The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  Elizabeth Hunter had opened up what was officially the living-room. Under Helen, they had congregated almost exclusively in the kitchen, in an atmosphere of fry and good-fellowship. Elizabeth’s accession promised subtler nuances. She had stood a pair of candles on the old cottage piano, and further tricked it out with a piece of music, the banality of which, together with a certain hypnotic sweetness, partly accounted for its being a performer’s first choice when shaking the dust off a long neglected talent.

  She might have appeared to greater advantage if the piano had been a concert grand set in a waste of uncluttered carpet. As it was, however high she raised her head, exposing her famous throat, her lily neck, the size of the instrument and the rather warped, salt-cured keys, made it look more as though she were hunching her shoulders over some harmonium. There was her back though, white amongst the shadows, and light in her hair, and she had obviously dressed herself for an occasion, in a long white robe of raw silk, of unbroken fall if it had not been for a corded girdle, and faint flutings which gave her slenderness an architecture.

  The dress was one Dorothy could not remember. She decided not to notice it again. Nor listen to the wretched hammered nocturne.

  She said in her harshest voice, ‘Shall I fetch you a drink, professor? After being almost trampled to death I feel we need something strong to revive us.’

  ‘Trampled? How?’ Elizabeth Hunter did not turn because she was having a fight with the treble.

  Music seemed to excite Professor Pehl. ‘It is great chance, Mrs Hunter, that you have this gift, and can entertain us.’

  She bowed her head, and broke off playing only then, ‘But how,’ she asked, turning to face them, ‘were you nearly trampled?’ A vague concern troubled her candle-lit surface.

  ‘It was these wild horses which galloped past us down the beach.’ Professor Pehl got it over as briefly as possible. ‘But tell me, Mrs Hunter, you who perform the piano, what persuades you to waste your time on this mediocre composer Field?’ He aimed his perceptiveness like a dart which the target must gladly suffer.

  ‘I play him because he is easy,’ she admitted with exquisitely serious candour, before allowing the smile to come, ‘and leisurely enough to show off one’s wrists.’

  Dorothy went to get the drinks. When she returned, Mother was explaining the insignificance of her gift, while Edvard Pehl had developed an itch to discuss Brahms.

  ‘At least we have music in common,’ Mrs Hunter said. ‘I shan’t have to make a fool of myself trying to take an interest in—science.’

  The professor laughed so vibrantly he made the candle flames shudder on their wicks.

  Mrs Hunter modestly ignored her success. ‘Amuse him, Dorothy, while I go and cook the fish.’ In passing, she draped herself for a moment on this difficult child. ‘The brumbies! How fortunate I sent you to fetch her, Professor.’ Could some of Mother’s concern have been sincere? ‘I was somehow told that danger was in store for Dorothy.’ She kissed a bony cheek with what could have been tenderness.

  Dorothy was silent; and Elizabeth Hunter, silent too, left for the kitchen. She was barefooted, her daughter realized with disgust.

  What had brought on coldness in the Princesse de Lascabanes provoked a restlessness in Professor Pehl. As he roamed around the room guzzling his drink (many Norwegians, she had read, were incurable alcoholics) he asked while mopping the sweat from his forehead, ‘Has the temperature perhaps fallen? I think I hear a wind has arisen.’

  ‘Not that I’ve noticed.’ She could not make it cold enough.

  The professor announced he was going to put on a coat, and came back wearing a linen jacket, all creases, as though dragged straight out of a suitcase, or more likely, a rucksack. But the coat was Edvard Pehl’s contribution to dressiness, and the colour, ultramarine, emphasized the blue as well as the clear whites of his eyes. (Bitterly, Dorothy visualized a figure equipped for a path winding round a fjord: the rucksack needless to say, hobnailed boots, woven tie, and a meerschaum.)

  ‘This is better!’ As he settled his shoulders in the creased jacket he seemed to be angling for a compliment, which he did not get from the princess: she had been made too ashamed by her novelettish fantasy.

  When the cook called from the kitchen, ‘Ed-vard? I shall call you “Edvard”, shan’t I? These magnificent fish haven’t been scaled, and I think-don’t you? it’s a man’s job to scale the fish.’

  So Madame de Lascabanes found herself alone. Only she had failed to dress in celebration of the fish caught by Edvard Pehl. Or was it the contingency which had brought all three of them together in this unlikely house beside the sea? Or simply, Elizabeth Hunter’s voracious beauty and vanity?

  Whatever else, Mother had transformed ‘Ed-vard’s magnificent catch’ into a work of art: she had grilled it, and laid it on a bed of wild fennel, and strewn round the border of a fairly common, chipped dish a confetti of native flowers.

  On the wings of her second whiskey, the Princesse de Lascabanes was taken with a sombre glee. ‘Do you realize that for every fish cooked, a still life is sacrificed?’ When she fell foul of her darker humours. ‘Or has it been said by someone else?’

  Neither Edvard nor Elizabeth could give attention enough to affirm or contradict.

  As though a martyr to the appetites of others, Mother was no more than picking at her fish; whereas Edvard frankly stuffed his mouth, then fossicked for bones with his fingers, lips grown shiny with gluttony and oil.

  He cried, ‘The head is always best!’ and seized the largest.

  Though she lowered her eyelids, Elizabeth Hunter seemed prepared to accept whatever behaviour might demonstrate a man’s rights.

  If Dorothy too, only picked at her fish, it was for a different reason: she believed she could detect, between her teeth, traces of sand. Slightly appeased by this flaw in what should have been perfection, another thought kept recurring: that the cook might be practising her art, not for art’s sake, but for immoral purposes.

  Because why leave off her shoes? In Helen Warming’s case, it was from force of habit and living in a hot climate. But Elizabeth Hunter had done it to impress, if not to seduce. She was sitting sideways at the table, sipping the wine she had brought up from the bunker, exposing her slender, miraculously unspoilt feet from beneath the white, raw-silk hem. Her feet had the tones of tuberoses.

  (Why are others given the physical attributes which belong to your true, invisible, hence unappreciated self?)

  The white of the throat was mottled with green to golden reflections as the wine she was holding floated in the glass. ‘Isn’t it a bit sweet?’ she asked. ‘That slight Spritz is interesting, however.’

  Perhaps she had overdone it; she threw back her head and more than sighed, she whimpered, ‘That poor child!’

  ‘Which child are you referring to, Mrs Hunter?’ The professor was gouging the last revolting fragment of jelly out of a fish’s skull.

  ‘Why, the Warmings’s of course! That boy who’s developed God knows what—polio? leukaemia even!’

  ‘Oh—no!’ Dorothy dug the points of her elbows into the table: she was weeping not only for the good Warmings’s innocent child, but for her own intransigent, and worse still, Mother’s possibly compassionate nature.

  Professor Pehl remained more equable than either of them. ‘It is very unfortunate, that is for sure. But medicine is making all the time remarkable advances.’ He licked the juices from his knife, and having cleaned it, propped the blade against the edge of his plate.

  He saw there was a pineapple to come. Mrs Hunter had torn out the flesh, and returned it to the shell, and replaced the crown of stylized leaves. Now when she lifted the lid, an insidiously sugared perfume mingled with the somewhat hostile smell of bruised fennel and the stench of charred, oil-tinctured fishskin.

  For some reason Mrs Hunter and her daughter barely touched the pineapple, while watching Professor Pehl feasting on its jagged flesh.

  Tonight the moon was glinting gree
n above black water, the princess noticed, and could have lingered, brooding over this capricious image, together with the injustices to which a sensitive human being is inevitably subjected.

  Till Dorothy, in redemptive mood, jumped up and as good as insisted, ‘Why don’t you let me do the washing up?’

  Elizabeth Hunter made the appropriate murmurs by which acceptance is disguised as protest, while the professor, as replete male of some importance, could see no reason for dismissing the suggestion. So, when he had finished picking his teeth from behind a formal hand, he bowed, and followed Mrs Hunter, not without actually sidestepping the visible thoughts of this Princesse de Lascabanes who had already taken up her duties at the sink.

  Mother’s voice on the veranda floated like the flamingo scarf with which she had waved the Warmings to their son’s sickbed. ‘Obliging of the moon always to do the right thing in landscapes like these.’

  By the time the princess had finished the washing up (which failed to purge her of her spleen as she had hoped) the piano was at work again, though with a masculine authority, if not male heaviness. Hardly musical herself, Dorothy could only guess at Brahms, by the clotted chords, and what she recognized as an unmistakeably Germanic-skittish brio, as she slung the dishes around, and wiped a fleck of offending detergent off her upper lip. As a Frenchwoman she was bound to condemn the Germanic; as an Australian daughter she was contemptuous of a mother who could lie by moonlight on a chaise longue (where else would Elizabeth Hunter have chosen?) flicking her ankle at the music whenever she thought about it, making the tuberose tones come and go in her naked feet.

  Her martyrdom folded, or stacked to drain, Dorothy went outside. The screen door clashed harshly with the mood Elizabeth Hunter would have wished to invoke. Her daughter hugged her fish-scales and a patch of sticky pineapple juice: they were honest humiliations at least. She went and sat on the higher ground outside the bunker where the Warmings stored their wine.

  If he failed to scent you out by your fishy fumes, you would identify him by his characteristic reek and the sound of blunt toes exploring the formless surroundings. Here I am—Edvard—your skiapod. Not surprising he should hesitate; and still clogged besides, with Brahms. My which is it you say? Laughter—by courtesy of Mother (you can’t dispense with her entirely.) Fish shadows are more substantial than they seem—as you, an expert, must know,

  He did. Her own no more than shadowy innuendo of a body had been pinned down, flattened flatter surely, by his substantial weight.

  Dorothy de Lascabanes had so appalled herself that she sat up holding her elbows, while the grass, starved and vindictive, continued tilting at her thighs through her dress. Brahms must have stuck somewhere in mid-actuality; voices had broken out instead, in the kitchen, only a short distance from where she was aching on a hummock.

  In different circumstances, Dorothy felt, she would not have allowed herself to eavesdrop. Now she was too frustrated to resist. There was a barrel, moreover, visible amongst the stilts on which the house was raised.

  It did occur to the Princesse de Lascabanes: what if I topple off the barrel? tear my leg on a rusty nail? Quelle horreur— tetanus at least! But hearing, and eventually seeing from eye level as she clung to the sill, reinforced her limbs with steel.

  Without his shirt, Edvard Pehl was seated astride a kitchen chair, arms folded along its back, one cheek resting on a forearm, eyes closed in what the expression of his face suggested must be bliss. The princess almost whinged in anguish: there, standing over him, bottle in hand, was Elizabeth Hunter, anointing this peeling, though still inflamed Viking with what appeared to be calamine lotion.

  ‘Don’t you find it soothing, Edvard?’

  The professor answered, ‘Yes,’ or barely: it reached Dorothy as ‘esss’, the pearly tips of his little-boy’s teeth for a moment visible in his man’s flaming face.

  She was infuriated. But of course Mother was to blame.

  Elizabeth Hunter must have had faith in her own healing powers: she was radiant with charisma. ‘You poor dear!’ she murmured, as she stroked the scruffy, burnt back. ‘Somebody should have attended to you before. Before the worst.’

  Edvard Pehl did not answer, but snuggled visibly against the chair.

  And Elizabeth Hunter poured herself another pink handful, and clapped it, but ever so gently, between the suffering shoulderblades. ‘There’s nothing like calamine for driving out the fire.’ Now it was she who closed her eyes, as she raised her face, willing the inflammation to subside.

  The Princesse de Lascabanes was so incensed she could feel the barrel tottering under her, and did not care.

  ‘You will tell me if I’m hurting you, Edvard?’ Mother commanded, but her little boy only sighed, and smiled out of the cushions of his own dreaming flesh.

  After that there was the clop clop of renewed handfuls of calamine lotion.

  As Mother stroked and soothed, her white, classic form poised at an admirably cool, though unconvincing, parallel distance from the body to which she was ministering, you could tell from her face that she was preparing to outdo the night, with its background of sea and moon on the one hand, and on the other, scrub stirring, wings brushing, frogs croaking out of damp-leather throats (also, alas, the creaking of a barrel). Dorothy could tell that Mother was about to change the slide in her magic lantern, and trembled to discover what its successor might be.

  Click! Here it was, as the face revealed, and the raised voice commented, not on a single image, but a whole series, while preserving a tone both velvety and dark.

  ‘Do you know, Edvard, there’s a dream I dream—on and off;’ and her hand encouraged a deeper participation in this recurring velvet. ‘Naturally the details vary, but always in my dream I am walking on the bed of the sea.’

  She paused until her fellow sleeper stirred.

  ‘I expect those clever people who know, would accuse me of all kinds of obscene desires. But there—I can’t avoid telling the truth—and the truth was always beautiful,’ the hand insisted.

  Whether she had put her patient into such a dead sleep that her dream narrative would be wasted on him, it looked unimportant to Elizabeth Hunter, herself once again walking on the sea bed.

  She had grown so luminous even Dorothy, perched on her barrel, was precariously spellbound.

  ‘What I remember in particular from each of these dreams is the light I found below—sometimes flowing around me—like water—then, on other occasions, as though emanating from myself: I was playing a single beam on objects I thought might be of interest.’

  Without opening his eyes or shifting position, Professor Pehl announced in his most direct voice, ‘Many deep-sea animals are provided with luminescent organs, you know, to enable them to produce the light they need. Some fish use this light to attract their prey.’ Still without opening his eyes, the lines around them deeply engraved by the seriousness of the subject, he asked, ‘Were you, in the dreams, a fish, Mrs Hunter?’

  Mother looked only fairly amused; nor could Dorothy blame her, but would not go so far as admitting they might have united in a ‘good laugh’ at the expense of this turgid male—or human turbot (the princess quietly sniggered at her own conceit).

  When Elizabeth Hunter continued. ‘How can I say? One is always rather fluid in a dream. Or if I took on a form, I don’t believe I was ever more than a skiapod.’

  Dorothy was breathless with resentment for what she herself could no more than half-remember, had perhaps only half-discovered—on the banks of the Seine? in dreams? as part of that greatest of all obsessions, childhood? and how could Elizabeth Hunter have got possession of anything so secret? Only Mother was capable of slicing in half what amounted to a psyche, then expecting the rightful owner to share.

  Professor Pehl also seemed surprised: his eyes had flickered open. ‘A what did you say, Mrs Hunter?’

  ‘Oh, a kind of shadowy fish, but with a woman’s face. The face was not shadowy. Or some of it at least was painfully distinct. I sa
w it years ago in a drawing, and it stayed with me. You couldn’t say the expression looked deceitful, or if it was, you had to forgive, because it was in search of something it would probably never find.’

  The Princesse de Lascabanes heard her own dry gasps; possibilities were shooting, like minute, brilliant, electric fish, in and out of her sunken skull; she heard her ribs fluttering against the equally frail boards of a rickety house; but the professor closed his eyes again because Mrs Hunter had led the conversation outside his sphere of interest.

  ‘There were fish of course—real ones. I was often surrounded by them. Enormous creatures. All the fish I saw were in fact much larger than myself. It should have been frightening. But I don’t think I was ever frightened.’

  The professor remained equally calm, as might have been expected on his own ground. ‘A characteristic of some deep-sea fish is the enormous mouth. It makes it possible for them to swallow prey much larger than themselves. A very practical arrangement: meals are few and far between.’ Because it was meant to be a joke, he laughed.

  Though Dorothy doubted whether this turbot of a man, eyelids again closed, could possibly have seen the point of his own remark, she was rejoiced: her equilibrium had been restored.

  Mother only smiled as she drew her hand back and forth, very slowly, three or four times, across the small of her patient’s back; if you had not known more, she might have been wiping him off.

  The professor suddenly opened his eyes, their expression so concentrated the tone of their blue was that of anger. ‘Did you ever come across any interesting invertebrates at the level to which your dreams have taken you?’

  ‘No. Definitely, no. I was never interested in invertebrates.’

  Professor Pehl looked momentarily incredulous. ‘They are the most greatest interest in my life,’ he confessed. It is remarkable,’ he added, ‘that a woman of your intellect have been born with no inclination to science. I would be happy if you would grant me time to acquaint you at least with my special subject. That way is it only possible for you to get to know me,’