The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  ‘Oh—the roses—yes.’

  The nurse ran to fetch the chipped, washstand jug. The resplendent roses scattered their dew their light their perfumed reflections over the sheet into the straining nostrils the opalescent eyes staring out through this paper mask.

  ‘Look!’ Mary de Santis forgot.

  Elizabeth Hunter answered, ‘Yes. I can see, Mary—our roses.’

  And at once Mary de Santis heard in her mother’s voice the words she had not understood when the peasant-migrant spoke them, ‘What a sunrise we are making!’

  It was: the roses sparkled drowsed brooded leaped flaunting their earthbound flesh in an honourably failed attempt to convey the ultimate.

  ‘Yes—our roses,’ Elizabeth Hunter repeated.

  Which Mary de Santis interpreted as: we, the arrogant perfectionists, or pseudo-saints, shall be saved up out of our shortcomings for further trial.

  Six

  WELCOMING THE princess, the president of the club had pointed out that the room was a cheery one. Madame de Lascabanes supposed it was; but the flowered chintz (green and beige) and the reproduction of a landscape with daringly stylized eucalypts, aggravated the disease of foreignness from which she suffered. There was a white telephone which intimidated her fearfully; what if it went off before she was prepared to cope with it? She felt better when her things, collected from Moreton Drive after a long delay by that decent soul Arnold Wyburd, were delivered below. Just to unpack her toothpaste calmed her nerves; and in the meantime she had begged a headache powder from a maid. Yes, she was feeling better.

  Unless reminded of her escape from where she wanted but feared to be: that housekeeper hovering with something raw and German; and the mummified head of Santa Chiara Hubert insisted on visiting elle a quand même une influence extraordinaire which the jealous Franciscan refuted vous savez c’est une tête quelconque que les soeurs se sont procurées pour en tirer profit. Alone in the lift on her way down to dinner, Dorothy de Lascabanes whimpered a little thinking of poor Mummy.

  Discretion reigned in the dining-room, where six or seven powdered ladies lowered their eyelids over the roast chicken or stewed apple they were pretending not to masticate, while an ancient maid in stiff white led the honorary member to a table of her own, from which she was expected to impose. It had the effect of exposing Dorothy Hunter, alone with her cutlery and the tight arrangement of Queen Elizabeth rosebuds. She spread her hands on the cutlery as though she were going to strike a chord, and sat staring at the vacant air.

  ‘Poor Madge, she is so tahd,’ one of the ladies remarked now that the climate was restored.

  ‘Yes, she’s tahd,’ her companion agreed. ‘It’s the humidity. And Madge is over generous of her energy and time.’ Perhaps to quash any such impulse in herself, the second lady added a minimum of stuffing to her forkful of breast, with the merest smear of bread sauce.

  It must have brought on recklessness in a third, in no way connected lady, who swallowed her mouthful of stewed apple and started coughing. She coughed and coughed. Intent on ignoring this indisposition, Dorothy Hunter was fascinated to see what could have been a bubble of syrup appear for an instant at each of the lady’s nostrils; and as instantly, each of the bubbles was sucked back.

  Oh dear, if only Mummy were here ‘at the club’ to order for you! And what if you blew bubbles with your syrup, or dropped a dollop of bread sauce on the elderly maid’s spotless cuff?

  Or if you screamed.

  When the maid approached with the menu Dorothy barely glanced at what she could not have read; she remembered leaving her glasses in her room. ‘Do you know what I’d like better than anything—I mean, if it isn’t any trouble—if you have one—I’d like a nice, thick, mutton chop. And make it rather pink.’

  ‘Oh yes, milady—of course—I’ll see.’ The maid looked terrified; somewhere she must have heard about a curtsey, but hadn’t the courage for more than a bob.

  The members raised their heads like so many disturbed cows.

  The Princesse de Lascabanes had not succeeded in vindicating herself: between the inspiration and the command, or perhaps even farther back, after changing airlines at Bangkok, le mutton chop had shed its exotic implications. Dorothy Hunter was left to get by heart the mumbled syllables of her gaffe. It didn’t help to catch sight of herself in memory holding the chop over the embers on a sharpened stick, and to hear the even less articulate, but naturally sincere, voice of littlegirlhood, no Daddy it isn’t burnt only charred that’s when it’s scrummiest.

  Though most of the members had left the room, a couple had lingered purposely to watch the maid serve the chop to Princess Thingumabob: one of those Hunters from Gogong if you please.

  By now the princess had completely lost even the pretence of an appetite. In any case the meat, when brought, was too red, too fat: en effet écœurant ce chop australien; it would have warmed her late mother-in-law’s heart to know it.

  When she had eaten a mouthful of tepid cress and drunk a glass of water, Dorothy pushed away the mutilated chop. ‘Thank you, nothing else.’ She smiled at the maid, while appealing to the woman with her eyes not to tell on her.

  Coffee in the drawing-room could only have been a greater ordeal than dinner in the dining-room. There was the question of where to sit: not so far off that it might appear offensive, yet beyond hailing distance of any of the other inhabited islands. In the end she ran up the two flights to her bed, where her exhaustion promptly left her for the night. She passed this between dipping into La Chartreuse de Parme, which she knew too well, and remembering the motives for her return. In consequence, any of the homelier images were a comfort to the mind: for instance, her tube of French, soon alas to be expended, toothpaste, or a rather boring family solicitor. She shepherded in procession anything that might be considered safe, but was forced repeatedly to sit in judgment on herself.

  Let’s face it: I’ve come back to coax a respectable sum of money out of an aged woman who happens also to be my mother, whom I do sincerely love at times, but have also hated (God, yes!) so perhaps it will be more pardonable, if coaxing fails, to bully the money out of her, most pardonable because she herself has been the greatest bully, and hateful remember hateful the visit to the island the jade sea grey jade is subtler than green if Mother hadn’t thought of it first there’s something so comically banal about these Pacific islands don’t you think Professor I mean the sea is just as jade as advertised the grey days a positive relief of subtler less expected jade Mother lighting candles to illuminate her conversation to profess herself on the over appealed-to professor whose name is EDVARD spelt with a V unlike Mother you would not pronounce it in his hearing any more than abuse a sacrament the white flakes of his skin the sun has shredded.

  The half-sleepless princess drew her thighs up closer in her bed until she was all thighs and buttocks a knot of flesh or pile of bones under which the pea revolved.

  Edvard with a V is telling of forests whether the rain forest of Brumby Island or spruces larches rowans of Norway has no importance. Ashes too. The wild horses racing at dusk along the beach sting your cheeks with flying sand horsehair whips. Not afraid Professor only that my ribs may batter their way through your side in this electric moment of locked hands clamped bodies.

  Trust Mother to cook the fish the professor caught and lay it on a bed of wild fennel with all this chichi of native flowers round the edge of the dish the electric moment has galloped into the dark tossing its mane only hope Mother’s fish will taste of sand.

  The princess, grinding around on her colossal ball-bearing of a pea, continued munching on her waking sleep. If neither coaxing nor bullying what if you should kill an old woman or mother what can money mean to the aged except as a reminder of triumphs no longer desirable or possible? It wouldn’t be killing, a shock, not murder. Definitely not. You can scarcely step on a cockroach for all your pus which spurts out.

  Basil could: my genius of a brother of a famous actor why why has he come Mr Wybur
d don’t tell but I know don’t I Basil and Dorothy = brother and sister = hunters lurking in the fuggy depths of Elizabeth Salkeld’s cave. When you could have stayed curled indefinitely in Mummy she pitched you out unarmed not Basil an actor is born with clubs instead of inhibitions your inhibitions can only have been inherited from Alfred a deformed statue at the point where the road forks the other side of Gogong his inscription at least speaks for him also the wrinkles in his waistcoat and trousers around around well the fork poor bill hunter DAD.

  Yourself a father Mr Wyburd tell me won’t you about my father this newspaper cutting you so kindly sent to remind.

  The princess stirred. She regretted the solicitor bored her so intensely when she had much to ask but fathers forgive we are told this one of practically the same height thickness fastidious habits as yourself untying the pink ribbon which holds your character your deeds together Arnold W as methodical as Edvard with the V will only profess when he has considered all the facts then when they are quite naked the solicitor is prepared to admit only a good man could have married Alfred’s wife.

  Oh Father Father she wanted to cry for what he had suffered she was only consoled by the touch of milky legal silk his long old transparent testicles dangling trailing over her thighs.

  The Princesse de Lascabanes was so shocked to see Mr Wyburd his shanks his blue veins his everything embossed on the darkness she sat up in bed and switched the light on: to be faced with her reflected self instead of a dream solicitor. Her breasts, leaner and longer than she would have cared to admit, looked askew inside the reflected nightie; her thin, naked lips were parted; she was scarcely less disgusted by reality than by the dream which had been foisted on her.

  After this perfectly ghastly night in the cheery bedroom Dorothy swallowed an aspirin and considered whether she ought to confess. But to whom? in Sydney. Some anonymous Irish peasant would scarcely appreciate her spiritual bruises, and might even despise her for her educated voice. She had never thought anonymity in the confessional more than a dubious, theoretical comfort for special occasions. But wasn’t this a special occasion? Yes, but she personally, on all occasions, preferred acquaintanceship with the hand which strokes the soul. Moist-eyed, she lay regretting her beloved Abbé Passebosc, then grew haggard remembering her mother. Mummy would somehow worm out that shameful dream. Dorothy lashed the sheet around her. Never! Better to suppurate.

  After she had rung for coffee, and innocently drunk a draught of unmistakable essence, what she had been dreading the day before began to happen: the white telephone exploded.

  ‘Good morning, madame. I haven’t learnt your habits, so you must forgive me if I’m disturbing you.’

  On identifying the solicitor’s punctiliousness, the princess was in fact disturbed; she avoided her own reflection in the glass opposite. What to say? Their bodies had already communicated with greater expressiveness than words could offer.

  ‘… the meeting I want to arrange—yourself and your brother—to discuss Mrs Hunter’s situation. What are your plans, madame?’

  Her plans? Ever since leaving Mother for Europe, she had hoped somebody, some man, would materialize to make them for her. If an elderly, not to say fatherly, solicitor could not, who then would?

  To disguise her own ineptitude she heard herself suggest in a high bright voice suspiciously like the Queen of England’s, ‘I do wish you’d call me “Dorothy”—won’t you? Mr Wyburd?’

  He sounded understandably gratified, but did not make a reciprocal offer, because after all, he was quite a bit older-desirably so; instead he said, ‘Thank you, Dorothy. I’ll be glad to. As a matter of fact I’ve always—my wife and I, that is, have been in the habit of referring to you by your Christian name, for old times’ sake.’

  None of this meant he wasn’t still expecting to hear her plans; he fell silent waiting for them.

  ‘Well,’ she began desperately, ‘I had better pay my mother a short, early visit—before she has tired.’ The shortness of the visit would ensure that you could not initiate your real, your infernal plan, on this occasion. ‘Any time later in the morning—I know nobody, and have nothing else to do—I shall be at your disposal.’

  The solicitor was too discreet to react in any way emotionally to her admission; but she had impressed herself by the pathos of her nothingness.

  Mr Wyburd suggested eleven-thirty at his office provided Basil also.

  ‘Yes, yes, provided Basil—naturally,’ Dorothy earnestly agreed.

  But was it ‘natural’ that she should confer with her brother at any time about their mother’s affairs? Basil’s character was such that he must accept without hesitation the most ruthless details of her design. And had the solicitor perhaps smelt the crypto-plan? Bad enough; but worse if he had some more convincing, legal solution to share with his client’s long-suffering children. He could be the wily Wyburd in fact.

  Madame de Lascabanes felt desolated as she put down the phone, not so much because the good solicitor might turn out to be yet another dishonest man, but because, when a victim of injustice, she preferred herself as the sacrificial lamb rather than the justified crusader in burnished, many-faceted armour; brilliance at its best is a quality of heartless jewels, at its worst, of supple, ultimately self-destructive intrigue. So she forgot the solicitor for seeing herself in an ignominious light.

  She forgot the whole issue when the white telephone went off again, far too soon. ‘Is it the princess—the Princesse de Lascabanes?’ Not a bad attempt at it.

  ‘Yes. It is.’ There was no escaping the caller, except through a downright lie; alone in the chintzy bedroom, there was no escaping yourself.

  ‘This is Cherry—Cherry Cheeseman—Bullivant that was.’

  ‘Why—Cherry!’ In the train of your false enthusiasm a dark pause filled with breathings: Cherry Bullivant Cheeseman sounded bronchial, or corseted, or perhaps she had taken the plunge too quickly.

  The princess threw in something appropriately banal. ‘How clever of you to have tracked me down.’

  ‘Oh, but everybody knows—Dorothy. It’s in the papers.’

  Dorothy de Lascabanes frowned. ‘I haven’t read one—not since I left Le Monde behind in Paris.’

  It was Cherry who filled the current awkward pause. ‘You can buy it, Dorothy—at least I think so—all the foreign papers—from a stall outside the G.P.O. You remember the G.P.O., darling?’

  Helpful Cherry could not have seen herself as the unwelcome revenant she was; ghosts are never so insubstantial that they don’t breed others, and strings of ghostly incidents, and odd, chilling, ghostly phrases. Cherry Bullivant had been present on too many first occasions: the First Meeting (accidental) in the Crillon lounge; first to see the ring after the improbable engagement; she should have played First Bridesmaid if Mrs Bullivant hadn’t been overcome by Methodist misgivings. A sweetly pretty girl, dark and glossy to match her name, Cherry was also practical: shouldn’t you ask for a settlement or something? it had occurred to her to ask. Born plain and shy, Dorothy Hunter, too, was of a practical, if more disillusioned nature: don’t you see Cherry I’m the one who’s expected to bring the settlement? If she had been less wealthy, though as luscious as Cherry Bullivant, she suspected even then that this desirable man would not have been enticed. No, she was born without illusions, about life anyway, and other people; instead she had been given determination which enemies saw as stubbornness, and Hubert failed to understand as love. Just as he could not believe in fastidiousness. It was her delicacy in sexual matters rather than his perversities which had ripped the ribbons off their marriage. Oh Cherry why did you make this telephone call? Dorothy Hunter, whose self-confidence began trickling away on her arrival as a bride at Lunegarde, glanced down as though expecting to catch sight of a last pool on the club carpet.

  ‘The point is,’ Mrs Cheeseman’s wheezy voice returned to insist from away down the tunnel of the telephone, ‘when are we going to see you, Dorothy dear? From all he has heard, Douglas would a
dore to meet you. I thought perhaps a little dinner—here at Warrawee.’

  Mrs Cheeseman sounded comfortably middle-aged, and Dorothy de Lascabanes, still au fond a jittery girl, was grateful for it. ‘I’d love it, Cherry—just ourselves—so that we can talk;’ when to talk was the last thing she wanted, unless to be confronted with a whole battery of listening faces.

  ‘Oh, we’ll keep it small!’ Cherry Cheeseman lowered her voice to make her promise. ‘What about Thursday?’

  All the way to Mother’s that morning Dorothy de Lascabanes was half conscious of a malaise from which she should not have been suffering: the steam of yesterday had lifted, leaving behind it a glossy morning; the taxi was diving, describing curves with such daring she could easily have claimed for herself expertise in living; she should have felt as free as she was ever likely to be on earth, returning to the country she knew through her instincts, but to which at the same time she was under no further obligation. Oh yes, she was free enough. Only the sickness persisted. Supposing. She had intended to have that check-up. Perhaps she should ask the advice of one of Mother’s army of nurses—while appearing not to, of course: you could look too foolish if the trouble wasn’t physical, as it more than probably wasn’t.

  So she tried, physically, to shrug the sickness off, as the face of a television star on a hoarding, skin stretched, teeth bared in a ravenous imitation of youth, towered for the instant before dismissal.

  ‘Mais qu’est-ce qui vous prend? Vous êtes fou?’ the passenger in the taxi screamed as she was shot against the roof.

  Who was fou was immaterial: the driver, or the elderly pedestrian, his pace abnormally leisured, too uncertain in crossing, the face too white, the bags under the eyes too blue.

  ‘Is he ill? Drunk more likely!’ shouted the princess: the bump (what if her skull had been fractured?) together with the fright she had got, made her feel extra virtuous.

  ‘Some flaming metho artist!’ The driver himself had had a fright, his passenger screaming down his neck: bloody hysterical foreign woman.