The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  ‘Oh, Martian? Dorothy de Lascabanes opened her bag: if she knew what might help, she could not find it; she shut the bag; she wept.

  Basil probably hadn’t noticed: he had half-closed his eyes, and his nostrils had a pinched look, as though detecting a stench of pickled onions in shuttered rooms. ‘I’ll ask the old Wyburd to approach whoever they are and come to some agreement. I must see “Kudjeri” while I’m here.’ Return to the source of things, and in doing so, perhaps even save yourself from Mitty Jacka and the death play.

  But it did not allow him to forget that a future of any kind hinged materially on Elizabeth Hunter. ‘In the meantime, Mother darling, Dorothy and I shall investigate the Thorogood Village.’

  His smile as he left the room looked irresponsible, Dorothy thought, like that of somebody falling asleep or setting out on an obsessive journey.

  ‘Dorothy, are you still with me?’

  You became, inevitably, Mother’s dutiful girl awaiting dismissal.

  ‘Kiss me, won’t you? Before you go?’ One of the organisms Elizabeth Hunter’s skiapod depended on for nourishment, you let yourself be sucked in. ‘Come back tonight—both of you,’ the mouth withdrew enough to bubble. ‘I’ll get hold of an ambassador, or foreign professor. That’s the sort of thing people seem to like. However perfectly foreigners use words, one can blame them for what one doesn’t want to understand.’

  Tear yourself away from this mouth, the underwater implications, from a simple dangerously illuminating beam, and from love, as Elizabeth Hunter understood it. (Could Mother have loved, ever? She loves offering herself for love, but that is a different matter.)

  Madame de Lascabanes went: a woman of tensed calves and variable age, her handbag sealed to her ribs to avoid losing the keys and documents from which one cannot afford to become separated. Though anything really important, such as incriminating letters, can be more safely carried in a chamois bag pinned to the slip, in that sanctuary below the division of the breasts.

  Walking quickly along the passage towards the landing, she intended to glance through a certain doorway at her own virginal sufferings, when she heard voices in the nurses’ room, and caught sight of Sir Basil Hunter talking at that healthy, pretty nurse. Was it so late that the tea planter’s widow had been replaced by the gaudy strumpet? To distract herself from her twinges, the princess looked at her watch, which confirmed that everything was, in a broad superficial sense, in order; the details are what grow disorderly as they take it upon themselves to sprout in conflicting directions.

  ‘Basil?’ she called in passing, in a high, light, deliberately disinterested voice. ‘We shall be late if we don’t make a move.’ Late for what, she could not have told, but continued down the stairs with an obduracy to convince anyone but herself.

  If Sir Basil had heard his sister’s warning, he delayed answering it. Unable to resist just a peep into the room where the nurses changed, he struck lucky: the little Manhood, already in uniform, was checking something, it appeared, in an exercise book. It was also obvious she had taken it up very recently and too quickly: the pages had not yet settled down.

  Sir Basil had meant to close the door after stepping inside the dressing-room. Whether he did, he was not aware; in any case, his only reason for doing so would have been to avoid pandering to Dorothy’s inquisitiveness. But he soon forgot his sister.

  He was too intent, while too uncertain, how to behave now that he had a foothold in this room, with its closed cupboards and a scent of wych-hazel; but no doubt Sister Whatnot—his Primavera! would come up with his cue.

  Instead she continued squeezing and releasing the end of her ball pen, as she gave herself to whatever she was reading in her exemptive notebook.

  It became a question of interrupting or looking a fool. ‘I half expected you to follow up our meeting of the other evening.’ His voice was no longer that of a successful actor playing a part he knew inside out: he detected in himself the quavers of an elderly amateur.

  ‘Oh?’ Though she condescended to raise her head, it was surrounded by the forbidding veil, and her eyes showed him she was taking in no more than the tip of one of his ear lobes, and that as a favour he had scarcely earned. ‘I don’t know why you would ’uv even half expected it,’ she finally said. ‘We didn’t arrange anything, did we?’ While breaking her silence, her face remained opaque, seemingly sullen, the eyelids thick and half-lowered.

  ‘It didn’t occur to me to suggest a business deal.’ Nor to snigger now. ‘Not where mutual tenderness exists.’ Oh Lord! He had always hated his matinee performances.

  Again, ‘Oh?’ but this time Sister Manhood’s swollen lips smiled enough, under the pale lipstick, to show the concession did not mean a thing.

  Then she tossed her veil, swished what she was wearing of a skirt over her dimpled flanks. ‘I must go in to my patient,’ she announced with a busy officiousness.

  ‘Anyway, you know where I am,’ he pointed out, ‘if you care to repeat what I personally found most enjoyable.’ To make it sound less like a meal, he added, ‘I even felt we cared a little for each other,’ bullshit though it was.

  Sister Manhood gave no clue to what she may have experienced at the Onslow Hotel.

  He was going downstairs having made a fool of himself over a cocktease nurse on a one-night stand, at this crucial point in his life when he should have been concentrating instead on persuading his mother to die, so that he might survive. He went down, lashing out now and then with a foot at the cast-iron Hesperides and thorns put there to protect him from space. He remembered only at the bottom of the stairs that his sister and accomplice would be waiting for him with a knowing, and probably vindictive, smile.

  At once he saw he had done poor old Dorothy an injustice. She must have guessed what he had been up to, but decided to half-veil her knowledge in a virtuous woman’s understanding. She had gone out into the garden leaving the hall door ajar. She was standing in the sun waiting for him, her intolerant brand of elegance at odds with the blowsy light and tree fronds indolently stirring. But it did not prevent her offering a smile in which her own virtue waived virtue in the male, particularly one to whom she was related. It restored his virility. He took her by the elbow, and squeezed it.

  ‘You’re giving me a lift, aren’t you?’ To beg her tender favour she had turned her bony face towards his, almost as though expecting a kiss into the bargain.

  Walking down the path together he slipped an arm under hers, and actually thought how pleasant to be connected with this Princesse de Lascabanes, all the more since she happened to be his confederate as well.

  ‘How do you think we have done?’ he asked.

  ‘Mother is unpredictable.’ She gave one or two curious, apparently genuine sobs, which she tried to turn into grunts, before continuing in her driest voice, ‘I’m more than ever convinced old people should not be encouraged to live for ever.’

  They were in agreement, but it made him feel alone again: with his failed Lear of some years past; and the prospect of leaping into darkness under the guidance of Mitty Jacka.

  Till the fantasy he had woven for himself at the height of the unpleasant business in Mother’s room returned to screen him from this other vision of a puppetry more sinister because it concerned him personally. ‘When I said I have a strong desire to re-visit “Kudjeri”, I don’t believe, Dorothy, you took me seriously.’ He must will her to share this obsession of his. ‘I very definitely mean to go, if it can be arranged—not just as a sentimental pilgrimage—more as a—’ the false ones amongst his teeth were offering stumbling blocks to the simple words he was trying to utter, ‘I mean this journey might put me in touch with a reality I no long—which everybody, right? tends to underrate and forget—and which no artist, of any kind, can afford to ignore.’ His clumsy tongue had finally forced this foolish confession past the teeth.

  He had come to a standstill with his sister at a turn in the path overhung by an old weeping bottlebrush. The light, together with th
e fronds through which it was spilling, had imposed a lattice between himself and Dorothy’s face. Was she mocking him from within her purdah? Or had she simply closed down, like a woman for whom abstractions hold no interest? He could not tell, much as he wished to; she was perhaps as necessary for his regeneration as for the crime they had agreed to help each other commit.

  ‘Why don’t you come along, Dorothy?’

  As though performing an act of love on a still doubting mistress, he inserted his suggestion gently but firmly in what he could only guess to be her imagination. At the same time, he reinforced the square of their clasped hands. They continued standing in the semi-shade of the bottlebrush, while he half swung the hand she was only half attempting to withdraw.

  At first Dorothy made a series of rudimentary bird noises. She was surprised at herself: it was not her sort of thing; and because he was unaccustomed to them, her tentative chirps probably sounded as odd to him.

  She became more herself when habit had her flash the knife of her face, just for an instant. ‘Won’t it be horribly uncomfortable?’ She winced. ‘I can’t bear discomfort, Basil—sharing bathrooms and all that—not at my age.’ To confess to your own age, as opposed to others implying it, is something of a luxury.

  It used not to be uncomfortable. Far from it.’

  ‘Once upon a time!’

  Visions of strangers’ hair stuck to the bath, country cisterns characteristically refusing to flush, breakfast conversation while fat congeals around the ruins, little hands invading your dressing-table, to touch, try, upset, and leave codewords written by finger in spilt powder, roused in her a repugnance she must have inherited from Mother.

  It would give the old girl time to make up her mind—and soothe the nerves of her murderers.’ He spoke the word with saving gusto.

  Dorothy laughed to please him, but without mirth and shapelessly.’ What if she makes it up the wrong way?’

  ‘She wont, I’ve appealed to a sense of duty which has always been there in the depths, and depths are easier to reach in senile minds.’

  ‘Senile minds are infinitely stubborn, let me tell you.’

  He did not see it that way because it would not have suited him to.

  ‘Stubborn or not,’ she prepared to console, ‘our present concern is whether this ghastly village will have a vacancy in the possibly near future.’

  They bounced down a flight of three steps, at that dangerous corner, still swinging hands. ‘Bless you, darling!’ At the bottom he raised her knuckle to his lips. ‘And I salute your French in-laws for bringing you up so practical.’

  If ever she should have hated Basil, it was now; but the warmth of his hand, the hint of his lips, had stanched the wound from which hatred flows: in her imagination she raced ahead tied by conscience to this brother she had never accepted as a blood relation and as they bumped in the rented car the dusty miles even united them physically freshly burnished not repulsively barbecued by the sun they recognize an avatar in every skeleton tree then their own totems of casuarina and willow the oval rosebed in front of a house from which the no longer vengeful siblings tumble down the veranda steps to greet the travellers and merge at last into one another.

  Basil may have sensed some of the dangers of exaltation. ‘Whatever we decide about “Kudjeri”, tomorrow it’s Matron, the clergy, and any other ghastliness the Thorogood Village has to offer.’

  ‘The inmates!’ Dorothy unaccountably shrieked as they reached the gate of their mother’s garden. ‘Those who aren’t vegetable will be looking us over—from the moment we arrive. Old people with nothing more to do about their lives develop a nose for weaknesses, like dogs and children—as we ought to know.’ It appalled her to think they might scent out ambitions she kept more or less veiled from her conscious mind; nor could she hope to hide behind her brother.

  Nine

  ‘WHAT’S THIS?’ Sister Manhood owed it to her profession to disapprove of the unorthodox; but you couldn’t knock Lottie, who apart from everything else was looking such a fright in her drag.

  ‘Mrs Hunter asked me for to entertain her.’

  ‘Never in the middle of the day. First her dinner, then her shut-eye.’

  ‘Today she has no appetite for food. That is why I am to dance for her.’

  A laugh was a laugh, but Sister Manhood was losing patience. ‘Mrs Hunter doesn’t always know best—not about everything.’

  The housekeeper took off her top hat; she stood to attention as it were, balancing the scurfy cylinder on a level with her right breast. Less disciplined because expected to remain unseen, her hair also looked skimpier, from having been screwed up and stuffed inside the ancient hat; one dusty lock stuck out straight and stiff at an angle from an unexpectedly pretty little ear.

  ‘I’m the one who will decide.’ The nurse spoke as though she actually believed in her own infallibility, and marched down the passage.

  Lotte Lippmann tagged along behind. If her pumps had not forced her to walk flatfooted, time and arthritis would have clinched the matter. In her worst moral doldrums, she thumped; and this afternoon the polka bow, flopping between throat and bosom, took on a more wilted look, grubbier for the flesh tints a performer’s sweaty painted neck leaves on oyster sateen.

  ‘Wait in the dressing-room, please,’ Sister Manhood ordered; but was tickled into relenting a little. ‘I’d say, darl, you’ve been to town on yourself!’ She could not bottle up the laughter frothing inside her authority: she let it rip; and went so far as to give Lottie a quick cuddle while disguising it as condescension.

  ‘Bin zerschplittert!’

  ‘Eh?’ As there was no means of deciding whether these harsh noises were tragic or merely funny-foreign, Flora Manhood went on laughing.

  The lips out of which Lotte Lippmann had uttered her fierce cry were formally drawn in twin peaks almost as far as the nostrils, with a heavy crimson loop swooning in the direction of the chin. Where lips and cheeks had not burnt through, the skin was whiter than powder could make it: she had more than likely floured herself.

  It was a good giggle. Till the nurse took fright.

  Something in Lotte Lippmann’s eyes pierced an unhappiness at Flora Manhood’s core so that it squirmed. This baby, if she did have it inside her, was already a disaster; and how would she ever atone for all the child must suffer after she had given birth to it?

  She said in her hardest voice, ‘You’ve only yourself to blame, Lottie, for letting her push you around. Making a fool of you.’

  ‘She is making no fool. This is what I am.’

  ‘Those feet alone! How you’ll ever dance!’

  Swollen flesh and contorted bones had deformed the scarred, once sprightly, skintight pumps.

  ‘Sit, anyway,’ Sister Manhood advised more gently, ‘while I give the old cow hell for turning down her lovely din din.’

  Lotte Lippmann did as told. Resigned to waiting, she sat herself on the dressing-table stool in company with the looking-glass.

  As the nurse went into her patient’s room a voice was coming from under the bed, ‘… Dad threw another of ’em Thursday just after sundown a new moon too I forgot to wish what with Dad flounderin’ around Mavis and Donald pretendin’ they pretend upstairs since Donald’s finger got bit instead of the cork it turned septic I told Mavis it was time to squeeze it she rousted on me ‘er mother and Donald looked as if it was me not a sick man bit ’is bloody finger for ’im …’

  If Mrs Hunter had not been strung for listening, she might have looked dead. Sister Manhood, after her first shock, realized the old thing was living someone else’s life.

  ‘Yairs.’ Mrs Cush crawled sighing from under the bed soaked with perspiration and O’Cedar. Her seams were grey where they weren’t pricked out in black. She was a formerly spry, smallish woman; the smaller women surrendered themselves more willingly, it seemed, to enslavement by Betty Hunter.

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ and Sister Manhood no longer did; ‘it was your morning, Mrs Cush, was
n’t it? not your afternoon.’

  ‘She asked me to extend.’

  ‘Weren’t my children here this morning?’

  ‘Couldn’t get on with me work—not with all the yakker that was goin’ on m ’ere.’ Mrs Cush leered, and sucked her teeth back into place.

  ‘I asked her to stay,’ Mrs Hunter confirmed, ‘and tell me something to divert me.’

  ‘And that is what I was just tellun.’ Mrs Cush frowned at the snooty sister.

  ‘Where is my cook?’ Mrs Hunter asked. ‘I was expecting her to dance for me.’

  Her patient’s whims, as well as the slaves who ministered to them, were getting Sister Manhood down; she made an effort, however. ‘What about your luncheon, Mrs Hunter? I believe you refused your luncheon. You might try to take a mouthful, and everybody will be pleased.’

  ‘Oh, but I did. Or didn’t I? Yes, I did! They rammed it down my throat by handfuls. Chased me round the nursery while Nurse was out. There’s nothing like older children when they have you at their mercy and want to get their own back. That’s something Lilian Nutley escaped. She galloped away, and was murdered at the foot of those orange cliffs—down the street. They found her bones amongst the oyster shells. So they say. Personally I don’t think she was murdered: she died of all she remembered.’

  Mrs Cush was so distressed she flipped with her duster and sent a little silver tray spinning off the dressing-table. It clattered through Sister Manhood’s nerves like wind bashing into a curtain of metal beads.

  ‘If that’s how you feel,’ said the nurse, ‘it’s better for you to take a nap.’

  ‘Oh, I have! Haven’t I been sleeping all my life? That’s why I asked Mrs Cush to tell me something real.’

  ‘I’ll give you something to help.’ It was not like Sister Manhood to make offers.

  ‘I may take you up on that, Mrs Pardoe. But not now. I want Sister Lippmann to dance for me.’