Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

Arnold Wyburd was suddenly so ashamed he wrenched himself round to face the parson, the coffin, the pleated curtains still intact before the fiery furnace. What would have been a reckless action at the best of times, now produced an authentic twinge all the way down his right side. (Lal would be upset; he would keep it from her; though his behaviour must give him away in the end.)

The service was as short and decontaminated as a busy day at the crematorium demands. There were no spectacular outbreaks of grief, only the hint of a soggy patch here and there in the broken rows. Elizabeth Hunter’s own sense of style would not have encouraged emotional excess.

Then, as they waited for the mechanism to release the coffin, there was the sound of tin buckling, clattering, and a rain of lozenges on the tiles. At once the glaring varnished box came to life: it began to jerk, to stagger down the ramp towards the parted curtains. The least military of men, the solicitor decided to square his shoulders: it might be what those behind expected of him. Nobody would see that he was not watching. Hearing was what he could not avoid: above his deafness and the bumping of his heart in his creaking body, he was forced to hear; in fact he ended by listening to it.

When he looked again the curtains had closed; he might have experienced anti-climax if it had not been for recalling the clause in what must be something like her eleventh will: ‘… that my solicitor and friend Arnold Wyburd take my ashes on a day when it is convenient and scatter them over the lake in the park opposite the house where I have lived …’ In the circumstances he was glad the twinge came in his side without assistance.

And again in the open, he was all spontaneous twinge, exchanging condolences with other controlled faces, some of which he could not identify; while those who had done their duty by the dead strolled amongst the wreaths, to look for the inscriptions on the cards attached, and perhaps discover somebody had been as stingy or as tasteless as one would have imagined.

Arnold Wyburd tried to think what it was he had to remember: oh, yes! to offer Sister de Santis a lift. He looked round for the Caliph’s hat, and searched along a couple of the paths which led away from the holocaust between memorial plaques and the unnaturally perfect shrubs. In no direction was there any sign of an orange beacon, and he felt relieved at last. Would they have found enough to say to each other on the long drive back? and how would he have explained to Lal why he had chosen to give a lift to Sister de Santis of all people?

He told his wife on his return, ‘You did well not to come.’

‘You know I would have if you had wanted. But you gave me no indication.’ She added, ‘She mightn’t have wanted it.’

He noticed Lal was wearing a chain Mrs Hunter had given him for her. Her neck looked red and shrivelled, its freckles fretted by the turquoise clusters dividing the ceremonial chain.

‘Was it a success?’ Immediately she blushed for what must seem a gaffe. ‘Well, you know how furious she got if any of her entertainments fell flat. I can’t think how she would feel if she knew her funeral had been a failure.’

The pain in Arnold Wyburd’s thigh became so inescapably violent she must have seen it reflected in his face.

‘Oh, darling, what is it?’

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘A touch of my sciatica.’

‘Ohhh!’ she moaned.

He rather enjoyed her sympathy.

‘Why don’t I slip round to the chemist for a plaster?’ She did so hope to be allowed.

‘It’s nothing,’ he grimaced.

He was not a masochist, but wanted to bear this superficial pain without Lal’s well-intentioned interference. At the same time he gave her a wry smile in appreciation of her sympathy, while tapping on her hand in the code they had used over practically half a century to communicate their love.

Out of prudence, Mrs Wyburd waited till his second helping of salmon loaf before inquiring, ‘Was there anybody I know?’

‘Nurses. Cleaners. Otherwise, the kind of face one half knows: the reason why one has never joined a club.’ Arnold continued masticating his salmon.

Lal drank a draught of water. ‘The children?’

Arnold began shaking his head, swallowing; he looked quite ratty. ‘I told you. Or didn’t I? Dorothy developed a migraine.’ As he returned them to the plate the knife and fork escaped from his fingers and landed loudly in the pink slush and two or three white vertebrae.

Lal rounded her eyes and breathed under pressure for a treachery she would have expected.

‘Basil was coming,’ he was forced to tell, because his wife would surely prise it out, ‘but didn’t show up. I don’t doubt they’ll put in an appearance at the office — as agreed — to investigate the will.’

In fact the Princesse de Lascabanes appeared before the solicitor had touched his earlier than usual tea.

‘You can’t begin to imagine the effect these headaches have on me, but I assure you, to experience one of them is — ghastly !’

Suffering, whether of a particular or a general kind, had enlarged her eyes and filled them almost to the brim. Dorothy Hunter was a handsomer woman than Arnold Wyburd remembered.

The princess could see this, and she saddened her smile accordingly. She had forgotten how easy success feels. She knew already from her dressing-table glass that she looked appealing: exhaustion had combined with relief to make her so. She was always at her most effective in garments which had reached the stage where the shabby has not too obviously taken over from the sumptuous, like her old Persian lamb, in the sable collar of which she had pinned a brooch: an enormous blister pearl in its targe of diamonds, one of the few fruits of her unfortunate marriage. Now if she was exhausted by the discomforts, not to say the shocks, of ‘Kudjeri’, she was sustained by knowing that Mother had chosen for herself the only reasonable way out of their impasse, and that the years of her own genteel and, yes, gallant poverty, were thereby ended. (No doubt there were lots of malevolent little souls who had seen the past situation in a different light, and who would begrudge her the ease she was about to enjoy. The attitude of the professional poor to the privations of the theoretically rich had always incensed Dorothy de Lascabanes; it was so wrong : a brooch, for instance, is more often than not the symbol of a substance which barely exists.)

The princess roused herself to pay attention to this decent old man conscientiously telling her about the weather while secretly admiring her looks. She must compose some specially amiable remark as a reward for a creature so simple he would never guess at the actual reason for her absence from Mother’s funeral.

So she picked at the leather arm of the chair, tilting her cheek against her sable collar, and told him, ‘You, of course, are the one I feel for. Anyone of a sensibility such as yours must have suffered most cruelly. I’m thankful you had my brother with you — to take some of the strain — on the day. As for Basil — a funeral is a gift to any actor.’

Arnold Wyburd decided not to reveal that her brother had let them down: she might have profited by it too inordinately.

While Dorothy wondered whether she would have squeezed Mr Wyburd’s hand if she had been closer to it. As it was, the distance between them would have made such a gesture look theatrical, or even athletic. In any case, she had no desire. It was strange how Mother’s death seemed to have cut most of her desires: before any, her hankering after a father. She was again appalled, very briefly, by that dream in which the solicitor had trailed his silky testicles across her thighs.

She glanced at her watch and said, ‘I expect my brother will be late as usual;’ and laughed for a remark which did not require it.