and completely lovers.

  What if he did fall for some pretty, healthy, but ordinary girl like this? Would her love for him survive his bitches of friends? Would he be turned by her perpetual clangers into a pillar of sullenness? Come to think of it he had never been ‘adored’ by any but unattractive girls who came to the performance night after night, and hung about the stage door blushing through chlorosis or acne; or by some elderly, often deformed woman usually without means, whose permanent, near stall was her one shameless extravagance, in which she sat devouring with her eyes, her open dentures, perving on a codpiece. Esmé Gilchrist (E. Gilchrist she signed herself) invited him to tea at Islington, and he went because at that age he was still so incredibly innocent, and—she must have guessed—shockable. She received him in a lace whatyoume—teagowns in those days—and hoped to excite him with her truss. As a bonus, shit on the sheet. He got away so quickly the knocker could hardly have stopped knocking by the time he reached the bus stop.

  What he had always longed for, he now knew, was to be loved by some such normal, lovely, insensitive but trusting hunk of a girl as this Flora Nightingale beside him: he had done her twice and felt progressively younger. Then why Alvaro? at one level a rewarding part for an elderly—let’s say ‘mature’, actor of voice and presence; at another, the mouthpiece of asceticism preaching its withering gospel from the foothills of tragedy. As he climbed higher into a rarefied atmosphere, he breathed more deeply to satisfy his youthful lungs. It occurred to him: only an old man should aspire to, and would be capable of enduring, the fissions of Lear, but an old man with the strength of youth. So he paused, on a ledge as it were, to huddle closer to this warm girl who had received him unprotesting for the second time.

  He began to feel lonely at last, on his narrow ledge, and thought he would wake his companion: have to sooner or later; probably shamming anyway. ‘Darling,’ he addressed in turn, an ear, her mouth, each of her nipples, his arms as deep in her flesh as wire in the bark of a tree after a long relationship, ‘I have a feeling we’re starting something that’s—most important—for both of us.’ If he had resisted writing a play for himself to act in, it was because it might have sounded something like this.

  ‘Mmmm?’ She was too sleepy; or not so sleepy that the resident crowbar of her will could not prise her apart from her lover. She turned her back, her moody rump. Was she corrupt? Nurses—when you come to think of it. And when he had wanted to worship at the altars of health, purity, innocence; to lay his head on a pair of breasts which sympathized with the hunger of his thoughts.

  Anger doused the rosy flame he had gone to so much trouble coaxing. He had nothing, or comparatively little, against this poor cow, who had simply flopped from running backwards and forwards at the beck and call of Elizabeth Hunter throughout the afternoon, then flogging half the night. No, he must look farther for somebody to blame, farther even than Mitty Jacka expecting him to find the money for the spectacular suicide she was devising for him. Look right back to the original grudge. I was never a natural mother—I couldn’t feed. But that—you see, darling—hasn’t deprived you of—of nourishment. She had told him, by God, without his asking. And doled out a cheque for five thousand—dollars, not pounds. Again only a wretched nibble.

  He dragged the sheet up, tight, sawing at his throat, then settled down to hugging his resentment. Forgetful of his love, he must have rocked his anger to sleep.

  In the cold awfulness of this fur-trimmed robe feelings unshutter only for brilliant glimpses watching the old painted skin give its last gasps through every frightened pore as well as the purple cupid’s bow no need to use the dagger in your sleeve words are fatal if pointed enough money is life while there is life left otherwise it is time to die die then she can’t protest against the truth only use her automatic bellows on the not even half-life she is giving up for life for say The Master if Alvaro’s own attitudes are sterile that is only to make a play to forego the wrack the storm and put buggered to the Jacka’s version of suicide by the unplayed I.

  Flora Manhood lumped herself together in the bed. Already there were
flashes of tawny light through the rattling blinds. The light blew cold on her nakedness raising goosepimples as she watched.

  Basil Hunter looked frightening in his sleep. His expression twitched, and on and off, it was twisted into tight knots of wrinkles. She too felt frightened at last.

  She put out a hand, before bending over him to say, ‘You must have been having a shocking dream.’

  ‘Yes. I was murdering—or being murdered—I can’t remember—or who.’

  Though it sounded sleepy enough, he was watching her keenly to see whether his explanation had satisfied her. But she was not interested in his dream: she looked preoccupied by some unhappiness, or murder, of her own. It had given her something more than her rather commonplace, healthy prettiness: she was beautiful, her hair an equal of the tawny light; only her expression remained remote and sad.

  Flora Manhood did in fact feel unbearably sad. Here was this strange, not bad, but boring man, unconscious of the part he was playing, or the child she could conceive by him, regardless of whether he, or the child, wished it. She herself would not have wished to be born; sometimes she wondered whether her parents had wished it; or whether it was something that had happened because it was too long a drive to the pictures, so they stayed at home. Of course they would never have admitted to it if you had been brave enough to ask them; they were honest, religious-minded people.

  She was the dishonest one, the deceiver. Her own child, whom she could not help seeing with the features of Colin Pardoe, would grow up as the visible proof of her deception, and she would have to disguise her remorse as love for her boy. Whichever way she looked she could see no end to her dishonesty: a vista of mirrors inside a mirror.