The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

It made Sir Basil snigger at least; while realizing he was found out.

  ‘Basil?’

  She was coming towards him, sticks snapping as she trod on them; there was no escaping his big sister; and here on his knees he was at greater disadvantage than when she had caught him playing with that old car.

  But she gave no sign of wishing to use her advantage. She approached shivering, it seemed. Perversely, and for the first time at ‘Kudjeri’, she had changed for dinner. It was intended to be simple and inoffensive, but the Princesse de Lascabanes had her gift for drawing attention to simplicity; how her little white would glare through the fug of the Macrory kitchen. He could not remember having seen her in white before: he had only known the perennial veuve, the discreetly expensive Frenchwoman.

  She was holding her elbows to make her arrival appear as casual as possible. ‘We had begun to wonder why you had deserted us.’ Delivered gently enough, it had the measure of formality.

  ‘We? Who?’ He got to his feet, managing his bad knee with care.

  She avoided a direct reply. ‘Anne’s afraid the dinner will spoil.’

  ‘What’s she giving us?’

  ‘Can’t you guess?’

  It was a somewhat half-hearted joke.

  Then she laid her cheek against his. Her skin felt slightly greasy, which made the affection she was offering more intimate and spontaneous. Their relationship had grown dove-tailed, they were taking it so much for granted.

  So the Hunter children held hands for the return. They leaned on each other in the climb up the river bank, before wading, almost luxuriously, through the sea of dry, winter tussock, to reach the house.

  When she had seen the children to bed Anne Macrory came back to the kitchen where her guests and her husband were still sitting over the rejected fragments of their spotted dog.

  ‘Didn’t you like it?’ she felt it her duty to ask.

  Because they were listening to Anne’s husband, Dorothy avoided committal; Basil did that thing with his crow’s-feet, which served as reply, and had been known to win sympathy. As for Anne Macrory, she had fulfilled her obligations by putting food in front of people: whether they liked it or not was of less importance; perhaps life, or her Scottish ancestry, had persuaded her that what one eats is necessary rather than enjoyable.

  And Rory was holding forth, she only saw at first, because she was so used to him.

  ‘Anne will tell me I’m drunk,’ Macrory said; ‘but a man—even a passionate one—needs to keep his fire stoked.’ Several private drinks were glittering in his eyes, though he had not offered his guests so much as the sight of a bottle.

  Anne said, ‘I wouldn’t presume to tell you a blooming thing—at any rate, not a thing that matters.’

  She plonked down at the tableful of remains. Elbows dug in, she slid her hands under the cap of her matted, dust-coloured hair. Her speech was that bit too precise: she looked as though she had been drinking too, but she hadn’t; she would have made a sad, sulky drunk as opposed to his fiery one.

  ‘Particular when the frost sets in,’ Macrory said, ‘a man needs to put heart into himself.’

  ‘What if it’s summertime?’ asked his wife.

  ‘By summertime it’s second nature.’ Macrory laughed for his own encouragement.

  The Hunters smiled the contained smiles of overhearing, disbelieving guests. Their mouths were growing cavernous besides, with mutton fat and yawns.

  Running his tongue over the roof of his mouth Basil could not have felt more desolated: he might have been standing under the carbonized girders of a London railway station, waiting for the train to carry him back to an unsuccessful tour of the Midlands. He closed his eyes to blot it out, and found himself instead, still running his tongue around the structure the mutton fat had emphasized, in the belly of a spiritual whale: unlike Jonah’s, his would not spew him out till she died, and perhaps not even then.

  The Macrorys were still at it, he heard from his depths.

  ‘Our son Robert—our eldest—who you haven’t met,’ Macrory flashed his teeth at his guests to make amends for what they had missed, ‘a clean, methodical lad—and cold—he’ll succeed where his parents failed.’

  Anne tensed her nostrils and closed her eyes. ‘Robert is pure Robertson.’

  ‘Isn’t yourself a bit too much of a Robertson?’ her husband gnashed. ‘Of “Kirkcaldy”!’ He leaned across the table to take his trick.

  Anne only smiled as she answered, still from behind lowered lids, ‘Once I was!’ Then opened her eyes to look, still smiling, at her friend Dorothy Hunter, and again at her husband after digging her elbows deeper into the kitchen table. ‘Do you suppose I’m complaining, Rory, that my awful pride was extinguished?’

  Rory squirmed; he showed her the crown of his head as he stirred his hair: it made almost the sound of broken glass as you sweep it up. ‘Robert ’ull come good,’ he did not exactly groan, but burped; and once or twice he scratched an armpit.

  Anne was rocking on the points of her elbows. ‘I’d like to think parents don’t imagine their children.’

  Driven by embarrassment, the Princesse de Lascabanes had risen from the table. She might have wanted to efface herself completely. Unable to, she looked for her handbag, which she had stowed away somewhere and forgotten. If she could find her bag, she would have that at least to hold.

  While Macrory continued whipping his obsession round the prison of his skull. ‘He can’t help but succeed, from inheritun his grandfather’s cold blood—and knowun his bloody messes of parents.’

  Dorothy had found her bag.

  ‘Robert’s loaded. Like the French princess and the actor knight.’ Whether he had aimed it in humility or bitterness, the superb Hunters were reduced to a crocodile handbag and a pair of cornelian and filigree cufflinks.

  Dorothy’s throat felt so dry and choked she would have withdrawn from the success stakes regardless of whether Basil still considered himself a contender: as an actor he might decide to act it out; when she realized the Macrorys were training on her neither envy nor resentment, but their admiration, and, in Anne’s case, love.

  There was nothing in the inventory of her character or features which could possibly explain it; or was it her white dress? unpretentious enough, she had thought, and like most of her clothes, just outclevering shabbiness. But Anne was lapping it up; Macrory’s eyes seemed to be having a love affair, not with the dress, nor her body inside it (she was pretty sure) but with what she stood for.

  When Anne explained, ‘Dorothy, we only saw your mother once. She drove up not long after she and Father agreed on the deal. I’ll never forget her. She was wearing white.’

  Dorothy’s voice grated. ‘Even as an old woman, white was one of her affectations.’

  Basil was moved to defend their mother. ‘She could never resist her sense of theatre.’

  ‘I’d say Mrs Hunter was a flirt.’ Macrory lolled remembering. ‘She asked me hadn’t we met before. Or perhaps we hadn’t, she decided. Anyhow, she hoped we would meet again.’ His eyes, his lips were licking at prospects he might still be considering.

  Anne was unperturbed. ‘Yes, she liked to flirt. With either sex. And although you knew what she was up to, it didn’t matter. You let her seduce you with her eyes. What great persuaders her hands were! And her lovely voice.’

  ‘She was all right,’ Macrory agreed.

  ‘I loved your mother,’ Anne said.

  While it was Dorothy her daughter they were looking at. Basil too, was beginning to take notice. He had raised his head. Surely to God Basil was not in love with Elizabeth Hunter? With her arms Dorothy de Lascabanes tried to cover as much of herself as she was able; though she probably only succeeded in suggesting that she was suffering from a stomach ache.

  Basil had continued looking past or into her, when the telephone shattered the whole house. Anne went slommacking to answer; she was wearing a man’s felt slippers tonight. Dorothy opened her bag and took out the mirror, then was afraid t
o look in it. Nor did she dare look at her brother.

  Anne was not gone for long. ‘That was Mrs Emmett again, to tell me nobody understands her, and couldn’t I help.’

  ‘You can’t ’uv thrown ’er much of a lifeline to be back so quick.’

  ‘I told her she’d better ring another number. We’re out of business.’

  ‘Bankrupted!’ Macrory beat so hard with the spoon on one side of his plate, a bit flew out.

  ‘Ah, dear!’ Anne laughed; she pressed against her husband before stooping to gather up the piece; she said she was going to bed.

  Basil too, left the kitchen: the telephone’s false alarm had unnerved him; and Macrory lounged out, his slow gross manner emphasizing that neither his wife’s silent invitation nor his guests’ presence would influence his true, his secret life.

  Ashamed for expecting deliverance by telephone, and for wearing her innocent white dress, Dorothy directed her anger at the ostentatiously unconscious Macrory long after he had left the room. Alcohol had intensified his insolence; it had glazed his eyes more brutally, and brought out the snakes of veins in the whites. His muscular attitudes were odious; she disliked his smell; body hair revolted her.

  Her own sober breath was finally rasping.

  Not only was she allergic to Macrory physically, she resented his memories of Mother: of Elizabeth Hunter revealing possibilities (to Macrory of all people) as she stepped from the car. (How much had Basil realized at the telling?) In a white dress. Had the glass been conscious of it when you put it on in Mother’s room? Macrory had sat palming off those suggestions of Mother’s nymphomania to mask his actual thoughts. Were you the Second Nymphomaniac? The one who hadn’t found her feet? When God knew, everything in your experience of that, disgusted. Thoughts even. (What had Basil been looking at?) Thin arms are incapable of shielding anything vital.

  Looking down, Dorothy found her dress exaggerated a nakedness which had never occurred to her before. (But Basil, a preoccupied, cultivated man—Shakespeare in his pocket, could not have noticed.)

  Macrory would have.

  The hall was not so dark that an oval rosewood mirror failed to reflect a steely light. The ugly mirror must have been one of the few bits of Robertson loot brought with them from ‘Kirkcaldy’ to ‘Kudjeri’. It should have mocked a Hunter, but seemed instead to cajole: hips still impeccable; faintly mauve gloves of skin ending at the elbows; face wavering behind glass dissolving into water.

  She was not drunk. It was most likely this glimpse of herself in Mother’s white which inspired Dorothy de Lascabanes to prove to Elizabeth Hunter she could play the game of generosity, or self-aggrandizement. She groped in her bag for the notecase. She could not remember its ever having been so fat: it was money from Mummy’s gift cheque. It both thrilled and hurt Dorothy to take hold of so much ready money. She decided against counting. She would make a grand gesture. But after crumpling the notes in a careless handful, she could not resist confirming the extent of her generosity, and found that nobody would be able to accuse her of stinginess after this.

  Though she could hear a crackling from the fire he had lit in the study, there was no sign that Macrory was still inside the room. She paused at the door, to listen; more irrevocably, she pushed it, however gently, from ajar to open.

  He was lying on the hearth, his offside knee drawn up, so that his shoulders, his head were forced back, to help the other tensed leg balance his body. Though his eyes were closed, he was hardly relaxed: his Adam’s-apple, which moved once after she entered, looked too self-conscious. She found herself glancing, by accident, at what she supposed they call the ‘crutch’ of this repellent man, to whom she was in any case only about to discharge a debt.

  ‘Mr Macrory,’ she began, when once or twice during their stay she had addressed him by his first name (not without ironic overtones) Tm afraid my brother and I have been imposing on you far too long;’ only a lethargy descending on her prevented her adding, sponging on you in fact.

  As she spoke she stood squeezing the handful of notes; they should have dripped sweat, but were so dry, they could very easily have emitted sparks, or caught fire.

  Macrory opened his eyes and looked in her direction. Did he notice the nakedness which the dress had revealed for the first time tonight in the kitchen? Or was he, rather, listening for echoes of Elizabeth Hunter as she stepped radiant out of the car?

  Madame de Lascabanes blundered on. Td like you to accept this—from both of us—in appreciation of all you’ve done. Your wife too, of course.’ Macrory cocked an eyebrow, as though sceptical of Anne and Basil’s part in it.

  ‘Please!’ The princess heard herself trumpeting.

  Macrory turned on what was, for him, an exceptionally agreeable look. ‘I never thought of friendship as something you pay for, Dorothy. Not like love.’

  If he had left it at that, but he didn’t: he carried on smiling at her, for an improbable proposition she had made, or worse, a professional service she demanded and he could only half-heartedly perform.

  The Princesse de Lascabanes had never experienced a similar situation, except in her imagination. ‘I’m sorry to have explained myself, apparently, so crudely. I also realize I misinterpreted a metaphor you used at dinner.’

  It was humiliating to have chosen a word the fellow might find laughable for never having come across it. Her double gaffe produced in her a frisson as though somebody had drawn a wire brush across her slackening skin.

  Then she remembered to drop the handful of notes back into the darkness of her bag. It was in one sense a relief.

  ‘Such full lives,’ the princess murmured, ‘and your children—you must find the children most rewarding.’

  He was still looking at her; so she went.

  Passing through the house she did not hear the sound of her own movements: it was Elizabeth Hunter in pursuit. Whatever the name—Hubert Edvard Rory—didn’t you know Dorothy it’s the same man one chases? With Mother forcing you to look back it was impossible to escape shame. The frisson revived on Dorothy’s arms, along the passages, and up the stairs. Stairs are worse: the sounds made by comparatively modest garments will swell voluptuously when thoughts are attuned to them. Nobody—least of all you Dorothy—likes to admit to all the names Arnold isn’t one is it would be too ridiculous but what about …?

  Dorothy shut out the voice; her ears whammed. If Basil had been there, they might have held hands, felt the warmth flow between them as reassurance of affection. She longed for this affection: its label carried the only convincing guarantee against a cold old age.

  It was splitting cold tonight in the upper storey of this damned house. After leaving the fugbound kitchen and mounting the stairs, Basil could practically feel the chilblains opening in the backs of his hands. He had suffered from them as a little boy. They painted his watery sores with balsam of Peru, and gave him mittens to wear. Tonight on the stairs and in Alfred Hunter’s dressing-room he was trailing this wintry scent of chilblains. Put the mat on the bed, on top of the blankets; the weight might help keep the shivers down. Supposing his bladder, victimized by age and the climate, returned him to little-boyhood, would the Macrory woman scold to find a map on the floor? Yes, she was a scold. His almoner-daughter Imogen was the only one who might offer comfort. But she wasn’t his. If she were, by blood, there could be a Goneril lurking in her; Cordelias are too hard to get.

  Where the hell was Dorothy? He often wondered what women do in bathrooms, to spend so much time locked up in them.

  He went into their parents’ room. ‘What are you doing, Dorothy?’ Whether she was there or not, he had to hear the sound of his own voice.

  She was in fact standing in the middle of the room beneath a shadeless bulb, which still appeared to be streaming strings of crystal beads from Elizabeth Hunter’s reign. Arms round her ribs, Dorothy herself stood streaming and glittering with misery, her bony nose clogged and swollen.

  At first he would only allow himself to admire her virtuosity
; but as a pro, he could not avoid taking his cue. ‘What’s worrying you, darling?’ His cavernous, his ballooning, his deflating voice was horribly, sincerely convincing.

  They were grappling shivering with each other in what might become the performance of their lives.

  ‘Oh, Basil!’ She was deafening him; and smelt—they both probably did—of mutton fat. ‘What have we got unless each other? Aren’t we, otherwise—bankrupt?’

  ‘Are we?’ He was pretty sure she had come up with a wrong line; or else his memory was letting him down.

  More important the discoveries they were making, which were not quite grief, passion, despair, horror, but something of them all, under the threadbare Macrory blankets, in the great bed. Elizabeth Hunter had specialized in spacious beds: so much of her life was spent in them, and still not spent; her children might go before her, bones broken by their convulsions on this shuddering rack.

  If, instead of passing from one room to the other, he had thought of saying his prayers. But to whom, after all this time? Himself?

  Now there was nothing to be done about it. Perhaps the grater instinctively loves the cheese. Wives don’t love: they swallow you. And most mistresses are in it for calculated reasons.

  But Dorothy! ‘Dorothy?’ He might have suspected the reality of this rather thin human substance he was—embracing? If he had been drunk at least; but Macrory had seen to it that each of them was sober.

  ‘What is it, darling?’ Sobriety can become more obsessed than drunkenness; she was too absorbed to more than mumble.

  It seemed to her that if she had been fond of, instead of trying to love Hubert, he might have responded. Love can freeze the limbs; affection thaws the instincts.

  So she and Basil were comforting each other.

  Somewhere in the night he rejected their drowsy nakedness. ‘Do you realize, Dorothy, they probably got us in this bed?’ Such thoughtless candour poured them back into their separate skins: to turn to ice.

  Till she felt she must tear open a darkness which was at the same time stifling her.

  This stick-woman was staggering, tripping, lashed, he could just see, before she reached the curtains and started snatching by handfuls, at last wrenching the window up.