Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

Sir Basil turned, partly to avoid the nurse’s eyes, partly to pick with a finger nail at the worst of the lobster shreds nagging at him from between his teeth. He too was oppressed by the squalor to which their surroundings had been reduced: disordered tables, crumpled napkins, lipstuck glasses, the skeletons and shells of fish. Only the party of executives, silenced by business still in hand, continued guzzling food and drink. The sweat gathering in enormous balls round Basil’s eyes was almost ready to fall; if it did he was afraid Sister de Santis might notice it bounce.

So he wrenched himself round, and still avoiding the patch of silence in his audience, began to declaim, ‘There, you see — this is where we must concentrate our attention — on all this which was given to us to take pride in, to cherish;’ at the same time indicating with what had become his jewelled glove, embracing with the sweep of his heavy, fur-trimmed sleeve, a vision of sky and sea, towers and domes, conjured up for his wimpled queen.

But he no longer had the power (he had known his delivery temporarily affected before this, by physical exhaustion, indigestion, mental strain, or quite simply, if he over-moistened his vocal cords). Now he was sucking on his words, audibly, though he would have liked to think it was one of the businessmen at work on a lobster claw behind him. The sun had gone in besides, behind a drift of dirty cloud. And once your vision is withdrawn from you, there remain the lapping shallows, the littered sand, one competing with the other for the sludge to which the human spirit can sense itself rendered: an aimless bobbing of corks which have served their purpose, and scum, and condoms, and rotting fruit, and rusted tins, and excrement.

‘Yes, isn’t it glorious?’ murmured Sister de Santis from memory.

But she was too conscious of the wicker-sheathed demijohn floating at a drunken, slanted level a little way out. To recognize those purple stains round the mouth pained her more than anything else.

When Sir Basil Hunter began dragging on the tablecloth, practically shouting, ‘What’s that? That filthy object — the black thing!’ hysterically for a man.

Then she caught sight of it: something black drenched swollen and obscene rolling slightly in imitation of life somewhat like the full waterskins Colonel Askew pointed out the Arabs were holding as the liner sailed through the Canal.

The thing was slowly washed or rolled on to the sand almost directly in front of where they were sitting. It was the corpse of a dog, a not-too-well pickled Labrador. A sick stench was rising out of the natural smells of salt and weed.

Sir Basil appeared to take it personally. ‘Isn’t this the ultimate in filth? This barbarism! But only what can be expected,’ he screeched, like an old parrot she thought, its tongue stuck out, hard and blue; like — oh no, his mother caught in what could be a seizure, at the point of aiming her deadliest insult, or curse.

Unlike Sir Basil, Sister de Santis was not immediately shocked by the drowned dog; she was more passive of course, and less articulate; while most of her life she had been personally, though objectively, involved with the physical aspects of death. Till now a nameless anguish began seeping, and she put her handkerchief to her mouth, to stanch it. She could do nothing about the smell: this continued penetrating, and would probably haunt her nostrils, cling to her clothes for ever; or the gelatinous sockets where the dog’s eyes had been: they were staring at her so intently they gave the mask a live expression.

Sir Basil got up as though meaning to go in search of the waiter and ask for the bill, but the waiter was already approaching, carrying a saucer with the bill on it. Sir Basil passed him, walking on as straight a line as his somnambulant condition allowed, and disappeared at the back of the restaurant.

Only then Sister de Santis noticed the wire eating into the dog’s neck.

After putting down the saucer, the waiter grinned, and said, ‘Never know what next! Last month they fished out a woman. I been looking for the case in the papers, but nothing come up yet. It adds interest when you’ve taken part in it like.’

Sister de Santis had been sitting staring a lifetime at the strangled dog when a man dressed in eroded jersey and washed-out pants rolled above the knees, seized the tail, and dragged the corpse farther down the beach.

‘Good on yer, Joey!’ the waiter called. ‘Takin’ on the undertakin’, eh?’ He followed for some distance, flicking the air with a stained napkin.

While two little boys ran squealing, ploughing the sand, pitching pebbles at the carcase. One of them caught up and gave it a kick with his bare toes. But fell back afterwards.

The businessmen were all applauding, though what, they might not have been able to tell: they were too full, their faces running over with sweat and melted butter. One of them seemed to imagine the sea air had tarnished his ex-service badge: he had raised a sleeve to his buttonhole, and was rubbing the brass with exaggerated, yet completely detached, solicitude.

Basil returned. A tautening of the skin had dismissed the blur from the edges of his face; his hair was grooved, steely, again perfect; his clothes had resumed the careless worldliness of an important man who grants interviews to journalists.

He clapped his hands together, looking at her whimsically, when it might have been his intention to convey forcefulness. ‘We must go!’ he announced. ‘Oh yes, the bill — the bill!’

He plumped down (none of the restaurant chairs seemed too stable) and dragged the wallet out of his pocket. Distantly she noticed it as a beautiful crocodile, monogrammed affair, and no dearth of money.

Basil doled the notes out, then hesitated, mumbling and fumbling.

‘What is it?’ she asked, leaning forward from her side.

‘The tip. I can never work out the percentage.’

‘Just like Colonel Askew,’ she consoled; ‘he could never work it out either.’

Basil offered a handful of coins from which his nurse, kindly and gently, extracted the necessary.

‘It’s so much easier with dollars,’ Sister de Santis reminded.

‘Yes. One has to admit it’s easier with dollars.’ Perhaps this was what he had needed all along: to be nursed by some such competent but impersonal creature.

Both were rehabilitated, or so it seemed on the drive back.

Till Sister de Santis, remembering, looked at her practical, man’s wristwatch, and began to murmur, ‘How late it is! For me at least.’ Unexpectedly for someone so placid, she was twitching. ‘I ought to be resting. My patient.’

It was the performance again, he realized; she had his sympathy.

He tried to console her from his own experience of life. ‘Well, yes — I know. We cling to our principles — arrive two hours before curtain-up — go into a trance — get the smell of the greasepaint in our nostrils. Then, sometimes, you may have been held up rather delightfully. You run in at the last moment, make a few passes at your cheeks, go on stage and — take wing as never before.’

He could not see whether she understood: she was too self-absorbed probably; and he driving: nothing mechanical ever came naturally to him.

They got into a traffic jam between ‘Santa Monica’ on one side and ‘Key West’ on the other. The nurse began to sway, to rock, to grunt. The hold-up allowed him to look at her.

It must have triggered her off. ‘I can’t help it!’ she burst out. ‘It was very funny, wasn’t it?’

‘What?’ The stink had risen again; the wire was cutting into the throat: which probably only he had seen.

‘The man falling through his chair!’ She was rocking beside him in the stationary car. ‘I thought it was a scream!’ It went on echoing in her memory screama screama: it was Lily Lake chambermaid at Brown’s Hotel to whom she had sent post-cards till several years after the replies had stopped coming; there were so few people to write to.