Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

He was looking through her, and at once she wanted to confess: oh no, this isn’t what I think; the words are borrowed. But because you never can, and he would not have believed anyway, she could only close her eyes and drink up the bitter dregs from her glass. A tenderness she might have conveyed petered out in a shiver as she stood the glass on the gritty surface of the metal table.

He too, had finished. She would not have dared chew the lemon peel left behind in the gin shallows, but Sir Basil Hunter could and did. More, he could afford to spit out the last shreds of pith on the surrounding gravel.

His eyes watered, and he attempted a comic face to disguise a nausea of words and sensations he could feel rising in him. ‘I’m glad you’re not of the theatre,’ he was saying. ‘It’s seldom one talks to anybody who isn’t. It’s seldom one talks,’ he added with what, for that instant, he recognized as sincerity deserted by technique; his voice had an uncontrolled, an unregretted wobble.

His confession made her feel duller, more ignorant, farther removed. When she tried expressing sympathy, it sounded to her like a low moan.

What he was going to say, he was not sure, but had to say it. ‘All my life I have wanted — needed to be of the theatre — even before I became an actor — when I was a mere boy here in Australia, taken to an occasional panto or musical comedy. I only began to breathe, to live, the first time I got inside a part — only a few lines, mind you — in a play. And outside the theatre, there was always the gossip, the bitchery, the question of billing — lights! Your name in lights — after the physical drudgery — this was the summum bonum: an electric crown. The perks are far less gratifying — the accolade, for instance — because it’s like falling off a log after the blood and sweat of acting. Suck up to a few personages, give a charity performance or two, alter your tempo, your thinking a little — and you’re home! From now on, you are the one who is sucked up to. Till you reach — let’s call it “the age of disgust”—when you can feel something taking place in your metabolism, and a change comes over the expression of other people’s faces, and you want to reject the whole business of — of acting: all its illusions and your own presumption — not to say spuriousness.’

Mary de Santis would have liked to think he was not serious, but he was, she saw. She could not bear to witness this second death of the only man she had ever loved. This time she was unable to offer even a needle. She sat looking at Sir Basil Hunter’s silken ankle.

‘To reject,’ he said, ‘before you are rejected.’

He was horrified by what he had spewed up. Though only a lymphatic nurse was to any extent aware, he might have been speaking in a dressing-room full of pros: the smell of greasepaint, the authentic gusts of superstition were overpoweringly present. For a moment he wondered whether he ought to suspect the vacuous though probably innocent eyes of his actual audience.

‘Well,’ he said, slapping her on the knee with what he hoped would be interpreted as joie de vivre, not brutality, ‘aren’t I supposed to be taking you out to lunch?’

Sister de Santis gasped, scrambling up, dropping, then quickly retrieving her navy handbag so as not to give him the trouble of forestalling her. ‘Oh yes, that will be fun!’ she seemed to remember the ladies at the dinner parties, as she and Sir Basil scarified the coarse gravel, cannoning off each other once, under the shabby plane trees. ‘Aren’t those plaster birds ghastly!’ she heard her dinner party voice, followed by a nurse’s giggle: that of a young girl just down from Kempsey or Coonamble.

‘Execrable!’ Basil Hunter hid his half-heartedness in pronunciation.

Glancing up, he caught sight of the chenille woman leaning on her sill. The light splintered on her multi-coloured helmet. She was looking as though she had proved a point.

Perhaps from having already exposed themselves, and unwisely, Mary de Santis and Basil Hunter were for the most part silent on their drive along the foreshore in the rented car. The nurse would have expected something more streamlined, more spectacular, to further the legend of a star actor. Then instinctively dismissing her pretentious thought, she remarked on the ‘glorious day’; and felt miserable for the glazed post-card she was substituting for subtler glories experienced by a different light.

Any subtlety on this journey was soaked up by the glare of sun off brick, as on their arrival, what should have remained primitive forms, timber surfaces untouched except by the crackle of age and a patina of weather, were overlaid with painted slogans and scuffed posters. At least the sea was unspoilt, but only as an expanse, or in its pretty lapping round the stilts of a bleached jetty; along the skirting of sand and detritus which passed for a beach an earlier tide had hemmed scallops of oil scum.

Basil Hunter asked his guest to grab a table while he organized a bottle of wine from the pub round the corner. So she sat and waited at one of the tables on the pavement in front of the little restaurant. Perhaps I am the one to blame for anything dull or disappointing in the landscape, she tried to persuade herself; a muzziness from unaccustomed drink could be clouding her vision, and was certainly blurring her thought; though she could not be held responsible for the actual litter on the beach, only in the background of her mind her half-silted intention of pleading for Mrs Hunter. She roused herself. She would speak of course; it was just that the auspicious moment had not yet occurred.

Basil returned with a green bottle. It was wearing a chill, and looked a very special wine, at least beside her memory of the wicker-covered demijohns Papa used to buy from a compatriot, and which left those purple stains on the cloth under the trellis in Marrickville.

‘I took a chance and picked a dry one, seeing how we started dry.’ He was not convinced his voice disguised the canker of gloom eating at false heartiness: wine bought over the counter from the Bottle Department of a pub could only turn out to be cat piss; and deeper still, there lurked the continued mystery of why he had invited the nurse.

But Sister de Santis, it seemed, was finding everything agreeable. After the waiter had uncorked the bottle, and she had put her lips to the doubtful wine, she looked at him and composed them in a smile. ‘Delicious, isn’t it?’

The word alone made him wince; he did not know how he would match her genteel composure.

‘Why don’t you take off your hat?’ he surprised himself saying; and again detecting a brutal tone in what was more a command than a suggestion, decided to play it lighter. ‘Here we are in the much publicized outdoors — no formalities — no cares.’ His chair grated on the concrete. ‘And I’ll be able to see you better, shan’t I?’

Taken unawares, Sister de Santis glanced round quickly: certainly everyone else lunching at the little alfresco tables was hatless; but her unconformity and his cheek could not have been the sole causes of her expression of guilt and embarrassment. She was probably one of those subservient souls always afraid they have not spread the gratitude thick enough.

Whatever it was, the nurse recovered her moral balance, took off her forbidding hat, meekly it would have appeared if she had not immediately shaken her head and disclosed the curve of her throat: it was too unconscious a gesture, and too noble he realized, for meekness. Once more he was disturbed by the confused motives in their being seated where they were on the edge of this rubbishy beach.

‘That’s better. You’re right,’ she said with gentle command of her voice. ‘One feels free.’ She smiled with a candour which threatened to bring to light shortcomings he hoped he had well and truly sunk in the depths of his being.