Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

Leaping off the eroded ridge, the jeep bore down on a brown dam framed by a stand of withered tussock.

‘There!’ Basil pointed and shouted. ‘That’s where you can drop me.’

Shocked by the unorthodox demand, Macrory shouted back, ‘Why?’

Sir Basil Hunter explained, ‘Used to come here after yabbies. I’d like to poke around a bit.’ What he did not dare confess was that he wanted to feel the mud between his toes.

Even so, Macrory’s surprise turned to surliness: he could hardly reconcile himself to what amounted to a perversion. ‘Dam’s near as anything dry. Couldn’t drown in it, anyway. I’ll pick you up on the way back — if you’re still here.’

Basil said he would be.

Macrory pelted off, but returned in a swirl to deliver a warning. ‘May be gone an hour or so.’

Basil assured his host he could use every minute of that time at the dam.

Again Macrory drove off, tensed and disgruntled: perhaps he had been hoping to ferret a secret out of his guest, or to make some more of company he despised.

At the far end of the dam stood a single tree, of tremendous girth beside the comparative sapling rooted in Basil Hunter’s memory. Mentally he could still put his arms round the tree, instinctively shinning up its shagginess, grasping it with bare knees, while a stench from the ants he crushed and the motions of his chafing limbs drowned the scent of gorse and the twittering of tits as they hovered above the fists of blossom with which the spiky bushes bristled. Overhead, the cries of a desperate magpie were sawing away, and once or twice a beak struck at the marauding skull almost close enough to bump the nest. Tits’ eggs were peanuts to maggies’. He hoped he would find a nestful of reds: what he hadn’t got was a maggie red.

Perhaps never would. The moment of falling his heart descended bounding ahead his vision a whirligig of fear. Then his lungs must have collapsed: they were spread on the ground as flat as perished balloons. That he was still alive he knew from the pain in his arm, the bone of which should have been protruding through the skin. But the arm looked normal: no sign of the sick throbbing going on inside the flesh. Though alive now, he would probably die of his arm.

The roan mare was coming at a canter. For God’s sake boy what have you done? Father was shorter, more breathless than usual, the seat of his breeches too tight as he arrived on the ground out of the saddle. What is it Basil? His pores were open. I think I broke my arm. Those red, staring pores. The deuce you did — we don’t know — got to find out. A man’s a father’s hands shouldn’t tremble it was frightening: if you cry you may make him worse. Have it put right. Get you up in front of me. Shove the good arm round my neck. Too close his breath on you like the trembling and that scalding sweat your own as cold. Now lie back son lean against me I’ll support you. Awful bumpy hard half on the mare’s withers the pommel of the saddle and half lying on Dad’s stomach the bone shrieking under your skin deliciously delirious his fire dripping into your cold sea of sweat. Won’t be long Basil boy. It was Dad trying to love. It made you want to cry, to reach up with your crook arm. So you laughed.

Sir Basil Hunter limped towards the tree he had fallen out of. He would lie down under it a while: even his omissions are a luxury to the expatriate of a certain age and reputation. The ground was suitably unyielding. The scents returned: of ants competing with gorse blossom.

And Alfred Hunter offering downright love disguised as tentative, sweaty affection. When Mother was the one you were supposed to love: you are my darling my love don’t you love your mummy Basil? Bribing with kisses, peppermint creams, and more substantially, half crowns. I don’t believe you love me at all perhaps you are your father’s monopoly or is it yourself you love? So the game of ping pong was played between Moreton Drive and ‘Kudjeri’, between Elizabeth and Alfred Hunter (Dad at a handicap).

You all played. Dorothy was playing it still.

Sir Basil Hunter opened his eyes. The other side of the branches of the great tree the empty sky was staring at him. Suddenly he would have liked to feel certain that he had actually loved somebody, that he had not been only acting it.

He sat up, looked over his shoulder, then began taking off his shoes: whether it was self-indulgence or not he would have to feel the mud between his toes.

Around him the silence was watching, which made him stealthier in his movements. No, it was his soft white feet: still elegant, he had liked to think, long and narrow, formed by generations walking in the furrow behind the plough and sticking their toes into stirrup irons. But become useless, except to stride imagined miles around a stage; incapable of trudging the actual miles to Dover. Perhaps this was why he had failed as Lear.

Along the edge of the dam the hoof-prints of sheep had set in a fussy clay sculpture. Painful, too: he was regretting the sentimentality which had driven him to paddle back towards little-boyhood. At least he was unable to see his face, but his feet looked foolish mincing over the fanged clay. Till the soft, softer than soft, the effortless squelch: flesh is never so kind, nor as voluptuous, as mud: certain phrases, lines, can become its equal when delivered by a practised tongue into darkness on a propitious night.

‘In such a night,’ he aimed at the Australian daylight, while throughout the ritual dark he had conjured up in his mind, the pale discs were raised to receive the seed he was raining on them;

‘in such a night,

Stood Dido with a willow in her hand

Upon the wild sea-banks, and wav’d her love

To come again to Carthage …’

Legs apart, pants hitched their highest and tightest, he listened for his own voice (his worst vice) and some of it returned out of that extrovert blue. He listened again: as the circles widened around him on the muddy water, magpies’ wings were clattering skywards; but the silence burning into his skin was the applause he valued. That his art should have come to terms with his surroundings gratified Sir Basil Hunter.

But what if the disapproving Macrory should reappear sooner than he had reckoned? Sir Basil began frowning; he started swirling around, shouldering off his not reprehensible, but in the circumstances, embarrassing gift. He stumbled into a pothole: could have come a gutser. Walking not so steady now on his Shakespeare legs. When beneath the soles of his feet a tickling, a prickling of life, restored his balance. Putrefying meat was the best bait for yabbies, he remembered. He could remember the jar: to be kept beyond smelling distance; that Easter Sunday he fetched up his breakfast tying the string round a lump of green, stinking mutton. Catching yabbies might not have given him so much pleasure if it had not displeased HER: I shan’t darling you smell so don’t claw at me Basil smelly boys aren’t kissable.

The light now streaming over the eroded ridge was her same glistening white, still blinding him. And another crueller, more relevant trick the light was playing, as its meaner refractions flickered on the face of the dam: this old freckled claw was twitching, clenching and unclenching, or beckoning through the brown water, perhaps appealing to him. Poor Mum’s acold. Oh yes, he pitied her, but had to think of himself (no need to include Dorothy, a thriving hive of self-pity). And remember Mother’s practical ethics: one can drown in compassion if one answers every call it’s another way of suicide. All the best aphorisms have a habit of doing you dirt sooner or later, and the illusory claw reflected in the water conveyed something of the same distress of the actual hand lying on the hemstitched sheet.