Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

While Mrs Hunter insisted this man Sister you went with your last day off — to Noamurra — or wherever it was — tell me about it — I mean him! As if you would have known how. And what is this delicious cosmetic of which you are smelling? Ah (snuffle) that is wych-hazel I’ve often wondered. Wonder what she smelled under the wych-hazel: perhaps those goats she went on about.

They had gone that day to Noamurra, it was true.

‘Why Noamurra, Col? Such a godforsaken sort of a place!’

‘That’s what appeals. The bulldozer won’t nose it out, or not yet. And that’s what I want today.’

He was driving the old Mercedes SSK (whatever it means). He had traded in the Valiant, and done up this old car; he was clever at that sort of thing. Col would have been clever at anything he put his mind to, but said what he wanted was peace of mind. As if you didn’t, all of you; but what was it? and how to get it?

‘Noamurra! Who’d want to live there? Amongst all those old neglected orchards.’

‘You could listen to yourself living at least — in between hearing the oranges drop.’

‘Not very progressive. I’m for progress.’

‘You could stand for mayor, Flo.’

In other circumstances she might have got angry but the warmth, the sound of the road, had drugged her. And the scrub: each swathe identical. She giggled slightly and it bumped her against the back of the seat. Col was smoking the pipe with the aluminium stem, which made the spit sizzle at the bottom of the bowl. Along the sandstone ridges the sun glazed and dazed: through the open window sun-wind was flung harsh as sandpaper against the skin.

Farther back, while the suburbs were still streaming, she had tried to benefit from travelling by Mercedes, but you couldn’t ever: this one was so old-fashioned nobody would have recognized it, not amongst the glossy up to date models. Now that there wasn’t that much traffic, one or two dislocated fruit and vegetable trucks, here and there a family bus, what you looked like hardly mattered.

Was this being happy? If, as she suspected, it was, nobody, not Col, not even the Old Bitch of Moreton Drive, would have dragged the confession out from between her lips, parted like an idiot’s, she realized, as she moistened their nakedness with her tongue.

‘This Mrs Hunter, because she’s old, comes out with the biggest nonsense. And thinks she can get away with it.’

‘Such as?’

‘Oh, I couldn’t tell you!’

‘If you can’t tell, why did you begin?’

‘I was making conversation.’

‘That isn’t conversation; it’s frustration.’

‘Oh, well.’

She settled down. She liked being with Col at times, and this was one of them. She would have liked to take a look at him, but might have given herself away. More than anything it’s what you see; but that would not have done for poor Mrs Hunter, who had to invent theories about smells, and grow spooky over voices. Did the old thing remember with any clearness what she had seen when she had her sight? Men’s hands, for instance; their hard throats: men show you their thoughts in their throats, or anyway Col does. She had to have just one look.

‘What are you looking at?’

‘Thought I saw a signpost. But there wasn’t. God, scrub like this never stops once it begins.’

Or it only stops for Noamurra.

They were gliding at last into that different deeper green, paddocks with sprung hummocks, orchards with tangled, scaly trees, past a waterhole with scum on it: that was the deepest, deadliest green. Where there were houses they were faded or unpainted weatherboard, all old. Only the service station was new, the ads, and the drive-in pictures. The people too, seemed old, their weather-cured elephant skins, wedding rings eating into the leather. On a veranda almost screened by privet an old couple sat drinking tea out of white cups, and munching at something, probably scones. A daughter in a long straight cotton frock, and her simple brother, sat looking only at the road; they were younger than the old people of course, but elderly.

The privet which recurred round most of the cottages began to overwhelm, to suffocate. If you turned your head a tropical moisture was tumbling, bouncing around your field of vision: which was always of the same deadly green, sometimes splotches of oranges, or pallid privet blossom.

Col wanted to walk. So they walked the back roads. There was a child, a little girl squatting on the edge of an orchard, beside the road, fiddling with something in a glass jar.

‘What is it?’ She bent to ask the child, who wouldn’t answer at first, but hid her face, as appetizing as dark plums.

‘What are you playing with?’ you tried again, more than anything to hold your own.

‘A lizard.’

It was a lizard all right in the jar, and the lizard had already lost its tail.

‘You won’t be cruel to it, will you?’ Silly the things you say to kids. ‘If I was you I’d let it go.’

All eyes and glistening lips, the child gave the lizard a black look. ‘He’s my pet,’ she said.

‘All the same, I’d let him go.’

Or would you? It was difficult to tell what you would have done, squatting by the roadside in muddied dress and tattered pants.

Col said, when they had meandered on, ‘She’ll tear the head off as soon as we’ve turned the corner. To see what happens. You would have done the same, Flo.’

‘How do you know?’ She could feel her anger burning all the way up her neck.

‘I don’t know ?’ he admitted; ‘but would guess.’ The air was too drowsy to allow prolonged speculation.

‘My own children wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘I’d see to that. Whatever I may be, I’d bring them up different.’

He swung her hand, and laughed.

‘Why not?’ Indignation was blurring her words. ‘I’d try to better myself in my children.’

They had cut across one of the green paddocks filled with spongy hummocks. The paddock might have been quilted on a large scale, the soft irregular quilting giving way beneath them as they tramped.

‘I’m sorry’, she said, ‘if I seem bad-tempered. I know I’m quarrelsome. There’s such a lot to quarrel about.’

‘It’s better to marry a girl with a bad temper. If you pick one that’s sweet and she turns out cranky it’s a big disappointment.’

‘I was never sweet. And marriage was nowhere near my mind. I meant, it’s a pity if you can’t go on a one-day outing without doing your block.’

They ploughed ahead through the soft paddock, through probably many years, perhaps a human lifetime, of fallow.

‘If I was domesticated I suppose I’d have cut us some sandwiches.’

‘I haven’t a single illusion, Flo’; making bite gestures down her arm as though it was a cob of corn.

‘Stopputt!’ It was too silly.

Or it wasn’t; as they pulled up facing each other the silence was serious around them. A network of midges hung in a glow of sunlight; on the one hand scraggy, slanting gums, on the other the fuzz of orange trees, sooty branches and wax-clogged twigs struggling to escape from their own crowd. She realized from the stillness that she was caught again, if she had ever really broken free. Col, who had at first stood back, was coming at her, like a sleep-walker returning by instinct to the room he had left earlier in the same dream; the exhausted, but intent trees were collaborating with him.

She wasn’t. ‘What do you think I am?’ she protested; when she knew too well; when they were already fitting together. ‘Col?’ If her voice resounded blatantly it was because her mouth was still under compulsion.

He didn’t reply. He went on dashing his lips backwards and forwards in the readymade groove of her mouth: where she couldn’t prevent them belonging.