Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

‘She came — oh, several times. And each time I was asleep.’ Mrs Hunter was so definite about that, he had to dismiss his theory.

‘I don’t know whether I’m sorry,’ she continued. ‘Dorothy gives the impression she would like to start discussing money. And that’s boring. Think about it if you must, but don’t talk about it. Almost any vice is more interesting than money.’

They languished after that, and the solicitor might have become the victim of his thoughts if the night nurse had not saved him, anyway from their lower depths. Sister de Santis was so much a presence he was not used to thinking of her as a person. Since she had begun trading in dangerous rumours, he looked at her tonight for further evidence of womanhood, but found only what pleased his old-fashioned, shy tastes.

After she had greeted him by bowing her veiled head, Sister de Santis became too intent on her patient’s welfare to bother with any visitor. ‘Have you spent a happy day, Mrs Hunter?’ she asked as she took up the token of a wrist.

‘How innocent you are, Mary! Oh, yes — I suppose I have,’ Mrs Hunter was forced to admit. ‘Happy, or un-happy: by this stage there’s not much to choose between them.’ She turned to the solicitor and asked, ‘Is there any reason why I shouldn’t feel happy, Arnold?’

‘Not that I know — unless you know of one yourself.’ He had staved her off, he hoped, and would not expose himself to further danger. ‘I’ll go now, Mrs Hunter, if you’ll excuse me.’

She had lost interest.

Sister de Santis seemed to be trying to apologize for her patient’s lapse. The immaculate lips were smiling at him, though the lamp was so placed, he could not judge the expression of her eyes. Probably she was on his side, but even if he had dared ask for confirmation, he suspected her discretion of being as great as his.

So he went down through the house, its silence alive with clocks, suggestions of subterfuge, the blatant echoes of downright lies, together with hints of the exasperating, unknowable truth.

The house in which he lived (judicious Georgian borrowings by a once fashionable, now forgotten architect) was making a last stand against a Central European pincer movement in yellow brick. He let himself in, and at once Lal, in an apron, was coming towards him across the hall. ‘I’ve done us some haddock,’ she said, ‘with a couple of poached eggs.’

As they sat down to enjoy their simple nursery food, it relieved him to find life still as he hoped it might be the other side of the hectic shimmer of apprehension: they were free to masticate the requisite number of times in silence, or mumble about grandchildren’s ailments, and discuss the price of things.

Over the bottled pears (Lal was for making a religion out of the country virtues) he thought to mention, ‘I paid Her a visit this evening.’ In masticating, he didn’t pretend to emulate Gladstone, but managed a ritual twelve to fifteen chews.

‘How was it?’ He only faintly heard above his absorption.

Lal’s face was inclined over the brown and leathery, but healthful pears. Their friends must always have seen his wife as plain, he imagined; he too, at times: some species of modest, monochrome bird, her low, and uniformly agreeable call unexpectedly punctuated by an ironic note or two. Now he surprised himself thinking Lal looked downright ugly; he was repelled in particular by that single pockmark on one cheek beside the nose, which he must have noticed every day of their life together. Disloyalty to this loyal wife made Arnold Wyburd swallow a mouthful of unmasticated pear.

And Lal was repeating in a louder, slightly reproachful voice, ‘How was the visit?

Suddenly he was leaning forward. ‘It was awful!’ he ejaculated with such force that some of his mouthful of pear shot on to the surface of the mahogany table; some of the juice must have spurted as far as his wife’s bare arm: from the way she jerked it back against her side she might have been spattered with acid.

But the account of his discoveries at Moreton Drive had to come pouring out on Lal. Wasn’t she the only recipient for what might otherwise have eaten him away? With age, the half hour of mutual confession had practically replaced their sexual life, after which, in normal times, they fell deliciously asleep.

‘On top of the children’s criminal intentions, to find a houseful of half-informed, speculating nurses! The housekeeper too. Even the cleaning woman, I gather, is in the know.’ If he had been able to restrain himself till later, it might have sounded less reprehensible after the light was turned out. ‘How far it has gone, I couldn’t tell, but suspect.’ Is there any reason why I shouldn’t feel happy Arnold? he was stabbed by a voice which memory made appeal and accuse more pointedly. ‘Or how the leak occurred.’ It was torn out of him in what, for Arnold Wyburd, was almost a tortured shout.

Lal had finished her pears; she laid her spoon and fork together, her behaviour the more seemly for his display of dry passion.

She looked at him and said, ‘It was I who told, Arnold.’

‘You!’ Who was this woman he hadn’t got to know in a lifetime of intimate exchange? Because of his faith in her, a greater criminal perhaps than Basil and Dorothy Hunter themselves.

‘After what you told me, I had to tell someone. I rang Sister de Santis. That is all,’ Lal was saying. ‘I was so upset,’ she continued with more difficulty, ‘not that I ever greatly cared for Mrs Hunter, I may as well admit; she was always too selfish, greedy, in spite of being over endowed — with everything. And cruel,’ she gasped. ‘But I suppose I also looked up to her as somebody beautiful, brilliant — occasionally inspired.’

He couldn’t help approving of the way his wife was choosing her words to express his own feelings; but her treachery came back at him; the dishonesty which had lurked behind her homely virtues increased her physical ugliness.

‘I knew you respected Sister de Santis,’ she was continuing when almost run down. ‘And I was so shocked that they could even contemplate discarding this pitiful old creature, I suppose I didn’t stop to think I had been told in confidence.’

‘Stop to think? After all these years — not to be — ethically conditioned?

She looked as though she expected him to dash his napkin in her face.

He had never seen Lal crying convulsively before; not even after Heather’s premature baby died. Her present anguish was streaming from a source far less rational than death because more unexpected. She was at her plainest. And Arnold Wyburd knew that he would not have wished her otherwise. Nor did he attempt to hide his own few spurts of tears: in that way, Lal and he completed each other.

He only removed himself while she was blowing her nose without thought for her table napkin. He went, as coldly as the undertaking demanded, to the upstairs telephone; not that there was much point in telephoning pretentious people at that hour. Indeed, at the Onslow, Sir Basil Hunter was not receiving calls; and the Princesse de Lascabanes had left the club for dinner with friends. So he was frustrated; or saved up.

That night the Wyburds went to bed earlier than usual. There were no confidences after lights-out. Instead, they were clutching at a flawed reality they had been allowed to discover in each other, perhaps even taking upon themselves the healing of a wounded conscience.

It was an occasion when it did not occur to Arnold Wyburd to regret the snoring sound he made as he approached an orgasm.

It was the night of the Douglas Cheesemans’ dinner for Princesse de Lascabanes: one of the club maids had read an announcement in the Telegraph. As the evening approached Dorothy increasingly regretted her too hasty acceptance. She had always practised social deferment at the risk of suffering for it: from being ‘hard to get’, she was gradually forgotten. Now, she thought, she would have given anything to be dropped by one who was never more than a casual girlhood acquaintance. If Cherry Bullivant had been proposed as bridesmaid it was because Dorothy Hunter had not been encouraged to form close attachments; she had never had what is called a Best Friend. In any case, if it had been expected of her to go in search, she might not have known how to find. So, whatever her legend and her weapons, she dreaded her entrée into Cherry Cheeseman’s world.