Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

The airy rubble over which the plane was bumping became so inconsiderable Madame de Lascabanes was made ashamed; she was saddened, also, to think it might never be given to her to enter the eye of the storm as described by the Dutch sea captain, though she was not unconscious of the folded wings, the forms of sea-birds afloat around them.

‘Sure, we had to take another battering — as the eye was moved away — and the farther wall of the storm rammed us — but less severe. You could tell the violence was exhausting itself.’

After that he closed his eyes. There was much she could have asked him, and perhaps would dare when he opened them. In the meantime, she sat half dreaming half thinking, her own eyes fixed on a full but tranquil vein in the back of one of this man’s hands.

Actually, when he woke from his doze, he struggled out of his seat to visit the lavatory. Their paltry storm had passed, it appeared, though they were advised to keep their seat-belts fastened for the landing at Bangkok.

So she did not speak again to the Dutchman, except in mumbles. They grunted, nodded and smiled at each other, amused, it must have seemed, by some shared secret, as they shuffled out of the plane at the airport.

It was here that she joined the Australian flight. She lost her Dutchman, probably for ever.

‘Is that all?’ Mrs Hunter opened her eyes.

‘Oh, yes. I know I had nothing special to tell. Nobody would be impressed who hadn’t heard from this ordinary, yet in some way, extraordinary man. He struck me as being’—she was struggling through the wicked jungle of language—‘himself the soul of calm and wisdom.’

Just then Dorothy Hunter was startled out of her memories by some of the former mineral glitter in her mother’s almost extinct stare.

‘Dorothy, didn’t I ever tell you of my experience in a cyclone?’

Mother was daring you not to have known. She was standing at the head of the stairs, one arm outstretched, pointing, in a dress of blinding white such as had suited her best: cold and perfect in its way. And now a mere daughter, in spite of trial by marriage, the exorcism of a number of doubts, and arrival at perhaps a few mature conclusions, was frightened to the edge of panic by whatever revelation this vision of earthly authority might be threatening her with.

‘No,’ she protested. ‘You didn’t tell — that is, I think I remember hearing — yes, about a storm.’

Somehow she must be spared: Mother must grant her this one concession.

‘If I didn’t write to you at the time, I must have been too annoyed with you — flying off like that — in a rage.’ Mrs Hunter sounded reasonable, calm, just. ‘It was when the Warmings asked us to stay on their island. They had to leave in a hurry. One of the children was sick, I think. Then you rushed away. You missed a lot of excitement — and made a fool of yourself.’

Mrs Hunter laughed gently; it sounded almost as though she still had those small but exquisite teeth. ‘What was the name of the professor man?’

Dorothy Hunter was frozen beyond answering. She shouldn’t have been; it had happened fifteen years ago.

‘Anyway, it was while I was on the island that this cyclone struck. Oh, I shall tell you — when I can find the strength. I can see the birds, just as your Russian said.’

If physical strength was letting her down, her capacity for cruelty would never fail her: to drag in Edvard Pehl. At her most loving, Mother had never been able to resist the cruel thrust. To have loved her in the prime of her beauty, as many had, was like loving, or ‘admiring’ rather, a jewelled scabbard in which a sword was hidden: which would clatter out under the influence of some peculiar frenzy, to slash off your ears, the fingers, the tongues, or worse, impale the hearts, of those who worshipped. And yet we continued to offer ourselves, if reluctantly. As they still do, it appears: to this ancient scabbard, from which the jewels have loosened and scattered, the blind sockets filled instead with verdigris, itself a vengeful semi-jewellery, the sword still sharp in spite of age and use.

She must try to define her love for her mother: it had remained something beyond her understanding.

And the cyclone: why was it given to Elizabeth Hunter to experience the eye of the storm? That too! Or are regenerative states of mind granted to the very old to ease the passage from their earthly, sensual natures into final peace and forgiveness? Of course Mother could have imagined her state of grace amongst the resting birds, just as she had imagined Mrs Hewlett’s escaped lovebird and the mad or distraught gardener. Though remembering some frightfulness the prince had forced on her mind more painfully than on her body, Dorothy de Lascabanes suspected the lovebird’s murder was not an invention.

Then the knocking, and in Sister Badgery’s voice, ‘Mrs Hunter? Here’s a lovely surprise for you, dear. Dr Gidley is paying us a visit.’

Brave or foolish, the nurse pushed the door open without waiting for encouragement, and for once her judgment seemed correct.

Her patient spoke up in the voice of a little girl who has learnt a lesson, though it could have been an unimportant one. ‘It is very kind of him,’ Mrs Hunter said.

‘We couldn’t very well not look in — not as we were passing — could we?’ The doctor was a large young man with a fatty laugh.

‘Not very well — not after promising Sister de Santis on the telephone.’

The doctor ignored it, while the duty nurse pursed up her mouth, her cheeks near to bursting for the wickedness of her precocious charge.

Then she remembered, ‘This is the — the daughter — Dr Gidley’; though her voice had a dash of acid, her eyes were radiating sunshine from behind the gold-rimmed spectacles.

‘Ahhh!’ The doctor recoiled, but put out his hand, sighing or hissing.

The Princess got the impression she was a rare disease he had not encountered before, and which he would have liked to look up furtively in a book; while avoiding his hand, she replied, ‘How do you do, Dr Gidley?’ Though recently grown up, the doctor would remain, for her at least, or at any rate for the moment, an enormous baby to whose somewhat featureless face had been added a pair of fashionable mutton-chops.

Apparently unconscious of a snub, he advanced on the bed, where he plumped his doctor’s bag (humbler than himself) beside him on the carpet. ‘How are we, Mrs Hunter? No strain on the Big Day?’ Without waiting to hear, he took up his patient’s wrist, which surprisingly she abandoned to him.

(Surely such enormous fingers would detect only a thundering pulse?)

‘She’s remarkable — truly remarkable,’ the nurse nattered sideways and superfluously to the daughter who was a princess.

The doctor frowned, and the nurse, recalled to duty, stood to attention like a frail private.

‘Normal enough.’ Dr Gidley finally complained out loud,

And so did Mrs Hunter. ‘Normal is the last thing I am — I hoped you might have gathered by now — Doctor — Dr Gidley .’ The corners of her mouth were struggling to perfect a half-remembered technique of malice. ‘Otherwise, what am I paying for? A — a dia- gnosis of my ordinariness?’

Dr Gidley flopped into the nearest chair, fingers dangling in clusters between wide-open legs. ‘Okay! Dictate your diagnosis, Mrs Hunter, and I’ll learn it.’ Mirth bumped the banana-bunches against swelling thighs.

Sister Badgery hummed with suppressed pleasure.

The strength of these two acolytes lay in their belief in the rightness of what they were doing and the wrong-thinking of others; which drew Dorothy towards her mother: at her most imperious, her most declamatory, Mother’s manner had suggested that the moment her will snoozed she might collide with some passive object or suffer buffeting by a directed one. Mother and daughter were both sleepwalkers, only their approach from opposite ends of the room ensured that their meetings should become, more often than not, collisions.