The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  This night (morning by the shagreen clock) it is the earth coming to a head: practically all of us will drown in the pus which has gathered in it.

  Elizabeth Hunter was almost torn off her shelf by a supernal blast then put back by a huge thrust or settling of exhausted atoms.

  She lay and submitted to someone to whom she had never been introduced. Somebody is always tinkering with something. It is the linesman testing for the highest pitch of awfulness the human spirit can endure. Not death. For yourself there is no question of dying.

  She could not visualize it. She only positively believed in what she saw and was and what she was was too real too diverse composed of everyone she had known and loved and not always altogether loved it is better than nothing and given birth to and for God’s sake.

  It must have been the silence which woke her. No, not woke: she had been stunned into a state of semi-consciousness from which light as much as silence roused her.

  She waded out of the bunker through a debris of sticks, straw, scaly corpses, a celluloid doll. Round her a calm was glistening. She climbed farther into it by way of the ridge of sand and the heap of rubbish where the house had stood. At some distance a wrecked piano, all hammers and wires, was half buried in wet sand.

  Without much thought for her own wreckage, she moved slowly down what had been a beach, picking her way between torn-off branches, great beaded hassocks of amber weed, everywhere fish the sea had tossed out, together with a loaf of no longer bread, but a fluffier, disintegrating foam rubber. Just as she was no longer a body, least of all a woman: the myth of her womanhood had been exploded by the storm. She was instead a being, or more likely a flaw at the centre of this jewel of light: the jewel itself, blinding and tremulous at the same time, existed, flaw and all, only by grace; for the storm was still visibly spinning and boiling at a distance, in columns of cloud, its walls hung with vaporous balconies, continually shifted and distorted.

  But she could not contemplate the storm for this dream of glistening peace through which she was moved. Interspersed between the marbled pyramids of waves, thousands of seabirds were at rest; or the birds would rise, and dive, or peacefully scrabble at the surface for food, some of them coasting almost as far as the tumultuous walls of cloud; and closer to shore there were the black swans—four, five, seven of them.

  She was on her knees in the shallows offering handfuls of the sodden loaf the sea had left for her. When they had floated within reach, the wild swans outstretched their necks. Expressing neither contempt nor fear, they snapped up the bread from her hands, recognizing her perhaps by what remained of her physical self, in particular the glazed stare, the salt-stiffened nostrils, or by the striving of a lean and tempered spirit to answer the explosions of stiff silk with which their wings were acknowledging an equal.

  All else was dissolved by this lustrous moment made visible in the eye of the storm, and would have remained so, if she had been allowed to choose. She did not feel she could endure further trial by what is referred to as Nature, still less by that unnaturally swollen, not to say diseased conscience which had taken over during the night from her defector will. She would lie down rather, and accept to become part of the shambles she saw on looking behind her: no worse than any she had caused in life in her relationships with human beings, hi fact, to be received into the sand along with other deliquescent flesh, strewn horsehair, knotted iron, the broken chassis of an upturned car, and last echoes of a hamstrung piano, is the most natural conclusion.

  Logically, it should have happened. If some force not her absent will had not wrenched at her doll’s head and faced it with the object skewered to the snapped branch of a tree. The gull, a homelier version of the white predators, had been reduced to a plaque in haphazard bones and sooty feathers. Its death would have remained unnoticed, if her mind’s ear had not heard the cry still tearing free as the breast was pierced.

  At least the death cry of the insignificant sooty gull gave her back her significance. It got her creaking to her feet. She began scuttling, clawing her way up the beach by handfuls of air, an old woman and foolish, who in spite of her age had not experienced enough of living.

  So she reached her bunker. She re-arranged herself, amongst rust and cobwebs, on her narrow shelf, protecting her skull with frail arms, to await the tortures in store for her when the storm returned.

  For the eye was no longer focused on her, she could tell; and as it withdrew its attention, it was taking with it the delusions of her feeble mind: the black swans feeding out of her hands and seabirds nestling among the dark-blue pyramids.

  As the storm came roaring back down the funnel in which she had clenched herself, the salt streamed out of her blinded sockets.

  Some time that morning day evening the thin ribbon of silence was stamped very faintly then more distinctly with voices. The thing on the shelf, becoming a body again, began painfully trying out joints to see whether they still worked.

  An old woman appeared in the hole which had once been the doorway to a bunker in a sandhill, behind what was now the ruins of the Warming family’s summer ‘place’.

  The woman said, ‘Yes. I am alive—after all.’ The breeze even lifted her hair, or one lock less sodden than the mass.

  Elizabeth Hunter smiled at the still tentative sunlight; no, it must be evening: the light was waning. She was glad to find herself reunited with her womanly self, and to see that these were actual men. One of them she recognized as the stringy Second Forester whose modesty had started him anointing his saw when she intruded on their privacy. His present companion was not the man with hairy belly; she had never seen this one before. He looked important, above physical employment, from the way he stood with his hands on his hips.

  Legs astride the ruins, the man of authority congratulated the survivor. ‘You’ve had a lucky escape, Mrs Hunter. We’ve come to take you back to the camp and across to the mainland. The line’s out of order, as you’ll appreciate. So we can’t call the copter. But some of the boys ’ull ferry you over in the boat.’

  She smiled, and bowed her head without comment, the ropes of sodden hair hanging like plummets from around her face. One of her breasts, she realized, had escaped through the tatters her dress had become. She could see no way of covering it without drawing attention to herself.

  As they trudged through the sand towards a truck standing on high ground she noticed the storm had blown the bark off several trees. There was that bird too, impaled on one of them, skewered by a snapped branch.

  The stringy fellow wanted to contribute something to their meeting. ‘Most of these trees are gunner die,’ he confided; then, after wetting his lips, he pointed. ‘See that bird? It’s a noddy.’ She saw her friend had left his teeth out.

  Elizabeth Hunter, while listening, was more intent on following the movements her feet were making in the sand. The men seemed to be accepting the exposed breast as a normal state of affairs. Which it had to be, in the circumstances; only Dorothy would have condemned it and everybody.

  The Forestry foreman, if that was his status, told how the cyclone had cut a swath halfway along the ocean side of the island, turning out to sea before arriving at the camp. This time the mainland was untouched.

  ‘Oh really,’ she said,’ a cyclone, was it?’ formally.

  She could hardly bother: nothing mattered beyond her experiencing the eye.

  When they reached the truck they helped her into the cabin. They sat her between them. They behaved as though guarding a treasure, something of great antiquity and value uncovered by the storm. Whereas she was simply herself again.

  In their erratic and roundabout drive, while the foreman was forcing the truck’s nose through, and sometimes over, freshly piled barricades of scrub, the stringy, -toothless fellow asked her, ‘Feelin’ okay, are yer?’ She caught a possessive tone in his voice, induced no doubt by their first meeting how many aeons ago in the rain forest; he had that over his boss, who was now merely the driver of the truck.

>   But she felt no desire to be possessed, by anybody. Like the black swans, she never had been, except for procreative purposes.

  Suddenly she blushed for her self-indulgence; she thinned herself out from between her companions, to lean forward, to impress on them the urgent need for action. ‘I forgot. There’s a man—a guest of Mr Warming’s—Professor Pehl, who didn’t return yesterday evening. He may have gone inland looking for shelter. He may have seen—he’s a scientist—that a storm was preparing. We must start looking for him at once. No,’ it was she who had taken command, ‘better drive on first to the camp so that we can brief as many men as you’ve got, and organize search parties. Or he may be dead,’ she thought to add; ‘but we’ll still have to find him.’

  ‘What—that Norwegian bloke?’ the foreman shouted unnecessarily loud. ‘He walked over yesterday evenin’, before the storm started up. Had ’is wotchermecallem—rucksack on ’im. Some of the boys were going across to Oxenbould. They took ’im along with ’em in the boat.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Bumped roofwards in the leaping truck, Elizabeth Hunter chafed the gooseflesh on her arms. She was only saved up, whereas that deadly man Edvard Pehl, had been saved. Did he join his accomplice the Princesse de Lascabanes on the mainland? She speculated no more than vaguely on the possibility of it, because she was still too weak from the great joy she had experienced while released from her body and all the contingencies in the eye of the storm.

  All the years she had spent lying on this mattress of warm moist sand the gulls had not deserted her. She had never been quite sure of gulls: even the stupid sooty kind, the noddies, are probably waiting to plunge their beaks and empty your sockets.

  ‘Mother? You’re not asleep, are you?’ Sea hunger, or continued use of the French language, had sharpened the voice. ‘You might give some thought to our suggestion. We don’t want to rush you into anything you’d dislike—but time can trickle away when decisions have to be made—and we’d like to see you settled before we leave—for Europe.’

  Dorothy feared her approach had not been resolute enough: too vague and womanly. Basil pretty certainly thought so: he shook off Mother’s claw as though getting rid of it.

  ‘Yes. Dorothy and I shall have the practical side to attend to. This house—the furniture alone.’ Movement helped him: his robes swirling and ballooning around him increased his confidence at every turn. ‘I imagine they’ll allow you to take some of the things you’re fond of. We’ll ask the matron. If necessary we’ll demand that you have your own furniture in your room. We must go up there and see them; why not tomorrow, Dorothy?’ he looked at his sister from out of the figure eight he was cutting in the middle of the carpet, ‘to discuss the matter.’

  Dorothy couldn’t help feeling moved by her brother’s famous voice.

  ‘Though of course,’ he had to remind her, ‘we may find they haven’t a vacancy for the moment.’ He too was moved, by the warmth which collusion had brought to their relationship.

  Mrs Hunter said, ‘If there isn’t a vacancy, somebody will conveniently die. They must be dying all the time.’

  It shocked her daughter. ‘Oh, darling! Now we’re being morbid again.’

  ‘I thought we’d decided to be realistic,’ Mrs Hunter said and laughed.

  At the same time, something liquid, sticky—oh dear, ancient eye-muck, began to force its way out, first a drop, then a positive driblet, from under one of the mottled lids. No tears! In Dorothy de Lascabanes a sense of revulsion was trying to get the better of her own anguish. Mother, one should remind oneself, was able to cry at will; she had quelled rebellious maids with tears, so that they stayed on worse enslaved than ever.

  Mother’s weakening, if it was, had a more personal effect on Basil. Professionally, he had to guard against his excessive sensibility. He remembered advancing on an audience, his dead Cordelia (that lump of a Bagnall girl) weighing down his arms, himself snuffling, then blubbering. The audience loved it, while he and the cast (trust your fellow artists) were too aware that his generous emotional response was destroying the concerted tone of a performance.

  Now his sensibility must resist this artful old creature, only incidentally their mother, by calling short her attempt to invoke pity and drown their plan in mawkishness. ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘that what we are doing will eventually be for the best, and for your happiness.’ If his voice trembled, it was because it suddenly occurred to him how the old bag might hang on and see the two of them reduced to ashes.

  Dorothy advised, ‘Don’t upset yourself, Mother;’ and start my poor Basil wavering, she did not add.

  Dorothy de Lascabanes had never before scented the opportunity of underpinning a weak man: the prospect, though alarming, was exhilarating: to react to the tremors, taste the tears, of someone ostensibly stronger than yourself.

  While Mother was explaining, ‘It’s something to do with my ducts—an oversensitivity, Dr—Treweek, I think—told me.’ She ungummed her gums to masticate a smile stored in the cavern behind.

  Basil had forgotten the doctor: an uncouth G.P. who used to come out from Gogong to ‘Kudjeri’, dandruff on his shoulders, and a smell of sweat from the leather band inside the hat he left hanging in the hall. Dr Treweek had a manner guaranteed to discourage the patient from ever falling ill again. Mother must have hated him.

  ‘I shouldn’t have thought Dr Treweek sensitive to oversensitivity.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right. It must have been Gidley. He likes his patients to think him kind. Perhaps he is.’

  ‘Dr Treweek attended to my arm. Surely he’s dead, isn’t he?’

  ‘Who’s dead—who’s alive—I no longer know.’

  But Basil was haunted by the smell of sweat, and of dusty casuarinas in the home paddock, and the scent of beeswax, at ‘Kudjeri’.

  ‘It was Dr Whichever who discovered about my hay fever. Did you know I am only ever infected in one nostril?’ Sure enough, one nostril was in full flood: Mrs Hunter tried to guggle it back.

  Écόeurant, mon Dieu! In the absence of a nurse Madame de Lascabanes tore out a Kleenex and wiped the snot from the old baby’s nose. She could have more than wiped: she might have broken off what she remembered as a work of art as late as Brumby Island. Instead, she pinched the gristle together till it showed white, and thus prevented any tenderness giving her away by running out of her fingertips.

  ‘Whurr—err—urrh!’ Mrs Hunter went.

  ‘Are you off your nut, Dorothy? Can’t you see you’re hurting her?’ Basil’s protest was halfhearted; his memories of ‘Kudjeri’ still possessed him: of pears in muslin of roses under tussore sunshades of children in gauze masks against the Spanish influenza there is no protection against poetry as perversely flavoured in the beginning as Isabellas damsons and Sevilles as much a secret vice as a first stream of sperm.

  Dorothy stood looking at her brother. His sharp words had wounded her. She could have wept for the unhappinesses he might not allow her to share in.

  But Mother had put on her social voice. ‘I do think it’s sweet of you both to pay me a visit—to tell me what you’re arranging for me. I so appreciate your kindness.’ She coughed, and tussled with the sheet. ‘I’m ready to die when you want me to.’

  Standing either side of the trussed figure on the great bed, the two avoided looking at each other.

  ‘I’ve experienced enough. Brumby Island alone would have satisfied anyone less—voracious. Now I’ve only got to work out how you stop the machinery.’

  Basil whispered, ‘Tomorrow, Dorothy? I have a little rented car.’

  ‘Tomorrow? Mmyeh-ss …’ Desperately searching for the other engagement she must have, Madame de Lascabanes could not find a convincing one.

  Her essentials only cobwebbed by the fine sheet, Elizabeth Hunter looked as good as naked. She was so perfectly lulled, Alfred might have been caressing her breasts, her navel, the Mount of Venus, till suddenly she became contorted, as though her children were jostling, elbowing, fighting
each other to be first out of the womb.

  Dorothy shuddered; but Basil was again entranced. ‘“Kudjeri”, Mother—who lives there now?’

  ‘Don’t ask me!’ she moaned. ‘Oh, some—some McDonald or Mackay, I believe. Arnold knows. Ask Arnold. A girl married an overseer, and her father bought a place for them. He bought “Kudjeri”. I don’t like to think how it must look nowadays. Scribble on the walls. Half-naked children sitting on their potties. The rugs threadbare. And a stench of pickled onions. Some people have a craving for them, because, I feel, they want to mortify themselves. I used to keep them to feed to that kind of person. I’d give them to Dr Treweek when he came out visiting my dear Edvard during his last illness.’

  ‘Edvard?’ The hackles of Dorothy’s shame and suspicion had risen: that grotesque, menopausal version of herself staring at her out of the glass. ‘But Edvard—we know too well—was the Norwegian we were stuck with on Brumby Island.’ Her mouth stiffening, she could not elaborate.

  ‘Yes,’ Mother agreed, ‘the one you were prepared to fall in love with—only you weren’t in your right mind at the time—and he too self-centred.’

  ‘I fall in love? with you preparing to carry on under my nose! That’s why I made sure I shouldn’t be a witness-why I sent for the helicopter—and booked on the first plane which would fly me back to sanity and Europe. Edvard Pehl, indeed!’ Que cette vieille garce créve sous mes yeux!

  Mrs Hunter lay grinning. ‘Looking back, lust is always difficult to understand. And ugly. One’s own is uglier than anybody else’s. Edvard Pehl was in some respects, I suppose, a desirable man. But tedious. Frightened. He ran away that same afternoon. I thought he must have caught you up—and that was why you’ve never wanted to mention him.’