Patrick White: The Eye of the Storm

‘Horrid little girl I was!’ Mrs Hunter muttered. ‘Most children are horrid except in theory.’

She also knew she had no desire to die however stagnant her life became: she only hoped she would be allowed to experience again that state of pure, living bliss she was now and then allowed to enter. How, she wasn’t sure. It could depend on Sister de Santis; she needed Mary to hold her hand.

When she opened her eyes, and started groping for her little handbell, to accuse her nurse of abandoning her, there was another figure, taller and thinner, standing in the doorway, but so misty she could not guess, except that, she fancied, she could smell a man.

‘Is it you, darling?’ she tried out. ‘What a long time I’ve been waiting.’

A dry silence told her she had given herself away.

Then a voice, ‘It is I — Wyburd.’ He had hesitated from wondering how to compose his reply; his grandchildren, sometimes even his daughters, laughed at his correct grammar.

‘Oh, it is! I suppose I’m glad to see you, Arnold. I knew you were coming. Of course I’m glad!’ She put on a bit more than the voice you use for the solicitor, because Arnold Wyburd was: a bit more than the solicitor; he couldn’t very well help it after all this time.

Keemis is sending up the papers with Arnold Wyburd the junior partner, so that we make sure nobody else grabs the block you have your eye on. This was the year Elizabeth and Alfred (‘Bill’) Hunter had looked at each other and finally admitted. Alfred looked at her longer than she at him because he was the more honest, she granted even then: not that she was dis-honest; she only lacked his purity of heart. The point is, Alfred, you must allow me to give our children what we owe them; here there is no life; and what about their education? Mention of education always stirred Alfred to action. So they were buying the block in Sydney, at Centennial Park, and the young cove was bringing the agreement for signature. Elizabeth Hunter had found Arnold Wyburd an agreeable young fellow, harmless anyway. It was the evening after he had gone. They were strolling up and down the veranda. Alfred was looking at her cleavage: she was wearing a rather lovely though simple dress of white lace which collaborated in a delicious cool with a breeze sweeping down off the hills. She realized she would have to allow Alfred tonight: she could hear by his breathing he expected it; but he was so kind, and the evenings at ‘Kudjeri’ interminable.

And now this old man Arnold Wyburd had approached her bed — well, not old, not as old as herself, nobody else was as old as that but oldish. He smelled old. He sounded dry. He had taken her hand, and she was touching paper, delicate tissue, against her own. She might have played a little with the hand if she could have been bothered.

‘Everything under control?’ the solicitor inquired in a loud though slightly tremulous voice.

‘Why not?’

It was the sort of thing men always ask; and Arnold in that old woman’s voice. Perhaps Lal had been the man; anyway, between them, they had got a couple of girls.

‘How’s Lal?’

‘Suffering, I’m sorry to say, from her rheumatic pains.’

‘Didn’t know she had any.’

‘For years. Only on and off, though.’

‘Then she ought to be thankful. “On and off” is nothing. I’ve been racked by arthritis, without pause, for years.’

‘Oh?’

Remember to give him a present for Lal: the plainest woman ever; freckles. (Mrs Hunter put her hands to her face, to touch.) Lal had pouches under her eyes even as a girl.

The solicitor cleared his throat. ‘I’ve got a disappointment for you, a very slight one however.’

‘Don’t — tell me.’

She had opened her eyes. Arnold Wyburd decided not to look at them.

‘Basil has been delayed in Bangkok. He’ll be here this evening.’

‘Why — why? Bangkok! ’ Mrs Hunter’s mouth was working past grief towards abuse. ‘Basil knew better than anybody how to — disappoint,’ she gasped. ‘I wonder whether he would have disappointed me as an actor.’

‘He has a great following. Lal saw him, you remember, when she took Marjorie and Heather over to London. I believe they saw him in Macbeth. Marjorie read somewhere that only the greatest actors can manage the part of Macbeth: the others don’t have the voice for it. Very taxing, it appears.’

Arnold’s snippet of information, however dry, might have fed her pride if she had not felt temporarily quenched. For the moment she loathed herself so intensely she wished Arnold Wyburd would leave.

Sensing something of her wishes, though not enough, he had moved across to one of the windows overlooking the park. Summer had left the grass yellow, the lake shrunken; only the columns had succeeded in keeping up appearances of a sort: rising out of a civic embroidery of cannas and agapanthus, they continued offering their job lot of European statuary.

Why had he never lost a sense of inferiority in his relationship with Mrs Hunter? He should have disliked; instead he had not shed his admiration, first for his client’s wife, then for the widow. There was Lal of course to heal the wounds: in so many ways a splendid woman, Mrs Hunter; we must forgive the faults, even if she won’t let us forget them.

He turned round, possibly to offer further consolation for the delay in Basil’s arrival: Dorothy will he here on time according to the last check with the airport. But she was again lying with her mouth open, not quite snoring, sucking at air, at life.

Ohhh she was moaning deep down while standing outside one of the many envelopes of flesh she could remember wearing. She was looking at her sleeping husband. He certainly wasn’t dead, only unaware of the other lives she was leading beside him in his house while engaged in the practical business of bottling fruit and pickling onions — if the cook allowed it — when she was not supervising or sacking governesses, or chivvying maids. He liked her to ride through the paddocks with him. Even when they rode out together, he was not aware that she had never been the person he thought her to be. Not even when his full calf in its leather legging brushed so close the stirrup-irons clashed. She used to wear that old velour with stains round the band, which heightened the deception. As cattle seethed past with a sound of scuffed buckram; or ewes milled or scampered; or rams plodded, coughing and panting. She was once photographed holding a ram by the horns, smoothing a ribbon on his prize shoulders. More than anything the rams helped break what should have been an interminable marriage.

Oh darling she moaned she moaned; from now on she was going to love him. Having known him as the Hunter boy, ‘Bill’, Alfred, kind husband, the Juggernaut of stifling nights under a mosquito net, there should have been no situation they could not embrace equally: when their mere bodies prevented that, or so it seemed, as he groped, stroked, fumbled, looking for some kind of confirmation through his hands, before thrusting up inside her to reach the secret she was keeping from him.

The wool men and cattle experts who came to ask his advice approached the presence in a spirit of blustering servility. She only realized how small he was as he lay wilted and sweating, rather fatty about the shoulders, his exhausted lungs still battering at her practically pulverized breasts. At his most masterful his toes would be gripping the sheets on either side of her long legs, as though he had found the purchase to impress her more deeply than ever before. Once, she remembered, she had felt, not his sweat, his tears trickling down the side of her neck, till he started coughing, and tore himself away from her: their skins sounded like sticking plaster. She tried to make herself, and finally did, ask what had upset him. His ‘luck’, in everything, was more than he deserved; however indistinct the answer, that was what it amounted to.