The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  Arnold Wyburd screwed up his face till it disappeared. ‘I believe Sisters de Santis, Badgery, and Manhood would consider five hundred an acceptable token,’ he said when he opened out again.

  ‘Five hundred each? Fair enough!’ Sir Basil looked quite jaunty, and without assistance from a tweed hat.

  Dorothy’s dreamy smile was not for Basil. Then she tossed her head and coughed to let the solicitor know she accepted.

  ‘And the housekeeper Mrs Lippmann?’

  ‘Good God, yes!’ Sir Basil was amazed they had forgotten the little Jewess.

  ‘Five hundred?’ Mr Wyburd asked. ‘Your mother thought a lot of Mrs Lippmann, though she wouldn’t always let her see it.’

  ‘An excellent cook,’ Sir Basil remembered, ‘if you like that Central European stuff.’

  Both the men were looking at the Princesse de Lascabanes, who at last produced a smile to go with her postponed reply. ‘I expect Frau Lippmann has her virtues.’

  ‘Five hundred, then?’

  ‘Oh, I am not mean? the princess radiantly protested.

  ‘I should also like to submit,’ the solicitor looked down as though addressing his signet ring, ‘to—to suggest— a small gratuity for the cleaning lady—Mrs Cush.’

  ‘Five hundred for Mrs Cush !’ Sir Basil clapped his hands: boredom was fast consuming his store of prudence.

  ‘The cleaning woman?’ The princess raised a startled head. ‘The one who was brought by hire-car— from Red-fern?’

  ‘Mrs Cush does live in Redfern,’ the solicitor confirmed, ‘with an epileptic husband.’

  ‘And varicose veins.’ The princess sank her chin. ‘We must all three of us resist becoming sentimental about epilepsy and varicose veins, I fail to see why the cleaner—a most inefficient one, my eyes immediately told me—should receive more than a hundred.’

  The silence might have shamed Dorothy Hunter if it had not been for the Princesse de Lascabanes: only a woman of rational mind can save men from their impulses.

  ‘If that is what you sincerely feel,’ Mr Wyburd murmured.

  ‘Why drag in sincerity? A sense of reality is what is called for!’ The princess spoke so vehemently she had to hang on to the handbag sitting on her lap.

  ‘One hundred for the cleaner.’ Basil breathed; it was a matter of little importance, and his coming over could help shorten the session.

  Dorothy was appeased, while making it clear that paltry concessions would not seduce her into relaxing her moral vigilance.

  ‘Finally,’ the solicitor said; but did he mean it? ‘there is the question of Mrs Hunter’s belongings—her furniture—her house.’

  Basil hooted; Dorothy sighed.

  ‘If there’s nothing you want to keep,’ the solicitor gravely advised, ‘better dispose of everything by auction. Naturally there will be—articles of sentimental value—the jewels, for instance,’ he turned to Dorothy.

  ‘Are there any jewels left?’ Madame de Lascabanes broodily exploded. ‘After the nurses have taken their pick?’

  ‘And the electrician, and the man who mends the refrigerator?

  The Hunter children were united in a good laugh.

  Till suddenly glancing at this old man Dorothy realized how often she had been hurt by life. ‘Perhaps I’ll keep the jewels.’ She relented with a cultivated sulkiness to show she was not too eager: in any case, Mother’s jewels were bizarre rather than beautiful.

  Mr Wyburd bowed his head. ‘That leaves the house.’

  ‘Oh, auction. Auction, Dorothy?’

  She would have preferred not to agree with her brother, but submitted because it was practical. She opened her bag. The disagreeable stresses of the morning had left her with a touch of heartburn.

  ‘One more point,’ the solicitor offered.

  Oh Lord! Sir Basil had risen: he was dusting imaginary crumbs off his flies.

  ‘While the estate is being wound up, we can’t run the risk of thieves and vandals at Moreton Drive. I have sounded out Sister de Santis and Mrs Lippmann, and gather they might be prepared to stay on, as caretakers, out of affection for Mrs Hunter.’

  It was an arrangement neither of the Hunter children saw any reason for objecting to; though the caretakers would probably eat their heads off, Basil foresaw. Dorothy observed that, on the contrary, women in their position become depressed and develop frugal habits.

  ‘I’m sorry if it’s been in some ways a painful discussion.’ While apologizing to his clients, it was the solicitor rather, who was looking ravaged.

  Dorothy smiled at him. ‘It’s over,’ she said softly; she could afford to be soft, at least in her attitude to someone who in no way threatened her equanimity. ‘Or it is for me. You are the one who will have to endure the auction.’

  ‘You’re not planning to leave us, are you?’

  ‘I have my reservation, I’m taking off tomorrow night for Paris.’

  Basil forced her to look at him at last: he was making such ugly, unorthodox sounds. Isn’t that a pretty swift one? Dirty—anyway, crafty. But typical.’ The face which had appeared puffy on arrival was drained of a complacency probably induced by alcohol: the leaner, lined Basil was standing on the brink of something; or was it nothing?

  ‘Is there any reason for staying?’ She hurried on in case he should produce one. ‘In this country to which I don’t belong, and where I shouldn’t choose to live longer than is absolutely necessary.’

  ‘You’re right. It’s time. I only thought we might have slunk off more cosily together.’

  ‘I can’t remember our depending on each other—to any extent—at any point.’

  She looked away on making her thrust; she could not see whether she had drawn blood, but was conscious of a wound opening in herself.

  Arnold Wyburd took them to the lift. Very properly, the solicitor volunteered to drive the princess to catch her plane the following evening. She was inclined to think his presence, so unemotional and banal, might soothe her airport nerves. The lift arrived, and soon after, was sinking with the Hunter children in it. Their fellow passengers huddled together to give them room. Unaccountably, a frightened look had settled on the anonymous faces.

  It was Dorothy who was frightened: what if she couldn’t shake Basil off? If he trailed her from one hemisphere to another like some filthy dream she wanted to forget? They were stalking along this street together, in step, and silent. Equal in height, their eyes were at the same level when Basil closed in on her, forcing their progress to a standstill.

  ‘Your strength, Dorothy, is probably your greatest weakness.’

  Her strength? Her swaying, timorous, ugly, helpless self! (If only the towers would crash, grind you into the gritty pavement, Basil too, with his cocky hat, parted lips, that split in the cushion of the lower one—buried beneath steel and concrete; but together.)

  ‘This is where I turn off.’ The voice of Madame de Lascabanes described its arc as gracefully as casually.

  He switched on his professional charmer’s smile. ‘Faithful to Air France, I expect?’

  ‘Need you ask? I join them at Bangkok.’

  Their laughter almost visibly splintered around them along with the other directionless refractions of a busy street.

  Then Dorothy swooped down on the bundle of snakes he imagined he had seen writhing inside her. Not ‘imagined’. They were there. He knew. Hadn’t he unknotted and charmed them? He could feel them slithering still against his skin.

  But Dorothy had ducked into the street she had chosen for her exit.

  Sir Basil Hunter cocked his hat farther forward. (Never, in any circumstances, let plate glass windows fool you into taking a look.) He squelched on: it was his arches, his age. He would order a double Scotch, or two—or a whole bottle as on the day of the funeral. The funeral. (Remember you have inherited a fortune, and can buy yourself back into life, into art, into the affections of—almost—anybody.)

  A revolving door propelled Sir Basil into the next scene. Unusually dim light
ing or the unexpected laughter of several couples seated in black glass alcoves upset his timing: he stood too long mumbling his smile; when a partition of the door still in motion whammed against an ear and sent his hat spinning. The alcoves showered laughter on this unknown comic (or did they recognize the leading man wrongly cast?). At least a waiter ran forward to present the actor with a hat which might have looked a mistake in whatever circumstances.

  Sir Basil strolled to the bar. He ordered a double Scotch. And a double Scotch. He had his ghosts to lay. (VOICE FROM LIMBO: Don’t look. The other one at the bar lifting her elbow so enthusiastically is Shiela Sturges the actress. She’s Basil Hunter’s wife. They say he drove her to it.)

  At Bangkok Madame de Lascabanes re-entered her world.

  ‘Vous désirez, madame?’

  ‘Rien, merci.’ It was actually true.

  The Air France hostess had inquired so impersonally that some (Australians for example, with their manic insistence on ‘warmth’) might have judged her contemptuous. Exchanging the ritual sliver of a smile, the princess and the air hostess knew better.

  Then Dorothy de Lascabanes sank back and closed her eyes. For the first time in weeks, months, perhaps in a whole lifetime, she had achieved a state where nobody could force her to behave as a character of their own conceiving, quite unlike the one she recognized as hers. She even thought she might have reached that point of impersonality she had liked to believe attainable: protected against disorder, directed towards a logical destination, saved from desire (oh God yes—beyond reach of importunate bodies, clutching hands).

  She whimpered once or twice with relief, and rubbed her head against the antimacassar before remembering her coiffure. At once she started rearranging herself more practically. It composed her mind as well, to sit obliquely, calves pressed against the case in which she carried her jewels.

  When she had laid hands on those inherited from Mother, she must see about having them re-set; though it was doubtful whether many of them would be wearable. She would keep them as sentimental tokens: because the worst mothers in the flesh do not necessarily destroy the touching concept of motherhood. (What sort of mother would you have made if fate had dispensed a child? Madame de Lascabanes was thankful her new impersonality would not be required to work out an answer to that one.)

  How she would occupy herself in her state of spiritual (and economic) emancipation was more to the point. For a start, she thought, she would go through her cupboards and drawers, but ruthlessly. She would make inventories. She would restock only with the very best quality, necessary clothes, preferably in black; though she looked well in green: amande ou tilleul, plutôt qu’un vert trop criard. And shoes: she might indulge, not in an orgy, but give way to her weakness for what can be an elegant means of disguising the ugliest member. She saw her shoes, of the style she had always worn, and which outlast ephemeral trends in fashion, tilted in methodical rows on the brass rails at the bottom of her armoires. Before any, she cherished a shoe in matured leather, of a patina she had created herself by long and devoted polishing.

  Dorothy de Lascabanes was filled with such an exaltation she glanced round to see whether anyone else had noticed. But the light dictated by those stern angels watching over their welfare had forced her fellow passengers into varying stages of dormancy. In the seat next to her, a Pakistani was turning yellow. The princess edged closer to the aisle.

  And books. In the library more than anywhere an inventory is essential: that volume of Pascal the Cousine Marie-Ange, personne d’autre, had carried off, more for the binding, one suspected, than the argument. The princess nursed her reverence for the French classics and the years of pleasure she promised herself in their company. (Weed out the books: Bourget, Bataille—all one’s mistakes; Maurois? on attend.)

  And men. Because all that was finished, it did not mean that some elderly, distinguished connoisseur might not occasionally offer to share the subtleties: of Stendhal, Odilon Redon, poularde demi-deuil, a bottle of Chassagne-Montrachet en tête à tête.

  In reassessing worldly pleasures, it occurred to the princess she might also change her spiritual preceptor. She visualized an unknown hand, sensitive though masculine, writing on the fresh white sheet it was in her power to become. Enraptured by her own pious ambitions, she flung back her head regardless of the grubby antimaccassar. Aidez-moi, mon Dieu, she insisted, je recommence ma vie. Then in the name of prudence, Sainte Marie, mère de Dieu, priez pour nous pauvres pécheurs, maintenant et à l’heure de notre mort.

  For the plane had started to shudder and roll. From inside the rug with which he had shrouded his head, the Pakistani moaned. Rejecting as far as possible this evidence of human frailty, Dorothy regretted her Dutchman who had experienced the eye of the storm, as he insufficiently told during her flight to Mother’s bedside.

  The weather which had just struck them hardly amounted to a storm, little more than a disagreeably personal nudge. Supposing the hostile forces rubbing against these fragile walls ordained disaster, death would be the least part of it. What she dreaded was the moment when the soul tears free, no bland Catholic balloon automatically patted on its way, but a kind of shrivelled leather satchel, as she saw her original Protestant soul, stuffed with doubts, self-esteem, bloodymindedness, which Catholic hands, however skilled, might not have succeeded in detaching from her.

  If her Dutchman had been seated beside her instead of this bilious black, she felt sure she would have found the courage to clutch his knee, and demand the impartial view of one who has passed through the eye of the storm. If it does not remain in the eye of the beholder.

  And Mother: what could Mother have told of her experience on Brumby Island? She was senile by the time you might have asked. But could anything of a transcendental nature have illuminated a mind so sensual, mendacious, materialistic, superficial as Elizabeth Hunter’s? (Poor Mummy! it is wicked to malign the dead: Sainte Marie, mère de Dieu, priez pour nous pauvres pécheurs, maintenant et à l’heure de notre mort. Amen.)

  It is to some extent calmer the nameless street you are walking down these are yours the hopefully lustrous shoes the new Balenciaga habit this the church you have been searching for bundles of pale-green spaghetti as columns dark water in the leaden stoup never touch the syphilitic water sign yourself with air my knees are old and cold offering 15-deniers in the name of faith how frightfully hard religion is on stockings the priest the surely no this Protestant expression which refuses to distinguish sheep from goats these Dutch-coloured fingers offering not the nice hygienic wafer but a chalice of qu’est-ce que vous me faites mon père spilling the stain will never come out rubbing spreading the unspeakable oh OH

  Head lolling, the Princesse de Lascabanes mingled her moans with those of the Pakistani.

  rub and run escape the Dutch anathema can’t you see c’est moi mon père MOI God will understand I am real my soul is no Catholic balloon Protestant satchel I am this flying shoebox the prayers rattling inside grâce à Dieu on atterrira à Orly à 07h 05

  Sir Basil Hunter refused his plastic dinner; if they had offered him a real one he might not have had the appetite for it. Instead, he told the hostess, he would like a second little bottle of Scotch: he held his fingers just so far apart to make it look tinier.

  She was a sonsy piece: if it had been the sort of thing you were looking for. He wasn’t. No return flight had ever caught him feeling older: just the part for which the lavatory mirror had cast him.

  Could it be that when Mummy dies, the age hidden in her little boy floats to the surface? Balls of course. He was all whimsy tonight: the Scotch was bringing it out. And in any case he had never really cared for—well, he had been fond of her, on and off—as a safe exercise, from another hemisphere. She had been there: always as an abstraction, sometimes as a positive enjoiner.

  Or flesh: at a distance she was still visible, palpable, out of respect for sensuality perhaps, or the acting profession, hesitating, it seemed deliberately, at the head of the st
airs (all beautiful women stage-manage their entrances, either intuitively, or more likely after endless rehearsal on feeling the first tremors of power in their green girlhood) then this woman is descending, not yet revealing her full radiance, keeping it veiled in false modesty, at least as far as the tip of her nose, because her lips are already faintly faintly smiling to herself as she glances at her feet (that shortsightedness which is neither confessed nor denied) till about the fourth stair the light breaks from inside around her, it is the moment you never catch in a flower however determined you are to witness the miracle of exploding petals, that is exactly what happens as this being descends, in a burst of sensuous joy she needs to share with those standing in comparative darkness below, controlling their breath, their blood, their amateurish attitudes, while her sun beats down on them, the rustle of her skirt, her fall of jewels promises relief from their drought of waiting, from their yes Mrs Hunter no Mrs Hunter how well you’re looking at their last gasp they are not relieved they are made drunk.

  Her smile is a perfume. Basil! Aren’t you in bed? This is my ‘mother’.

  Sir Basil Hunter looked at his fellow passengers, to dare them. Nobody had noticed; nor that the face he had brought back with him from the lavatory mirror was in a sweat: this slightly rotten fruit—her son.

  He would perhaps feel better if he loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar. It might be less painful in the end if one never allowed oneself to forget that flesh and tuberoses are only a disguise: death is the reality. Or that old doll leering up, out of a lot of greasy lipstick and a purple wig. Why have you kept me waiting darling? On the contrary, everything hurtles at you with diabolical speed.

  That letter from Mitty Jacka (don’t bother forwarding mail to Gogong; this is to be a complete rest) he found waiting at the Onslow after returning from their weeks of exploration ha-ha! at ‘Kudjeri’. He still took out the Jacka’s letter, misshapen from pockets and soggy with sweat, to re-read bits of it, often aloud,