The Eye of the Storm (60 page)

She dared only a quick look in the glass.

The wind had dropped. There was a breathlessness before sunset; irrelevant feathers of cloud were strewn on a white sky, just as she, at another level, was an irrelevent figure hanging around the veranda, living-room, kitchen, for no purpose she could think of, and in what was after all a ridiculous get-up. Well, she could cook something for the professor when he came: that would be purpose of a kind. She would make something simple, an omelette, say; though Dorothy had never approved of her omelettes. (You
were not prepared to join your French daughter in the cult of slime.)

Waiting, she sat down at the piano and listened to her own affectation hammering part of its way through the Field nocturne she had played last night (it was the only one she could remember). She had been waiting then for a man to approach and recognize that she had control over more than this hackneyed, girlhood piece, over music itself, and the threads of a brilliant sunset, and experience in general. Whereas now the most she could expect was a dull Norwegian, to hammer at facts, as she was hammering at the warped keys, fetching the thrummed, disjointed phrases out of the salt-eroded, motheaten depths of the piano.

Thrumming. Drumming in the end. Until she was outdrummed.

She went outside, and there were the flying brumbies approaching down the beach, their veils of manes, and in the sky the cloud feathers more tenuous than before. The sun too, was curiously veiled and pallid above the single stretched black hair of the horizon. At least the brumbies were outrunners of life, and she was gratefully prepared to watch them stampede along the beach in the direction of the striped cliffs. But this evening the mob propped, wheeled, and broke off through the scrub, smashing and trampling as they charged at the hinterland.

Quite suddenly a bluish dark had possessed and contracted the landscape. She lit her gentle lamps. Out to sea a blue lightning tattered the sky, which gradually lost its paper flatness, becoming a dome of black, thunderous marble. The night below had begun to snuffle. From undulating at first, the wind slammed hard at the land. She saw trees recoiling, heels dug in as it were, like a crowd resisting physical prostration.

She ran down out of the house, possibly falling once, but thinking less of selfpreservation than of finding and shepherding her deadly companion. ‘Edvard!' she called, then screamed into the wind,
‘ED-VARD!'
His stupidity was what worried her: all his science would not save his limbs from breaking.

Something flying could have been a board grazing her temple oh but sharp. For the moment a wound was less frightening than
exhilarating the wind roaring into her lungs inflating them like windsocks. The bluest lightning could not make her flinch.

Till cold and sober, she saw black walls on the move across what had been a flat surface of water. She was blown back no longer any question of where twirled pummelled the umbrella of her dress pulled inside out over her head then returned her breasts rib-cage battered objects blood running from her forehead she could feel taste thinned with water a salt rain.

In this solid rain herself a groping survived insect a staggering soaked spider fetching up at what must be the bunker behind the house where they keep their wine.

A child's broken celluloid doll lying in the sand at the entrance.

She looked back to see the groaning house break into sticks and flame a cardboard torch thrust high above the heap at once rain wiped it off.

Trains were rumbling, it sounded, over the wreckage, and continued rumbling, across the roof of the bunker.

It was dry inside her funnel. The walls, she could remember from daylight, were concrete buried in the dune which rose behind the house, but how resistant to acts of God she was not of a mind to calculate. She felt around her, through cobwebs and other accretions, and found the shelves of wine bottles. She began rolling the bottles off the uppermost shelf. Their thudding as they hit the tamped floor could not be heard above the thunder, roaring of the gale, groaning of the sea, lashing of wiry rain, until in a last desperate sweep she cleared the shelf entirely: out of the slithering torrent rose a shattering of glass. She clambered up, stiff with salt, sweat, and age, and stored herself thankfully on her shelf.

More awkward to dispose of than her jackknife body was the mind which kept lumbering around inside the walls of her bruised head, or streaking off independently by flashes. The lightning was soon as free to enter as her thoughts to sky-rocket, for the sturdy door of the bunker, till now wedged ajar in a drift of sand, was forced off its rusted hinges: she heard it somersaulted away.

There was a continual juggling of fireballs, either in the sky,
or was it at the back of her eyesockets:
rub hard enough Kate to see the coloured spots it's bad for the eyes but I don't care.
All night long the rumble of goods trains passing through Gogong, and on into precious memory, where it was Alfred trying to protect her storm-threatened body with his. As though she were the vulnerable one.

About three, if she could have looked at her little shagreen travelling clock (a present from Alfred, one of several, when Basil was born) the hour when she normally woke, to drink a glass of water and read a chapter, Elizabeth Hunter let herself down from her shelf. She was standing in water up around her thighs, nuzzled by several stiff objects, bottles, and dead fish.

Outside the hole where the door should have been the night was still hurtling. She could hear the ocean rising to accuse her. Well, she would stand accused: for the suicide of that contrary man who refused to come in; or was it murder if you were the cause of his staying out?

It was not the dead fish Edvard guiding you back on to the shelf more likely Alfred or solicitous Arnold. Arnold was born with a highly developed Sense of Responsibility which did not make him immune from irresponsible lust at least that one attack. For which you as much as he. Or more. Perhaps it is you who are responsible for the worst in people. Like poor little Basil sucking first at one unresponsive teat then the other the breasts which will not fill in spite of the nauseating raw beef and celery sandwiches prescribed by Dr Whatever—to ‘make milk to feed your baby'. Instead of milk, ‘my baby' (surely the most tragic expression?) must have drawn off the pus from everything begrudged withheld to fester inside the breast he was cruelly offered.

This night (morning by the shagreen clock) it is the earth coming to a head: practically all of us will drown in the pus which has gathered in it.

Elizabeth Hunter was almost torn off her shelf by a supernal blast then put back by a huge thrust or settling of exhausted atoms.

She lay and submitted to someone to whom she had never been introduced. Somebody is always tinkering with something. It is the
linesman testing for the highest pitch of awfulness the human spirit can endure. Not death. For yourself there is no question of dying.

She could not visualize it. She only positively believed in what she saw and was and what she was was too real too diverse composed of everyone she had known and loved and not always altogether loved it is better than nothing and given birth to and for God's sake.

It must have been the silence which woke her. No, not woke: she had been stunned into a state of semi-consciousness from which light as much as silence roused her.

She waded out of the bunker through a debris of sticks, straw, scaly corpses, a celluloid doll. Round her a calm was glistening. She climbed farther into it by way of the ridge of sand and the heap of rubbish where the house had stood. At some distance a wrecked piano, all hammers and wires, was half buried in wet sand.

Without much thought for her own wreckage, she moved slowly down what had been a beach, picking her way between torn-off branches, great beaded hassocks of amber weed, everywhere fish the sea had tossed out, together with a loaf of no longer bread, but a fluffier, disintegrating foam rubber. Just as she was no longer a body, least of all a woman: the myth of her womanhood had been exploded by the storm. She was instead a being, or more likely a flaw at the centre of this jewel of light: the jewel itself, blinding and tremulous at the same time, existed, flaw and all, only by grace; for the storm was still visibly spinning and boiling at a distance, in columns of cloud, its walls hung with vaporous balconies, continually shifted and distorted.

But she could not contemplate the storm for this dream of glistening peace through which she was moved. Interspersed between the marbled pyramids of waves, thousands of seabirds were at rest; or the birds would rise, and dive, or peacefully scrabble at the surface for food, some of them coasting almost as far as the tumultuous walls of cloud; and closer to shore there were the black swans—four, five, seven of them.

She was on her knees in the shallows offering handfuls of the
sodden loaf the sea had left for her. When they had floated within reach, the wild swans outstretched their necks. Expressing neither contempt nor fear, they snapped up the bread from her hands, recognizing her perhaps by what remained of her physical self, in particular the glazed stare, the salt-stiffened nostrils, or by the striving of a lean and tempered spirit to answer the explosions of stiff silk with which their wings were acknowledging an equal.

All else was dissolved by this lustrous moment made visible in the eye of the storm, and would have remained so, if she had been allowed to choose. She did not feel she could endure further trial by what is referred to as Nature, still less by that unnaturally swollen, not to say diseased conscience which had taken over during the night from her defector will. She would lie down rather, and accept to become part of the shambles she saw on looking behind her: no worse than any she had caused in life in her relationships with human beings, hi fact, to be received into the sand along with other deliquescent flesh, strewn horsehair, knotted iron, the broken chassis of an upturned car, and last echoes of a hamstrung piano, is the most natural conclusion.

Logically, it should have happened. If some force not her absent will had not wrenched at her doll's head and faced it with the object skewered to the snapped branch of a tree. The gull, a homelier version of the white predators, had been reduced to a plaque in haphazard bones and sooty feathers. Its death would have remained unnoticed, if her mind's ear had not heard the cry still tearing free as the breast was pierced.

At least the death cry of the insignificant sooty gull gave her back her significance. It got her creaking to her feet. She began scuttling, clawing her way up the beach by handfuls of air, an old woman and foolish, who in spite of her age had not experienced enough of living.

So she reached her bunker. She re-arranged herself, amongst rust and cobwebs, on her narrow shelf, protecting her skull with frail arms, to await the tortures in store for her when the storm returned.

For the eye was no longer focused on her, she could tell; and as it withdrew its attention, it was taking with it the delusions of her feeble mind: the black swans feeding out of her hands and seabirds nestling among the dark-blue pyramids.

As the storm came roaring back down the funnel in which she had clenched herself, the salt streamed out of her blinded sockets.

Some time that morning day evening the thin ribbon of silence was stamped very faintly then more distinctly with voices. The thing on the shelf, becoming a body again, began painfully trying out joints to see whether they still worked.

An old woman appeared in the hole which had once been the doorway to a bunker in a sandhill, behind what was now the ruins of the Warming family's summer ‘place'.

The woman said, ‘Yes. I am alive—after all.' The breeze even lifted her hair, or one lock less sodden than the mass.

Elizabeth Hunter smiled at the still tentative sunlight; no, it must be evening: the light was waning. She was glad to find herself reunited with her womanly self, and to see that these were actual men. One of them she recognized as the stringy Second Forester whose modesty had started him anointing his saw when she intruded on their privacy. His present companion was not the man with hairy belly; she had never seen this one before. He looked important, above physical employment, from the way he stood with his hands on his hips.

Legs astride the ruins, the man of authority congratulated the survivor. ‘You've had a lucky escape, Mrs Hunter. We've come to take you back to the camp and across to the mainland. The line's out of order, as you'll appreciate. So we can't call the copter. But some of the boys 'ull ferry you over in the boat.'

She smiled, and bowed her head without comment, the ropes of sodden hair hanging like plummets from around her face. One of her breasts, she realized, had escaped through the tatters her dress had become. She could see no way of covering it without drawing attention to herself.

As they trudged through the sand towards a truck standing on high ground she noticed the storm had blown the bark off several trees. There was that bird too, impaled on one of them, skewered by a snapped branch.

The stringy fellow wanted to contribute something to their meeting. ‘Most of these trees are gunner die,' he confided; then, after wetting his lips, he pointed. ‘See that bird? It's a noddy.' She saw her friend had left his teeth out.

Elizabeth Hunter, while listening, was more intent on following the movements her feet were making in the sand. The men seemed to be accepting the exposed breast as a normal state of affairs. Which it had to be, in the circumstances; only Dorothy would have condemned it and everybody.

The Forestry foreman, if that was his status, told how the cyclone had cut a swath halfway along the ocean side of the island, turning out to sea before arriving at the camp. This time the mainland was untouched.

‘Oh really,' she said,' a cyclone, was it?' formally.

She could hardly bother: nothing mattered beyond her experiencing the eye.

When they reached the truck they helped her into the cabin. They sat her between them. They behaved as though guarding a treasure, something of great antiquity and value uncovered by the storm. Whereas she was simply herself again.