The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  He murmured no she would not disturb; ‘I can shut myself off if necessary.’

  The princess gladly accepted the arrangement they had reached. Though normally she did not wear a hat, she began putting on the big straw pancake she had brought to Brumby as protection from the tropic sun. She was feeling better—indeed, restored. Her shoes were unpractical, though: she must remain a plodder beside this sturdy, self-sufficient figure tamping the beach with his rawhide sandals. Even so, she managed to keep level physically; it was morally and intellectually that she tagged along some way behind, but would have consented in the circumstances to become a sumpter mule to this—yes, boorish male.

  She risked the boorishness to ask, ‘Will you tell me what ecology is about?’

  He gasped at first; then he shrugged. ‘To put it simply, you might say this is the study of the structure and function of nature.’

  ‘And which part of such a vast and, to me, frightening subject is your special interest?’

  Professor Pehl seemed to be compressing reserves of steam inside his fired cheeks. ‘If I am known as a marine ecologist it is for my work on burrowing crustaceans of the neritic region.’

  A fine drawn sigh from the Princesse de Lascabanes might have signified appreciation.

  They continued marching, or plodding, while the professor stared ahead, from under bleached brows, out of pale eyes.

  ‘Then, since you are interested, I have gone on to, and am presently investigating, benthic aggregations: that is, briefly, the types of level bottom substrata and the parallel groupings of invertebrates supported by them at similar depths in different geographical regions. These invertebrates make a chain of ecologically similar aggregations that replace one another according to latitude and temperature.’

  Dorothy said, ‘I understand.’

  Professor Pehl turned on her his actually fervid eyes. ‘I shall explain in greater detail when we are less heated,’ he informed her.

  Dorothy agreed to listen in the cool of the evening. At the same time she was amazed at herself: at her instinctive insincerity. Or not altogether insincere: almost any mission is better than none; and she could perhaps in some way serve, she would not dare hope to comfort, this boring and complacent man contingency had given her.

  Professor Pehl had brought with him a clutch of plastic bags, and would stoop to examine shells, weeds, all kinds of anonymous sea rubbish, and sometimes pop a specimen into plastic; at one point he pounced on and bagged a distraught crab.

  It was the crab which made Dorothy exclaim, ‘Can’t I at least carry the bags for you?’

  Nothing would have struck the professor as more consistent with the nature of things, judging by the promptness with which he surrendered the specimen bags.

  Gratitude for being allowed to make this small but positive contribution launched the princess into a dangerous recitative. ‘Sometimes I feel I must take up a definite subject—I won’t go so far as to say scientific—but something to make a study of—now that I’m at a loose end. I may as well tell you—after years of a a failing marriage—my husband left me. That is why I am here. I mean,’ she quickly explained, ‘why I came home—or perhaps I should say back, to Australia—to visit my mother.’

  The professor was picking at a sea urchin: it smelled putrid and was of no interest. ‘I think, if I count, I was invited to assist at more divorces than were marriages.’

  The princess primly recovered herself. ‘I’m sorry if I bore you. And in this case there is no divorce: my church does not recognize it. No ceremony could alter the fact that my husband is living with a woman not his wife. An American,’ she made the extra effort to disclose.

  ‘Ho! So you accuse your husband?’

  ‘I don’t accuse’, here she blushed, ‘anybody.’

  ‘I am happy to hear it. Each party is almost always partially to blame.’ Inside his overheated body, he remained only coldly, distantly, scientifically involved.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ She sighed. ‘I expect you are right. We were both to blame.’ She laughed bitterly, while not entirely believing what she had just admitted.

  She was again enclosed by an emptiness. She dreaded being racked by the physical pain, though its less precise attendant, the fragmentation of mind and future, could inflict worse tortures. Through her own hovering mist, she stared at the coloured cliffs fluctuating in the haze of distance. Till the unreality of the cliffs became transformed into what she was sometimes forced to believe the only reality in life: that of the past, and more specifically, her own not particularly happy childhood. She was looking at the ornament in Nora’s bedroom: the glass dome filled with layers of coloured sand, a Souvenir from the Isle of Wight, where as a girl its owner had vowed herself to slavery. Dorothy loved the parlourmaid; indeed she had loved most maids, for the mystery surrounding their private belongings, such as this striped dome, and crochet collars dipped in tea, and lockets preserving likenesses, or twists of greenish hair. Now as she toiled along the beach there rose around her scents she had forgotten, of innocence and trustfulness, out of an open deal drawer.

  The Princesse de Lascabanes swept aside the curtain of perspiration distorting those already overpoignant cliffs. The heat was increasing. Professor Pehl had started dragging off his shirt, and as he did so, she was conscious of the aggressive stench, sweet but acrid, of fair-complexioned men. It was nauseating, or so she tried to persuade herself before dismissing her discovery.

  The professor made no concessions to the woman who had tacked herself on, but continued striding. His hairless, noticeably developed calves, could have been trying to outdistance her. He did at times, and then at others, he was forced to stoop, to examine a potential specimen. So she caught up, and was again drugged by that penetrating male stench.

  Under its influence she was moved to exclaim, ‘Oh, your back—how horribly painful it looks, Professor!’ Days of exposure to the sun had turned the more prominent parts into a scurf of skin, or salt codflesh.

  He straightened up. ‘The worst is over,’ he said, but continued fiercely working his shoulderblades together.

  ‘I expect it’s too late to have any great effect,’ she hesitated, ‘but if you would like—I’ll rub you with sunburn lotion—tonight.’ Automatically she listened for Mother’s comment.

  ‘Thank you.’ It was neither acceptance nor refusal.

  She was exasperated: a Frenchman would have let her know the extent of her success or failure; but with this Norwegian she could not be sure.

  Of course it did not matter to her, and to show it she asked, ‘Do you suppose the cliffs over there are a mirage?’ But either he did not understand, or he considered her remark too fanciful.

  For a moment they were overtaken by the forest pressing through the carob scrub which had so far fringed the beach: great eucalypts, themselves shedding skin, and darker sassafras, were massing to obscure the tantalizing coloured cliffs of childhood. She noticed grass of the same green as moss, sombre, yet glowing, clotting in hummocks at the roots of some native cypresses. What began by giving her pleasure, ended as a virulent glare.

  And the Norwegian decided to take up the subject she had offered in the first place. ‘These cliffs beyond are where a ship was wrecked. The crew and officers were murdered.’

  Yes she said she knew about the murder.

  ‘And the master’s wife taken by the blacks for their slave?’ He was looking at her more with his teeth, it seemed, than with his eyes.

  Yes she knew about that too.

  The throbbing had begun again. For some unreasonable reason directionless fears were shooting through her. However seductive the moss at the roots of the deformed cypresses, she must not give in, nor to the increasing ejaculations of her head.

  So she disentangled herself from the plastic bags. ‘This is where I shall leave you.’ As she tore free, one of the bags fell on the sand between them. ‘My mother will be wondering where I am. I can’t leave her indefinitely—not at her age,’ she snickered. />
  The professor was more intent on retrieving the fallen specimen bag, but thought to gasp, ‘Is Mrs Hunter an invalid, then?’

  ‘No. Only elderly.’

  Dorothy de Lascabanes and Edvard Pehl stood looking at each other from either end of this telescopic situation. Because hers was the wrong end, she could feel him staring into the pores of her skin, through them, and beyond.

  After she had turned and moved away she looked back once, ostensibly to re-focus on those mesmeric cliffs. In the foreground the Norwegian’s tattered shoulders were already exerting themselves on their solitary ecological trek.

  The Princesse de Lascabanes was glad of her shoes after all: she found the return journey strewn with oyster shells.

  Dorothy had noticed in the kitchen an antiquated telephone, its varnished box fastened to the wall, a receiver attached to a hook on one side. Its ancient air suggested that it might provide an even frailer lifeline than its more compact, outwardly more efficient, contemporary counterpart. There was a connection with the foresters’ camp, one gathered; but calls to the outside world were made through the mainland town of Oxenbould.

  When Dorothy reached the house, Helen Warming was standing at this antique telephone, her comfortable shoulders tensed inside the cotton frock, while Mother sat at the kitchen table making the formally sympathetic noises a sense of one’s own superfluousness induces.

  Helen was speaking with Sydney it seemed, the subject their eldest boy, ‘Oh yes, I’m sure … You’ve done everything that can be done. I know practically nothing of Sydney doctors, but accept your choice … No, it’s far better that he should go into hospital … Yes—every care … Yes yes … We must wait for the results of the tests … Thank you, Dugald—and Barbara. I’m truly grateful.’

  Helen hung up. When she turned, her face was blotched, her eyes were streaming. She probably did not see the friends instinct forced her to address. ‘Hugh collapsed. He’s been taken to hospital. They shan’t be able to diagnose before they have the results of the tests,’ she explained while walking out of the kitchen. ‘I must find Jack.’

  In the sense of inadequacy they had in common, and the increasing paroxysms of her own migraine, Dorothy was at first grateful for her mother’s presence. For a shameful instant she almost fell on her knees: she could have buried her head in Mummy’s lap; but managed to direct her anguish outward.

  ‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘is there nothing I can do to help?’ To demonstrate, not to Helen specifically, but to everybody, the love they suspected she was incapable of giving.

  Mother said, ‘Nothing, Dorothy. There’s nothing you can do, dear—except try to control yourself.’ She was becoming absorbed in contemplation of her own lustrous fingernails.

  ‘If you aren’t intolerable!. And as usual, right! There’s nothing I can do for anyone. I should have gone all the way—as the professor wanted me to on this expedition.’

  ‘You’ll only make it worse, dear, if you work yourself up emotionally. I advise you to go and lie down.’

  ‘That is something I have no intention of doing. Who knows—Helen may find she needs me after all.’

  Her rage might have erupted ceilingwards if Jack Warming had not come in. Like Helen, he no longer saw these guests. He began tinkering with the phone, talking with the mainland, organizing. There was a promise of the helicopter, at Brumby airstrip, at two; this should allow them to join the afternoon flight from Oxenbould to the south.

  Temporarily relieved, their host was able to concentrate on his guests’ future. ‘Though we shan’t be here, it needn’t prevent you enjoying the rest of your holiday. There’s food enough to see you through a couple of days. Ask the forestry people to help when you have to renew supplies; they’ll ferry anything across from the mainland.’ He showed them how to re-fill the two laborious kerosene refrigerators. ‘You’ll find wine in the bunker, there, behind the house. I rely on you, Elizabeth, and Dorothy, both of you, to be kind to the professor whatever your private opinions.’ Jack even laughed.

  In the circumstances it was a plan nobody could reject, and towards the time the helicopter was expected, Edvard Pehl, who had returned from his expedition, prepared to run the Warmings and their two silenced children down to the strip.

  Elizabeth Hunter stood on the veranda waving a scarf. She called out they could rely on her—and Dorothy. It was a flamingo scarf, the colour also of sunsets, which made the gesture more nostalgic, if not fateful.

  Because there was nothing else to do, the princess rested during the heat of the afternoon. In her room the other end of the veranda Elizabeth Hunter was no doubt resting too. If one could care. And Edvard Pehl?

  Dorothy turned a cheek to the rather coarse gritty pillow its scuffed-up skin salt-smelling sea-rinsed that is where She had it over most others insomnia rinses out the wrinkles the tide of years erodes but only imperceptibly in her case not in a hundred.

  A hundred eyelashes are distinctly becoming Dorothy Hunter. Never oh Lord anything but. She must have slept for she had dreamt of something if she could remember. She got up as the light was waning. The pillow had scored her face and left it looking like a washboard. After she had sponged it with soft though tepid rainwater from the jug, and put on a dress nobody could have seen before, she started on a walk, this time in a northerly direction, along the beach at first, then pushing inland through scrub, towards the darker rain forest. Till the trees began to frighten her. It was the light. She saw a man, nobody recognizable, in fact most improbable. Though there were the men up at the forester’s camp. There was, she became convinced, a stench of man in the undergrowth.

  After making her discovery she scrambled down, back to the beach, to return to the house. The sun was setting: this bronze tyrant lowered into the flamingo litter and encircling host of haze-blue trees. The splendours which were being enacted kindled tongues of expectancy in her, for the dissertation he—Edvard, had promised for the evening. Though she also swallowed a giggle or two: what if his benthic aggregations should put her to sleep?

  Then in the dusk she caught sight of an actual man, head down, crunching towards her, and from the thickset body, and the intense seriousness of his mission, knew it could only be Professor Pehl.

  ‘Ah, you are there!’ The lightening of tone, she felt, was intended to convey pleasure. ‘I have come to bring you,’ he announced while marching to a halt.

  ‘That is kind—thoughtful of you.’ She was genuinely touched by this, after all, amiable Norwegian.

  Walking beside her he proceeded to explain, ‘Yes, your mother has sent me. She has seen you walk along the beach, and now fears for your whereabouts.’

  ‘She needn’t have worried,’ the Princesse de Lascabanes replied. ‘I’ve managed to survive till now without help. However old and wise parents may grow, reasonableness is a virtue few of them seem to develop.’

  She shut up at once, as though finding her own contribution to reason had curdled; but the professor showed no sign of having detected a prig.

  ‘I have caught some fish,’ he was pleased to confess, ‘which Mrs Hunter will cook for us.’

  (Wonder what Mother will make of the fish, beyond the big tra-la?)

  They walked on, blissfully alone, through the forests of Norway. He was telling her about the birches and aspens; rowan berries were clustered overhead; cold air blew funnelling down from the glacier higher up, making her twitch closer the folds of a long heather-tinted cape.

  When the actual beach over which they were squelching, began thundering behind, then around them, sand hissing, spirting, flying in great veils—whinnying, it seemed, finally.

  ‘It is these horses!’ the professor called in a loud but unsteady voice. ‘Oh, the brumbies of Brumby!’ she shouted back between gusts of nervous laughter.

  On reaching them the horses propped for an instant; a couple of them reared; others wheeled and spun into spiralling shadows; there was the sound of hooves striking on hide, bone, stone; a flash of sparks, and of teeth t
earing at the dusk.

  Edvard Pehl and Dorothy de Lascabanes stood supporting each other. She could feel his thick body breathing against her negligible breasts and palpitating ribs, while outside their physical envelops their minds flapped around in bewilderment and fright.

  Then the brumbies had passed, lunging and stampeding farther down the beach, kicking up their heels, some of them audibly breaking wind.

  ‘Were you afraid?’ his trembling voice laughingly inquired.

  ‘Nohh!’ If she had been honest she would have answered: I was glad of you; I was glad even of your trembling; but would have been equally glad of someone else, provided that person was a man.

  They walked on. He continued in possession of a hand he had grabbed hold of at a moment of crisis, until he realized; and dropped it.

  They walked, and Professor Pehl started pointing. ‘There, you see, is a light.’ It sounded as though he was spitting with excitement brought on no doubt by relief after fear. ‘Mrs Hunter has lit a lamp.’

  ‘I dare say. I’m surprised they haven’t electricity. Lousy with money as they are.’ In her case, relief had dredged up the slang of her youth. ‘Haven’t you noticed how the very rich so often stint themselves of the obvious?’

  The professor did not appear to be listening, or not to her. ‘Is she a musician—Mrs Hunter?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I swear I have heard the Warmings’ piano.’

  ‘Oh—well—when I say “not a musician”, I can remember her playing the piano—yes—when we were children. As a matter of fact, she was pretty awful at it.’

  ‘I was sure I have heard a piano.’

  Now that she was warned, and reminded, Dorothy too, could hear. Somebody was very deliberately ‘playing the piano’. It came through the dark, sad and monotonous and maddening. It was Mother hammering away at that same old nocturne—whose was it? (I got it from Miss Hands. Every Thursday they drove me into Gogong. I was to learn the piano, along with other accomplishments.) Still hammering, she managed to intensify the ambivalence of a tropical evening. Her tenacity was remarkable: it explained not only her worldly success, but also perhaps her only slightly faltering beauty.