Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

‘Where?

He couldn’t possibly be interested.

‘Oh, some-where: I have it written down in my book;’ and with her arm, she pressed her handbag deeper into her side.

She had lied, and he knew it, but neither of them could be bothered; in any case, there was nothing wrong with the social forms of dishonesty.

Outside in the street it was one of the days when all human beings are handsome: young, casually mooching men in lightweight light-toned suits; perfectly articulated girls, born to their brilliant shreds of dresses as to their own skins.

‘It’s encouraging, Dorothy,’ Basil was saying, ‘to know we’re in agreement over Mother.’ As they lingered on the pavement he was looking at her almost passionately; but of course it was only part of the Basil Hunter performance, to which, surprisingly, she found herself warming (you had to admit he had looks of a deliquescent, actorish kind, if none of the distinction of Hubert de Lascabanes her husband). So that when he moved in on her, and she found herself fitted to Basil Hunter, she was less surprised, or when he kissed her on the mouth: it was probably as close as she had ever come to spontaneous surrender.

‘We shall meet soon, I hope.’ He spoke in what she recognized again as those nostalgic, husky tones of which he was the thrilling master, while looking at the hands he was holding — the rings more likely; but noticing for the first time whatever had attracted his attention.

The Princesse de Lascabanes toiled on alone up what had been till recently a bland hill in a rural landscape. She felt emotionally squeezed out. She went and sat on a bench, amongst the statues and the salvia, in the Botanic Gardens, at her back a wall of succulent evergreen spattered with gold. There she crossed her ankles, and might have enjoyed contemplating her classic Pinet shoes if it hadn’t been for a young couple stretched on the grass, in a bay scalloped from the evergreens. The young people were conducting themselves disgracefully, with the result that they impinged on the thoughts of the princess, till she too was writhing, upright and alone on her bench, in almost perfect time with their united, prostrate bodies.

It was ghastly.

For some reason she conjured up the image of the nurse: that Sister Manhood. To distract herself while the pseudo-Manhood was undulating with her lover in the scalloped bay, she took the cheque out of her bag, to re-examine, and confirm the sum. In spite of which, she had never felt so purposeless.

Turned at a sharper angle to exclude the lovers, she leaned forward, plaiting her long fingers together: there is something I must find out about, which is neither marriage, nor position, nor the procedures of formal religion, nor possessions, nor love in that sense. If I could only ask Mother; but Mother was always a greedy, sensual woman, and is now dotty with age.

She looked round to see whether the lovers had heard her thoughts. But they hadn’t. ‘Ohhh!’ she moaned in spite of herself.

The Princesse de Lascabanes ground her knife-edged buttocks into the park bench, till she was positive she had struck a splinter; and whom, in all this foreign city, would she ask to dig a splinter out of her behind?

Thinking to board a ferry and agreeably waste the rest of the day, Sir Basil meandered down towards the Quay after parting from his sister. First he bought a pound of cooked prawns. Then he decided against the ferry: in his boyhood the other side of the harbour had meant the other side of the world; and today, what with his return, and the warmth, he was womb-happy. So he plodded back up the hill, plunging a hand intermittently into the paper bag, gorging himself on prawns: he was illustrious and foreign enough to make a pig of himself in public. Even so, many of those he passed, appeared to glare at him; their own suburban laws would not have allowed them to guzzle in the streets, and here was this stranger dragging them down to a level they might have been yearning for. He was not influenced by their unspoken strictures, but went on climbing, shelling prawns, stuffing them into his mouth and spitting out any fragments of shell, some of which lodged in the transparent shirt, in particular on the shelf his stomach was beginning to provide. From time to time he brushed off the prawnshell, but only half-heartedly.

On this day of vacillations, which are also details of the overall design, Sir Basil Hunter found himself walking through a side gate to the Botanic Gardens. He sat down on a bench, amongst the statues and the salvia, against a wall of evergreens, the other side of which the Princesse de Lascabanes had begun worrying about her splinter.

Sir Basil had no worries, or not for the moment; he was enjoying vegetable status in the city to which he no longer belonged. So he dragged down his tie. And stuffed in some more of the prawns. Around him the fortified soil, the pampered plants, the whiffs of manure, the moist-warm air of Sydney, all were encouraging the vegetable existence: to loll, and expand, fleshwise only, and rot, and be carted away, and shovelled back into the accommodating earth. He closed his eyes. He loved the theory of it. The palm leaves were applauding.

He might have snoozed a little.

Because the tree was writhing around him none of the flattering palmate hands but the human denuded ones in bone stringing him up not against the halcyon cyclorama the Department of Tourism advertises but on branches of the pure anguish this is why He is unplayable by actors anyway at those moments when the veins are filled with lightning the Fool flickering in counterpoint like conscience conscience dies first so that you can feel more thoroughly destitute nothing else matters but this pure destitution not all the stalking the blood Goneril and Dorothy not jellied eyes not even the misunderstood Cordelia nothing is truly solved unless at the last button why Mother is closest but how close to the undoing Mitty the Jacka would cut it off before its time in one of those bursts of negative fulfilment.

Basil — Hunter? woke back. The salvias were stifling him. He (or He?) had undone the button. Not surprising: it had eaten into his throat.

He began to decide against visiting his old mum that evening. No, he would write a rather charming Letter of Thanks which all the nurses — and the neurotic Jewish housekeeper — would read and variously interpret. They would read it to Elizabeth Hunter, who cannot see except by flashes of lightning. (Has Mother inherited a lost art?)

Basil Hunter leant forward on the park bench, trying to interpret the blades of grass. There had been a time when he saw clearly, right down to the root of the matter, before his perception had retired behind a legerdemain of technique and the dishonesties of living.

MISS HAYGARTH announced, ‘It’s the second week the housekeeper hasn’t collected her money.’

Though the nurses had called, in accordance with Mrs Hunter’s original decree, and received their weekly due, it was Miss Haygarth who had attended to them. Mr Wyburd would have been unwilling to admit, but he had avoided contact with Moreton Drive since becoming an unwilling accessory to the Hunter children’s ‘plan’. If Basil and Dorothy had visited their mother since the meeting at his office, he presumed they had not raised the subject of her future; if they had, they would have been proud to mention it; he was only relieved they had not reproached him for not acting as their emissary.

Now he told his secretary, ‘I shall go out there, I expect. Yes, I must;’ and took from Miss Haygarth the two envelopes intended for Mrs Lippmann.

When the housekeeper opened the door to him, she appeared overcome by a diffidence as palpable as his. In fact, Mr Wyburd’s recent guilty involvement made him feel so awkward he came to the point with unusual directness. ‘You’ve forgotten these, haven’t you?’