The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  Farther back, while the suburbs were still streaming, she had tried to benefit from travelling by Mercedes, but you couldn’t ever: this one was so old-fashioned nobody would have recognized it, not amongst the glossy up to date models. Now that there wasn’t that much traffic, one or two dislocated fruit and vegetable trucks, here and there a family bus, what you looked like hardly mattered.

  Was this being happy? If, as she suspected, it was, nobody, not Col, not even the Old Bitch of Moreton Drive, would have dragged the confession out from between her lips, parted like an idiot’s, she realized, as she moistened their nakedness with her tongue.

  ‘This Mrs Hunter, because she’s old, comes out with the biggest nonsense. And thinks she can get away with it.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t tell you!’

  ‘If you can’t tell, why did you begin?’

  ‘I was making conversation.’

  ‘That isn’t conversation; it’s frustration.’

  ‘Oh, well.’

  She settled down. She liked being with Col at times, and this was one of them. She would have liked to take a look at him, but might have given herself away. More than anything it’s what you see; but that would not have done for poor Mrs Hunter, who had to invent theories about smells, and grow spooky over voices. Did the old thing remember with any clearness what she had seen when she had her sight? Men’s hands, for instance; their hard throats: men show you their thoughts in their throats, or anyway Col does. She had to have just one look.

  ‘What are you looking at?’

  ‘Thought I saw a signpost. But there wasn’t. God, scrub like this never stops once it begins.’

  Or it only stops for Noamurra.

  They were gliding at last into that different deeper green, paddocks with sprung hummocks, orchards with tangled, scaly trees, past a waterhole with scum on it: that was the deepest, deadliest green. Where there were houses they were faded or unpainted weatherboard, all old. Only the service station was new, the ads, and the drive-in pictures. The people too, seemed old, their weather-cured elephant skins, wedding rings eating into the leather. On a veranda almost screened by privet an old couple sat drinking tea out of white cups, and munching at something, probably scones. A daughter in a long straight cotton frock, and her simple brother, sat looking only at the road; they were younger than the old people of course, but elderly.

  The privet which recurred round most of the cottages began to overwhelm, to suffocate. If you turned your head a tropical moisture was tumbling, bouncing around your field of vision: which was always of the same deadly green, sometimes splotches of oranges, or pallid privet blossom.

  Col wanted to walk. So they walked the back roads. There was a child, a little girl squatting on the edge of an orchard, beside the road, fiddling with something in a glass jar.

  ‘What is it?’ She bent to ask the child, who wouldn’t answer at first, but hid her face, as appetizing as dark plums.

  ‘What are you playing with?’ you tried again, more than anything to hold your own.

  ‘A lizard.’

  It was a lizard all right in the jar, and the lizard had already lost its tail.

  ‘You won’t be cruel to it, will you?’ Silly the things you say to kids. ‘If I was you I’d let it go.’

  All eyes and glistening lips, the child gave the lizard a black look. ‘He’s my pet,’ she said.

  ‘All the same, I’d let him go.’

  Or would you? It was difficult to tell what you would have done, squatting by the roadside in muddied dress and tattered pants.

  Col said, when they had meandered on, ‘She’ll tear the head off as soon as we’ve turned the corner. To see what happens. You would have done the same, Flo.’

  ‘How do you know?’ She could feel her anger burning all the way up her neck.

  ‘I don’t know?’ he admitted; ‘but would guess.’ The air was too drowsy to allow prolonged speculation.

  ‘My own children wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘I’d see to that. Whatever I may be, I’d bring them up different.’

  He swung her hand, and laughed.

  ‘Why not?’ Indignation was blurring her words. ‘I’d try to better myself in my children.’

  They had cut across one of the green paddocks filled with spongy hummocks. The paddock might have been quilted on a large scale, the soft irregular quilting giving way beneath them as they tramped.

  ‘I’m sorry’, she said, ‘if I seem bad-tempered. I know I’m quarrelsome. There’s such a lot to quarrel about.’

  ‘It’s better to marry a girl with a bad temper. If you pick one that’s sweet and she turns out cranky it’s a big disappointment.’

  ‘I was never sweet. And marriage was nowhere near my mind. I meant, it’s a pity if you can’t go on a one-day outing without doing your block.’

  They ploughed ahead through the soft paddock, through probably many years, perhaps a human lifetime, of fallow.

  ‘If I was domesticated I suppose I’d have cut us some sandwiches.’

  ‘I haven’t a single illusion, Flo’; making bite gestures down her arm as though it was a cob of corn.

  ‘Stopputt!’ It was too silly.

  Or it wasn’t; as they pulled up facing each other the silence was serious around them. A network of midges hung in a glow of sunlight; on the one hand scraggy, slanting gums, on the other the fuzz of orange trees, sooty branches and wax-clogged twigs struggling to escape from their own crowd. She realized from the stillness that she was caught again, if she had ever really broken free. Col, who had at first stood back, was coming at her, like a sleep-walker returning by instinct to the room he had left earlier in the same dream; the exhausted, but intent trees were collaborating with him.

  She wasn’t. ‘What do you think I am?’ she protested; when she knew too well; when they were already fitting together. ‘Col?’ If her voice resounded blatantly it was because her mouth was still under compulsion.

  He didn’t reply. He went on dashing his lips backwards and forwards in the readymade groove of her mouth: where she couldn’t prevent them belonging.

  She was part of the plan his fingers had worked out scientifically, and which, finally, was their plan. He only tore one button from where it was rooted in his pants.

  In more conventional surroundings of sand and sea, their bodies never startled, but here against this hectic green their skins seemed a blinding, naked white. Immorally exposed at first, she was at last forced to ignore it.

  But muttered incidentally, ‘What if somebody comes?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘That child with the lizard—we might influence her whole life.’

  Not conceived along with their plan, the little girl was discarded. ‘A cruel kid—anyway.’ Flora Manhood remembered between gasps.

  She began to moan for something else as he drove her deeper into the yielding mattress of pricking grass.

  He sat up high above her. She was in love with the way his chest divided, till looking along her nose she became elsewhere riveted. She might have devoured her lover-tyrant if it hadn’t been for having to face Elizabeth Hunter’s grinning gums, her blind yet knowing stare.

  As soon as he allowed, she extricated her softened body, on principle, from the torpor of half-thoughts and flesh in which she could have continued lying.

  ‘You’re all crisscrossed, Flora, about the bum—it’s the twigs—and stained with green.’

  ‘What have you done to me?’ she moaned, trying to look over her shoulder at her quilted buttocks.

  ‘Isn’t it right?’ he asked. ‘Isn’t that what we came here for?’ Col too, grinning up at her.

  ‘Someone may see us,’ she began again.

  When they were only half dressed they were drawn back against each other; but now it was as if he was the child they had made together, her big child buffeting her breasts, and she couldn’t love him enough.

  ‘I don’t know what comes over us,’ she said when they were decent.


  ‘That’s what we do know, and you won’t admit it,’ he answered quietly.

  Along the road, near where they had parked the car, they found a house with a sign which read DRESSED POULTRY SNACKS BOILING WATER AS REQUIRED. The woman, in one of those long timeless cotton frocks, said she could fry them some eggs, if that was what they fancied. She brought them a dish of small, whole, eggshaped tomatoes. There was tea, from a brown enamel pot, in thick white cups.

  While they were eating, the long woman hung around. She would have liked to talk. After covering the weather, she tried out a current murder case. But your mouths were too full to contribute.

  ‘Arr, dear,’ the woman sighed. ‘It’s lovely to drive around on yer own—when you’re young,’ she added.

  Dribbles of egg were congealing with fat on the empty plates.

  ‘No family yet?’

  Col nearly swallowed the last egg tomato.

  Because his mouth was full, and anyway, this was a woman’s situation, you had to make the best of it. ‘No family. This is only a friendly outing.’

  The woman’s eyes had begun searching for the ring immediately after dropping her brick; she was blushing up her scrawny neck and along her leathery jaw. ‘I would of thought,’ she said, ‘but when it comes to some things, not everybody knows their own mind.’ Already slouching away from her mistake, she muttered above the sound of her sandshoes, ‘Kiddies make all the difference.’

  Col said too cheerfully when they were again in their car, ‘A lovely day at Noamurra! Know what it means ?’

  She didn’t of course.

  He said looking at her, ‘“Man and wife”.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  She did, though: Col knew everything; herself an ignorant girl off a North Coast banana farm, who took up nursing to catch a husband and then didn’t want one.

  They drove. At one point he put a hand between her thighs as though trying to show he owned her. If she didn’t throw it off it was because she was again lulled by the road.

  ‘There’s the concert Thursday,’ he reminded.

  She turned away, speaking out of the window, at the scrub, the rocks. ‘I don’t know what you want me at concerts for.’

  ‘Because I like to have you with me.’

  ‘But I don’t know how to listen to music. All that Mahler! All I can do is think of other things at music.’

  He didn’t seem to feel it mattered. ‘That’s fine. Go on thinking, Flo, and some of the music’ll rub off on your thoughts.’

  But he made her feel empty: the paperbacks, the records, knowing what Noamurra means. What had she got to offer Col, except her body, and her unborn children? Oh God those would come popping out of her like peas if she didn’t keep her wits about her.

  She might have felt content, so full of sun, and fried eggs, and Col; she might have snoozed if it hadn’t been for the little children climbing on her lap kneading her breasts dabbling their lashes in her throat crimping her skin into the smiles she wouldn’t allow herself to show how much she longed to take their golden cheeks between her teeth to test for love.

  ‘Had a good nap?’ he asked.

  ‘I wasn’t sleeping, if you think I was,’ she answered, just like Mrs Hunter.

  ‘You’ve been flopping like a half-filled sack most of the way to Hornsby.’ And he squeezed her knee to annoy her.

  Flora Manhood could have used the whole evening, elbows on the sill, hands folded against her cheek. She might have slipped the moment before from the attitude of prayer to one of dreaming, above the empty, faded park, above the traffic noises, facing the cut-out of convents on the skyline. Whatever else, she wouldn’t like to be a nun. Better than anything she would have liked to be nothing, or a dream through which she let down her hair into the evening like in that opera Col told the long hair her lover tied to a tree and she was caught. But what lover? Someone unknown walking out of the park at dusk, perfect to almost not existing. But wouldn’t she be caught? Yes, always!

  The little tingle tinkle was coming from the bell the old thing kept beside her bed. Disgusted by the inevitable trap into which her own thoughts had led her, the nurse was now positively anxious to collaborate with her case. She adjusted her veil as austerely as Matron would have wished, and stepped out along the passage towards the still fretfully tinkling summons.

  Almost twirling on the balls of her feet as she entered, Sister Manhood announced, ‘We’ve been neglecting you, haven’t we, Mrs Hunter? Now we must make up for it.’

  So good-humoured: you wondered where the catch was; prepared for something else, Mrs Hunter could not match her nurse’s volte-face. ‘I don’t suppose we can expect you permanently on the mat, but we don’t pay you to ignore us—Sister.’

  Sister Manhood ignored what was, after all, only a pinprick from Her. ‘I’m at your service, Mrs Hunter. Anything you care to command.’ She moistened her fresh lipstick with her tongue; she knew she must be looking pretty, though the old thing wouldn’t see that.

  ‘I want you to sit me in my chair.’

  ‘Do you think you’re up to it today?’

  ‘I must be. I must be sitting in my chair—for—for his arrival.’

  The nurse wheeled the chair, a functional contraption in chrome and leather, through that finicky rosewood and silver jungle.

  ‘First my gown,’ Mrs Hunter reminded; only she could remember the moves in their correct order.

  The nurse fetched the gown, of crumpled, tarnished rose brocade. At some time or other moths must have got into the sleeves, edged with what Flora Manhood believed were real sables. The garment’s tattiness could not lessen her respect for its intimations of original splendour.

  ‘Don’t be careless with my arms, please,’ Mrs Hunter warned. ‘Trained nurses have little idea how the human anatomy works.’

  When the gown was arranged, the chair at the bedside, the nurse gathered up the bundle of creaking bones and acerbated flesh, and manoeuvred it into a seated position.

  ‘So healthy,’ Mrs Hunter murmured, inhaling the draught from her nurse’s movements, under it the scented warmth of youth. ‘And strong.’

  ‘There, love. Are you comfy?’ Suddenly Flora Manhood was filled with pity: not for Mrs Hunter specifically, but she had to spend it on somebody; and there below the nightie, between the panels of rose brocade and edgings of real, moth-eaten sables, were those legs like sticks of grey spaghetti.

  The nurse knelt to put slippers on the chilly, transparent feet.

  Mrs Hunter sounded almost tearful. ‘Your hands feel kind, Sister. I hope you haven’t forgotten your promise to make me up.’

  Sister Manhood was ashamed: she would have given anything to be gentle, serene, loving by nature. It didn’t come easy, and perhaps she would never learn.

  ‘No, I haven’t forgotten.’ In standing up she curbed any further tendency to emotion.

  ‘I hope it doesn’t bore you.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t bore me.’ In fact it was the only part of the performance she genuinely enjoyed; they both knew it.

  Mrs Hunter grunted; she was happy at last.

  Sister Manhood fetched the vanity case, of later period than Mrs Hunter herself. In blue glacé leather with silver fittings, it was as much out of keeping as a chorus girl would have looked under the great silver sun which radiated from the head of Mrs Hunter’s rosewood bedstead.

  Mrs Hunter was happy; she snuffed up the smell of cosmetics which escaped when the case was opened.

  Sister Manhood went to work, you could not have said Voluptuously’, because of a certain air of reverence; while her subject submitted her cheeks with pride. As Sister Manhood worked the foundation cream into the droughty wrinkles, even Sister de Santis might have respected such obvious dedication. Not the technique, though: some of it was voluptuous.

  Elizabeth Hunter was at the first stage transformed into a glimmering ghost of the past. She could feel her cheeks rounding out. Those white dresses she use
d to wear: people stopped talking whenever she started coming downstairs.

  ‘Turn the light on, Sister.’

  ‘But there’s still daylight enough, Mrs Hunter. Truly. I can see perfectly.’

  ‘Go on—switch it on, please. I like to feel the light round me. It’s so much warmer.’

  Sister Manhood turned her annoyance into a mild sigh: smearing foundation cream on the switch. ‘I was only thinking of the expense—using electric light so early.’ At least the right sentiments.

  ‘I have always been extravagant,’ Mrs Hunter said, and smiled.

  I bet you were—when it was yourself, Sister Manhood didn’t say.

  Something was hurting Mrs Hunter, it seemed. ‘Alfred—my husband, considered that nobody learns to switch off lights or turn off taps till they have to pay the bills. That’s true in most cases. Nobody ever thought of Alfred,’ she said.

  Sister Manhood was rootling around in the vanity case amongst the jars and cartridges. She had begun to hum, almost to sing, what was intended as ‘I could have danced all night’.

  ‘Where is my husband?’ Mrs Hunter asked; the anxiety gathering on her face was undoing much of her acolyte’s work.

  The nurse was frightened for a moment; she didn’t know how to handle it; then she said, ‘I expect something has delayed him. He’ll come, though.’

  ‘Yes, he’ll come.’

  With the back of her hand Flora Manhood brushed the perspiration from where her moustache would have been. ‘Which tones do we fancy this evening?’ she asked in her brightest, classiest voice.

  ‘“Dusk Rose” for the cheeks, “Deep Carnation” for the lips,’ Mrs Hunter answered with conviction.

  ‘Mmmh? I’d have thought “Crimson Caprice” for the lips. Not if you don’t fancy it, of course.’

  ‘“Deep Carnation”.’

  Mrs Hunter’s cheeks took dusky wing. She closed her eyes: the perfumes rising out of the blue glacé leather might have been drugging her.

  Comparatively languid dashing away at the cheeks, Sister Manhood was nursing the subtler resources of her art, or vocation, for the lips.