The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  Her own lips invoked, ‘“Deep Carnation”,’ and let it die in a breathy hush.

  ‘You’ve forgotten the teeth, Sister. The teeth! You can’t possibly work on my mouth before you’ve stuck the teeth in. Don’t you realize?’

  Sister Manhood was corrected. She fetched the expensively created, natural-yellow teeth: never without a shiver. It was Mrs Hunter who began to hoist; but you had to shove, until you were both involved in what must have looked like part suicide, part murder.

  When she had sucked and glugged, the old thing would loll back exhausted. ‘Hateful things, teeth!’

  It couldn’t concern a young woman preoccupied by her devotions; nor was the object of these rites more than a moment humanly distressed: breath held, eyes closed, she reached out towards the necessary level of abstraction.

  After shooting the lipstick out of its gilt cartridge and making one or two conventionally mystic passes at nothing, the white-robed priestess began weaving deep carnation into the naked, crinkled lips. Anything she knew of art, all that she had learnt of sensuality, Sister Manhood drove into this mouth which was not her own. If she had never before attained to selflessness she succeeded now, forcing an illusion to assume a purple reality.

  Not all selfless, however: her act became a longing; she could have cried out through her own brooding, swollen lips; she would have accepted humbly, if only for that moment, any delicious indignity he might have demanded of her.

  ‘Mmmhhh!’ Mrs Hunter dragged her mouth sideways with an unexpected suddenness and strength which almost ruined the work of art, and certainly curtailed any advances Sister Manhood might have been making in the direction of ecstasy. ‘I’m not a thing, am I?’ Or if you were, you didn’t like other people’s behaviour to confirm it.

  ‘Oh, you’re going to—you already are—looking gorgeous!’ Sister Manhood sounded so throaty she must have meant it.

  ‘Am I?’ Mrs Hunter whispered softly.

  ‘“I could have danced all night”,’ Sister Manhood distinctly sang; then she murmured, ‘Are we going for eyeshadow?’

  Mrs Hunter revived. ‘Just a dash.’ She smiled up like a little girl thrilled by her own daring.

  ‘Blue?’

  ‘Blue,’ she agreed. ‘No!’ she luckily remembered. ‘“Delphinium-silver.” ‘

  Flora Manhood knew what to do: she traced on Elizabeth Hunter’s eyelids the dreamiest of moonlit snail-tracks. Elizabeth Hunter, all but transmuted, lolled in a delphinium-silver bliss.

  Till it occurred to her, ‘You know Alfred never approved of make-up?’

  ‘Didn’t he?’

  ‘Not even when it had become acceptable.’

  Their weaknesses brought nurse and patient close. At times their unhappiness was transferable; at others, it was their joys.

  Sister Manhood stood back after whisking a hair off the lips she had recently created. ‘Are you thinking of a wig, love?’

  ‘The lilac’ Mrs Hunter was definite on that.

  ‘How will you wear it?’

  ‘Flowing free.’

  ‘For a big occasion?’ The priestess had been prepared to give her all on a feast day.

  ‘Yes. Flowing. I have decided to appear utterly natural.’

  ‘I won’t try to persuade you against. But I did think of bouffing it up a bit.’

  The other members of the order, Sisters de Santis and Badgery, and the lay sisters, Lippmann and Cush, were aware it was Sister Manhood who renewed whatever was required for the ritual of anointment; what they didn’t know was that Mrs Hunter had paid for Flora’s course in the upkeep of wigs. The secret was one the two of them enjoyed, though Sister Manhood was inclined to disguise her doubly esoteric knowledge under a crust of irony, and to swing her hips and crook her fingers as guardian of the wigs.

  When she had fetched the lilac one, she drew it on reverently enough, over the fretful wisps of unnaturally natural hair and meek patches of scalp. The lilac climax appealed to a religious sense Flora Manhood thought she had discarded outside the weatherboard church down the road from the banana farm: she had wanted a miracle and it wasn’t granted; unless, possibly, whenever she assisted at Elizabeth Hunter’s resurrection.

  Now she backed between the furniture, feeling her way with her heels, with outstretched hands trembling between the pressures of emotion and air, till she reached the best distance from which to contemplate what in one sense was nothing more than a barbaric idol, frightening in its garishness of purple-crimson, lilac floss, and fluorescent white, in its robe of battered, rather than beaten, rose-gold, the claws, gloved in a jewelled armour, stiffly held about the level of the navel, waiting apparently for some further motive which might bring them to rest on the brocaded lap.

  In spite of her desire to worship, the younger woman might have been struck with horror if the faintly silvered lids hadn’t flickered open on the milkier, blank blue of Elizabeth Hunter’s stare. Then, for an instant, one of the rare coruscations occurred, in which the original sapphire buried under the opalescence invited you to shed your spite, sloth, indifference, resentments, along with an old woman’s cruelty, greed, selfishness. Momentarily at least this fright of an idol became the goddess hidden inside: of life, which you longed for, but hadn’t yet dared embrace; of beauty such as you imagined, but had so far failed to grasp (with which Col grappled, you bitterly suspected, somewhere in the interminably agitated depths of music); and finally, of death, which hadn’t concerned you, except as something to be tidied away, till now you were faced with the vision of it.

  It was the spectre of death which brought them both toppling down. Mrs Hunter suddenly twitched as though someone had walked over her grave. Sister Manhood herself was stroked into gooseflesh.

  ‘Am I looking—well?’ The purple lips quivered with the necessity for confirmation.

  Even if the nurse could have found a satisfactory answer, she was too distracted to offer it, what with Lottie Lippmann’s far from obligatory crackle of excitement in the hall; men’s voices; a thudding on the stairs; again men’s voices, mounting, louder.

  Elizabeth Hunter’s armoured fingers descended to her lap, ascended to where her breasts had been; then the hands fell like the Fabergé they were. ‘He’s come, has he? He’s come!’

  Sister Manhood couldn’t answer. Each of them was threatened by an imminence; but Elizabeth Hunter was the more afraid: her enamelled face was cracked with terror.

  ‘Do you think he’ll remember me?’

  You couldn’t console this poor old doll; you didn’t know how to, any more than you could ever help yourself.

  And then the door was opening: it was Mr Wyburd, his business suit, his correctly-mannered face, both ravaged by a day in which too much had happened. The solicitor might disjoint his fingers in trying to fit himself out with the right attitude and expression, as well as find words of an accuracy more painstaking than those he normally used. The old man looked properly grilled.

  After muttering his way past the superfluous nurse, raising his voice, though he must have known it annoyed his client (deaf is something I am not Arnold whatever else) he managed to utter, ‘Mrs Hunter—he’s here! Sir Basil—heugh heugh!’

  The laugh sounded awful: it creaked so; it obviously wasn’t what he had intended. But nervousness, the nurse could see, more than nervousness—fright, had aged the solicitor. He had had almost more than he could take, as he stood twisting the signet ring with the blue stone, practically peeing, you felt, in those baggy trousers.

  But what was inevitable, for everybody, happened: Sir Basil Hunter entered.

  His mother’s anguish was audible. What of his? Because the nurse did not know him, except from the legend of his career as told in pictures by the magazines, she could not guess. And now, faced with him in the flesh, she was further dazzled by the aura of charm and brilliantine the great actor was wearing.

  On catching sight of the figure in the wheelchair, Sir Basil hesitated the tick of a second, as though he had found an u
nderstudy waiting on the spot where his leading lady should have been; then (your performance is what matters; curse the management only after the curtain calls) he continued across the carpet with that distinctive limp, probably a mannerism before it had set in slight gout, but which never weakened the power of his attack. One shoulder slouched a shade in advance of the other, he was presented in fact, though not objectionably, sideways to the audience of two, a hand outstretched beyond the custom-made cuff visible by a couple of inches at the end of his perfectionist sleeve.

  He spoke, and the nurse thrilled to the riches in the voice. ‘Darling—what a homecoming!’

  As for the former goddess become a trembly woman, she, too, recovered her technique, her rings reaching up to clutch at her lover, his shoulder if she could get there, as soon as he arrived at her side. ‘How I’ve waited, dearest! I believe the fat lambs mean more to you than I.’

  Again Sir Basil hesitated, but drove himself at the understudy.

  When Elizabeth Hunter rallied. ‘Why—Basil? Basil! Whatever happened in Bangkok?’

  Sir Basil drew out of his breast pocket an enormous, enormously monogrammed, immensely expensive handkerchief to mop up what he hadn’t reckoned with: not from an understudy.

  ‘People, Mother. And then, I had a kind of—not exactly a turn—but needed a few hours rest. That’s the only reason, darling.’

  SHE was looking at him. ‘You were never—I shan’t say deceitful, Basil—but often disappointing.’

  He parried it with Olympic expertise. ‘Isn’t disappointment something we’ve got to expect the moment we put our mouths to the nipple?’

  Then they were clawing at each other; their ‘darlings’ richocheted off the rosewood while they played their scene.

  ‘I was not,’ Elizabeth Hunter panted between kisses, ‘what you would call a natural mother. I couldn’t feed you—in spite of all that raw steak—as I must have told you—it seems. But that, you see—darling—hasn’t deprived you of—of nourishment.’

  As he knelt beside her, exposing his still considerable profile, while she buried her rings in his hair in an effort to reintegrate the fragments of a relationship, probably neither of them was more than formally conscious of an audience: which is how it becomes on those evenings when all the elements of a performance, on either side of the footlights, are perfectly fused.

  Three

  HE SHOULD have remembered his right knee was having one of its bad spells. In his response to the theatre of reunion, while disguising the shock of finding the Lilac Fairy standing in as his rehearsed-for mother, he had thrown himself at her feet, and was now paying the penalty for giving too much too soon. But he owed it to her—to them.

  ‘Bless you,’ he said, ‘Mother.’ He kissed the claw which had finally disentangled itself from his hair, and distinctly felt the sympathy streaming out towards him, the rapport he was establishing with the whole auditorium. (The nurse was quite a dish as far as he could tell, still only from out of the corner of an eye.)

  He got up wincing for his age, his gout (left the pills in the bathroom cupboard in Eaton Place; not that they ever did much good). But the audience hadn’t noticed; at least the nurse hadn’t: she was too much like rapturous youth at its first play. He wasn’t so sure the old Wyburd was on his side.

  As you moved towards left centre Mother said, ‘Is anything the matter with you, Basil? Why are you limping? Isn’t your health in order? You never write to me—except when you’re down the financial drain—so I don’t know anything.’

  It was not in the script; he tried to shrug it off. ‘Oh—a nothing—a twinge.’ The bedazzled nurse accepted it; the solicitor was one of those patches of silence which occur even on your best nights.

  As for Mother, she said, ‘All ailments are hereditary, I think—like moral flaws. I am arthritic, Basil. I had a great-uncle who went blind at the end. I am blind—physically, anyway.’

  This time he more than shrugged; he raised his left shoulder. He could no longer look at her: greasy crimson overflowing the real mouth; the lilac silk sprouting from a withered cob. He felt he was to blame: the parents, those arch-amateurs of life, can’t be held responsible for themselves, let alone their children.

  ‘How is my granddaughter?’

  ‘Hardly ever see Imogen. She does turn up now and again with offers to do me good. Doing good is her stock-in-trade.’

  At least there was no mention of the wives, the mistresses, or any other moral blackmailers. He was conscious the pace was slowing up. Mustn’t let himself get dejected after coming all that way, at such expense, on what he was determined to see as a positive mission; he would make it so.

  ‘How’s poor old Dorothy?’ He pitched it to sound warm, mellow, affectionate, as indeed he had begun to feel towards a sister he hadn’t seen in years.

  ‘Dorothy is still poor old Dorothy,’ their mother gravely answered. ‘Full of the wrongs done her. She resents an experience I had on an island years ago. I expect she’ll be here to dinner.’

  The solicitor had to inform them the princess telephoned his office to say she had a headache. He didn’t tell them he wasn’t surprised. His loyalty, of an irrational kind, or else of such longstanding he was saturated with it, did not prevent him being caught in any of the cross currents.

  ‘There! I knew!’ The old lady was ablaze. ‘And you, Basil?’

  ‘I had booked a room at the Onslow. Didn’t want to …’

  ‘… give anybody any trouble. My cook will be so disappointed. She was an actress, you know—in Berlin—and other parts.’

  Not an actress! Nor daughter, nor wife, nor mother. He had reached that alarming stage in any actor’s career where he loses the desire to perform. Suddenly. He would have liked to flop down, feel the tape closing round his neck, the clean, soft, white bib settling below his chin, then a detached hand feeding him slowly but firmly with spoonfuls of sweetened bread and milk. In such circumstances the mistakes would not yet have been made, and might even be avoided.

  As things were, he could only answer, ‘Very well, Mother, I’ll stay to dinner. Actually it would give me great pleasure to meet your cook—and see some more of you, of course.’ This too, was ‘acting’, but a diffident performance of a small part.

  ‘Run, Sister Manhood, please—tell Mrs Lippmann Sir Basil will be here for dinner. She must—ex—exceed herself.’ In her anxiety that minds shouldn’t be changed, and that she scrape together words formal enough to compose her order, Mrs Hunter’s tongue continued protruding from her mouth after the order had been given.

  If he had felt less tired it might have shocked Sir Basil: that ‘slight stroke’ Wyburd had written about; though hadn’t your first reaction been to hope for a second one? So many problems solved by a stroke; so much unpleasantness avoided.

  Now as the nurse was hurrying to obey, he took it there was no danger. His conscience could enjoy the crisp swish of a departing skirt. If her nurse’s smile was in a convention, it was a pretty version of it, and he thought he could detect that slight friction of silken thighs against each other, scissorwise.

  He sighed brightly at his mother. ‘A pretty nurse.’

  ‘Oh, nurses! No end of them. And I’m the one who has to nurse the nurses. Take him, Arnold, and show him where everything is. The cloakroom lavatory doesn’t flush when you want it to.’

  ‘It does, Mrs Hunter, I assure you. We had it put right.’

  ‘It didn’t some years ago.’

  Sir Basil Hunter persuaded himself to kiss his mother just below where the lilac wig joined the forehead. What looked dry, tasted clammy. He closed his mouth on his revulsion; whatever the conscious motive for his visit, he realized that unconsciously he had been hoping for some sign that life is a permanence.

  She, on the other hand, seemed unaware of anything but her own exhaustion.

  ‘I’ll come up later,’ he made his words linger; ‘sit with you a while.’

  She did not answer, nor probably care.

&
nbsp; So, then, here he was, going downstairs with the Wy-burd, who was trying to talk theatre as though he thought that was the only stuff you were made of: well, there were one or two other components. The Wyburd wife and daughters, it appeared, had seen a performance of Macbeth.

  Whatever else, all, even your enemies, even the naming Agate, were agreed that you excelled as Macbeth. Though you yourself had endured agonizing doubts before the final flash of intuition. Perhaps you were after all the man of inspired mistakes.

  The solicitor was demonstrating how the lavatory flushed perfectly. ‘You see? She forgets.’ He sounded mildly, officially kind.

  ‘And remembers a hell of a lot that had better be forgotten.’

  ‘I expect so.’ There Arnold Wyburd would not wholly commit himself; of one thing he could not be sure.

  As they strolled down the path which meandered back and forth along the terraces of the darkening garden, the solicitor all of a sudden gushed sweat to think he too might one day remember publicly what he had decided to forget. Would senility cause him to betray himself? when he wouldn’t have wounded anyone intentionally: least of all, Lal.

  Feeling he ought, Basil decided to ask after the solicitor’s wife. The old man seemed pleased. It was becoming too easy to please: just as acting can become too easy, and you have to start again, imposing physical penance, and more painful still, by dragging up from the wells of the unconscious the sludge in which truth is found.

  The solicitor remembered, ‘My wife often tells how you made up your mind as a boy that you wanted to play Lear. And you did, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes. I had a shot at it. I’m one of the many premature Lears.’

  If you could remain long enough in this garden of ungoverned fronds, twisting paths, and statues disguising their real attitudes and intentions behind broken extremities and mossy smiles; if you could return upstairs and winkle experience out of the blind eyes and half-gelled responses of the Lilac Oracle, you might eventually present the Lear who had so far evaded almost everybody. But you had come here for a different purpose: short, sharp, and material.