Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

Dorothy said, ‘I understand.’

Professor Pehl turned on her his actually fervid eyes. ‘I shall explain in greater detail when we are less heated,’ he informed her.

Dorothy agreed to listen in the cool of the evening. At the same time she was amazed at herself: at her instinctive insincerity. Or not altogether insincere: almost any mission is better than none; and she could perhaps in some way serve, she would not dare hope to comfort, this boring and complacent man contingency had given her.

Professor Pehl had brought with him a clutch of plastic bags, and would stoop to examine shells, weeds, all kinds of anonymous sea rubbish, and sometimes pop a specimen into plastic; at one point he pounced on and bagged a distraught crab.

It was the crab which made Dorothy exclaim, ‘Can’t I at least carry the bags for you?’

Nothing would have struck the professor as more consistent with the nature of things, judging by the promptness with which he surrendered the specimen bags.

Gratitude for being allowed to make this small but positive contribution launched the princess into a dangerous recitative. ‘Sometimes I feel I must take up a definite subject — I won’t go so far as to say scientific — but something to make a study of — now that I’m at a loose end. I may as well tell you — after years of a a failing marriage — my husband left me. That is why I am here. I mean,’ she quickly explained, ‘why I came home — or perhaps I should say back, to Australia — to visit my mother.’

The professor was picking at a sea urchin: it smelled putrid and was of no interest. ‘I think, if I count, I was invited to assist at more divorces than were marriages.’

The princess primly recovered herself. ‘I’m sorry if I bore you. And in this case there is no divorce: my church does not recognize it. No ceremony could alter the fact that my husband is living with a woman not his wife. An American,’ she made the extra effort to disclose.

‘Ho! So you accuse your husband?’

‘I don’t accuse’, here she blushed, ‘anybody.’

‘I am happy to hear it. Each party is almost always partially to blame.’ Inside his overheated body, he remained only coldly, distantly, scientifically involved.

‘Oh, yes.’ She sighed. ‘I expect you are right. We were both to blame.’ She laughed bitterly, while not entirely believing what she had just admitted.

She was again enclosed by an emptiness. She dreaded being racked by the physical pain, though its less precise attendant, the fragmentation of mind and future, could inflict worse tortures. Through her own hovering mist, she stared at the coloured cliffs fluctuating in the haze of distance. Till the unreality of the cliffs became transformed into what she was sometimes forced to believe the only reality in life: that of the past, and more specifically, her own not particularly happy childhood. She was looking at the ornament in Nora’s bedroom: the glass dome filled with layers of coloured sand, a Souvenir from the Isle of Wight, where as a girl its owner had vowed herself to slavery. Dorothy loved the parlourmaid; indeed she had loved most maids, for the mystery surrounding their private belongings, such as this striped dome, and crochet collars dipped in tea, and lockets preserving likenesses, or twists of greenish hair. Now as she toiled along the beach there rose around her scents she had forgotten, of innocence and trustfulness, out of an open deal drawer.

The Princesse de Lascabanes swept aside the curtain of perspiration distorting those already overpoignant cliffs. The heat was increasing. Professor Pehl had started dragging off his shirt, and as he did so, she was conscious of the aggressive stench, sweet but acrid, of fair-complexioned men. It was nauseating, or so she tried to persuade herself before dismissing her discovery.

The professor made no concessions to the woman who had tacked herself on, but continued striding. His hairless, noticeably developed calves, could have been trying to outdistance her. He did at times, and then at others, he was forced to stoop, to examine a potential specimen. So she caught up, and was again drugged by that penetrating male stench.

Under its influence she was moved to exclaim, ‘Oh, your back — how horribly painful it looks, Professor!’ Days of exposure to the sun had turned the more prominent parts into a scurf of skin, or salt codflesh.

He straightened up. ‘The worst is over,’ he said, but continued fiercely working his shoulderblades together.

‘I expect it’s too late to have any great effect,’ she hesitated, ‘but if you would like — I’ll rub you with sunburn lotion — tonight.’ Automatically she listened for Mother’s comment.

‘Thank you.’ It was neither acceptance nor refusal.

She was exasperated: a Frenchman would have let her know the extent of her success or failure; but with this Norwegian she could not be sure.

Of course it did not matter to her, and to show it she asked, ‘Do you suppose the cliffs over there are a mirage?’ But either he did not understand, or he considered her remark too fanciful.

For a moment they were overtaken by the forest pressing through the carob scrub which had so far fringed the beach: great eucalypts, themselves shedding skin, and darker sassafras, were massing to obscure the tantalizing coloured cliffs of childhood. She noticed grass of the same green as moss, sombre, yet glowing, clotting in hummocks at the roots of some native cypresses. What began by giving her pleasure, ended as a virulent glare.

And the Norwegian decided to take up the subject she had offered in the first place. ‘These cliffs beyond are where a ship was wrecked. The crew and officers were murdered.’

Yes she said she knew about the murder.

‘And the master’s wife taken by the blacks for their slave?’ He was looking at her more with his teeth, it seemed, than with his eyes.

Yes she knew about that too.

The throbbing had begun again. For some unreasonable reason directionless fears were shooting through her. However seductive the moss at the roots of the deformed cypresses, she must not give in, nor to the increasing ejaculations of her head.

So she disentangled herself from the plastic bags. ‘This is where I shall leave you.’ As she tore free, one of the bags fell on the sand between them. ‘My mother will be wondering where I am. I can’t leave her indefinitely — not at her age,’ she snickered.

The professor was more intent on retrieving the fallen specimen bag, but thought to gasp, ‘Is Mrs Hunter an invalid, then?’

‘No. Only elderly.’

Dorothy de Lascabanes and Edvard Pehl stood looking at each other from either end of this telescopic situation. Because hers was the wrong end, she could feel him staring into the pores of her skin, through them, and beyond.

After she had turned and moved away she looked back once, ostensibly to re-focus on those mesmeric cliffs. In the foreground the Norwegian’s tattered shoulders were already exerting themselves on their solitary ecological trek.

The Princesse de Lascabanes was glad of her shoes after all: she found the return journey strewn with oyster shells.

Dorothy had noticed in the kitchen an antiquated telephone, its varnished box fastened to the wall, a receiver attached to a hook on one side. Its ancient air suggested that it might provide an even frailer lifeline than its more compact, outwardly more efficient, contemporary counterpart. There was a connection with the foresters’ camp, one gathered; but calls to the outside world were made through the mainland town of Oxenbould.

When Dorothy reached the house, Helen Warming was standing at this antique telephone, her comfortable shoulders tensed inside the cotton frock, while Mother sat at the kitchen table making the formally sympathetic noises a sense of one’s own superfluousness induces.