Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

As to the orchard, the sound of summer was natural to the river. He could not remember the river at ‘Kudjeri’ without its willows in leaf. Now (and reality is always present tense, whether for mad kings, or unemployed, ham actors) the cages were waiting. To be sure these communicated, but hints of steel nudged the fantasy of possible escape.

Inside a chosen cage there was no objection to his kneeling down on the petrified mud at the river’s edge. As a boy he had stretched out to drink, and afterwards lain, regardless of discomfort, staring at his own reflection. This evening he knelt, and stirred the brown, rustling water, and splashed his face with enough of it to counteract the stickiness. As the water hurried over the stones beneath, he could see his face, when he dared look, at the other end of this tunnel of light. To be truthful, he had considered suicide once or twice in his life, but had not come at it: on each occasion the water was too shallow. In any case, he was not by temperament a suicide: theatrical gestures only convince when you can share them with an audience.

It made Sir Basil snigger at least; while realizing he was found out.

‘Basil?’

She was coming towards him, sticks snapping as she trod on them; there was no escaping his big sister; and here on his knees he was at greater disadvantage than when she had caught him playing with that old car.

But she gave no sign of wishing to use her advantage. She approached shivering, it seemed. Perversely, and for the first time at ‘Kudjeri’, she had changed for dinner. It was intended to be simple and inoffensive, but the Princesse de Lascabanes had her gift for drawing attention to simplicity; how her little white would glare through the fug of the Macrory kitchen. He could not remember having seen her in white before: he had only known the perennial veuve, the discreetly expensive Frenchwoman.

She was holding her elbows to make her arrival appear as casual as possible. ‘We had begun to wonder why you had deserted us.’ Delivered gently enough, it had the measure of formality.

‘We? Who?’ He got to his feet, managing his bad knee with care.

She avoided a direct reply. ‘Anne’s afraid the dinner will spoil.’

‘What’s she giving us?’

‘Can’t you guess?’

It was a somewhat half-hearted joke.

Then she laid her cheek against his. Her skin felt slightly greasy, which made the affection she was offering more intimate and spontaneous. Their relationship had grown dove-tailed, they were taking it so much for granted.

So the Hunter children held hands for the return. They leaned on each other in the climb up the river bank, before wading, almost luxuriously, through the sea of dry, winter tussock, to reach the house.

When she had seen the children to bed Anne Macrory came back to the kitchen where her guests and her husband were still sitting over the rejected fragments of their spotted dog.

‘Didn’t you like it?’ she felt it her duty to ask.

Because they were listening to Anne’s husband, Dorothy avoided committal; Basil did that thing with his crow’s-feet, which served as reply, and had been known to win sympathy. As for Anne Macrory, she had fulfilled her obligations by putting food in front of people: whether they liked it or not was of less importance; perhaps life, or her Scottish ancestry, had persuaded her that what one eats is necessary rather than enjoyable.

And Rory was holding forth, she only saw at first, because she was so used to him.

‘Anne will tell me I’m drunk,’ Macrory said; ‘but a man — even a passionate one — needs to keep his fire stoked.’ Several private drinks were glittering in his eyes, though he had not offered his guests so much as the sight of a bottle.

Anne said, ‘I wouldn’t presume to tell you a blooming thing — at any rate, not a thing that matters.’

She plonked down at the tableful of remains. Elbows dug in, she slid her hands under the cap of her matted, dust-coloured hair. Her speech was that bit too precise: she looked as though she had been drinking too, but she hadn’t; she would have made a sad, sulky drunk as opposed to his fiery one.

‘Particular when the frost sets in,’ Macrory said, ‘a man needs to put heart into himself.’

‘What if it’s summertime?’ asked his wife.

‘By summertime it’s second nature.’ Macrory laughed for his own encouragement.

The Hunters smiled the contained smiles of overhearing, disbelieving guests. Their mouths were growing cavernous besides, with mutton fat and yawns.

Running his tongue over the roof of his mouth Basil could not have felt more desolated: he might have been standing under the carbonized girders of a London railway station, waiting for the train to carry him back to an unsuccessful tour of the Midlands. He closed his eyes to blot it out, and found himself instead, still running his tongue around the structure the mutton fat had emphasized, in the belly of a spiritual whale: unlike Jonah’s, his would not spew him out till she died, and perhaps not even then.

The Macrorys were still at it, he heard from his depths.

‘Our son Robert — our eldest — who you haven’t met,’ Macrory flashed his teeth at his guests to make amends for what they had missed, ‘a clean, methodical lad — and cold — he’ll succeed where his parents failed.’

Anne tensed her nostrils and closed her eyes. ‘Robert is pure Robertson.’

‘Isn’t yourself a bit too much of a Robertson?’ her husband gnashed. ‘Of “Kirkcaldy”!’ He leaned across the table to take his trick.

Anne only smiled as she answered, still from behind lowered lids, ‘Once I was!’ Then opened her eyes to look, still smiling, at her friend Dorothy Hunter, and again at her husband after digging her elbows deeper into the kitchen table. ‘Do you suppose I’m complaining, Rory, that my awful pride was extinguished?’

Rory squirmed; he showed her the crown of his head as he stirred his hair: it made almost the sound of broken glass as you sweep it up. ‘Robert ’ull come good,’ he did not exactly groan, but burped; and once or twice he scratched an armpit.

Anne was rocking on the points of her elbows. ‘I’d like to think parents don’t imagine their children.’

Driven by embarrassment, the Princesse de Lascabanes had risen from the table. She might have wanted to efface herself completely. Unable to, she looked for her handbag, which she had stowed away somewhere and forgotten. If she could find her bag, she would have that at least to hold.

While Macrory continued whipping his obsession round the prison of his skull. ‘He can’t help but succeed, from inheritun his grandfather’s cold blood — and knowun his bloody messes of parents.’

Dorothy had found her bag.

‘Robert’s loaded. Like the French princess and the actor knight.’ Whether he had aimed it in humility or bitterness, the superb Hunters were reduced to a crocodile handbag and a pair of cornelian and filigree cufflinks.

Dorothy’s throat felt so dry and choked she would have withdrawn from the success stakes regardless of whether Basil still considered himself a contender: as an actor he might decide to act it out; when she realized the Macrorys were training on her neither envy nor resentment, but their admiration, and, in Anne’s case, love.

There was nothing in the inventory of her character or features which could possibly explain it; or was it her white dress? unpretentious enough, she had thought, and like most of her clothes, just outclevering shabbiness. But Anne was lapping it up; Macrory’s eyes seemed to be having a love affair, not with the dress, nor her body inside it (she was pretty sure) but with what she stood for.

When Anne explained, ‘Dorothy, we only saw your mother once. She drove up not long after she and Father agreed on the deal. I’ll never forget her. She was wearing white.’