The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  ‘Macrory the archmasochist? He’s probably writhing in silence. After all these weeks. How long do you suppose it is?’

  They were not prepared to join in an accurate reckoning.

  ‘We have our lives to live,’ Dorothy looked at Basil for approval; ‘however long it may be before the Thorogood Village can offer a vacancy.’ He recognized in her eyes his own fear of developing the theme too explicitly.

  ‘We might simply go away,’ she said, ‘farther than “Kudjeri”, I mean—out of this country where we don’t belong.’

  ‘Never did.’ As he confirmed her assertion, he saw she had been watching for him to lie.

  Now she was positively disappointed. ‘To you it may mean something—something you aren’t prepared to admit.’ She had raised her voice, to force its scorn past the knots in her throat. ‘I’ve always hated—H A T E D it!’ Though insulated with dust and cobwebs, the shed failed to muffle Dorothy’s voice: it continuted ululating.

  As though he had ratted on her.

  ‘Yes, yes.’ He began moving her towards the door. ‘We’ll talk about it. When we’re calmer;’ hobbling helplessly beside her.

  ‘What is it?’ she hissed. ‘Is your foot troubling you? The wound? Oh, darling, I thought it had healed—perfectly.’

  ‘It’s not the foot.’ They had both stopped, and were looking down through the shadow in which they were standing waist deep. ‘It’s the boot!’ Though they were motionless he contrived an exaggerated stumble.

  ‘Boot?’ She was staring, brows pleated, eyeballs straining, with such distaste, not to say horror, at something so unexpected and still partly obscured by shadow, he might have been showing her his cock.

  She started hurrying towards the door.

  ‘I found it. I put it on.’ Hobbling, stumbling after her, he was trying to exonerate himself. ‘Don’t know what got into me. I had to try it. An impulse, that’s all. Don’t you have impulses, Dot?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think I do.’

  He had reached her side after cannoning off a scarifier.

  ‘And now I’ve got to get rid of the thing.’

  ‘Oh, Basil, aren’t you absurd!’ She sounded shattered.

  He had plumped down on what had been, judging by its scars, a chopping block, and was pulling at the offending boot. ‘All right, I’m the one who’s the fool!’ Panting pulling. ‘Aren’t I? So why worry?’

  What if it wouldn’t come off? There was no sign of its giving; a natural deformity could not have stuck closer.

  ‘Dorothy—you may have to—fetch a—knife!’ The words too, were a struggle.

  ‘A knife? What shall I tell them?’ His sister was to that extent humourless.

  She had got down on her stockinged knees, on the dust and slivers of bark, and had started wrenching at the filthy boot. ‘If we can’t, between us—we’re—not—much,’ her teeth bit the rest of it off; her long fragile nails ran skittering tearing over the surface of the mildewed leather; as the Hunter children fought for their self-justification and freedom from awfulness.

  The Princesse de Lascabanes fell sideways at last, holding the boot which together they had torn from Sir Basil Hunter’s foot.

  ‘How could you?’ she gasped. ‘You’re such a shit, Basil!’ She was crying, or at any rate laughing, as she thumped the dirt with the boot. ‘God only knows what sort of actor you are. Oh, fuck—fuck everybody!’ she moaned in a whimpered whisper: her Australian self was tormenting Dorothy de Lascabanes.

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed.

  He got her to her feet.

  By the time they burst through the curtain of light she had calmed down.

  ‘We shall think of something,’ he promised, and squeezed her elbow.

  Dorothy knew it was she who should think. ‘You didn’t close the door. Hadn’t you better go back and close it? On top of everything else, Macrory might object, Basil, to the door left open.’

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘I’ll go back and shut it.’

  For the moment Dorothy knew better. He also realized he must find his other shoe, or limp across the yard in his sock, perhaps bump into their host, and stand accused.

  So Sir Basil Hunter doubled back inside the shed, and the princess went on alone. It was preferable that way: those watching would be less likely to interpret conspiracy of any kind.

  Anne Macrory remarked, ‘I don’t know, Dorothy, how we managed before you came.’

  Dorothy bit off a thread.

  Anne could not stop herself totting up the virtues. ‘And Basil—he’s such good company. Rory admires him.’

  Dorothy would have re-threaded the needle if her hand had been trembling less. ‘I think all actors are pretty useless, except as actors.’ She had not met another. ‘Basil, I know from experience, feels out of his element with laymen.’ Her voice had suddenly tightened.

  Anne was mystified by something. ‘What is it, dear?’

  ‘I pricked my finger,’ Dorothy lied.

  After the customary women’s lunch they had come upstairs to what was still the sewing-room, and were renovating dresses for the girls. (‘You’re so imaginative, Dorothy, and clever. This year the poor things are going to look presentable.’) In a corner of the room Dorothy Hunter used to hate for what she was submitted to, both blandishment and slaps, Mother’s form had stood through the years, stuck with pins and several needles trailing multicoloured threads. There was the table in which Dorothy and Basil, during an armistice, had burnt their names with a poker. Over optimistically, Basil had pricked out an asymmetrical heart surrounding them.

  The bare room where the women were working was kept just warm enough by a thin winter sunlight and a rather smelly kerosene stove. The horizon was so distinctly drawn, frost must have started gathering in the hollows. The night would be cold.

  ‘Do you actually enjoy sewing?’ Anne asked respectfully.

  ‘Cutting is what I like,’ Dorothy confessed.

  She enjoyed hearing the crunch of the heavy, dressmaking scissors. And was an adept cutter. Though she had only recently been told. She was surprised to realize the number of ways in which she excelled since her friend pointed them out.

  She frowned at the dress she was finishing off, and brought it closer than her sight required. If she could have remained enclosed by this circle of love and trust, she might have accepted herself by living up to their opinion of her. But her heart sickened on her thinking that her commitments made this impossible. As the surrounding hills shrank under the pressure of cold, and the warmth from the rusty governess-stove decreased, so the love her friends appeared to feel for her became more poignant and undeserved.

  Anne Macrory and her girls were inured to cold, but Dorothy chattered and laughed while delivering a blow she had been contemplating. ‘That old dummy in the corner—is it of any use?’

  Anne looked up. ‘Not really. We use it as a pincushion.’

  ‘I wonder you think it worth keeping. It was Mother’s form when we were children—indispensable in those days, in the dressmaking department. But by now it’s probably full of borer and dry rot—what you might call a hazard.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought. It’s always been there.’

  Mog said, ‘We dress it up. Don’t we, Jan?’

  Janet blushed along her cold, milky cheekbones. She was waiting greedily for the frock the princess (her friend!) was sewing for her.

  Dorothy inclined her head above the dress. ‘You remember those figures stuck with pins? You made them out of wax, and threw them on the fire—and the person you wanted to die was supposed to.’

  Anne said, ‘No, I don’t know. What sheer superstitious rubbish! Anyhow, I can’t remember ever wanting anyone to die.’

  ‘And did they die?’ Janet asked.

  ‘Apparently, if you wanted it enough.’

  Mog was sticking a few additional pins into the dressmaker’s dummy. ‘Did you ever have a go with the wax?’

  ‘No,’ said Dorothy, looking through the window
at a landscape she did not see. ‘I know somebody who went as far as making the image. Then she hadn’t the courage. I think she felt—in fact she told me that merely to conceive such an evil thought starts you withering up, and you go on—withering.’

  Like flies in amber, the Macrorys hung transfixed in the light which for a moment had set solid in the quiet room; till Anne began to fidget, to glance at her watch, to twitch. ‘How morbid we’re being!’ She laughed, and looked over her shoulder at the window.

  ‘Here’s Janet’s dress at least.’ Dorothy shook it out for them to see; she was relieved to be making what was to some extent a positive contribution. ‘All it needs is a sash of sorts.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anne. ‘Blue for Janet.’ Her own preoccupation made her vague; the vastness of the sky bewildered her.

  ‘But I hate blue!’ Janet blazed, crumpling the dress against her thin body. ‘You know I decided on red, Mother.’

  Anne was too tired, too absent, to give the matter thought. ‘Blue is what suits you, darling. Red would look—well, eccentric.’

  ‘How do you know what I am? How do you know I’m not eccentric?’

  Janet looked to Dorothy, whom she loved, and who must understand and save her; when Dorothy knew that the most she could do for Janet would be to trim her dress with a red ribbon, and from a distance, carry on a correspondence till it died of natural causes.

  The mother sighed. ‘Red, then.’

  Mog Macrory chanted from behind the dressmaker’s dummy,

  ‘Red red he went to bed

  Silly blue she went too

  But nobody wanted purpurl!’

  At the last word, she stuck the scissors into the dummy, and a smell of must came out. It was disappointing. Possibly she had hoped for something better, like worms, or blood. She stabbed again, deeper—but nothing.

  The mother seemed reconciled to defeat over the colour of the ribbon: she was free to give herself to other worries.

  ‘How late it is!’ she was amazed to find, standing at the window. ‘Rory drives off, and never tells us where he could be found if needed. Supposing there was an accident here at the house? Or for that matter,’ she had opened the window and was craning out, ‘he could overturn the jeep—kill himself. Well, we do know of somebody who broke his leg, and was found at last, lying out in the paddocks, in the frost. But Rory considers nobody—least of all his wife.’

  The blaze of light and her obsessed relationship with her husband gave Anne Macrory’s grey face a resplendence. Dorothy tried not to envy her friend her gratuitous embellishments.

  Mog murmured, ‘If I broke my leg I’d go to the Cottage Hospital and Matron and the sisters would make a fuss of me. There was a lady used to let me get into bed with her and cuddle, when I had my tonsils out. A broken leg would take much longer than tonsils.’

  Janet would have liked to apologize to the Princess Lascaburn for her embarrassing family. As she did not know how, she could only wait for the princess to do or say something to loosen the tangle in which everyone was caught.

  But Dorothy continued sitting at the table, and it was Anne who roused herself finally; she came and took their friend by the hands. ‘What you must think of us! And how you’ve put up with it all this time!’ For a moment it looked as though Anne’s hovering face was going to plunge into Dorothy’s.

  Dorothy raised her shoulder: being kissed made her feel awkward; she had almost always tried to avoid it. ‘Is it so long?’ She broke away from Anne. ‘Of course, it must be. I’m ashamed.’

  ‘Truly that isn’t how I meant it!’ Anne moaned for her own tactlessness.

  Pinned to the sewing-room door was a local chemist’s calendar, the leaves of which had been neglected after the first couple of months.

  ‘But it’s true!’ Dorothy’s insistence made her voice boom. ‘The calendar will prove it.’

  In her determination to resist what she most desired, her chair groaned, then screeched, before falling over sideways, giving a bentwood bounce or two.

  While arms were grappling, laughter straining, Mog shouted, ‘I’ve got her by the leg. Gee, she’s wiry!’

  Janet put her cool, virgin hands over her friend’s eyes.

  ‘No, Dorothy darling, you’re ours! We need you!’ Anne struggled gasping to make her point. ‘Don’t you understand?’

  But Dorothy only understood that she must reach the calendar, on the leaves of which flies had printed their sepia riddles. She must tear away the leaves one by one till she unveiled the truth.

  She did succeed in tearing MARCH before they carried her, as part of their female Laocoon, past the door and on to a landing, all still writhing and laughing. Somebody was sobbing: or it could have been interpreted as that. Winter fire followed them a certain distance from the sewing-room window down the creaking stairs before being doused in the darker regions, with a noise of hissing, or anguished breathlessness.

  Mog kept repeating, ‘She’s wiry! That’s how I’d like to be—a wrestler—or acrobat.’

  When they reached the stone flags below, it was impossible to ignore the sound of a car driving into and pulling up short in the yard. The women composed their mouths, and began fiddling with their hair.

  ‘That’s Rory,’ Anne murmured religiously.

  Mog continued to caper, showing her muscles. ‘Or boxer!’ Dorothy decided the child was subnormal: another reason for throwing off the influence of ‘Kudjeri’.

  ‘Don’t listen to Mog,’ Janet appealed to her friend the princess.

  Perhaps the telephone would break out; you never stopped listening for it to ring so frantically that it would tear itself off the wall.

  Instead Anne Macrory, who had run outside, had met her husband and was bringing him in. Dorothy saw that Anne must have laid the wafer on his tongue: they both looked so meek, as though returning from communion. And Rory was working the last particles out of his teeth.

  ‘Dorothy has been helping as usual.’ Anne made it sound a pious afterthought.

  Macrory went so far as to smile at their guest, but immediately after, coughed and swallowed.

  The Princesse de Lascabanes announced that she would go and tidy up. She lowered her eyes. She might have committed a sacrilege: she felt pricked by pine needles; at the same time willow branches could have been paddled in her. And Basil her brother was not present to share her shame.

  Mog Macrory bellowed, ‘Haw-haw-haw!’ as she ran her short-cropped head at the thighs of the princess.

  In their preoccupation with each other the parents did not attempt to restrain or make apologies for their child; and Janet only winced for all that she sensed without entirely understanding.

  After the episode in the shed Basil took care to keep to himself. The warm sun, conflicting with overtones of cold, heightened his sense of expectation. The climate was that of diminishing freedom, as on the day before returning to school, or in the half hour to curtain up. Even so, his will had never been less inhibited by design or demands of any kind; his lack of connection with anything happening in the lives of others had a delicious, if also sickening, immorality about it.

  Around noon, after the sound of women’s voices had drained away from the kitchen quarters, he nipped in, tore out a handful of bread and broke off a lump of cheese, driven not so much by hunger as by habit. Swallowing the saltless bread, the insipid cheese, he fetched his book and hurried out before anyone could deprive him of the solitude which was his present need.

  He found quiet intensified in what used to be the orchard, amongst espaliers turned from fillets into actual trees, in grass bleached by sun and frost, amongst the skeleton suckers of raspberry canes and naked gooseberry scrub. Here he lay to study, if not to understand, the Part. It was foolish of him to bring it to ‘Kudjeri’ to remind him of past failures; though better to fail in a part than as a whole: Lear rather than the Jacka’s threat.

  So he rubbed his nose in it. Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts? Some of the lines were
flung back at him like stones; others melted on his snoozing skin, I have one part in my heart that’s sorry yet for thee; or battered on his sleep, thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal. Stick to the text reality is a mad king not an aged queen whose crown won’t come off for pulling whose not quite fresh eyes live by lucid flashes as hard as marble.

  Not even at the moment of waking could he remember his dream. Fish. The fishmonger? Or cemetery. Certainly the ground was hard enough in what had been the walled orchard. He would have welcomed the scent and sound of plums; instead, whips and thorns had been used against his whole length. The sun was on its way out, while lingering slightly in the rough surface of weathered brick. Though his sleeper’s clothes were crumpled and sweaty with anxiety and sleep, his body had tautened inside them. It was the cold coming. He got up. He put the book away in his pocket and began walking through this orange light to forestall anyone in search of him.

  As to the orchard, the sound of summer was natural to the river. He could not remember the river at ‘Kudjeri’ without its willows in leaf. Now (and reality is always present tense, whether for mad kings, or unemployed, ham actors) the cages were waiting. To be sure these communicated, but hints of steel nudged the fantasy of possible escape.

  Inside a chosen cage there was no objection to his kneeling down on the petrified mud at the river’s edge. As a boy he had stretched out to drink, and afterwards lain, regardless of discomfort, staring at his own reflection. This evening he knelt, and stirred the brown, rustling water, and splashed his face with enough of it to counteract the stickiness. As the water hurried over the stones beneath, he could see his face, when he dared look, at the other end of this tunnel of light. To be truthful, he had considered suicide once or twice in his life, but had not come at it: on each occasion the water was too shallow. In any case, he was not by temperament a suicide: theatrical gestures only convince when you can share them with an audience.