The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

Like dark, grounded birds, the casuarinas shied and flapped as the onrushing steel shore into their dusty feathers; along a rise, skeleton trees upheld the tradition of martyrdom; at each neck-breaking jolt, the sky showered sparks of light; and a decapitated thistle-head grazed Sir Basil’s cheek as they curved around the shoulder of a hill.

  Leaping off the eroded ridge, the jeep bore down on a brown dam framed by a stand of withered tussock.

  ‘There!’ Basil pointed and shouted. ‘That’s where you can drop me.’

  Shocked by the unorthodox demand, Macrory shouted back, ‘Why?’

  Sir Basil Hunter explained, ‘Used to come here after yabbies. I’d like to poke around a bit.’ What he did not dare confess was that he wanted to feel the mud between his toes.

  Even so, Macrory’s surprise turned to surliness: he could hardly reconcile himself to what amounted to a perversion. ‘Dam’s near as anything dry. Couldn’t drown in it, anyway. I’ll pick you up on the way back—if you’re still here.’

  Basil said he would be.

  Macrory pelted off, but returned in a swirl to deliver a warning. ‘May be gone an hour or so.’

  Basil assured his host he could use every minute of that time at the dam.

  Again Macrory drove off, tensed and disgruntled: perhaps he had been hoping to ferret a secret out of his guest, or to make some more of company he despised.

  At the far end of the dam stood a single tree, of tremendous girth beside the comparative sapling rooted in Basil Hunter’s memory. Mentally he could still put his arms round the tree, instinctively shinning up its shagginess, grasping it with bare knees, while a stench from the ants he crushed and the motions of his chafing limbs drowned the scent of gorse and the twittering of tits as they hovered above the fists of blossom with which the spiky bushes bristled. Overhead, the cries of a desperate magpie were sawing away, and once or twice a beak struck at the marauding skull almost close enough to bump the nest. Tits’ eggs were peanuts to maggies’. He hoped he would find a nestful of reds: what he hadn’t got was a maggie red.

  Perhaps never would. The moment of falling his heart descended bounding ahead his vision a whirligig of fear. Then his lungs must have collapsed: they were spread on the ground as flat as perished balloons. That he was still alive he knew from the pain in his arm, the bone of which should have been protruding through the skin. But the arm looked normal: no sign of the sick throbbing going on inside the flesh. Though alive now, he would probably die of his arm.

  The roan mare was coming at a canter. For God’s sake boy what have you done? Father was shorter, more breathless than usual, the seat of his breeches too tight as he arrived on the ground out of the saddle. What is it Basil? His pores were open. I think I broke my arm. Those red, staring pores. The deuce you did—we don’t know—got to find out. A man’s a father’s hands shouldn’t tremble it was frightening: if you cry you may make him worse. Have it put right. Get you up in front of me. Shove the good arm round my neck. Too close his breath on you like the trembling and that scalding sweat your own as cold. Now lie back son lean against me I’ll support you. Awful bumpy hard half on the mare’s withers the pommel of the saddle and half lying on Dad’s stomach the bone shrieking under your skin deliciously delirious his fire dripping into your cold sea of sweat. Won’t be long Basil boy. It was Dad trying to love. It made you want to cry, to reach up with your crook arm. So you laughed.

  Sir Basil Hunter limped towards the tree he had fallen out of. He would lie down under it a while: even his omissions are a luxury to the expatriate of a certain age and reputation. The ground was suitably unyielding. The scents returned: of ants competing with gorse blossom.

  And Alfred Hunter offering downright love disguised as tentative, sweaty affection. When Mother was the one you were supposed to love: you are my darling my love don’t you love your mummy Basil? Bribing with kisses, peppermint creams, and more substantially, half crowns. I don’t believe you love me at all perhaps you are your father’s monopoly or is it yourself you love? So the game of ping pong was played between Moreton Drive and ‘Kudjeri’, between Elizabeth and Alfred Hunter (Dad at a handicap).

  You all played. Dorothy was playing it still.

  Sir Basil Hunter opened his eyes. The other side of the branches of the great tree the empty sky was staring at him. Suddenly he would have liked to feel certain that he had actually loved somebody, that he had not been only acting it.

  He sat up, looked over his shoulder, then began taking off his shoes: whether it was self-indulgence or not he would have to feel the mud between his toes.

  Around him the silence was watching, which made him stealthier in his movements. No, it was his soft white feet: still elegant, he had liked to think, long and narrow, formed by generations walking in the furrow behind the plough and sticking their toes into stirrup irons. But become useless, except to stride imagined miles around a stage; incapable of trudging the actual miles to Dover. Perhaps this was why he had failed as Lear.

  Along the edge of the dam the hoof-prints of sheep had set in a fussy clay sculpture. Painful, too: he was regretting the sentimentality which had driven him to paddle back towards little-boyhood. At least he was unable to see his face, but his feet looked foolish mincing over the fanged clay. Till the soft, softer than soft, the effortless squelch: flesh is never so kind, nor as voluptuous, as mud: certain phrases, lines, can become its equal when delivered by a practised tongue into darkness on a propitious night.

  ‘In such a night,’ he aimed at the Australian daylight, while throughout the ritual dark he had conjured up in his mind, the pale discs were raised to receive the seed he was raining on them;

  ‘in such a night,

  Stood Dido with a willow in her hand

  Upon the wild sea-banks, and wav’d her love

  To come again to Carthage …’

  Legs apart, pants hitched their highest and tightest, he listened for his own voice (his worst vice) and some of it returned out of that extrovert blue. He listened again: as the circles widened around him on the muddy water, magpies’ wings were clattering skywards; but the silence burning into his skin was the applause he valued. That his art should have come to terms with his surroundings gratified Sir Basil Hunter.

  But what if the disapproving Macrory should reappear sooner than he had reckoned? Sir Basil began frowning; he started swirling around, shouldering off his not reprehensible, but in the circumstances, embarrassing gift. He stumbled into a pothole: could have come a gutser. Walking not so steady now on his Shakespeare legs. When beneath the soles of his feet a tickling, a prickling of life, restored his balance. Putrefying meat was the best bait for yabbies, he remembered. He could remember the jar: to be kept beyond smelling distance; that Easter Sunday he fetched up his breakfast tying the string round a lump of green, stinking mutton. Catching yabbies might not have given him so much pleasure if it had not displeased HER: I shan’t darling you smell so don’t claw at me Basil smelly boys aren’t kissable.

  The light now streaming over the eroded ridge was her same glistening white, still blinding him. And another crueller, more relevant trick the light was playing, as its meaner refractions flickered on the face of the dam: this old freckled claw was twitching, clenching and unclenching, or beckoning through the brown water, perhaps appealing to him. Poor Mum’s acold. Oh yes, he pitied her, but had to think of himself (no need to include Dorothy, a thriving hive of self-pity). And remember Mother’s practical ethics: one can drown in compassion if one answers every call it’s another way of suicide. All the best aphorisms have a habit of doing you dirt sooner or later, and the illusory claw reflected in the water conveyed something of the same distress of the actual hand lying on the hemstitched sheet.

  This was where the Thing, no yabby playfully tickling memory, rose up out of the mud under Sir Basil’s right sole. Because his innocent morning’s pastime had made him spiritually vulnerable, the submerged object wounded him more deeply than rusty spike, broken bottle, or jagged t
in. In his state of aggrieved anguish, his arms began swimming against the air as he made for land, jaws clenched, gristle straining in his throat. He was not yet able to hobble, except mentally, because his legs were still swathed in sheets of brown filthy ooze, in promises of septicæmia, anthrax—perhaps death, simple and unassuming; none of the Jacobean trappings when YOU are the one concerned.

  At least he reached the bank: the clay impressions of hooves, or teeth, bit into his flesh regardless of existing wounds as he hopped towards the not much more charitable grass, trickling lustrous scarlet behind him. He was bleeding all right.

  What to do? Wash in stagnant water? Tie up infected flesh in a far from aseptic handkerchief? Sitting in the coarse grass Basil for a moment got his foot almost as far as his mouth, to give the wound a good suck, but realized he was not the contortionist to bring it off.

  Nor a boy. Unless an elderly one. Abandoned by everybody. Stranded in his own egotism and ineptitude. Though he listened for it, the reliable roan was not coming at a canter.

  When he had pulled himself together (it was nothing more than a cut, an ordinary cut) he went so far as tying the dirty handkerchief round his wounded foot; he made quite a neat parcel of it. And at least there had been nobody to see, or hear; hearing might have been the more humiliating: the way his thoughts at one stage were pumped to the surface.

  About noon he heard the barking. A mob of sheep was advancing in his direction: though fairly compact, its individual members were bobbing like scuffled cocoons, at first in silence, then as a rustling, then a dry panting. They halted on seeing the figure at the dam. The leaders stamped. Here and there a cough muffled by flannel. The faded kelpie ran back and forth, rejoicing in any emergency which gave him the opportunity to work; while Macrory’s jeep, by nudging the straggling rear with its bonnet, tightened the invisible string which kept his string-coloured flock intact.

  The figure with bandaged foot seated on a clay hummock between the dam and these dedicated workers, was irrelevant to their whole delicate operation.

  At last Macrory allowed himself to notice. ‘How are we?’ he deigned to shout.

  Sir Basil Hunter, aware of his own superfluousness, could have been sulking: he did not answer. Carrying one shoe, he began hobbling towards the jeep, which did not intend to stop for him.

  ‘Wotcherdoneteryerself?’ Monotony had bleached Macrory’s voice; dust had clogged it.

  Sir Basil mumbled. ‘Cut my foot.’

  ‘Waddayerknow! Can’t be much of a shoe yer’ve got. Pom made?’

  I’d taken them off. It happened in the dam.’

  ‘Good Christ! What were you up to? Paddling?’

  ‘Exactly. Paddling in the dam.’

  As they continued the uninterrupted droving of their flock, Sir Basil found himself hating the jeep as an extension of its owner. Like the metal excrescence on which the injured actor was allowed to perch, Macrory’s body looked inviolable. Basil’s foot began throbbing, out of time with the loutish jeep. On and off, the grazier glanced down: where the thought of paddling had disgusted, even shocked him, the bandaged foot was no more than a harmlessly passive object from the way he squinted at it through his black, gummed-up lashes.

  Suddenly he said, ‘It’ll be all right,’ surprising himself, it appeared, more than anybody else.

  Basil recognized the tone of voice in which the man addressed his children: for the moment you were accepted as Macrory’s additional, if idiot, child.

  But the fellow regretted his mistake: he tried to disguise it by shouting curses at the dog, who seemed to be laughing back at his master, in little whinges, from behind a splather of tongue.

  Basil gloomed and throbbed. A gout of moody crimson was gathering on the crude bandage. Obviously he could not expect sympathy at ‘Kudjeri’, either from this boor, or the two shrews of women; the ghost of his father was insubstantial; and his mother’s image would refuse, understandably, to respond to invocation.

  Anne Macrory disguised her concern. ‘Oh, Lord—we’ll soon see to that.’ She spoke too loudly, with a show of determination which suggested the incident might be her final test.

  She began fetching and dropping things. ‘Dorothy’s down at the river with some of the children. She’ll be back soon,’ she added hopefully, looking out through the ruptured screen, though the kitchen faced in the wrong direction.

  Basil’s hopes of his sister were less optimistic than Mrs Macrory’s.

  A year-old baby in a high chair started crying. The mother, who had been feeding her and bottling pears at the same time, returned to battering with a spoon on a plastic dish, from which a mess of predigested pap showered the immediate kitchen.

  ‘Eat, love! Look, Mummy’s eating. We’re eating it together, aren’t we? It’s going to be so good for us.’ The social worker had adopted what she understood as a dual purpose voice: sweet and stern at the same time.

  In her distraction, she pushed the spoonful of pap into the blank of the child’s cheek; the baby roared.

  Sir Basil sat watching a fly drown in a half-filled bottle of brown pears.

  ‘Where’s Rory?’ his wife asked as though she needed to know; but flipped on. ‘Dorothy is so dependable.’ She sighed.

  Through what metamorphosis, Sir Basil wondered, had his sister possessed herself of this distraught woman’s respect? He would have to learn the trick.

  Presently Dorothy came. The two Macrory girls in tow were still loving up to her. Her dress and one elbow were stained green by grass. Her eyes were overflowing with languor, and what Basil recognized as river light: greenish to golden-brown.

  Fat Mog was pointing. ‘Ooh, look! Basil’s cut his foot!’

  The older girl, who had grasped something of protocol from associating generally with a princess, and from looking through the drawers and cupboard where their visitor kept her belongings, blushed to the height of her fleshless cheekbones.

  Dorothy was still too dazed by light to assess the situation. She looked beautiful, he thought; almost not his sister.

  Then the truth struck her. ‘Oh, darling, what have you done to yourself? Ohhhh!’

  While the Macrory women were flapping their wings ineptly, Dorothy Hunter swam across the kitchen, to arrive, to settle herself at her brother’s feet, and untie the dirty handkerchief. She dipped her head; for a moment he thought she was going to put her lips to the wound: they protruded so noticeably, and were besides so tremulous.

  Basil basked.

  ‘You’re not feverish?’ Dorothy cried. ‘Or are you?’ She began tenderly exploring, while giving icy orders, which Mrs Macrory and her girls were glad to obey.

  Only the baby gravely stared from above the dish of unfinished pap, wondering whether to grind her brows together and scream.

  Whereas most of the Macrorys accepted the princess as the same woman who had arrived at their house the night before, and whom they had got to know, if not intimately, anyway enough to have formed a relationship of trust and affection, Basil could not recognize his sister; and Dorothy, with her competence, more than that, her authority, and the obvious compassion with which she approached his wound, seemed to be avoiding recognition: not once since her bemused entrance had she offered him her eyes.

  After she had bathed the foot, using a tin basin Mrs Macrory had first dropped, and Mog retrieved and filled, she disinfected the cut with a powder Janet fetched from upstairs together with lint and an assortment of grubby bandages.

  When she had bound him, coldness took over again in his nurse. ‘There you are!’ She turned away, and confessed to Anne Macrory alone, ‘I don’t trust our own crude methods. I shall have to ring the doctor.’

  But it was no longer the age when doctors could be summoned at will to ‘Kudjeri’; and that evening a sulky Macrory drove the Hunters to Gogong in the jeep.

  The bronze version of Alfred Hunter had its back towards them as they flew across the railway lines approaching the township through the dusk. Basil nudged Dorothy, but she
was in no mood to encourage family jokes. He must remember that his sister was essentially a solemn bore.

  On the return journey, a long wait at the doctor’s made it easier for him to resist glancing at the sculpture of their father. They tore up into the hills, through an amorphousness of dark, in the smell of antiseptics which accompanied them. The sequence of events and the drugs he had been given made him feel light-headed. Dorothy’s hair had escaped: once or twice it touched his cheek. Macrory cursed the road, the dark. From time to time Basil and Dorothy in the back seat were thrown at each other and stirred together. They recovered themselves. They might have been returning from a country dance, separating the pleasures from the disappointments. Not quite drunk.

  When they walked into the kitchen a hardfaced Mrs Macrory looked at her husband and said, ‘I thought you must have had an accident.’

  Everybody was hungry by then.

  Basil went to bed soon after what they were coming to recognize as the standard meal at ‘Kudjeri’. The inflated importance of the day’s events as they occurred, had begun subsiding: they would soon no doubt assume their actual, flat significance.

  Dorothy escaped into the study with Father’s Charterhouse of Parma which she had only slight intention of reading: holding the book would be her safeguard against anybody’s intrusion on her thoughts. Again a fire was burning, but tonight it had been only recently lit: the room was cold and smelt of ash. After drawing up her legs beside her on the broken springs of the daybed, she lifted the Indian counterpane draped to disguise the cracks and deforming bulges in the leather. By stretching out she was able to peer into the space between the floorboards and sagging springs to confirm that there was nothing to fear. Settled back, she felt tolerably comfortable; if also, yes, deprived.

  After a lifetime of luxurious isolation she had been left alone hardly at any point in this huggermugger day: her neck was sticky from children’s hands; under her nails she could feel grease and grit from the pans she had scoured that morning; her dress and an elbow were still stained with grass juices. Any attempts at washing or grooming herself had been slapdash gestures made out of obedience to habit: unconsciously, she could have been cherishing her patina of grime. Now as she lay turning the pages of a book she was not reading, increasing warmth from the fire intensified the burning in her arms. Normally she would have deplored a sensation which conjured up images of zombie women, their shrivelled, leathery faces, beside the road or driven in lorries. But tonight her own rather dry skin was prickling with life.