Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

Helen was speaking with Sydney it seemed, the subject their eldest boy, ‘Oh yes, I’m sure … You’ve done everything that can be done. I know practically nothing of Sydney doctors, but accept your choice … No, it’s far better that he should go into hospital … Yes — every care … Yes yes … We must wait for the results of the tests … Thank you, Dugald — and Barbara. I’m truly grateful.’

Helen hung up. When she turned, her face was blotched, her eyes were streaming. She probably did not see the friends instinct forced her to address. ‘Hugh collapsed. He’s been taken to hospital. They shan’t be able to diagnose before they have the results of the tests,’ she explained while walking out of the kitchen. ‘I must find Jack.’

In the sense of inadequacy they had in common, and the increasing paroxysms of her own migraine, Dorothy was at first grateful for her mother’s presence. For a shameful instant she almost fell on her knees: she could have buried her head in Mummy’s lap; but managed to direct her anguish outward.

‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘is there nothing I can do to help?’ To demonstrate, not to Helen specifically, but to everybody, the love they suspected she was incapable of giving.

Mother said, ‘Nothing, Dorothy. There’s nothing you can do, dear — except try to control yourself.’ She was becoming absorbed in contemplation of her own lustrous fingernails.

‘If you aren’t intolerable!. And as usual, right! There’s nothing I can do for anyone. I should have gone all the way — as the professor wanted me to on this expedition.’

‘You’ll only make it worse, dear, if you work yourself up emotionally. I advise you to go and lie down.’

‘That is something I have no intention of doing. Who knows — Helen may find she needs me after all.’

Her rage might have erupted ceilingwards if Jack Warming had not come in. Like Helen, he no longer saw these guests. He began tinkering with the phone, talking with the mainland, organizing. There was a promise of the helicopter, at Brumby airstrip, at two; this should allow them to join the afternoon flight from Oxenbould to the south.

Temporarily relieved, their host was able to concentrate on his guests’ future. ‘Though we shan’t be here, it needn’t prevent you enjoying the rest of your holiday. There’s food enough to see you through a couple of days. Ask the forestry people to help when you have to renew supplies; they’ll ferry anything across from the mainland.’ He showed them how to re-fill the two laborious kerosene refrigerators. ‘You’ll find wine in the bunker, there, behind the house. I rely on you, Elizabeth, and Dorothy, both of you, to be kind to the professor whatever your private opinions.’ Jack even laughed.

In the circumstances it was a plan nobody could reject, and towards the time the helicopter was expected, Edvard Pehl, who had returned from his expedition, prepared to run the Warmings and their two silenced children down to the strip.

Elizabeth Hunter stood on the veranda waving a scarf. She called out they could rely on her — and Dorothy. It was a flamingo scarf, the colour also of sunsets, which made the gesture more nostalgic, if not fateful.

Because there was nothing else to do, the princess rested during the heat of the afternoon. In her room the other end of the veranda Elizabeth Hunter was no doubt resting too. If one could care. And Edvard Pehl?

Dorothy turned a cheek to the rather coarse gritty pillow its scuffed-up skin salt-smelling sea-rinsed that is where She had it over most others insomnia rinses out the wrinkles the tide of years erodes but only imperceptibly in her case not in a hundred.

A hundred eyelashes are distinctly becoming Dorothy Hunter. Never oh Lord anything but. She must have slept for she had dreamt of something if she could remember. She got up as the light was waning. The pillow had scored her face and left it looking like a washboard. After she had sponged it with soft though tepid rainwater from the jug, and put on a dress nobody could have seen before, she started on a walk, this time in a northerly direction, along the beach at first, then pushing inland through scrub, towards the darker rain forest. Till the trees began to frighten her. It was the light. She saw a man, nobody recognizable, in fact most improbable. Though there were the men up at the forester’s camp. There was, she became convinced, a stench of man in the undergrowth.

After making her discovery she scrambled down, back to the beach, to return to the house. The sun was setting: this bronze tyrant lowered into the flamingo litter and encircling host of haze-blue trees. The splendours which were being enacted kindled tongues of expectancy in her, for the dissertation he — Edvard, had promised for the evening. Though she also swallowed a giggle or two: what if his benthic aggregations should put her to sleep?

Then in the dusk she caught sight of an actual man, head down, crunching towards her, and from the thickset body, and the intense seriousness of his mission, knew it could only be Professor Pehl.

‘Ah, you are there!’ The lightening of tone, she felt, was intended to convey pleasure. ‘I have come to bring you,’ he announced while marching to a halt.

‘That is kind — thoughtful of you.’ She was genuinely touched by this, after all, amiable Norwegian.

Walking beside her he proceeded to explain, ‘Yes, your mother has sent me. She has seen you walk along the beach, and now fears for your whereabouts.’

‘She needn’t have worried,’ the Princesse de Lascabanes replied. ‘I’ve managed to survive till now without help. However old and wise parents may grow, reasonableness is a virtue few of them seem to develop.’

She shut up at once, as though finding her own contribution to reason had curdled; but the professor showed no sign of having detected a prig.

‘I have caught some fish,’ he was pleased to confess, ‘which Mrs Hunter will cook for us.’

(Wonder what Mother will make of the fish, beyond the big tra-la?)

They walked on, blissfully alone, through the forests of Norway. He was telling her about the birches and aspens; rowan berries were clustered overhead; cold air blew funnelling down from the glacier higher up, making her twitch closer the folds of a long heather-tinted cape.

When the actual beach over which they were squelching, began thundering behind, then around them, sand hissing, spirting, flying in great veils — whinnying, it seemed, finally.

‘It is these horses!’ the professor called in a loud but unsteady voice. ‘Oh, the brumbies of Brumby!’ she shouted back between gusts of nervous laughter.

On reaching them the horses propped for an instant; a couple of them reared; others wheeled and spun into spiralling shadows; there was the sound of hooves striking on hide, bone, stone; a flash of sparks, and of teeth tearing at the dusk.

Edvard Pehl and Dorothy de Lascabanes stood supporting each other. She could feel his thick body breathing against her negligible breasts and palpitating ribs, while outside their physical envelops their minds flapped around in bewilderment and fright.

Then the brumbies had passed, lunging and stampeding farther down the beach, kicking up their heels, some of them audibly breaking wind.

‘Were you afraid?’ his trembling voice laughingly inquired.

‘Nohh!’ If she had been honest she would have answered: I was glad of you; I was glad even of your trembling; but would have been equally glad of someone else, provided that person was a man.

They walked on. He continued in possession of a hand he had grabbed hold of at a moment of crisis, until he realized; and dropped it.

They walked, and Professor Pehl started pointing. ‘There, you see, is a light.’ It sounded as though he was spitting with excitement brought on no doubt by relief after fear. ‘Mrs Hunter has lit a lamp.’