The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  Oh God, ‘anaesthetizing’ was the more likely word; as he resisted the isolation to which she would have liked to introduce him, under a colourless sky. He tried to remember how it felt just to have arrived in a great, unknown city, but couldn’t; or did, and wanted to reject this momentary vision of himself in a cold, empty, darkened theatre, looking for an identity to replace the one he had lost.

  Sir Basil Hunter shifted on his iron chair from one uncomfortable position to another. He must listen to the woman, if not with interest, professionally. There had been that immensely turgid, endlessly melodious Ethelyne Perry who had played opposite him in a piece he let them talk him into, at the Duke of York’s; it must have been about the year Sister de Santis arrived in London with her colonel. (She hadn’t mentioned visits to the theatre.) In the second act there was a scene with Ethelyne on a bench; wasn’t there just: ten good minutes every performance of the fortnight’s run he had concentrated on Ethelyne while she lowed her way through her monologue (she was married to the management) himself so tensed with interest it was a wonder his body hadn’t broken up, scattering his irrelevant thoughts around her feet.

  Almost as melodious, quite as stately and monotonous as Ethelyne Perry, the de Santis woman was forcing him to give the same kind of performance now. ‘What did you do when you returned to London after your holiday in the country?’

  She looked at him with an expression of surprise. ‘I came back here.’ Her throat knotted, she appeared startled, as though it might not have occurred to her that life offers alternatives.

  They were saved by a waiter in grubby mess jacket presenting a tray with their two martinis.

  ‘Gin fumigates,’ Sir Basil informed his guest somewhat sternly; ‘it blows away any night thoughts. That’s why there’s nothing like a dry martini before lunch.’

  She was not sure how she ought to react to his remark: the self she acknowledged could not have shared her beliefs with him, but she seemed to have been parted from that real self on entering the hotel garden.

  Because the glass was filled too full, she gulped quickly at her drink’s teetering, colourless surface. ‘Isn’t it a bit strong?’

  ‘So it ought to be. That’s what you ordered. Dry. Personally I feel vermouth is only an excuse for gin.’ His knowingness appalled him.

  She had only mildly complained; her drink was too agreeable: perfumed and cold; the scorched leaves of the plane trees had begun to clap; lemon and alternately, greenish screens, were being slid one behind the other; a sudden more emphatic burst of light suggested that louvres had clattered open to admit it.

  ‘I expect you’re right,’ she murmured; the unbelievable circumstances justified her giving the matter serious thought.

  In an upper window of what was probably a residential overlooking the hotel garden, a woman had appeared. All of her shouted for Basil’s attention: the plastic curlers in the whitened hair; the cleavage in her plump form above the pink chenille; and the feather duster, more a toy, as variegated as the curlers studding her formally informal head. The fat woman began camping with her duster round the window sash. She hummed a few broodily self-conscious bars, winked once or twice at this man in the situation he was preparing for himself in the garden, and let it be understood she was on for a joke, the dirtier the better.

  Basil Hunter might have responded surreptitiously if it had not been for the flash in which he saw that the pink woman took it for granted he belonged to her level of vulgarity.

  As he did; at any rate for the moment, in the presence of this other, subdued creature unconscious of the pantomime going on above her head. So much so, the nurse smiled at him just then with such innocent gratitude and pleasure he bundled his commonness out of sight. (Anyway there are some parts, important ones, you can’t hope to play without a touch of common.)

  ‘I have an idea,’ he said. ‘I’ll buy us another drink, then drive you out to Watson’s Bay. There’s a place where we can lunch—not brilliant, but not impossible—and the weather’s with us.’

  She said she had not intended; she ought to rest before her night duty. -She had never felt so undecided, powerless.

  He had gone to order the second round and she knew this was as she really wanted. She must not forget the reason for her coming was to plead for Mrs Hunter. She would speak soon, not the moment he reappeared, but after a decent pause, before they left. The light predicted that she would sit beside the sea, eating—it didn’t matter what: light, and by glimpses, when she dared, a face.

  What, she wondered, would Papa have thought of Basil Hunter? She almost had not known another man, excepting doctors, whom she externalized as colleagues, and patients: the human beings to whom she had dedicated herself. But never men. Unless during the last years of his life, when Enrico de Santis had crumbled, and she, no longer his daughter or his nurse, had been united with him in a dangerously rarefied climate where love and suffering mingle.

  Distracted by her thoughts, Sister de Santis decided it might be wiser not to look at Sir Basil, just returned from ordering the drinks. She found herself staring instead, from under the brim of her hat, at his ankle. And that was worse. She had never before considered a man’s ankle, or only as bones and ligaments. Now she was fascinated, if also disturbed, by what should have been no more than another ankle. But this one displayed, besides the silken elegance you might expect in a man of wealth and taste, a cruel menace.

  Sir Basil sat waggling his ankle. Could he have been conscious of the effect he was creating? No, she thought, it isn’t possible; nobody, except probably Mrs Hunter, knows the effect they have on others; it is fortunate, or sad.

  ‘An actor in a play—does he allow himself to be carried away by his emotions?’ she asked in a desperate burst of what might have been inspiration, or again it might not.

  At least it was not what he had expected; it dragged him back from his distant thoughts. ‘Of course he’s got to feel the situation. But he mustn’t drown in it. That’s where his technique saves him—leaves him free to speak and breathe—to convey.’ Just how much was he conveying to this nurse, he wondered, and how much did she know already?

  ‘Much the same as in nursing: there’s the question of how far to become involved.’ She tried deliberately to make it sound matter of fact; then immediately hoped she had not succeeded.

  Sir Basil did not allow her to see; he remained moodily distant: an assured, handsome man.

  In the circumstances it was a relief to be holding the second drink; in fact she was so relieved she was reduced to clumsiness: some of the fumigatory gin slopped over the edge of the glass, and she drank too deep to hide her confusion.

  ‘What do you know about theatre?’ He seemed to be looking at her intently; till she realized he wasn’t at all, and perhaps hadn’t been from the beginning.

  ‘Practically nothing,’ she had to admit, in spite of a desire to please. ‘What I mean to say is—I don’t go very often.’ One half of her lumbered with a heavy sincerity she knew to be her own, the other was feeling its way into a groove faintly remembered, in which she hoped to glide with the same aluminium brightness as some of the women at those dinner parties Elizabeth Hunter had given during her convalescence, in the first months of their relationship. ‘I adore the theatre,’ she heard herself mouthe. ‘But it isn’t always possible. Sometimes to a matinée. I like to see something light. To make me laugh. There’s so much unhappiness in the world;’ which is what they say, she recalled.

  He was looking through her, and at once she wanted to confess: oh no, this isn’t what I think; the words are borrowed. But because you never can, and he would not have believed anyway, she could only close her eyes and drink up the bitter dregs from her glass. A tenderness she might have conveyed petered out in a shiver as she stood the glass on the gritty surface of the metal table.

  He too, had finished. She would not have dared chew the lemon peel left behind in the gin shallows, but Sir Basil Hunter could and did. More, he could afford to spit
out the last shreds of pith on the surrounding gravel.

  His eyes watered, and he attempted a comic face to disguise a nausea of words and sensations he could feel rising in him. ‘I’m glad you’re not of the theatre,’ he was saying. ‘It’s seldom one talks to anybody who isn’t. It’s seldom one talks,’ he added with what, for that instant, he recognized as sincerity deserted by technique; his voice had an uncontrolled, an unregretted wobble.

  His confession made her feel duller, more ignorant, farther removed. When she tried expressing sympathy, it sounded to her like a low moan.

  What he was going to say, he was not sure, but had to say it. ‘All my life I have wanted—needed to be of the theatre—even before I became an actor—when I was a mere boy here in Australia, taken to an occasional panto or musical comedy. I only began to breathe, to live, the first time I got inside a part—only a few lines, mind you—in a play. And outside the theatre, there was always the gossip, the bitchery, the question of billing—lights! Your name in lights—after the physical drudgery—this was the summum bonum: an electric crown. The perks are far less gratifying—the accolade, for instance—because it’s like falling off a log after the blood and sweat of acting. Suck up to a few personages, give a charity performance or two, alter your tempo, your thinking a little—and you’re home! From now on, you are the one who is sucked up to. Till you reach—let’s call it “the age of disgust”—when you can feel something taking place in your metabolism, and a change comes over the expression of other people’s faces, and you want to reject the whole business of—of acting: all its illusions and your own presumption—not to say spuriousness.’

  Mary de Santis would have liked to think he was not serious, but he was, she saw. She could not bear to witness this second death of the only man she had ever loved. This time she was unable to offer even a needle. She sat looking at Sir Basil Hunter’s silken ankle.

  ‘To reject,’ he said, ‘before you are rejected.’

  He was horrified by what he had spewed up. Though only a lymphatic nurse was to any extent aware, he might have been speaking in a dressing-room full of pros: the smell of greasepaint, the authentic gusts of superstition were overpoweringly present. For a moment he wondered whether he ought to suspect the vacuous though probably innocent eyes of his actual audience.

  ‘Well,’ he said, slapping her on the knee with what he hoped would be interpreted as joie de vivre, not brutality, ‘aren’t I supposed to be taking you out to lunch?’

  Sister de Santis gasped, scrambling up, dropping, then quickly retrieving her navy handbag so as not to give him the trouble of forestalling her. ‘Oh yes, that will be fun!’ she seemed to remember the ladies at the dinner parties, as she and Sir Basil scarified the coarse gravel, cannoning off each other once, under the shabby plane trees. ‘Aren’t those plaster birds ghastly!’ she heard her dinner party voice, followed by a nurse’s giggle: that of a young girl just down from Kempsey or Coonamble.

  ‘Execrable!’ Basil Hunter hid his half-heartedness in pronunciation.

  Glancing up, he caught sight of the chenille woman leaning on her sill. The light splintered on her multi-coloured helmet. She was looking as though she had proved a point.

  Perhaps from having already exposed themselves, and unwisely, Mary de Santis and Basil Hunter were for the most part silent on their drive along the foreshore in the rented car. The nurse would have expected something more streamlined, more spectacular, to further the legend of a star actor. Then instinctively dismissing her pretentious thought, she remarked on the ‘glorious day’; and felt miserable for the glazed post-card she was substituting for subtler glories experienced by a different light.

  Any subtlety on this journey was soaked up by the glare of sun off brick, as on their arrival, what should have remained primitive forms, timber surfaces untouched except by the crackle of age and a patina of weather, were overlaid with painted slogans and scuffed posters. At least the sea was unspoilt, but only as an expanse, or in its pretty lapping round the stilts of a bleached jetty; along the skirting of sand and detritus which passed for a beach an earlier tide had hemmed scallops of oil scum.

  Basil Hunter asked his guest to grab a table while he organized a bottle of wine from the pub round the corner. So she sat and waited at one of the tables on the pavement in front of the little restaurant. Perhaps I am the one to blame for anything dull or disappointing in the landscape, she tried to persuade herself; a muzziness from unaccustomed drink could be clouding her vision, and was certainly blurring her thought; though she could not be held responsible for the actual litter on the beach, only in the background of her mind her half-silted intention of pleading for Mrs Hunter. She roused herself. She would speak of course; it was just that the auspicious moment had not yet occurred.

  Basil returned with a green bottle. It was wearing a chill, and looked a very special wine, at least beside her memory of the wicker-covered demijohns Papa used to buy from a compatriot, and which left those purple stains on the cloth under the trellis in Marrickville.

  ‘I took a chance and picked a dry one, seeing how we started dry.’ He was not convinced his voice disguised the canker of gloom eating at false heartiness: wine bought over the counter from the Bottle Department of a pub could only turn out to be cat piss; and deeper still, there lurked the continued mystery of why he had invited the nurse.

  But Sister de Santis, it seemed, was finding everything agreeable. After the waiter had uncorked the bottle, and she had put her lips to the doubtful wine, she looked at him and composed them in a smile. ‘Delicious, isn’t it?’

  The word alone made him wince; he did not know how he would match her genteel composure.

  ‘Why don’t you take off your hat?’ he surprised himself saying; and again detecting a brutal tone in what was more a command than a suggestion, decided to play it lighter. ‘Here we are in the much publicized outdoors—no formalities—no cares.’ His chair grated on the concrete. ‘And I’ll be able to see you better, shan’t I?’

  Taken unawares, Sister de Santis glanced round quickly: certainly everyone else lunching at the little alfresco tables was hatless; but her unconformity and his cheek could not have been the sole causes of her expression of guilt and embarrassment. She was probably one of those subservient souls always afraid they have not spread the gratitude thick enough.

  Whatever it was, the nurse recovered her moral balance, took off her forbidding hat, meekly it would have appeared if she had not immediately shaken her head and disclosed the curve of her throat: it was too unconscious a gesture, and too noble he realized, for meekness. Once more he was disturbed by the confused motives in their being seated where they were on the edge of this rubbishy beach.

  ‘That’s better. You’re right,’ she said with gentle command of her voice. ‘One feels free.’ She smiled with a candour which threatened to bring to light shortcomings he hoped he had well and truly sunk in the depths of his being.

  As for Mary de Santis, she had recovered faith in her own purpose, not through the company of this amiable, if also occasionally unnerving man, but from joy in a life which still stretched ahead of her, for which the sun assaulting a barricade of cloud, the steamboat tooting towards the jetty, and a launchload of children dangling their hands in the transparent wavelets as they moved parallel with the shore, appeared as affirmations.

  While Basil remembered with surprise his easily satisfied sensuality of how many nights ago, his ‘love’ for his Primavera, even a fantasy of marriage with a young and healthy nurse. Such illusions as he had about her colleague were scarcely of the same kind: he would have recoiled from touching this statue of a goddess.

  The waiter brought the food they had ordered: a rather nasty looking mess of scallops for Sister de Santis and grilled lobster for Sir Basil Hunter.

  Sir Basil sighed. ‘Looks as though I’m the greedy one.’

  But Sister de Santis seemed satisfied.

  One of two women seated at a table nearby nudged the ot
her.

  The nurse glanced down at her front; or perhaps it was the fork she was using; then she blushed on realizing she was lunching with a famous actor.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said, raising her voice to the level of the occasion, ‘which is your favourite part, Sir Basil?’

  ‘Oh Lord, my favourite part?’

  She knew she had pronounced it as ‘port’ in her effort to make conversation with Sir Basil Hunter. The blue-haired ladies at the nearby table chafed their rings and laughed. Everyone was laughing. A party of six or seven businessmen had moved from the pub on the corner and were descending on the table waiting for them. The men were laughing. Their skins oozed. Glassy-eyed, teeth bared, the executives were looking around for something on which to whet their wit or their appetites.

  Sir Basil Hunter groaned, and struggled with his lobster. What to tell the woman? He had been a riot as Horner, though you might not believe it today.

  ‘Surely there’s some part—or play—-which gives you special pleasure in looking back?’ Sister de Santis was gently determined.

  A curse on all nurses!

  In her abstraction, wondering how she might rouse her patient’s interest, the nurse looked full in the teeth of one of the cheery businessmen, and he closed his mouth as though he had swallowed a bad oyster.

  ‘There’s Lear, I suppose,’ Sir Basil offered, God knows why: he had not got there with Lear.

  ‘Oh yes-Lear!’ She made it warm and bright: Lear might have been a cousin she hadn’t met for years, but for whom she would always have a soft spot. ‘I’ve never seen it, though.’ Too high for a contralto, and aggressive, but she had to compete against the laughter, the general noise.

  Still standing round the table reserved for them, the businessmen were having difficulty sorting themselves out. They were all drunk, it seemed.