Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

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.