The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  She flipped over the page to see that it was from Dr Treweek of Gogong, an unattractive elderly man with dandruff on his coat collar, and a habit of breaking wind regardless of who was present. What Dr Treweek had to say would undoubtedly be distasteful; at least she was on her guard against it.

  … Briefly, I have to inform you that Bill is suffering from cancer of the liver, and is unlikely to last many months. This was established on a recent visit to a specialist in Sydney, of which you are unaware, as your husband’s chief concern in life is not to cause, others distress. I have strongly advised him to let me arrange for his admission to a hospital in the city, but his present intention is to see his illness out at ‘Kudjeri’. Even with a nurse in attendance, and at present he refuses to have one, this will create difficulties, as perhaps you can imagine. The housekeeper is in a state of nerves, and may easily pack her traps rather than accept responsibility for an incurable invalid. There you have the situation. Whether you are conscious of your husband’s selflessness, any more than his stubbornness, I cannot tell, but as you are his wife it is up to you to make several important decisions. (Sorry if you can’t forgive me for throwing such an unexpected bomb!)

  Yrs truly

  ROBERT TREWEEK

  As it burst around her, distorting the view of the park, tingling in pins and needles down her limbs, and with particular violence in the freshly manicured hands with which she held the offensive letter (how had he dared underline the ‘wife’!) she couldn’t easily, perhaps never, forgive Robert Treweek. In the first surge of her rage and horror she almost went so far as to hold him responsible for Alfred’s condition. At the mercy of a country physician! The physician no doubt would draw attention to the patient’s neglect of himself (through selflessness, desire not to cause distress, etc.) to disguise his own ignorance and negligence.

  So at first she could not weep, for anger, and because the charming filigree of her life had been hammered without warning into an ugly, patternless entanglement.

  Till she did begin to cry. She could only remember Alfred’s hurt, never the joyful, expressions of his face. Not their affection for each other, only her ill-natured dismissal of some of his more tender advances. Lying on her unshared bed, the freedom of which she had so often told herself she enjoyed, she tried to recover her normal capacity for making up her mind. Unable to do so, she was glad of Dr Treweek’s image, to match her rage against the explosion of his bomb.

  Then, as the afternoon advanced, she exorcised her grief simply by letting it pour out. It seemed as though nothing would remain of herself, who had failed to recognize this gentle man her husband.

  As light as unlikely probably as painful as a shark’s egg the old not body rather the flimsy soul is whirled around sometimes spat out anus-upward (souls have an anus they are never allowed to forget it) never separated from the brown the sometimes tinted spawn of snapshots the withered navel string still stuck to what it aspires to yes at last to be if the the past the dream life will allow.

  Suddenly Mrs Hunter was leaving for ‘Kudjeri’. Herself packed the crocodile dressing-case (tearing one of her nails on a hasp) as well as a larger bag, for what kind of visit she did not stop to think, only that she had to go. Nor could she give the maids any indication how long she would be away from home; she would ask Mr Wyburd to pay them weekly if she continued absent. She did not send for Lennox—it was late—but rang for a taxi to drive her to the station.

  Throughout the train journey she sat pressed into her corner of the empty compartment. She felt cramped with cold, while unable to make the effort to raise a half-lowered window. The upholstery smelt of tunnels and night. She saw she had forgotten her gloves, and that the hands Miss Thormber had admired that morning were wearing a superfluity of rings.

  It was again morning, though still only the dead of it, when she arrived at Gogong, at the Imperial Hotel. While she tried to rouse someone, she became increasingly aware of her own superfluousness. On the other hand, Hagerty the publican, as soon as he had recovered from his first annoyance, was impressed by the arrival of Mrs Hunter, of all people. He offered to run her out, there and then, to ‘Kudjeri’. She said she would take a room at the hotel, and hire a car in the morning: she didn’t want to upset her husband’s housekeeper by fetching her down in her nightdress.

  The remainder of those white hours trickled like sand under her eyelids as she lay between the rough sheets and tried to accept the small part she played in existence. A cock, a dog, and the moon were the major characters, it seemed. Till a cockatoo, evidently left uncovered, united its screeches with the crowing and barking. A man was cursing as he first muffled, then silenced, the cockatoo. Slippers slopped across the yard. There was the sound of somebody making water against stone.

  She may have slept an instant. And did not really wake till the hire-car was approaching ‘Kudjeri’, her husband’s property, never hers, though for some years her automaton had run his house and given orders for the rearing of his children. If she belonged at all in the district, it was from living as a little girl at Salkelds’ rundown place. So she did belong: as inevitably as the brown river flowing beneath willows, as her own blood running through her veins. So she had to respond at last to these hidden jewels of hills. The same sun, re-discovering fire in dew and rock, was drawing tears and bedazzled acceptance from frozen eyes.

  Too soon the car was crunching on the drive, bruising the laurels, swirling round the oval rose-bed in front of the house. Alfred had come out and was standing at the foot of the veranda steps, as though by appointment. At least he did not appear surprised, only so much thinner, smaller, than she remembered. She had to stoop, she found, to embrace her husband. This, and the hire-car man’s abrupt departure, gave their relationship a special significance: they must have looked like lovers locked in one of the conventional attitudes of passion; whereas she knew by her own diffidence, and the response of her frail ‘lover’, each of them only wanted to comfort the other’s spirit. Whether they would be given time or grace, remained to be seen.

  Alfred said, ‘It’s the best month of the year at “Kudjeri”;’ as though this were her first visit.

  ‘Oh, there’ll be all the months, if you let me stay.’

  As a man he was trying to pick up the larger of the two bags, and found he no longer could. Instead of going into the house, leaving the luggage to the groom, as would have happened normally, they began struggling, panting, for possession of the handle, converting a minor into a major issue; they needed to. By the time she had got control they were saved: Alfred must have decided he would not degrade himself morally by carrying the smaller dressing-case; she would lug the larger bag up the steps if it tore her side open.

  Opening still on special feast days for Sister de Santis to put her hand in and touch the remains even that most unregenerate non-nun Sister Flora Pudenda is reconciled to a relic only it is not mine it is Alfred’s whose liver is recommended worship remember any stench is sanctity the odour of each time a panful I lie again if I’m lucky in the arms of my DEAR LORD whose strength increases as he weakens I the guilty I will never be eaten away never purged because sin won’t come out in the bedpan like what the walls call shit I like Kleenex best Sister it’s softer and some nuns are heavy handed send for St Mary de Kleenex funny how the sinless overlook the stains understand the insufferable sins which can’t escape or perhaps no one is sinless otherwise how would the night nurse get through her nights.

  In spite of his autumnal complexion and the altered, more refined structure of his face, the first days were like a convalescence rather than an illness. Or perhaps that was how she wanted to see it. Alfred himself never referred to his condition in her presence.

  Twice a week the doctor came out from Gogong. He was never without a sleepless, often a glazed look. He drove himself to such an extent she sometimes wondered whether it was without assistance.

  Once as she approached the pantry where he was sterilizing a syringe, she heard voices. Eld
red the groom must have come in, and was addressing the doctor with an unashamed callousness, ‘If you don’t mind my saying so, Doc, you look like the ghost that wasn’t laid.’

  Dr Treweek was squirting the syringe at the ceiling as she reached the doorway. ‘Not laid, but near enough,’ he admitted. ‘I feel just about fucked, Eldred.’

  The groom looked shocked to see the mistress, and made his getaway.

  She could not conceal from the doctor what was a mixture of dislike, apprehension, and petulance. ‘Is the pain increasing, then?’

  ‘Yes.’ He sawed at a capsule till its neck broke. ‘I’m going to show you how to give the needle. He’ll probably want it more regularly now. If he seems real bad, you can ring me and I’ll come out, but I’m nearly run off my feet as it is.’ His contempt for her was obvious.

  ‘I’m sure I can manage on my own,’ she replied as coldly as she could; ‘if you’ll show me.’ She was looking down her nose from under her lowered eyelids, but the effect was wasted because Dr Treweek had turned his back.

  When he had filled the syringe, she followed him into the bedroom, where Alfred was lying waiting. He had a mysterious greedy expression which excluded her from the rite the doctor was about to perform. Even so, she was determined to help: she pulled down the pyjama pants over the wasted buttock, and only trembled on catching sight of the slender testicles, the blue head of the shrivelled penis.

  ‘There we are,’ said Dr Treweek.

  ‘What—not now?’ He thrust the hypodermic at her, when she hadn’t bargained for it this side of some very vague interval of time.

  As he explained the technique she stood holding the evil weapon she was expected to drive into her husband’s flesh. Resistance to the whole idea almost made her vomit.

  ‘Fire away!’ the doctor commanded. ‘If you‘re honest, I expect you’ve done worse in your time.’ He laughed through what must have been phlegm.

  Because of the truth in his remark she couldn’t feel injured. But plunged the needle.

  The doctor said, ‘You’ll make an expert, Mrs Hunter.’

  While she withdrew the needle under cover of the wad of cotton wool, Alfred was lying, eyes closed, throat working, mouth relaxed in advance of relief: he might have experienced the perfect orgasm.

  Then the doctor changed his tactics, his voice, bent down over his patient, and touched the sweat-stained pyjama shoulder. ‘You’ll be feeling better now, old feller.’ It sounded as though he was speaking through a megaphone.

  Again Mrs Hunter was excluded; till Alfred gasped in an unrecognizable voice, ‘Thank you—Elizabeth.’

  She asked the doctor, ‘May I give you some lunch before the drive back?’

  He accepted, and she served him herself, with a dish of spiced beef and salad, afterwards leaving him to it. Several rooms away she heard him belch, and as she was seeing him off, withstood the metallic blast of the pickled onions he had devoured too hastily.

  ‘Don’t hesitate to ring me,’ he reminded while settling himself in his car. ‘I’d do anything for old Bill.’

  As the doctor predicted, she became adept at giving the injection, but all this was only later, after the ‘convalescence’ period of Alfred Hunter’s fatal illness.

  In the beginning they enjoyed this sere honeymoon of the hopeful spirit. They were full of consideration for each other, and hungrily discussed everyday matters in minutest detail.

  ‘Send for Stanilands, Betty, in the morning. I’d like to ask him whether he thinks we could use Kilgallen. Still immature, I know, but a fine ram in the making. I’d be interested to see his progeny—if that will be possible.’ At this first hint that it might not be, he began wriggling his neck inside the collar which had grown too large for him, and twitching at one corner of his mouth.

  She brought him a pear she had specially picked; taking it from its muslin bag, she stood holding this enormous, perfect, golden fruit humbly in her two hands. ‘Do you feel tempted? Let me peel it for you at least, so that you can enjoy the perfume.’

  He agreed to that, and because he loved her, allowed her to feed him slivers which he tried to swallow, while the juice ran down amongst the stubble on his chin.

  She coaxed Eldred to shave her patient. Alfred liked him; he had mentioned naming the groom’s family in his will. She too, was revived by the man’s presence, one of physical strength and health, none the worse for sometimes bringing with it smells of the stable, or of milk from the house cows in his charge.

  Do you like …? was one of the games she and Alfred played. It was shameful how little they knew about each other, at least those childish tastes to which they confessed; if their honesty did not cut deeper, it was because the knife could not have prolonged their relationship: better to cherish surfaces in the time left to them.

  Now that it was late autumn the evenings were what they most looked forward to. ‘Ask Eldred to bring in another log before he goes down to the cottage.’ After the groom had built up the fire and taken his leave, they would look through books together.

  ‘What a funny old thing you are! To have been collecting this hoard of books over the years and kept so quiet about it!’

  ‘You’ve never been interested in books.’

  It was true; it had suited her purposes to adopt the opinion that to read is to live at second hand.

  Now she could only murmur, ‘I’ve read myself to sleep night after night. I’d say Goethe is my most effective pill.’ She made a wry face to match her trumped-up explanation; farther than that she didn’t go; nor did his kindness let him force her into an admission of frivolous tastes.

  In fact, from the anxious way he immediately shifted his position, he seemed to fear she might have sensed a criticism he had not intended to offer. ‘You had your life to live. It’s different in the country—when you’re on your own.’ It was the bitterest reproach he had made: in one instant she experienced interminable nights aching with frost and silence.

  She was looking through a book of French engravings and lithographs. Added to Alfred’s remark, the artist’s insistence on death, his marsh flowers, and detached, blandly staring eyeballs made her material self seem even more trivial and ephemeral. She quickly turned the pages to escape her unwilling fascination by reaching the end of the book; when she became spellbound by the artist’s image of what he called a skiapod: not her own actual face, but the spiritual semblance which will sometimes float out of the looking-glass of the unconscious. Unlike most of the other monsters in the book, this half-fish half-woman appeared neither allied to, nor threatened by, death: too elusive in weaving through deep waters, her expression a practically effaced mystery; or was it one of dishonesty, of cunning?

  ‘What are you looking at?’ Alfred asked.

  ‘Glimpses of the morbid mind of Odilon Redon.’ She made this attempt at complacency as she snapped the book together.

  He loved her to read to him. They were halfway through The Charterhouse of Parma, which he admired, he said, ‘almost more than anything else’. Her own pleasure in it was sometimes lost in its longueurs, but she improved on those by listening to the sound of her own voice: when she made the effort, she read well.

  That night Alfred began staring at her in what appeared like suddenly feverish, hitherto unrealized, admiration. ‘Isn’t she splendid?’ he interrupted. ‘What a dazzler of a woman—the Sanseverina!’

  ‘A bit female at times.’ If her voice sounded dry, it was from the length of time she had spent reading aloud.

  ‘Womanly women don’t much care for one another, I suppose.’

  She herself certainly had never counted overmuch on her women friends. ‘There’s something else—a kind of freemasonry which brings them together, and they feel they must obey some of the rules.’

  He laughed: they were united in a moment of such understanding she went and knelt beside his chair and started desperately kissing his hands. It was as close as they came to physical desire during those last weeks. But the hands remained
cold and yellow.

  Shortly after, he said, ‘If you don’t mind, Bet—you’ll have to give me a shot tonight.’

  As his strength left him, Eldred would carry him down to his chair in the library. Still later in his decline, she would call the groom to lift him out of or into his bed, till the day she discovered she could manage this bundle of dwindling flesh herself.

  At once their relationship changed. Where she had loved, now she pitied. It was not pity in the ordinary sense, but an emotional need to merge herself with this child who might have sprung in the beginning from her body, by performing for him all the more sordid menial acts: tenderly wiping, whether faeces, or the liquid foods he mostly vomited back. Sometimes in the dependency of this new relationship she thought of her actual children: she had never felt pity for those, walled up in themselves, armed for emergencies with formidable moral weapons. But perhaps she had been wrong: they may have needed her pity; she might have earned their love.

  On a day of steely, straight rain, she was forced to approach a subject Alfred was determined to avoid. ‘Surely now you should allow me to write and tell the children?’

  ‘I don’t want to disrupt their lives.’

  ‘If, when you go, they haven’t been told, they may resent it terribly.’ Of course she could not truthfully answer for their children, only for herself, the remorse boiling up in her.

  Whatever Alfred’s wishes, she took it upon herself to write.

  Dorothy, in the grip of her unhappy marriage, replied in a translation from the French:

  My dearest Father,

  You can imagine my feelings on receiving this truly shocking news. It grieves me deeply to be unable to do anything to ease your suffering. Here I am, living, though neither fruitfully nor happily, at the other end of the earth, yet with certain obligations towards those who have become by marriage my family. Hubert I rarely see; we play Cox and Box between Lunegarde and Passy. But I shall not allow myself to hate my husband, nor shall anyone have cause to blame me for not trying, if our marriage appears to fail. The dreadful old princess my mother-in-law is eternally waiting to pounce, but I refuse to offer myself as her mouse.