Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

It was a relief to remember, ‘What about the children? Did they turn up?’

‘Yes. And Elizabeth’s chain is safe.’

Very slightly, Dorothy twitched; while the Princesse de Lascabanes guiltily allowed herself to be comforted by kind arms.

Prescribing sleep, Helen went away. Not sleep but spasms. Sewn into the silver to reddish sheet the worse than red the angry ejaculating moon shoots to kill ah non Hubert je suis dèjá morte d’avoir tant souffert Ed v ard may understand that basic aggravations breed at the greatest depth it is hope dead or alive which floats on the surface to be identified and gently netted.

Dorothy woke, still not rested, but surprisingly calm. Some intention, she was not sure what, had tautened her body while insulating her nerves. The light, when she opened the shutters, was of a silver so cool she did not quail at thought of the approaching blaze, or its white aftermath which would smoulder through the middle of the day. Cherishing her delicately balanced contentment, she tiptoed along the veranda as soon as she was dressed, to brew herself coffee ( sans doute immonde ) or at worst, a pot of Indian tea.

In the kitchen somebody else, alas, was already disturbing the pots.

‘I was thinking to boil myself some coffee,’ Professor Pehl explained in a thick and gloomy voice. ‘The Warmings have no liking for coffee.’

Dressed, she observed, in shorts and shirt, he had already started the operation.

‘I am lost without my coffee,’ she heard, not herself, but Mother preparing to deal with a man. (Well, why not? there was nobody to listen in.) ‘And I like it French,’ she added rather too stridently as she took possession of the pot.

‘Not French,’ Professor Pehl objected. ‘French is muddy. I favour the American style of coffee — since I am at San Diego.’

‘Are you, now?’ Dorothy tried to visualize the distance between Mother’s room and the kitchen; but she couldn’t; which distracted her. ‘San Diego — is it interesting?’ she asked, for safety’s sake, in a softer voice.

‘Interesting? That is where I am recently attached — for better or worse.’ The professor spoke through a crust of bread he had torn off and started chewing.

‘When you say “attached”, do you mean “engaged”?’ The princess enunciated very clearly in addressing this Scandinavian; while remaining distracted, vague.

‘I do not by any means mean “engaged”. I mean I am attached for my research to the University of California at San Diego.’

Imbécile que je suis! The percolator squealed, she dragged it so rudely across the stove.

‘I am formerly engaged to a young lady at Bergen. For a short time I entertained the idea of marriage, but decided it was early days: it would have interfered with my research projects.’

‘Your work must be fascinating.’ In the circumstances, the princess plumped for an insincerity she might have condemned in someone else.

When the coffee was ready, and herself prepared to pour, an inspiration whirled her round. ‘I know what I’m going to do. I shall make you an omelette.’ Even Hubert had complimented her on her omelettes. ( Si tu es Française, chérie, c’est par ton talent pour faire les omelettes.) They sometimes stuck, however.

‘I take only coffee to my breakfast.’

‘But a man should start the day with something more substantial,’ she heard the Australian countrywoman in her.

Professor Pehl made no further comment: Mother may have known, after all.

Dorothy was elated to rediscover her lapsed art. The perfectly folded omelette shuddered as it settled on the plate, not so much from resignation as voluptuousness.

‘How is it?’ She would claim from his stolid lips the praise which was her due; though if she had achieved perfection, surely he would not have munched so?

‘It is good. It is only — for my taste — too much slime.’

‘Baveuse! That is how we like it.’ Her tone had sharpened. ‘And the French invented the omelette.’ Or had they? She was no longer certain.

‘Ah, the French!’ He laughed and forked in another yellow mouthful.

When he had swallowed, his looks returned; and she remembered what she liked to believe she had succeeded in hiding: bien baveuse ma chere petite — Australienne — peur-euse. No, it was slime. How could she have been so depraved as to collaborate in depravity? She wiped away all trace of it, but could not rid herself of her disgust: it had festered and left a scar, visible only in a certain introspective light.

As he munched, Professor Pehl moodily stared at the maker of omelettes.

For her part, she wondered whether his eyes, trained to observe underwater life, would notice her skin leaping. She saw her hand as it would have lain, like a narrow, snoozing, white fish, in the pale hair, its thicket still sticky from salt and the shortage of rainwater; she avoided the phosphorescent pubics, recurring anyway only in one of the briefest flickers.

She went to her room to remove physical temptation and spare herself renewed mental shame, but knew she was listening for movements: ostensibly Mother’s. But Mother’s ‘insomnia’ allowed her the luxury of rising late, so there was not much likelihood that she would accuse you of chasing after a professor.

He returned to his room, on no more than a short visit. The Princesse de Lascabanes dismissed her reflection from the dressing-table glass: it might have ended by unnerving her. She heard what sounded like final departure. Recklessly casual, she opened her own flimsy door.

‘Are you working while you are here on Brumby Island?’ Would the increased volume of her voice impinge on Mother’s insomnia?

‘I am invited here for a holiday, but yes, you could say I am working. I always work.’

One after another, the planks were buckling under the weight of his descent. She followed him down with the same intention of disembarking. Arrived on shore, the professor was starting out on what he had obviously planned as a solitary trek along the beach in the direction of the striated cliffs she had noticed the evening before.

‘Shall I disturb you,’ she asked, ‘if I walk some of the way?’

He murmured no she would not disturb; ‘I can shut myself off if necessary.’

The princess gladly accepted the arrangement they had reached. Though normally she did not wear a hat, she began putting on the big straw pancake she had brought to Brumby as protection from the tropic sun. She was feeling better — indeed, restored. Her shoes were unpractical, though: she must remain a plodder beside this sturdy, self-sufficient figure tamping the beach with his rawhide sandals. Even so, she managed to keep level physically; it was morally and intellectually that she tagged along some way behind, but would have consented in the circumstances to become a sumpter mule to this — yes, boorish male.

She risked the boorishness to ask, ‘Will you tell me what ecology is about?’

He gasped at first; then he shrugged. ‘To put it simply, you might say this is the study of the structure and function of nature.’

‘And which part of such a vast and, to me, frightening subject is your special interest?’

Professor Pehl seemed to be compressing reserves of steam inside his fired cheeks. ‘If I am known as a marine ecologist it is for my work on burrowing crustaceans of the neritic region.’

A fine drawn sigh from the Princesse de Lascabanes might have signified appreciation.

They continued marching, or plodding, while the professor stared ahead, from under bleached brows, out of pale eyes.

‘Then, since you are interested, I have gone on to, and am presently investigating, benthic aggregations: that is, briefly, the types of level bottom substrata and the parallel groupings of invertebrates supported by them at similar depths in different geographical regions. These invertebrates make a chain of ecologically similar aggregations that replace one another according to latitude and temperature.’