Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

Oh God, ‘anaesthetizing’ was the more likely word; as he resisted the isolation to which she would have liked to introduce him, under a colourless sky. He tried to remember how it felt just to have arrived in a great, unknown city, but couldn’t; or did, and wanted to reject this momentary vision of himself in a cold, empty, darkened theatre, looking for an identity to replace the one he had lost.

Sir Basil Hunter shifted on his iron chair from one uncomfortable position to another. He must listen to the woman, if not with interest, professionally. There had been that immensely turgid, endlessly melodious Ethelyne Perry who had played opposite him in a piece he let them talk him into, at the Duke of York’s; it must have been about the year Sister de Santis arrived in London with her colonel. (She hadn’t mentioned visits to the theatre.) In the second act there was a scene with Ethelyne on a bench; wasn’t there just: ten good minutes every performance of the fortnight’s run he had concentrated on Ethelyne while she lowed her way through her monologue (she was married to the management) himself so tensed with interest it was a wonder his body hadn’t broken up, scattering his irrelevant thoughts around her feet.

Almost as melodious, quite as stately and monotonous as Ethelyne Perry, the de Santis woman was forcing him to give the same kind of performance now. ‘What did you do when you returned to London after your holiday in the country?’

She looked at him with an expression of surprise. ‘I came back here.’ Her throat knotted, she appeared startled, as though it might not have occurred to her that life offers alternatives.

They were saved by a waiter in grubby mess jacket presenting a tray with their two martinis.

‘Gin fumigates,’ Sir Basil informed his guest somewhat sternly; ‘it blows away any night thoughts. That’s why there’s nothing like a dry martini before lunch.’

She was not sure how she ought to react to his remark: the self she acknowledged could not have shared her beliefs with him, but she seemed to have been parted from that real self on entering the hotel garden.

Because the glass was filled too full, she gulped quickly at her drink’s teetering, colourless surface. ‘Isn’t it a bit strong?’

‘So it ought to be. That’s what you ordered. Dry. Personally I feel vermouth is only an excuse for gin.’ His knowingness appalled him.

She had only mildly complained; her drink was too agreeable: perfumed and cold; the scorched leaves of the plane trees had begun to clap; lemon and alternately, greenish screens, were being slid one behind the other; a sudden more emphatic burst of light suggested that louvres had clattered open to admit it.

‘I expect you’re right,’ she murmured; the unbelievable circumstances justified her giving the matter serious thought.

In an upper window of what was probably a residential overlooking the hotel garden, a woman had appeared. All of her shouted for Basil’s attention: the plastic curlers in the whitened hair; the cleavage in her plump form above the pink chenille; and the feather duster, more a toy, as variegated as the curlers studding her formally informal head. The fat woman began camping with her duster round the window sash. She hummed a few broodily self-conscious bars, winked once or twice at this man in the situation he was preparing for himself in the garden, and let it be understood she was on for a joke, the dirtier the better.

Basil Hunter might have responded surreptitiously if it had not been for the flash in which he saw that the pink woman took it for granted he belonged to her level of vulgarity.

As he did; at any rate for the moment, in the presence of this other, subdued creature unconscious of the pantomime going on above her head. So much so, the nurse smiled at him just then with such innocent gratitude and pleasure he bundled his commonness out of sight. (Anyway there are some parts, important ones, you can’t hope to play without a touch of common.)

‘I have an idea,’ he said. ‘I’ll buy us another drink, then drive you out to Watson’s Bay. There’s a place where we can lunch — not brilliant, but not impossible — and the weather’s with us.’

She said she had not intended; she ought to rest before her night duty. -She had never felt so undecided, powerless.

He had gone to order the second round and she knew this was as she really wanted. She must not forget the reason for her coming was to plead for Mrs Hunter. She would speak soon, not the moment he reappeared, but after a decent pause, before they left. The light predicted that she would sit beside the sea, eating — it didn’t matter what: light, and by glimpses, when she dared, a face.

What, she wondered, would Papa have thought of Basil Hunter? She almost had not known another man, excepting doctors, whom she externalized as colleagues, and patients: the human beings to whom she had dedicated herself. But never men. Unless during the last years of his life, when Enrico de Santis had crumbled, and she, no longer his daughter or his nurse, had been united with him in a dangerously rarefied climate where love and suffering mingle.

Distracted by her thoughts, Sister de Santis decided it might be wiser not to look at Sir Basil, just returned from ordering the drinks. She found herself staring instead, from under the brim of her hat, at his ankle. And that was worse. She had never before considered a man’s ankle, or only as bones and ligaments. Now she was fascinated, if also disturbed, by what should have been no more than another ankle. But this one displayed, besides the silken elegance you might expect in a man of wealth and taste, a cruel menace.

Sir Basil sat waggling his ankle. Could he have been conscious of the effect he was creating? No, she thought, it isn’t possible; nobody, except probably Mrs Hunter, knows the effect they have on others; it is fortunate, or sad.

‘An actor in a play — does he allow himself to be carried away by his emotions?’ she asked in a desperate burst of what might have been inspiration, or again it might not.

At least it was not what he had expected; it dragged him back from his distant thoughts. ‘Of course he’s got to feel the situation. But he mustn’t drown in it. That’s where his technique saves him — leaves him free to speak and breathe — to convey.’ Just how much was he conveying to this nurse, he wondered, and how much did she know already?

‘Much the same as in nursing: there’s the question of how far to become involved.’ She tried deliberately to make it sound matter of fact; then immediately hoped she had not succeeded.

Sir Basil did not allow her to see; he remained moodily distant: an assured, handsome man.

In the circumstances it was a relief to be holding the second drink; in fact she was so relieved she was reduced to clumsiness: some of the fumigatory gin slopped over the edge of the glass, and she drank too deep to hide her confusion.

‘What do you know about theatre?’ He seemed to be looking at her intently; till she realized he wasn’t at all, and perhaps hadn’t been from the beginning.

‘Practically nothing,’ she had to admit, in spite of a desire to please. ‘What I mean to say is — I don’t go very often.’ One half of her lumbered with a heavy sincerity she knew to be her own, the other was feeling its way into a groove faintly remembered, in which she hoped to glide with the same aluminium brightness as some of the women at those dinner parties Elizabeth Hunter had given during her convalescence, in the first months of their relationship. ‘I adore the theatre,’ she heard herself mouthe. ‘But it isn’t always possible. Sometimes to a matinée. I like to see something light. To make me laugh. There’s so much unhappiness in the world;’ which is what they say, she recalled.