Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

This was where Sir Basil felt the damp in his right foot, looked at his sole as soon as he reached a quiet lamp-post, and noticed that he needed mending. All right, simple enough: he wasn’t on the rocks, only shortly out of a job. He had his experience, his title, his technique, his voice, and, it had been demonstrated, women were attracted to him.

What was the-Mitty Jacka! Of Golden Hill? Of Beulah!

He took the bus to Beulah Hill looking for signs of a disturbing presence: on the seats of an empty upper deck; at a flint-studded gatepost apparently much favoured by dogs; then along the path, slippery with snails, till he was again standing on her doorstep about that same hour of night.

‘I’ve come’, he said, ‘to hear about the play you spoke of. Remember?’ Perhaps it was his position on the lower step which made it sound suppliant.

The two pugs were poppopping at his ankles, while around hers curved an arc of luminous fur.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve been giving it thought. I’m glad you’ve decided.’

He could feel his mask grinning up at her, the teeth grown jagged in its mock flesh: that of the Second Conspirator. Or was it the First Suicide?

Anyway, here he was as a result, in this other sunlight, dazed by it as he lolled in the cavorting taxi, prickling with grit, streaming with sweat in spite of his recent bath and shave. He was feeling fine: not the shadow of a conscience for keeping them waiting, old Arnold the Wyburd and the bloody princess, probably three-quarters of an hour. It was hardly his fault, was it? if the Herald and the A.B.C. chose to ring, one after the other, just as he was making a dash for it.

So he was determined to relax and enjoy this whizzing vision of a city which had grown out of his childhood recollections: of a Pitt Street peopled only by acquaintances, all of them converging on the Civil Service Stores. Though he had played no active part in his city’s transformation, though he had rejected it in fact, he accepted some of the credit for it. He had to share his recovered self-respect with this self-important metropolis. However late in the piece, he offered his love to its plate glass and neo-brutal towers; at the heart of it, his old mother. He would forget his horror of the lilac wig, the deliquescent smile: these dismissed, he could love the whole idea of mothers, as of Sydney. (Recall the horrors later if you are short on ruthlessness. Remember to send the better suit for pressing, for your interview with the telly girl of the mellow-’cello voice.)

Mr Wyburd glanced at the clock. Unpunctuality was one of the vices which roused him to anger, an ugly and intemperate emotion, though perhaps not as deplorable as unwillingness to forgive the offender; and the Hunter children had both failed to keep an appointment made for eleven. One of them could have been involved in an accident, but not both, surely? unless they had shared a taxi, and there was not love enough between them for that. A regular churchgoer (he had kept it up as an example to his own children, then found it had become a habit), the solicitor would have liked to conjure a material banner embroidered with the concept CHARITY to hold between himself and his clock, to prevent the anger rising again, peculiarly physical and bitter-tasting, out of his stomach into his mouth. Or in any event, he must dissociate his irritation from the face of a clock for which he had a longstanding and sentimental attachment.

It was a carriage clock, and had been sent him by Mrs Hunter as a memento and token of esteem after her husband’s death. The clock had belonged to the late Mr Hunter. Arnold Wyburd could remember exactly where it used to stand on the library mantelpiece at ‘Kudjeri’. He remembered, not from that first brief stay when he had arrived unsuitably dressed, timid as a boy, bringing for signature the agreement to their purchase of the block in Moreton Drive, but from later visits, by which time he had proved himself worthy of his clients’ trust, and could unbend sufficiently to take pleasure in their hospitality. His respect and affection for Mr Hunter grew, until (it had been something of an ice-breaking) he could be included among those who addressed him as ‘Bill’.

Under the carriage clock, in the library at ‘Kudjeri’, Bill Hunter and Arnold Wyburd would sit talking: each had a respect for functional objects such as clocks, telescopes, razors, barometers, as well as for acts of God; often they were content simply to stare into the fire. Arnold Wyburd wondered how many of those present at Bill Hunter’s funeral had noticed him crying, and how many still remembered. He was half ashamed of it himself. He hadn’t thought about it for years, till this morning Bill’s pestiferous children gave him the opportunity. Had Bill loved his children? You didn’t believe he could have, then felt guilty at thinking such a thought.

Standing beside the devotedly accurate carriage clock on the bookcase in Arnold Wyburd’s office was a framed studio portrait inscribed in Bill’s angular hand (it reminded the solicitor of arrowheads) To Arnold Wyburd — in affectionate friendship — Bill. Several years before her husband’s death, this, too, had been sent by Mrs Hunter, almost as if she wished to suggest the inscribed photograph were one of her own little inspirations (though wives usually do up the parcels). She had enclosed a note in her familiar, awful scrawl (she must have started writing large as an affectation, then found it came naturally) … an exceptionally good likeness I consider and as you more than anyone else Arnold love and appreciate Alfred you must be the first to have one … She hadn’t inscribed the photograph herself, but you could see her standing over him with advice. It embarrassed you still to remember the wording of her note. What, Arnold Wyburd sometimes wondered, did Mrs Hunter understand as ‘love’? For that matter, he wasn’t too clear what he understood by it himself: probably, from personal experience, many years of honourable conjugal affection interspersed with decently conducted sexual intercourse.

The solicitor coughed. On top of everything else that morning, he couldn’t help resenting Mrs Hunter’s intrusion on his memories of Bill.

To restore mental order, he moved one or two objects on his desk. There was no question of settling down to work. Avoiding the eyes of the photograph he might have glanced again at the infuriating clock if Miss Haygarth hadn’t appeared with the cup of pale, milky tea (normally she brought it earlier) and the two biscuits he seldom touched. Miss Haygarth went away.

No need to look at the clock: his mind was keeping pace with it. Rage, he had told himself, is generated by those of unreasonable temperament, and leads to the courts. As for irritation, simpler, though more often than not, perverse, it could bring on stomach ulcers, when his health, apart from appendicitis at the age of thirty-seven, had remained exceptional all these years, thanks to regular habits, plain food, and a prudent wife. Yet now, all seemed threatened, if not by rage or irritation, by an uncharacteristic restlessness. He had spent a most disturbed night; and at breakfast Lal had joined him in one or two cynical remarks (unlike either of them).

‘Poor Dorothy — I’d be curious to see her again — to find out whether a plain girl can make a glamorous princess.’ Then she laughed, and her teeth looked — no, not really. 1 expect she can, because underneath I’m a bit of a snob.’ The honesty of her admission together with too large a mouthful of corn fritter made her cheeks bulge: his reliable Lal.

‘Yesterday she said she’d love to see you.’

‘That’s what they say.’

‘Oh, Dorothy will come — unless there’s too much of her mother in her.’