Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

So you couldn’t or only half smile back to thank the woman for her kind interest.

Athol Shreve was what is real. This gross male. A fake: the real is so often fake. You had never recognized your own lust; you hadn’t often been troubled by it. But it exists — alongside those unrealizable aspirations.

And husbands.

He said it was surprising they hadn’t met before. Not at all surprising, you were tempted to reply, only you could no longer have aimed it at the heart of the matter.

There was a worm in the Radfords’ de Lucca peach.

All Elizabeth Hunter’s worst nightmares occurred at noon. She gritted her gums, crisped her jewelled fingers against being sucked farther down into the fug of afternoon sleep; its flannel tunnel daunted her; and to be dragged back eventually by someone who is paid to do it: that is why nurses, particularly little Manhood, remain so cool.

That man: the politician. Her lips tried, but failed to work the name free of her mind.

After dinner there was conversation and a pretence of music: two tall young men vamping at pianos; it was fashionable just then to engage them. You would have liked to slip away, but couldn’t. Even accepted a curaçoa. Gladys so civil; and Sidney wanted to show you some Japanese prints he had bought: he had always bought something.

Where was Athol Shreve? she wondered. She couldn’t escape him, she realized now. He was the reason she had told Lennox he needn’t return with the car after the party. He was the awfulness, the reality, she had decided unconsciously to risk; if she had miscalculated the explosive force of her lust, she had felt its first tremor that evening when misdrawing her mouth in lipstick. She went at one point into the cloakroom to whimper over Alfred. The other awfulness is: you can sincerely love those you betray. She gashed again at that not so casually planned mouth.

Then everyone was leaving. There was something about a couple who lived somewhat in the same direction: as it happened, the plain quiet woman from opposite at dinner, and a husband, her male replica. Athol Shreve knew you would expect the offer of a lift, which you didn’t, and did. Furs made you shiver: tonight they were too much a forfeit.

En route the gears kept tangling grinding before the eventual grudging release. The married couple on the back seat accepted gratefully to be dropped. He was wearing a white scarf, with a fringe and black monogram, she clutching to thin breasts a narrow moiré party handbag, as they stood on the pavement outside their house, stooping to call goodbye. They were smiling for what no one could explain: not yourself, certainly; and they were too nice to want to.

Athol Shreve had more trouble with the gears. It was an ordinary car for such an opportunist, but perhaps the ordinary is a better disguise for ruthlessness. Or the car could have been an innocent oversight, or convenience. They were bumping around against and off each other inside it. A pothole bounced them: she hit her skull on the roof.

‘Seems like I’m trying to kill us!’ (All your worst nightmares speak with actual mouths, but the mouths of megaphones.) ‘Mightn’t look too good, eh?’ his thick, megaphone laugh, ‘driving Elizabeth Hunter home, both drunk, after the shivoo.’

A sort of jollity in his voice made you wonder if it isn’t a dormant instinct for evil rather than their thinking minds which drives men to dishonesty. A woman’s knowledge of herself sees to it that she is aware of her guilt.

In Moreton Drive pulling up, ‘This is the terminus, isn’t it?’

Even so, he had no intention of turning round; was getting out: too big for the doorway of that smallish car.

A light was blazing illuminating your own solid yet unreliable house.

‘There is this step — where the path turns: two people have broken legs.’ Inwardly burning, her voice sounded cold.

Didn’t listen to the joke he was making she was fumbling in her bag the gold mesh a wedding present from Alfred’s mother in it the key to this house in which she was living.

Mrs Hunter groaned the cramps in her legs if night she would have allowed de Santis to give her one of Gidley’s pills. After luncheon sleeping pills are immoral. Open her eyes at least. She couldn’t. On the dark screen her lids provided the picture show continued flickering.

‘I expect I should pour you a drink after your so nobly bringing me home.’ A silly bitchy pretty woman after a party.

He recognized it. ‘I think we had enough to know each other.’

They were driven together in a collision which sounded like that between two objects in solid bone or hard rubber so little surprising it might have happened before.

‘Not along there. The maids are sleeping. If you’re not careful you’ll wake them.’ She distinctly added, ‘They might telephone the police thinking somebody had broken in and was assaulting or trying to murder me.’ She was so sure of her innocence in the minds of everybody who didn’t know her; nobody, not even Athol Shreve, knew her; only she knew herself.

‘The police — you could deny anything the maids told them, couldn’t you?’

Instead of answering she smiled at him, because she had no idea what she would tell until it was necessary.

Suspicion of treachery seemed to have made him determined to devour its source: her throat her breasts.

‘If you don’t mind — my dress. That might be inescapable evidence.’

He watched her prepare. They were watching each other. He had a vein in his forehead which swelled as he bent to ease, then to drag the cloth, down from his thighs.

Disgust for his body, his exploratory hands, the rasp of hair against her skin, did not diminish her own lust. Her enraged beast could have wanted to die of his: when there was some condition she knew she had aspired to above the placid waters of marriage the eruptions of adultery finally hatred of her own aspirant.

His thundering into her ear, ‘God, Betty, we screw pretty good together, don’t we?’ Then squelching back out of their mutual revulsion.

You would have liked to separate, more than from your lover, from your own body.

Halfway into his clothes he began muttering, finally loudly whispering, ‘What’s wrong? There’s nothing wrong, is there?’

Only everything; but how tell?

She could have lain resting for ever, not thinking; but roused herself. ‘Is your wife politically minded?’ That speeded his buttoning.

‘Not very. Not now. She’s too sick to take an interest. What made you ask?’

As well as husbands, wives had begun to haunt her: a strained, chalky menopause, but featureless.

Again fully armoured, he came and sat on the edge of the bed, seeming inclined to return to picking at a meal he thought he had finished.

When he put his hand she reminded, ‘My husband might arrive unexpectedly from Gogong.’

Athol Shreve could behave very nervously for such a large, designated man. ‘Thought the Gogong train reached Sydney in the morning.’

‘It does. There’s also a slower, daylight one Alfred sometimes takes because he enjoys looking at the country.’

She spent seconds on a total death wish.

‘Better see me out, hadn’t you? Make it look more like a social visit — if anybody — one of the maids.’ For this final pretence she dressed herself in what she had been wearing, even made up her mouth; there was nothing she could have done about her eyes.

At the front door he was all for fumbling kissing sentimental respects. ‘Night night, girlie. Thanks for the party. Next time we’ll know each other’s form better.’

She shut it out at last, not that the latch sounded convincing.

In the morning (it might have been today) Nora announced with a dignity which was a good copy of the original, ‘Mr Hunter has come, madam. He hopes you won’t get a shock — Master Basil fell out of a tree and fractured an arm.’