Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

Madge recovered first. ‘It could be a perfectly marvellous idea. I only wonder — Mitty Jacka.’

Dudley, who grew earnest in drink, got you into a corner to warn you against a poison which could end in professional suicide.

Babs and Madge were not exactly quarrelling. Garth leaned over and began bathing Janie’s cheeks with a spate of whispered kisses; his lips looked enormous, but no longer hostile; her hair, fallen to either side of her face, might have been dipped in water.

Suddenly you remembered. ‘That flaming plane!’

Dudley took up the phone because it was his room and his responsibility as the equivalent of host. After the clicks, the polite voices, the re-connections and the explanations, he burped, and reported, ‘They give it another three hours.’

It didn’t surprise you by now; anything else would have seemed unlikely.

Everybody yawning mumbling mouthing the ice in empty tumblers.

You said you were imposing and would impose less in a public lounge if there was.

The key in which nobody said goodbye you would meet again if you didn’t it didn’t matter.

Known faces begging for forgiveness for past sins or to be loved in the indeterminate future.

He saw Janie Carson determined to pick up what must be the duty-free bottle. He could visualize her face as that of an old woman: a guarantee in the young — of? of?

Hands falling apart; the succulent kisses.

Long putty-coloured corridors smelling of soy sauce above refrigeration. Janie disappeared behind a door with Garth.

He went on through the cool but stale corridors looking for a hidden lift: well. Found its cage just as the air started beating at him.

It was Janie the swinging bottle swashbuckling legs underwater hair. She took him by the hand, and it seemed natural: they had dropped their ages.

‘ … why you should get a stiff neck in an armchair in a lounge.’ Instead she was unlocking 365.

‘Hospitality plus,’ he foolishly and wearily contributed, but she gave no signs of having noticed its lack of sparkle.

Walking amongst the furniture (nineteen twenties pink modernistic) she had begun taking off the little she was wearing. She was shaking and folding her shift. She lay on the bed having gooseflesh.

All the while the refrigerator was clonking over continuing continuously.

‘Bed’s pretty narrow, but ought to adapt.’

Reminded of what he was expected to do, he started taking off his own clothes but out of time with the airconditioner.

‘Which parts are you playing?’ he brought out from inside his shirt.

‘Oh,’ she sighed. ‘Hero — Lady Montague — Gwendolyn. Gwendolyn’s rather fun.’

‘A compendium of females!’ He wrenched himself pompous idiotic out of the tearing shirt.

The trousers clinging fashionably were more difficult. What if he toppled over?

‘You know why I’m here? I’ve got to raise the money for this damn play. Even if she doesn’t die she may come good with a few thousand.’

‘I’d like to be in your peculiar play.’

‘We’ll im — provise it!’ Tearing off the last of the trousers.

Why not? Mitty Jacka the master mind must have planned a few incidental harpies to tear into his nakedness.

Janie Carson almost didn’t glance; she switched off the light soon after. It was thoughtful of her. His nervous shanks might tremble less in the dark, the slacker skeins of flesh not swing. Balls too.

When he reached her he lay along her let her at least feel his weight while dabbling his lips in her mouth. It would have swallowed him if he had stopped.

She gulped once. ‘What I’d really like, terribly,’ she spat him out, ‘will you have me one day for your Cordelia?’

‘Why?’

‘I’ve never understood exactly what Cordelia’s about. That’s what makes her exciting.’

‘I’ll have you for Cordelia — if you — when we’re both ready.’ He had to think of something to do — some business— between now and his apotheosis.

‘That makes all of this madly incestuous, doesn’t it?’ Wriggling giggling under him didn’t convert his limpness into enthusiasm only increased his shame.

‘A dead loss tonight,’ he apologized, before leaning off her into the dark somewhere in the right direction to do what he hadn’t done for years.

‘Sordid old brute! Vomited almost over me — anyway all over the carpet.’

‘Serves you bloody right for tampering with old men.’

‘But you won’t understand, Garth. I’ve got to experience everything .’

‘I guess you’ve experienced some of it, then.’

Janie a silk flame beside male body hair and white briefs: this one snapshot before you were acting the corpse you felt.

‘Looks like the old bugger’s passed out.’

‘Let’s move my things. That’ll make the room more sort of his — as well as the vomit.’

The room did become yours as far as sleep could persuade a vast black chamber in which naked tumblers were playing a scene from birth to death it was the only scene in the play Mitty explaining for that reason fairly elastic somebody pulls your frightened prick to remind you the tumblers have formed a womb out of their stacked bodies through which you were expected to crawl under the encrustations of swallows’-nests out between the mare’s legs whether Mitty approved of her Primordial Baby’s interpretation you couldn’t tell nor look to see whether Mother

The air had stopped flowing past him as he woke rigid on the narrow bed searching for some

The Flight!

‘Flight 764 departed already one hour,’ the sweet sleepy telephone voice informed.

‘Then I must find — do you hear? a seat on another. As little delay as possible.’

Escape from this room, from Sir Basil Hunter his vomit. Thank God for your clothes: nothing like costume for security.

As he reached the upper terrace, his mother’s house rose above him, black against the green-flickering sky, and almost as enormous as the houses of childhood: the dark had evolved a kind of beauty out of the pepper-pot turrets, dormers and bull’s-eyes, fretwork canopies and balconies. At his return by half light, the same house had appeared a joke; now he had to take it seriously.

Respectfully he wiped his feet on the mat outside the door he had left ajar. From inside, sounds of cutlery and glass transformed his hopes into confidence, till he suddenly remembered he had to face another actress. It made him creep through the living-rooms, withdrawing his feet as though from a stickiness wherever a lamp had formed its pool of light. The portraits on the walls were passing judgment, his own disgusted little-boy’s face the most relentless.

Someone had arranged decanters and glasses on a marquetry table in what had been known officially as the ‘study’. He was glad of a couple of hairs of the dog before making his entrance for the scene with the housekeeper. He experienced as usual a faint excitement mixed with misgiving at the thought of playing opposite a woman whose work he didn’t know, who had been chosen for him perhaps ill-advisedly, or even out of malice.

Then the housekeeper herself was standing in the doorway. ‘Your dinner is served, sir, if you wish and it is not too early.’ The opulent house filled with superfluities overemphasized the austerity of this stone figure.

‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to eat.’ He began moving with a grace which came easily when he was in his best form; he smiled, and the lights in his head were refracted in a glass hung above the fireplace. ‘Basil Hunter,’ he added unnecessarily, he hoped kindly, to put her at her ease.

But she must have been overdazzled: her lips, her chin, were in trouble to reply, ‘Lotte Lippmann.’