Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

Then she turned and began to lead him with as much seriousness as her black dress, her white crochet collar and scraped hair, had learnt to command; but her neatish bottom waggled, he noticed, because she couldn’t help it.

Arrived in the dining-room, she indicated his chair with a languidly formal gesture, her eyes potentially communicative, though for the moment preoccupied with some irony of her own.

They had to get it over, so he said, ‘My mother mentioned that you’re an actress.’

As he sat down she was pushing at his chair from behind. ‘Achhh! Mere Tingeltangel — Tingeltangel, Sir Basil.’ Her sigh expiring behind her as she left the room seemed to echo the sentiments of old honky-tonk pianos.

So he was invaded by her, or rather, by their common melancholy: of darkened theatres, or clubs where the stained tablecloths would be bundled up in the light of morning. The middle-class pomp of Moreton Drive gave no protection.

By the time she returned with a tureen, its lid rising to a climax in a miniature viridian cabbage, he had manufactured a whole arsenal of bread pellets, appropriately grey, to defend himself against a repetition of the hours they had both undoubtedly experienced.

‘This Tingeltangel was my only talent.’ Lotte Lippmann released the steam from the contents of the bulging tureen.

He would neither interject, nor hurry her towards the big speech for which, he sensed, she was holding herself in reserve.

She ladled out for him one of the German soups afloat with meticulously moulded Knödeln, the whole smelling a bit obscene of must or puffballs. ‘Na— you like it?’ She was asking for praise out of her dark scar of a mouth.

The Englishman he had become, replied, ‘Mmm — excellent— yes!’

They were laughing together in conspiracy, though she lowered her eyelids and withdrew soon after, out of discretion.

Outside, the thunder had begun. He could hear branches whipping the air. What might have been rain was still only the sound of attached leaves streaming in a wind.

He had come home to a foreign country. On the other hand Enid had once said, after one of the daily rows marriage privileged them to indulge in, when we misunderstand each other Basil I must remember you are a foreigner we may speak the same language but we interpret it very differently. Lady Enid Sawbridge, his second wife and the Earl of Burlingham’s intellectual daughter, amounted to five volumes of verse besides a monograph on Aphra Behn, three novels, and the Travels in Asia Minor, in Outer Mongolia, and in Micronesia; with such a scholarly mind it was surprising the grasp she had of the facts of life.

He couldn’t think why he had married Enid, unless to consume more of the unlimited flattery she appeared to offer, and for the doors she opened to allow him to indulge his lust for sociability. As a wife she was one long squabble. After the first week, in which they continued to share the triumphs of knowingness, they realized that beyond their few points of agreement, each knew something better and different. All through the quarrels Enid would smile: she had the grin of a borzoi bitch about to snap. The most amicable thing about their marriage was their parting. They agreed not to divorce for the moment, and the moment became permanent because it seemed as though no other arrangement would suit them better. Lady Enid Hunter was still about town: sometimes she made an appearance in his dressing-room, and they would rub cheeks and exchange endearments, perhaps go on to supper and have a good laugh at somebody’s expense; it took the sting out of what they knew about each other. Possibly Enid liked to think of these occasional meetings as one of her many contributions to civilized living; in his own case they were the outcome of a fatal weakness, his inability to say no.

Certainly he had said it often enough to Shiela, but that was in the theatre: he couldn’t tolerate a bad, perhaps even worse, an intellectual actress, holding her stomach to simulate an emotion her head had ‘understood’. And yet in the beginning she seemed fired by intuitions, or was it the glow of youth, in the drab digs, the grimy Midland theatres? He had been in love with her — or the lines with which they wooed each other nightly. In any case, it was cosier for two to make the assault on the West End; whatever their ideals, that was their ambition.

Outside the house in Moreton Drive the storm effects had become more controlled: the zinc thunder was rolled only intermittently; the wind must have died; he had forgotten rain could fall as straight or as solidly.

He would have liked to continue listening to the rain, neither remembering the past, nor plotting the uncooperative future, simply being; but the housekeeper returned carrying a silver dish, molten it appeared, from her haste, and the sizzle of butter, and a considerable display of starched white cloth with which she was grasping the silver edges.

‘Du lieber! ’ On the dish with which she smacked the sideboard lay a pair of flawless Schnitzel, the slices of lemon shaved to transparency, the anchovy fillets lovingly curled.

‘Don’t you find it tedious?’ he asked, to disguise the greed which had risen in him.

‘I enjoy myself to feed other people.’ The hands which withdrew in a flurry of scorched napkin were trembling.

‘But as a performer, I mean.’

‘Oh, Sir Basil Hunter, I was never more than a kind of compelled firework. Night after night I was let off, and fizzed— bang— and went out. Till at the end I hardly fizzed. My firework was a sodden one.’

Inside its crust of golden crumbs her veal was succulent and tender. Instead of encouraging the housekeeper to reconstruct a life with which he would have to sympathize, he would have preferred his own company and thoughts. He was too much the victim of his own doldrums to be expected to enter anybody else’s.

He could see from the corner of an eye that she was stationed by the sideboard, the hands below the white cuffs locked in an arrow pointing at the floor. The fact that she was standing guard made him conscious of the movements of his jaws and the silence he broke by masticating and swallowing. He was aware that one of his shoulders was raised, as if to ward her off across the intervening distance. She reminded him of some actresses, uncertain in their art, yearning towards an audience they feel they have not yet converted.

He half turned to compliment her. ‘Whatever else, you’re a first-class cook.’

‘Oh, yes?’ She laughed. ‘That is important too — isn’t it?’

The air was passive around the sideboard; he could not tell whether he had offended her.

‘Cooks! Actresses! No one is all-important, unless the great artists: Mozart, Goethe, Bernhardt — Sir Basil Hunter!’ Her rather Jewish compliment had him wincing; or did she intend it as a side swipe? ‘If I could choose — if I could begin again — I would ask to create one whole human being.’

‘Literally?’ he asked, while knowing they were more or less agreed.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Or two. Myself. And one other — out of my body.’

Though he had finished all but the rind of lemon and a thin ribbon of gristle, she did not attempt to clear away his plate or the quenched serving-dish.

‘Na, ja !’ she sighed from her formal attitude against the sideboard; ‘though the life of theatre is necessary for us — for you and me, Sir Basil Hunter. This drunkenness! This is why — when my family is murdered — the man who is my Lieb’ und Leib is lost — I still look to Tingeltangel— why, when I run out through the drenching lights, I can bear their worst laughter, their whiskey breath, afterwards the kisses, the praise and promises, the dirty gestures of both men and women. Even though these are only skulls, and false bosoms, and male vanity around the tables, I have to air my song — the little dance-step they expect— ein zwei drei .’ She demonstrated round the Hunters’ (four-leaved) mahogany table. ‘I have no voice. Except that of drunkenness. Which is what they have been longing for. It is their need — and mine. They laugh. They wish to touch my hat, my stick, my coat-tails of almond velvet. They aspire — to what? to be translated out of themselves? to be destroyed? Certainly, Sir Basil Hunter, there is nothing of this that you will not have experienced.’