Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

Trains were rumbling, it sounded, over the wreckage, and continued rumbling, across the roof of the bunker.

It was dry inside her funnel. The walls, she could remember from daylight, were concrete buried in the dune which rose behind the house, but how resistant to acts of God she was not of a mind to calculate. She felt around her, through cobwebs and other accretions, and found the shelves of wine bottles. She began rolling the bottles off the uppermost shelf. Their thudding as they hit the tamped floor could not be heard above the thunder, roaring of the gale, groaning of the sea, lashing of wiry rain, until in a last desperate sweep she cleared the shelf entirely: out of the slithering torrent rose a shattering of glass. She clambered up, stiff with salt, sweat, and age, and stored herself thankfully on her shelf.

More awkward to dispose of than her jackknife body was the mind which kept lumbering around inside the walls of her bruised head, or streaking off independently by flashes. The lightning was soon as free to enter as her thoughts to sky-rocket, for the sturdy door of the bunker, till now wedged ajar in a drift of sand, was forced off its rusted hinges: she heard it somersaulted away.

There was a continual juggling of fireballs, either in the sky, or was it at the back of her eyesockets: rub hard enough Kate to see the coloured spots it’s bad for the eyes but I don’t care. All night long the rumble of goods trains passing through Gogong, and on into precious memory, where it was Alfred trying to protect her storm-threatened body with his. As though she were the vulnerable one.

About three, if she could have looked at her little shagreen travelling clock (a present from Alfred, one of several, when Basil was born) the hour when she normally woke, to drink a glass of water and read a chapter, Elizabeth Hunter let herself down from her shelf. She was standing in water up around her thighs, nuzzled by several stiff objects, bottles, and dead fish.

Outside the hole where the door should have been the night was still hurtling. She could hear the ocean rising to accuse her. Well, she would stand accused: for the suicide of that contrary man who refused to come in; or was it murder if you were the cause of his staying out?

It was not the dead fish Edvard guiding you back on to the shelf more likely Alfred or solicitous Arnold. Arnold was born with a highly developed Sense of Responsibility which did not make him immune from irresponsible lust at least that one attack. For which you as much as he. Or more. Perhaps it is you who are responsible for the worst in people. Like poor little Basil sucking first at one unresponsive teat then the other the breasts which will not fill in spite of the nauseating raw beef and celery sandwiches prescribed by Dr Whatever — to ‘make milk to feed your baby’. Instead of milk, ‘my baby’ (surely the most tragic expression?) must have drawn off the pus from everything begrudged withheld to fester inside the breast he was cruelly offered.

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.