Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

Basil had some difficulty in remembering their father’s study, except as a scene of embarrassment and lockjaw. As in the rest of the house by this stage there was hardly any furniture: a burst, leather armchair; a day bed, probably burst too, if it had not been draped with a faded Indian counterpane, scorched in places by an overheated iron; general collapse among the books on sparsely tenanted shelves.

‘Don’t you remember your father’s chair?’ Anne Macrory was daring them to let her kindness down.

‘Why was the chair left here, if, as you say, Mother was so determined to do the right sentimental thing?’ Dorothy’s voice had begun hammering again.

‘She let it stay because it was too old, I expect. She made us a present of a number of things. We were glad of them.’ Anne tried draping the counterpane into more artistic folds. ‘Books, too. Though we’re not readers. There isn’t time.’

Dorothy was particularly outraged by Mother’s abandoning the books: apart from their sacredness as literature, books are the most personal possessions. Basil did not care: he had dragged the chair closer to the fireplace and two great smouldering knots of wood. He sat smiling down at the fire.

Dorothy pounced at the bookshelves. Tm sure none of these were my father’s.’

Anne offered proof. ‘Here’s his signature in one.’

‘The Charterhouse of Parma!’ Dorothy turned on Basil. ‘It was his favourite. She told me. She could leave his favourite! And mine!’ She was chafing the book between her hands. ‘No one can accuse us of heartlessness.’

Basil could not care. ‘I never read it— The Charterhouse of Thing.’ He was too drowsy: couldn’t read a book in any case, unless a play, if it had the right part in it.

Dorothy was so engrossed in their father’s book, in checking the text, shaking out the crumbs, fingering a tea stain (or was it faded blood?) Anne Macrory must have withdrawn. Dorothy herself must have sat down on the washed-out cotton counterpane. She must have been, anyway half-reading, half-drifting, in their sitting-room.

While Basil must have half-dreamt he had grown old, as people do in life; you can’t afford to grow old in the theatre. Perhaps if he sat long enough over the murmurous fire the most calamitous events might seem inevitable, even become acceptable: his wives; his non-child Imogen; the attempt to prolong what he and Dorothy understood as living by condemning their mother Elizabeth Hunter.

He opened his eyes wide. Her legs drawn up on the decrepit daybed, the open book dangling from her fingers, not as book but as artifice, Dorothy was staring at him, and not. What reminded him of their mother he could not think, or did not want to.

Still looking at him Dorothy said, ‘That little, decent man struggling to escape from an unnatural bronze attitude. Which she imposed on him. The most grotesque idea Mother ever conceived! Say if we’re not justified?’ She was looking wholly at her brother, in the ruin of their father’s room which had been made over to them.

He would have liked to close his eyes again, but as she would not allow it, he had to use the socially approved channel of evasion, ‘Don’t let’s talk about it;’ yawning, stretching his comfortable drowsiness to its full extent. ‘We didn’t come here, I feel, simply for that purpose.’

‘For which other, I’d like to know? unless to wallow in discomfort.’ She laughed. ‘We must admit it’s the rock bottom, darling.’

‘We can slip away when we’ve had enough.’

‘Yes, we can always slip away.’ Sunk in an apathy of sagging leather and faced with the pleasures of martyrdom, she wondered if she would be able to.

Overhead, voices were wrenched and slamming rather than talking.

‘Listen to them!’ Basil said.

‘Poor wretches!’ Dorothy murmured dispassionately.

‘Perhaps we should go to bed,’ Basil suggested. ‘That appears to be what the Macrorys have done.’

Unexpectedly, Dorothy awoke to a morning filled with explicit forms, after a night disordered by equivocal thoughts and suspicious, finally not unpleasant, dreams. She had woken once already, during the hours of darkness, to a sensation of being surrounded. She had switched the light on. Basil was snoring in the next room; beyond them silence was heaped on silence. She browsed here and there in The Charterhouse of Parma, She thought she might get to hate Macrory; although she had renounced men, at her age, she found his physical presence disturbing. She read, but could not become involved with this pale ghost of the novel she knew. Not that it was lost for ever: she could invoke its flesh and blood by reading it again in the original; thus her vanity was satisfied.

Sometimes at night Madame de Lascabanes allowed herself a touch of brilliance which should have been hers. Under the sheet she crossed her still estimable legs, an involuntary legacy from Elizabeth Hunter, and thought how she would enslave others, Anne Macrory for a start, and perhaps one or two of the children, simply by using her eyes. Her Sanseverina wandered after that into deeper velvet. One of several presences was entangling almost tripping before fitting her closer than a skirt. It could not be called adultery: Anne Macrory herself had confirmed it was the parents’ bed. Love which has been imprisoned a lifetime in this tower which is also incidentally a body can only be the purest noblest occurring with a delicacy Stendhal cannot realize till Fabrizio breaks open his bronze and there is the knuckle with this one ugly scab oh Basil Bas Ber Bazzurl tu es le seul à me comprendre.

Dorothy Sanseverina woke. Again it was dark, Basil snoring in the next room. Supposing she had called out, as women do, she had read, in their ecstasy? She was relieved Basil continued sleeping. She could not have explained such an exquisitely elusive pleasure to her brother, or any of the others who came to mind: that monument her father; the disgusting man with shirt open as far as his navel; less perhaps to Mrs Macrory; least of all to a vengeful Elizabeth Hunter, whose bed it was.

So Dorothy slept uneasily.

And got up too quickly: she had heard it was dangerous for people beyond a certain age to jump out of bed on waking; but had meant to rise early, to introduce some sort of order into the ghastly Macrory kitchen. Instead, here she was, listening to her anxious breathing as she bumped around in a grey light amongst the scant furniture.

Nor could she enjoy her own virtue to the utmost for finding Anne already in the kitchen, fire roaring in the flue, and beside the sink, additions to the unwashed plates. On the range stood a black pot, from which porridge had dribbled down to burn. In spite of the range it was cold in the kitchen at that hour. Through the rent in a fly-proof door, Anne was throwing chopbones to a pack of dogs in the yard beyond.

Anne said in her frostiest ‘Kirkcaldy’ voice, ‘I hope you slept. I hope Rory and I didn’t disturb you. We were not quarrelling. We were discussing whether to send some old ewes to market. My brothers say Rory hasn’t a business head. That was my father’s opinion also.’ But suddenly Anne Macrory descended from her mythical-pastoral level, and exclaimed quite passionately, ‘Come away! Whatever are you doing?’

‘Preparing to wash up these pans and dishes.’

‘But you mustn’t! We wouldn’t hear of it — Princess.’

‘Truly, once I’ve drunk my coffee — and I can do that comfortably standing at the sink. How else shall I spend my time?’

‘Oh dear, that’s not for you!’ moaned the social worker dérangée. ‘And we don’t have coffee.’

‘Tea, then. I adore tea.’

Madame de Lascabanes stuck to her pans. She often surprised in herself a practically mystical attitude towards the ordering of chaos, even in its more squalid manifestations. In different circumstances, she might have made a devoted and uncrushable femme de ménage. Strange that it was her French self which abounded in humility, while the Australian in her aspired to a place among the ‘happy few’.