The Eye of the Storm (45 page)

Because she might have sounded cranky, and because she owed him something in return, she must make the effort to deceive: perhaps deception was what an actor expects of life.

So she put her arms around him; she must think about this child he was going to give her: the child who would be the embodiment of unselfish love. ‘Yes,' she muttered. ‘I'll love you all right. I've only got to get used to—the idea.' And she crushed him with all her health and strength, as someone else had crushed, and mauled, and possessed her into a state of resentment.

Sir Basil seemed to like it. He grew young and excited. Even if he slit her open, she must love it for the sake of this golden child he was going to plant inside her.

So they were giving a great performance.

Whereas at the beginning his supremacy had been assured by ambition, now it was she who had become the guiding force. It was this desire to create something tangible, her only means of self-justification: as she must make others understand.
I'm not oh God oh Col I'm not the fucking whore you think,
she moaned the shapeless words into her lover's mouth.
Col?

‘Mmmm?' The getter of her child this pseudo-husband drove the word back into her she had wanted
oh Col Col ohh
she wanted her own her flesh her child
ohhhhh.

Sir Basil keeled over, finally, and slithered off her left flank. He lay beside her trying to show he wasn't exhausted.

‘Have you,' he panted, ‘everything you—need, Flora?' He sounded anxious.

‘Yes.'

She felt becalmed rather than calm, let alone fulfilled. There was nothing she needed beyond the certainty—she might even settle for the faint hope—of conceiving. She couldn't visualize her child except as a burst of distant gold. Would Col bash her up? She would have to tell him to his face because the letters she wrote made her want to puke, and on the phone she was at her dumbest.

Sir Basil Hunter was snoring. Although she would not have imagined she could fall asleep beside a man she didn't know, and without his clothes, she must have snoozed to find herself walking it could only be with Col Pardoe amongst the green hummocks of Noamurra printed up large on a hoarding
A NOAMURRA WELCOME TO MAN AND WIFE
Col if it was it was his arm seemed pleased to confirm what he already knew.

Basil woke. The surrounding darkness must have reached its lowest depths of black. He drooled for the glass of Alka-Seltzer he would presently brew, not on account of a hangover, but because
it was a drink which soothed and restored him in the middle of the night; he slept more innocently, he liked to believe, after gulping this pristine draught. He scrabbled after, and found his watch, only to remember his eyesight was no longer up to reading the time on its luminous face. So he groped farther, till bumping the lamp he realized he ought not to switch it on: there was this girl, the nurse he had gone to bed with. He could hear her beside him, breathing in her sleep.

He hankered after light more than before, to stare at the flesh which had given him such a surprising amount of unexpected pleasure; but he might not be dispassionate enough, and the nurse could return to her body and start bossing or abusing him.

So he lay flickering his eyelids and thinking; there was no alternative in the trap in which he found himself. Oh Lord, if only he could kick her out and spread a bit; but in an effort to rearrange himself he found he had been brought closer, plastered to her ribs, almost part of the movement of her heart. He tried listening for signs of waking; but there weren't any: if anything she was sinking deeper drawing him under with her a voice calling in his mind's ear from a long way off
BASIL
his own slippery name nobody he could recognize not even the sex behind the voice only that it was persistent clearly articulated though faint. He shut it out at last by forcing himself full awake.

His thoughts began steeplechasing, spurt after spurt, a string of competitive images. He looked his best in sombre, fur-trimmed robes: that photograph of Alvaro, the one from the Third Act. Nobody could deny you made a fine figure (in fact, there is always some bastard aiming a banana skin, but dammit). Fly back as soon as it is practically possible, and revive
Malatesta
perhaps, or
The Master of Santiago.
On the whole they preferred your Alvaro: an austere, destructive, while self-destroying soul—a noble inquisitor. Yes, revive The Master, with its shorter, cheaper cast; woman's part not big enough for her to think she can rob the kitty or throw a tantrum. Impress anybody with some of those lines—and your voice:
God neither wishes nor seeks anything. He is eternal calm. It is in wishing nothing that you will come to mirror God.

Oh God, if only he could have switched the light on: he was driven to speak the remembered lines, address Alvaro in the mirror; but the damn girl; and on this narrow bed he couldn't tear himself free of the adhesive skin. He was stuck with her.

So he sank back. What he had never been able to understand was how he had moved them in certain scenes night after night while wanting and getting everything, the whole jackpot, for himself, and not believing in ‘God' Every night the faces stirred, the breathing rose out of the darkness. Only the author was unmoved, a cantankerous, hostile Frenchman arriving unannounced to catch you out. When the critics had more than hinted that his play was corn. Some of the lines
were;
everything depended on the voice which spoke them. But the Frenchman couldn't forgive himself his own corn, so he wanted to hold you responsible.

It was becoming the nurse's play. Rolling violently, she was trying to throw off her dream, get her lines out. ‘Donthigkbecolsidoancallyoudarligidoanfeeloralway—sfelt.' Well, you would have expected her to love somebody, probably the whole pack: this Botticelli, not so much vulgarized as pop slanted.

He was unable to resist stroking the surface of her dream. The hot skin responded to his fingers without her waking. He felt a bit guilty for doing her so easily, and considering what she had given in return: she had made him see and hear himself again, moving with authority under the weight of his winter-toned, fur-trimmed robes. Perhaps this Alvaro was a little more in love, sensually, with his Mariana than the text demanded. Not an easy part to cast, herself always too much the sheath to his sword, particularly in that last duet:

MARIANA.
   O rose of gold! Face of a lion! Face of honey! At your feet! My forehead on the earth before Him whom I feel!

ALVARO.
     No, rise up higher! Rise up more swiftly! Drink and let me drink of you! Rise yet more!

MARIANA
.   I am drinking and being drunk of, and I know that all is well.

Sister Thing—Flora Manhood—was stirring. He, too. Without her knowing, she was filling him with more than pleasure, poor girl: positive joy. He had to impress it on her whether he woke her or not. She gave no formal sign of waking, but this time they were more gently and completely lovers.

What if he did fall for some pretty, healthy, but ordinary girl like this? Would her love for him survive his bitches of friends? Would he be turned by her perpetual clangers into a pillar of sullenness? Come to think of it he had never been ‘adored' by any but unattractive girls who came to the performance night after night, and hung about the stage door blushing through chlorosis or acne; or by some elderly, often deformed woman usually without means, whose permanent, near stall was her one shameless extravagance, in which she sat devouring with her eyes, her open dentures, perving on a codpiece. Esmé Gilchrist (E. Gilchrist she signed herself) invited him to tea at Islington, and he went because at that age he was still so incredibly innocent, and—she must have guessed—shockable. She received him in a lace whatyoume—teagowns in those days—and hoped to excite him with her truss. As a bonus, shit on the sheet. He got away so quickly the knocker could hardly have stopped knocking by the time he reached the bus stop.

What he had always longed for, he now knew, was to be loved by some such normal, lovely, insensitive but trusting hunk of a girl as this Flora Nightingale beside him: he had done her twice and felt progressively younger. Then why Alvaro? at one level a rewarding part for an elderly—let's say ‘mature', actor of voice and presence; at another, the mouthpiece of asceticism preaching its withering gospel from the foothills of tragedy. As he climbed higher into a rarefied atmosphere, he breathed more deeply to satisfy his youthful lungs. It occurred to him: only an old man should aspire to, and would be capable of enduring, the fissions of Lear, but an old man with the strength of youth. So he paused, on a ledge as it were, to huddle closer to this warm girl who had received him unprotesting for the second time.

He began to feel lonely at last, on his narrow ledge, and thought
he would wake his companion: have to sooner or later; probably shamming anyway. ‘Darling,' he addressed in turn, an ear, her mouth, each of her nipples, his arms as deep in her flesh as wire in the bark of a tree after a long relationship, ‘I have a feeling we're starting something that's—most important—for both of us.' If he had resisted writing a play for himself to act in, it was because it might have sounded something like this.

‘Mmmm?' She was too sleepy; or not so sleepy that the resident crowbar of her will could not prise her apart from her lover. She turned her back, her moody rump. Was she corrupt? Nurses—when you come to think of it. And when he had wanted to worship at the altars of health, purity, innocence; to lay his head on a pair of breasts which sympathized with the hunger of his thoughts.

Anger doused the rosy flame he had gone to so much trouble coaxing. He had nothing, or comparatively little, against this poor cow, who had simply flopped from running backwards and forwards at the beck and call of Elizabeth Hunter throughout the afternoon, then flogging half the night. No, he must look farther for somebody to blame, farther even than Mitty Jacka expecting him to find the money for the spectacular suicide she was devising for him. Look right back to the original grudge.
I was never a natural mother—I couldn't feed. But that—you see, darling—hasn't deprived you of—of nourishment.
She had told him, by God, without his asking. And doled out a cheque for five thousand—dollars, not pounds. Again only a wretched nibble.

He dragged the sheet up, tight, sawing at his throat, then settled down to hugging his resentment. Forgetful of his love, he must have rocked his anger to sleep.

In the cold awfulness of this fur-trimmed robe feelings unshutter only for brilliant glimpses watching the old painted skin give its last gasps through every frightened pore as well as the purple cupid's bow no need to use the dagger in your sleeve words are fatal if pointed enough
money is life while there is life left otherwise it is time to die die then
she can't protest against the truth only use her automatic bellows on the not even half-life she is giving up for life for say
The Master
if Alvaro's own attitudes are sterile that is only to make a play to forego the wrack the storm and put buggered to the Jacka's version of suicide by the
unplayed I.

Flora Manhood lumped herself together in the bed. Already there were flashes of tawny light through the rattling blinds. The light blew cold on her nakedness raising goosepimples as she watched.

Basil Hunter looked frightening in his sleep. His expression twitched, and on and off, it was twisted into tight knots of wrinkles. She too felt frightened at last.

She put out a hand, before bending over him to say, ‘You must have been having a shocking dream.'

‘Yes. I was murdering—or being murdered—I can't remember—or who.'

Though it sounded sleepy enough, he was watching her keenly to see whether his explanation had satisfied her. But she was not interested in his dream: she looked preoccupied by some unhappiness, or murder, of her own. It had given her something more than her rather commonplace, healthy prettiness: she was beautiful, her hair an equal of the tawny light; only her expression remained remote and sad.

Flora Manhood did in fact feel unbearably sad. Here was this strange, not bad, but boring man, unconscious of the part he was playing, or the child she could conceive by him, regardless of whether he, or the child, wished it. She herself would not have wished to be born; sometimes she wondered whether her parents had wished it; or whether it was something that had happened because it was too long a drive to the pictures, so they stayed at home. Of course they would never have admitted to it if you had been brave enough to ask them; they were honest, religious-minded people.

She was the dishonest one, the deceiver. Her own child, whom she could not help seeing with the features of Colin Pardoe, would grow up as the visible proof of her deception, and she would have to disguise her remorse as love for her boy. Whichever way she
looked she could see no end to her dishonesty: a vista of mirrors inside a mirror.

At least the actor would go away, and need not know. It was the rightful father who would remain and know. Passing them in the street or sitting opposite in the bus, he would look for his own features in what should have been his child. Oh, but she would take her boy away to another city, and there perhaps she would be able to love him enough to prevent him suspecting her deceit and ending up hating her.

While Basil Hunter, the more he looked at her brooding over her secret thoughts, wanted to make amends for what must have seemed a capricious seduction: on the contrary, he had been feeling tired and dispirited, not to say disgusted with himself for his intentions towards that old woman who was also his mother. Actually there should not have been any question of making amends to Flora Manhood; he was by now sure—or as sure as you can ever be—that it was not merely a matter of sexual desire: he could love this girl for the beauty of her simplicity, and her still unformed character would respond gratefully and happily.