Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

Touched by a famous hand, Flora Manhood jumped up; she was on fire, and liking it. What was more, she hadn’t altogether ratted on old Mrs Hunter. So she was now free, not to enjoy the situation she had so carefully prepared, but to go through with it for the sake of the fruit it must bear.

‘If it was only an idea,’ she panted, ‘we’ve got that straight at least. But your other ideas may be as crook,’ she threw off in the brassier voice she used as one of her weapons of defence.

Sir Basil would have liked to follow suit by standing up as quickly from the musical sofa, but could have felt a twinge in his back. His moody smile became a bare grin as he got to his feet, but he came on in the only possible direction: he too, had his plan to carry out.

And grabbed.

Probably on account of the twinge throwing him slightly off balance, he caught hold of a handful of flesh she wasn’t proud of (it was superfluous) above her right hip; and Basil Hunter looked angry that his technique should let him down, converting a smooth pass into what must look an act of vulgar clumsiness.

Even so, they were thrown together on the edge of the room, and rebounded so abruptly off the pounding fridge they almost overturned a Queen Anne walnut veneer table with piecrust edging, the lot.

‘I should have thought,’ Sir Basil got it out while eating his way along her shoulder, ‘we understood each other, Sister Man — Clara, is it?’

‘Flora.’

‘Oh, yes — Flora! Perfect! Flora!’

They were seeing eye to eye, both literally and figuratively: they understood each other’s inquisitive lust as it tempered and tried them out. How much else she understood of this ageing man, desirable, if only in bursts, she could not try to think. That he had no inkling of her real intention, she was a hundred per cent sure. Which gave her the advantage.

So she collapsed somewhat in his arms and made no secret of her breathlessness. ‘Whoo! Aren’t you making the pace a bit hot?’

It gave him an opportunity to pass the buck. ‘I’m hardly responsible — am I? Flora?’

Having kicked free of her shoes, she walked across the carpet on practical, flat feet, and pulled herself out of her dress: the green.

Sir Basil remarked, ‘Now that clothes have become so rudimenary, we can’t offer to help, can we?’

It did seem to become increasingly practical, and solemn. Till there she was.

‘A genuine Botticelli!’ He glanced over his shoulder, half expecting some unseen spectator might have overheard his corny remark.

‘My what?’ she giggled as he stood out of his dressing-gown.

The breasts of this elderly man — her lover — were developing relentlessly inside the fur bra.

‘Please,’ she screwed up her eyes, ‘must we have the lights — Basil?’ Mention of the sacred name seemed to add just that extra touch of obscenity.

As he switched off the lights, she had a blinding vision of that old sightless woman his mother: Mrs Hunter would surely smell out the whole circus, and to make it worse, keep her dignity.

You lay and felt Sir Basil limbering up: he might not be the artist you would have expected. Nobody is what you expect; and all great artists, you had read, suffer from nerves.

‘You don’ know what you’re denying me,’ he said in a sort of peeved voice, ‘insisting on darkness.’

She grunted. She couldn’t very well tell him her idea might breed more fruitfully in the dark, though Sir Basil had already shown his approval of ideas, anyway his own.

He was going on again a bit about his ‘Botterchelly Flora’.

She would have liked to ask Col about this ‘Botterchelly’. She was so uneducated.

‘What is it, darling? Did I hurt you? Aren’t you comfy?’ He spoke with a tenderness which should have delighted any blessed Daddy’s girl.

But she couldn’t play up to it. Instead, she choked what must have begun as a whimper, or turned it into a sigh.

Which appeared to satisfy her lover.

He was all over and around her: exploring. She felt she had stopped being a woman, to become a mountain range. She saw herself spread out, under a Technicolor sky, on a picture postcard: Greetings from the Sleeping Sister.

He seemed to be trying, unsuccessfully, to drink her eyes. Then he climbed down. He kissed the soles of her feet. It tickled.

‘What’s the matter? Don’t you like it?’ He too, laughed, though he didn’t sound amused.

Again, he was burning inside her ear. ‘Do you think you’ll be able to love me, Flora?’

‘What are we doing I’d like to know?’

‘Yes,’ he sighed, while undeceived.

Because she might have sounded cranky, and because she owed him something in return, she must make the effort to deceive: perhaps deception was what an actor expects of life.

So she put her arms around him; she must think about this child he was going to give her: the child who would be the embodiment of unselfish love. ‘Yes,’ she muttered. ‘I’ll love you all right. I’ve only got to get used to — the idea.’ And she crushed him with all her health and strength, as someone else had crushed, and mauled, and possessed her into a state of resentment.

Sir Basil seemed to like it. He grew young and excited. Even if he slit her open, she must love it for the sake of this golden child he was going to plant inside her.

So they were giving a great performance.

Whereas at the beginning his supremacy had been assured by ambition, now it was she who had become the guiding force. It was this desire to create something tangible, her only means of self-justification: as she must make others understand. I’m not oh God oh Col I’m not the fucking whore you think, she moaned the shapeless words into her lover’s mouth. Col?

‘Mmmm?’ The getter of her child this pseudo-husband drove the word back into her she had wanted oh Col Col ohh she wanted her own her flesh her child ohhhhh.

Sir Basil keeled over, finally, and slithered off her left flank. He lay beside her trying to show he wasn’t exhausted.

‘Have you,’ he panted, ‘everything you — need, Flora?’ He sounded anxious.

‘Yes.’

She felt becalmed rather than calm, let alone fulfilled. There was nothing she needed beyond the certainty — she might even settle for the faint hope — of conceiving. She couldn’t visualize her child except as a burst of distant gold. Would Col bash her up? She would have to tell him to his face because the letters she wrote made her want to puke, and on the phone she was at her dumbest.

Sir Basil Hunter was snoring. Although she would not have imagined she could fall asleep beside a man she didn’t know, and without his clothes, she must have snoozed to find herself walking it could only be with Col Pardoe amongst the green hummocks of Noamurra printed up large on a hoarding A NOAMURRA WELCOME TO MAN AND WIFE Col if it was it was his arm seemed pleased to confirm what he already knew.

Basil woke. The surrounding darkness must have reached its lowest depths of black. He drooled for the glass of Alka-Seltzer he would presently brew, not on account of a hangover, but because it was a drink which soothed and restored him in the middle of the night; he slept more innocently, he liked to believe, after gulping this pristine draught. He scrabbled after, and found his watch, only to remember his eyesight was no longer up to reading the time on its luminous face. So he groped farther, till bumping the lamp he realized he ought not to switch it on: there was this girl, the nurse he had gone to bed with. He could hear her beside him, breathing in her sleep.

He hankered after light more than before, to stare at the flesh which had given him such a surprising amount of unexpected pleasure; but he might not be dispassionate enough, and the nurse could return to her body and start bossing or abusing him.