The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  Flora’s head was aching by now. ‘It hasn’t been an easy duty,’ she admitted. ‘I think Badgery sees to it that the worst of the morning will take effect only in the afternoon.’

  Sister de Santis had begun the more intricate, personal moves in her disrobing. She was a bloody onion tonight. Not that anybody had to watch. Not if they could uproot themselves.

  ‘They rang the Thorogood Village.’ It sounded muffled from inside a dress. ‘They’re going out tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes, the princess rang them.’

  Flora Manhood took a look at St Mary’s great dollops of breasts as she stooped and hunched to get her slip off.

  ‘It was the princess, was it? Not Sir Basil?’ Sister Manhood needlessly asked.

  Sister de Santis confirmed that it was the Princesse de Lascabanes, not Sir Basil Hunter: which might have been a consolation or, on the other hand, a disappointment each had half expected.

  When Sister Manhood rounded. ‘How do you know they rung, Sister?’

  ‘Matron Aspden phoned me to ask what sort of woman Mrs Alfred Hunter is—whether she would adapt herself to life at the Village. Matron and I were same year at P.A. She’s good. She’s down to earth.’ The flatness of their conversation might have been a comfort to both of them.

  Sister de Santis was setting her veil in the orthodox folds. ‘So tomorrow they will drive out—to interview Matron and Mr Thackray the chaplain—to decide—officially, that is.’

  Sister Manhood stopped tweaking the corner of the document she had stuck, for want of a better place, under the pincushion. ‘I’ll go now,’ she said.

  She did, but shortly returned, to collect for safety’s sake, Mrs Hunter’s written promise.

  Strange in one so professional, Sister de Santis would have liked to postpone appearing in her patient’s room. Later, in the small hours, it might be easier to convert this old woman into an abstraction of age, or justification for your own existence, or see her in both physical and metaphoric terms, as the holy relic to which your faith bowed down in worship; but for the present, as mother of her children, Mrs Hunter remained distressingly human. Mary de Santis turned once or twice in the narrow cupboard-lined room, itself a narrow cupboard, or suddenly transparent repository in which those other relics were piled hugger-mugger: a silken ankle; a shrunken, needle-punctured arm; a woman’s white, bloodied knee; the body of a strangled dog. The least brutal of these images flickered in Mary de Santis the most subtly and persistently. Grace would never abound in one who was frivolous, sensual, irresponsible enough to shiver still in contemplating the relic of Sir Basil Hunter’s silken ankle.

  Fortunately, it was given to her to escape her thoughts in remembering the calomel.

  Sir Basil’s mother was asleep at least in theory. As the nurse approached the bed the old woman’s breathing grew more complicated: it sounded like a crumpling, then a tearing, of tissue paper. The level of the barley water slightly swayed.

  Sister de Santis was moving around.

  ‘What are you doing, Mary?’

  ‘They left your jewel box open.’

  The old woman lay managing her bones, grimacing.

  ‘Did you have a good time?’ Sister de Santis asked. ‘Did Sister dress you up?’

  ‘No. I’ve been giving some presents.’

  ‘I hope they were appreciated.’ Mary de Santis felt duller, heavier for her sententiousness; the darkened room shook as she tiptoed around: a hypocrite’s movements should have been more skilful.

  Mrs Hunter said, ‘I’ve never given you anything. Or nothing of consequence. You seem to me complete, Mary.’

  The nurse mumbled.

  ‘What did you say?’

  Oh, Lord! ‘I said there’s nothing I need.’

  The old woman floated off again.

  The nurse pulled up her usual chair. At first she sat forward, arms round knees, gasping, panting, till noticing in a mirror the white contortions of a throat, dark lips struggling to contain the hole which opened in them. What if she lost control and sounds blared out across the silence?

  She sat back after that, to await the motions of a patient’s bowels. She had her work, which was her faith. Whatever images might distract, seduce, even spiritually strengthen her in the course of this life, her formal faith would remain as plain as a bedpan. Nobody could destroy her.

  Yes, she had her faith her work her work.

  Ten

  BASIL WAS driving very cautiously amongst the concrete mixers, the semi-trailers, the lopsided vegetable trucks, and parti-coloured Holden sedans. The long road out of the city repeated itself in hills and hollows, in rows of red identical villas, and blocks of equally conformist shops. The used-car racketeers added something of daring by mooring their fleets under canopies of garish pennants permanently fidgeted by a wind. Still, the predominant colour of the highway was that of cement dust.

  Basil drove sitting too upright. Neither of them was yet resigned to the circumstances they alone had wanted: they had badgered Arnold Wyburd into organizing their visit to ‘Kudjeri’ against his wish.

  ‘But they’re very ordinary, quiet people;’ the solicitor tried to fob his clients off.

  It clashed with Dorothy’s sense of what was due to her. ‘Are we such hectic monsters that we shall disjoint the lives of ordinary quiet people? And? she turned on the vox humana Australian style, ‘isn’t “Kudjeri” our old home?’

  So it was engineered. It would be one way of killing time while the details of Mother’s future were fully arranged. And yet, having satisfied her wishes, Dorothy narrowed herself as they drove north. Was it in imitation of her brother? Basil was so unnaturally erect he would surely break this side of Gogong. She preferred on the whole to be driven by somebody she did not know; knowing a driver made her nervous. The exception was the man she still referred to as her husband: with Hubert at the wheel, she accepted the wall which would spring up straight ahead of them.

  Now ostensibly driving on a positive mission with her brother, they were in fact allowing the past to suck them back through this choked intestine recorded on maps as the Parramatta Road. Faces to either side of them were watching it happen: streaming, muscular men and their drier, scorched women aimed sideways glances at the couple swaying with assumed discretion in their unconvincingly modest car. Emotionally at least, things were what they used to be, the tall poppies bowing mock apologies to those who held them guilty of the worst.

  At an intersection a truck had spilt half its load in slewing to avoid collision with a milk van: burst open or slackly contorted, the flour bags lying on the grey concrete had a disconcerting dead look. A tall young policeman was noting details of an accident which only lacked blood.

  Dorothy began to snigger.

  ‘What is there to laugh at?’ As a driver Basil was incensed.

  ‘Nothing,’ Dorothy admitted, but the laughter bumped out of her. ‘Actually, I was thinking of that woman—Matron Whatnot at the Thorogood Village—the day we went.’

  ‘A stout lady, and worthy.’ Superior to Dorothy, Basil did not laugh; he smiled.

  ‘Worthy—yes—I grant you! I’m only too thankful!’ Dorothy laughed with greater restraint, till a veil of flour draped across the road, and in her mind’s eye an image of blancoed shoes severed from a pair of ankles, shocked her short; she was relieved when Basil had driven her past.

  Basil, too, was uneasy for something. ‘Seriously though, Dorothy, with plenty of warm-hearted attention—and Matron Aspden is obviously the personification of what they call “warmth”,’ Dorothy could not resist a giggle, ‘there’s no reason why Mother shouldn’t be happy at the Thorogood Village.’

  ‘In her day she was an intelligent woman, and is still, au fond, reasonable.’

  ‘She thrives on flattery of course.’

  ‘Don’t we know! And she’ll get that. Mother is one of those who generate in their slaves the flattery they’re hungry for.’

  Basil drove. The fac
tories were gone; the shops, the houses were thinning out, offering glimpses of a still shamefaced landscape. He tried coughing away a suspicion that trees appear real only when artificially lit. At ‘Kudjeri’ perhaps he would re-discover the real thing—if there was enough of him left to fill so large a stage.

  ‘What I thought most frightening,’ he formed his words with foresight because the road had some treacherous bends in it, ‘was the row of inmates sitting along the veranda as we pulled up—before Matron came out to jolly them. That was an audience I shouldn’t care to play to. You could act your head off, and they wouldn’t let you know how they were responding.’

  ‘They were old. Old people are detached.’

  ‘Made me feel an awful outsider.’

  ‘Mother will be on the in-side.’

  ‘There was one old girl—the one with the bone bracelets and a hank of pink chiffon round her shingle: a kind of musical comedy queen. Mother will hate her. She’ll queer Elizabeth Hunter’s opera.’

  ‘Mother won’t know. She’ll be too wrapped up in her own past. The outer world doesn’t exist beyond her bed.’

  Yet the frieze might encroach, with a rattle of bone bracelets, a creaking of arthritic limbs, a clutching of sticky, remindful fingers, the kiss of chiffon.

  Whatever might happen to Elizabeth Hunter, her children were determined to resist encroachment.

  Basil said, ‘The bed will be a problem. I hope they can fit it into the room.’

  ‘They’ll have to.’

  ‘She’ll give them hell if they don’t.’

  ‘Matron’s a resourceful woman.’

  ‘I can’t see—short of taking a saw.’ It was a scene in which you could laugh; so he did.

  ‘Nothing so brutal.’ Dorothy’s voice rose, harsh and querulous, not to accuse her tasteless brother, but to defend herself. ‘Anyhow,’ the voice subsided, ‘somebody’s got to die first. There isn’t a vacancy. The matron explained that.’

  ‘Somebody’s got to die,’ he agreed.

  He drove, and said, ‘Arnold Wyburd’s the one who’s going to have it in for us for ever after.’

  ‘Men like old Wyburd are so vain about their own integrity in serving a family and keeping its fortune together over the years, they lose sight of the fact that the actual members of the family are human beings with human desires. I think Arnold only realized that when we descended on him out of the air. It gave him a shock.’

  Dorothy looked at her brother: she would have liked him to recognize her humanity. She was feeling more youthful since they had left the suburbs behind.

  But Basil was intent on driving: it absolved him from appreciating his passenger. When Dorothy started acting it filled him with dislike: he recognized at such times the hard, greedy, scene-stealing pro she might have become. He glanced for re-assurance in the driver’s mirror: men on the whole were more generous, both as artists, and as human beings. On the windward side his hair had been ruffled without appreciable damage to his looks. (Might give Richard Two another go.)

  In the mountains the weatherboard and fibro townships were minding their own business. Chummier shops displaying pragmatic goods had nothing to hide. But doubts set in among the stragglers, towards the fringes, where houses built for permanence had reached the lurching stage, above the rich humus spread by their shrubberies to soften the logical collapse. The shrubberies themselves, planted by their owners as a sober duty, were touched with a cold apocalyptic fire. Here and there at the foot of a tree, old, broken, black umbrellas arranged singly or in clumps, were seen to stir at times, then to move, slowly, sideways, asymmetrically. Some of the old umbrella-forms were trundling through an undergrowth of rhododendrons and azaleas assisted by what appeared to be part of their own aluminium frames, which had become conveniently unstuck, and could be used as crutches.

  Basil was stopping the car in front of a shop. On a blind wall a square of faded bluebag blue was advertising some illegible commodity. Without explaining why, Basil was getting out. Nor did Dorothy ask for explanations: she was frantically searching for some face or object with which to identify herself. As Basil was closing the car door, a boy in jeans followed by a high-stepping spotted dog, came jaunting past. Dorothy tried smiling at the boy, but her smile must have looked directionless, or old; anyway the boy was plainly ignoring foreigners. When Basil had gone inside the shop, Dorothy was left with gooseflesh up her arms. The silence around her might have been solid if it had not been for the sound of the boy’s departing thongs and the notes of a currawong floating on the mountain air. Something was eluding her; it will be different, she said, when we reach ‘Kudjeri’.

  Basil returned with the two pies. He was wearing the expression of a man who has laid hands on a symbol of his boyhood: it made him look somewhat ponderous.

  ‘Oh, Basil—you’re not going to eat them!’ She spoke with the languor of an older girl.

  ‘What else?’ The light through a sycamore illuminated his sheepish words.

  He handed her the second pie. ‘Oh, really!’ She couldn’t refuse it, and at the same time it was too hot, too greasy: she didn’t know what to do with the thing.

  Basil was already stuffing his mouth. She doubted whether his boyhood could be recaptured so easily. As a trickle of pale gravy meandered down towards the cleft in his chin, she was reminded, rather, of a boyish, slightly sweaty commercial traveller in a train. Only the dustcoat was missing.

  Dorothy sighed. ‘Oh, dear!’ She bit into her horrid pie.

  Flooded with the flavour of hot soggy cardboard and floury gravy, her unwillingness and contempt turned to loathing; worse on discovering something loathsome in herself: she was filled with a guilty voluptuousness as though biting into her own flesh.

  ‘By God, it’s good? Basil sprayed the windscreen with several fragments of gristle.

  ‘Naus-e-ating!’ She sucked back anything else that was trying to escape.

  And turned her head to prevent Basil’s noticing. The same boy, returning with his cold insolence and high-stepping, swivel-nosed dog, must have seen. But that did not matter. She could feel the tears hurtling hot down her cheek to join the mess round her mouth. (Her faith would never have allowed her to contemplate suicide, but she came close to committing it each time she betrayed the past.)

  Basil had swallowed his last mouthful. He was wiping fingers on his breast-pocket foulard. One currawong floated longer and closer than the others. It seemed, as always, that the answer might have been found in the country town you were leaving; if you had not already left.

  ‘Admit you enjoyed it, Dotty!’ Basil sounded brisk and ruthless.

  Searching through her normally organized handbag, Dorothy was all cunning. ‘The wretched thing was warm, at least—food of a kind. But only in the wildest moment of sentimental excess could anyone admit to enjoying that pie.’

  ‘I did.’ It was what made him an artist, he decided, as opposed to what kept Dorothy, alas, Dorothy.

  Although driving, he looked at her with what she might have interpreted as compassion. But she did not need it.

  She had found her mirror. There was no getting away from her face, for today she had abstained from make-up, in celebration of nature. Now the cynicism she had been cultivating of late helped her bear up against the drought furrowing her skin. She quirked the corners of her mouth. A touch of sunburn lent her courage while emphasizing the desiccation, except where some grease had overflowed the naked lips. She began rubbing at the ghastliness: that grisly, gristly pie. After restoring her true self, she relaxed her throat. She was looking bright rather than anxious. She glanced at Basil, wondering to what extent he could distinguish between vanity and courage.

  Basil was lowering his eyes, smiling as they plunged down through the glare, which was all that could be seen of the bleached plains. A sombreness lay in the depths of his stomach. He converted a belch into flatulent silence. Soon he would be forced to do a pee. He stopped. And did. Even Dorothy, a lone emu, casually flounced into
deeper scrub.

  When they were reassembled, she asked, ‘Doesn’t it make you feel guilty, darling?’ while surveying a non-existent landscape, smiling a bright, casual smile.

  ‘For what? And why? For God’s sake!’ If Dorothy de fucking Lascabanes wasn’t the archetypal rat.

  ‘For foisting ourselves on these poor Macrorys.’

  ‘Would they have let themselves in for what they didn’t want?’

  Basil and Dorothy Hunter were getting back into the car. The scrub around them was of the poorest. Left-over blue metal at the roadside petered out in stones, then rocks. There was a dry scuffle of heat and lizards.

  Dorothy advised practically, ‘Whether they want us or not, we’d better push on. It’s worse arriving after dark.’

  All women, wives even, are fundamentally big sisters: Dorothy he saw and heard easing her elastic in front of a brother.

  ‘Would they have accepted us,’ he harked back, ‘if they hadn’t wanted us?’ She had got him upset.

  ‘Mr Wyburd suggested they were rundown. Perhaps we could offer them something—as rent, I mean.’

  Basil grumbled, and drove.

  Dorothy, for her part, was ready to dismiss the idea of making too large a hole in Mother’s cheque; though she had bought the little dress she was wearing: nigger for longevity.

  ‘It was only a thought,’ she murmured.

  She pointed her elbows at the windscreen, and the wind blew down the short sleeves into her armpits liberating her from obligations. Basil must have felt included: he snuffle-laughed, and rearranged a thigh.

  Only in competing with distance, the gongs and drums made it difficult to maintain a human balance. He had to remind himself I am Sir Basil Hunter—the actor; while the Princesse de Lascabanes kept looking in her handbag for something she was unable to find.

  What he, what either of them expected of the Macrorys, it might have been indelicate to enquire. Or he might not have known. He was pretty sure Dorothy had no idea, though if asked, she would pretend to one.