Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

When they were re-settled, she told him, ‘This house where I live — which I inherited — is too big, too demanding.’

Was she after all making a proposition?

She didn’t seem to be. ‘Still, it’s where I’ve got to live, and I don’t normally complain — only that my dependents make it impossible for me to lead my life wholly at night.’

‘You have a large family?’

‘Not family in the usual sense: various old people, women mostly, dotted all over London — who won’t die — and at home, animals.’

He thought he wouldn’t inquire into the animals; he didn’t care for them, except as an English theory he had adopted, and as engravings.

Instead he rounded on her with what might have sounded like reprehensible enthusiasm. ‘Now that I come to think of it, I haven’t any dependents — one of a kind, a pathetic failed actress to whom I pay what is necessary — no need to the other — nor to my well-balanced, committed daughter. I have no one. I ran away from my family, my country, to become an actor.’

She was waiting.

‘I’ve done what I set out to do,’ he insisted, he felt, modestly.

She didn’t disagree. ‘You were knighted by the Queen,’ she reminded with appropriate gravity.

When it wasn’t his achievement he wanted to recall, but his childhood, from which Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear, together with other paler apparitions, had sprung, out of the least likely drought-stricken gullies, brown, brooding pools, and austere forms of wind-tattered trees. Only the bus was not the ideal place in which to begin his invocation; and for once the sound of his famous voice would have made him wince.

‘I’ve seen some of your performances,’ she was telling, ‘though I don’t make a habit of going to the theatre. I remember your Lear — and I’ve been to the present thing.’

This drew him. ‘Will you admit it isn’t as bad as they said?’

‘No, not bad — in fact good, in its stunted way.’

He could feel himself inwardly bridling; perhaps vanity was the source of his greatest sensual pleasure.

‘But might have been better if you had dared give yourself.’

‘How do you mean “give”?’ He could hear the anger in his voice; and he looked at her afresh, wondering whether this old bag was leading up to what would materialize as an unmade bed.

‘Nothing physical,’ she formed the word with almost prudish care. ‘I don t doubt you’ve given yourself physically, night after night, in the parts you’ve acted — to the wives you mention — mistresses probably (I know nothing about your private life because I don’t read newspapers). And I don’t mean creatively either, because that’s unconscious where it isn’t disciplined physical labour. Nor do I mean what used to be called “spiritual” before we shed our illusions. Perhaps I should say you haven’t yet given yourself “essentially”.’

His mind felt numb, his skin clammy. Was she preparing to introduce him, not to the unmade bed with its coffee stains and importunate ageing flesh, but to a far more daunting prospect: the other side of that grey screen, or backcloth, he had seen in his boyhood as standing between himself and nothing; and which he resurrected even now in times of flux and fallibility. So he armed himself with scepticism against anything else she might have to say.

‘Why I don’t go to the theatre more often,’ she continued, ‘is because it exhausts and irritates me to watch a set of cast-iron figures trying to drag their weight around in a disintegrated world. Since our conglomerate existence became less conglomerate, less controllable, more fluid, how can we express, or become part of it, unless we flow too, by giving — or losing — ourselves “essentially”?’

Cock, he resisted answering; I have been able to control my own life ever since I learnt the technique of living, which is also the technique of acting; my gift, which is myself, is something no critic, no ratbag witch, no banana skins, only senility or death, can destroy. But what she had said stimulated him to the extent that he would have been tempted to flow with the darkness and the rain, and beyond them, if she was prepared to show him how.

Instead, the bus jolted and stopped. ‘This is where I get out,’ she said, looking younger for the moment and unexpectedly shy. ‘My name is Mitty Jacka.’ It could have accounted for the shyness.

She got up lugging a string bag filled with awkward, lumpy parcels, which had been lying on the seat beside her. Again he tagged along; at some point on their nightride they had come to an agreement.

The rain had stopped, or rather, he could feel only an occasional flurry of moisture, fine enough to have been shaken in his face by plant tendrils, or out of human hair. The glistening pavement they were mounting rose sharply enough for Mitty Jacka to sound breathless, though she looked more youthful for her breathlessness whenever the lamplight showed her up. He too was breathless, from the strangeness of what he was letting happen.

‘My house will put me to shame,’ she said, and you knew that she was being no more than formally truthful. ‘Other people find it dirty.’

‘Other people? I imagined you leading the life of a recluse, apart from those dependents “dotted about”.’

‘Oh, no. They pour in. Droves of them. At all hours of the day. That’s why I prefer the night. Night is for the elect.’

Though she gave no direct sign of including him amongst the chosen, he was moved by vanity for the second time since their meeting. He brushed against her, partly by losing his balance, if also a little by intention. She didn’t appear to notice, unless awareness was the reason for a sharp clout he received from the loaded shopping bag.

Soon after, they arrived at a gate in a flint wall at which a cat was on the lookout, back arched at first in anticipation of danger, then subsiding into a serpentine blue glimmer.

The cat’s purring and the drip of moisture from branches lifted in a gentle breeze made the sound of his voice an inept and impertinent intrusion on their dark surroundings. ‘What’s its name?’ he asked, stroking air instead of fur.

‘Oh, I don’t know — Cat! It was called something in the beginning, but I forget. We’re always together, so a name isn’t necessary, is it?’

After identifying him on the bus, she hadn’t addressed him by name, and he felt pretty sure he would never venture to call her by hers.

All around them were wet, needling branches, patches and trailers of faintly moonlit ivy; he caught sight of an irruption of fungus on the scaly torso of a tree. Here and there he had to stoop, not always successfully, to avoid being hit in the face. She too, was tall, but there the difference began: she had been initiated into the ways of darkness, while he might remain the blundering intruder.

As soon as her key grated in the lock, there were sounds from inside the house: of scuffling, and snuffling, and a pop pop popping. Then, by light, a brace of pugs had begun to seethe around them, laying their faces flat against a stranger’s ankles, squeaking joy for those they were re-discovering.

Mitty Jacka was no demonstrative dog lover; she allowed devotion to flow around her, which it did: her pugs were ecstatic. After his experience with the cat Cat, he suppressed an impulse to ask their names. Instead, he was learning to adapt himself to the flow, if not to the smell of rubber hot water bottles and peanuts, evidently the distinctive smell of pug.

He sat with a glass she had brought him, filled with something sweet, unacceptable, finally insidious, while she went about her animal business. Around him smouldered an upholstery of garnet plush, against panelling which looked like ebony, but couldn’t have been. At least it was an ebony pedestal on which a figurine stood holding its curve under an ivory parasol. He found he had begun smiling into his sweet and fiery drink, while the voice of Mitty Jacka in the distance flung a few ritual ‘darlings’ to her animals.