Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

The draft-mare, whose name was Janie Carson, announced that she would contribute her duty-free to the party, ‘to drink to the time I barged into Sir Basil Hunter’. (Possibly Janie embarrassed some of her contemporaries, to whom she might have explained herself more fully: all right there’s art we all know that but who’s going to look after Janie if she doesn’t look after herself and the ways of getting on are the same old ways it’s only art that changes.)

The refrigeration in a second-class tropical hotel was turning over groggily: you would see everybody’s thoughts before the night was half over.

Two or three new faces put in an appearance at the door; the second flight had arrived, flogged, from Tokyo. They faded on seeing someone they knew only in the press or by repute.

One of them thought to call, ‘Diana’s sure she’s pregnant. She thinks she took the seasick pills instead.’

A male guffawed.

That old bawd Babs Rainbow was grinning above her ginny-boo. ‘Diana must leave it to Auntie Babs’; while Madge and Dudley, childless as far as you could remember, smiled rather thin, trying to show they were with it.

It was here that Janie rolled over and started fingering the clock on his sock. ‘Possibly you don’t know — I was at school with Imogen — your daughter.’

He swallowed half a tumblerful.

‘Imogen and I were chums,’ she added.

Not unlikely: two coarse-boned girls, equal in age; only Imogen hadn’t Janie’s plastic face: her missionary zeal would not have allowed it.

‘Imogen sometimes asked me home. Shiela was ghastly, and Imogen always wonderful to her.’

He drank the rest of the whiskey in his glass. ‘She isn’t my daughter, you know. No blood offspring, I mean.’ Why was he telling this young thing with the swinging hair and partially revealed twat? Honesty? Or masochism?

‘I hadn’t realized.’ Some prude ancestor forced her to lower her eyes; a closer influence made her suck on her glass.

‘Oh, no — definitely no!’ he was emphasizing. ‘Shiela admitted — out of spite. She made use of Len Bottomley, the most bloody uninteresting actor in the profession — butlers, friends, courtiers, all that — because she was jealous of me. She took Len as her stud, and Imogen — my “daughter”—is the result.’

Janie Carson looked as though she hadn’t wanted to hear about it: confessions, when not launched as amusing details of gossip, can become embarrassing.

One of the burnt-up young men, Garth by name, was smouldering at him with what looked like contempt.

Janie said, ‘What an awful time you’ve had, Basil, what with all that, and now your mother.’ She delivered her line in a level tone of voice, except at the point where she swooped on his Christian name.

But he wasn’t interested in the reactions, the preoccupations of Janie Carson or any of the present company. Although it boiled up in him at times, he was not interested in the past, or the messes he had made in certain corners of a successful career. What obsessed him was the future and its threats.

Again he was speaking to this girl, not because she offered him more than a token sympathy, but because her slight interest might help him give shape to some of his more shadowy thoughts. ‘When I spoke of my mother’s “deathbed” I was exaggerating — I think. I don’t believe she’ll die till she wants to. And I suspect she doesn’t want to. What makes any strong-willed old person decide to die is something I’ve never worked out.’ He looked round at the other faces, none of which, with the possible exception of Janie’s, was giving attention to what he had to say. ‘I haven’t had much experience of the old and senile; in fact I’ve always gone out of my way to avoid that sort of thing.’

Good old solemn Dudley was dutifully automatically sleepily pouring you another drink. It was a relief to sink your mouth afresh; and no one had accused you of ignoble intentions.

‘I must admit that when I’ve had a study I’ve longed for the star girl to drop dead.’ Janie shook her hair and giggled at her glass.

‘Not death again!’ The word had broken through to Madge at the other end of the room; she was holding her chin too high to stretch the wrinkles in her throat.

Garth, the dark thin young hawk, had raised his beak; his eyes were contemplating no one else but Sir Basil Hunter the famous ham. ‘Did you ever hear — sir,’ he coughed for a word he used unwillingly; words probably made him feel awkward unless they were handed to him in lines: then he knew how to kindle them, ‘I think I read it — that fear of sex underlies an obsession with death?’ It was uttered with a seriousness so intense it fell wide and heavily.

‘No. I hadn’t heard it.’ Sir Basil smiled the smile which had vanquished many.

Garth the hawk flushed darker, but wasn’t vanquished. Gathering his shinbones inside sinewy arms, he sat and glowered.

Babs Rainbow blew one of her ripest raspberries. ‘Tell us what’s on in life for a change. Haven’t you a nice play, Bas? Something old-fashioned and plummy?’

‘I have a play.’

This was more in everybody’s line, even the morose amongst them.

‘Tell us!’

‘The play!’

‘Not old-fashioned. And if there’s a plum, it’s mine.’ He hunched himself in mock apology. ‘Aren’t I an actor?’

Garth looked down his eyelashes and curled a lip.

Sir Basil Hunter drew in his nostrils. ‘A sour plum, to shrivel the mouth.’ You could feel their imagination catching.

Janie Carson had rolled over and was lying propped on her elbows. ‘And who’s written this frightening play?’

‘It’s not written — or not entirely. The greater part will be improvised.’ To expose his daring was making him drunk.

‘Darling,’ Madge Puckeridge warned, ‘you’ll end up naked, and in the round.’

‘Got to take the plunge, haven’t we?’

Dudley, Madge, Babs, all old old; yourself, the high-diver, probably older than any of them, but from the tower on which you had climbed even the armoured young looked defenceless.

‘It’s only an idea — as yet.’ There might still be time to throw the beastly thing off.

‘But who’s writing it? Who? This play — or idea.’ Janie was rocking on her elbows, insisting.

‘Mitty jacka.’

‘Never ’eard of ’er.’

Their ignorance might have deflated him if what they hadn’t heard of could have been in any way important.

Then Madge remembered something. ‘The woman who lives somewhere out — Beulah Hill?’

‘That’s where she lives.’

‘Oh, but she’s old! She’s older than us.’ Madge couldn’t take it seriously. ‘Writes poetry and things.’

‘Mitty isn’t old; she’s ageless.’ He believed it, and it frightened him.

‘Has she got hold of you, Bas?’

‘He’s having a thing with a mummy.’

‘The death wish more like it.’

‘But at least tell us,’ Janie Carson was insisting with her elbows, what’s the idea behind this half-written non-play?’

‘My life, more or less. Acted out with a company of actors. According to how we — the actors and audience — choose, it could go this way or that — as life can — and does.’

There! He was sweating. His glass was empty. This time Dudley didn’t fill it.

Babs screwed up her face till the mouth disappeared and the glaring eyes and the dimple in the chin were her predominant features; then she said, ‘No part for me, Bas, in any old non-play — swingin’ me tits all over the auditorium — fartin’ in the aisles. No thanks! No harm in a little embroidery here and there, but at my age I like a few lines to hang on to.’

There were visions in the faces of the others: Dudley Howard shorn of his reliability; Madge Puckeridge divorced from the affectations she depended on to disguise her thinness; Janie and Garth had slithered together, and could have been mounting on a wave, but of their own inspiration. So that he was again alone. All foresaw his downfall, he could tell, not by their smiles, but from the shadows under the cheekbones, their parted lips, as they watched the naked knight’s exposure: the pendulous, vulnerable testicles.