Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

As the storm came roaring back down the funnel in which she had clenched herself, the salt streamed out of her blinded sockets.

Some time that morning day evening the thin ribbon of silence was stamped very faintly then more distinctly with voices. The thing on the shelf, becoming a body again, began painfully trying out joints to see whether they still worked.

An old woman appeared in the hole which had once been the doorway to a bunker in a sandhill, behind what was now the ruins of the Warming family’s summer ‘place’.

The woman said, ‘Yes. I am alive — after all.’ The breeze even lifted her hair, or one lock less sodden than the mass.

Elizabeth Hunter smiled at the still tentative sunlight; no, it must be evening: the light was waning. She was glad to find herself reunited with her womanly self, and to see that these were actual men. One of them she recognized as the stringy Second Forester whose modesty had started him anointing his saw when she intruded on their privacy. His present companion was not the man with hairy belly; she had never seen this one before. He looked important, above physical employment, from the way he stood with his hands on his hips.

Legs astride the ruins, the man of authority congratulated the survivor. ‘You’ve had a lucky escape, Mrs Hunter. We’ve come to take you back to the camp and across to the mainland. The line’s out of order, as you’ll appreciate. So we can’t call the copter. But some of the boys ’ull ferry you over in the boat.’

She smiled, and bowed her head without comment, the ropes of sodden hair hanging like plummets from around her face. One of her breasts, she realized, had escaped through the tatters her dress had become. She could see no way of covering it without drawing attention to herself.

As they trudged through the sand towards a truck standing on high ground she noticed the storm had blown the bark off several trees. There was that bird too, impaled on one of them, skewered by a snapped branch.

The stringy fellow wanted to contribute something to their meeting. ‘Most of these trees are gunner die,’ he confided; then, after wetting his lips, he pointed. ‘See that bird? It’s a noddy.’ She saw her friend had left his teeth out.

Elizabeth Hunter, while listening, was more intent on following the movements her feet were making in the sand. The men seemed to be accepting the exposed breast as a normal state of affairs. Which it had to be, in the circumstances; only Dorothy would have condemned it and everybody.

The Forestry foreman, if that was his status, told how the cyclone had cut a swath halfway along the ocean side of the island, turning out to sea before arriving at the camp. This time the mainland was untouched.

‘Oh really,’ she said,’ a cyclone, was it?’ formally.

She could hardly bother: nothing mattered beyond her experiencing the eye.

When they reached the truck they helped her into the cabin. They sat her between them. They behaved as though guarding a treasure, something of great antiquity and value uncovered by the storm. Whereas she was simply herself again.

In their erratic and roundabout drive, while the foreman was forcing the truck’s nose through, and sometimes over, freshly piled barricades of scrub, the stringy, — toothless fellow asked her, ‘Feelin’ okay, are yer?’ She caught a possessive tone in his voice, induced no doubt by their first meeting how many aeons ago in the rain forest; he had that over his boss, who was now merely the driver of the truck.

But she felt no desire to be possessed, by anybody. Like the black swans, she never had been, except for procreative purposes.

Suddenly she blushed for her self-indulgence; she thinned herself out from between her companions, to lean forward, to impress on them the urgent need for action. ‘I forgot. There’s a man — a guest of Mr Warming’s — Professor Pehl, who didn’t return yesterday evening. He may have gone inland looking for shelter. He may have seen — he’s a scientist — that a storm was preparing. We must start looking for him at once. No,’ it was she who had taken command, ‘better drive on first to the camp so that we can brief as many men as you’ve got, and organize search parties. Or he may be dead,’ she thought to add; ‘but we’ll still have to find him.’

‘What — that Norwegian bloke?’ the foreman shouted unnecessarily loud. ‘He walked over yesterday evenin’, before the storm started up. Had ’is wotchermecallem — rucksack on ’im. Some of the boys were going across to Oxenbould. They took ’im along with ’em in the boat.’

‘Oh?’

Bumped roofwards in the leaping truck, Elizabeth Hunter chafed the gooseflesh on her arms. She was only saved up, whereas that deadly man Edvard Pehl, had been saved. Did he join his accomplice the Princesse de Lascabanes on the mainland? She speculated no more than vaguely on the possibility of it, because she was still too weak from the great joy she had experienced while released from her body and all the contingencies in the eye of the storm.

All the years she had spent lying on this mattress of warm moist sand the gulls had not deserted her. She had never been quite sure of gulls: even the stupid sooty kind, the noddies, are probably waiting to plunge their beaks and empty your sockets.

‘Mother? You’re not asleep, are you?’ Sea hunger, or continued use of the French language, had sharpened the voice. ‘You might give some thought to our suggestion. We don’t want to rush you into anything you’d dislike — but time can trickle away when decisions have to be made — and we’d like to see you settled before we leave — for Europe.’

Dorothy feared her approach had not been resolute enough: too vague and womanly. Basil pretty certainly thought so: he shook off Mother’s claw as though getting rid of it.

‘Yes. Dorothy and I shall have the practical side to attend to. This house — the furniture alone.’ Movement helped him: his robes swirling and ballooning around him increased his confidence at every turn. ‘I imagine they’ll allow you to take some of the things you’re fond of. We’ll ask the matron. If necessary we’ll demand that you have your own furniture in your room. We must go up there and see them; why not tomorrow, Dorothy?’ he looked at his sister from out of the figure eight he was cutting in the middle of the carpet, ‘to discuss the matter.’

Dorothy couldn’t help feeling moved by her brother’s famous voice.

‘Though of course,’ he had to remind her, ‘we may find they haven’t a vacancy for the moment.’ He too was moved, by the warmth which collusion had brought to their relationship.

Mrs Hunter said, ‘If there isn’t a vacancy, somebody will conveniently die. They must be dying all the time.’

It shocked her daughter. ‘Oh, darling! Now we’re being morbid again.’

‘I thought we’d decided to be realistic,’ Mrs Hunter said and laughed.

At the same time, something liquid, sticky — oh dear, ancient eye-muck, began to force its way out, first a drop, then a positive driblet, from under one of the mottled lids. No tears! In Dorothy de Lascabanes a sense of revulsion was trying to get the better of her own anguish. Mother, one should remind oneself, was able to cry at will; she had quelled rebellious maids with tears, so that they stayed on worse enslaved than ever.

Mother’s weakening, if it was, had a more personal effect on Basil. Professionally, he had to guard against his excessive sensibility. He remembered advancing on an audience, his dead Cordelia (that lump of a Bagnall girl) weighing down his arms, himself snuffling, then blubbering. The audience loved it, while he and the cast (trust your fellow artists) were too aware that his generous emotional response was destroying the concerted tone of a performance.