Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

He was too humiliated to reply.

‘At a different height, it goes without saying.’ Her laughter made it sound more shameful, though unintentionally, he hoped. ‘They tell me you’ve played Hamlet, Lear: all the great German roles.’ As she went out with the empty dishes the housekeeper laughed quite recklessly. ‘So you must understand, Sir Basil!’

He sat holding his head, staring at the place where his plate had been. To create one other being out of my own body. He had failed in that. Though Imogen his ‘daughter’ had shown herself willing to stand in. But with Shiela in the beginning, before the performance had set, he might have created a whole rather than a part. When all the parts were hanging from their pegs and out of sight, this whole might have reminded him that he was not wholly actor: he was also a whole human being.

On the other hand, the ‘drunkenness’. Again this crazy Jewess was right. It is the next part which promises to bring the sum right. At the end another fly at Lear’s stony, perhaps unscalable mountain. He feared the prospect almost as much as Mitty Jacka’s non-play. Worst of all he dreaded the sound of projecting a tattered voice into a half empty theatre. In Glasgow during that last tour someone had thrown a banana skin.

The housekeeper was returning to offer a crystal goblet; a perfume suggested peaches and champagne, together with a sickliness of almond? anyhow, inappropriate.

She planked her offering in front of him. She was too excited; emotion could have destroyed the servant’s respect for a guest.

Though he had no taste for sweets, he began stirring the contents of the glass, poking at the bobbing gobbets of peach. ‘Where did you learn this other art of seduction?’ he asked in a voice which belonged to a different scene.

‘Not from my old mother!’ She laughed cruelly. ‘I have learnt from a lover — no, we shall call him “protector”—a chef in Zurich. Berlin — Zurich — Haifa — Sydney: these have been my stations to date.’

Her recollections made her furiously active in the present. The Lippmann had shed any pretence of passivity. If her feet didn’t go ein zwei drei the almond-green velvet of her coat-tails flew. Her hands looked younger for the shadows and her agitation.

‘I don’t blame!’ she protested. ‘Not this fat Swiss always smelling of the kitchen. Not any of the others. My one lover. My poor incinerated parents.’

She dragged up a chair and thumped down at the opposite end of the ponderous mahogany table. ‘My parents, you see, are these liberated Jews who worship scientifically. Medicine, you might say, is their religion, their rabbi a physician, when not a psychiatrist. I, their daughter, must become a dietitian. I must study the Bircher Benner und so weiter. Right? But I cannot deny the drunkenness — which is also, by another light, my Jewishness. I run away to the Tingeltangel— certainly ein Rausch in its most unorthodox form — but drunk!’ She threw back her head till she was all throat, her laughter at its most convulsive.

‘And love!’ Her face had returned. ‘I love this one German — this goy ! It is not desecration, as you perhaps, as certainly my dead parents, believe. There is no desecration where there is love.’ The housekeeper’s face at the opposite end of the table had grown old and terrible.

‘What became of your German?’ he hardly dared ask.

‘I left him.’

‘But others left together.’

‘We were not as others. I left him because I loved him.’ She got up, trying but failing at first to unlock her arthritic hands. ‘Or because — as your lady mother insists — I am the original masochist.’

‘No one ever knew better than Mother how to rub salt into other people’s wounds.’

‘But I love her!’ the housekeeper gasped.

‘How can you love what is evil, brutal, destructive?’ If he were to survive, he must persuade himself to continue believing some of this.

‘Yes. She is all you say,’ her housekeeper agreed; ‘but understands more of the truth than most others.’ As her hands fell away from the table she added, ‘And if I cannot worship, I have to love somebody.’

Then she removed the goblet of sweetstuff, which, it appeared to both of them, had been an unnecessary prop.

She brought him coffee in the study. She was again as self-effaced as she should have been in the role of servant: eyelids lowered; hands dutiful; bearing modest without trace of servility. When she had left him he scalded his tongue drinking her coffee, bitter-tasting, and strong enough to blow a safe let alone a human skull. But he forced himself to drink a second cup, because he must see his mother before leaving the house which, he had to remember, was only legally hers.

The storm had moved away, he realized. These were his footsteps thundering on the soft stairs; no other sound, not even the racket of traffic, to profane a perfect silence.

In the sanctuary the acolytes had created round the object of their apparent devotions, Sister de Santis sat writing with an old-fashioned, once elegant, gold-encircled fountain pen; on her knees a document, of no doubt esoteric significance, clamped to a board by a common bulldog clip. Seeming to take for granted that the intruder was of her persuasion, she looked up smiling as soon as he entered, then returned to her occupation. As in the garden earlier, the radiance of the woman’s eyes and the opulence of her breasts surprised him. He could not entirely accept her in the way she appeared to accept him. Of course nothing of this would ever become acceptable. What he might have longed for, against his rational judgment, he stifled under repugnance in this house become shrine, in which there was even a hint of incense, if only from cypresses rubbed up the wrong way by the storm withdrawing from the garden.

By now the image on the bed was stripped of vestments and jewels, the festive paint removed from its face. What remained might have been a corpse if a fluttered breathing had not animated the shroud; and eyelids, otherwise like speckled seashells cast up on a beach by a storm, persisted in tremulous activity; and the light spun a nimbus out of the threads of dead-coloured hair. The total effect did not suggest a woman, less than any, his own mother: as the guardian of the relic may have wished him to believe. The shaded light, the scent of ruffled cypresses, the hypnotic motions of the fluttered sheet and tremulous eyelids, all invited him to share with the elect their myth of sanctity; when he had come here for his own and different purpose: his survival depended on the death a materialistic old woman had delayed too long.

He was relieved the attendant nun did not expect him to participate in any of their rites; at the moment she was having trouble with her antiquated fountain pen. Only in his first move towards departure it was suggested, ‘Aren’t you going to kiss your old mother goodnight?’ Completely impersonal, impossible to identify, the voice was basically a woman’s. (Could conscience be a woman, perhaps?)

At this point the night nurse raised her head, and he broke away, leaving her, he saw in one of the many mirrors, the token of a haggard smile, which she received with what he might have mistaken for an expression of pity or even selfless love.

He ran downstairs, feeling his pockets for he couldn’t remember what, rang for a taxi, did remember his coat, the luggage he had brought with him from the airport, and the name of the hotel where they were keeping a room for him. The housekeeper did not appear again, and he was the happier for her avoidance. It also allowed him to fill his cigarette case from the full box he had found in the study before dinner.