Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

(Oh no, Mother must, of course, be resisted at every instant. Remember the island, the calamine lotion, the skiapod equipped with a mouth large enough to swallow an ecologist.)

Basil did not greet their mother, perhaps because guilty of arriving late and in a rush, though Dorothy preferred to take it as a sign that he meant business.

Till he shook her by asking, ‘Have you started anything, Dorothy?’ when nobody knew for certain that Elizabeth Hunter was deaf.

‘No. Why should I? Haven’t I been waiting for you?’ Her anger might have returned, but she could sense shudders appealing from the sibling conscience to her own.

Mother herself helped them out of their impasse. ‘I never saw you act, Basil. When there was the opportunity — after that de Lascabanes wedding — when we went across and spent a few weeks in London — I couldn’t bring myself to go to the theatre. You were in something at the time, too. You were clever enough always to be in something. But I just wasn’t brave enough to find out for myself.’

‘The only time you were not brave, I should say.’ Sir Basil Hunter had recovered his jewelled scabbard, his sleeves sumptuous with fur. ‘I expect you were busy, Mother darling, trying on hats, and patiently enduring all those fittings at the dressmakers’.’ A particularly splendid movement brought him from L.C. to bedside, C., laughter glistening on the points of his teeth.

Dorothy was reassured on finding the teeth pointed — if they were not false: that day at the solicitors, before Basil had her sympathy, she had decided some of them were false.

Elizabeth Hunter’s gums were grinning in her son’s direction. ‘Yes, the hats and dresses! You’re laughing at me. But hadn’t I my own art to consider? Admittedly a minor one.’ As she stirred, there was a faint rustling of stale perfumes; light clashed with light and was ground still finer, brighter; the air was swizzled. ‘What really prevented me going to the theatre,’ she sneezed as though memory had pricked her eroded nostrils, ‘was the thought that I mightn’t find perfection — which is what I have always looked for — wanted so desperately to find, in my children.’

Dorothy could no longer bear to look at Mother, but saw that Basil had been stung; which was all to the good.

When Mother played her next. ‘Your father went.’ A card they had not expected, it strengthened her hand by the love they had withheld from a man there seemed no point in knowing.

Basil was in the position of one who still cannot tell how deeply he has been wounded. ‘If Father saw me act, he must have given you a full report. Strange he didn’t come round after the performance — unless he found so little to approve of.’ On top of the social omission, an unenlightened judgment ruffled his actor’s vanity.

‘He didn’t go round, I expect, because he was shy. Nor did he report on the performance. I tried to pump him — because half of me was curious to know. Well, he didn’t utter a word. Alfred, you see, was a man of great delicacy.’

Basil licked the salt off his lips on deciding Mother’s game was less cunning than fortuitous.

‘They were both gentle, sensitive men, my husband and my father, and each died of his disappointments.’ Elizabeth Hunter’s eyes were staring like two saucers of frozen milk. ‘Do you think I could have prevented any of their suffering?’

Again playing for compassion, she might have won it if Dorothy had not remembered.

‘How can one tell? I hardly knew my father, and my grandfather was always only a name. Or a myth of failure and suicide. Oh, and one other thing — funny it should come back to me — that cuff link of his. Do you remember, Mother? The one I found under your bed. Rather an ugly object in brown agate, I think it was, in a heavy gold setting. Mother?’

Dorothy looked at Basil. Though he could not have known about her find, as her accomplice he must sense its importance, and that she should go carefully — or no, not even carefully now.

Mother’s head protested against the pillow. ‘No, I don’t remember, dear. Do I?’

‘Have you got your father’s cuff links? In your jewel case perhaps?’

A claw, without its armour this morning, fumbled at Basil’s hand for pity: Basil was the affectionate one. ‘No, I don’t know, Dorothy — whether I have them. There was too much to keep.’ Basil had accepted the claw. ‘As a matter of fact, I seem to remember, I threw the cuff link — into the park grass. You saw what an ugly thing it was.’

Dorothy looked away, and Basil knew it would be he who must drive the knife home: Sir Basil Hunter the Great Actor.

Seated beside the bed, still with the claw clasped in his experienced hand, against his breast (actually damned uncomfortable, on a little, tipsy chair, your guts pushed up into your thorax, the jockstrap pinching your balls) he began to blandish this ancient queen. ‘Such a welter of morbid thoughts, whatever they amount to! I can’t keep pace with them. Don’t you feel — Mother darling — living alone in this great house full of associations, not all of them happy — does tend to make you morbid?’

Like a child at the dentist’s, Elizabeth Hunter had clamped her jaws.

‘What you must miss more than anything, I should have thought, is the company of your contemporaries. Which you could enjoy in some efficiently-run institution — or home, dear, home — such as I understand there is on the outskirts of Sydney.’

He looked at his sister. Who saw the sweat lying blue in the field of bluer, incipient stubble.

So it was her responsibility as well. ‘Yes, Mother. As Basil says. Sympathetic company in bright surroundings. There’s one place I’ve been told. And a garden. At the Thorogood Village. There’s a scented garden laid out specially for those whose sight isn’t of the best. I was told that by Cherry Cheeseman. You remember the Bullivants, Mother? Well, her mother …’ The Princesse de Lascabanes did not normally perspire.

‘I know, Dorothy. Violet Bullivant died at the Thorogood Village.’

‘That was sad,’ Dorothy admitted. ‘But everybody dies eventually. Let us at least be realistic’

‘And you, darling,’ Sir Basil added, carrying the blotched claw to his lips, ‘will not die before it is time.’

‘Not before my time,’ Elizabeth Hunter’s undamped jaws agreed.

To her children she had become an enormously enlarged pulse dictating to the lesser, audible valves opening and closing in their own bodies.

‘Something I found out,’ she panted, ‘on that island — after you had all run away — nothing will kill me before I am intended to die.’

If you could describe your storm; but you could not. You can never convey in words the utmost in experience. Whatever is given you to live, you alone can live, and re-live, and re-live, till it is gasped out of you.

So she lay gasping, as though the tide had almost fully receded from this estuary of sheets, while they watched her, she could tell, with their unregenerate, gulls’ eyes.

She had got up earlier that morning: it must have been a changed light, the latticework of bird sounds, then an enormous span of wings spreading creaking (or was it a car?) compelling her. She had taken to wearing a minimum of clothes on the island. Although she had scarcely been near the beach, sand which had collected in them set up a dry, cleanly friction with her skin as she was putting them on. Round her hair, unkempt by now, she tied the flamingo scarf, before deciding to discard it. Would that slab of a Norwegian, or worse still, would Dorothy have thought you were wearing the scarf for a purpose? As you might have been: which was all the more reason for undoing the knot.