Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

‘They were old. Old people are detached.’

‘Made me feel an awful outsider.’

‘Mother will be on the in-side.’

‘There was one old girl — the one with the bone bracelets and a hank of pink chiffon round her shingle: a kind of musical comedy queen. Mother will hate her. She’ll queer Elizabeth Hunter’s opera.’

‘Mother won’t know. She’ll be too wrapped up in her own past. The outer world doesn’t exist beyond her bed.’

Yet the frieze might encroach, with a rattle of bone bracelets, a creaking of arthritic limbs, a clutching of sticky, remindful fingers, the kiss of chiffon.

Whatever might happen to Elizabeth Hunter, her children were determined to resist encroachment.

Basil said, ‘The bed will be a problem. I hope they can fit it into the room.’

‘They’ll have to.’

‘She’ll give them hell if they don’t.’

‘Matron’s a resourceful woman.’

‘I can’t see — short of taking a saw.’ It was a scene in which you could laugh; so he did.

‘Nothing so brutal.’ Dorothy’s voice rose, harsh and querulous, not to accuse her tasteless brother, but to defend herself. ‘Anyhow,’ the voice subsided, ‘somebody’s got to die first. There isn’t a vacancy. The matron explained that.’

‘Somebody’s got to die,’ he agreed.

He drove, and said, ‘Arnold Wyburd’s the one who’s going to have it in for us for ever after.’

‘Men like old Wyburd are so vain about their own integrity in serving a family and keeping its fortune together over the years, they lose sight of the fact that the actual members of the family are human beings with human desires. I think Arnold only realized that when we descended on him out of the air. It gave him a shock.’

Dorothy looked at her brother: she would have liked him to recognize her humanity. She was feeling more youthful since they had left the suburbs behind.

But Basil was intent on driving: it absolved him from appreciating his passenger. When Dorothy started acting it filled him with dislike: he recognized at such times the hard, greedy, scene-stealing pro she might have become. He glanced for re-assurance in the driver’s mirror: men on the whole were more generous, both as artists, and as human beings. On the windward side his hair had been ruffled without appreciable damage to his looks. (Might give Richard Two another go.)

In the mountains the weatherboard and fibro townships were minding their own business. Chummier shops displaying pragmatic goods had nothing to hide. But doubts set in among the stragglers, towards the fringes, where houses built for permanence had reached the lurching stage, above the rich humus spread by their shrubberies to soften the logical collapse. The shrubberies themselves, planted by their owners as a sober duty, were touched with a cold apocalyptic fire. Here and there at the foot of a tree, old, broken, black umbrellas arranged singly or in clumps, were seen to stir at times, then to move, slowly, sideways, asymmetrically. Some of the old umbrella-forms were trundling through an undergrowth of rhododendrons and azaleas assisted by what appeared to be part of their own aluminium frames, which had become conveniently unstuck, and could be used as crutches.

Basil was stopping the car in front of a shop. On a blind wall a square of faded bluebag blue was advertising some illegible commodity. Without explaining why, Basil was getting out. Nor did Dorothy ask for explanations: she was frantically searching for some face or object with which to identify herself. As Basil was closing the car door, a boy in jeans followed by a high-stepping spotted dog, came jaunting past. Dorothy tried smiling at the boy, but her smile must have looked directionless, or old; anyway the boy was plainly ignoring foreigners. When Basil had gone inside the shop, Dorothy was left with gooseflesh up her arms. The silence around her might have been solid if it had not been for the sound of the boy’s departing thongs and the notes of a currawong floating on the mountain air. Something was eluding her; it will be different, she said, when we reach ‘Kudjeri’.

Basil returned with the two pies. He was wearing the expression of a man who has laid hands on a symbol of his boyhood: it made him look somewhat ponderous.

‘Oh, Basil — you’re not going to eat them!’ She spoke with the languor of an older girl.

‘What else?’ The light through a sycamore illuminated his sheepish words.

He handed her the second pie. ‘Oh, really !’ She couldn’t refuse it, and at the same time it was too hot, too greasy: she didn’t know what to do with the thing.

Basil was already stuffing his mouth. She doubted whether his boyhood could be recaptured so easily. As a trickle of pale gravy meandered down towards the cleft in his chin, she was reminded, rather, of a boyish, slightly sweaty commercial traveller in a train. Only the dustcoat was missing.

Dorothy sighed. ‘Oh, dear!’ She bit into her horrid pie.

Flooded with the flavour of hot soggy cardboard and floury gravy, her unwillingness and contempt turned to loathing; worse on discovering something loathsome in herself: she was filled with a guilty voluptuousness as though biting into her own flesh.

‘By God, it’s good ? Basil sprayed the windscreen with several fragments of gristle.

‘Naus -e-ating!’ She sucked back anything else that was trying to escape.

And turned her head to prevent Basil’s noticing. The same boy, returning with his cold insolence and high-stepping, swivel-nosed dog, must have seen. But that did not matter. She could feel the tears hurtling hot down her cheek to join the mess round her mouth. (Her faith would never have allowed her to contemplate suicide, but she came close to committing it each time she betrayed the past.)

Basil had swallowed his last mouthful. He was wiping fingers on his breast-pocket foulard. One currawong floated longer and closer than the others. It seemed, as always, that the answer might have been found in the country town you were leaving; if you had not already left.

‘Admit you enjoyed it, Dotty!’ Basil sounded brisk and ruthless.

Searching through her normally organized handbag, Dorothy was all cunning. ‘The wretched thing was warm, at least — food of a kind. But only in the wildest moment of sentimental excess could anyone admit to enjoying that pie.’

‘I did.’ It was what made him an artist, he decided, as opposed to what kept Dorothy, alas, Dorothy.

Although driving, he looked at her with what she might have interpreted as compassion. But she did not need it.

She had found her mirror. There was no getting away from her face, for today she had abstained from make-up, in celebration of nature. Now the cynicism she had been cultivating of late helped her bear up against the drought furrowing her skin. She quirked the corners of her mouth. A touch of sunburn lent her courage while emphasizing the desiccation, except where some grease had overflowed the naked lips. She began rubbing at the ghastliness: that grisly, gristly pie. After restoring her true self, she relaxed her throat. She was looking bright rather than anxious. She glanced at Basil, wondering to what extent he could distinguish between vanity and courage.

Basil was lowering his eyes, smiling as they plunged down through the glare, which was all that could be seen of the bleached plains. A sombreness lay in the depths of his stomach. He converted a belch into flatulent silence. Soon he would be forced to do a pee. He stopped. And did. Even Dorothy, a lone emu, casually flounced into deeper scrub.

When they were reassembled, she asked, ‘Doesn’t it make you feel guilty, darling?’ while surveying a non-existent landscape, smiling a bright, casual smile.