Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

‘I dare say. I’m surprised they haven’t electricity. Lousy with money as they are.’ In her case, relief had dredged up the slang of her youth. ‘Haven’t you noticed how the very rich so often stint themselves of the obvious?’

The professor did not appear to be listening, or not to her. ‘Is she a musician — Mrs Hunter?’

‘No.’

‘I swear I have heard the Warmings’ piano.’

‘Oh — well — when I say “not a musician”, I can remember her playing the piano — yes — when we were children. As a matter of fact, she was pretty awful at it.’

‘I was sure I have heard a piano.’

Now that she was warned, and reminded, Dorothy too, could hear. Somebody was very deliberately ‘playing the piano’. It came through the dark, sad and monotonous and maddening. It was Mother hammering away at that same old nocturne — whose was it? (I got it from Miss Hands. Every Thursday they drove me into Gogong. I was to learn the piano, along with other accomplishments.) Still hammering, she managed to intensify the ambivalence of a tropical evening. Her tenacity was remarkable: it explained not only her worldly success, but also perhaps her only slightly faltering beauty.

Elizabeth Hunter had opened up what was officially the living-room. Under Helen, they had congregated almost exclusively in the kitchen, in an atmosphere of fry and good-fellowship. Elizabeth’s accession promised subtler nuances. She had stood a pair of candles on the old cottage piano, and further tricked it out with a piece of music, the banality of which, together with a certain hypnotic sweetness, partly accounted for its being a performer’s first choice when shaking the dust off a long neglected talent.

She might have appeared to greater advantage if the piano had been a concert grand set in a waste of uncluttered carpet. As it was, however high she raised her head, exposing her famous throat, her lily neck, the size of the instrument and the rather warped, salt-cured keys, made it look more as though she were hunching her shoulders over some harmonium. There was her back though, white amongst the shadows, and light in her hair, and she had obviously dressed herself for an occasion, in a long white robe of raw silk, of unbroken fall if it had not been for a corded girdle, and faint flutings which gave her slenderness an architecture.

The dress was one Dorothy could not remember. She decided not to notice it again. Nor listen to the wretched hammered nocturne.

She said in her harshest voice, ‘Shall I fetch you a drink, professor? After being almost trampled to death I feel we need something strong to revive us.’

‘Trampled? How?’ Elizabeth Hunter did not turn because she was having a fight with the treble.

Music seemed to excite Professor Pehl. ‘It is great chance, Mrs Hunter, that you have this gift, and can entertain us.’

She bowed her head, and broke off playing only then, ‘But how,’ she asked, turning to face them, ‘were you nearly trampled?’ A vague concern troubled her candle-lit surface.

‘It was these wild horses which galloped past us down the beach.’ Professor Pehl got it over as briefly as possible. ‘But tell me, Mrs Hunter, you who perform the piano, what persuades you to waste your time on this mediocre composer Field?’ He aimed his perceptiveness like a dart which the target must gladly suffer.

‘I play him because he is easy,’ she admitted with exquisitely serious candour, before allowing the smile to come, ‘and leisurely enough to show off one’s wrists.’

Dorothy went to get the drinks. When she returned, Mother was explaining the insignificance of her gift, while Edvard Pehl had developed an itch to discuss Brahms.

‘At least we have music in common,’ Mrs Hunter said. ‘I shan’t have to make a fool of myself trying to take an interest in — science.’

The professor laughed so vibrantly he made the candle flames shudder on their wicks.

Mrs Hunter modestly ignored her success. ‘Amuse him, Dorothy, while I go and cook the fish.’ In passing, she draped herself for a moment on this difficult child. ‘The brumbies! How fortunate I sent you to fetch her, Professor.’ Could some of Mother’s concern have been sincere? ‘I was somehow told that danger was in store for Dorothy.’ She kissed a bony cheek with what could have been tenderness.

Dorothy was silent; and Elizabeth Hunter, silent too, left for the kitchen. She was barefooted, her daughter realized with disgust.

What had brought on coldness in the Princesse de Lascabanes provoked a restlessness in Professor Pehl. As he roamed around the room guzzling his drink (many Norwegians, she had read, were incurable alcoholics) he asked while mopping the sweat from his forehead, ‘Has the temperature perhaps fallen? I think I hear a wind has arisen.’

‘Not that I’ve noticed.’ She could not make it cold enough.

The professor announced he was going to put on a coat, and came back wearing a linen jacket, all creases, as though dragged straight out of a suitcase, or more likely, a rucksack. But the coat was Edvard Pehl’s contribution to dressiness, and the colour, ultramarine, emphasized the blue as well as the clear whites of his eyes. (Bitterly, Dorothy visualized a figure equipped for a path winding round a fjord: the rucksack needless to say, hobnailed boots, woven tie, and a meerschaum.)

‘This is better!’ As he settled his shoulders in the creased jacket he seemed to be angling for a compliment, which he did not get from the princess: she had been made too ashamed by her novelettish fantasy.

When the cook called from the kitchen, ‘Ed- vard ? I shall call you “Edvard”, shan’t I? These magnificent fish haven’t been scaled, and I think-don’t you? it’s a man’s job to scale the fish.’

So Madame de Lascabanes found herself alone. Only she had failed to dress in celebration of the fish caught by Edvard Pehl. Or was it the contingency which had brought all three of them together in this unlikely house beside the sea? Or simply, Elizabeth Hunter’s voracious beauty and vanity?

Whatever else, Mother had transformed ‘Ed- vard ’s magnificent catch’ into a work of art: she had grilled it, and laid it on a bed of wild fennel, and strewn round the border of a fairly common, chipped dish a confetti of native flowers.

On the wings of her second whiskey, the Princesse de Lascabanes was taken with a sombre glee. ‘Do you realize that for every fish cooked, a still life is sacrificed?’ When she fell foul of her darker humours. ‘Or has it been said by someone else?’

Neither Edvard nor Elizabeth could give attention enough to affirm or contradict.

As though a martyr to the appetites of others, Mother was no more than picking at her fish; whereas Edvard frankly stuffed his mouth, then fossicked for bones with his fingers, lips grown shiny with gluttony and oil.

He cried, ‘The head is always best!’ and seized the largest.

Though she lowered her eyelids, Elizabeth Hunter seemed prepared to accept whatever behaviour might demonstrate a man’s rights.

If Dorothy too, only picked at her fish, it was for a different reason: she believed she could detect, between her teeth, traces of sand. Slightly appeased by this flaw in what should have been perfection, another thought kept recurring: that the cook might be practising her art, not for art’s sake, but for immoral purposes.

Because why leave off her shoes? In Helen Warming’s case, it was from force of habit and living in a hot climate. But Elizabeth Hunter had done it to impress, if not to seduce. She was sitting sideways at the table, sipping the wine she had brought up from the bunker, exposing her slender, miraculously unspoilt feet from beneath the white, raw-silk hem. Her feet had the tones of tuberoses.