The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  Of course the whole situation was thoroughly perverse, whatever Basil had persuaded himself he might get out of it. You would have to extricate him, not crudely, but in a few days time, after gently paving the way towards escape. From the squalor of this ugly, crumbling house, with which neither had any rational connection. Certainly not with the people at present living in it. Not even Anne Macrory your friend: that was what Anne seemed aspiring to be. That was why you ran to scour pans, feed her regurgitating baby, help raise the mother from the level to which she had been only half-willingly reduced.

  By the brute Rory.

  Madame de Lascabanes made the extra effort to concentrate on her book. She did not want Count Mosca to see her talking to Fabrizio. Unfortunate that the English language should transform a great work of French literature into a mock-Italian novelette. Still, it was in this version that Father had found consolation; so Mother implied.

  Dorothy rested her cheek against the padded scroll of the daybed on which she was lying. She closed her eyes and willed the spirit of Alfred Hunter, his charity, his innocence, his essential goodness, to possess her. Without the innocence, would he have been so effortlessly good? like Arnold Wyburd, that other virtuous man; and neither of them memorable. Dorothy Hunter opened her eyes: better perhaps insignificant and good, than insignificant and bad.

  No, you were not bad, only dishonest in socially acceptable ways, and then only slightly, out of necessity; it was a dishonesty inherited from Mother.

  When it was Alfred’s charity Dorothy Hunter was determined to woo, she was most haunted by Elizabeth’s greedy sensuality, and in Alfred’s own room, where he had enjoyed chaste and manly discourse with his friend Arnold: of clocks, moreover. Dorothy glanced. There was no clock. She could not have been more helplessly exposed to Elizabeth Hunter’s influence. There was no doubt Mother, whatever she said, had desired other men: Edvard Pehl for one; more successfully, for certain, the owner of that cufflink lying under the bed. On the whole, though, Mother’s adulteries had probably been mental ones: to possess rather than to be possessed.

  Why did Mother fill the room tonight? Had she perhaps died? Oh God, never! She was too cunning, cruel, to release you from your hatefulness by dying.

  While listening for the telephone, that urgent ringing through a silent, country house, which suggests that the instrument is about to tear itself from the wall, Dorothy heard steps. She did not doubt it was Macrory: the sound was too heavy, too boorish, to announce anybody else. It was what she had been dreading. Would she be forced by terror to submit to her friend’s husband? Or by curiosity? she had time to wonder.

  Then Macrory was knocking; after which, he barged in.

  Scorn for a man who knocked on doors was followed by a feeling of outrage that he had not waited for her invitation. She must have looked idiotic besides, stretched out rigid on the daybed, stiffly raising her head to stare at the intruder.

  Macrory giggled, his eyes too brilliant, his lips moister, fuller than she could remember.

  ‘Took you by surprise, did I?’

  ‘Why should I be surprised?’ Madame de Lascabanes mumbled back.

  He did not answer, but crumped down in Alfred Hunter’s leather chair.

  Basil would save her if she needed saving. Though she did not want Sir Basil Hunter to see her so much as talking to Rory. (She was contemptuous of herself for letting the name enter her head.)

  ‘Isn’t it late?’ she suggested; and was vain enough to add, ‘Won’t your wife be wondering where you are?’

  ‘I often prowl around the house at night, knock back a drink or two, and think things over, after she’s gone to bed.’

  She could see he had knocked back the drink or two. His less evident thoughts he would not, or more likely, could not share. In their absence she visualized them as trussed and writhing, a bundle of instinctive snakes, or no, hairy caterpillars. Her cynicism made her draw down the corners of her mouth, lower her eyelids, not so far that she could not contemplate one of her own limply dangled wrists: with or without jewellery wrists had been among her assets.

  Like many plain women, she was vain. But wasn’t Macrory vain of his thoughts? Would he have dangled them otherwise? He might even have been wanting to suggest that his mind could outshine his effortless, but otherwise repulsive, body. Rory Macrory was a man who had not been designed for clothes: they emphasized all they were meant to conceal. Madame de Lascabanes made herself concentrate harder than ever on her own wrist.

  ‘You people have it all over us,’ Rory suddenly blurted, and his pants shot higher up his calves.

  ‘Which people?’ the princess bitterly asked. ‘And how do you mean “have it over you”?’

  ‘Anne “Kirkcaldy” Robertson—Sir Basil Hunter—and you.’ He would continue to punish her, she suspected, by refusing to address her by name, let alone title. ‘You’re all of you cold perfect, arrogant people.’

  Poor stained Anne!

  ‘You love your wife, surely, to have made all those children with her?’

  There was no logic in it, and Rory did not reply.

  ‘Whatever my own shortcomings,’ Dorothy hurried on in case he should absolve her, though he showed no signs of preparing to, ‘my brother is a most distinguished man—and great actor.’

  Macrory said, ‘I’ve never been inside of a bloody theatre.’

  It did not matter that she had never seen Basil act; no one, not even Mother, should accuse her of disloyalty, or of being stingy with affection; affection is a pure pleasure, and costs nothing, unlike the tortuous proposition, love.

  But Macrory had other thoughts. ‘That book you’re reading—I had a go at it once.’ He was picking at the scab on his knuckle.

  ‘Well?’ Her faith in truth, as opposed to the orthodoxies, made her stiffen.

  ‘Seemed to me a fuss about nothing.’ Then, ‘I couldn’t understand it.’

  This was where the Princesse de Lascabanes, surprised by a comparative humility, surrendered to him. ‘It is a “fuss”, admittedly;’ she realized she was perspiring at the roots of her hair, ‘but it is about something—whether we find out or not.’ The conviction she could not convey was distended painfully inside her; the broken springs of the daybed were driven into her straining back. (At least you can always close your eyes, but whether you like it or not, you have got to listen to a man’s breathing.)

  Rory was as unmoved as the chair in which he was sitting. ‘I only ever believed,’ he said, ‘in what I can see and touch. I expect that’s why we get children. Did you have any kids, Dorothy?’

  ‘I’m childless.’ His use of her name made the admission sound more wretched.

  ‘And Basil?’

  ‘Also. No, he has, I believe, one child.’ ‘Imogen’ had never been convincing; less, in the present circumstances.

  While Macrory was stung by his own dilemma. ‘You people can get away with it. You don’t need kids. You have the time—the nerve—to con yourselves—and others—with words and ideas.’

  There was no reason why his rejection should hurt: all her life she had lived with her own emptiness. Macrory: his arms alone filled her with revulsion.

  ‘Time to spend a morning mooning round a dam! D’you know what? He was shouting something at the top of his voice. I couldn’t see him, but heard it from a distance. It sounded like bloody poetry. Why d’you suppose he was spouting poetry at nobody?’

  ‘How should I know?’ She was floating on her own breathlessness. ‘He was showing off, perhaps, to himself—listening to the sound of his voice.’ She had not intended to make Basil look foolish; it was this clod Macrory who had brought her to it.

  Macrory laughed, like a boy. ‘I admire old Basil.’

  Dorothy’s lips were at their thinnest, she could tell. ‘I thought you thoroughly despised us both.’

  ‘Shouting at the flamun air! He can get away with it.’

  ‘He ought to. Isn’t it his profession?’

  ‘And shoes! Those Pom sho
es! He’s sharp—Basil!’

  Dorothy said it was time she went to bed. Her arms were thin. She felt as though she had been trampled on, actually, physically, and for no good reason.

  Macrory, who was kicking the fire together, called after her without turning, ‘Sleep good, Dorothy!’ If an inarticulate, practically retarded mind, his body was highly articulated; every muscle in his back worked.

  Elizabeth Hunter was having the last laugh, in this dark, seemingly deserted house. The sound of her dress filled the draughty staircase. On the way up, on a half-landing, Dorothy leaned her head against a cedar post. She would have liked to cry on a shoulder if Mother had been more than a presence. At least Basil had not seen her talking to that boor; he had not heard her betrayal, nor witnessed an adultery of which Macrory himself remained unaware.

  Some way back from the house, across a yard, the meticulously planned stables now fulfilled only a memorial function. A clock face pale amongst the ivy had long ago ceased to express time. But dogs liked to frequent the yard for snoozing and shitting; and hens to stalk, and peck between the pavings; and through an archway with which the clock-tower was pierced stood a slightly less neglected, because more utilitarian, shed. Built of iron and slab, with a reinforcement of solidified cobweb, the whole ramshackle barrack had taken on the colour of dust except where the weather had left on the iron a look of dried blood.

  Basil Hunter had paid several visits to the shed, and was on his way again this morning in the leisurely fashion he found himself adopting for ‘Kudjeri’, where his responsibilities remained spiritual rather than technical.

  On reaching the closed door he paused to pick a splinter or two from the slab wall, then to expend his splinters by plunging them one after another into the dust-cemented cobweb funnels. It achieved nothing, but he found the pastime as absorbing and consoling as any of the many rituals of childhood.

  When he had finished he glanced round to see whether anyone had noticed: he could have deceived an adult by turning it into a joke, but a child would have recognized the dead seriousness of such behaviour. There was nobody looking, fortunately.

  The great door creaked and staggered wide open once the wooden arm which held it had been withdrawn from the iron hasp. Instead of the door a curtain of spangled light hung protecting the secrets of the cavern beyond. He pushed through, needlessly stooping, for the swallows’ nests encrusting the lintel were several feet above his head. As on previous occasions, his heart was beating noisily for the pleasures of renewed acquaintance.

  Stashed away in the shadows of the barn, all these implements and machines were by now more believable as sculpture, though here and there, traces of a practical function clung still to esoteric forms: soil to a ploughshare; grains of unsown maize in a row of wooden box-compartments; a faint pungency of fertilizer lingering where he had lifted a lid. From touching the scant remains of superphosphate his ephemeral fingertips became as shrivelled as the ageless grains of corn.

  He was lured farther: to bounce on a harvester’s rusted though resilient seat, while walls of green fell before his progress down the river flat. He could feel the hand at his shoulderblades: to prevent young Basil falling off. Hating at the time this indignity of protective hands, you would have had them back long after shrugging them off for ever: strong but submissive, insensitive, while abrasively solicitous.

  Mucking around always deeper in the shadow, Basil knew he was deliberately saving one corner till the last. Where most of the utilitarian machines had returned to being the bores they always were, nothing would dull his delight in what that far corner contained. He was trembling to such an extent he was glad to bend down and pick up a boot he could not remember noticing on other visits. A bloom of fungus on leather cast in iron wrinkles discouraged any normal foot from prising its way into the boot. Suddenly Basil was determined to wear it, and got it on. He was able to hobble around too, heel raised higher than the inturned toe. And was not handicapped more than he already knew: he could have been wearing this same unnatural boot on his walk to Dover.

  So he stumbled at last on the corner in which Alfred Hunter’s 3-litre Bentley stood waiting for him on flat tyres. The most reactionary of all these pieces of sculptured memory assembled in the shed, Alfred’s car stole the show. With its straight-set hood and goggling lamps, its nickel corseting, and once cobby, now deflated tyres, it suggested some mild, deposed monarch. Or Alfred Hunter late of ‘Kudjeri’.

  Basil hobbled in the iron boot to fetch the nail from where he kept it, to continue digging grasshopper-corpses out of the radiator in which they had been incinerated. He picked, picked, the dribble soon running out of his mouth, then the grunts, or half-sobs, for murders and tortures perpetrated on earth, for others not yet conceived; only if you were lucky enough, a decent harmless death.

  What you doing Basil boy?

  Nothing Dd-dadd. After defeating that slight stammer, your voice had developed what seemed like unlimited power; but the limp came to replace the stutter.

  Basil stopped picking at the corpses, to leave something for next time. He climbed inside the car. Airlessness, and the scents of luxury embalmed, made him gasp. But his touch received from the gears a vague promise of motion, and wiping the dust off upholstery and the more frivolous fitments, restored something of a former life, both elegant and sybaritic. He got half an erection running his hand over his surroundings. He lifted a walnut-veneer lid: did he imagine the smell of grazed flint still hovered around the lighter? No mistaking the trail of perfume from the little flask in fluted glass. She so deplored vulgar overscented females driving in motorcars scenting themselves some more en route. Had she ever used it? like what she called a public woman. People do what they most deplore. Just a dash darling for fun.

  They were driving along that same old endless road into Gogong. They overflowed on him from either side so that he hardly existed; in any case only their little boy. Isn’t it a lovely light Alfred the hills look soft. Because he was a man Daddy said it was the Good Season making everything soft-looking. He spoke in the voice he used for Mother when they were alone: sort of croaking, which also stroked. Mother sat not looking at the hills. After a bit she laughed. Certain words I can’t bring myself to use for doctors—at any rate not Dr Treweek the word B-R-E-A-S-T for instance. Father laughed his smoky laugh. Why not Betty it seems to me natural enough. The smoky laughter like a bridge between them over your head. Oh yes natural I’ll admit. She put out her hand towards him, but stopped on seeing you were sitting between. For driving he wore doeskin gloves, turned back at the wrists into cuffs. The gloves made his wrists look naked, except where his watchstrap was eating into one of them. Dad was hairless at the wrists. Mother suddenly remembered look Basil darling the lambs aren’t they sweet the newborn lambs for their little boy. Do you think he understands? Father was a careful driver; he slowed down always over culverts. Don’t see how he possibly could—not when you spell it. They laughed some more. For each other.

  They drove on, and the wind started coming from another direction. She lost control of her gossamer. It flicked your eyeball.

  It was still not crying, running. Sir Basil Hunter was forced to take out Enid’s Christmas handkerchief, to mop the trickling.

  ‘Basil?’

  The voice was too real, more forbidding than the figure, its substance diffused into a dark blur by the curtain of light hanging in the doorway. Foolish of him to forget to close the door. At least she could not have noticed him jump: all those rusted machines cluttering the space between them were serving a purpose.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked like everybody else.

  ‘Nothing.’ Now he was angry. ‘Playing with this bomb. Don’t you remember Dad’s car?’

  ‘Do I? I suppose I do.’

  He had found that girls remember less. Though the glare behind her did not allow him to see her face, he knew Dorothy was wearing the expression to match her voice: that of an older, responsible girl, the thinner for her earnes
t disapproval.

  As she chose her way between the obstructive machinery, narrowing her shoulders narrower still, flattening her chest if possibly flatter with one long glimmering hand, he started scrambling out of the car. However deeply Dorothy and he were committed to each other as partners in a crime, she must not catch sight of the train of images and emotions which had barely stopped flashing past.

  Just before she reached him, he managed to slam the car door shut, and stand with his back to the nickel bonnet.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you,’ she said. ‘And this ought to give us more privacy than most places.’ She looked around them, slightly shivering.

  He knew he would not want to hear whatever it was she planned to discuss.

  Dorothy had indeed planned, after observing Basil make for the shed on other occasions. Unnoticed by any Macrory children, she had kept watch this morning from behind the screen of the scullery window. Though a smell of milk on the turn had roused her fastidiousness, she decided to stick it out.

  And now was reunited with her brother, who resented it; she could sense that. To butt in on his private games had usually made Basil hurtful.

  For that reason, as she spoke, she was carefully tracing a seam in his coat with one of her long fingernails. ‘I want to talk about this situation we’ve got ourselves into and have to get ourselves out of. I mean to say, we can’t go on sponging indefinitely on strangers.’ As she traced, or rather, dug out the intricate seam, she smiled for her own thoughtfulness.

  Outside the theatre, Basil had been inclined to favour postponement; so he blew a raspberry. ‘You can’t call it sponging, can you? They’d be the first to notice. You can be sure Macrory would have let us know.’