Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

As for Mary de Santis, she had recovered faith in her own purpose, not through the company of this amiable, if also occasionally unnerving man, but from joy in a life which still stretched ahead of her, for which the sun assaulting a barricade of cloud, the steamboat tooting towards the jetty, and a launchload of children dangling their hands in the transparent wavelets as they moved parallel with the shore, appeared as affirmations.

While Basil remembered with surprise his easily satisfied sensuality of how many nights ago, his ‘love’ for his Primavera, even a fantasy of marriage with a young and healthy nurse. Such illusions as he had about her colleague were scarcely of the same kind: he would have recoiled from touching this statue of a goddess.

The waiter brought the food they had ordered: a rather nasty looking mess of scallops for Sister de Santis and grilled lobster for Sir Basil Hunter.

Sir Basil sighed. ‘Looks as though I’m the greedy one.’

But Sister de Santis seemed satisfied.

One of two women seated at a table nearby nudged the other.

The nurse glanced down at her front; or perhaps it was the fork she was using; then she blushed on realizing she was lunching with a famous actor.

‘Tell me,’ she said, raising her voice to the level of the occasion, ‘which is your favourite part, Sir Basil?’

‘Oh Lord, my favourite part?’

She knew she had pronounced it as ‘port’ in her effort to make conversation with Sir Basil Hunter. The blue-haired ladies at the nearby table chafed their rings and laughed. Everyone was laughing. A party of six or seven businessmen had moved from the pub on the corner and were descending on the table waiting for them. The men were laughing. Their skins oozed. Glassy-eyed, teeth bared, the executives were looking around for something on which to whet their wit or their appetites.

Sir Basil Hunter groaned, and struggled with his lobster. What to tell the woman? He had been a riot as Horner, though you might not believe it today.

‘Surely there’s some part — or play — which gives you special pleasure in looking back?’ Sister de Santis was gently determined.

A curse on all nurses!

In her abstraction, wondering how she might rouse her patient’s interest, the nurse looked full in the teeth of one of the cheery businessmen, and he closed his mouth as though he had swallowed a bad oyster.

‘There’s Lear, I suppose,’ Sir Basil offered, God knows why: he had not got there with Lear.

‘Oh yes-Lear!’ She made it warm and bright: Lear might have been a cousin she hadn’t met for years, but for whom she would always have a soft spot. ‘I’ve never seen it, though.’ Too high for a contralto, and aggressive, but she had to compete against the laughter, the general noise.

Still standing round the table reserved for them, the businessmen were having difficulty sorting themselves out. They were all drunk, it seemed.

The blue-haired women had got into some kind of menopausal huddle. ‘You sit tight, I tell you, dear. It’ll pass in a year or two. He’ll come round. He’s probably going through the same thing. Men do you know.’ The eyes of the menopausal ladies were focused on their own plight.

‘You must have read it, though — haven’t you? Lear?’ Sir Basil shouted.

‘Yes,’ she shouted back; then corrected herself. ‘No. I didn’t succeed in finishing. There was a lot I couldn’t understand.’

She was honest enough, poor thing. He was the dishonest one. And a bloody superficial Lear.

When a brief crunch began, followed by a positive crash. In seating himself, one of the businessmen had gone through the ricketty chair. Every one of his party roared. Still embraced by a bentwood skeleton, the victim sat heaving on the concrete, a vast purple bladder palpitating with mirth and tears.

Sister de Santis heard herself explode while half-glancing at the blue-haired ladies to ask their permission. It was too late. Her example had put them against laughter: their flaked lips were working restrainedly against their teeth as they stared out over the solemn sea from above the bones of the fish they had devoured. One of the ladies was massaging a pearl ear-ring.

Sister de Santis was appalled by the unlikelihood of her own behaviour. But laughed. It was the wine. It was not all that funny. But was. She vaguely wondered whether she should feel sorry for the purple man flopping around and scratching his wreckage against the concrete. Somebody would pick him up. So she continued laughing. Till plunging her mouth in her glass, she drank a great, choking draught. The wine had not lost its cool, but tasted more insipid than before. She went on laughing, for nothing funny, merely settling whimpering down. Exhausted.

She was shaken by what she had in her without having realized. ‘I’m so sorry. But it was very funny,’ she protested guiltily to her host, when perhaps it had never been that.

‘Yes, I expect it was funny,’ Sir Basil answered; he had spilt some barbecue sauce on his thigh.

Distressed by the way things had gone she finished her wine. ‘Tell me, won’t you? about the play,’ she sighed, ‘about King Lear.’

As if their small frail table would have allowed either of them to rise to it: his hollow lobster was battering the plate; the remains of her scallops encouraged his worst memory of a Channel crossing.

Welladay, Sir Basil broke bread; he drank the lees of the wine (unfortunately he had a head for it, at any rate today, whereas the nurse, drunk or sober, could be absolved for her innocence). ‘Lear—’ he had got it out from amongst the shreds of lobster with which his teeth were stuck, ‘nobody has ever entirely succeeded as Lear, because I don’t think he can be played by an actor — only by a gnarled, authentic man, as much a storm-tossed tree as flesh.’ He looked to see whether he had dared too much, but encountered fleshy scallops of eyelids. ‘So he can probably never be played.’ Sir Basil hit the lobster shell with his fork. ‘Blake could have, perhaps. Or Swift.’ That didn’t mean you wouldn’t have another go at it yourself.

He tried to decide how much the nurse had gathered, and saw her swaying, very slightly, above her shambles.

‘I see,’ she said, solemnly, thickly.

At no stage had she looked more opaque: a giant scallop, and raw.

He felt suddenly maddened: not by this heavy woman, not even at her worst, putting on a social voice for the occasion, or giggling and shrieking when the business bum landed smack on the concrete; no, what infuriated him was his own worst, or what she had seen of it. Mercifully not all. She would have to be profoundly innocent, if not downright mad, to suspect him of hoping to commit so much as a discreet murder.

But his uneasiness increased as she continued brooding opposite. Perhaps she was preparing to accuse him.

In fact, Sister de Santis was accusing herself of her own fall from grace which had begun with the arrival of Mrs Hunter’s son. She would scarcely have believed she had given way to lust, if she had not found as proof, those tears in her clothes, scratches in her flesh; there were times when her breasts, becoming snouted, were still pointed at her, when all desire for this man was dead. She would have liked to substitute pity, which is one aspect of pure love. But between Basil and her soul’s eye, hovered the face of her pitiful father. Whom she had desired to love in some way never made clear to her during his lifetime, only recently in the line of Basil Hunter’s jaw, the veins in his temples, the bones of a silken ankle. Her whole vocation of selflessness was threatened if she offered this man her pity, grown as it was on decomposed lust. Now too, in the context of slovenliness and apathy presented by the half-deserted restaurant, she knew she would never find the strength or opportunity to bear witness to her true faith and plead for the one who was also, incidentally, Elizabeth Hunter.