Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

The visitors were still meekly disengaging themselves from the car, when the stairway reaching to what looked more a continuous balcony than the veranda of the stilted house, was shaken by a woman’s descent. She came thumping barefoot down in a cheap faded cotton frock which did not detract from the chatelaine’s authority. Dorothy would not have recognized Helen Warming: she had let herself go; her hands had been coarsened by menial grind, her body made slommacky by childbearing. Then, for an instant, the little girl looked out of the fulfilled woman, and quailed, if smilingly, beneath the prefect’s stare, before the woman resumed control, and flung on towards her objective.

‘Dear Mrs Hunter! How brave of you to take the risk! It’s only a primitive humpy — as I warned you.’

It was not the pretentious gush it might have sounded, even Dorothy was forced to recognize. Helen almost swept Mother away, after which the two women embraced with a tenderness approved by husband and children.

The girl child told, ‘That chain she’s got — with the tur- kwoys— she says I can wear tonight.’

But personal honours were irrelevant beside the family triumph in having come by a living breathing object of worship and source of oracular wisdom. With a twinge Dorothy de Lascabanes realized she had been invited, not because the Warmings had wanted to be kind, but because they adored her mother.

A galling discovery was further inflamed after the devotees had bundled their idol up the creaking stairway, and sat her in the room prepared for her visit. ‘Do you think you’ll be comfortable, Mrs Hunter? The shutters are a bit stiff. Look, these are biscuits in case you’re hungry in the night. And books. Have we remembered matches? Don’t touch the biscuits, John. We’ve only got the old kero lamps. John! Please! I still think oil lamps give the only truly benign light. Cleaning them’s a drag, but once you get into your stride it’s like saying the Lord’s Prayer. Jack, darling, why don’t you lay Mrs Hunter’s bag on the stool? Sara, nobody likes being mauled. Oh dear, poor Mrs Hunter!’ Helen stooped to give an extra hug.

The fractured light in the shuttered room gave back to Mother’s hair the aureole it must have worn in youth, of what again appeared as palest, purest gold. Her eyes, at their deepest bluest, expressed the resignation of one receiving her due.

Till she said with some severity, ‘There’s something I can’t allow if I’m to spend a fortnight as your guest. All this “Mrs Hunter”! My name is “Elizabeth”. Nothing less. I detest diminutives.’

The Warmings were variously enraptured.

Somebody had stuck a bunch of flowers in a pottery vase, and stood it on the chest. The Name insisted on knowing who had gathered her nosegay.

‘I did,’ said Sara.

‘We did,’ John corrected.

‘How thoughtful of you; and how clever to know nothing would please me better than natives.’

‘They’re all there are,’ John confessed.

Elizabeth Hunter ignored him. ‘In whatever other ways we fall short, we have our native flowers: there’s nothing subtler — nobler; and getting up, she advanced on the erect bunch to rearrange it.

Unable to endure any more, Dorothy had stepped outside on to the veranda. From where she was standing she might have been on board a ship, one which would never weigh anchor. Heat had bleached the colour from the sea, and reduced the coastline to a dead green, except at a point to the south where it rose into a curious cliff layered in reds and yellows. The cliff glared back at her ferociously.

‘What is it, Dorothy? Is anything wrong?’

‘No. Nothing to speak of. Well, I do have a wretched head.’ She turned a wince into a smile. ‘I’ll take something I’ve got with me.’

Helen would no doubt have been prepared to dredge up a generous ration of the sympathy which seemed to be her stock in trade, but Dorothy feared to run the risk of accepting it, with a white sun staring at her, and those angry cliffs.

Behind the shutters of her narrow cabin of a room, after the tablet had begun to take effect, she was to some extent soothed. She lay wondering at the helicopter pilot with the bird-watching wife, and Helen Warming’s husband in that rank-smelling stockman’s shirt he had worn to meet them; she wondered at the law which decrees that almost everybody shall desire some other human being. She could not have desired the lean, gauche young pilot, or for that matter, any man she had known or could imagine, least of all Hubert de Lascabanes, who had been her husband, and still was in the eyes of God.

Mother could be heard at a distance charming her hosts with an impersonation of the character generally accepted as Elizabeth Hunter, involved for her present purpose in some mock-dramatic situation. Through the cracks in the floorboards the threads of children’s voices were interwoven in conspiracy. All always conspire. None so secretively as waves. But you were laid to sleep in them at last.

And woke, not refreshed, but the despair wrung out, the children clattering chattering along the veranda outside. The room had darkened by now; it smelt of stuffiness, damp sheets, and what was probably dry rot.

She ought to face the children.

When she had touched herself up, she went outside, and smiled at them, and said, ‘I believe you have something to tell me.’

They looked embarrassed, not to say frightened, and she realized she must have put it badly; mutual understanding did exist at another level, if the children would admit to it.

She tried to improve her position. ‘I heard you underneath the house. Playing?’ She looked at them, not too significantly she hoped.

The boy was the first to respond, looking away, his voice rapt for the scene he saw or was dreaming. ‘There was somebody murdered here in the beginning. They were wrecked on the island. The blacks killed the men and made the woman their slave.’

Though it was hardly night, Sara was already wearing the promised gold-and-turquoise chain. ‘They undressed this woman,’ she said, ‘till she was quite naked.’

‘It’s supposed to have happened down there.’ John pointed with a wishbone gesture at the striated cliffs; his arm must have been double-jointed.

Sara said, ‘But we think it was here,’ stamping with bare foot on the veranda boards.

‘Why?’ asked Dorothy Hunter, not intending to question their belief: she hoped they would allow her to share their myth.

‘Because — underneath the house — there’s the smell of dead bodies, sort of,’ John explained.

Sara added, ‘There’s the oyster shells the blacks left.’

The children began to giggle, but not on account of the murders: she suspected they were laughing at the person who was a princess, and it made her unhappy again; she wanted to be one of them.

While everything was in the balance, she looked out along the coast where the light had dwindled, and saw a man approaching. He had beached a dinghy, evidently. He was wearing no more than a pair of faded scarlet trunks.

‘Do you see that man?’ she asked the children. ‘Who is he?’

‘That’s Professor Pehl.’

‘He’s staying with us.’

‘He’s — Norwegian.’

‘They invited him, but I don’t think they like him much.’

‘They felt they had to ask him.’

Dorothy looked in the direction of the unwanted Norwegian. From that distance it was difficult to estimate his age; but he had not yet gone to seed. The streaky hair had been bleached lighter by the sun, and arrested in the chaos wind and salt water create. Not adapted to the climate, his skin looked shabby: except that it was almost of the same complexion as his faded trunks, it reminded her of dried cod hanging from the ceiling chez l’épicier.