The Eye of the Storm Page 11

  When he put his hand she reminded, ‘My husband might arrive unexpectedly from Gogong.’

  Athol Shreve could behave very nervously for such a large, designated man. ‘Thought the Gogong train reached Sydney in the morning.’

  ‘It does. There’s also a slower, daylight one Alfred sometimes takes because he enjoys looking at the country.’

  She spent seconds on a total death wish.

  ‘Better see me out, hadn’t you? Make it look more like a social visit—if anybody—one of the maids.’ For this final pretence she dressed herself in what she had been wearing, even made up her mouth; there was nothing she could have done about her eyes.

  At the front door he was all for fumbling kissing sentimental respects. ‘Night night, girlie. Thanks for the party. Next time we’ll know each other’s form better.’

  She shut it out at last, not that the latch sounded convincing.

  In the morning (it might have been today) Nora announced with a dignity which was a good copy of the original, ‘Mr Hunter has come, madam. He hopes you won’t get a shock—Master Basil fell out of a tree and fractured an arm.’

  ‘Oh my God, when did they arrive?’

  ‘Just now. By the night train.’

  Alfred’s anguished face; Basil, more gloomy than suffering, was wearing a sling.

  ‘Oh, darlings!’ She was too shattered to cry; and Alfred might have joined her if she had let herself go.

  Basil was only ashamed of his parents. ‘It’s not broken; it’s bent, or cracked.’

  Alfred was so upset trying to trace Dr Moyes, to arrange an appointment, to confirm the bone had received proper treatment from the local man, he could pay no attention to anything else till later.

  Then he remembered, ‘Poor old Betty, it must have been a shock.’

  She could only look at her husband: his vulnerable temples, kind mouth, eyes so much milder than her own.

  It was Basil who suspected something, nothing specific, he couldn’t have. It was just that he suspected his mother generally and on principle.

  She used to say, ‘Why are you so full of secrets, darling? What have we got to hide from each other? You can be so charming to other people—with Mrs Wyburd.’

  Would he remember that? He had a phenomenal memory. As a boy he could recite whole scenes from Shakespeare. Sometimes they would read together from the plays, she taking the women’s parts.

  Now they were playing this scene at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Anyway, a sling suits you—makes you look gorgeous: a hero back from the wars.’

  ‘I stink! Haven’t been out of my clothes since it happened. I stink of squashed ants.’ His nostrils expressed a disgust which was aimed at her as well.

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Wait till after the doctor. Then we’ll see how you can be washed.’

  She could tell he was already preparing to resist her advice, let alone help.

  The following day Dorothy returned from the Bullivants. If Basil was suspicious, Dorothy’s absorbed little face was specially designed for locking up accusations. If she let them out, her emotions might get the better of words; though sometimes she saved them up for a better occasion. Now she was passing judgment on you for something she couldn’t possibly guess, except that her stare sank deeper, her silence had intensified.

  And she found a clue under the bedside table. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘What on earth? A cuff link!’

  ‘Whose is it?’

  ‘It’s one which belonged to my—my father—your Grandfather Salkeld.’

  Dorothy, looking at it with a kind of horror, didn’t at least ask to see its twin. ‘Isn’t it ugly!’

  You couldn’t deny that. She gave it to you, and you would have to think where to put it, before you could throw it away somewhere—in the park grass—and forget about the whole incident, if Dorothy didn’t re-discover the link.

  Only Alfred was trusting: he treated you as though you, not Basil, were the victim of an accident. ‘I’ll stay a few days, Elizabeth—keep you company—help you get your spirits back.’

  The second day he suggested a walk together in the park. As they strolled between the formal beds he held her arm along his own, her hand clasped in his, in that position which most clearly demonstrates prerogative. His weathered face and grey eyes encouraged her convalescence from some melancholy nameless illness. In fact it was an illness they had shared, his expression implied, at the time Basil ‘broke’ his arm. Husband and wife were drawn very close inside the circle of her creamy sunshade.

  ‘Is there anything special you’d like to eat?’ she sighed and asked, since he had persuaded her to accept their convalescence.

  He squeezed her languid hand. ‘Anything simple that we can enjoy together.’

  Should she drop everything, sell the house, put the children at boarding school, and leave with Alfred for ‘Kudjeri’?

  She didn’t. She could not have worn indefinitely the veils of tenderness with which he wanted to invest her. Nor was she, except for that one necessary instance, the rutting sow Athol Shreve had coupled with. She would have given anything to open a box containing the sum total of expectancy, but as this did not happen (except in a single comforting dream, in which she discovered in a little marquetry casket a splinter of rock crystal lying naked and unexplained on the lead lining) she must expect her answers outside boxes, in the colder contingencies preparing for her.

  While Alfred looked at her with much the same expression as the plain woman on the opposite side of the Radfords’ dinner table: grateful for something they imagined you to be.

  If you could have said: I am neither compleat wife, sow, nor crystal, and must take many other shapes before I finally set, or before I am, more probably, shattered. But you couldn’t; they would not have seen you as the eternal aspirant. Solitariness and despair did not go with what they understood as a beautiful face and a life of outward brilliance and material success.

  Over the years the letters: My dearest Elizabeth, I realize our attempts at marriage are not bringing us any closer to success. From your last visit to ‘Kudjeri’ and mine to Moreton Drive I feel you find our pretences too great a strain, and that I should offer to let you divorce me. I have no further ambitions in the field of marriage, but although you don’t care to admit it, you might like to look around you while there is still time to form a more satisfactory relationship. If I haven’t suggested this before, it was on account of the children. Now that they have started thinking for themselves, they may feel less resentful, and even forgive erratic behaviour in their parents … oh the bitterness of your own inadequacies which people who give to charities interpret as selfishness yes you were selfish by some standards but did not bribe your conscience with good works or by acting as a domestic doormat certainly selfish beside Alfred’s exceptional selflessness saints reap admiration when probably it is easier for them a saint is what Dorothy wanted and not getting could only blame the least of saints it is easier for you Mother for anyone beautiful forceful to be admired praised worshipped that is what you are greedy for more and more worshippers it was not true not when you understood your own faults better even than your children did yes praise perhaps but for some inward perfection you hadn’t been able to achieve My dear dear Alfred, how dreadfully guilty you make me feel. I am the one who should be making humble offers if there is any talk of ‘freedom’. It is you who must call the tune and I shall accept whatever you choose. Personally I don’t believe there is a state of freedom greater than the one we know and ‘enjoy’—at least, not in life … but how you longed for it.

  A silveriness about the room brighter than the mists of vision: a faint afternoon breeze deliciously flirting with your steamy hair, but chilling, alarming to boiled skin. This is the cool side of the house: the western rooms will be in flames. Nothing should alarm: at least you won’t die; that has been proved over the years. And Basil coming, probably at dusk (you might look better by artificial light) to act out the scene a
n actor expects. A travesty, of course, but you can’t condemn artifice without dismissing the whole of art.

  An unnatural wraith of steam rising to the left in the humid evening is what is making you cough. You alone, not Alfred, probably responsible for Dorothy’s bronchitis, for Basil’s super-selfishness disguised as genius. Better a cow cocky or bank teller than an artist. Yes, now you’ve said it: what good is an artist to those who want to love him? We are never the one they think; we are not one, but many. Father was expecting his daughter to read Browning to him as usual, when there she was dawdling beside the river of drowned dolls, plaiting grass, listening for the sound of hooves on the bridge, the evening he put the gun in his mouth. ‘Blood exhaustion’, Mrs Lippmann calls it. But there are still, even now, the little delights.

  Out of the wraith a voice asking, ‘Mrs Hunter? Did you have a nice rest? Are you ready for your sponge?’ It is Sister Manhood with the Spode basin they are allowed to use for menial purposes.

  ‘I had such horrid dreams.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t sleep.’

  ‘Oh, you can dream, can’t you? without sleeping?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ The nurse had embarked, if not conscientiously, then at least professionally, on one of the duties for which she was paid: to sponge a geriatric case.

  Mrs Hunter smiled. She would wait. She knew she could play Flora Manhood without her suspecting she was on the hook. In the meantime, the sponging made you feel better.

  The nurse might have been peeling a fruit: she was so detached. In theory powerful. When it was the soft, tepid sponge which exercised the power, seeping into crevices, smoothing the wrinkles out of thoughts. Objects, including the human ones, are often more powerful than people.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Sister Manhood, ‘it’s a lovely evening, Mrs Hunter.’

  ‘Is it?’

  The life of Sydney was streaming past and around, you could sense as well as hear, pouring out of factories and offices: by this hour men in bars, a confraternity of Athol Shreves, had begun inflating their self-importance with beer; ambulances were hurtling towards disasters in crumpled steel and glass confetti; in semi-private houses, mothers would have started sponging little boys, their still empty purses, while nubile girls looked in glasses to pop their spots cream their skins dreaming of long-hoped-for but unlikely lads.

  The children: thank God they didn’t know it, they were the all-powerful—not that silly princess, nor, judging by his letters, the famous bankrupt actor, but Dorothy and Basil, more devastating in their silences than Elizabeth and Alfred Hunter with all their authority, money, experience of life, and practical, but finally useless, advice. Parents are wraiths beside their children, who are drained in turn by the business of living; sometimes their candour and perception are returned, but almost too late, when they have become thinking objects.

  If Alfred hadn’t died too soon it might have been different: you were learning to speak to each other in what seemed a revealed language, discovering unexpected meanings.

  ‘Did I hurt you?’ Sister Manhood asked.

  ‘It was Alfred I was dreaming about. Did you know my husband died of cancer?’

  ‘Oh, how dreadful!’ It wasn’t convincing: a nurse performing her professional duties shouldn’t be called upon too suddenly to turn into a human being.

  ‘And I nursed him. You didn’t know that,’ Mrs Hunter said, and laughed.

  ‘No, I didn’t.’ Nor did she believe it: that was what made you laugh in advance.

  ‘How did you manage—without the experience—if the illness was a prolonged one?’

  ‘Oh, it was long—not in years, or months even. I managed. By will. Which I don’t think you believe in, Sister. By instinct too, I suppose. Why do people start writing poems—or making love? You ought to know that—some of it at least.’

  Sister Manhood had done with the sponge. This was the sort of thing which drove you up the wall: at times when you had got past pitying to liking, or farther, to almost having a love affair, the two of you and a sponge, the old bitch would start hacking, to remind you that you really hated her.

  ‘Sister Manhood, you’re making my nightie grate the length of my skin.’

  Let it grate. ‘P’raps it’s a cheap nightie.’

  ‘You’re not angry with me, are you?’

  …

  ‘Sister?’

  …

  ‘About what I said? After all—isn’t it our instinct to love—or try to? Surely you must understand that? By instinct!’

  ‘I don’t know.’ There was nothing you really understood, or so they told you regularly—Col Pardoe and old Mrs Betty bloody Hunter; you were either a body for fucking, or a log for the axemen (or -women) to hack at.

  ‘Where are you going, Sister Manhood?’

  ‘To throw out the dirty water.’ If you could have thrown the baby with it.

  ‘You won’t forget your promise, will you?’

  …

  ‘Sister?’

  …

  ‘The promise!’

  Like hell you wouldn’t. Not for a moment. You were never ever allowed to forget what you were there for.

  Sister Manhood flung the water into the bath; sometimes it was the lavatory, but because she needed greater scope, tonight it had to be the bath. In that great bloody carpeted bathroom as big as somebody’s whole flat. The smooth mahogany seat on which Her rich bloody arse hadn’t rested since God knew when. The sealed jars of bath salts, the bowl of brown dusty potpourri, were what best explained the unused bathroom in terms of Elizabeth Hunter. One day, Flora Manhood sourly decided, she was going to take off her clothes and make use of that fucking bath, take her time on the polished mahogany ledge, before slipping down the white, sloping sides into untroubled waters.

  Tonight the west was on fire outside the window: the bathroom was Flora Manhood’s furnace. From which she stumbled panting, gasping, into the cooler, what Jessie Badgery called, Nurses’ Retiring Room (I ask you: as if you could ever retire with Her around the corner) to dab the wych-hazel.

  Col’s favourite perfume: said it was neither nursey nor tarty one of the sweet natural smells just what I’d expect of you Flo. Oh yeah? I may be natural but nobody could call me sweet. Not when you could never tell for sure the sincere from the sarky in other people; they never let you know, or else you were stupid. Your trouble Flo you’ve got wrong ideas about yourself for that matter nobody knows what he really is. Not according to Her: only oneself can know what one is really like Sister. So it was always this: hacking into you from either side.

  Along the edges of the park the pines deepening in the silvery light grass whitening the lake silver which from close up was a mud colour smelling of mud invisible dead fish and the droppings from long-legged ugly birds. Coot, Col said they were.

  Always Col! Or Mrs Betty Hunter. What if the old girl wouldn’t let you go if you said you wanted to chuck up the job? E. Hunter was more powerful than any man you could remember. Or Snow. Must be from living so long that Mrs Hunter got the stranglehold. She’d sucked the living daylights out of all the people she’d killed: that husband for instance; or half-killed: Princess Dorothy you could see at a first glance had almost been swallowed; the real proof would be the son arriving tonight, whether he had survived the mother to become the great actor, or whether he would start acting her tame zombie.

  Be fair though, Flora: wasn’t the old girl always saying this man Sister you’re going with I can tell by your touch I can tell by his voice when he brings—no need—the medicines we’ve telephoned for—they’ve got the boy with the bicycle haven’t they to deliver—that this is the man you’re intended for. As if it was any of her business. Oh reely Mrs Hunter? (snicker snicker). Made you feel such a silly drip. But the point was, she couldn’t want to hang on to you for her own ends. Then there was nothing that you could truthfully accuse her of, except her scratchy bitchy ways; but she was old and oh God tired and sick.

  So there was no one to prot
ect or save you from Col Pardoe.

  Only Snow.

  All along the parkside the dead dwindling grass. It would be dark by the time the actor came. Snow was an albino though she called it a natural ash blonde. She’d develop skin cancers later on, specially working in a burning bus, and at the depot, sitting on a bench in the sun smoking with the blokes waiting for the handover. Snow smelled like white-coloured women do: more like a man. She smelled of the coins she had been handling, and sweaty leather, and too many smokes. But you had Coff’s Harbour in common: my cousin—my only living relative.

  While Mrs Hunter insisted this man Sister you went with your last day off—to Noamurra—or wherever it was—tell me about it—I mean him! As if you would have known how. And what is this delicious cosmetic of which you are smelling? Ah (snuffle) that is wych-hazel I’ve often wondered. Wonder what she smelled under the wych-hazel: perhaps those goats she went on about.

  They had gone that day to Noamurra, it was true.

  ‘Why Noamurra, Col? Such a godforsaken sort of a place!’

  ‘That’s what appeals. The bulldozer won’t nose it out, or not yet. And that’s what I want today.’

  He was driving the old Mercedes SSK (whatever it means). He had traded in the Valiant, and done up this old car; he was clever at that sort of thing. Col would have been clever at anything he put his mind to, but said what he wanted was peace of mind. As if you didn’t, all of you; but what was it? and how to get it?

  ‘Noamurra! Who’d want to live there? Amongst all those old neglected orchards.’

  ‘You could listen to yourself living at least—in between hearing the oranges drop.’

  ‘Not very progressive. I’m for progress.’

  ‘You could stand for mayor, Flo.’

  In other circumstances she might have got angry but the warmth, the sound of the road, had drugged her. And the scrub: each swathe identical. She giggled slightly and it bumped her against the back of the seat. Col was smoking the pipe with the aluminium stem, which made the spit sizzle at the bottom of the bowl. Along the sandstone ridges the sun glazed and dazed: through the open window sun-wind was flung harsh as sandpaper against the skin.