The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  ‘I shouldn’t have thought of them as “poor wretches”. They’re paid very well. The award’s ridiculously high.’

  ‘What do you know about awards?’

  ‘Only what I’ve found out.’

  Overcoming her repugnance for the signs of human decay, the princess stooped to kiss the papery cheek, and was again victimized by the past. Oh Mummy can’t we stay together? can’t you come into my bed? To sleep blissfully secure. In this dress? do he sensible Dorothy you must know Mummy’s expected at dinner. The fingers as pink-tipped the dress as slippery scentful white as—what was it? Tuberoses darling somebody thought they were paying me a compliment.

  Cling, for God’s sake, to the present. ‘Only what I’ve found out,’ Dorothy de Lascabanes repeated, and what that was could have been as distasteful to her as the body’s corruption.

  Even so, screwed up for ruthlessness, she felt inside her a movement too physical to be ignored, as though conscience had become the baby sterility had prevented her having. Her lips seemed to grow thick and blubbery as she withdrew them from her mother’s cheek. She had to go quickly and stand looking out of the open window.

  ‘Basil will be here presently,’ she flung back over her shoulder as hard as she could.

  ‘I expect he will have found out a whole lot more.’

  ‘I doubt it. Basil has his gift; beyond that, I suspect him of being a wobbly, helpless male.’

  ‘Basil was the affectionate one.’

  ‘His manners were always flamboyant. And it’s an advantage to be a man, Mother.’ Dorothy’s mirth was so dry, she herself was reminded of a lizard, possibly a deadly one; again she felt guilty, no longer on this old woman’s account, but for the people she could see strolling through the park below, innocent of what might be in store for them, at any thicket, even in the open grass.

  ‘What was that man’s name, dear?’

  ‘Which man, Mother?’ As if your instinct for danger had not forewarned.

  ‘You know—the Norwegian—when somebody invited us to an island.’

  Dorothy did not think she could bring herself to force it out from between her teeth; but Mother seemed to have lost interest since she had got her own back. If she had. Out of a haze of sentiment and tuberoses, she had conjured for you this solid land mass, or island of hate: its stinging sand, twisted tree-roots, and the brumbies snapping at one another with yellow teeth, lashing out with broken hooves as they stampeded along their invaded beach.

  Dorothy de Lascabanes did not have to remind herself she had never hated anyone so bitterly as she had hated their mother on their brief visit to Brumby Island. She should remember Elizabeth Hunter’s treachery on that occasion could only make the most brutally reasonable plan her children might now conceive for her seem morally defensible.

  Jack and Helen Warming were going on ahead to the island, to open up the house and get in some serious fishing before the arrival of their guests. The Hunters would fly up later from Sydney to Oxenbould, and there transfer to the helicopter Jack was chartering to take them across to Brumby. From the beginning Dorothy wondered why they were invited. The Warmings had never been more than superficial acquaintances living in another state. Though Helen and Dorothy had gone to the same school, Helen had been a junior when Dorothy was at the point of leaving. Then there was Mother, a most incongruous element: on finding this out for herself she would develop the fidgets, and start rearranging other people’s furniture and lives.

  ‘I know what’s on your mind, Dorothy. Don’t worry; I shall fit in. Though the island’s uninhabited except for a few forestry workers, the Warmings don’t pig it, so I’m told. In any case, I’ve never had a craving for luxury, and know how to pull my weight under primitive conditions.’ Her Edwardian man’s slang made it the more irritating.

  The thought that the Warmings might be doing them a kindness started to fester in Dorothy. There she is Jack ditched by the Frenchman back on old Betty’s hands shouldn’t we do something about them only a couple of weeks won’t ruin the holidays. Becoming an obsession it nagged and throbbed, bringing on a migraine at times. Wouldn’t you think Jack the unfortunate Dorothy has probably reached the menopause it must be ghastly for her mewed up with that hideously successful ex-beauty of a mother. Till she looked to reason to rescue her from her thoughts: surely the Warmings would not have invited Mother if they had been taking pity on you? Dorothy knew that one of her worst faults was to suspect ulterior motives in others; and kindness always roused her suspicions.

  Now, at the end of the journey, arrival practically upon them, everything smooth-running, so far no one specific to accuse, she felt afraid. It must be the helicopter. She was no good at this sort of thing: beneath them the straits burnished to silver by the heat; ahead of them the solid island trembling just perceptibly with the motion of their flight. If she could have heard a door closing behind her, and hidden herself, not only from strangers, but from kind friends. She had been wrong to come. Yes, to be perfectly truthful, it was the menopause, which Helen Warming would see, if she had not already guessed—or more likely, Mother told.

  Seated beside her mother, Dorothy Hunter (still ‘de Lascabanes’, it might help to remember) pressed her hands together in her lap: held in the vertical position they would have suggested one of the Gothic attitudes of prayer; laid in her lap, they revealed too plainly the white pressure of nervous frustration, and by some law of architectural stress, helped to narrow her shoulders. By contrast the young pilot was relaxed, brown, naked it would seem, under his khaki shirt and shorts. Not that she was in any way impressed by this young man, only envious of his detachment.

  As Mother would not have understood. Who was at the moment trying to burn her way into your thoughts using those blowtorches of eyes. You were not deceived, nor by the counterfeit smiles, the quirked corners of which were hung with webs of faint silvery wrinkles.

  Dorothy looked away. She might have drawn comfort from the wrinkles if she had not imagined she could hear laughter trailing cool and indulgent through the noise and the suddenly torrid air. The pilot was bringing them down, she realized, on a strip of grey sand. Whether their landing would mean her mental release remained to be seen.

  The women bowed their heads simultaneously as the helicopter touched down; its rotor, slashing at the light, collaborated with it in a whirligig of blue and green which scattered normally reliable values. In consequence Dorothy started throbbing again. On one side was the strait, flat and listless through a fringe of mean-looking mangroves; on the other, beyond pickets of eucalypts, rose the dark mass of a more esoteric rain forest which obscured, presumably, the ocean.

  After climbing out of the machine, Dorothy’s legs felt as brittle and spindly as Mother’s looked.

  But Mrs Hunter was not admitting to any of the physical shrinkage which can occur in lesser beings in exotic surroundings. ‘I must thank you for delivering us as sound as when we left the mainland.’ She advanced on the pilot while keeping him at a distance with an outstretched arm and white-gloved hand.

  The young man saw with surprise he was meant to accept this cleanly hand. ‘No trouble at all,’ he whinged rather than spoke, as though punched in the thorax, and gave her a lopsided smile.

  Dorothy noticed that the wrench her mother’s whole arm sustained from the pilot’s mechanical handshake did not make her flinch, and that the legs, far from being brittle and spindly, justified exposure.

  Dorothy looked in vain for the car which must surely come to meet them.

  While Mother had decided to make the best of a hitch in the arrangements. ‘Is there much wild life on the island?’ she asked the pilot in a clear, rather jolly voice.

  ‘Lousy with it.’

  ‘Then I shall spend my time studying the wild life of Brumby Island.’

  Dorothy winced for the tone, even if the pilot did not understand. Mother could start a flirtation at a street crossing, waiting for the lights to change.

  After thinking things over,
the pilot informed them, or more precisely, Elizabeth Hunter, ‘The wife likes to watch birds—whenever the kids give her a break.’ He added, ‘She’s got a bird book.’

  ‘Have you a bird book with you, Mother?’ The pilot’s presence made it sound more sardonic.

  ‘Don’t be silly! I don’t propose to go into it scientifically, only for my own pleasure.’

  Of course you were silly, not to say boring: wasn’t it what Hubert had given you to understand, by exquisitely tactful innuendo, long before margarine had started offering its rival charms?

  ‘And I haven’t yet decided whether it’s birds I’m interested in.’ Mother was still at it though the pilot had obviously dropped out. ‘For all you know, Dorothy, I may take up trees—or sea creatures.’

  Dorothy looked down, and caught sight of a land crab, claws raised in anguish as it moved sideways over the sand by bursts of protective choreography.

  She enjoyed a reprieve from her own anguish when an ancient car dashed towards the airstrip from out of the tallowwoods and sassafras, bucking, almost pig-rooting, at every ridge it had to cross. Jack Warming had driven across the island to fetch them as Helen had promised in her letter. He was a large man, with large, extrovert manner allied unconvincingly to that faded, quasi-mystical expression of those who spend their lives searching the shimmer of distance for the sheep or cattle dissolved in it.

  Mrs Hunter responded enormously to Jack Warming’s arrival. ‘Now I can feel we’re really off to the races!’ She offered her cheek, bravely patted the Chevrolet’s overheated bonnet, and advanced on two little children dressed in the tatters of the rich, who had come with their father.

  Jack bellowed in appreciation of Elizabeth Hunter, ‘We’ve been wondering whether you realize what you’re in for. We lead a pretty simple life on the island. Helen thinks you’re tough, though.’

  Dorothy suspected the Warmings were among the many Mother had taken in. Jack was innocent enough to attempt drawing ‘old Dorothy, here’ into the circle of his own pleasure: with good-natured clumsiness he took her by an elbow, squeezed it, but let go at once. The quasi-mystical expression was averted, though light still lingered on the tips of teeth exposed in an uncertain smile.

  As for Elizabeth Hunter, she was engaged in seducing the children. ‘The stones are turquoises. It’s a tremendously old chain. It belonged to my mother before me—one of the few pretty things she possessed: we were poor, you see. I’ll allow you to wear it, Sara,’ she promised the girl child, ‘tonight.’

  The children were entranced by the kind of stranger Elizabeth Hunter excelled at being. Then they looked at the one who was the princess, and looked away.

  Dorothy was not hurt: if children disliked, or perhaps feared her, it was because they recognized one who understood them too well. Mother’s strength lay partly in not knowing what other people were like.

  With revived bellows, Jack had begun recalling ‘the MacGregors’ party’, apparently the last occasion Mother and the Warmings had been together.

  As Mrs Hunter left off courting the children she lowered her eyelids, raised her chin, and smiled faintly at the others. ‘It was a riot, wasn’t it?’ she said in the softest voice.

  Dorothy was surprised, even shocked: she failed to equate the MacGregors’ party with anything she knew of her mother’s life; she had a stampeded vision of Elizabeth Hunter in a paper cap, then, too brutally sudden, Mother’s naked, white body as seen through a sheet of water or curtain of tropic light.

  Mrs Hunter opened her eyes very wide and said with studied emphasis, ‘You won’t believe, Dorothy—I cooked bacon and eggs for about twenty people at three in the morning.’

  It was a relief to be getting into the car. Dorothy made sure she had the seat beside the driver: in this way she would be separated from the children. She was appalled to think there were five other Warming offspring, fortunately ‘farmed out for the holidays’ their mother had written, ‘at points between Rockhampton and the Monaro’.

  Nonchalantly the Chevrolet leaped away from the airstrip, tore through a belt of thinnish scrub, and started its climb through the rain forest.

  Compared with the other islands strung out along the Queensland coast Brumby was considerable. Grabbed by a Warming grandfather early on, most of it had been resumed for its timber. The present Warming owned no more than a few acres on the ocean side and a house to which he brought his family as a respite from the inland summers. The island was uninhabited, except by a permanently stationed gang of foresters, and the Warmings on their infrequent visits.

  Now it hushed the strangers it was initiating. At some stages of the journey the trees were so densely massed, the columns so moss-upholstered or lichen-encrusted, the vines suspended from them so intricately rigged, the light barely slithered down, and then a dark, watery green, though in rare gaps where the sassafras had been thinned out, and once where a giant blackbutt had crashed, the intruders might have been reminded of actual light if this had not flittered, again like moss, but dry, crumbled, white to golden.

  The Chev skirted a clearing in which stood three or four tents coloured by permanence, as well as a Nissen hut, a couple of hatless men outside it, their leather visors of faces expressionless below white, vulnerable foreheads.

  Jack bellowed. The children waved and shouted. The men waved back. Out of the corner of an eye Dorothy caught sight of Elizabeth Hunter languidly wooing the foresters with the flicker of a white arm.

  The Princesse de Lascabanes failed to animate the stick she was changed into. More than anything, she feared that the secret joy she had experienced while carried onward and upward through the forest, might overflow through her eyes, and give her away. So she screwed it up as tight as she could, together with the equally terrifying sobs which were rising in her. Ten minutes later, as they sprang into the open and down a grass-stitched slope, she might have prayed, if her prayers had been more successful in the past, that their car should continue charging into the immensity of light and water, as far as the ocean would support its wheels. Better blinded by green glass, ear drums burst by a black roar, infinity pouring into the choked funnel of your throat, than the paroxysms and alternating apathy of a lopsided existence.

  Instead they were pulling up alongside what must be the Warmings’ house, a ramshackle ricketty structure in the easygoing Queensland style: where breezes are encouraged to blow through lattice nailed to unequal stilts, behind which any old thing you want to forget about may be stashed away, and children hide, to share their more sinister imaginings. Standing on a shelf between the forest and a strip of powdered coral, the house had been stained a practical brown with trimmings of glossier, though blistered green, the whole so placidly domesticated it was a wonder it had resisted the throbbing, the threats, the apocalyptic splendours of an ocean perpetually unrolling out of an indeterminate east.

  The visitors were still meekly disengaging themselves from the car, when the stairway reaching to what looked more a continuous balcony than the veranda of the stilted house, was shaken by a woman’s descent. She came thumping barefoot down in a cheap faded cotton frock which did not detract from the chatelaine’s authority. Dorothy would not have recognized Helen Warming: she had let herself go; her hands had been coarsened by menial grind, her body made slommacky by childbearing. Then, for an instant, the little girl looked out of the fulfilled woman, and quailed, if smilingly, beneath the prefect’s stare, before the woman resumed control, and flung on towards her objective.

  ‘Dear Mrs Hunter! How brave of you to take the risk! It’s only a primitive humpy—as I warned you.’

  It was not the pretentious gush it might have sounded, even Dorothy was forced to recognize. Helen almost swept Mother away, after which the two women embraced with a tenderness approved by husband and children.

  The girl child told, ‘That chain she’s got—with the tur-kwoys— she says I can wear tonight.’

  But personal honours were irrelevant beside the family triumph in having co
me by a living breathing object of worship and source of oracular wisdom. With a twinge Dorothy de Lascabanes realized she had been invited, not because the Warmings had wanted to be kind, but because they adored her mother.

  A galling discovery was further inflamed after the devotees had bundled their idol up the creaking stairway, and sat her in the room prepared for her visit. ‘Do you think you’ll be comfortable, Mrs Hunter? The shutters are a bit stiff. Look, these are biscuits in case you’re hungry in the night. And books. Have we remembered matches? Don’t touch the biscuits, John. We’ve only got the old kero lamps. John! Please! I still think oil lamps give the only truly benign light. Cleaning them’s a drag, but once you get into your stride it’s like saying the Lord’s Prayer. Jack, darling, why don’t you lay Mrs Hunter’s bag on the stool? Sara, nobody likes being mauled. Oh dear, poor Mrs Hunter!’ Helen stooped to give an extra hug.

  The fractured light in the shuttered room gave back to Mother’s hair the aureole it must have worn in youth, of what again appeared as palest, purest gold. Her eyes, at their deepest bluest, expressed the resignation of one receiving her due.

  Till she said with some severity, ‘There’s something I can’t allow if I’m to spend a fortnight as your guest. All this “Mrs Hunter”! My name is “Elizabeth”. Nothing less. I detest diminutives.’

  The Warmings were variously enraptured.

  Somebody had stuck a bunch of flowers in a pottery vase, and stood it on the chest. The Name insisted on knowing who had gathered her nosegay.

  ‘I did,’ said Sara.

  ‘We did,’ John corrected.

  ‘How thoughtful of you; and how clever to know nothing would please me better than natives.’

  ‘They’re all there are,’ John confessed.

  Elizabeth Hunter ignored him. ‘In whatever other ways we fall short, we have our native flowers: there’s nothing subtler—nobler; and getting up, she advanced on the erect bunch to rearrange it.

  Unable to endure any more, Dorothy had stepped outside on to the veranda. From where she was standing she might have been on board a ship, one which would never weigh anchor. Heat had bleached the colour from the sea, and reduced the coastline to a dead green, except at a point to the south where it rose into a curious cliff layered in reds and yellows. The cliff glared back at her ferociously.