The Eye of the Storm Read online

  Keemis is sending up the papers with Arnold Wyburd the junior partner, so that we make sure nobody else grabs the block you have your eye on. This was the year Elizabeth and Alfred (‘Bill’) Hunter had looked at each other and finally admitted. Alfred looked at her longer than she at him because he was the more honest, she granted even then: not that she was dis-honest; she only lacked his purity of heart. The point is, Alfred, you must allow me to give our children what we owe them; here there is no life; and what about their education? Mention of education always stirred Alfred to action. So they were buying the block in Sydney, at Centennial Park, and the young cove was bringing the agreement for signature. Elizabeth Hunter had found Arnold Wyburd an agreeable young fellow, harmless anyway. It was the evening after he had gone. They were strolling up and down the veranda. Alfred was looking at her cleavage: she was wearing a rather lovely though simple dress of white lace which collaborated in a delicious cool with a breeze sweeping down off the hills. She realized she would have to allow Alfred tonight: she could hear by his breathing he expected it; but he was so kind, and the evenings at ‘Kudjeri’ interminable.

  And now this old man Arnold Wyburd had approached her bed—well, not old, not as old as herself, nobody else was as old as that but oldish. He smelled old. He sounded dry. He had taken her hand, and she was touching paper, delicate tissue, against her own. She might have played a little with the hand if she could have been bothered.

  ‘Everything under control?’ the solicitor inquired in a loud though slightly tremulous voice.

  ‘Why not?’

  It was the sort of thing men always ask; and Arnold in that old woman’s voice. Perhaps Lal had been the man; anyway, between them, they had got a couple of girls.

  ‘How’s Lal?’

  ‘Suffering, I’m sorry to say, from her rheumatic pains.’

  ‘Didn’t know she had any.’

  ‘For years. Only on and off, though.’

  ‘Then she ought to be thankful. “On and off” is nothing. I’ve been racked by arthritis, without pause, for years.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Remember to give him a present for Lal: the plainest woman ever; freckles. (Mrs Hunter put her hands to her face, to touch.) Lal had pouches under her eyes even as a girl.

  The solicitor cleared his throat. ‘I’ve got a disappointment for you, a very slight one however.’

  ‘Don’t—tell me.’

  She had opened her eyes. Arnold Wyburd decided not to look at them.

  ‘Basil has been delayed in Bangkok. He’ll be here this evening.’

  ‘Why—why? Bangkok!’ Mrs Hunter’s mouth was working past grief towards abuse. ‘Basil knew better than anybody how to—disappoint,’ she gasped. ‘I wonder whether he would have disappointed me as an actor.’

  ‘He has a great following. Lal saw him, you remember, when she took Marjorie and Heather over to London. I believe they saw him in Macbeth. Marjorie read somewhere that only the greatest actors can manage the part of Macbeth: the others don’t have the voice for it. Very taxing, it appears.’

  Arnold’s snippet of information, however dry, might have fed her pride if she had not felt temporarily quenched. For the moment she loathed herself so intensely she wished Arnold Wyburd would leave.

  Sensing something of her wishes, though not enough, he had moved across to one of the windows overlooking the park. Summer had left the grass yellow, the lake shrunken; only the columns had succeeded in keeping up appearances of a sort: rising out of a civic embroidery of cannas and agapanthus, they continued offering their job lot of European statuary.

  Why had he never lost a sense of inferiority in his relationship with Mrs Hunter? He should have disliked; instead he had not shed his admiration, first for his client’s wife, then for the widow. There was Lal of course to heal the wounds: in so many ways a splendid woman, Mrs Hunter; we must forgive the faults, even if she won’t let us forget them.

  He turned round, possibly to offer further consolation for the delay in Basil’s arrival: Dorothy will he here on time according to the last check with the airport. But she was again lying with her mouth open, not quite snoring, sucking at air, at life.

  Ohhh she was moaning deep down while standing outside one of the many envelopes of flesh she could remember wearing. She was looking at her sleeping husband. He certainly wasn’t dead, only unaware of the other lives she was leading beside him in his house while engaged in the practical business of bottling fruit and pickling onions—if the cook allowed it—when she was not supervising or sacking governesses, or chivvying maids. He liked her to ride through the paddocks with him. Even when they rode out together, he was not aware that she had never been the person he thought her to be. Not even when his full calf in its leather legging brushed so close the stirrup-irons clashed. She used to wear that old velour with stains round the band, which heightened the deception. As cattle seethed past with a sound of scuffed buckram; or ewes milled or scampered; or rams plodded, coughing and panting. She was once photographed holding a ram by the horns, smoothing a ribbon on his prize shoulders. More than anything the rams helped break what should have been an interminable marriage.

  Oh darling she moaned she moaned; from now on she was going to love him. Having known him as the Hunter boy, ‘Bill’, Alfred, kind husband, the Juggernaut of stifling nights under a mosquito net, there should have been no situation they could not embrace equally: when their mere bodies prevented that, or so it seemed, as he groped, stroked, fumbled, looking for some kind of confirmation through his hands, before thrusting up inside her to reach the secret she was keeping from him.

  The wool men and cattle experts who came to ask his advice approached the presence in a spirit of blustering servility. She only realized how small he was as he lay wilted and sweating, rather fatty about the shoulders, his exhausted lungs still battering at her practically pulverized breasts. At his most masterful his toes would be gripping the sheets on either side of her long legs, as though he had found the purchase to impress her more deeply than ever before. Once, she remembered, she had felt, not his sweat, his tears trickling down the side of her neck, till he started coughing, and tore himself away from her: their skins sounded like sticking plaster. She tried to make herself, and finally did, ask what had upset him. His ‘luck’, in everything, was more than he deserved; however indistinct the answer, that was what it amounted to.

  At least she had given him their children. She must remember that, re-create their faces: fluctuating on the dark screen, Dorothy’s little mask, never quite transparent nor yet opaque, not unlike those silver medals on the dried stems of honesty; and Basil the Superb, who preferred to perform for strangers or gullible innocents like Lal Wyburd. Their children. Hardly Alfred’s, except by the accident of blood.

  So she must make amends. She was not ungenerous with her long cool body for which he had paid so largely: it was no fault of his he had not been in time to save her father’s life. Tragedy and the elasticity of awakened flesh brought them close in those early years. So they believed. What else she could give was more than she knew. She began going out of her way to avoid him, hoping to find in solitude insight into a mystery of which she was perhaps the least part. It was easy enough to excuse herself from riding round the paddocks with him: household matters; a child ill; endless simple and convincing reasons. But she continued hemmed in, not only by the visible landscape of hills and scrub, but by the landscape of her mind. I am superficial and frivolous, she blurted hopelessly; there is no evidence, least of all these children, that I am not barren. By the light of spring the surrounding hills had glittered like jewels, in the more brutal summer blaze they were smelted into heaps of blue metal: either way they looked dead. Her own state of mind appalled her increasingly.

  How much of it he guessed, let alone understood, she had not been able to decide; he could not have been so insensitively male not to be hurt. He was: hadn’t she on one occasion felt his tears? Otherwise he hid his feelings with a delicacy w
hich must have made her behaviour appear more shocking: not exactly selfish, as some no doubt had seen it, though nobody had dared accuse her, simply because she had dared them to and they were afraid of her. Maids had accused, silently: maids are more candid in the thoughts their eyes reflect, from overhearing telephone conversations and living through one’s headaches and colds. Friends can be held at bay with social conventions—and by maids. In any case the women, if not too stupid, were saving you up against the necessity of a future alliance. Men friends were either too dense to see, or too honourable to comment: like Arnold Wyburd, who must have seen more than most. Arnold was an honourable man, as opposed to his wife, who was an honest woman. You hardly ever saw Lal; but when you did, the flat replies, together with a certain tension of manner, implied judgment.

  Lal Wyburd would naturally have interpreted as selfishness every floundering attempt anybody made to break out of the straitjacket and recover a sanity which must have been theirs in the beginning, and might be theirs again in the end. That left the long stretch of the responsible years, when you were lunging in your madness after love, money, position, possessions, while an inkling persisted, sometimes even a certainty descended: of a calm in which the self had been stripped, if painfully, of its human imperfections.

  Mrs Hunter sighed, and the solicitor at the window turned to look. The Plantagenet attitude she had preserved for so long under the sheet was breaking up.

  That is something Lal Wyburd would never understand: she’s too normal,’ she said, or moaned.

  With his wife in the foreground of his thoughts, his client’s uncanny intrusion started the solicitor stuttering. ‘Wuh-what is it? Are you in pain? Can I do something—tuh-turn you, or something?’ when he wasn’t normally a stutterer, and would have liked to express, however rustily, some degree of tenderness.

  As for Mrs Hunter, she did not seem to find it necessary to reply: her mouth was again firmly adapted to her gums.

  So he continued standing at the window, still the junior in a firm whose senior partner had died many years ago.

  In the park, morning had solidified by now. Autumn at its blandest had infused an almost convincing life into dead grass and exhausted leaves. Anonymous figures strayed along the banks of the ornamental lakes, or walked more purposefully to work. A girl on a livery stable hack just missed becoming unseated when her nag shied at a tussock.

  As a young man Arnold Wyburd had fancied himself in a boater with striped band; he had started wearing, or liked to think he was ‘sporting’, a blue blazer with brass buttons. He had given up because, frankly, it was not what people expected of him. Suddenly he found himself head of a family, married to Lal Pennecuick, a thoroughly sensible, not pretty, but pleasing young woman, with whom he got the two little girls they had christened Marjorie and Heather. Nowadays he saw less of Lal, but that was understandable since grandchildren claimed so much of her attention, and in any case there seemed more to get through since they themselves had begun slowing up.

  In spite of the encroachment of family, very satisfying in its way, and the equally satisfying, if exhausting demands of a restricted, though respectable practice, he and Lal continued meeting every night in bed. Probably both were at their happiest discussing the events of the day. He could trust Lal’s discretion, and would sometimes report on the more reprehensible whims of his most respected clients; while she was equally frank in some of her disclosures, such as the symptoms of meanness she was discovering in their son-in-law Oscar Hawkins, and Heather’s menopausal troubles. If he had not revealed his secret passion for Marjorie’s middle daughter, Jenny, it was because a sense of being disloyal to the other grandchildren prevented him.

  Arnold Wyburd hardly allowed himself to hear what could only be a slow, soft fart from the direction of his client’s bed; he could not remember ever having heard a woman break wind before. Whether Mrs Hunter herself heard, it was impossible to tell: she appeared too engrossed in sleep or thought.

  Actually she no longer attached much importance to her own physical behaviour, unless it hurt her. Didn’t care for smells, though: those dreadfully increasing accidents. But they gave the nurses something to do.

  And solicitors? What did Arnold Wyburd do? It was doubtful whether his morning consisted of much more than reading the Herald at that old-fashioned office. Lucky there were the nurses and Mrs Lippmann for him to pay. Otherwise she had to invent little jobs for him, like looking up retired housemaids to see whether they were in need of financial assistance, or inquiring about the arrival of aeroplanes.

  Was his arrival at ‘Kudjeri’ with the deeds to the block of land Alfred bought for her in Sydney, and on which she was determined to die—none of those convalescent homes, and certainly not the Thingummy Village, thank you—was the occasion of the deeds her first sight of the young Arnold? She could not remember any other. He looked so thin and prissy, white too, beside the coarser, ruddier Alfred. He was everything she felt a solicitor ought to be. Because he looked so hot in his dark and incongruous city clothes, she told him to take his coat off, but he said he wouldn’t.

  Then, after giving the matter a reasonable amount of thought, he changed his mind. In moving the coat from the sofa to the back of a chair she detected a faint smell of moist warmth, hardly perspiration: certainly unlike the tom-cat stench of male sweat.

  (Why does all this come back when I can’t always remember what I’ve had for lunch, or if I’ve had it? The past has been burnt into me, I suppose—like they do with cattle.)

  Was Arnold already married? Oh yes, he must have been. There was some formal talk about children at dinner that night. Yes. The worthy Lal had produced her first, and was expecting another. After dinner Dorothy and Basil came in: Dorothy still looking thin after her bronchitis that winter (the official reason why Alfred proposed to build a house in Sydney); Basil on the other hand never had an illness, and not a nerve in his body. The children had not taken to Mr Wyburd: not surprisingly he bored them. Later on, Dorothy developed a passion for his wife. On the few occasions when they all met she wouldn’t leave Lal alone, putting her arms round that freckled neck, wanting to cuddle—quite laughable. Even Basil used to talk to Mrs Wyburd, at an age when he had started sulking at everybody else; wanted to drag the solicitor’s wife into corners to tell her about his ambitions. One was thankful for his civility.

  But Arnold was rigid in the company of children, with almost everybody. That night at ‘Kudjeri’ he had lit her cigarette, and his hand trembled. She held his wrist, to steady him, and was surprised at its sinewiness. Perhaps she could teach him courage. Yes, that was something she could give to them all—perhaps; she had never been afraid.

  It was an excruciating evening. Alfred fell asleep after telling about the rams and the Gimcrack mare slipping her foal the night before. That young Arnold Wyburd, unhappy in his comfortable shirtsleeves, sat watching you toss your ankle as you tried to think of a topic which might break the agony. (Lal shortened her skirt only after everybody had forgotten skirts were short.) Next morning he left and you didn’t see him: there was no reason why you should; Alfred’s driving him into Gogong in the Bentley, to catch the train, was attention enough.

  (All country evenings were boring. People only become religious about them after escaping and forgetting the details. Funny you should remember that sinewiness in Arnold’s smooth, hairless wrist.)

  When the house was built—the spiteful, and those in any way radically inclined, liked to refer to it as a ‘mansion’, which it wasn’t: only four reception, and as many bedrooms, not counting the maids’ quarters—you decided not to give gossip a chance by moving in too enthusiastically. Besides, this was starting from scratch, unlike ‘Kudjeri’, with all those inherited monstrosities. At Moreton Drive there were cabinet-makers, decorators and so forth to make patience a virtue. Delay and an unfashionable address should have silenced most tongues. People still talked, however, the babbling, frivolous ones. Why, Elizabeth, won’t you be cutting yourself o
ff living at Centennial Park? Coming from the bush to settle, practically—in the bush! We’ve never known anyone live in Moreton Drive. She could only answer, Now you will know somebody, won’t you? It was certainly very sandy, almost dune wherever houses had not been built; the branches of bottlebrush rattled when winds blew, which was permanently. Bad for the garden and the hair. But she would show the trivial members of her acquaintance.

  She had faith in her own originality and taste; everybody admitted those were among her virtues. She was not interested in possessions for the sake of possessions, but could not resist beautiful and often expensive objects. To those who accused her of extravagance she used to reply, They’ll probably become more valuable; not that she was materialistic, not for a moment. Her argument was: if I can’t take your breath away, if I can’t awaken you from the stupor of your ugly houses, I’ve failed. She did honestly want to make her acquaintances as drunk as she with sensuousness.

  Oh, she would screw her eyeballs deeper into her skull today, knowing she would never again see her long drawing-room, its copper and crimson and emerald melting together behind the bronze curtains drawn against the afternoon sun.

  You see, she said, you can’t say it’s extravagant if it’s beautiful—now can you? Standing on the stairs. Flinging out her arms to embrace this work of art her house; not forgetting her husband, her children, and a couple of servants she had as audience. If she overdid it slightly it was because she had something of the actress in her. (They used to say of Basil later, you can see where he gets it from.)

  Only now it is Alfred speaking, Don’t over-excite yourself, Betty, every one of us is full of admiration. Poor dear Alfred, she could have eaten him at times, from gratitude. When gentle devotion was what he would have liked. She was always trying to include him in what she was doing. Come and see your room—the study—which I hope you’ll use—when you come down to he with us—I hope you’ll make a habit of it, darling—because we’ll miss you, shan’t we? Dorothy? Dragging Alfred, and Alfred alone, by the hand, its skin coarsened by joining in the work at ‘Kudjeri’—to jolly the men—a square, undemonstrative hand, trying manfully to return her enthusiasm with curious little encouraging pressures. (Their whole married life they had spent trying to encourage each other’s uninteresting interests.) What am I going to study in this study? He laughed after a fashion. If I ever use it.