The Eye of the Storm (69 page)

‘Has she come to live with us?' asked Mog, the fat girl who had scoffed the dripping the night before.

The mother was too distracted to attempt an answer. Before each of her children who had appeared in the kitchen, she set a plateful of burnt porridge. For the recalcitrant princess she managed to slide a cup of tea in amongst the litter at the sink.

The tea tasted bitter and stewed. It thrilled the Princesse de Lascabanes, as did her own consummate industry and the tongues of frosty air licking at her through the yard door.

‘What about Sir Basil?' Mrs Macrory thought to ask, and became more distracted than before.

‘No idea. You know, I hardly know my brother.' Indeed, Madame de Lascabanes was more intimate with the inside of this pan she was scouring.

It was too immoral for poor Mrs Macrory. ‘We were a close family.' She sighed, and drifted to the screen door, and warmed her hands in her soiled sleeves, and returned uncomforted. ‘Rory's gone to fork out the silage to the calves. He'll be back later on, and we'll see what plans he has for entertaining Sir Basil.'

The Princesse de Lascabanes narrowed her eyes, her lips, at the saucepan lid she had finished. She was holding it like a buckler between her self and the unspeakable Macrory; or herself and Basil, even; Hubert might not have existed; Father was at least dead; Fabrizio, a character she saw differently at successive readings, offered the greatest difficulties because substantially affected by the climate at waking.

Half opening in her, this dream of the night before was a wound more exquisite than any she had yet experienced.

By the time Sir Basil Hunter woke the frost must have thawed. The light reflected on the bare walls was suggestive of glossy, yellow-green apples. It had probably been a child's room before the
visitor turned him out: in one corner stood a toy cart. Early in the night Basil had grown resigned to the stretcher: he was too tired to sulk at discomfort. On waking, he was still tired and stiff, as though he had been on a journey in his sleep far longer than their drive to ‘Kudjeri'. Now he continued lying curled in the shape he had been longing to assume: that of a sleeping possum, or a bean before the germinal stage, or a foetus in ajar. He might snooze some more if nobody came to scold him. Each of the women in the house was a scold. If it were that thug Macrory he might have a knuckle duster with him. None of it greatly mattered to Basil in bed.

In fact nobody bothered about him. He shaved unevenly in cold water, and tried to decide which of his unsuitable clothes to wear for ‘Kudjeri'. His mind was beginning to grope around amongst its surroundings regardless of what the Macrorys had reduced them to. The physical context should not matter; but it always did. He patted his face in the flawed, deal-framed mirror. He wasn't too bad, considering. Reassured, he roughed up the foulard at his throat, and wondered what Dorothy would be wearing.

When he went down he was surprised to find her in the kitchen, looking far less incongruous than he expected. She was arranging things in cupboards as though she had taken possession of the house.

Because of the march she had stolen on him, he asked with some severity, ‘Where are the Macrorys?'

‘She is starting the children on their lessons. He's out around the place, doing something occupational, but will be back shortly to entertain you.'

Only then she looked at him, to give him the opportunity to grimace.

He took it, and at once felt annoyed with himself for having fallen into the trap: he was no longer sure which side Dorothy was on. She had tied up her hair in a Roman scarf, as though she were again a child dressing up on a wet afternoon. The scarf made the face fend for itself, which it did by not communicating. Her arms, he noticed for the first time, were not only lean, but leathery and muscular. No doubt her hands, with their long nails which usually
exempted them from any form of drudgery except boredom, had already acquired a film of household grime, not to say kitchen sludge. No, he could not be certain which side Dorothy was on; when he needed her on his.

‘What do you want for breakfast?' she asked.

‘There you've got me. Whatever they have.'

‘Men eat charred chops,' Dorothy reminded him with every sign of gravity.

She even produced from out of a fly-proof cupboard a dishful of drought-fed, mutilated chops, and held one up, not for him to laugh at, mercifully he realized at the last moment. ‘Rory himself does practically all the outside work,' Dorothy told; and let the chop fall back on the pile.

‘Well,' he said, ‘I'll have a chop, if that's what you advise. Or two.'

The Princesse de Lascabanes actually knew what ought to be done. Not only was she grilling the chops, so the stench told him, she was melting a lump of dripping in an enormous blackened pan, to fry up a mound of grey cold potato laced with ribbons of pale cold cabbage.

The blue fumes, the spitting, then the revolver firing a blank at memory, brought the image jerking to life. ‘You know—' he wanted somebody to share it, ‘we might be on tour—in digs up north—doing for ourselves. Before anybody knew we existed.' Encouraged by the fug of sentiment, he moved in on her and squeezed a buttock.

The princess did not like it. ‘Watch the grill!' she shouted. ‘See if the chops are far enough gone.'

They looked infernal. ‘They should be. They're writhing.'

In her irritation, she pushed him aside, to stoop, to peer, to frown: her recently contracted partnership with life made her as damn humourless as she had been when a girl. ‘A tough chop is easier to swallow if frizzled,' she announced with bossy assurance.

Her opinion of him was probably as low as Shiela's or Enid's. Faced with his trio of contemptuous women, what he desired
most, as ageing man and precarious actor, was respect rather than admiration.

Dorothy at least handed him a plateful of food, all the better for being primitive and mountainous: he tucked in, devouring with particular appetite the charred fat round the edges of the chops and those bits of the fried-up veg which had stuck to the pan. He had forgotten something, and Dorothy pushed the bottle at him to test his reaction to ritual. She stood watching obliquely, and only turned away, whether hissing or sighing it was difficult to tell, on seeing him consecrate amorphous matter, first with a turgid clot or two, followed by an ejaculation of authentic, plopping red; while the act transformed him into a boy, greedy for life as much as food, as he watched an old rain-soaked drover still sitting in this same kitchen chewing the greasy mass of tucker a boss's cook had doled out as charity.

Macrory appeared too suddenly, as though bursting in might deliver him from a predicament by intimidating a pair of impostors.

He ignored the woman and jerked his head at the actor bloke. I'm gunner muster this mob of ewes we're sending in.' He showed his teeth in the ambiguous smile. If you'd care to come,' the offer was a grudging one, ‘we'll make tracks as soon as you've put away yer breakfast.'

Macrory drove his jeep at such a bat he might have been prepared to sacrifice himself if it would dispose of Sir Basil Hunter. On the back seat stood a bleached and matted kelpie, whinging old womanishly and draping a purple tongue over the driver's shoulder.

Like dark, grounded birds, the casuarinas shied and flapped as the onrushing steel shore into their dusty feathers; along a rise, skeleton trees upheld the tradition of martyrdom; at each neck-breaking jolt, the sky showered sparks of light; and a decapitated thistle-head grazed Sir Basil's cheek as they curved around the shoulder of a hill.

Leaping off the eroded ridge, the jeep bore down on a brown dam framed by a stand of withered tussock.

‘There!' Basil pointed and shouted. ‘That's where you can drop me.'

Shocked by the unorthodox demand, Macrory shouted back, ‘Why?'

Sir Basil Hunter explained, ‘Used to come here after yabbies. I'd like to poke around a bit.' What he did not dare confess was that he wanted to feel the mud between his toes.

Even so, Macrory's surprise turned to surliness: he could hardly reconcile himself to what amounted to a perversion. ‘Dam's near as anything dry. Couldn't drown in it, anyway. I'll pick you up on the way back—if you're still here.'

Basil said he would be.

Macrory pelted off, but returned in a swirl to deliver a warning. ‘May be gone an hour or so.'

Basil assured his host he could use every minute of that time at the dam.

Again Macrory drove off, tensed and disgruntled: perhaps he had been hoping to ferret a secret out of his guest, or to make some more of company he despised.

At the far end of the dam stood a single tree, of tremendous girth beside the comparative sapling rooted in Basil Hunter's memory. Mentally he could still put his arms round the tree, instinctively shinning up its shagginess, grasping it with bare knees, while a stench from the ants he crushed and the motions of his chafing limbs drowned the scent of gorse and the twittering of tits as they hovered above the fists of blossom with which the spiky bushes bristled. Overhead, the cries of a desperate magpie were sawing away, and once or twice a beak struck at the marauding skull almost close enough to bump the nest. Tits' eggs were peanuts to maggies'. He hoped he would find a nestful of reds: what he hadn't got was a maggie red.

Perhaps never would. The moment of falling his heart descended bounding ahead his vision a whirligig of fear. Then his lungs must have collapsed: they were spread on the ground as flat as perished balloons. That he was still alive he knew from the pain in his arm, the bone of which should have been protruding through the skin. But the arm looked normal: no sign of the sick throbbing going on
inside the flesh. Though alive now, he would probably die of his arm.

The roan mare was coming at a canter.
For God's sake boy what have you done?
Father was shorter, more breathless than usual, the seat of his breeches too tight as he arrived on the ground out of the saddle.
What is it Basil?
His pores were open.
I think I broke my arm.
Those red, staring pores.
The deuce you did—we don't know—got to find out.
A man's a father's hands shouldn't tremble it was frightening: if you cry you may make him worse.
Have it put right. Get you up in front of me. Shove the good arm round my neck.
Too close his breath on you like the trembling and that scalding sweat your own as cold.
Now lie back son lean against me I'll support you.
Awful bumpy hard half on the mare's withers the pommel of the saddle and half lying on Dad's stomach the bone shrieking under your skin deliciously delirious his fire dripping into your cold sea of sweat.
Won't be long Basil boy.
It was Dad trying to love. It made you want to cry, to reach up with your crook arm. So you laughed.

Sir Basil Hunter limped towards the tree he had fallen out of. He would lie down under it a while: even his omissions are a luxury to the expatriate of a certain age and reputation. The ground was suitably unyielding. The scents returned: of ants competing with gorse blossom.

And Alfred Hunter offering downright love disguised as tentative, sweaty affection. When Mother was the one you were supposed to love:
you are my darling my love don't you love your mummy Basil?
Bribing with kisses, peppermint creams, and more substantially, half crowns.
I don't believe you love me at all perhaps you are your father's monopoly or is it yourself you love?
So the game of ping pong was played between Moreton Drive and ‘Kudjeri', between Elizabeth and Alfred Hunter (Dad at a handicap).

You all played. Dorothy was playing it still.

Sir Basil Hunter opened his eyes. The other side of the branches of the great tree the empty sky was staring at him. Suddenly he would have liked to feel certain that he had actually loved somebody, that he had not been only acting it.

He sat up, looked over his shoulder, then began taking off his shoes: whether it was self-indulgence or not he would have to feel the mud between his toes.

Around him the silence was watching, which made him stealthier in his movements. No, it was his soft white feet: still elegant, he had liked to think, long and narrow, formed by generations walking in the furrow behind the plough and sticking their toes into stirrup irons. But become useless, except to stride imagined miles around a stage; incapable of trudging the actual miles to Dover. Perhaps this was why he had failed as Lear.

Along the edge of the dam the hoof-prints of sheep had set in a fussy clay sculpture. Painful, too: he was regretting the sentimentality which had driven him to paddle back towards little-boyhood. At least he was unable to see his face, but his feet looked foolish mincing over the fanged clay. Till the soft, softer than soft, the effortless squelch: flesh is never so kind, nor as voluptuous, as mud: certain phrases, lines, can become its equal when delivered by a practised tongue into darkness on a propitious night.

‘In such a night,' he aimed at the Australian daylight, while throughout the ritual dark he had conjured up in his mind, the pale discs were raised to receive the seed he was raining on them;

Legs apart, pants hitched their highest and tightest, he listened for his own voice (his worst vice) and some of it returned out of that extrovert blue. He listened again: as the circles widened around him on the muddy water, magpies' wings were clattering skywards; but the silence burning into his skin was the applause he valued. That his art should have come to terms with his surroundings gratified Sir Basil Hunter.

But what if the disapproving Macrory should reappear sooner than he had reckoned? Sir Basil began frowning; he started swirling
around, shouldering off his not reprehensible, but in the circumstances, embarrassing gift. He stumbled into a pothole: could have come a gutser. Walking not so steady now on his Shakespeare legs. When beneath the soles of his feet a tickling, a prickling of life, restored his balance. Putrefying meat was the best bait for yabbies, he remembered. He could remember the jar: to be kept beyond smelling distance; that Easter Sunday he fetched up his breakfast tying the string round a lump of green, stinking mutton. Catching yabbies might not have given him so much pleasure if it had not displeased
HER:
I shan't darling you smell so don't claw at me Basil smelly boys aren't kissable.