The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  IT yes it is a dying a beige cow its ribs showing white through the hide (they couldn’t surely have showed up white but perhaps they did.) The eyes. There was nothing you could do for the cow—any more than for yourself. Gently touch the ribs with your toe (in actual fact if you want to be honest you kicked that cow because of the immensity of dying and ran to look for Kate to tell her about this one scraggy paralysed cow not about the immensity she would not have understood it but Kate was never to be found when wanted). They were calling from the back door. Elizabeth? Where have you been? Don’t you realize we worry about you? You danced to show you were not in the wrong that you didn’t belong to them except as the child they ‘loved’ you ‘loved’ them in return everybody doing what is expected. I found a half-dead cow. Pooh! Putrid! It couldn’t get up. An old cow. They said the poor thing can’t because it is the drought don’t you know Elizabeth Salkeld haven’t you any pity in you? You danced because you knew more than the people who loved you more than the stones of the walls of houses. (Pity is such a private matter something between yourself and the object you must hide it from.)

  Elizabeth Hunter was trying to plant her bungling lips on the wind the dancer was creating round her. She tried to grasp hold of something. She couldn’t. She was the prisoner of her chair. Her attempts were as needless as ineffectual as drunkenness. She subsided.

  Now that her other self had been released from their lover’s attempts to express tenderness in terms of flesh (no less touching, tragic even, for being clumsy and impotent) their movements became more fluid. They were dancing amongst what must have been trees the light at first audibly flickering between the trunks or was it trains roaring rushing you towards incurable illness old age death corruption no it was the dying away you must be hearing through moss-padded doors a bird’s glistening call then the gulls scraping colour out of the sky. (What was that sooty one got pierced?)

  Lotte Lippmann’s hair had come undone. Though still part of her, it was leading a separate life. Flinging itself in opposite directions. A tail of coarse hair lashed Mrs Hunter across the mouth.

  It stung. It was bitter-tasting, as might have been expected from the pace at which both were galloping.

  As she closed in towards the climax of her dance, Lotte Lippmann was shedding her sequins; though the structure of the moonlit dress held.

  Mrs Hunter was dribbling: to hear the waves open and close at this hour of morning in nacred shallows carrying the shells back and forth whole Chinaman’s fingernails and the fragments the fragments becoming sand.

  It was sand which Mrs Hunter could feel grating. Ask the night nurse for Optrex. A cold eyeball in blue glass. Or was it That Girl still? Maids used to fly off the handle and mope in such a way on discovering they were pregnant.

  A woman was still dancing dancing for no apparent reason.

  When Mrs Lippmann suddenly flopped. ‘What more do you expect of me?’ she panted into Mrs Hunter’s knees.

  ‘Nothing. Go! You’re hurting. I don’t feel like being touched.

  It caused the housekeeper pain: she was not yet wholly released from the ceremony of exorcism.

  But Mrs Hunter was relentless. ‘Send my nurse to me,’ she ordered. ‘I want to relieve myself.’

  She had a hollow tooth she was not prepared to spend on till she had paid off the lay-by on the caffee o’lay caftan.

  Standing at the bathroom glass Sister Manhood probed her tooth with the quill pick she kept for that purpose. The pain she sent shooting up the tooth was almost ready to shriek (Would the quill, perhaps, do? … I always ever used the bark but Mavis she swears by a hairpin … Ugh, not a pin!)

  Coot crying round the lake in the park poured the darkness thicker on. They found the body floating in the lake: it was a man, though. Lottie galumphing in the old girl’s bedroom is enough to bring the plaster down. Dancing. Join the witches and dance it out—ha-ha! Or go up to the Cross when you had handed over to St Mary, hang around a street corner, or a more likely lurk, do the motel foyers and get yourself murdered. (Investigation has revealed that the 25-year-old trained nurse found strangled with her own scarf on the floor of a Pacific Towers bedroom was two months pregnant. Sister Flora Manhood lived alone in rooms at Randwick. Her landlord Mr Fred Vidler 63 was thunderstruck. ‘Can’t understand,’ Mr Vidler said, ‘what motive anyone would have in taking the life of suck a fine girl.’ Mrs Vidler 57 was too upset to give an opinion. ‘Almost my own daughter,’ she whispered from under sedation. The nurse’s most recent case, 86-year-old wealthy socialite and grazier’s widow Mrs Elizabeth Hunter of Moreton Drive informed the police, ‘Yes, I expect she was honest. Who’s to say what “honest” is? She was engaged to my son, or the chemist, I forget which. I gave her my pink sapphire to clinch the deal. Not the blue as well, mind you. Personally I always thought her a twit, nothing more than a breeder, as she proved by starting too soon. But I suppose you would have called her honest. Can you claim the same for yourself—what are you? Sergeant?’)

  Sister Manhood was getting a certain amount of enjoyment out of her own post-mortem. If she had been less pregnant the stolen sapphire might have swelled into a large boil on her inflamed mind. Now it only intermittently throbbed. Though of course it must burst sooner or later, when the accusations began.

  That her legs were already trickling she did not at first realize what with the tooth the coot the thumping dance the sapphire and the sensation in her lower abdomen.

  When it was trickling oozing not actually flooding.

  She was wet, however.

  Her lovely blessed BLOOD oh God o Lord who she didn’t believe in but would give her closer attention to as soon as she had the time and as far as she was capable.

  When she had made herself decent Flora Manhood might have shed a tear or two if she hadn’t felt so angry: kidding herself into a two months pregnancy. A nurse!

  A banging on the door. ‘Yes. What is it? Lot?’

  ‘Mrs Hunter wishes for you, Floradora.’

  ‘Wishes?’ Shriek shriek. ‘Aren’t you comical!’ It was not all that funny, but Flora Manhood was so free she would have liked to take out her joy on someone, tell them the joke against herself.

  While Lotte here might have crawled up out of the depths, hair hanging, that grotty dress in the worst tatters; only the eyes were human.

  Their expression was so apprehensive Sister Manhood thought to ask, ‘The star sapphire—did she tell you? The blue one—somebody snitched it!’ In spite of the wound you could see opening in Lottie’s mind, Flora Manhood had to laugh for her own acquittal.

  The housekeeper groaned and shifted her spongy feet. ‘I am the one they will accuse. Ach, yoy!’ She hobbled thumping in the direction of the dividing door.

  The little bell had begun its tinkling. Years ago for the devil of it Flora Manhood and Snow Tunks had pushed against another, blacker door, padded and studded. They stood beside the basin of urky water just as the bell was rung to signify nothing can become something, if you let yourself believe if you had the power to look far enough deep enough not get the creeps the gooseflesh the giggles craning to see above the heads or around all those red Irish necks.

  When here along the passage this same bell, except it had an angrier, more desperate ring.

  ‘What is it, Mrs Hunter?’ Flora Manhood was bouncing like the rubber ball she felt: tell her about the Baby that Isn’t; have a laugh together; the old thing would soon forget. ‘What can I do for you?’ the nurse asked.

  ‘I am the one who must do. I want you to help me on to the throne.’

  Help, indeed; Sister Manhood was so strong she gathered up the bundle of trussed flannel scratching jewellery baby powder stained brocade and ratty sables in one armful.

  She dumped it on the seat. ‘There, dear. Hold tight!’ Seeing the claws still groping for the mahogany rails, ‘Got your balance, have you?’

  Mrs Hunter murmured, ‘Yes.’ Balance is always a matter of chance.

  Again Sister Manhood tho
ught she could feel the trickling of her joyous blood. ‘Now if you are happy—comfy—there are one or two things I must attend to. I’ll leave the door open so as you can call out if you want me. Or here’s your little bell.’ She fetched a stool and stood it with the bell beside the commode.

  It tickled her to think that all but the same tinkle which brought Flora Manhood might summon the Holy Ghost (not that she intended blasphemy: she could perhaps in time sort of believe; what would Col have thought, though?).

  Mrs Hunter had no complaints to make. Her nose was brooding: she was so deep in concentration she was glad to hear her nurse go. Nobody could help her now: only herself, and grace.

  If she strained periodically on the commode it was as a formality to please her nurses and her doctor. Now the real business in hand was not to withdraw her will, as she had once foreseen, but to will enough strength into her body to put her feet on the ground and walk steadily towards the water. There was the question of how much time she would have before the eye must concentrate on other, greater contingencies, leaving her to chaos. That this was threatening, she could tell from the way the muslin was lifted at the edges, till what had been a benison of sea, sky, and land, was becoming torn by animal passions, those of a deformed octopod with blue-suckered tentacles and a glare of lightning or poached eggs.

  Alfred my dearest dearest you are the one to whom I look for help however I failed,

  And know that I alone must perform whatever the eye is contemplating for me.

  To move the feet by some miraculous dispensation to feel sand benign and soft between the toes the importance of the decision makes the going heavy at first the same wind stirring the balconies of cloud as blows between the ribs it would explain the howling of what must be the soul not for fear that it will blow away in any case it will but in anticipation of its first experience of precious water as it filters in through the cracks the cavities of the body blue pyramidal waves with swans waiting by appointment each a suppressed black explosion the crimson beaks savaging only those born to a different legend to end in legend is what frightens most people more than cold water climbing mercifully towards the overrated but necessary heart a fleshy fist to love and fight with not to survive except as a kindness or gift of a jewel.

  The seven swans are perhaps massed after all to destroy a human will once the equal of their own weapons its thwack as crimson painful its wings as violently abrasive don’t oh DON’T my dark birds of light let us rather—enfold.

  Till I am no longer filling the void with mock substance: myself is this endlessness.

  From the bathroom window Sister Manhood could see the moon had risen: it was full, or almost (the moon is always less than perfect the moment after catching sight of it).

  Her breasts gathered on the sill, Flora Manhood was humming very slightly, down her nose, against her teeth. She would have offered her love if it had been asked for—not sensual love: no men, for God’s sake! but in support of some objective, or idea. Unfortunately she was short on ideas, as Col had hinted on and off, except the one she had refused to entertain, and which Col had insisted he would nourish in her. She laughed lazily (not sensually) from between relaxed lips. Shriven by her menstrual blood, she was reconciled, she believed, to what had been a shaky vocation, and was anxious for Mary de Santis to arrive, so that she might impress her, not with crude zeal, but with what St Mary would surely recognize as altered vision.

  In a minute she would return to her patient and together they would celebrate this change. She would wipe the old thing’s bottom with a tenderness it had never before experienced, and surely Elizabeth Hunter, with her gift for scenting weakness in others, was not such a cynical bitch that she would laugh in your face and tear your intentions to shreds. She could, though.

  Was it the bell? Not the tinkled ascent of silver notes but thin tin crumpling and a tongue abruptly flattened out into silence.

  Sister Manhood left the window so quickly the sash shuddered, the panes rattled.

  When she reached the bedroom the muslin curtain was waving from its rod as it did whenever a wind rose behind your back. The swollen curtain was filling the room. It could have upset the little bell, now lying on the carpet.

  For that matter, it could have upset Mrs Hunter.

  The nurse rushed to shut the window. ‘It’s the climate!’ she cried. ‘You don’t stand a chance!’ (Actually Flora Manhood had never given the climate a thought till Princess Dorothy had started drawing everybody’s attention to it; otherwise a climate is what you are born to, and accept because you can’t avoid it.) ‘The draught wasn’t too much for you, was it?’

  Mrs Hunter had slipped sideways on her throne while still hooked to the mahogany rails. One buttock, though withered, was made to shine like ivory where the rose brocade was rucked up. The eyes were mooning out through the mask which was the apex of her acolyte’s creative skill.

  ‘Mrs Hunter?’

  Never had the nurse felt so powerless, so awkward, as in slewing this totem into its orthodox position.

  In spite of the several corpses she had dealt with, it was Flora Manhood’s first death, and for this reason she walked backwards and forwards awhile, hissing and gulping, and trying to remember where to go from here.

  She knew of course. The books tell you. The lectures. And Sister: remove any jewellery Nurse it may fall into the wrong hands. And practice: block every hole so that nothing nothing escapes.

  Though the mind can become as functional as the digestive tract after your feelings have been minced up fine, it did not prevent her touching the body several times when she had laid it on the bed, not expecting evidence of life (she was too experienced for that) but illumination? that her emptiness, she ventured to hope, might be filled with understanding.

  As for knowing what to do, the nurse was already turning back her sleeves in preparation for the unpleasanter duties she had been trained to perform. Her arms were strong rather than shapely. The carpeted landing was creaking and thundering around her as she advanced on the telephone, to report to the doctor that their patient was dead, that he should pay his last visit and confirm that her responsibility was ended.

  Twelve

  AT HIS LAST dozing Basil had willed himself to wake early, to avoid any possible Macrory invasion, but on opening his eyes next, he was in some way conscious of having failed. It was early enough: in fact the sheets of spent moonlight still showed their random inkblots. Then why this shock of cold terror? He covered parts of himself as though his parents were standing at the bedside.

  And Dorothy waking, crumpled, crushed. Hadn’t she been supporting a weight? But smiling for Basil.

  While prolonging the smile, Dorothy closed her eyes again. Less pressed for time in that the bed was officially hers, she could afford the extra snooze.

  Till she too fully awoke to the same reverberating terror. The sheet hissed as she snatched up an armful of it to hide her breasts.

  ‘The telephone!’ Whichever of them had uttered the word, it echoed the other’s fears: ringing and ringing through a cold house; and ringing.

  When the ringing stopped it was impossible to tell whether the telephone had given up, or whether somebody had intervened.

  To escape from the clinging bed Basil tore himself out with such violence his balls tangled painfully. He was nothing less than skedaddling into the room beyond, resentful of a wind which was streaming past his nakedness. Nobody was exclusively to blame; though instinctively, he might have liked to hold Dorothy responsible.

  Either exhausted or appeased she was slower to react. She could have been lingering amongst some of her more disreputable thoughts before clothing them for ever in convention. She lay nursing the bundle of grey, early-morning sheets and ailing blankets. The terror with which she had been flooded by the telephone had almost ebbed before she threw them off. She glanced along her nose at her own distantly exposed limbs, which became, more distantly still, in Hubert’s voice, ton corps qui se réfuse aussi passion�
�ment que d’autres se donnent.

  The Princesse de Lascabanes shot out of bed and put on her mouth before anything else. There was nothing she could have done to hide from that cold increasing light the cruel slashes in her cheeks. Her general gooseflesh, her flapping sinews, she was able to clothe effectively before the sound of slippers reached her door.

  ‘Entrez done!’ the princess called in a rational voice, ducking at the glass to know the worst about her hair; her heart would become visible, she felt, beating inside the gown she had swathed too tightly.

  Mrs Macrory should have made the perfect messenger for tragedy: manner direct; speech precise (Scottish at one remove); of moral integrity to ensure a respectful relationship with the audience she was about to shock as well as console. But this messenger could not rid herself of the mouthfuls of ugly words; emotions which she should have curbed with objective tact, left her eyes goitrous.

  ‘They telephoned,’ she began, and was cut off immediately.

  Not to improve matters, Sir Basil Hunter made an entrance from the dressing-room, adjusting the cord of a robe he had thrown on in a hurry, tamping with the palms of his hands the hair which sleep had tousled. In spite of these side activities the great actor did not withhold his generous attention: he would not be accused of trying to steal someone else’s scene.

  ‘They rang,’ the messenger began afresh. ‘Mr Wyburd rang,’ she corrected herself.

  ‘Qu’est-ce que vous voulez nous dire, chère Anne?’ If she had not steeled herself with her second language Madame de Lascabanes might have imitated the lamentable mouthing of her friend, whose hands she took out of charity to chafe and comfort. ‘Allons, voyons, n’ayez pas peur’ The princess half looked to Sir Basil to interpret, but saw him refuse; it would not have mattered greatly to any of them if he had accepted.

  To Anne Macrory it mattered least of all: she was too high on disaster. ‘Mrs Hunter, your mother—died,’ she said, ‘yesterday evening.’ It was so perfectly clumsily final the messenger sprayed the princess with the end of her line.