Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

So he lay flickering his eyelids and thinking; there was no alternative in the trap in which he found himself. Oh Lord, if only he could kick her out and spread a bit; but in an effort to rearrange himself he found he had been brought closer, plastered to her ribs, almost part of the movement of her heart. He tried listening for signs of waking; but there weren’t any: if anything she was sinking deeper drawing him under with her a voice calling in his mind’s ear from a long way off BASIL his own slippery name nobody he could recognize not even the sex behind the voice only that it was persistent clearly articulated though faint. He shut it out at last by forcing himself full awake.

His thoughts began steeplechasing, spurt after spurt, a string of competitive images. He looked his best in sombre, fur-trimmed robes: that photograph of Alvaro, the one from the Third Act. Nobody could deny you made a fine figure (in fact, there is always some bastard aiming a banana skin, but dammit). Fly back as soon as it is practically possible, and revive Malatesta perhaps, or The Master of Santiago. On the whole they preferred your Alvaro: an austere, destructive, while self-destroying soul — a noble inquisitor. Yes, revive The Master, with its shorter, cheaper cast; woman’s part not big enough for her to think she can rob the kitty or throw a tantrum. Impress anybody with some of those lines — and your voice: God neither wishes nor seeks anything. He is eternal calm. It is in wishing nothing that you will come to mirror God.

Oh God, if only he could have switched the light on: he was driven to speak the remembered lines, address Alvaro in the mirror; but the damn girl; and on this narrow bed he couldn’t tear himself free of the adhesive skin. He was stuck with her.

So he sank back. What he had never been able to understand was how he had moved them in certain scenes night after night while wanting and getting everything, the whole jackpot, for himself, and not believing in ‘God’ Every night the faces stirred, the breathing rose out of the darkness. Only the author was unmoved, a cantankerous, hostile Frenchman arriving unannounced to catch you out. When the critics had more than hinted that his play was corn. Some of the lines were; everything depended on the voice which spoke them. But the Frenchman couldn’t forgive himself his own corn, so he wanted to hold you responsible.

It was becoming the nurse’s play. Rolling violently, she was trying to throw off her dream, get her lines out. ‘Donthigkbecolsidoancallyoudarligidoanfeeloralway — sfelt.’ Well, you would have expected her to love somebody, probably the whole pack: this Botticelli, not so much vulgarized as pop slanted.

He was unable to resist stroking the surface of her dream. The hot skin responded to his fingers without her waking. He felt a bit guilty for doing her so easily, and considering what she had given in return: she had made him see and hear himself again, moving with authority under the weight of his winter-toned, fur-trimmed robes. Perhaps this Alvaro was a little more in love, sensually, with his Mariana than the text demanded. Not an easy part to cast, herself always too much the sheath to his sword, particularly in that last duet:

MARIANA. O rose of gold! Face of a lion! Face of honey! At your feet! My forehead on the earth before Him whom I feel!

ALVARO. No, rise up higher! Rise up more swiftly! Drink and let me drink of you! Rise yet more!

MARIANA. I am drinking and being drunk of, and I know that all is well.

Sister Thing — Flora Manhood — was stirring. He, too. Without her knowing, she was filling him with more than pleasure, poor girl: positive joy. He had to impress it on her whether he woke her or not. She gave no formal sign of waking, but this time they were more gently and completely lovers.

What if he did fall for some pretty, healthy, but ordinary girl like this? Would her love for him survive his bitches of friends? Would he be turned by her perpetual clangers into a pillar of sullenness? Come to think of it he had never been ‘adored’ by any but unattractive girls who came to the performance night after night, and hung about the stage door blushing through chlorosis or acne; or by some elderly, often deformed woman usually without means, whose permanent, near stall was her one shameless extravagance, in which she sat devouring with her eyes, her open dentures, perving on a codpiece. Esmé Gilchrist (E. Gilchrist she signed herself) invited him to tea at Islington, and he went because at that age he was still so incredibly innocent, and — she must have guessed — shockable. She received him in a lace whatyoume — teagowns in those days — and hoped to excite him with her truss. As a bonus, shit on the sheet. He got away so quickly the knocker could hardly have stopped knocking by the time he reached the bus stop.

What he had always longed for, he now knew, was to be loved by some such normal, lovely, insensitive but trusting hunk of a girl as this Flora Nightingale beside him: he had done her twice and felt progressively younger. Then why Alvaro? at one level a rewarding part for an elderly — let’s say ‘mature’, actor of voice and presence; at another, the mouthpiece of asceticism preaching its withering gospel from the foothills of tragedy. As he climbed higher into a rarefied atmosphere, he breathed more deeply to satisfy his youthful lungs. It occurred to him: only an old man should aspire to, and would be capable of enduring, the fissions of Lear, but an old man with the strength of youth. So he paused, on a ledge as it were, to huddle closer to this warm girl who had received him unprotesting for the second time.

He began to feel lonely at last, on his narrow ledge, and thought he would wake his companion: have to sooner or later; probably shamming anyway. ‘Darling,’ he addressed in turn, an ear, her mouth, each of her nipples, his arms as deep in her flesh as wire in the bark of a tree after a long relationship, ‘I have a feeling we’re starting something that’s — most important — for both of us.’ If he had resisted writing a play for himself to act in, it was because it might have sounded something like this.

‘Mmmm?’ She was too sleepy; or not so sleepy that the resident crowbar of her will could not prise her apart from her lover. She turned her back, her moody rump. Was she corrupt? Nurses — when you come to think of it. And when he had wanted to worship at the altars of health, purity, innocence; to lay his head on a pair of breasts which sympathized with the hunger of his thoughts.

Anger doused the rosy flame he had gone to so much trouble coaxing. He had nothing, or comparatively little, against this poor cow, who had simply flopped from running backwards and forwards at the beck and call of Elizabeth Hunter throughout the afternoon, then flogging half the night. No, he must look farther for somebody to blame, farther even than Mitty Jacka expecting him to find the money for the spectacular suicide she was devising for him. Look right back to the original grudge. I was never a natural mother — I couldn’t feed. But that — you see, darling — hasn’t deprived you of — of nourishment. She had told him, by God, without his asking. And doled out a cheque for five thousand — dollars, not pounds. Again only a wretched nibble.

He dragged the sheet up, tight, sawing at his throat, then settled down to hugging his resentment. Forgetful of his love, he must have rocked his anger to sleep.

In the cold awfulness of this fur-trimmed robe feelings unshutter only for brilliant glimpses watching the old painted skin give its last gasps through every frightened pore as well as the purple cupid’s bow no need to use the dagger in your sleeve words are fatal if pointed enough money is life while there is life left otherwise it is time to die die then she can’t protest against the truth only use her automatic bellows on the not even half-life she is giving up for life for say The Master if Alvaro’s own attitudes are sterile that is only to make a play to forego the wrack the storm and put buggered to the Jacka’s version of suicide by the unplayed I.