Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

That night Alfred began staring at her in what appeared like suddenly feverish, hitherto unrealized, admiration. ‘Isn’t she splendid?’ he interrupted. ‘What a dazzler of a woman — the Sanseverina!’

‘A bit female at times.’ If her voice sounded dry, it was from the length of time she had spent reading aloud.

‘Womanly women don’t much care for one another, I suppose.’

She herself certainly had never counted overmuch on her women friends. ‘There’s something else — a kind of freemasonry which brings them together, and they feel they must obey some of the rules.’

He laughed: they were united in a moment of such understanding she went and knelt beside his chair and started desperately kissing his hands. It was as close as they came to physical desire during those last weeks. But the hands remained cold and yellow.

Shortly after, he said, ‘If you don’t mind, Bet — you’ll have to give me a shot tonight.’

As his strength left him, Eldred would carry him down to his chair in the library. Still later in his decline, she would call the groom to lift him out of or into his bed, till the day she discovered she could manage this bundle of dwindling flesh herself.

At once their relationship changed. Where she had loved, now she pitied. It was not pity in the ordinary sense, but an emotional need to merge herself with this child who might have sprung in the beginning from her body, by performing for him all the more sordid menial acts: tenderly wiping, whether faeces, or the liquid foods he mostly vomited back. Sometimes in the dependency of this new relationship she thought of her actual children: she had never felt pity for those, walled up in themselves, armed for emergencies with formidable moral weapons. But perhaps she had been wrong: they may have needed her pity; she might have earned their love.

On a day of steely, straight rain, she was forced to approach a subject Alfred was determined to avoid. ‘Surely now you should allow me to write and tell the children?’

‘I don’t want to disrupt their lives.’

‘If, when you go, they haven’t been told, they may resent it terribly.’ Of course she could not truthfully answer for their children, only for herself, the remorse boiling up in her.

Whatever Alfred’s wishes, she took it upon herself to write.

Dorothy, in the grip of her unhappy marriage, replied in a translation from the French:

My dearest Father,

You can imagine my feelings on receiving this truly shocking news. It grieves me deeply to be unable to do anything to ease your suffering. Here I am, living, though neither fruitfully nor happily, at the other end of the earth, yet with certain obligations towards those who have become by marriage my family. Hubert I rarely see; we play Cox and Box between Lunegarde and Passy. But I shall not allow myself to hate my husband, nor shall anyone have cause to blame me for not trying, if our marriage appears to fail. The dreadful old princess my mother-in-law is eternally waiting to pounce, but I refuse to offer myself as her mouse.

So you will understand, my darling father, it is impossible for me to obey my instincts and come to you. This is how our lives have been arranged, and however brutally, in your case, or foolishly in mine, there is little we can do about it, beyond praying to God for deliverance from our sufferings.

You are always in my prayers and thoughts; in ever-increasing appreciation and affection—

DOROTHY

Basil was more genuinely Basil:

My dear old Dad,

You are the last man I’d like to think a victim of this most horrible injustice: as I remember you, the kindest and most generous of human beings. I am the more depressed for being unable at the moment to concentrate all my thoughts on you: we are in the throes of rehearsal (opening at the New a week from now in Macbeth). Since receiving Mother’s letter, this is literally the first opportunity to sort out my feelings and attempt to reply. Even now it is only a few moments snatched in an empty auditorium. While a troupe of actors continues to agonize on stage, here I sit unshaven, unwashed, with a weight on my stomach after swallowing a wretched, fatty sandwich too fast; but I wanted to send you my very deepest sympathy however inadequately expressed.

We scarcely ever spoke to each other, did we? And yet, on looking back, I can sense that some kind of empathy existed between us. Oh, if we had our lives over again, I believe I’d choose to live! Not to renounce life for the grubby business of creating an appearance of it.

I’d like to sit a few minutes longer, Dad, and try to share your feelings at this moment of awfulness, but they are calling for me, so there is nothing for it but to leave you most regretfully.

Blessings!

BASIL

P.S. Nobody can realize the strain experienced by an actor who has taken on Macbeth.

Alfred Hunter was pleased to receive these letters from his children. ‘They express themselves well, don’t they?’ His thread of a voice was not asking her to confirm what he wished to believe: that his clever children were the ultimate in rewards.

After reading the letters to him, his wife was still too confused to interpret them for herself. More collected, she might have used sarcasm on their considered insincerities; in the circumstances she preferred to accept their coldness, or, at best, their artificial warmth, as the formality imposed by distance and prolonged separation. As for being her children, she remembered them as sensations in her womb, then as almost edible, comfortingly soft parcels of fat, till later they were turned into leggy, hostile, scarcely human, beings, already preparing themselves for flight.

But she said to Alfred, ‘I’m glad we told them. We did the right thing.’ She ended as virtuous as the Princesse de Lascabanes probably felt.

Then she began to realize that the brief, exquisite phase when she had been able to speak to her husband in words which conveyed their meanings was practically past; from now on, they must communicate through their skins and with their eyes. It was a climax of trustfulness; but of course they had nothing left to lose.

Dr Treweek drove out from Gogong almost every day. Technically grateful, she could not altogether overcome her irritation for his uncouth habits, nor disguise her satisfaction at having routed his scepticism. Once she only just restrained herself from recommending a cure for dandruff.

‘We can expect it any day now,’ he said.

She felt so exhausted it hardly moved her to realize the doctor was referring to death, not even when she reminded herself it was her husband’s.

‘Call me if you want me.’ Dr Treweek himself was glittering with weariness, and, she was pretty sure by now, the stimulus of drugs.

She replied with deadly calculation, ‘You can’t expect me to want to share my husband’s death. Strong as your friendship was, I think I have precedence.’

One glance at the scurfy back, and mentally she was wringing her hands. ‘Don’t think I’m not— truly— grateful, Doctor,’ she was forced to add.

He was shrugging his way into the muddy car. ‘Please yourself. Some people are afraid.’

She was not afraid, either in contemplating what must happen, or when it did. They accused her of being cold. She was not: she was involved in a mystery so immense and so rarely experienced, she functioned, it could have been truthfully said, by reverence, in particular for this only in a sense, feebly fluttering soul, her initiator.

On the night, she was roused from her half-sleep, not by sounds of death in the next room, but by her instinct to participate in a miraculous transformation. She snatched her gown, and hurried in.

Here was this dear husband of her flesh still lying waiting for her, it appeared, to come to his bed. Only now, the fading eyes implied, it was she who must take the initiative. So she laid her hand as gently as she could against the chamber of his yellow cheek.