Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

The receptionist frowned before smiling at the bakelite cup she was addressing. ‘A Sister Manhood to see you, Sir Basil.’ There were the usual formal gulps and clicks from the phone; then the receptionist stuck the phone back on its stand, and without looking, condescended, ‘Up the short flight, and follow the passage to the left. It’s number Five;’ her voice as impersonal as bakelite: whose business was it if a casual, if Sir Basil Hunter (Guest of Honour on the A.B.C.) received a prostitute in his room?

The dark shiny receptionist had already begun pressing her damp handkerchief against her catarrhal nose before Sister Manhood started mounting the short flight, to follow the passage to the left.

The visitor had hardly given Sir Basil time to come out from under the shower; but he came, in a dressing-gown she recognized as ‘luxurious’, tousling his hair with a rough towel. ‘What can I do for you?’ The voice was natural, weary rather than elderly, at any rate not as old as Arnold Wyburd’s.

He must have dropped to himself, because immediately he settled for a sharper expression, both mouth and eyes, and stopped drying his hair.

She felt a spurt of fear, which might have shot deeper into her if it hadn’t been for Mary de Santis coming up with guidance. ‘It’s your mother,’ Flora Manhood said, ‘I thought I’d like to have a word with you about — Sir Basil.’

‘Oh, come!’ He laughed; and she reckoned the eye-teeth were probably hitching posts for the false. ‘I was hoping you were paying me a sociable visit.’

Legs apart, back turned, rubbing stuff into his hair in front of the dressing-table glass, Sir Basil Hunter gave the impression it was the most natural thing in life to be receiving sociable visits from girls, in hotel bedrooms, in his dressing-gown. As for herself, she felt for ever rooted in her origins: in spite of your training at P. A., the diploma, the gear you had dolled yourself up in, a pretty intensive sexual life (till recently at least) and a lengthy spell nursing a rich bitch who had many cranky but often pointed answers to the questions, your basic knowledge was that of the girl reared amongst the banana palms up country from Coffs Harbour.

All of this made her mumble past the trembling cigarette she had lit for a purpose. ‘Mrs Hunter has been my case for over a year. Why can’t you believe I have her interests at heart?’

He stooped a bit, so that his reflection could stare back at her. Without turning, he gave her a look of what she suspected was — commiseration? Seeing that he knew the hypocrite she was, she dragged on the jittery cigarette she had only lit to help herself. (Never got more than a screen, you couldn’t say it was pleasure, out of smoking.)

While still taken up with the hair he was dashing back into shape, the lights in it intensified by repeated blows from the brushes against the crisp waves and unctuous tonic, Sir Basil sighed. ‘Yes — Mother — poor darling!’

After that he laid the brushes down; it was as though his visitor and he had settled a matter between them: they had done their duty by Elizabeth Hunter.

Sir Basil brought a bottle of Scotch. He brought ice from the fridge, which was ticking over the other side of the room; while she removed from her tongue a shred of tobacco she wasn’t sure existed, but it was what they do.

(How to raise her glass without giving herself away? There was the two-handed method she had practised while a trainee on her first dates with residents: young pukey milk-skinned doctors, themselves nervous enough not to notice the trembles in somebody else; but Sir Basil Hamlet Hunter?)

‘If you don’t mind, I prefer a lighter one.’ Not quite, but almost, Badgery lining up a tea planter as the sun went down on the equator.

He added soda. She felt the draught prickling upward, and lowered her eyes. She sank her pale lipstick in the glass as she noticed the hairs on the backs of the actor’s fingers.

‘Right?’

‘Thank you.’

Even if the half of her tried on and off to kid the other half into believing her standards were basically moral, and that she was genuinely concerned for Mrs Hunter’s welfare, the more positive half had declared its intentions by choosing the sofa; just as he declared his by sitting down deliberately beside her. The sofa was neither very large nor very new; the springs protested, but the occupants were brought unavoidably closer as from the sides of a shallow funnel. More unexpected was the sudden change of climate, from temperate to tropical, as the steam from his freshly showered body burst out of the dressing-gown. For a moment or two she had trouble getting her breath.

Sir Basil seemed unconscious of the effect he had produced without evidently trying for it; he was too intent on the touches with which he would build up a performance into something recognizably his.

‘Thank you for coming here tonight,’ he said, focusing a lustrous eye on his opposite lead. ‘You couldn’t have known you’d be saving me from myself.’

‘Oh?’ The most she could summon out of her stupor was this pathetic moo, like a cow sunk, but passively, in a bog.

‘One of my black days.’

‘I don’t want to latch on — not, I mean, if you have anything else in view.’ A pellet of gum flattened on a back tooth couldn’t have given worse trouble than the words her jaws were trying to get rid of. ‘The girl at the desk said you were dressing for dinner.’

‘Dinner with myself — unless the girl at the desk knew more than I.’ All the time he was looking at, or into her, his right hand was picking over the upholstery somewhere at the back of her head.

She must make the effort to overcome this stranglehold of huskiness on her monotonous, her charmless voice. ‘Don’t imagine I came here expecting dinner.’ She hawked up the words, it sounded, out of her hoarse throat.

Instead of answering he smiled at her with an indulgence to dismiss diffidence for good and all.

He was certainly going out of his way to make it easy for her. She was by now almost sealed up with Sir Basil in his envelope of steam. She should not have had to think out a further move, only adopt a grateful expression.

What then prevented her taking immediate advantage of his consideration? It wasn’t Mrs Hunter, though in the absence of an admissible reason, it would bloody well have to be: not the old incontinent carcase whose mind maundered after the dolls she had played with and tortured as a child, till suddenly and cruelly, she was back inside her right mind, the dolls turned into human playthings. You would have to concentrate, not on this real woman, but the pale ghost of a saint Lottie Lippmann and de Santis persuaded themselves to believe in.

Instead, what Flora Manhood had begun to see was not the ghost-saint, it was Sir Basil Hunter’s knee — and calf — slowly released by the slippery folds of the dressing-gown. ‘I mean, I did honestly come here to ask whether you were considering your mother’s feelings in putting her in the Thorogood Village.’ She seemed to have achieved at last a low, soft, perhaps even appealing voice, while making circular passes with the palm of a hand over her own uppermost knee, unwisely, it soon appeared, because it emphasized the nakedness, not to say the closeness, of his.

The eyes of each were concentrated on the other’s knee; when the telephone went off, knocking their attention, as well as their bodies, sideways.

Sir Basil handled the situation. ‘I’m not taking any calls tonight. I’m too exhausted.’ To prove it he closed his eyes, and smiled rather bitterly for the switchboard before dumping the receiver in its cradle.

He was back in brisker form. ‘Nothing has been decided. It was an idea, only. And more than likely won’t get any farther, if everyone who pleads for my mother is so pretty and so tenderhearted.’ He squeezed her knee, very warmly, through the hose.