Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

In spite of his autumnal complexion and the altered, more refined structure of his face, the first days were like a convalescence rather than an illness. Or perhaps that was how she wanted to see it. Alfred himself never referred to his condition in her presence.

Twice a week the doctor came out from Gogong. He was never without a sleepless, often a glazed look. He drove himself to such an extent she sometimes wondered whether it was without assistance.

Once as she approached the pantry where he was sterilizing a syringe, she heard voices. Eldred the groom must have come in, and was addressing the doctor with an unashamed callousness, ‘If you don’t mind my saying so, Doc, you look like the ghost that wasn’t laid.’

Dr Treweek was squirting the syringe at the ceiling as she reached the doorway. ‘Not laid, but near enough,’ he admitted. ‘I feel just about fucked, Eldred.’

The groom looked shocked to see the mistress, and made his getaway.

She could not conceal from the doctor what was a mixture of dislike, apprehension, and petulance. ‘Is the pain increasing, then?’

‘Yes.’ He sawed at a capsule till its neck broke. ‘I’m going to show you how to give the needle. He’ll probably want it more regularly now. If he seems real bad, you can ring me and I’ll come out, but I’m nearly run off my feet as it is.’ His contempt for her was obvious.

‘I’m sure I can manage on my own,’ she replied as coldly as she could; ‘if you’ll show me.’ She was looking down her nose from under her lowered eyelids, but the effect was wasted because Dr Treweek had turned his back.

When he had filled the syringe, she followed him into the bedroom, where Alfred was lying waiting. He had a mysterious greedy expression which excluded her from the rite the doctor was about to perform. Even so, she was determined to help: she pulled down the pyjama pants over the wasted buttock, and only trembled on catching sight of the slender testicles, the blue head of the shrivelled penis.

‘There we are,’ said Dr Treweek.

‘What — not now?’ He thrust the hypodermic at her, when she hadn’t bargained for it this side of some very vague interval of time.

As he explained the technique she stood holding the evil weapon she was expected to drive into her husband’s flesh. Resistance to the whole idea almost made her vomit.

‘Fire away!’ the doctor commanded. ‘If you‘re honest, I expect you’ve done worse in your time.’ He laughed through what must have been phlegm.

Because of the truth in his remark she couldn’t feel injured. But plunged the needle.

The doctor said, ‘You’ll make an expert, Mrs Hunter.’

While she withdrew the needle under cover of the wad of cotton wool, Alfred was lying, eyes closed, throat working, mouth relaxed in advance of relief: he might have experienced the perfect orgasm.

Then the doctor changed his tactics, his voice, bent down over his patient, and touched the sweat-stained pyjama shoulder. ‘You’ll be feeling better now, old feller.’ It sounded as though he was speaking through a megaphone.

Again Mrs Hunter was excluded; till Alfred gasped in an unrecognizable voice, ‘Thank you — Elizabeth.’

She asked the doctor, ‘May I give you some lunch before the drive back?’

He accepted, and she served him herself, with a dish of spiced beef and salad, afterwards leaving him to it. Several rooms away she heard him belch, and as she was seeing him off, withstood the metallic blast of the pickled onions he had devoured too hastily.

‘Don’t hesitate to ring me,’ he reminded while settling himself in his car. ‘I’d do anything for old Bill.’

As the doctor predicted, she became adept at giving the injection, but all this was only later, after the ‘convalescence’ period of Alfred Hunter’s fatal illness.

In the beginning they enjoyed this sere honeymoon of the hopeful spirit. They were full of consideration for each other, and hungrily discussed everyday matters in minutest detail.

‘Send for Stanilands, Betty, in the morning. I’d like to ask him whether he thinks we could use Kilgallen. Still immature, I know, but a fine ram in the making. I’d be interested to see his progeny — if that will be possible.’ At this first hint that it might not be, he began wriggling his neck inside the collar which had grown too large for him, and twitching at one corner of his mouth.

She brought him a pear she had specially picked; taking it from its muslin bag, she stood holding this enormous, perfect, golden fruit humbly in her two hands. ‘Do you feel tempted? Let me peel it for you at least, so that you can enjoy the perfume.’

He agreed to that, and because he loved her, allowed her to feed him slivers which he tried to swallow, while the juice ran down amongst the stubble on his chin.

She coaxed Eldred to shave her patient. Alfred liked him; he had mentioned naming the groom’s family in his will. She too, was revived by the man’s presence, one of physical strength and health, none the worse for sometimes bringing with it smells of the stable, or of milk from the house cows in his charge.

Do you like …? was one of the games she and Alfred played. It was shameful how little they knew about each other, at least those childish tastes to which they confessed; if their honesty did not cut deeper, it was because the knife could not have prolonged their relationship: better to cherish surfaces in the time left to them.

Now that it was late autumn the evenings were what they most looked forward to. ‘Ask Eldred to bring in another log before he goes down to the cottage.’ After the groom had built up the fire and taken his leave, they would look through books together.

‘What a funny old thing you are! To have been collecting this hoard of books over the years and kept so quiet about it!’

‘You’ve never been interested in books.’

It was true; it had suited her purposes to adopt the opinion that to read is to live at second hand.

Now she could only murmur, ‘I’ve read myself to sleep night after night. I’d say Goethe is my most effective pill.’ She made a wry face to match her trumped-up explanation; farther than that she didn’t go; nor did his kindness let him force her into an admission of frivolous tastes.

In fact, from the anxious way he immediately shifted his position, he seemed to fear she might have sensed a criticism he had not intended to offer. ‘You had your life to live. It’s different in the country — when you’re on your own.’ It was the bitterest reproach he had made: in one instant she experienced interminable nights aching with frost and silence.

She was looking through a book of French engravings and lithographs. Added to Alfred’s remark, the artist’s insistence on death, his marsh flowers, and detached, blandly staring eyeballs made her material self seem even more trivial and ephemeral. She quickly turned the pages to escape her unwilling fascination by reaching the end of the book; when she became spellbound by the artist’s image of what he called a skiapod: not her own actual face, but the spiritual semblance which will sometimes float out of the looking-glass of the unconscious. Unlike most of the other monsters in the book, this half-fish half-woman appeared neither allied to, nor threatened by, death: too elusive in weaving through deep waters, her expression a practically effaced mystery; or was it one of dishonesty, of cunning?

‘What are you looking at?’ Alfred asked.

‘Glimpses of the morbid mind of Odilon Redon.’ She made this attempt at complacency as she snapped the book together.

He loved her to read to him. They were halfway through The Charterhouse of Parma, which he admired, he said, ‘almost more than anything else’. Her own pleasure in it was sometimes lost in its longueurs, but she improved on those by listening to the sound of her own voice: when she made the effort, she read well.