The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  ‘It has the authentic flavour. Delicious.’ Dorothy despised the words she had chosen, but did want to contribute something.

  ‘You can only call it tough—to tell the truth.’ Macrory looked at his wife; he wanted to hurt somebody, and in doing so, himself.

  ‘But it’s not bad, Dad.’ One of his boys, who did not understand, was trying to help him.

  ‘To you it isn’t.’ The father sighed; he was considerate of his children.

  They were all eating the gristly meat, some of them genuinely loving it, others persuading themselves. The Hunters looked at each other with unforced tenderness.

  ‘Will anyone have some more?’ Anne was enunciating again so bright and clear she might have been fresh from ‘Kirkcaldy’.

  This would be the test. Some of the children accepted; the guests declined with sugared smiles.

  Macrory could relax again.

  Now it was Anne who carved the mutton. ‘And what about Rory?’

  Cocking his head, lowering his eyelids, his lashes so thick they looked as though they were gummed together, or fringed with flies, he agreed delicately to accept another help of mutton.

  Anne brought it. Again she brushed against him; while arranging the plate, she leaned over his shoulder lower than she need have. The Macrorys tended still to communicate by touch; words were the dangerous weapons some malicious daemon from time to time put into their mouths.

  During the pudding a child began wilting and moaning. I’m sick of spotted dog, Mum!’

  ‘Eat it up! When I was a little girl at “Kirkcaldy” spotted dog was my favourite pudding. Certainly the spotted dog was lighter. I don’t pretend to be a cook. But you can’t say it isn’t wholesome. We had a professional cook at “Kirkcaldy”.’

  ‘At “Kirkcaldy”! At “Kirkcaldy”!’ The husband bowed his head. ‘Everything was lighter, sweeter—better class. Only the fences were the same. Barbed wire never changes.’

  Anne was not going to be caught. ‘Isn’t it a weakness everybody suffers from to some extent?’ She looked from Dorothy to Basil, who smilingly agreed not to disagree.

  Rory was addressing his knuckles, white except where one of them was scabbed. ‘Any “Kirkcaldy” I knew was only ever from the wrong entrance.’ He rinsed his mouth with what remained of the whiskey, and left them.

  His wife murmured, ‘Rory’s tired.’ She was at her gauntest, her saddest, the social worker whose job has got the better of her.

  The Princesse de Lascabanes suggested that everyone was tired: her revenant certainly felt exhausted.

  ‘Oh, but I must show you!’ Anne revived. ‘Rory had the idea of turning your father’s study into a private sitting-room. So that you can escape from children—and think your own thoughts.’ She had got up. ‘I believe he’s lit a fire. Come and see.’

  The Hunters followed her warily. It was obvious that Anne wished to rehabilitate a delinquent husband. But what sort of ambush had the husband prepared? Or did he reason that your own thoughts in Father’s room would be dynamite enough?

  Basil had some difficulty in remembering their father’s study, except as a scene of embarrassment and lockjaw. As in the rest of the house by this stage there was hardly any furniture: a burst, leather armchair; a day bed, probably burst too, if it had not been draped with a faded Indian counterpane, scorched in places by an overheated iron; general collapse among the books on sparsely tenanted shelves.

  ‘Don’t you remember your father’s chair?’ Anne Macrory was daring them to let her kindness down.

  ‘Why was the chair left here, if, as you say, Mother was so determined to do the right sentimental thing?’ Dorothy’s voice had begun hammering again.

  ‘She let it stay because it was too old, I expect. She made us a present of a number of things. We were glad of them.’ Anne tried draping the counterpane into more artistic folds. ‘Books, too. Though we’re not readers. There isn’t time.’

  Dorothy was particularly outraged by Mother’s abandoning the books: apart from their sacredness as literature, books are the most personal possessions. Basil did not care: he had dragged the chair closer to the fireplace and two great smouldering knots of wood. He sat smiling down at the fire.

  Dorothy pounced at the bookshelves. Tm sure none of these were my father’s.’

  Anne offered proof. ‘Here’s his signature in one.’

  ‘The Charterhouse of Parma!’ Dorothy turned on Basil. ‘It was his favourite. She told me. She could leave his favourite! And mine!’ She was chafing the book between her hands. ‘No one can accuse us of heartlessness.’

  Basil could not care. ‘I never read it—The Charterhouse of Thing.’ He was too drowsy: couldn’t read a book in any case, unless a play, if it had the right part in it.

  Dorothy was so engrossed in their father’s book, in checking the text, shaking out the crumbs, fingering a tea stain (or was it faded blood?) Anne Macrory must have withdrawn. Dorothy herself must have sat down on the washed-out cotton counterpane. She must have been, anyway half-reading, half-drifting, in their sitting-room.

  While Basil must have half-dreamt he had grown old, as people do in life; you can’t afford to grow old in the theatre. Perhaps if he sat long enough over the murmurous fire the most calamitous events might seem inevitable, even become acceptable: his wives; his non-child Imogen; the attempt to prolong what he and Dorothy understood as living by condemning their mother Elizabeth Hunter.

  He opened his eyes wide. Her legs drawn up on the decrepit daybed, the open book dangling from her fingers, not as book but as artifice, Dorothy was staring at him, and not. What reminded him of their mother he could not think, or did not want to.

  Still looking at him Dorothy said, ‘That little, decent man struggling to escape from an unnatural bronze attitude. Which she imposed on him. The most grotesque idea Mother ever conceived! Say if we’re not justified?’ She was looking wholly at her brother, in the ruin of their father’s room which had been made over to them.

  He would have liked to close his eyes again, but as she would not allow it, he had to use the socially approved channel of evasion, ‘Don’t let’s talk about it;’ yawning, stretching his comfortable drowsiness to its full extent. ‘We didn’t come here, I feel, simply for that purpose.’

  ‘For which other, I’d like to know? unless to wallow in discomfort.’ She laughed. ‘We must admit it’s the rock bottom, darling.’

  ‘We can slip away when we’ve had enough.’

  ‘Yes, we can always slip away.’ Sunk in an apathy of sagging leather and faced with the pleasures of martyrdom, she wondered if she would be able to.

  Overhead, voices were wrenched and slamming rather than talking.

  ‘Listen to them!’ Basil said.

  ‘Poor wretches!’ Dorothy murmured dispassionately.

  ‘Perhaps we should go to bed,’ Basil suggested. ‘That appears to be what the Macrorys have done.’

  Unexpectedly, Dorothy awoke to a morning filled with explicit forms, after a night disordered by equivocal thoughts and suspicious, finally not unpleasant, dreams. She had woken once already, during the hours of darkness, to a sensation of being surrounded. She had switched the light on. Basil was snoring in the next room; beyond them silence was heaped on silence. She browsed here and there in The Charterhouse of Parma, She thought she might get to hate Macrory; although she had renounced men, at her age, she found his physical presence disturbing. She read, but could not become involved with this pale ghost of the novel she knew. Not that it was lost for ever: she could invoke its flesh and blood by reading it again in the original; thus her vanity was satisfied.

  Sometimes at night Madame de Lascabanes allowed herself a touch of brilliance which should have been hers. Under the sheet she crossed her still estimable legs, an involuntary legacy from Elizabeth Hunter, and thought how she would enslave others, Anne Macrory for a start, and perhaps one or two of the children, simply by using her eyes. Her Sanseverina wandered after that into deeper velvet.
One of several presences was entangling almost tripping before fitting her closer than a skirt. It could not be called adultery: Anne Macrory herself had confirmed it was the parents’ bed. Love which has been imprisoned a lifetime in this tower which is also incidentally a body can only be the purest noblest occurring with a delicacy Stendhal cannot realize till Fabrizio breaks open his bronze and there is the knuckle with this one ugly scab oh Basil Bas Ber Bazzurl tu es le seul à me comprendre.

  Dorothy Sanseverina woke. Again it was dark, Basil snoring in the next room. Supposing she had called out, as women do, she had read, in their ecstasy? She was relieved Basil continued sleeping. She could not have explained such an exquisitely elusive pleasure to her brother, or any of the others who came to mind: that monument her father; the disgusting man with shirt open as far as his navel; less perhaps to Mrs Macrory; least of all to a vengeful Elizabeth Hunter, whose bed it was.

  So Dorothy slept uneasily.

  And got up too quickly: she had heard it was dangerous for people beyond a certain age to jump out of bed on waking; but had meant to rise early, to introduce some sort of order into the ghastly Macrory kitchen. Instead, here she was, listening to her anxious breathing as she bumped around in a grey light amongst the scant furniture.

  Nor could she enjoy her own virtue to the utmost for finding Anne already in the kitchen, fire roaring in the flue, and beside the sink, additions to the unwashed plates. On the range stood a black pot, from which porridge had dribbled down to burn. In spite of the range it was cold in the kitchen at that hour. Through the rent in a fly-proof door, Anne was throwing chopbones to a pack of dogs in the yard beyond.

  Anne said in her frostiest ‘Kirkcaldy’ voice, ‘I hope you slept. I hope Rory and I didn’t disturb you. We were not quarrelling. We were discussing whether to send some old ewes to market. My brothers say Rory hasn’t a business head. That was my father’s opinion also.’ But suddenly Anne Macrory descended from her mythical-pastoral level, and exclaimed quite passionately, ‘Come away! Whatever are you doing?’

  ‘Preparing to wash up these pans and dishes.’

  ‘But you mustn’t! We wouldn’t hear of it—Princess.’

  ‘Truly, once I’ve drunk my coffee—and I can do that comfortably standing at the sink. How else shall I spend my time?’

  ‘Oh dear, that’s not for you!’ moaned the social worker dérangée. ‘And we don’t have coffee.’

  ‘Tea, then. I adore tea.’

  Madame de Lascabanes stuck to her pans. She often surprised in herself a practically mystical attitude towards the ordering of chaos, even in its more squalid manifestations. In different circumstances, she might have made a devoted and uncrushable femme de ménage. Strange that it was her French self which abounded in humility, while the Australian in her aspired to a place among the ‘happy few’.

  ‘Has she come to live with us?’ asked Mog, the fat girl who had scoffed the dripping the night before.

  The mother was too distracted to attempt an answer. Before each of her children who had appeared in the kitchen, she set a plateful of burnt porridge. For the recalcitrant princess she managed to slide a cup of tea in amongst the litter at the sink.

  The tea tasted bitter and stewed. It thrilled the Princesse de Lascabanes, as did her own consummate industry and the tongues of frosty air licking at her through the yard door.

  ‘What about Sir Basil?’ Mrs Macrory thought to ask, and became more distracted than before.

  ‘No idea. You know, I hardly know my brother.’ Indeed, Madame de Lascabanes was more intimate with the inside of this pan she was scouring.

  It was too immoral for poor Mrs Macrory. ‘We were a close family.’ She sighed, and drifted to the screen door, and warmed her hands in her soiled sleeves, and returned uncomforted. ‘Rory’s gone to fork out the silage to the calves. He’ll be back later on, and we’ll see what plans he has for entertaining Sir Basil.’

  The Princesse de Lascabanes narrowed her eyes, her lips, at the saucepan lid she had finished. She was holding it like a buckler between her self and the unspeakable Macrory; or herself and Basil, even; Hubert might not have existed; Father was at least dead; Fabrizio, a character she saw differently at successive readings, offered the greatest difficulties because substantially affected by the climate at waking.

  Half opening in her, this dream of the night before was a wound more exquisite than any she had yet experienced.

  By the time Sir Basil Hunter woke the frost must have thawed. The light reflected on the bare walls was suggestive of glossy, yellow-green apples. It had probably been a child’s room before the visitor turned him out: in one corner stood a toy cart. Early in the night Basil had grown resigned to the stretcher: he was too tired to sulk at discomfort. On waking, he was still tired and stiff, as though he had been on a journey in his sleep far longer than their drive to ‘Kudjeri’. Now he continued lying curled in the shape he had been longing to assume: that of a sleeping possum, or a bean before the germinal stage, or a foetus in ajar. He might snooze some more if nobody came to scold him. Each of the women in the house was a scold. If it were that thug Macrory he might have a knuckle duster with him. None of it greatly mattered to Basil in bed.

  In fact nobody bothered about him. He shaved unevenly in cold water, and tried to decide which of his unsuitable clothes to wear for ‘Kudjeri’. His mind was beginning to grope around amongst its surroundings regardless of what the Macrorys had reduced them to. The physical context should not matter; but it always did. He patted his face in the flawed, deal-framed mirror. He wasn’t too bad, considering. Reassured, he roughed up the foulard at his throat, and wondered what Dorothy would be wearing.

  When he went down he was surprised to find her in the kitchen, looking far less incongruous than he expected. She was arranging things in cupboards as though she had taken possession of the house.

  Because of the march she had stolen on him, he asked with some severity, ‘Where are the Macrorys?’

  ‘She is starting the children on their lessons. He’s out around the place, doing something occupational, but will be back shortly to entertain you.’

  Only then she looked at him, to give him the opportunity to grimace.

  He took it, and at once felt annoyed with himself for having fallen into the trap: he was no longer sure which side Dorothy was on. She had tied up her hair in a Roman scarf, as though she were again a child dressing up on a wet afternoon. The scarf made the face fend for itself, which it did by not communicating. Her arms, he noticed for the first time, were not only lean, but leathery and muscular. No doubt her hands, with their long nails which usually exempted them from any form of drudgery except boredom, had already acquired a film of household grime, not to say kitchen sludge. No, he could not be certain which side Dorothy was on; when he needed her on his.

  ‘What do you want for breakfast?’ she asked.

  ‘There you’ve got me. Whatever they have.’

  ‘Men eat charred chops,’ Dorothy reminded him with every sign of gravity.

  She even produced from out of a fly-proof cupboard a dishful of drought-fed, mutilated chops, and held one up, not for him to laugh at, mercifully he realized at the last moment. ‘Rory himself does practically all the outside work,’ Dorothy told; and let the chop fall back on the pile.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ll have a chop, if that’s what you advise. Or two.’

  The Princesse de Lascabanes actually knew what ought to be done. Not only was she grilling the chops, so the stench told him, she was melting a lump of dripping in an enormous blackened pan, to fry up a mound of grey cold potato laced with ribbons of pale cold cabbage.

  The blue fumes, the spitting, then the revolver firing a blank at memory, brought the image jerking to life. ‘You know—’ he wanted somebody to share it, ‘we might be on tour—in digs up north—doing for ourselves. Before anybody knew we existed.’ Encouraged by the fug of sentiment, he moved in on her and squeezed a buttock.

  The pr
incess did not like it. ‘Watch the grill!’ she shouted. ‘See if the chops are far enough gone.’

  They looked infernal. ‘They should be. They’re writhing.’

  In her irritation, she pushed him aside, to stoop, to peer, to frown: her recently contracted partnership with life made her as damn humourless as she had been when a girl. ‘A tough chop is easier to swallow if frizzled,’ she announced with bossy assurance.

  Her opinion of him was probably as low as Shiela’s or Enid’s. Faced with his trio of contemptuous women, what he desired most, as ageing man and precarious actor, was respect rather than admiration.

  Dorothy at least handed him a plateful of food, all the better for being primitive and mountainous: he tucked in, devouring with particular appetite the charred fat round the edges of the chops and those bits of the fried-up veg which had stuck to the pan. He had forgotten something, and Dorothy pushed the bottle at him to test his reaction to ritual. She stood watching obliquely, and only turned away, whether hissing or sighing it was difficult to tell, on seeing him consecrate amorphous matter, first with a turgid clot or two, followed by an ejaculation of authentic, plopping red; while the act transformed him into a boy, greedy for life as much as food, as he watched an old rain-soaked drover still sitting in this same kitchen chewing the greasy mass of tucker a boss’s cook had doled out as charity.

  Macrory appeared too suddenly, as though bursting in might deliver him from a predicament by intimidating a pair of impostors.

  He ignored the woman and jerked his head at the actor bloke. I’m gunner muster this mob of ewes we’re sending in.’ He showed his teeth in the ambiguous smile. If you’d care to come,’ the offer was a grudging one, ‘we’ll make tracks as soon as you’ve put away yer breakfast.’

  Macrory drove his jeep at such a bat he might have been prepared to sacrifice himself if it would dispose of Sir Basil Hunter. On the back seat stood a bleached and matted kelpie, whinging old womanishly and draping a purple tongue over the driver’s shoulder.