Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

Gladys Radford couldn’t leave off: such a dynamic — a self-made man … Athol Shreve had been one of those paper boys who rise to position and fame; paper boys are among the clichés of the success story. Aren’t there rather too many of them? It was a bad connection and Gladys couldn’t understand, kept hitting the receiver. Too many what? Gladys’s annoyance was growing; it was fun listening to it.

Shreve the trade unionist had ratted on the movement, to become the inspiration of the Nationalists. He was ripe for the Radford dinners.

Gladys — I’m not enthusiastic darling. Only crackle for the moment. Well, if you’re not: Gladys’s tinkle was becoming a sunken bell. Except it’s the holidays — which is something you can’t appreciate — Dorothy gone to the Bullivants — Basil to ‘Kudjeri’—to Daddy. I’m stuck here with a team of Irish maids fighting out their religious differences every other night. So I’ll come darling — unless.

Gladys Radford thought it would be simply marvellous. She had almost lost her voice achieving what she wanted. She hung up before you could modify your acceptance.

Mrs Hunter coughed a series of dry, exploratory coughs. She hoped she would not develop anything, grow feverish, or not before Sir Basil’s arrival. Her star guest. She would be glad when it was all over, when night and Mary de Santis were in possession of the house. Of course Basil wouldn’t want to stay any more than Dorothy had wanted to. Old people aren’t quite human for those who are still capable of escaping from the past by moving about in what they like to think is positive action: movement, the great illusory blessing. Certainly if you are motionless you are more an object than a person: you are a less significant part of the design you make with the lives of others, particularly your children; children in particular get around to thinking how they can improve on the design, which ends in their wanting to eliminate superfluous detail. You had seen it before. You had heard it in Dorothy and Basil’s letters, most clearly in the recent ones: have decided to come out and discuss what will be best for you; which could be interpreted as ‘ us ’.

Yes, it will be good when the guests have gone. You can hear the darkness clotting in the rooms below, Lippmann bumping into furniture and sighing for the Jews; outside in the park, screams from rape and waterfowl. Only yourself and de Santis are real. Only de Santis realizes that the splinters of a mind make a whole piece. Sometimes at night your thoughts glitter; even de Santis can’t see that, only yourself: not see, but know yourself to be a detail of the greater splintering,

When the guests have gone: at the Radfords’ they always seemed to stick, at the beginning and the end, on that great mauve staircase. Gladys and Sidney couldn’t, or more probably wouldn’t, encourage a flow after all the money they had spent importing the marble from Portugal; and Gladys liked to show off her feet and ankles: that was why she had to have an upstairs drawing-room, so they said, for her feet and her ankles to be noticed at the head of the mauve staircase, before the guests could concentrate on her slab of a body with its thick neck.

There on the staircase everyone was stuck as usual the night that Athol Shreve. You hadn’t looked, or barely glanced, when introduced on the landing outside the drawing-room. Confidentially, he’d never come across an upstairs lounge: isn’t it a bit eccentric? She had decided to create an impression of casualness. Why not? she asked; you’re not conventional yourself, are you? from what one reads in the press. While half disapproving as a democratic Australian dependent on his constituents’ approval, the other half of him was flattered to be tinged with an impropriety she implied. Caught in the crush, herself in turn crushing the cinerarias, she looked in a glass and saw that she had drawn her mouth all wrong, its bow noticeably asymmetrical. Usually meticulous, her hand must have slipped on this occasion. Or perhaps it would establish the casualness she wished for.

She was wearing white. It seemed to make him ashamed of something; he began telling her, when I was a boy … And again at dinner, when I was a boy … Gladys had sat them together, so there was no escaping Athol Shreve’s boyhood, nor his appearance which at last she could let herself loose on. Nobody, not Athol Shreve himself — nor her self — would have interested her in that before the second course.

Even now she only took quick bites, at the cratered skin, the heavy hands, concentrated eyes, and hair so thick and stiff you knew how it felt without having to touch.

He talked about his law studies (tedious), less about politics; if he was confident of what Sidney Radford predicted for him, he showed no sign of wanting to parade that confidence. He was boring her on the whole, and probably she him, though thoroughly masculine men seldom seem to become bored provided a female audience will pay them token attention.

So she felt at liberty to withdraw from his anecdotes and ideas to the company of her own thoughts while leaving him her physical presence. As the courses were delivered, acceptably anonymous food, on the Radfords’ gold dinner service. Why she had agreed to be thrust together with Athol Shreve was not yet clear to her; so far there was nothing about him she could admire, or even like, she thought.

… never employ or trust a man who hasn’t a worker’s hands.

His cynicism appealed to a cynicism in herself. She laughed, but saw him look surprised, perhaps even unconscious of anything cynical in his remark. He went on stubbornly cutting into a chicken’s too muscular thigh. Betrayal of the side to which he belonged had not transformed his own worker’s hands, she noticed.

What would he think of Alfred, whose rather sensitive hands were scarred by the manual labour to which he committed himself on principle?

She was pleased to remember: my husband —not the mystic title contained in a humdrum word, but an expression of respect and affection. Whether Alfred respected her she could not tell: he loved her.

Are you married Mr Shreve? It ended in something between desperation and a cough; she took a sip of wine to hide a watering of her eyes.

It was not quite as she had hoped: Athol Shreve was another of those dutifully, sentimentally uxorious men with invalid wives.

At the same time his thigh, she realized, had come to rest alongside hers, or more than rest: it was plastered to her. If he was conscious of it he didn’t show her, but continued telling about a daughter (her name Doris) studying economics in London. He was exceptionally earnest when it came to the matter of education, which again created a cynical situation. Only his hands were genuine: in shape and texture, at least, and if you ignored the history of his political betrayal.

And what about her own betrayal of Alfred? But she hadn’t betrayed him, or only once, and that was little more than an afternoon’s indiscretion, of no lasting significance. It didn’t destroy the possibility of an ideal relationship, above the respect and affection she had for Alfred, and Alfred’s (hurt) devotion to her. If she could to some extent understand or visualize this probably super-human relationship. But she couldn’t.

It was in any case nothing to do with Athol Shreve the turncoat politician and tame social bull. Drunk by now. That was why his thick thigh was burning into her cooler, unresponsive one. Herself close enough to drunk. Gladys and Sidney served too many wines to show they were able to afford them.

She sat forward over the dessert, locking her hands against her forehead in the hope that this might cure an ache. Naturally it didn’t. The bubbles continued rising and pricking, from the glass as well as in the head. Opened her eyes and there was a plain woman smiling opposite. Someone to whom you had been introduced, but who didn’t matter while you were in full possession of yourself. Some plain women smile at you genuinely grateful when you are at your prettiest, but perhaps it is only for the success of a dress, or some — some aura. And that imagined — not real.