The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  She laughed for the conspiracy she was having with herself.

  Then she was alone. Not even herself for company.

  Never one for self-pity, or not more than a normal ration, she snivelled a bit on reaching the veranda. She recognized her own type of useless, beautiful woman, whose husband had got the number of children required by convention from the body he had bought at an inflated price because he was over-loving, and regretted the contract—secretly (he was an honourable man) and perhaps died grieving over his lack of wisdom. She was a woman who had encouraged her lovers’ lust; indeed she had made it inevitable; not in the Norwegian’s case (she only half-wanted the Norwegian: he was peeling). Above all, she was a mother whose children had rejected her.

  Oh God! Rooted to the veranda, she opened her mouth, and the sun blared back across the glass-inflected Pacific Ocean.

  She had come across the coffee dregs in the kitchen when Professor Pehl drove up, between the bunker and the house, stopped the car, and got out.

  She could not have felt less amiably disposed, but her upbringing and the dregs made her inquire automatically, ‘Is that you, Professor? Will you drink a cup of coffee if I make it?’

  He stood to attention beside that wholly utilitarian machine. ‘Thank you. I have already drunk.’

  His sobriety struck her as grisly.

  So she bared her teeth while calling lightly, ‘Where is that silly Dorothy my daughter?’

  She regretted it: he returned her stare so seriously she might have lost not only Professor Benthic Aggregations Pehl, poor Princess Menopause de Lascabanes, Alfred the Good, Basil my Beloved Only Son, Athol Shreve the—ugh! Arnold the Pure—but Everyone.

  Professor Pehl dutifully replied, ‘I am not permitted to reveal the whereabouts of your princess daughter.’

  He disappeared after that; and Elizabeth Hunter bowed her head.

  Instead of brewing coffee for herself alone, she drank a draught of tepid water. Under her nails she could feel an irritant from the dregs her secretive daughter had bequeathed her.

  Of course you could not altogether blame poor old Dorothy, what with that devious Frenchman, and now her unfortunate condition. Only natural that she should bear grudges, whether imaginary or justified, especially against a mother whose love of life often outstripped discretion, in the eyes of those who were drab and prickly.

  To confess her faults (to herself) and to accept blame when nobody was there to insist on it, produced in Elizabeth Hunter a rare sense of freedom. As she wandered up past the bunker, past the abandoned Chevrolet, into the bush, she even went so far as to admit: in some ways I am a hypocrite, but knowing does not help matters; to be utterly honest, spontaneously sincere, one should have been born with an innocence I was not given. Which Alfred had.

  Yet Alfred, not she, had been hurt, deceived, tortured, and finally destroyed. While she had continued demanding and receiving more than most women would have dared envisage. Even her beauty had only just begun to dim; her body remained supple at the age of seventy. For the first time she was disturbed by the mystery of her strength, of her elect life, not that frequently unconvincing part of it which she had already lived, but that which stretched ahead of her as far as the horizon and not even her own shadow in view.

  Walking more humbly, as much for her solitariness as for the powers and honours so unreasonably conferred on her, she let herself be led into the cool depths of the rain forest, striped by the occasional light which fell between the shafts of its trees, rubbing past vines which had survived their writhing to become abstractions. It occurred to her she had read of elderly women lured into the scrub by an instinct for self-destruction, and of an old man driven mad after days imprisoned in a blackberry bush. Obviously none of this was reserved for her: she was too rational. So she went on.

  Soon after setting out she had unpinned her hair, that most recalcitrant, though habitually controlled part of her. Now it floated round her face, almost completely veiling it at times, at others opening for her mind to surface and identify a foreign substance, or translate her present movements into recollections of another person’s sensuality.

  In a clearing she came across flowers: a variety of ground orchid, each tongue returning into the tufts of fine-drawn green sprouting from the gristle of its own sickle-shaped ear. Overjoyed at her find she got down on her knees: to insinuate herself into secrets, to pick, to devour, or thrust up her nostrils, or carry back to die on her dressing-table. When she discovered the desire to possess had left her.

  Ah, but temporarily, and flowers. Sitting back on her haunches, taking a detached look, she knew she was still annoyed at Dorothy’s behaviour, and irritated by that Norwegian, not only for his presence on Brumby Island, but for existing at all. She picked a blade of pale grass, and sucked at it, and wondered what Edvard Pehl could be doing at the moment.

  By allowing her inescapably frivolous and, alas, corrupt nature the freedom of its silence, the forest had begun to oppress her: she could not believe, finally, in grace, only luck.

  This was where she heard the sound of an axe. And more faintly, voices. She got up, not without a warning twinge. She was longing to talk to somebody, nobody, somebody quite simple, stupid even. She needed to reassure herself that she could still fit into the pattern of someone else’s life.

  She was soon given the opportunity to prove it. After blundering some way through the undergrowth she arrived at the spot where two men had felled a blackbutt. Peace and light were flooding in where violence had recently exploded. One of the men was systematically lopping minor branches off the desecrated crown; the other was tending a saw, filing its teeth, feeling, almost stroking the blade, with trembling hand.

  At once Elizabeth Hunter realized it was going to be practically impossible to make herself credible. The man with the axe left off” lopping. His stomach heaved under its hairy entanglement. His rather prominent eyes would have withdrawn deeper than the sockets allowed. A chain dangling from the waist of his thinner, stringier mate struck a slight music out of the saw he was holding.

  ‘ I heard the tree crash,’ she claimed; when she hadn’t. ‘I came to see. May I watch?’

  The pursy man mumbled something and returned to lopping, but delicately now. The stringy fellow laid down his saw, then thought better, and took it up again.

  She breathed rather than spoke. ‘Isn’t it a wonderful smell?’ Indeed, the heavy air was impregnated with bleeding sap. ‘More than a smell—a perfume.’

  The men laughed, but softly. She suspected they might not look at her after that.

  She sat on the trunk just above the fatal wound they had made. ‘And taste!’ She did actually taste a chip from the tree, and might have dropped this transmuted wafer as quickly as she could; but managed to put it down instead. It slithered off the trunk and fell to the ground.

  For herself she was again brittle and pretentious, but the two men appeared to be enjoying the unexpected.

  The big fat one went tiptoeing alongside the trunk chopping through branches turned to butter. His thin mate had begun smearing the saw with oil, an operation he might have taken slower if she had not been there.

  Undoubtedly neither of them would look at her again. Perhaps it was her loose hair. Or was she old? Or mad, perhaps?

  Whatever it was, they respected it: the men were as reverent as a cloister of nuns.

  ‘I expect you live over at the forestry camp.’ A pointless remark, but one which she hoped might put them at their ease.

  Yairs, they lived at the camp; they were employed by the Department.

  ‘I’m staying with the Warmings.’ It was too obvious, but she told. ‘They had to leave. One of their boys was taken sick.’

  The men probably knew this: telephone lines in remote places are usually public property; but the hairy belly murmured, ‘Go on, eh?’ out of regard for convention.

  They still would not look at her; to do so might have been irreverent.

  In the end she could onl
y ask, ‘Now if I start back in that direction shall I come out somewhere near the house?’

  Yairs, they began to explain, their reverential arms making signposts, their blackened hands trembling from recent exertions.

  Some of the hairy creature’s sweat flung off his jowl on to the back of one of her hands. He realized, and looked embarrassed.

  When she left them, they were smiling, but at the ground.

  The walk back was monotonous. She would have liked to put up her hair now, but there was no means of fastening it since she had thrown away the pins. She went on. Just before entering the carob scrub which fringed the beach, she licked the back of her hand, sucking up her own salt together with what she liked to think the axeman’s sweat, and went sweltering or weeping through the glare off sand and ocean. As it happened, she was not a great distance from the spindly house. She walked slowly, less than ever capable of explaining the gifts which were showered on her.

  The house felt empty, though somebody had made use of the kitchen. It could only have been Professor Pehl: a sliver of corned beef fat on a plate and a scattering of crumbs on the oilcloth had been left for a woman to dispose of. The sulks, or else her migraine, would have prevented Dorothy contemplating food.

  Elizabeth Hunter tore off a lettuce leaf, and cut herself a wedge of mousetrap cheese. Eating her blameless cheese she envied the Warmings their complementary lives; she even envied them their child’s illness. In a burst of sympathy rather than inquisitiveness, she marched along the veranda to their room. They had barely stopped living in it, leaving off as they had, in haste and anguish. Behind curtains dragged together at the last moment, there was still a smell of privacy: Helen’s powder on the dressing-table, Jack’s shirt rolled in a ball in a dark corner. Children’s faces looked at the intruder out of framed snapshots. Neither of her own children had looked her full in the face, either from photographs or in life.

  It was really too irritating, not to say maddening.

  ‘Dorothy?’ When she reached the door which she knew must open to her, Mrs Hunter rattled the knob.

  Now she was feeling old; she would be looking haggard: just how old and haggard Dorothy alone would see.

  To get it over quickly, she sprang the door, and practically lurched into this narrow glaring box. Dorothy’s room was so empty it might never have been inhabited.

  Elizabeth Hunter could not have hated Dorothy more than she did at that moment. More than Dorothy, she hated Edvard Pehl for having a part in her daughter’s defection. She was glad she had not washed up his insolent plate.

  Till suddenly faced with her own insolence, her childishness, she returned to the kitchen, and scraped and washed the plate. The sliver of sweating fat, and the iron roof crackling at her in the language of heat, reminded her of the foresters, their misguided gentleness, and a reverence to which she was not entitled.

  Because she was alone, she lay down and snoozed, or simply lay, during the afternoon. (If he was there at the other end of the house, he gave no sign.)

  She was roused by hands, it seemed. No, by thin fingers twitching at the corrugated roof. Only wind after all.

  She got up and washed herself as well as you can from a jug and basin. She powdered her revived skin. She annointed herself. Why not? Her life had been a ceremony. She put on the dress she had worn the night before. Though in fact old, age had not tarnished its splendour, nor blunted its fluting: like certain classic sculptures. the dress was designed not only to ravish the human eye, but to seduce time into relaxing its harshest law. Tonight she plaited her hair, and wound, or moulded it, into a crown; then bowed her head before slipping over it the gold and turquoise chain she had allowed the child to wear.

  She dared only a quick look in the glass.

  The wind had dropped. There was a breathlessness before sunset; irrelevant feathers of cloud were strewn on a white sky, just as she, at another level, was an irrelevent figure hanging around the veranda, living-room, kitchen, for no purpose she could think of, and in what was after all a ridiculous get-up. Well, she could cook something for the professor when he came: that would be purpose of a kind. She would make something simple, an omelette, say; though Dorothy had never approved of her omelettes. (You were not prepared to join your French daughter in the cult of slime.)

  Waiting, she sat down at the piano and listened to her own affectation hammering part of its way through the Field nocturne she had played last night (it was the only one she could remember). She had been waiting then for a man to approach and recognize that she had control over more than this hackneyed, girlhood piece, over music itself, and the threads of a brilliant sunset, and experience in general. Whereas now the most she could expect was a dull Norwegian, to hammer at facts, as she was hammering at the warped keys, fetching the thrummed, disjointed phrases out of the salt-eroded, motheaten depths of the piano.

  Thrumming. Drumming in the end. Until she was outdrummed.

  She went outside, and there were the flying brumbies approaching down the beach, their veils of manes, and in the sky the cloud feathers more tenuous than before. The sun too, was curiously veiled and pallid above the single stretched black hair of the horizon. At least the brumbies were outrunners of life, and she was gratefully prepared to watch them stampede along the beach in the direction of the striped cliffs. But this evening the mob propped, wheeled, and broke off through the scrub, smashing and trampling as they charged at the hinterland.

  Quite suddenly a bluish dark had possessed and contracted the landscape. She lit her gentle lamps. Out to sea a blue lightning tattered the sky, which gradually lost its paper flatness, becoming a dome of black, thunderous marble. The night below had begun to snuffle. From undulating at first, the wind slammed hard at the land. She saw trees recoiling, heels dug in as it were, like a crowd resisting physical prostration.

  She ran down out of the house, possibly falling once, but thinking less of selfpreservation than of finding and shepherding her deadly companion. ‘Edvard!’ she called, then screamed into the wind, ‘ED-VARD!’ His stupidity was what worried her: all his science would not save his limbs from breaking.

  Something flying could have been a board grazing her temple oh but sharp. For the moment a wound was less frightening than exhilarating the wind roaring into her lungs inflating them like windsocks. The bluest lightning could not make her flinch.

  Till cold and sober, she saw black walls on the move across what had been a flat surface of water. She was blown back no longer any question of where twirled pummelled the umbrella of her dress pulled inside out over her head then returned her breasts rib-cage battered objects blood running from her forehead she could feel taste thinned with water a salt rain.

  In this solid rain herself a groping survived insect a staggering soaked spider fetching up at what must be the bunker behind the house where they keep their wine.

  A child’s broken celluloid doll lying in the sand at the entrance.

  She looked back to see the groaning house break into sticks and flame a cardboard torch thrust high above the heap at once rain wiped it off.

  Trains were rumbling, it sounded, over the wreckage, and continued rumbling, across the roof of the bunker.

  It was dry inside her funnel. The walls, she could remember from daylight, were concrete buried in the dune which rose behind the house, but how resistant to acts of God she was not of a mind to calculate. She felt around her, through cobwebs and other accretions, and found the shelves of wine bottles. She began rolling the bottles off the uppermost shelf. Their thudding as they hit the tamped floor could not be heard above the thunder, roaring of the gale, groaning of the sea, lashing of wiry rain, until in a last desperate sweep she cleared the shelf entirely: out of the slithering torrent rose a shattering of glass. She clambered up, stiff with salt, sweat, and age, and stored herself thankfully on her shelf.

  More awkward to dispose of than her jackknife body was the mind which kept lumbering around inside the walls of her bruised head, or streakin
g off independently by flashes. The lightning was soon as free to enter as her thoughts to sky-rocket, for the sturdy door of the bunker, till now wedged ajar in a drift of sand, was forced off its rusted hinges: she heard it somersaulted away.

  There was a continual juggling of fireballs, either in the sky, or was it at the back of her eyesockets: rub hard enough Kate to see the coloured spots it’s bad for the eyes but I don’t care. All night long the rumble of goods trains passing through Gogong, and on into precious memory, where it was Alfred trying to protect her storm-threatened body with his. As though she were the vulnerable one.

  About three, if she could have looked at her little shagreen travelling clock (a present from Alfred, one of several, when Basil was born) the hour when she normally woke, to drink a glass of water and read a chapter, Elizabeth Hunter let herself down from her shelf. She was standing in water up around her thighs, nuzzled by several stiff objects, bottles, and dead fish.

  Outside the hole where the door should have been the night was still hurtling. She could hear the ocean rising to accuse her. Well, she would stand accused: for the suicide of that contrary man who refused to come in; or was it murder if you were the cause of his staying out?

  It was not the dead fish Edvard guiding you back on to the shelf more likely Alfred or solicitous Arnold. Arnold was born with a highly developed Sense of Responsibility which did not make him immune from irresponsible lust at least that one attack. For which you as much as he. Or more. Perhaps it is you who are responsible for the worst in people. Like poor little Basil sucking first at one unresponsive teat then the other the breasts which will not fill in spite of the nauseating raw beef and celery sandwiches prescribed by Dr Whatever—to ‘make milk to feed your baby’. Instead of milk, ‘my baby’ (surely the most tragic expression?) must have drawn off the pus from everything begrudged withheld to fester inside the breast he was cruelly offered.