Patrick White: The Eye of the Storm

At least she had given him their children. She must remember that, re-create their faces: fluctuating on the dark screen, Dorothy’s little mask, never quite transparent nor yet opaque, not unlike those silver medals on the dried stems of honesty; and Basil the Superb, who preferred to perform for strangers or gullible innocents like Lal Wyburd. Their children. Hardly Alfred’s, except by the accident of blood.

So she must make amends. She was not ungenerous with her long cool body for which he had paid so largely: it was no fault of his he had not been in time to save her father’s life. Tragedy and the elasticity of awakened flesh brought them close in those early years. So they believed. What else she could give was more than she knew. She began going out of her way to avoid him, hoping to find in solitude insight into a mystery of which she was perhaps the least part. It was easy enough to excuse herself from riding round the paddocks with him: household matters; a child ill; endless simple and convincing reasons. But she continued hemmed in, not only by the visible landscape of hills and scrub, but by the landscape of her mind. I am superficial and frivolous, she blurted hopelessly; there is no evidence, least of all these children, that I am not barren. By the light of spring the surrounding hills had glittered like jewels, in the more brutal summer blaze they were smelted into heaps of blue metal: either way they looked dead. Her own state of mind appalled her increasingly.

How much of it he guessed, let alone understood, she had not been able to decide; he could not have been so insensitively male not to be hurt. He was: hadn’t she on one occasion felt his tears? Otherwise he hid his feelings with a delicacy which must have made her behaviour appear more shocking: not exactly selfish, as some no doubt had seen it, though nobody had dared accuse her, simply because she had dared them to and they were afraid of her. Maids had accused, silently: maids are more candid in the thoughts their eyes reflect, from overhearing telephone conversations and living through one’s headaches and colds. Friends can be held at bay with social conventions — and by maids. In any case the women, if not too stupid, were saving you up against the necessity of a future alliance. Men friends were either too dense to see, or too honourable to comment: like Arnold Wyburd, who must have seen more than most. Arnold was an honourable man, as opposed to his wife, who was an honest woman. You hardly ever saw Lal; but when you did, the flat replies, together with a certain tension of manner, implied judgment.

Lal Wyburd would naturally have interpreted as selfishness every floundering attempt anybody made to break out of the straitjacket and recover a sanity which must have been theirs in the beginning, and might be theirs again in the end. That left the long stretch of the responsible years, when you were lunging in your madness after love, money, position, possessions, while an inkling persisted, sometimes even a certainty descended: of a calm in which the self had been stripped, if painfully, of its human imperfections.

Mrs Hunter sighed, and the solicitor at the window turned to look. The Plantagenet attitude she had preserved for so long under the sheet was breaking up.

That is something Lal Wyburd would never understand: she’s too normal ,’ she said, or moaned.

With his wife in the foreground of his thoughts, his client’s uncanny intrusion started the solicitor stuttering. ‘Wuh-what is it? Are you in pain? Can I do something — tuh-turn you, or something?’ when he wasn’t normally a stutterer, and would have liked to express, however rustily, some degree of tenderness.

As for Mrs Hunter, she did not seem to find it necessary to reply: her mouth was again firmly adapted to her gums.

So he continued standing at the window, still the junior in a firm whose senior partner had died many years ago.

In the park, morning had solidified by now. Autumn at its blandest had infused an almost convincing life into dead grass and exhausted leaves. Anonymous figures strayed along the banks of the ornamental lakes, or walked more purposefully to work. A girl on a livery stable hack just missed becoming unseated when her nag shied at a tussock.

As a young man Arnold Wyburd had fancied himself in a boater with striped band; he had started wearing, or liked to think he was ‘sporting’, a blue blazer with brass buttons. He had given up because, frankly, it was not what people expected of him. Suddenly he found himself head of a family, married to Lal Pennecuick, a thoroughly sensible, not pretty, but pleasing young woman, with whom he got the two little girls they had christened Marjorie and Heather. Nowadays he saw less of Lal, but that was understandable since grandchildren claimed so much of her attention, and in any case there seemed more to get through since they themselves had begun slowing up.

In spite of the encroachment of family, very satisfying in its way, and the equally satisfying, if exhausting demands of a restricted, though respectable practice, he and Lal continued meeting every night in bed. Probably both were at their happiest discussing the events of the day. He could trust Lal’s discretion, and would sometimes report on the more reprehensible whims of his most respected clients; while she was equally frank in some of her disclosures, such as the symptoms of meanness she was discovering in their son-in-law Oscar Hawkins, and Heather’s menopausal troubles. If he had not revealed his secret passion for Marjorie’s middle daughter, Jenny, it was because a sense of being disloyal to the other grandchildren prevented him.

Arnold Wyburd hardly allowed himself to hear what could only be a slow, soft fart from the direction of his client’s bed; he could not remember ever having heard a woman break wind before. Whether Mrs Hunter herself heard, it was impossible to tell: she appeared too engrossed in sleep or thought.

Actually she no longer attached much importance to her own physical behaviour, unless it hurt her. Didn’t care for smells, though: those dreadfully increasing accidents. But they gave the nurses something to do.

And solicitors? What did Arnold Wyburd do? It was doubtful whether his morning consisted of much more than reading the Herald at that old-fashioned office. Lucky there were the nurses and Mrs Lippmann for him to pay. Otherwise she had to invent little jobs for him, like looking up retired housemaids to see whether they were in need of financial assistance, or inquiring about the arrival of aeroplanes.

Was his arrival at ‘Kudjeri’ with the deeds to the block of land Alfred bought for her in Sydney, and on which she was determined to die — none of those convalescent homes, and certainly not the Thingummy Village, thank you — was the occasion of the deeds her first sight of the young Arnold? She could not remember any other. He looked so thin and prissy, white too, beside the coarser, ruddier Alfred. He was everything she felt a solicitor ought to be. Because he looked so hot in his dark and incongruous city clothes, she told him to take his coat off, but he said he wouldn’t.

Then, after giving the matter a reasonable amount of thought, he changed his mind. In moving the coat from the sofa to the back of a chair she detected a faint smell of moist warmth, hardly perspiration: certainly unlike the tom-cat stench of male sweat.

(Why does all this come back when I can’t always remember what I’ve had for lunch, or if I’ve had it? The past has been burnt into me, I suppose — like they do with cattle.)

Was Arnold already married? Oh yes, he must have been. There was some formal talk about children at dinner that night. Yes. The worthy Lal had produced her first, and was expecting another. After dinner Dorothy and Basil came in: Dorothy still looking thin after her bronchitis that winter (the official reason why Alfred proposed to build a house in Sydney); Basil on the other hand never had an illness, and not a nerve in his body. The children had not taken to Mr Wyburd: not surprisingly he bored them. Later on, Dorothy developed a passion for his wife. On the few occasions when they all met she wouldn’t leave Lal alone, putting her arms round that freckled neck, wanting to cuddle — quite laughable. Even Basil used to talk to Mrs Wyburd, at an age when he had started sulking at everybody else; wanted to drag the solicitor’s wife into corners to tell her about his ambitions. One was thankful for his civility.