Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

As you moved towards left centre Mother said, ‘Is anything the matter with you, Basil? Why are you limping? Isn’t your health in order? You never write to me — except when you’re down the financial drain — so I don’t know anything.’

It was not in the script; he tried to shrug it off. ‘Oh — a nothing — a twinge.’ The bedazzled nurse accepted it; the solicitor was one of those patches of silence which occur even on your best nights.

As for Mother, she said, ‘All ailments are hereditary, I think — like moral flaws. I am arthritic, Basil. I had a great-uncle who went blind at the end. I am blind — physically, anyway.’

This time he more than shrugged; he raised his left shoulder. He could no longer look at her: greasy crimson overflowing the real mouth; the lilac silk sprouting from a withered cob. He felt he was to blame: the parents, those arch-amateurs of life, can’t be held responsible for themselves, let alone their children.

‘How is my granddaughter?’

‘Hardly ever see Imogen. She does turn up now and again with offers to do me good. Doing good is her stock-in-trade.’

At least there was no mention of the wives, the mistresses, or any other moral blackmailers. He was conscious the pace was slowing up. Mustn’t let himself get dejected after coming all that way, at such expense, on what he was determined to see as a positive mission; he would make it so.

‘How’s poor old Dorothy?’ He pitched it to sound warm, mellow, affectionate, as indeed he had begun to feel towards a sister he hadn’t seen in years.

‘Dorothy is still poor old Dorothy,’ their mother gravely answered. ‘Full of the wrongs done her. She resents an experience I had on an island years ago. I expect she’ll be here to dinner.’

The solicitor had to inform them the princess telephoned his office to say she had a headache. He didn’t tell them he wasn’t surprised. His loyalty, of an irrational kind, or else of such longstanding he was saturated with it, did not prevent him being caught in any of the cross currents.

‘There! I knew!’ The old lady was ablaze. ‘And you, Basil?’

‘I had booked a room at the Onslow. Didn’t want to …’

‘… give anybody any trouble. My cook will be so disappointed. She was an actress, you know — in Berlin — and other parts.’

Not an actress! Nor daughter, nor wife, nor mother. He had reached that alarming stage in any actor’s career where he loses the desire to perform. Suddenly. He would have liked to flop down, feel the tape closing round his neck, the clean, soft, white bib settling below his chin, then a detached hand feeding him slowly but firmly with spoonfuls of sweetened bread and milk. In such circumstances the mistakes would not yet have been made, and might even be avoided.

As things were, he could only answer, ‘Very well, Mother, I’ll stay to dinner. Actually it would give me great pleasure to meet your cook — and see some more of you, of course.’ This too, was ‘acting’, but a diffident performance of a small part.

‘Run, Sister Manhood, please — tell Mrs Lippmann Sir Basil will be here for dinner. She must — ex — ex ceed herself.’ In her anxiety that minds shouldn’t be changed, and that she scrape together words formal enough to compose her order, Mrs Hunter’s tongue continued protruding from her mouth after the order had been given.

If he had felt less tired it might have shocked Sir Basil: that ‘slight stroke’ Wyburd had written about; though hadn’t your first reaction been to hope for a second one? So many problems solved by a stroke; so much unpleasantness avoided.

Now as the nurse was hurrying to obey, he took it there was no danger. His conscience could enjoy the crisp swish of a departing skirt. If her nurse’s smile was in a convention, it was a pretty version of it, and he thought he could detect that slight friction of silken thighs against each other, scissorwise.

He sighed brightly at his mother. ‘A pretty nurse.’

‘Oh, nurses! No end of them. And I’m the one who has to nurse the nurses. Take him, Arnold, and show him where everything is. The cloakroom lavatory doesn’t flush when you want it to.’

‘It does, Mrs Hunter, I assure you. We had it put right.’

‘It didn’t some years ago.’

Sir Basil Hunter persuaded himself to kiss his mother just below where the lilac wig joined the forehead. What looked dry, tasted clammy. He closed his mouth on his revulsion; whatever the conscious motive for his visit, he realized that unconsciously he had been hoping for some sign that life is a permanence.

She, on the other hand, seemed unaware of anything but her own exhaustion.

‘I’ll come up later,’ he made his words linger; ‘sit with you a while.’

She did not answer, nor probably care.

So, then, here he was, going downstairs with the Wy-burd, who was trying to talk theatre as though he thought that was the only stuff you were made of: well, there were one or two other components. The Wyburd wife and daughters, it appeared, had seen a performance of Macbeth.

Whatever else, all, even your enemies, even the naming Agate, were agreed that you excelled as Macbeth. Though you yourself had endured agonizing doubts before the final flash of intuition. Perhaps you were after all the man of inspired mistakes.

The solicitor was demonstrating how the lavatory flushed perfectly. ‘You see? She forgets.’ He sounded mildly, officially kind.

‘And remembers a hell of a lot that had better be forgotten.’

‘I expect so.’ There Arnold Wyburd would not wholly commit himself; of one thing he could not be sure.

As they strolled down the path which meandered back and forth along the terraces of the darkening garden, the solicitor all of a sudden gushed sweat to think he too might one day remember publicly what he had decided to forget. Would senility cause him to betray himself? when he wouldn’t have wounded anyone intentionally: least of all, Lal.

Feeling he ought, Basil decided to ask after the solicitor’s wife. The old man seemed pleased. It was becoming too easy to please: just as acting can become too easy, and you have to start again, imposing physical penance, and more painful still, by dragging up from the wells of the unconscious the sludge in which truth is found.

The solicitor remembered, ‘My wife often tells how you made up your mind as a boy that you wanted to play Lear. And you did, didn’t you?’

‘Yes. I had a shot at it. I’m one of the many premature Lears.’

If you could remain long enough in this garden of ungoverned fronds, twisting paths, and statues disguising their real attitudes and intentions behind broken extremities and mossy smiles; if you could return upstairs and winkle experience out of the blind eyes and half-gelled responses of the Lilac Oracle, you might eventually present the Lear who had so far evaded almost everybody. But you had come here for a different purpose: short, sharp, and material.

Wyburd was making strangulated noises as though he had not enough of some foreign tongue to translate a simple wish into plain but consoling words. ‘You actors of — of intellectual integrity, must find it immensely rewarding — to immerse yourselves in the great classic roles,’ he at least attempted; poor old bugger, if he only knew!

Then the men were interrupted by a gate squeaking on rusty hinges; the figure of a woman was approaching under the fluorescent lighting and a cautious moon.

‘Good evening, gentlemen.’ Anachronistic, but not unpleasing.

‘Ah!’ The solicitor was prepared to do the honours. ‘Sister de Santis — Sir Basil Hunter. Sister is your mother’s night nurse.’

The woman bowed her head beneath a large, dark, dowdy hat. She was one of those who make the worst of themselves: the stately bust was clothed, before anything else, in an impersonal gaberdine which disregarded the lengths of fashion; the large, luminous eyes in the rather livery face looked almost phosphorescent in the street lighting; nothing about the night nurse provoked the actor’s charm.