Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

Walking quickly along the passage towards the landing, she intended to glance through a certain doorway at her own virginal sufferings, when she heard voices in the nurses’ room, and caught sight of Sir Basil Hunter talking at that healthy, pretty nurse. Was it so late that the tea planter’s widow had been replaced by the gaudy strumpet? To distract herself from her twinges, the princess looked at her watch, which confirmed that everything was, in a broad superficial sense, in order; the details are what grow disorderly as they take it upon themselves to sprout in conflicting directions.

‘Basil?’ she called in passing, in a high, light, deliberately disinterested voice. ‘We shall be late if we don’t make a move.’ Late for what, she could not have told, but continued down the stairs with an obduracy to convince anyone but herself.

If Sir Basil had heard his sister’s warning, he delayed answering it. Unable to resist just a peep into the room where the nurses changed, he struck lucky: the little Manhood, already in uniform, was checking something, it appeared, in an exercise book. It was also obvious she had taken it up very recently and too quickly: the pages had not yet settled down.

Sir Basil had meant to close the door after stepping inside the dressing-room. Whether he did, he was not aware; in any case, his only reason for doing so would have been to avoid pandering to Dorothy’s inquisitiveness. But he soon forgot his sister.

He was too intent, while too uncertain, how to behave now that he had a foothold in this room, with its closed cupboards and a scent of wych-hazel; but no doubt Sister Whatnot — his Primavera! would come up with his cue.

Instead she continued squeezing and releasing the end of her ball pen, as she gave herself to whatever she was reading in her exemptive notebook.

It became a question of interrupting or looking a fool. ‘I half expected you to follow up our meeting of the other evening.’ His voice was no longer that of a successful actor playing a part he knew inside out: he detected in himself the quavers of an elderly amateur.

‘Oh?’ Though she condescended to raise her head, it was surrounded by the forbidding veil, and her eyes showed him she was taking in no more than the tip of one of his ear lobes, and that as a favour he had scarcely earned. ‘I don’t know why you would ’uv even half expected it,’ she finally said. ‘We didn’t arrange anything, did we?’ While breaking her silence, her face remained opaque, seemingly sullen, the eyelids thick and half-lowered.

‘It didn’t occur to me to suggest a business deal.’ Nor to snigger now. ‘Not where mutual tenderness exists.’ Oh Lord! He had always hated his matinee performances.

Again, ‘Oh?’ but this time Sister Manhood’s swollen lips smiled enough, under the pale lipstick, to show the concession did not mean a thing.

Then she tossed her veil, swished what she was wearing of a skirt over her dimpled flanks. ‘I must go in to my patient,’ she announced with a busy officiousness.

‘Anyway, you know where I am,’ he pointed out, ‘if you care to repeat what I personally found most enjoyable.’ To make it sound less like a meal, he added, ‘I even felt we cared a little for each other,’ bullshit though it was.

Sister Manhood gave no clue to what she may have experienced at the Onslow Hotel.

He was going downstairs having made a fool of himself over a cocktease nurse on a one-night stand, at this crucial point in his life when he should have been concentrating instead on persuading his mother to die, so that he might survive. He went down, lashing out now and then with a foot at the cast-iron Hesperides and thorns put there to protect him from space. He remembered only at the bottom of the stairs that his sister and accomplice would be waiting for him with a knowing, and probably vindictive, smile.

At once he saw he had done poor old Dorothy an injustice. She must have guessed what he had been up to, but decided to half-veil her knowledge in a virtuous woman’s understanding. She had gone out into the garden leaving the hall door ajar. She was standing in the sun waiting for him, her intolerant brand of elegance at odds with the blowsy light and tree fronds indolently stirring. But it did not prevent her offering a smile in which her own virtue waived virtue in the male, particularly one to whom she was related. It restored his virility. He took her by the elbow, and squeezed it.

‘You’re giving me a lift, aren’t you?’ To beg her tender favour she had turned her bony face towards his, almost as though expecting a kiss into the bargain.

Walking down the path together he slipped an arm under hers, and actually thought how pleasant to be connected with this Princesse de Lascabanes, all the more since she happened to be his confederate as well.

‘How do you think we have done?’ he asked.

‘Mother is unpredictable.’ She gave one or two curious, apparently genuine sobs, which she tried to turn into grunts, before continuing in her driest voice, ‘I’m more than ever convinced old people should not be encouraged to live for ever.’

They were in agreement, but it made him feel alone again: with his failed Lear of some years past; and the prospect of leaping into darkness under the guidance of Mitty Jacka.

Till the fantasy he had woven for himself at the height of the unpleasant business in Mother’s room returned to screen him from this other vision of a puppetry more sinister because it concerned him personally. ‘When I said I have a strong desire to re-visit “Kudjeri”, I don’t believe, Dorothy, you took me seriously.’ He must will her to share this obsession of his. ‘I very definitely mean to go, if it can be arranged — not just as a sentimental pilgrimage — more as a—’ the false ones amongst his teeth were offering stumbling blocks to the simple words he was trying to utter, ‘I mean this journey might put me in touch with a reality I no long — which everybody, right? tends to underrate and forget — and which no artist, of any kind, can afford to ignore.’ His clumsy tongue had finally forced this foolish confession past the teeth.

He had come to a standstill with his sister at a turn in the path overhung by an old weeping bottlebrush. The light, together with the fronds through which it was spilling, had imposed a lattice between himself and Dorothy’s face. Was she mocking him from within her purdah? Or had she simply closed down, like a woman for whom abstractions hold no interest? He could not tell, much as he wished to; she was perhaps as necessary for his regeneration as for the crime they had agreed to help each other commit.

‘Why don’t you come along, Dorothy?’

As though performing an act of love on a still doubting mistress, he inserted his suggestion gently but firmly in what he could only guess to be her imagination. At the same time, he reinforced the square of their clasped hands. They continued standing in the semi-shade of the bottlebrush, while he half swung the hand she was only half attempting to withdraw.

At first Dorothy made a series of rudimentary bird noises. She was surprised at herself: it was not her sort of thing; and because he was unaccustomed to them, her tentative chirps probably sounded as odd to him.

She became more herself when habit had her flash the knife of her face, just for an instant. ‘Won’t it be horribly uncomfortable?’ She winced. ‘I can’t bear discomfort, Basil — sharing bathrooms and all that — not at my age.’ To confess to your own age, as opposed to others implying it, is something of a luxury.

It used not to be uncomfortable. Far from it.’

‘Once upon a time!’

Visions of strangers’ hair stuck to the bath, country cisterns characteristically refusing to flush, breakfast conversation while fat congeals around the ruins, little hands invading your dressing-table, to touch, try, upset, and leave codewords written by finger in spilt powder, roused in her a repugnance she must have inherited from Mother.