Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

He realized she was with him again on seeing her drop a piece of paper about the size of a visiting card into an urn on the shadowy outskirts of the room.

‘What was that?’ The drink inside him made him feel less brazen than spontaneous.

‘Oh — an idea I might decide to use.’ She sounded unwilling, even a bit sour.

Then she was gone, followed by her anxious retinue. He continued sitting. Perhaps the smell of raw liver she left behind deterred him from investigating her ‘idea’. Instead he waited: for what? His future as an actor of some importance no longer seemed relevant.

When she returned, not to settle — her behaviour suggested she might never do that, anyway during the hours of darkness — she freshened up his drink, more of which he had meant to refuse. As she moved about the room a cigarette she had lit for herself trailed its streamers of smoke, or described more elaborate arabesques as she stopped to look at and sometimes re-arrange objects she might have been seeing for the first time. She smoked so furiously that he was more drugged by her cigarette than drunk by whatever was in his glass.

From adding up a couple of her remarks he decided to risk her displeasure again. ‘I gather you write.’ Carefully composed, the words shot out of his mouth like a handful of independent marbles.

She drew harder on her cigarette. ‘I hammer away.’ The smoke she blew looked peculiarly solid. ‘Sometimes it takes a recognizable shape — or one which I can recognize, though more often than not it isn’t what it was intended to be. Yes, I write verses,’ she added, by way of obeying a social convention. ‘And all my life I’ve been putting together I don’t know what you would call it — a work — which will convey everything there is to express — if I can extract and compress it — or if in the end I don’t find it has melted down of its own accord into the word I started with.’

Surrounded by the smoke with which she had been filling the room, he began telling, ‘When I was a boy — I forget how old, but quite young — I had an illness — no, I must have broken my arm: I can remember the sling, and the clammy feeling of my skin from the arm strapped against my unwashed body — in bed. They had fixed me up for the night — tried to make me comfortable. My father lit one of the night-lights left over from when we were smaller. And stood a screen across one corner of the bedhead — to keep the draught off, I imagine. During the night this screen began to terrify me. The fall — the broken arm — must have left me a bit delirious. As the night-light flickered I kept trying to turn — the strapped arm made it agony — to watch the screen. It was of a pale grey, or some nondescript colour, with the skeletons of trees stencilled on it. Or that was how the light made it appear. As the night dragged on and I became more desperate, I longed to look behind the screen, but was too afraid of what I might find. I was running with sweat. I suppose I fell asleep in the end.’

Nor did the wine, or whatever the Jacka woman had poured, help him decide whether he had been speaking or dreaming. She had come and was sitting beside him on the couch, in a heap of drowsy pugs. She could have been smiling as she watched him, while stroking the rise and fall of a pug’s exposed teats.

‘This screen — how it’s continued cropping up. So solid and real — as real as childhood.’ He laughed uneasily for his discovery. ‘I’ve built speeches round it, rehearsing parts which have worried me. It’s always protected me from the draught.’ He sniggered, sipping the drink which had let loose his confession. ‘This screen thing — it materializes again when you feel you’re beginning to slip — in musty provincial theatres — a piece of disintegrating silk stretched on a ricketty, tottering frame. You’re less than ever inclined to look behind it. And you’re pretty sure that if it blows over, you’re lost.’

His lips were almost paralysed. He was no longer aware of her as a face but as a smile beneath water. What else he told he could not have unravelled for sleep in a white dress streaming light from the top of the stairs. Did she touch his forehead?

Towards morning he needed to relieve himself, stumbled through the curtains of smoke and plush, and against a low, object-laden table, but reached the garden, where cold and a sprinkling of rain revived him. A sweet scent, cold too, rejoiced him as he did his business. This piercing scent of night flowers was threaded through the smell of damp rot which finally predominated.

Returning to the house, he looked up, and caught sight of Mitty Jacka seated by a naked light, in an upper room, either ‘hammering away’, or, more likely, ‘locked’: for the moment she was perfectly still, her expression desperate by that searching light.

He felt so sober burrowing back into the darkness where he had slept, it occurred to him to investigate the urn in which she had dropped her slip of paper. He made light, put in his hand, and skimmed the surface of an urnful of similar slips for what was probably the most recent: there were traces of raw liver on it, as well as a bloody fingerprint or two.

Sceptical this morning, not to say cynical, he opened the folded paper to read:

… an actor tends to ignore the part which fits him best his life Lear the old unplayable is in the end a safer bet than the unplayed I …

His breath sharpened as the words blurred. He didn’t have with him the glasses he used, not to read (he seldom did) but to study a part. So he held the paper at arm’s length. After the first attempt to focus on words too perfectly formed in a severe, anachronistic hand, he saw he might as well give up. Depressing the way his sight had deteriorated: after shock for instance, or abusive letters, selfish performances by the vindictive young, and especially after alcohol. Considering how the Jacka had dosed him the night before, it was no wonder half the message was lost. He was glad to re-fold her squalid paper, and toss it back into the urn, where it couldn’t remind him of physical decay.

Then he proceeded to arrange himself again on what had become an uncomfortable unsprung sofa. He drew himself into an appropriate form, only it wasn’t: he realized he had taken on the shape of a prawn, and that it was too TIGHT. When sleep seeped back shallowly around he was lashing and kicking, more transparent than the words in which he was netted.

His hostess brought him a cup of coffee at a most untheatrical hour. After she had dragged the curtains back, a grey light touched their reunion with fatality. Even so, Mitty Jacka, all gooseflesh and shivers now that day had succeeded her elective night, would have liked to float on the surface.

She said too hastily, ‘Poor you — you must have been uncomfortable! The sofa’s a disaster. It belonged to a great-aunt.’

She stood chafing thin and elderly arms; while he sat muttering approval of the sofa into his coffee. The cup, a once sumptuous Empire, had a brown chip as large as a thumbnail.

‘We’ll keep in touch,’ she predicted, looking out uneasily through the amorphousness of a wet garden, ‘because I know we’re meant to write a play together.’

She had him at her mercy: she could attack him at the theatre where he was playing; whereas he had neither her number, nor address — nor did he want them.

‘Plays cost money,’ he replied, showing her his smile, which she ignored.

‘It can always be raised from somewhere. What about this old rich invalid mother?’

What had he told her in the night? He wasn’t aware he had mentioned Elizabeth Hunter.

‘She’s pretty tight,’ he mumbled, staring at his white knuckles. ‘Oh, she’s generous enough, I must admit — in little handouts — from time to time.’