The Eye of the Storm (59 page)

Like a child at the dentist's, Elizabeth Hunter had clamped her jaws.

‘What you must miss more than anything, I should have thought, is the company of your contemporaries. Which you could enjoy in some efficiently-run institution—or home, dear, home—such as I understand there is on the outskirts of Sydney.'

He looked at his sister. Who saw the sweat lying blue in the field of bluer, incipient stubble.

So it was her responsibility as well. ‘Yes, Mother. As Basil says. Sympathetic company in bright surroundings. There's one place I've been told. And a garden. At the Thorogood Village. There's a
scented
garden laid out specially for those whose sight isn't of the best. I was told that by Cherry Cheeseman. You remember the Bullivants, Mother? Well, her mother …' The Princesse de Lascabanes did not normally perspire.

‘I know, Dorothy. Violet Bullivant died at the Thorogood Village.'

‘That was sad,' Dorothy admitted. ‘But everybody dies eventually. Let us at least be realistic'

‘And you, darling,' Sir Basil added, carrying the blotched claw to his lips, ‘will not die before it is time.'

‘Not before my time,' Elizabeth Hunter's undamped jaws agreed.

To her children she had become an enormously enlarged pulse dictating to the lesser, audible valves opening and closing in their own bodies.

‘Something I found out,' she panted, ‘on that island—after you had all run away—nothing will kill me before I am intended to die.'

If you could describe your storm; but you could not. You can never convey in words the utmost in experience. Whatever is given you to live, you alone can live, and re-live, and re-live, till it is gasped out of you.

So she lay gasping, as though the tide had almost fully receded from this estuary of sheets, while they watched her, she could tell, with their unregenerate, gulls' eyes.

She had got up earlier that morning: it must have been a changed light, the latticework of bird sounds, then an enormous span of wings spreading creaking (or was it a car?) compelling her. She had taken to wearing a minimum of clothes on the island. Although she had scarcely been near the beach, sand which had collected in them set up a dry, cleanly friction with her skin as she was putting them on. Round her hair, unkempt by now, she tied the flamingo scarf, before deciding to discard it. Would that slab of a Norwegian, or worse still, would Dorothy have thought you were wearing the scarf for a purpose? As you might have been: which was all the more reason for undoing the knot.

She laughed for the conspiracy she was having with herself.

Then she was alone. Not even herself for company.

Never one for self-pity, or not more than a normal ration, she snivelled a bit on reaching the veranda. She recognized her own type of useless, beautiful woman, whose husband had got the number of children required by convention from the body he had bought at an inflated price because he was over-loving, and regretted the contract—secretly (he was an honourable man) and perhaps died
grieving over his lack of wisdom. She was a woman who had encouraged her lovers' lust; indeed she had made it inevitable; not in the Norwegian's case (she only half-wanted the Norwegian: he was peeling). Above all, she was a mother whose children had rejected her.

Oh God! Rooted to the veranda, she opened her mouth, and the sun blared back across the glass-inflected Pacific Ocean.

She had come across the coffee dregs in the kitchen when Professor Pehl drove up, between the bunker and the house, stopped the car, and got out.

She could not have felt less amiably disposed, but her upbringing and the dregs made her inquire automatically, ‘Is that you, Professor? Will you drink a cup of coffee if I make it?'

He stood to attention beside that wholly utilitarian machine. ‘Thank you. I have already drunk.'

His sobriety struck her as grisly.

So she bared her teeth while calling lightly, ‘Where is that silly Dorothy my daughter?'

She regretted it: he returned her stare so seriously she might have lost not only Professor Benthic Aggregations Pehl, poor Princess Menopause de Lascabanes, Alfred the Good, Basil my Beloved Only Son, Athol Shreve the—ugh! Arnold the Pure—but Everyone.

Professor Pehl dutifully replied, ‘I am not permitted to reveal the whereabouts of your princess daughter.'

He disappeared after that; and Elizabeth Hunter bowed her head.

Instead of brewing coffee for herself alone, she drank a draught of tepid water. Under her nails she could feel an irritant from the dregs her secretive daughter had bequeathed her.

Of course you could not altogether blame poor old Dorothy, what with that devious Frenchman, and now her unfortunate condition. Only natural that she should bear grudges, whether imaginary or justified, especially against a mother whose love of life often outstripped discretion, in the eyes of those who were drab and prickly.

To confess her faults (to herself) and to accept blame when nobody was there to insist on it, produced in Elizabeth Hunter a rare sense of freedom. As she wandered up past the bunker, past the abandoned Chevrolet, into the bush, she even went so far as to admit: in some ways I am a hypocrite, but knowing does not help matters; to be utterly honest, spontaneously sincere, one should have been born with an innocence I was not given. Which Alfred had.

Yet Alfred, not she, had been hurt, deceived, tortured, and finally destroyed. While she had continued demanding and receiving more than most women would have dared envisage. Even her beauty had only just begun to dim; her body remained supple at the age of seventy. For the first time she was disturbed by the mystery of her strength, of her elect life, not that frequently unconvincing part of it which she had already
lived,
but that which stretched ahead of her as far as the horizon and not even her own shadow in view.

Walking more humbly, as much for her solitariness as for the powers and honours so unreasonably conferred on her, she let herself be led into the cool depths of the rain forest, striped by the occasional light which fell between the shafts of its trees, rubbing past vines which had survived their writhing to become abstractions. It occurred to her she had read of elderly women lured into the scrub by an instinct for self-destruction, and of an old man driven mad after days imprisoned in a blackberry bush. Obviously none of this was reserved for her: she was too rational. So she went on.

Soon after setting out she had unpinned her hair, that most recalcitrant, though habitually controlled part of her. Now it floated round her face, almost completely veiling it at times, at others opening for her mind to surface and identify a foreign substance, or translate her present movements into recollections of another person's sensuality.

In a clearing she came across flowers: a variety of ground orchid, each tongue returning into the tufts of fine-drawn green sprouting from the gristle of its own sickle-shaped ear. Overjoyed at her
find she got down on her knees: to insinuate herself into secrets, to pick, to devour, or thrust up her nostrils, or carry back to die on her dressing-table. When she discovered the desire to possess had left her.

Ah, but temporarily, and flowers. Sitting back on her haunches, taking a detached look, she knew she was still annoyed at Dorothy's behaviour, and irritated by that Norwegian, not only for his presence on Brumby Island, but for existing at all. She picked a blade of pale grass, and sucked at it, and wondered what Edvard Pehl could be doing at the moment.

By allowing her inescapably frivolous and, alas, corrupt nature the freedom of its silence, the forest had begun to oppress her: she could not believe, finally, in grace, only luck.

This was where she heard the sound of an axe. And more faintly, voices. She got up, not without a warning twinge. She was longing to talk to somebody, nobody, somebody quite simple, stupid even. She needed to reassure herself that she could still fit into the pattern of someone else's life.

She was soon given the opportunity to prove it. After blundering some way through the undergrowth she arrived at the spot where two men had felled a blackbutt. Peace and light were flooding in where violence had recently exploded. One of the men was systematically lopping minor branches off the desecrated crown; the other was tending a saw, filing its teeth, feeling, almost stroking the blade, with trembling hand.

At once Elizabeth Hunter realized it was going to be practically impossible to make herself credible. The man with the axe left off” lopping. His stomach heaved under its hairy entanglement. His rather prominent eyes would have withdrawn deeper than the sockets allowed. A chain dangling from the waist of his thinner, stringier mate struck a slight music out of the saw he was holding.

‘ I heard the tree crash,' she claimed; when she hadn't. ‘I came to see. May I watch?'

The pursy man mumbled something and returned to lopping, but delicately now. The stringy fellow laid down his saw, then thought better, and took it up again.

She breathed rather than spoke. ‘Isn't it a wonderful smell?' Indeed, the heavy air was impregnated with bleeding sap. ‘More than a smell—a perfume.'

The men laughed, but softly. She suspected they might not look at her after that.

She sat on the trunk just above the fatal wound they had made. ‘And taste!' She did actually taste a chip from the tree, and might have dropped this transmuted wafer as quickly as she could; but managed to put it down instead. It slithered off the trunk and fell to the ground.

For herself she was again brittle and pretentious, but the two men appeared to be enjoying the unexpected.

The big fat one went tiptoeing alongside the trunk chopping through branches turned to butter. His thin mate had begun smearing the saw with oil, an operation he might have taken slower if she had not been there.

Undoubtedly neither of them would look at her again. Perhaps it was her loose hair. Or was she old? Or mad, perhaps?

Whatever it was, they respected it: the men were as reverent as a cloister of nuns.

‘I expect you live over at the forestry camp.' A pointless remark, but one which she hoped might put them at their ease.

Yairs, they lived at the camp; they were employed by the Department.

‘I'm staying with the Warmings.' It was too obvious, but she told. ‘They had to leave. One of their boys was taken sick.'

The men probably knew this: telephone lines in remote places are usually public property; but the hairy belly murmured, ‘Go on, eh?' out of regard for convention.

They still would not look at her; to do so might have been irreverent.

In the end she could only ask, ‘Now if I start back in
that
direction shall I come out somewhere near the house?'

Yairs, they began to explain, their reverential arms making signposts, their blackened hands trembling from recent exertions.

Some of the hairy creature's sweat flung off his jowl on to the back of one of her hands. He realized, and looked embarrassed.

When she left them, they were smiling, but at the ground.

The walk back was monotonous. She would have liked to put up her hair now, but there was no means of fastening it since she had thrown away the pins. She went on. Just before entering the carob scrub which fringed the beach, she licked the back of her hand, sucking up her own salt together with what she liked to think the axeman's sweat, and went sweltering or weeping through the glare off sand and ocean. As it happened, she was not a great distance from the spindly house. She walked slowly, less than ever capable of explaining the gifts which were showered on her.

The house felt empty, though somebody had made use of the kitchen. It could only have been Professor Pehl: a sliver of corned beef fat on a plate and a scattering of crumbs on the oilcloth had been left for a woman to dispose of. The sulks, or else her migraine, would have prevented Dorothy contemplating food.

Elizabeth Hunter tore off a lettuce leaf, and cut herself a wedge of mousetrap cheese. Eating her blameless cheese she envied the Warmings their complementary lives; she even envied them their child's illness. In a burst of sympathy rather than inquisitiveness, she marched along the veranda to their room. They had barely stopped living in it, leaving off as they had, in haste and anguish. Behind curtains dragged together at the last moment, there was still a smell of privacy: Helen's powder on the dressing-table, Jack's shirt rolled in a ball in a dark corner. Children's faces looked at the intruder out of framed snapshots. Neither of her own children had looked her full in the face, either from photographs or in life.

It was really too irritating, not to say maddening.

‘Dorothy?' When she reached the door which she knew must open to her, Mrs Hunter rattled the knob.

Now she was feeling old; she would be looking haggard: just how old and haggard Dorothy alone would see.

To get it over quickly, she sprang the door, and practically
lurched into this narrow glaring box. Dorothy's room was so empty it might never have been inhabited.

Elizabeth Hunter could not have hated Dorothy more than she did at that moment. More than Dorothy, she hated Edvard Pehl for having a part in her daughter's defection. She was glad she had not washed up his insolent plate.

Till suddenly faced with her own insolence, her childishness, she returned to the kitchen, and scraped and washed the plate. The sliver of sweating fat, and the iron roof crackling at her in the language of heat, reminded her of the foresters, their misguided gentleness, and a reverence to which she was not entitled.

Because she was alone, she lay down and snoozed, or simply lay, during the afternoon. (If he was there at the other end of the house, he gave no sign.)

She was roused by hands, it seemed. No, by thin fingers twitching at the corrugated roof. Only wind after all.

She got up and washed herself as well as you can from a jug and basin. She powdered her revived skin. She annointed herself. Why not? Her life had been a ceremony. She put on the dress she had worn the night before. Though in fact old, age had not tarnished its splendour, nor blunted its fluting: like certain classic sculptures. the dress was designed not only to ravish the human eye, but to seduce time into relaxing its harshest law. Tonight she plaited her hair, and wound, or moulded it, into a crown; then bowed her head before slipping over it the gold and turquoise chain she had allowed the child to wear.