Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

‘Oh my God, when did they arrive?’

‘Just now. By the night train.’

Alfred’s anguished face; Basil, more gloomy than suffering, was wearing a sling.

‘Oh, darlings!’ She was too shattered to cry; and Alfred might have joined her if she had let herself go.

Basil was only ashamed of his parents. ‘It’s not broken; it’s bent, or cracked.’

Alfred was so upset trying to trace Dr Moyes, to arrange an appointment, to confirm the bone had received proper treatment from the local man, he could pay no attention to anything else till later.

Then he remembered, ‘Poor old Betty, it must have been a shock.’

She could only look at her husband: his vulnerable temples, kind mouth, eyes so much milder than her own.

It was Basil who suspected something, nothing specific, he couldn’t have. It was just that he suspected his mother generally and on principle.

She used to say, ‘Why are you so full of secrets, darling? What have we got to hide from each other? You can be so charming to other people — with Mrs Wyburd.’

Would he remember that? He had a phenomenal memory. As a boy he could recite whole scenes from Shakespeare. Sometimes they would read together from the plays, she taking the women’s parts.

Now they were playing this scene at the top of the stairs.

‘Anyway, a sling suits you — makes you look gorgeous: a hero back from the wars.’

‘I stink! Haven’t been out of my clothes since it happened. I stink of squashed ants.’ His nostrils expressed a disgust which was aimed at her as well.

‘Doesn’t matter. Wait till after the doctor. Then we’ll see how you can be washed.’

She could tell he was already preparing to resist her advice, let alone help.

The following day Dorothy returned from the Bullivants. If Basil was suspicious, Dorothy’s absorbed little face was specially designed for locking up accusations. If she let them out, her emotions might get the better of words; though sometimes she saved them up for a better occasion. Now she was passing judgment on you for something she couldn’t possibly guess, except that her stare sank deeper, her silence had intensified.

And she found a clue under the bedside table. ‘What’s this?’

‘What on earth? A cuff link!’

‘Whose is it?’

‘It’s one which belonged to my — my father — your Grandfather Salkeld.’

Dorothy, looking at it with a kind of horror, didn’t at least ask to see its twin. ‘Isn’t it ugly!’

You couldn’t deny that. She gave it to you, and you would have to think where to put it, before you could throw it away somewhere — in the park grass — and forget about the whole incident, if Dorothy didn’t re-discover the link.

Only Alfred was trusting: he treated you as though you, not Basil, were the victim of an accident. ‘I’ll stay a few days, Elizabeth — keep you company — help you get your spirits back.’

The second day he suggested a walk together in the park. As they strolled between the formal beds he held her arm along his own, her hand clasped in his, in that position which most clearly demonstrates prerogative. His weathered face and grey eyes encouraged her convalescence from some melancholy nameless illness. In fact it was an illness they had shared, his expression implied, at the time Basil ‘broke’ his arm. Husband and wife were drawn very close inside the circle of her creamy sunshade.

‘Is there anything special you’d like to eat?’ she sighed and asked, since he had persuaded her to accept their convalescence.

He squeezed her languid hand. ‘Anything simple that we can enjoy together.’

Should she drop everything, sell the house, put the children at boarding school, and leave with Alfred for ‘Kudjeri’?

She didn’t. She could not have worn indefinitely the veils of tenderness with which he wanted to invest her. Nor was she, except for that one necessary instance, the rutting sow Athol Shreve had coupled with. She would have given anything to open a box containing the sum total of expectancy, but as this did not happen (except in a single comforting dream, in which she discovered in a little marquetry casket a splinter of rock crystal lying naked and unexplained on the lead lining) she must expect her answers outside boxes, in the colder contingencies preparing for her.

While Alfred looked at her with much the same expression as the plain woman on the opposite side of the Radfords’ dinner table: grateful for something they imagined you to be.

If you could have said: I am neither compleat wife, sow, nor crystal, and must take many other shapes before I finally set, or before I am, more probably, shattered. But you couldn’t; they would not have seen you as the eternal aspirant. Solitariness and despair did not go with what they understood as a beautiful face and a life of outward brilliance and material success.

Over the years the letters: My dearest Elizabeth, I realize our attempts at marriage are not bringing us any closer to success. From your last visit to ‘Kudjeri’ and mine to Moreton Drive I feel you find our pretences too great a strain, and that I should offer to let you divorce me. I have no further ambitions in the field of marriage, but although you don’t care to admit it, you might like to look around you while there is still time to form a more satisfactory relationship. If I haven’t suggested this before, it was on account of the children. Now that they have started thinking for themselves, they may feel less resentful, and even forgive erratic behaviour in their parents … oh the bitterness of your own inadequacies which people who give to charities interpret as selfishness yes you were selfish by some standards but did not bribe your conscience with good works or by acting as a domestic doormat certainly selfish beside Alfred’s exceptional selflessness saints reap admiration when probably it is easier for them a saint is what Dorothy wanted and not getting could only blame the least of saints it is easier for you Mother for anyone beautiful forceful to be admired praised worshipped that is what you are greedy for more and more worshippers it was not true not when you understood your own faults better even than your children did yes praise perhaps but for some inward perfection you hadn’t been able to achieve My dear dear Alfred, how dreadfully guilty you make me feel. I am the one who should be making humble offers if there is any talk of ‘freedom’. It is you who must call the tune and I shall accept whatever you choose. Personally I don’t believe there is a state of freedom greater than the one we know and ‘enjoy’—at least, not in life … but how you longed for it.

A silveriness about the room brighter than the mists of vision: a faint afternoon breeze deliciously flirting with your steamy hair, but chilling, alarming to boiled skin. This is the cool side of the house: the western rooms will be in flames. Nothing should alarm: at least you won’t die; that has been proved over the years. And Basil coming, probably at dusk (you might look better by artificial light) to act out the scene an actor expects. A travesty, of course, but you can’t condemn artifice without dismissing the whole of art.

An unnatural wraith of steam rising to the left in the humid evening is what is making you cough. You alone, not Alfred, probably responsible for Dorothy’s bronchitis, for Basil’s super-selfishness disguised as genius. Better a cow cocky or bank teller than an artist. Yes, now you’ve said it: what good is an artist to those who want to love him? We are never the one they think; we are not one, but many. Father was expecting his daughter to read Browning to him as usual, when there she was dawdling beside the river of drowned dolls, plaiting grass, listening for the sound of hooves on the bridge, the evening he put the gun in his mouth. ‘Blood exhaustion’, Mrs Lippmann calls it. But there are still, even now, the little delights.