Patrick White: The Eye of the Storm

But Arnold was rigid in the company of children, with almost everybody. That night at ‘Kudjeri’ he had lit her cigarette, and his hand trembled. She held his wrist, to steady him, and was surprised at its sinewiness. Perhaps she could teach him courage. Yes, that was something she could give to them all — perhaps; she had never been afraid.

It was an excruciating evening. Alfred fell asleep after telling about the rams and the Gimcrack mare slipping her foal the night before. That young Arnold Wyburd, unhappy in his comfortable shirtsleeves, sat watching you toss your ankle as you tried to think of a topic which might break the agony. (Lal shortened her skirt only after everybody had forgotten skirts were short.) Next morning he left and you didn’t see him: there was no reason why you should; Alfred’s driving him into Gogong in the Bentley, to catch the train, was attention enough.

(All country evenings were boring. People only become religious about them after escaping and forgetting the details. Funny you should remember that sinewiness in Arnold’s smooth, hairless wrist.)

When the house was built — the spiteful, and those in any way radically inclined, liked to refer to it as a ‘mansion’, which it wasn’t: only four reception, and as many bedrooms, not counting the maids’ quarters — you decided not to give gossip a chance by moving in too enthusiastically. Besides, this was starting from scratch, unlike ‘Kudjeri’, with all those inherited monstrosities. At Moreton Drive there were cabinet-makers, decorators and so forth to make patience a virtue. Delay and an unfashionable address should have silenced most tongues. People still talked, however, the babbling, frivolous ones. Why, Elizabeth, won’t you be cutting yourself off living at Centennial Park? Coming from the bush to settle, practically — in the bush! We’ve never known anyone live in Moreton Drive. She could only answer, Now you will know somebody, won’t you? It was certainly very sandy, almost dune wherever houses had not been built; the branches of bottlebrush rattled when winds blew, which was permanently. Bad for the garden and the hair. But she would show the trivial members of her acquaintance.

She had faith in her own originality and taste; everybody admitted those were among her virtues. She was not interested in possessions for the sake of possessions, but could not resist beautiful and often expensive objects. To those who accused her of extravagance she used to reply, They’ll probably become more valuable; not that she was materialistic, not for a moment. Her argument was: if I can’t take your breath away, if I can’t awaken you from the stupor of your ugly houses, I’ve failed. She did honestly want to make her acquaintances as drunk as she with sensuousness.

Oh, she would screw her eyeballs deeper into her skull today, knowing she would never again see her long drawing-room, its copper and crimson and emerald melting together behind the bronze curtains drawn against the afternoon sun.

You see, she said, you can’t say it’s extravagant if it’s beautiful — now can you? Standing on the stairs. Flinging out her arms to embrace this work of art her house; not forgetting her husband, her children, and a couple of servants she had as audience. If she overdid it slightly it was because she had something of the actress in her. (They used to say of Basil later, you can see where he gets it from.)

Only now it is Alfred speaking, Don’t over-excite yourself, Betty, every one of us is full of admiration. Poor dear Alfred, she could have eaten him at times, from gratitude. When gentle devotion was what he would have liked. She was always trying to include him in what she was doing. Come and see your room — the study — which I hope you’ll use — when you come down to he with us — I hope you’ll make a habit of it, darling — because we’ll miss you, shan’t we? Dorothy? Dragging Alfred, and Alfred alone, by the hand, its skin coarsened by joining in the work at ‘Kudjeri’—to jolly the men — a square, undemonstrative hand, trying manfully to return her enthusiasm with curious little encouraging pressures. (Their whole married life they had spent trying to encourage each other’s uninteresting interests.) What am I going to study in this study? He laughed after a fashion. If I ever use it.

And yet, Alfred read, she discovered: he had accumulated a whole library of unexpected books, used ones, you could tell by the stains on them and crumbs between the pages. So she had found out in the painful months at the end when they were together again at ‘Kudjeri’.

Earlier, when he would come down and ask them to put him up at Moreton Drive, he took to film-going. Though what Dad saw in the pictures he sat through, Basil could not imagine. It made him laugh in his in-between voice (his lovely pure little treble had broken). Basil was at his most horrid, exploiting harshness under cover of his beauty: like a still-ripening plum, he would have shrivelled the mouth if you had bitten into him. But he was right about those crude films; after tagging along to one or two, you could only conclude that poor Alfred interpreted them to suit himself, laughing when there was nothing to laugh at, crying — you suspected — at a common actress in corkscrew curls bringing her illegitimate baby to be christened in the parish church patronized by the young man’s family. Admittedly, you did sniffle slightly yourself — against your better judgment. Or because Alfred was trying to get hold of your hand and press his thigh against yours. (Imagine if the lights went up and anyone you knew was at the ‘pictures’!)

Mrs Hunter’s eyelids might have been turned to walnut-shells if tears had not started oozing from beneath them: out of old, mottled, dammed-up eyes.

Even during the phase after the (unofficial) separation, she never withheld herself when he came down to Sydney from ‘Kudjeri’. She was determined to show her gratitude and repay him in affection for what amounted to her freedom. (He, too, must appreciate that affection is much less bumpy going than passion.) She used to make some sign, cough a shade too dramatically, or slam a drawer, or remark in an unnaturally high voice, Those Wyburds of yours — do you think she knows how to treat him? and Alfred would come to her, on bare feet, from the next room, and immediately they would drop their disguises. If he had still been alive she hoped he would remember with as much delight as she the pleasures of this calmer, therapeutic relationship.

Not that the other hadn’t been necessary, desirable: the purposeful is necessary. And their children were purposeful. She would still dream of the barbs he had planted in her womb.

But was Arnold Wyburd necessary?

Scarcely saw him at first after the move to Moreton Drive. Old Keemis was too possessive: an old, reputed masher, in silk hat and thin white ribbon of a necktie pushed through what looked like a wedding ring. Married to Millicent, a person you never set eyes on: an invalid, it was said. The old man was very correct in his behaviour: sucked peppermints, for instance, to disguise his breath. She would have preferred the full blast of tobacco which lingered under the peppermint. Flowers for her birthday from Keemis: yellow roses; at Christmas the box of French liqueur chocolates. Archie Keemis was a man who made life seem everlasting: then he went and died in Pitt Street, on Cup Day, on his way to the club. Her grief for this old man who hadn’t meant all that much to her was as spontaneous as any she had experienced. Must have been the suddenness the shock, the removal of something solid and dependable. An almost solidly male funeral watched her while pretending not to. She was glad she had thought to wear a veil. They were watching to see what ‘Bill’ Hunter’s wife had meant to their solicitor. And Millicent Keemis was not there. The wife’s absence, however invalid she may have been, made your presence more calculable to men who believed in their powers of calculation. (Honest affection, she had found, often appears more dubious than outright infidelity: probably no one — well, almost no one, had guessed at her consummated flings; there had been other, unconsummated ones of course, because you can be unfaithful, mentally unfaithful, with a jewel, a house, a child, a woman — couldn’t have gone all the way with a woman, or not farther than a hand’s flirt. Who had said — some forgotten brute— Her only genuine adulteries are those she commits with herself? She must try to remember.