The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  Holding forth in its rasping, high-pitched growl from under the sofa, the cat made it clear who should live, while its mistress remained only an aspiring murderess.

  Seeing that the moment could provide him with a reason for his exit, the actor advanced firmly, professionally, on his hostess, and took her hands in his. ‘Thank you’, he said, ‘for your hospitality—the ideas you’ve shared—and this memorable house.’ Make it sound final. ‘I shan’t forget any of it.’

  There was a faint trembling, it seemed, in the cold unresponsive hands, till he realized it came from his own warmer, fleshier ones.

  ‘Next time,’ she said as they were walking through the rooms towards the front door. ‘I’ll tell you how I visualize this play.’ Their shoulders collided in conspiracy: his well-cut, actor’s sleeve, and her shabby, black silk, rustling kimono, with stains become part of its embroideries.

  Mitty Jacka was still apparently speaking. ‘A man develops only one of his several potential lives. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t live them all—or at least act them out, if he can liberate himself. This is what I’d like for you: this nightly liberation instead of the cast-iron figures dragging themselves from one prescribed attitude to another.’

  By now he had dragged his cast-iron, proven self as far as the front door, from which he could see, through foliage and boughs, the gate set in the flint-studded wall. The gate was still a long way off.

  He replied cagily enough, ‘A lot would depend on who else was available at the time; not forgetting a theatre. That’s after we’ve raised the cash by whatever immoral means!’

  ‘In this case almost everything would depend on yourself; and aren’t you a great actor, Sir Basil Hunter?’

  This time he saw to it that she didn’t raise a flicker out of his vanity. ‘I’m a man who’s been bitten more than once, and who intends to go carefully.’ In spite of long experience, he could not tell how his audience had reacted to this touch of false humility.

  ‘If it’s a matter of life and death, wouldn’t you choose life?’

  At the moment he might have chosen death rather than go through another performance for Mitty Jacka. So he ignored her question.

  Then, when retreating down the path, he remembered the convention in which he must behave, and looked back, not so much to raise, as re-tilt his Homburg with the right show of insouciance. She was standing on the step, an archaic figure in the black gown she had gathered around her with her arms, her face an expressionless white, except for a grey shadow of what could have been anxiety.

  ‘Don’t forget to write to that old woman—your mother,’ she called after him in practical tones. ‘You’d be surprised how many people are longing to be asked to collaborate. It gives them the illusion of living.’

  The gate jingled, clicked; he was free, thank God.

  His footsteps resounding down the hill, the sky awash with early morning colours above the telly grids and wet slates, restored his faith in himself as future. If he did fly home on a brief visit, it would be from his own choice, not a mentor’s, his object not to bully an old woman into handing over a fortune even if it killed her, but to renew himself through bursts of light, whiffs of burning, the sound of trees stampeded by a wind when they weren’t standing as still as silence. And mud: in spite of the pavement and his shoes, he could feel it almost, oozing upward, increasing, between the splayed toes of his bare feet.

  Fortified by sensual realities such as these, it was easy to dismiss as hallucination the incident at wherever it was. Certainly the woman made no attempt to get in touch. A week or two, and it began to surprise him; once or twice he caught himself resenting Mitty Jacka’s neglect.

  Then the notices went up. Though there had been rumours, the management (a second-rate, recent lot) hadn’t so much as hinted that their miserable play was likely to close abruptly; and himself carrying the thing for weeks, in support of a young Geordie graduated overnight from bricklayer to leading man.

  Well, that was the way nowadays. He belched at the sheet of paper pinned to the board.

  ‘We’re off, I see,’ he mentioned to Peggy Digby, her perky tits and jumper in a hurry down the corridor.

  ‘Yes. Didn’t you know? Waddarelief! Now I guess I’ll make the panto.’

  He continued staring, not so much at the announcement on the board, as the brand-new drawing pins, and the image of that woman on the bus.

  On the night of the fourth last performance he poured himself a tot purely to moisten his vocal chords. The walls of his dressing-room at the Delphic were painted poison green above a chocolate dado: both green and brown had blisters in them. He poured himself a second tot: the first had been thoughtlessly done, and weak.

  But his voice stayed hoarse all that evening. Nothing he threw in—and God knows he performed—nothing helped them out of the doldrums in which they were stuck. Except in the second act, when the Geordie bricklayer bared his torso, a girl’s voice nearly squealed the darkness down. The audience (mostly paper) laughed.

  Taking off his make-up after the performance, which normally revived his spirits as much as putting it on in the beginning, he was nauseated by the smell of Cremine to the extent of trembling. And his disgusting old rag of a towel. Surely he wasn’t becoming a professional trembler—or Parkinsonian?

  He longed for somebody to come. He listened for the sound of a formal dress; he might have put up with his second ex-wife, the Lady Enid; even a worshipful, crushed macintosh wouldn’t have come amiss. But nobody appeared, and in the absence of visitors, he poured himself a tot. Walker handed him the Homburg.

  He went out. In the green-and-chocolate corridor, Peggy Digby gave him a big, skilful kiss. ‘Promise to come up to Glasgow to see the panto. You’ll find I’m the Number One Dandini.’

  It was parky outside under an etiolated lamp-lit drizzle. He had no appetite for the meal he would eat in the corner of some stale Soho joint: no point in cutting a dash when he was on his own. He could have rung any number of bells, where groovy young pros or business swingers would have dragged him in raucously, and scooped out the foie gras and got him drunk, but he couldn’t think of one who might satisfy his hunger—for what? For substance perhaps, for permanence. Friendship, as he saw it, was more and more like an ingenious farce with too much plot and too many characters all acting frenetically, in spite of which it closed after the routine run. (Marriage too; though that was a different sort of play.)

  This was where Sir Basil felt the damp in his right foot, looked at his sole as soon as he reached a quiet lamp-post, and noticed that he needed mending. All right, simple enough: he wasn’t on the rocks, only shortly out of a job. He had his experience, his title, his technique, his voice, and, it had been demonstrated, women were attracted to him.

  What was the-Mitty Jacka! Of Golden Hill? Of Beulah!

  He took the bus to Beulah Hill looking for signs of a disturbing presence: on the seats of an empty upper deck; at a flint-studded gatepost apparently much favoured by dogs; then along the path, slippery with snails, till he was again standing on her doorstep about that same hour of night.

  ‘I’ve come’, he said, ‘to hear about the play you spoke of. Remember?’ Perhaps it was his position on the lower step which made it sound suppliant.

  The two pugs were poppopping at his ankles, while around hers curved an arc of luminous fur.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve been giving it thought. I’m glad you’ve decided.’

  He could feel his mask grinning up at her, the teeth grown jagged in its mock flesh: that of the Second Conspirator. Or was it the First Suicide?

  Anyway, here he was as a result, in this other sunlight, dazed by it as he lolled in the cavorting taxi, prickling with grit, streaming with sweat in spite of his recent bath and shave. He was feeling fine: not the shadow of a conscience for keeping them waiting, old Arnold the Wyburd and the bloody princess, probably three-quarters of an hour. It was hardly his fault, was it? if the Herald and the A.B.C. chose to ri
ng, one after the other, just as he was making a dash for it.

  So he was determined to relax and enjoy this whizzing vision of a city which had grown out of his childhood recollections: of a Pitt Street peopled only by acquaintances, all of them converging on the Civil Service Stores. Though he had played no active part in his city’s transformation, though he had rejected it in fact, he accepted some of the credit for it. He had to share his recovered self-respect with this self-important metropolis. However late in the piece, he offered his love to its plate glass and neo-brutal towers; at the heart of it, his old mother. He would forget his horror of the lilac wig, the deliquescent smile: these dismissed, he could love the whole idea of mothers, as of Sydney. (Recall the horrors later if you are short on ruthlessness. Remember to send the better suit for pressing, for your interview with the telly girl of the mellow-’cello voice.)

  Mr Wyburd glanced at the clock. Unpunctuality was one of the vices which roused him to anger, an ugly and intemperate emotion, though perhaps not as deplorable as unwillingness to forgive the offender; and the Hunter children had both failed to keep an appointment made for eleven. One of them could have been involved in an accident, but not both, surely? unless they had shared a taxi, and there was not love enough between them for that. A regular churchgoer (he had kept it up as an example to his own children, then found it had become a habit), the solicitor would have liked to conjure a material banner embroidered with the concept CHARITY to hold between himself and his clock, to prevent the anger rising again, peculiarly physical and bitter-tasting, out of his stomach into his mouth. Or in any event, he must dissociate his irritation from the face of a clock for which he had a longstanding and sentimental attachment.

  It was a carriage clock, and had been sent him by Mrs Hunter as a memento and token of esteem after her husband’s death. The clock had belonged to the late Mr Hunter. Arnold Wyburd could remember exactly where it used to stand on the library mantelpiece at ‘Kudjeri’. He remembered, not from that first brief stay when he had arrived unsuitably dressed, timid as a boy, bringing for signature the agreement to their purchase of the block in Moreton Drive, but from later visits, by which time he had proved himself worthy of his clients’ trust, and could unbend sufficiently to take pleasure in their hospitality. His respect and affection for Mr Hunter grew, until (it had been something of an ice-breaking) he could be included among those who addressed him as ‘Bill’.

  Under the carriage clock, in the library at ‘Kudjeri’, Bill Hunter and Arnold Wyburd would sit talking: each had a respect for functional objects such as clocks, telescopes, razors, barometers, as well as for acts of God; often they were content simply to stare into the fire. Arnold Wyburd wondered how many of those present at Bill Hunter’s funeral had noticed him crying, and how many still remembered. He was half ashamed of it himself. He hadn’t thought about it for years, till this morning Bill’s pestiferous children gave him the opportunity. Had Bill loved his children? You didn’t believe he could have, then felt guilty at thinking such a thought.

  Standing beside the devotedly accurate carriage clock on the bookcase in Arnold Wyburd’s office was a framed studio portrait inscribed in Bill’s angular hand (it reminded the solicitor of arrowheads) To Arnold Wyburd—in affectionate friendship—Bill. Several years before her husband’s death, this, too, had been sent by Mrs Hunter, almost as if she wished to suggest the inscribed photograph were one of her own little inspirations (though wives usually do up the parcels). She had enclosed a note in her familiar, awful scrawl (she must have started writing large as an affectation, then found it came naturally) … an exceptionally good likeness I consider and as you more than anyone else Arnold love and appreciate Alfred you must be the first to have one … She hadn’t inscribed the photograph herself, but you could see her standing over him with advice. It embarrassed you still to remember the wording of her note. What, Arnold Wyburd sometimes wondered, did Mrs Hunter understand as ‘love’? For that matter, he wasn’t too clear what he understood by it himself: probably, from personal experience, many years of honourable conjugal affection interspersed with decently conducted sexual intercourse.

  The solicitor coughed. On top of everything else that morning, he couldn’t help resenting Mrs Hunter’s intrusion on his memories of Bill.

  To restore mental order, he moved one or two objects on his desk. There was no question of settling down to work. Avoiding the eyes of the photograph he might have glanced again at the infuriating clock if Miss Haygarth hadn’t appeared with the cup of pale, milky tea (normally she brought it earlier) and the two biscuits he seldom touched. Miss Haygarth went away.

  No need to look at the clock: his mind was keeping pace with it. Rage, he had told himself, is generated by those of unreasonable temperament, and leads to the courts. As for irritation, simpler, though more often than not, perverse, it could bring on stomach ulcers, when his health, apart from appendicitis at the age of thirty-seven, had remained exceptional all these years, thanks to regular habits, plain food, and a prudent wife. Yet now, all seemed threatened, if not by rage or irritation, by an uncharacteristic restlessness. He had spent a most disturbed night; and at breakfast Lal had joined him in one or two cynical remarks (unlike either of them).

  ‘Poor Dorothy—I’d be curious to see her again—to find out whether a plain girl can make a glamorous princess.’ Then she laughed, and her teeth looked—no, not really. 1 expect she can, because underneath I’m a bit of a snob.’ The honesty of her admission together with too large a mouthful of corn fritter made her cheeks bulge: his reliable Lal.

  ‘Yesterday she said she’d love to see you.’

  ‘That’s what they say.’

  ‘Oh, Dorothy will come—unless there’s too much of her mother in her.’

  They had such a laugh together he promptly suffered from a fit of disloyalty to the Hunter family. He stabbed the sausage on his plate. Lal bought beef because they were more economical, and less greasy, but even so, when he pricked the skin a jet of liquid fat shot out on to his waistcoat. He covered the stain with his napkin in case she should notice and feel she must do something about it before he left for the office. For his additional discomfiture, the napkin, he realized, was one of a good Irish set the Hunters had given, on no formal occasion, simply as a spontaneous gesture between Easter and Christmas. (Because it was Mrs Hunter who must have thought of the napkins, it made him feel almost as guilty as when she had referred to his ‘love’ for Bill.)

  Now Miss Haygarth was returning, not to remove the cup and saucer and the two rejected biscuits, but to announce with unusual enthusiasm (she was a rather phlegmatic, though efficient girl, from Bexley North), ‘It’s the princess—Miss—Miss Dorothy Hunter.’

  At almost the same moment the Princesse de Lascabanes came pushing in. What the solicitor suspected of being worldly abandon, perhaps inspired by her inexcusable unpunctuality, seemed to have replaced the reserve, the diffidence of the day before. If her manner was still harsh, recklessness had tempered it. She approached, hatless, taking off her gloves, smiling a smile, some of which had come off on her teeth. It surprised the solicitor that a princess should not be wearing a hat, and considering the gloves; though lots of ladies, even the older ones, went hatless nowadays. (He wondered whether Mrs Hunter, if she had the strength to rise from her bed, would have broken into his office hatless, and started dictating to him from the leather chair.)

  ‘I’m not horribly late, am I? I expect I am,’ Madame de Lascabanes opened in a voice loud enough to cause a sensation in the outer office.

  The solicitor formed the word No, but it sat soundless on his pale lips as he unnecessarily rearranged a chair.

  Dorothy observed, ‘My brother is late at least;’ and could have been drawing attention to one among many other flaws.

  She could not have been better pleased: things were turning out as she had planned, when she imagined she had botched it all by her expedition, however rewarding, to the kitchen and the housekeeper’s b
edroom.

  ‘I’m so glad.’ Her sigh was perhaps too little-girlish.

  For a moment her diffidence returned as she reflected that the solicitor might plunge her abruptly into business matters. What she had wanted by forestalling Basil was to talk, not to a solicitor, but to an elderly man, one old enough to be her father. It had been her intention originally to ask about the father she scarcely knew, but she had changed her mind at some point since waking from her dream of the night before.

  ‘Are you comfortable at the club?’ Mr Wyburd kindly inquired.

  ‘The beds are comfortable.’ She blushed, and added, ‘Yes, I am comfortable—thank you.’

  She thought she would begin, after all, by discussing her one and only father. ‘I believe you and he were very close friends;’ she was launched well into it before she realized: too intense, but there was nothing she could do about that; she was only grateful for the unusual impetus. ‘So you must have understood him, Mr Wyburd—as we never did. My brother was certainly too selfish, too much concentrated on his own ambitions; I, too shy—and yes, too stupid’; on a different occasion she would have been ashamed to make any such admission, but now she was offering a wise and consoling confidant what she hoped he might recognize as virtues; whether he did, there wasn’t time to calculate before she fired her last and most necessary shot, ‘as for my mother, she never allowed herself to understand anybody in case it might interrupt what she liked to see as her own continuous triumph. Mother specialized in slaves, of whom Father was the most valuable. She must have tortured him cruelly.’ Dorothy Hunter looked at the solicitor and begged—no, not this morning; this morning, for some reason, she was the Princesse de Lascabanes, brave enough to command this man to become her ally.

  But in his position of trust Arnold Wyburd was above alliances; and even if he hadn’t been, he imagined prudence would not have allowed him to desire one; so he wet his lips, and answered, ‘I can’t remember your father ever referring to Mrs Hunter in the conversations I had with him, except formally, in legal matters, and—oh, you know the kind of jokes men make about their wives!’