Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

This was where the Thing, no yabby playfully tickling memory, rose up out of the mud under Sir Basil’s right sole. Because his innocent morning’s pastime had made him spiritually vulnerable, the submerged object wounded him more deeply than rusty spike, broken bottle, or jagged tin. In his state of aggrieved anguish, his arms began swimming against the air as he made for land, jaws clenched, gristle straining in his throat. He was not yet able to hobble, except mentally, because his legs were still swathed in sheets of brown filthy ooze, in promises of septicæmia, anthrax — perhaps death, simple and unassuming; none of the Jacobean trappings when YOU are the one concerned.

At least he reached the bank: the clay impressions of hooves, or teeth, bit into his flesh regardless of existing wounds as he hopped towards the not much more charitable grass, trickling lustrous scarlet behind him. He was bleeding all right.

What to do? Wash in stagnant water? Tie up infected flesh in a far from aseptic handkerchief? Sitting in the coarse grass Basil for a moment got his foot almost as far as his mouth, to give the wound a good suck, but realized he was not the contortionist to bring it off.

Nor a boy. Unless an elderly one. Abandoned by everybody. Stranded in his own egotism and ineptitude. Though he listened for it, the reliable roan was not coming at a canter.

When he had pulled himself together (it was nothing more than a cut, an ordinary cut) he went so far as tying the dirty handkerchief round his wounded foot; he made quite a neat parcel of it. And at least there had been nobody to see, or hear; hearing might have been the more humiliating: the way his thoughts at one stage were pumped to the surface.

About noon he heard the barking. A mob of sheep was advancing in his direction: though fairly compact, its individual members were bobbing like scuffled cocoons, at first in silence, then as a rustling, then a dry panting. They halted on seeing the figure at the dam. The leaders stamped. Here and there a cough muffled by flannel. The faded kelpie ran back and forth, rejoicing in any emergency which gave him the opportunity to work; while Macrory’s jeep, by nudging the straggling rear with its bonnet, tightened the invisible string which kept his string-coloured flock intact.

The figure with bandaged foot seated on a clay hummock between the dam and these dedicated workers, was irrelevant to their whole delicate operation.

At last Macrory allowed himself to notice. ‘How are we?’ he deigned to shout.

Sir Basil Hunter, aware of his own superfluousness, could have been sulking: he did not answer. Carrying one shoe, he began hobbling towards the jeep, which did not intend to stop for him.

‘Wotcherdoneteryerself?’ Monotony had bleached Macrory’s voice; dust had clogged it.

Sir Basil mumbled. ‘Cut my foot.’

‘Waddayerknow! Can’t be much of a shoe yer’ve got. Pom made?’

I’d taken them off. It happened in the dam.’

‘Good Christ! What were you up to? Paddling?’

‘Exactly. Paddling in the dam.’

As they continued the uninterrupted droving of their flock, Sir Basil found himself hating the jeep as an extension of its owner. Like the metal excrescence on which the injured actor was allowed to perch, Macrory’s body looked inviolable. Basil’s foot began throbbing, out of time with the loutish jeep. On and off, the grazier glanced down: where the thought of paddling had disgusted, even shocked him, the bandaged foot was no more than a harmlessly passive object from the way he squinted at it through his black, gummed-up lashes.

Suddenly he said, ‘It’ll be all right,’ surprising himself, it appeared, more than anybody else.

Basil recognized the tone of voice in which the man addressed his children: for the moment you were accepted as Macrory’s additional, if idiot, child.

But the fellow regretted his mistake: he tried to disguise it by shouting curses at the dog, who seemed to be laughing back at his master, in little whinges, from behind a splather of tongue.

Basil gloomed and throbbed. A gout of moody crimson was gathering on the crude bandage. Obviously he could not expect sympathy at ‘Kudjeri’, either from this boor, or the two shrews of women; the ghost of his father was insubstantial; and his mother’s image would refuse, understandably, to respond to invocation.

Anne Macrory disguised her concern. ‘Oh, Lord — we’ll soon see to that.’ She spoke too loudly, with a show of determination which suggested the incident might be her final test.

She began fetching and dropping things. ‘Dorothy’s down at the river with some of the children. She’ll be back soon,’ she added hopefully, looking out through the ruptured screen, though the kitchen faced in the wrong direction.

Basil’s hopes of his sister were less optimistic than Mrs Macrory’s.

A year-old baby in a high chair started crying. The mother, who had been feeding her and bottling pears at the same time, returned to battering with a spoon on a plastic dish, from which a mess of predigested pap showered the immediate kitchen.

‘Eat, love! Look, Mummy’s eating. We’re eating it together, aren’t we? It’s going to be so good for us.’ The social worker had adopted what she understood as a dual purpose voice: sweet and stern at the same time.

In her distraction, she pushed the spoonful of pap into the blank of the child’s cheek; the baby roared.

Sir Basil sat watching a fly drown in a half-filled bottle of brown pears.

‘Where’s Rory?’ his wife asked as though she needed to know; but flipped on. ‘Dorothy is so dependable.’ She sighed.

Through what metamorphosis, Sir Basil wondered, had his sister possessed herself of this distraught woman’s respect? He would have to learn the trick.

Presently Dorothy came. The two Macrory girls in tow were still loving up to her. Her dress and one elbow were stained green by grass. Her eyes were overflowing with languor, and what Basil recognized as river light: greenish to golden-brown.

Fat Mog was pointing. ‘Ooh, look! Basil’s cut his foot!’

The older girl, who had grasped something of protocol from associating generally with a princess, and from looking through the drawers and cupboard where their visitor kept her belongings, blushed to the height of her fleshless cheekbones.

Dorothy was still too dazed by light to assess the situation. She looked beautiful, he thought; almost not his sister.

Then the truth struck her. ‘Oh, darling, what have you done to yourself? Ohhhh!’

While the Macrory women were flapping their wings ineptly, Dorothy Hunter swam across the kitchen, to arrive, to settle herself at her brother’s feet, and untie the dirty handkerchief. She dipped her head; for a moment he thought she was going to put her lips to the wound: they protruded so noticeably, and were besides so tremulous.

Basil basked.

‘You’re not feverish?’ Dorothy cried. ‘Or are you?’ She began tenderly exploring, while giving icy orders, which Mrs Macrory and her girls were glad to obey.

Only the baby gravely stared from above the dish of unfinished pap, wondering whether to grind her brows together and scream.

Whereas most of the Macrorys accepted the princess as the same woman who had arrived at their house the night before, and whom they had got to know, if not intimately, anyway enough to have formed a relationship of trust and affection, Basil could not recognize his sister; and Dorothy, with her competence, more than that, her authority, and the obvious compassion with which she approached his wound, seemed to be avoiding recognition: not once since her bemused entrance had she offered him her eyes.

After she had bathed the foot, using a tin basin Mrs Macrory had first dropped, and Mog retrieved and filled, she disinfected the cut with a powder Janet fetched from upstairs together with lint and an assortment of grubby bandages.