The Eye of the Storm Page 10

  What was the housekeeper’s story? something about an Aryan lover. Weren’t they planning to run away together—to England—when she was arrested? The boy’s family agreed to see her safely delivered into Switzerland—alone—and Mrs Lippmann had accepted for her lover’s good.

  Another idealist, but a realistic one; in your own case, your idealism was too abstract, improbable, under cover of the dinner parties, the jewels, the lovers, some of them real, but more often only suspected; or else a few individuals, sensitive up to a point, had guessed at some mysterious, not religious or intellectual, some kind of spiritual aspiration, and labelled you a fraud when you couldn’t confront them with, not spiritual, but material evidence.

  Anyway, you had eaten a mouthful of Torte to please Mrs Lippmann, only it didn’t: one mouthful made things worse. But that was what Mrs Lippmann liked. If you had full command of your senses, and your strength, and could order a spectacular bombe for a party, and take a sword and slash it just as it was ready to be brought in, Mrs Lippmann would descend into the deepest of her infernal heavens.

  Never see a bombe again. Those ponderous dinners the Radfords used to give: always something on fire, or with a music box playing inside; always an important guest—in Gladys’s estimation. Betty—it’s short notice—tomorrow night—I have Athol Shreve—I need a woman—I mean, an exceptional one—Sidney tips Mr Shreve as Prime Minister two elections from now—so you see darling your meeting could be a historic one. Play Gladys for ringing you after trying probably everyone else. Do you think I’d fit into your party darling? not as you know the least politically minded—I’d half promised the Pritchetts—then a migraine hit me this afternoon—I’ve been feeling impossible—and isn’t Athol Shreve—one hardly likes to utter the word nowadays—isn’t he ‘common’? Gladys tinkled. She was one of those short thick slabs of women who project tiny voices and specialize in shapely ankles and dancing feet. He has a certain brutish charm Betty. Never liked Gladys Radford, but you remained friends over the years. One of the advantages of being a woman: you can do just that. After a clash, men sometimes don’t speak to each other again, but real women can endure the worst in one another; must be because they’re debarred from all that honest-to-God mateship, and the Masons.

  Athol Shreve: upstanding hair and coarse skin in the photographs; probably had acne as a boy. You couldn’t fall—not immediately—for the Radfords’ importunate invitation; you were too obviously a pis aller.

  Sidney Radford, after inheriting coal, had sat about in an office looking important, while somebody else managed the coal. Gladys had money of her own; was it from—from—biscuits? or those cakes and puddings full of burnt fruit and sand, in tins. Anyway, with their two fortunes, and the Italian statuary and mosaics, the French tapestries—said to be Gobelins—and Aubusson carpets, the Radfords could put on a show. All their parties were soirées: some of them musical. Sidney Radford played the fiddle, a famous one, which rapidly became infamous. They engaged Moiskovsky? the Russian pianist—to play sonatas with Sidney—but Moisenstein got up and walked out. Stuck to the cheque, and Sidney and Gladys were too ashamed to ask for it back.

  This Athol Shreve Gladys finally hysterical was still going on about.

  Perhaps you were a snob: perhaps being born into poverty had made you it. And Father’s education, and suicide. Father was frail, as in the end, dear decent Alfred; you recognized the same quality when it was too late to do more than clumsily attempt to mend the breakages.

  Gladys Radford couldn’t leave off: such a dynamic—a self-made man … Athol Shreve had been one of those paper boys who rise to position and fame; paper boys are among the clichés of the success story. Aren’t there rather too many of them? It was a bad connection and Gladys couldn’t understand, kept hitting the receiver. Too many what? Gladys’s annoyance was growing; it was fun listening to it.

  Shreve the trade unionist had ratted on the movement, to become the inspiration of the Nationalists. He was ripe for the Radford dinners.

  Gladys—I’m not enthusiastic darling. Only crackle for the moment. Well, if you’re not: Gladys’s tinkle was becoming a sunken bell. Except it’s the holidays—which is something you can’t appreciate—Dorothy gone to the Bullivants—Basil to ‘Kudjeri’—to Daddy. I’m stuck here with a team of Irish maids fighting out their religious differences every other night. So I’ll come darling—unless.

  Gladys Radford thought it would be simply marvellous. She had almost lost her voice achieving what she wanted. She hung up before you could modify your acceptance.

  Mrs Hunter coughed a series of dry, exploratory coughs. She hoped she would not develop anything, grow feverish, or not before Sir Basil’s arrival. Her star guest. She would be glad when it was all over, when night and Mary de Santis were in possession of the house. Of course Basil wouldn’t want to stay any more than Dorothy had wanted to. Old people aren’t quite human for those who are still capable of escaping from the past by moving about in what they like to think is positive action: movement, the great illusory blessing. Certainly if you are motionless you are more an object than a person: you are a less significant part of the design you make with the lives of others, particularly your children; children in particular get around to thinking how they can improve on the design, which ends in their wanting to eliminate superfluous detail. You had seen it before. You had heard it in Dorothy and Basil’s letters, most clearly in the recent ones: have decided to come out and discuss what will be best for you; which could be interpreted as ‘us’.

  Yes, it will be good when the guests have gone. You can hear the darkness clotting in the rooms below, Lippmann bumping into furniture and sighing for the Jews; outside in the park, screams from rape and waterfowl. Only yourself and de Santis are real. Only de Santis realizes that the splinters of a mind make a whole piece. Sometimes at night your thoughts glitter; even de Santis can’t see that, only yourself: not see, but know yourself to be a detail of the greater splintering,

  When the guests have gone: at the Radfords’ they always seemed to stick, at the beginning and the end, on that great mauve staircase. Gladys and Sidney couldn’t, or more probably wouldn’t, encourage a flow after all the money they had spent importing the marble from Portugal; and Gladys liked to show off her feet and ankles: that was why she had to have an upstairs drawing-room, so they said, for her feet and her ankles to be noticed at the head of the mauve staircase, before the guests could concentrate on her slab of a body with its thick neck.

  There on the staircase everyone was stuck as usual the night that Athol Shreve. You hadn’t looked, or barely glanced, when introduced on the landing outside the drawing-room. Confidentially, he’d never come across an upstairs lounge: isn’t it a bit eccentric? She had decided to create an impression of casualness. Why not? she asked; you’re not conventional yourself, are you? from what one reads in the press. While half disapproving as a democratic Australian dependent on his constituents’ approval, the other half of him was flattered to be tinged with an impropriety she implied. Caught in the crush, herself in turn crushing the cinerarias, she looked in a glass and saw that she had drawn her mouth all wrong, its bow noticeably asymmetrical. Usually meticulous, her hand must have slipped on this occasion. Or perhaps it would establish the casualness she wished for.

  She was wearing white. It seemed to make him ashamed of something; he began telling her, when I was a boy … And again at dinner, when I was a boy … Gladys had sat them together, so there was no escaping Athol Shreve’s boyhood, nor his appearance which at last she could let herself loose on. Nobody, not Athol Shreve himself—nor herself—would have interested her in that before the second course.

  Even now she only took quick bites, at the cratered skin, the heavy hands, concentrated eyes, and hair so thick and stiff you knew how it felt without having to touch.

  He talked about his law studies (tedious), less about politics; if he was confident of what Sidney Radford predicted for him, he showed no sign of wanting to pa
rade that confidence. He was boring her on the whole, and probably she him, though thoroughly masculine men seldom seem to become bored provided a female audience will pay them token attention.

  So she felt at liberty to withdraw from his anecdotes and ideas to the company of her own thoughts while leaving him her physical presence. As the courses were delivered, acceptably anonymous food, on the Radfords’ gold dinner service. Why she had agreed to be thrust together with Athol Shreve was not yet clear to her; so far there was nothing about him she could admire, or even like, she thought.

  … never employ or trust a man who hasn’t a worker’s hands.

  His cynicism appealed to a cynicism in herself. She laughed, but saw him look surprised, perhaps even unconscious of anything cynical in his remark. He went on stubbornly cutting into a chicken’s too muscular thigh. Betrayal of the side to which he belonged had not transformed his own worker’s hands, she noticed.

  What would he think of Alfred, whose rather sensitive hands were scarred by the manual labour to which he committed himself on principle?

  She was pleased to remember: my husband—not the mystic title contained in a humdrum word, but an expression of respect and affection. Whether Alfred respected her she could not tell: he loved her.

  Are you married Mr Shreve? It ended in something between desperation and a cough; she took a sip of wine to hide a watering of her eyes.

  It was not quite as she had hoped: Athol Shreve was another of those dutifully, sentimentally uxorious men with invalid wives.

  At the same time his thigh, she realized, had come to rest alongside hers, or more than rest: it was plastered to her. If he was conscious of it he didn’t show her, but continued telling about a daughter (her name Doris) studying economics in London. He was exceptionally earnest when it came to the matter of education, which again created a cynical situation. Only his hands were genuine: in shape and texture, at least, and if you ignored the history of his political betrayal.

  And what about her own betrayal of Alfred? But she hadn’t betrayed him, or only once, and that was little more than an afternoon’s indiscretion, of no lasting significance. It didn’t destroy the possibility of an ideal relationship, above the respect and affection she had for Alfred, and Alfred’s (hurt) devotion to her. If she could to some extent understand or visualize this probably super-human relationship. But she couldn’t.

  It was in any case nothing to do with Athol Shreve the turncoat politician and tame social bull. Drunk by now. That was why his thick thigh was burning into her cooler, unresponsive one. Herself close enough to drunk. Gladys and Sidney served too many wines to show they were able to afford them.

  She sat forward over the dessert, locking her hands against her forehead in the hope that this might cure an ache. Naturally it didn’t. The bubbles continued rising and pricking, from the glass as well as in the head. Opened her eyes and there was a plain woman smiling opposite. Someone to whom you had been introduced, but who didn’t matter while you were in full possession of yourself. Some plain women smile at you genuinely grateful when you are at your prettiest, but perhaps it is only for the success of a dress, or some—some aura. And that imagined—not real.

  So you couldn’t or only half smile back to thank the woman for her kind interest.

  Athol Shreve was what is real. This gross male. A fake: the real is so often fake. You had never recognized your own lust; you hadn’t often been troubled by it. But it exists—alongside those unrealizable aspirations.

  And husbands.

  He said it was surprising they hadn’t met before. Not at all surprising, you were tempted to reply, only you could no longer have aimed it at the heart of the matter.

  There was a worm in the Radfords’ de Lucca peach.

  All Elizabeth Hunter’s worst nightmares occurred at noon. She gritted her gums, crisped her jewelled fingers against being sucked farther down into the fug of afternoon sleep; its flannel tunnel daunted her; and to be dragged back eventually by someone who is paid to do it: that is why nurses, particularly little Manhood, remain so cool.

  That man: the politician. Her lips tried, but failed to work the name free of her mind.

  After dinner there was conversation and a pretence of music: two tall young men vamping at pianos; it was fashionable just then to engage them. You would have liked to slip away, but couldn’t. Even accepted a curaçoa. Gladys so civil; and Sidney wanted to show you some Japanese prints he had bought: he had always bought something.

  Where was Athol Shreve? she wondered. She couldn’t escape him, she realized now. He was the reason she had told Lennox he needn’t return with the car after the party. He was the awfulness, the reality, she had decided unconsciously to risk; if she had miscalculated the explosive force of her lust, she had felt its first tremor that evening when misdrawing her mouth in lipstick. She went at one point into the cloakroom to whimper over Alfred. The other awfulness is: you can sincerely love those you betray. She gashed again at that not so casually planned mouth.

  Then everyone was leaving. There was something about a couple who lived somewhat in the same direction: as it happened, the plain quiet woman from opposite at dinner, and a husband, her male replica. Athol Shreve knew you would expect the offer of a lift, which you didn’t, and did. Furs made you shiver: tonight they were too much a forfeit.

  En route the gears kept tangling grinding before the eventual grudging release. The married couple on the back seat accepted gratefully to be dropped. He was wearing a white scarf, with a fringe and black monogram, she clutching to thin breasts a narrow moiré party handbag, as they stood on the pavement outside their house, stooping to call goodbye. They were smiling for what no one could explain: not yourself, certainly; and they were too nice to want to.

  Athol Shreve had more trouble with the gears. It was an ordinary car for such an opportunist, but perhaps the ordinary is a better disguise for ruthlessness. Or the car could have been an innocent oversight, or convenience. They were bumping around against and off each other inside it. A pothole bounced them: she hit her skull on the roof.

  ‘Seems like I’m trying to kill us!’ (All your worst nightmares speak with actual mouths, but the mouths of megaphones.) ‘Mightn’t look too good, eh?’ his thick, megaphone laugh, ‘driving Elizabeth Hunter home, both drunk, after the shivoo.’

  A sort of jollity in his voice made you wonder if it isn’t a dormant instinct for evil rather than their thinking minds which drives men to dishonesty. A woman’s knowledge of herself sees to it that she is aware of her guilt.

  In Moreton Drive pulling up, ‘This is the terminus, isn’t it?’

  Even so, he had no intention of turning round; was getting out: too big for the doorway of that smallish car.

  A light was blazing illuminating your own solid yet unreliable house.

  ‘There is this step—where the path turns: two people have broken legs.’ Inwardly burning, her voice sounded cold.

  Didn’t listen to the joke he was making she was fumbling in her bag the gold mesh a wedding present from Alfred’s mother in it the key to this house in which she was living.

  Mrs Hunter groaned the cramps in her legs if night she would have allowed de Santis to give her one of Gidley’s pills. After luncheon sleeping pills are immoral. Open her eyes at least. She couldn’t. On the dark screen her lids provided the picture show continued flickering.

  ‘I expect I should pour you a drink after your so nobly bringing me home.’ A silly bitchy pretty woman after a party.

  He recognized it. ‘I think we had enough to know each other.’

  They were driven together in a collision which sounded like that between two objects in solid bone or hard rubber so little surprising it might have happened before.

  ‘Not along there. The maids are sleeping. If you’re not careful you’ll wake them.’ She distinctly added, ‘They might telephone the police thinking somebody had broken in and was assaulting or trying to murder me.’ She was so sure of her innocence i
n the minds of everybody who didn’t know her; nobody, not even Athol Shreve, knew her; only she knew herself.

  ‘The police—you could deny anything the maids told them, couldn’t you?’

  Instead of answering she smiled at him, because she had no idea what she would tell until it was necessary.

  Suspicion of treachery seemed to have made him determined to devour its source: her throat her breasts.

  ‘If you don’t mind—my dress. That might be inescapable evidence.’

  He watched her prepare. They were watching each other. He had a vein in his forehead which swelled as he bent to ease, then to drag the cloth, down from his thighs.

  Disgust for his body, his exploratory hands, the rasp of hair against her skin, did not diminish her own lust. Her enraged beast could have wanted to die of his: when there was some condition she knew she had aspired to above the placid waters of marriage the eruptions of adultery finally hatred of her own aspirant.

  His thundering into her ear, ‘God, Betty, we screw pretty good together, don’t we?’ Then squelching back out of their mutual revulsion.

  You would have liked to separate, more than from your lover, from your own body.

  Halfway into his clothes he began muttering, finally loudly whispering, ‘What’s wrong? There’s nothing wrong, is there?’

  Only everything; but how tell?

  She could have lain resting for ever, not thinking; but roused herself. ‘Is your wife politically minded?’ That speeded his buttoning.

  ‘Not very. Not now. She’s too sick to take an interest. What made you ask?’

  As well as husbands, wives had begun to haunt her: a strained, chalky menopause, but featureless.

  Again fully armoured, he came and sat on the edge of the bed, seeming inclined to return to picking at a meal he thought he had finished.