The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  She would have liked to share with him the joy she had felt when the blood had begun to run between her legs. But would not tell what nobody but herself knew. Unless Mrs Hunter had guessed. Sir Basil Hunter’s misconceived, miscarried child would remain a secret: the dishonest touch is sometimes also necessary and harmless.

  As sleeplessness can become a virtue of sorts or stocktaking in the bed he hadn’t made since when he was all around you though sleeping on the lounge in the other room never properly heard him before sleeping too close in this narrow marriage bed She is knocking on the wood with her sapphire the pink it is yours isn’t it the coffin Nurse is where one sows one’s last seed I can see it germinating inside you like a lot of little skinned rabbits oh Mrs Hunter how can you be so unkind (giggle) always hated obstets but your own flesh is different my children are human we hope Mrs Hunter if the blessed sapphire works.

  Miss Haygarth stood the tea beside his blotter. ‘I got them to make it early. Later on, you mightn’t have time to enjoy it.’

  She had taken to creeping round him on her errands to his desk, standing too close, irritating him by her thoughtfulness, and more than anything by an only recent tendency to mumble.

  ‘What are you saying?’ he had to ask.

  ‘… enjoy it before they come.’ Miss Haygarth explained; even then half of it was lost.

  At the door she turned, and the importance of her question lent her an adequate voice. ‘Should I provide tea for the princess and Sir Basil?’

  Mr Wyburd manœuvred his glance to the level required by his bi-focals. ‘By the time they arrive you might try offering them lunch.’

  Though the corrugations in which her employer’s forehead was set implied seriousness, Miss Haygarth knew a joke was intended. She laughed for Mr Wyburd’s joke; her round, rimless spectacles and the gums of her denture appeared unduly grateful for it.

  Arnold Wyburd did not laugh. The cold had got into his right side, his right leg, from hanging about at the funeral.

  Mrs Hunter had made a point of not knowing the inhabitants of the Northern Suburbs, but like everybody one knew, she was disposed of by the Northern Suburbs Crematorium, of which she had been a shareholder. The mourners from across the water were brought there in long black hire cars which slowed up on entering the precincts, and rolled the rest of the way on what seemed like supernatural impetus, past the perfect shrubs. Overhead a pennant of smoke streamed from the chimney. Not inappropriately, one of Sydney’s black winds was blowing.

  Even before the ceremony, as he stood about acknowledging smiles which went so far and no farther, Arnold Wyburd suspected the wind had marked him down: he could almost feel the twinges in his lumbar regions. There were few mourners. Since age and her condition had compelled Mrs Hunter to withdraw from the world, most of her friends had dropped off—or died; in any case funerals, like shipboard farewells, tend to attract recent acquaintances rather than friends. Though several of those present for the funeral could not have been other than friends: elderly people stuffed into long-lasting tweed or fur held together by moulted buttons, they limped or shuffled out of the past, peering through a brandy haze with an air of humorous incredulity.

  The solicitor waited outside till the last possible moment, then walked in past the sparsely filled benches till reaching a row where his relationship with the deceased dictated he should sit. Not far behind him he was aware of Mrs Hunter’s cleaning woman, and what must have been the daughter and perhaps son-in-law. (The tribe of Cush, he had found, are amongst the most dedicated mourners.) Sister Badgery, always at her most professional when out of uniform, gave him a therapeutic smile.

  Arnold Wyburd was glad of the intimations of physical pain which came and went between himself and a mentally distressing situation. From time to time he moved in his seat to discover whether he could produce a twinge when he needed one. There was a smell of mothballs somewhere near, and the racket of a bronchial cough. Hands the plumper for a pair of black kid gloves were straining to get at the lozenges inside a difficult tin.

  Mrs Hunter had not encouraged the clergy (all the handsome ones are dead) but the man in the dog collar who gave the address had done his homework pretty conscientiously. He spoke with consoling warmth of the dead woman’s kindness, her beauty, intelligence, benefactor-husband, distinguished children, and managed to introduce discreet reference to her wealth. For an instant Elizabeth Hunter’s image radiated all the human virtues in an unmistakably celestial aura. But Arnold Wyburd’s vision was a blur: he could have been partially blinded by the vitriol she had flung at him over a lifetime.

  He looked round quickly, either to produce that twinge from above his right buttock, or persuade himself he could see clearly, or accuse some of those who were absent. In any case, he frowned, and through his frown noticed Sister de Santis arriving late, dressed in what he thought he recognized as her usual navy coat, and in addition a shocking hat: nothing less than a Caliph’s turban in orange silk.

  De Santis took a seat in the back row on the aisle. She must have had an uninterrupted view of the coffin. But she was not looking at it, or at anything, as far as you could tell from her eyelids. The great onion of a hat would have disguised nothing if her face had not been closed. He admired her prudence in matters other than the hat. He must offer her a lift back. They would talk about Mrs Hunter, which in itself would be consoling, because a return to habit, and Sister de Santis might mention, he did not know what, nothing he had ever expected of any human being, certainly not his good Lal, not even the late Elizabeth Hunter; he was positively trembling for the arcane wisdom Sister Mary de Santis might reveal on opening the locked cupboard of her face after the funeral.

  Arnold Wyburd was suddenly so ashamed he wrenched himself round to face the parson, the coffin, the pleated curtains still intact before the fiery furnace. What would have been a reckless action at the best of times, now produced an authentic twinge all the way down his right side. (Lal would be upset; he would keep it from her; though his behaviour must give him away in the end.)

  The service was as short and decontaminated as a busy day at the crematorium demands. There were no spectacular outbreaks of grief, only the hint of a soggy patch here and there in the broken rows. Elizabeth Hunter’s own sense of style would not have encouraged emotional excess.

  Then, as they waited for the mechanism to release the coffin, there was the sound of tin buckling, clattering, and a rain of lozenges on the tiles. At once the glaring varnished box came to life: it began to jerk, to stagger down the ramp towards the parted curtains. The least military of men, the solicitor decided to square his shoulders: it might be what those behind expected of him. Nobody would see that he was not watching. Hearing was what he could not avoid: above his deafness and the bumping of his heart in his creaking body, he was forced to hear; in fact he ended by listening to it.

  When he looked again the curtains had closed; he might have experienced anti-climax if it had not been for recalling the clause in what must be something like her eleventh will: ‘… that my solicitor and friend Arnold Wyburd take my ashes on a day when it is convenient and scatter them over the lake in the park opposite the house where I have lived …’ In the circumstances he was glad the twinge came in his side without assistance.

  And again in the open, he was all spontaneous twinge, exchanging condolences with other controlled faces, some of which he could not identify; while those who had done their duty by the dead strolled amongst the wreaths, to look for the inscriptions on the cards attached, and perhaps discover somebody had been as stingy or as tasteless as one would have imagined.

  Arnold Wyburd tried to think what it was he had to remember: oh, yes! to offer Sister de Santis a lift. He looked round for the Caliph’s hat, and searched along a couple of the paths which led away from the holocaust between memorial plaques and the unnaturally perfect shrubs. In no direction was there any sign of an orange beacon, and he felt relieved at last. Would they have found enough to say to each othe
r on the long drive back? and how would he have explained to Lal why he had chosen to give a lift to Sister de Santis of all people?

  He told his wife on his return, ‘You did well not to come.’

  ‘You know I would have if you had wanted. But you gave me no indication.’ She added, ‘She mightn’t have wanted it.’

  He noticed Lal was wearing a chain Mrs Hunter had given him for her. Her neck looked red and shrivelled, its freckles fretted by the turquoise clusters dividing the ceremonial chain.

  ‘Was it a success?’ Immediately she blushed for what must seem a gaffe. ‘Well, you know how furious she got if any of her entertainments fell flat. I can’t think how she would feel if she knew her funeral had been a failure.’

  The pain in Arnold Wyburd’s thigh became so inescapably violent she must have seen it reflected in his face.

  ‘Oh, darling, what is it?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘A touch of my sciatica.’

  ‘Ohhh!’ she moaned.

  He rather enjoyed her sympathy.

  ‘Why don’t I slip round to the chemist for a plaster?’ She did so hope to be allowed.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he grimaced.

  He was not a masochist, but wanted to bear this superficial pain without Lal’s well-intentioned interference. At the same time he gave her a wry smile in appreciation of her sympathy, while tapping on her hand in the code they had used over practically half a century to communicate their love.

  Out of prudence, Mrs Wyburd waited till his second helping of salmon loaf before inquiring, ‘Was there anybody I know?’

  ‘Nurses. Cleaners. Otherwise, the kind of face one half knows: the reason why one has never joined a club.’ Arnold continued masticating his salmon.

  Lal drank a draught of water. ‘The children?’

  Arnold began shaking his head, swallowing; he looked quite ratty. ‘I told you. Or didn’t I? Dorothy developed a migraine.’ As he returned them to the plate the knife and fork escaped from his fingers and landed loudly in the pink slush and two or three white vertebrae.

  Lal rounded her eyes and breathed under pressure for a treachery she would have expected.

  ‘Basil was coming,’ he was forced to tell, because his wife would surely prise it out, ‘but didn’t show up. I don’t doubt they’ll put in an appearance at the office—as agreed—to investigate the will.’

  In fact the Princesse de Lascabanes appeared before the solicitor had touched his earlier than usual tea.

  ‘You can’t begin to imagine the effect these headaches have on me, but I assure you, to experience one of them is—ghastly!’

  Suffering, whether of a particular or a general kind, had enlarged her eyes and filled them almost to the brim. Dorothy Hunter was a handsomer woman than Arnold Wyburd remembered.

  The princess could see this, and she saddened her smile accordingly. She had forgotten how easy success feels. She knew already from her dressing-table glass that she looked appealing: exhaustion had combined with relief to make her so. She was always at her most effective in garments which had reached the stage where the shabby has not too obviously taken over from the sumptuous, like her old Persian lamb, in the sable collar of which she had pinned a brooch: an enormous blister pearl in its targe of diamonds, one of the few fruits of her unfortunate marriage. Now if she was exhausted by the discomforts, not to say the shocks, of ‘Kudjeri’, she was sustained by knowing that Mother had chosen for herself the only reasonable way out of their impasse, and that the years of her own genteel and, yes, gallant poverty, were thereby ended. (No doubt there were lots of malevolent little souls who had seen the past situation in a different light, and who would begrudge her the ease she was about to enjoy. The attitude of the professional poor to the privations of the theoretically rich had always incensed Dorothy de Lascabanes; it was so wrong: a brooch, for instance, is more often than not the symbol of a substance which barely exists.)

  The princess roused herself to pay attention to this decent old man conscientiously telling her about the weather while secretly admiring her looks. She must compose some specially amiable remark as a reward for a creature so simple he would never guess at the actual reason for her absence from Mother’s funeral.

  So she picked at the leather arm of the chair, tilting her cheek against her sable collar, and told him, ‘You, of course, are the one I feel for. Anyone of a sensibility such as yours must have suffered most cruelly. I’m thankful you had my brother with you—to take some of the strain—on the day. As for Basil—a funeral is a gift to any actor.’

  Arnold Wyburd decided not to reveal that her brother had let them down: she might have profited by it too inordinately.

  While Dorothy wondered whether she would have squeezed Mr Wyburd’s hand if she had been closer to it. As it was, the distance between them would have made such a gesture look theatrical, or even athletic. In any case, she had no desire. It was strange how Mother’s death seemed to have cut most of her desires: before any, her hankering after a father. She was again appalled, very briefly, by that dream in which the solicitor had trailed his silky testicles across her thighs.

  She glanced at her watch and said, ‘I expect my brother will be late as usual;’ and laughed for a remark which did not require it.

  It immediately brought Sir Basil Hunter.

  He was looking puffy, she thought, under a little tweed hat cocked forward over one eye. Either he was an actor playing a vulgar part, or else a vulgarity in himself had come to the surface since she saw him last.

  In spite of the flash hat and an expression of glittering biliousness Basil had evidendy decided to play it sober. ‘Morning, Dorothy—Wyburd.’ He sat down on the nearest uncomfortable chair, arranging his fists knuckle to knuckle against his chest as though one were to believe he didn’t know what to do with them.

  Thus disposed he looked from one to the other of his companions before delivering his line, ‘There are heights of grief to which weaker mortals fail to attain.’

  Dorothy was instinctively impressed by what she suspected of being Shakespeare, then irritated by Basil’s pretentiousness.

  But Wyburd murmured, ‘Quite,’ smiled in a sort of way, and looked down at the papers on his desk.

  Basil accepted the solicitor’s forgiveness as sentiment due to him; but could he be sure of Dorothy’s charity as well? She gave no sign; she refused to look at him, as though she would trust the floor rather than an affectionate reality they had discovered in their relationship.

  ‘As we know,’ the solicitor was saying, ‘there is the question of Mrs Hunter’s will.’

  Dorothy looked pained. She could tell from the angle at which Basil was holding his head that he must have plumped for wistfulness. ‘Yes,’ he said rather breathily, ‘the will.’

  She remembered the sound of eyelashes opening and closing. Or can you hear them? Isn’t it, rather, the touch?

  Since leaving ‘Kudjeri’ there were certain thoughts she had succeeded in driving out of her mind. She could not afford to let such thoughts return.

  Madame de Lascabanes opened her bag. She took out her handkerchief. She held it firmly against her lips.

  Determined to prevent an outbreak of grief in his office, the solicitor hurried on. ‘Of course we’re all acquainted with the terms of your father’s will: the estate to his widow for life, to be divided equally between his children on her death.’

  Basil at least was genuinely moved; it was the word ‘children’, applicable even at the end of the piece. He shivered slightly.

  Dorothy had recovered her balance: money has great stabilizing powers. She was only surprised—she always had been—at Father’s decision to divide his fortune ‘equally’. As a woman she might have expected to be badly done by.

  ‘So,’ the solicitor continued, ‘you will now receive your equal portions. It is more specifically your mother’s will we have to consider. I think you’ll find it straightforward enough;’ he distributed copies to the children. ‘But then
Mrs Hunter was straightforward in almost everything she did.’

  Somebody laughed.

  ‘Don’t you agree, Dorothy?’

  ‘Oh, I suppose so—up to a point.’ She buttoned her mouth and closed her eyes on anything beyond that point.

  Arnold Wyburd blushed. ‘At least I hope you’ll find her will straightforward. Apart from one or two minor legacies, again it’s the equal division of a fortune between yourselves.’

  Basil and Dorothy looked appropriately grave.

  ‘There are the bequests to servants, some of them now dead—and this gift,’ he coughed, ‘the sum of five thousand dollars to my wife—surprisingly—movingly—generous.’

  Basil said, ‘I’m only too happy Mother should have appreciated Mrs Wyburd. As I remember, she was an exceptionally likeable character.’ He was so relieved at his own good fortune he could forgive Mrs Wyburd her five thousand; though admittedly, it came as a surprise.

  Dorothy summoned nostalgia in a vision of freckles and the scent of summer. ‘Charming—motherly. I always loved her.’ She was fairly pleased with her own magnanimity.

  ‘Where I fear Mrs Hunter erred is in failing to recognize what she owed to her latter-day dependents. I suggested more than once that she remember her nurses and her housekeeper Mrs Lippmann in her will, but by then she was so old, she couldn’t believe she was destructible. I didn’t continue bothering her because I thought it a matter we could easily settle, between ourselves, after her death.’

  ‘By all means a little something to the nurses,’ Sir Basil Hunter agreed. ‘Isn’t it one of the conventions?’

  Dorothy settled for a long slow stare which she aimed at the toe of one of her shoes: some decisions she preferred to leave to the men, or anyway, till she saw them led astray by innocence or ignorance.

  ‘How much would you suggest, Arnold?’ Basil might have been projecting his voice into the darkness of the stalls, asking advice of a director during rehearsal; he was not afraid of, he respected, his leading lady, except when objective judgment was called for.