The Eye of the Storm (18 page)

‘Dorothy is still poor old Dorothy,' their mother gravely answered. ‘Full of the wrongs done her. She resents an experience I had on an island years ago. I expect she'll be here to dinner.'

The solicitor had to inform them the princess telephoned his office to say she had a headache. He didn't tell them he wasn't surprised. His loyalty, of an irrational kind, or else of such longstanding he was saturated with it, did not prevent him being caught in any of the cross currents.

‘There! I knew!' The old lady was ablaze. ‘And you, Basil?'

‘I had booked a room at the Onslow. Didn't want to …'

‘… give anybody any trouble. My cook will be so disappointed. She was an actress, you know—in Berlin—and other parts.'

Not an actress! Nor daughter, nor wife, nor mother. He had reached that alarming stage in any actor's career where he loses the desire to perform. Suddenly. He would have liked to flop down, feel the tape closing round his neck, the clean, soft, white bib settling below his chin, then a detached hand feeding him slowly but firmly with spoonfuls of sweetened bread and milk. In such circumstances the mistakes would not yet have been made, and might even be avoided.

As things were, he could only answer, ‘Very well, Mother, I'll stay to dinner. Actually it would give me great pleasure to meet
your cook—and see some more of you, of course.' This too, was ‘acting', but a diffident performance of a small part.

‘Run, Sister Manhood, please—tell Mrs Lippmann Sir Basil will be here for dinner. She must—ex—ex
ceed
herself.' In her anxiety that minds shouldn't be changed, and that she scrape together words formal enough to compose her order, Mrs Hunter's tongue continued protruding from her mouth after the order had been given.

If he had felt less tired it might have shocked Sir Basil: that ‘slight stroke' Wyburd had written about; though hadn't your first reaction been to hope for a second one? So many problems solved by a stroke; so much unpleasantness avoided.

Now as the nurse was hurrying to obey, he took it there was no danger. His conscience could enjoy the crisp swish of a departing skirt. If her nurse's smile was in a convention, it was a pretty version of it, and he thought he could detect that slight friction of silken thighs against each other, scissorwise.

He sighed brightly at his mother. ‘A pretty nurse.'

‘Oh, nurses! No end of them. And I'm the one who has to nurse the nurses. Take him, Arnold, and show him where everything is. The cloakroom lavatory doesn't flush when you want it to.'

‘It does, Mrs Hunter, I assure you. We had it put right.'

‘It didn't some years ago.'

Sir Basil Hunter persuaded himself to kiss his mother just below where the lilac wig joined the forehead. What looked dry, tasted clammy. He closed his mouth on his revulsion; whatever the conscious motive for his visit, he realized that unconsciously he had been hoping for some sign that life is a permanence.

She, on the other hand, seemed unaware of anything but her own exhaustion.

‘I'll come up later,' he made his words linger; ‘sit with you a while.'

She did not answer, nor probably care.

So, then, here he was, going downstairs with the Wy-burd, who was trying to talk theatre as though he thought that was the only stuff you were made of: well, there were one or two other com
ponents. The Wyburd wife and daughters, it appeared, had seen a performance of
Macbeth.

Whatever else, all, even your enemies, even the naming Agate, were agreed that you excelled as Macbeth. Though you yourself had endured agonizing doubts before the final flash of intuition. Perhaps you were after all the man of inspired mistakes.

The solicitor was demonstrating how the lavatory flushed perfectly. ‘You see? She forgets.' He sounded mildly, officially kind.

‘And remembers a hell of a lot that had better be forgotten.'

‘I expect so.' There Arnold Wyburd would not wholly commit himself; of one thing he could not be sure.

As they strolled down the path which meandered back and forth along the terraces of the darkening garden, the solicitor all of a sudden gushed sweat to think he too might one day remember publicly what he had decided to forget. Would senility cause him to betray himself? when he wouldn't have wounded anyone intentionally: least of all, Lal.

Feeling he ought, Basil decided to ask after the solicitor's wife. The old man seemed pleased. It was becoming too easy to please: just as acting can become too easy, and you have to start again, imposing physical penance, and more painful still, by dragging up from the wells of the unconscious the sludge in which truth is found.

The solicitor remembered, ‘My wife often tells how you made up your mind as a boy that you wanted to play Lear. And you did, didn't you?'

‘Yes. I had a shot at it. I'm one of the many premature Lears.'

If you could remain long enough in this garden of ungoverned fronds, twisting paths, and statues disguising their real attitudes and intentions behind broken extremities and mossy smiles; if you could return upstairs and winkle experience out of the blind eyes and half-gelled responses of the Lilac Oracle, you might eventually present the Lear who had so far evaded almost everybody. But you had come here for a different purpose: short, sharp, and material.

Wyburd was making strangulated noises as though he had not enough of some foreign tongue to translate a simple wish into
plain but consoling words. ‘You actors of—of intellectual integrity, must find it immensely rewarding—to
immerse
yourselves in the great classic roles,' he at least attempted; poor old bugger, if he only knew!

Then the men were interrupted by a gate squeaking on rusty hinges; the figure of a woman was approaching under the fluorescent lighting and a cautious moon.

‘Good evening, gentlemen.' Anachronistic, but not unpleasing.

‘Ah!' The solicitor was prepared to do the honours. ‘Sister de Santis—Sir Basil Hunter. Sister is your mother's night nurse.'

The woman bowed her head beneath a large, dark, dowdy hat. She was one of those who make the worst of themselves: the stately bust was clothed, before anything else, in an impersonal gaberdine which disregarded the lengths of fashion; the large, luminous eyes in the rather livery face looked almost phosphorescent in the street lighting; nothing about the night nurse provoked the actor's charm.

The solicitor and the nurse had launched into a duet on weather themes.

‘A lovely evening, Sister, after the heat of the day.'

‘Yes, Mr Wyburd—rain, though—a storm: I caught sight of lightning from the bus stop.'

The banality of the interweaving voices exorcised any mystery the night might have had, though the actor realized that he himself had contributed to this exorcism. He knew too much, alas. As he stood gloomily watching, a greenish sheet twitched for a moment against the cyclorama, making him listen for a rumble of zinc thunder from the wings.

The thunder missed its cue, and the nurse left them, climbing the terraces towards bedpans and thermometers.

‘All these nurses and other characters must be eating up a fortune.' Sir Basil made it sound like a practical approach, when he knew himself to be the least practical of men.

‘I don't think the cost need worry your mother, even if she lives to a hundred.'

‘Hmmm!'

‘And ought to be allowed—at her age—to choose what she most enjoys.'

‘But does she enjoy? She seems to me full of grumbles.'

‘That is part of her enjoyment.'

‘Anyway we must talk, old Wyburd. I have a plan: a practical one.'

The solicitor took out his car keys as though to protect himself from any possibility of conspiracy by night; jingling his keys in retreat he went only so far as to admit, ‘Yes, indeed. There will be plenty to discuss—for your sister and ourselves.'

He who had taken off from London Airport in the fever of a conspiratorial plan might have sweated it out of his system as the solicitor drove away. When he had thought himself ready for piercing the heart of the matter with a ruthless blade, he might, he feared, fall back on brandishing the theatrical counterfeit of a weapon. A lot would depend on Dorothy: had she been taught, tempered by, her mistakes? Most people aren't: an accumulation of failures either drives them inward or leads them to compassion for others; neither condition fits them to be partners in crime.

Weaving back along the serpentine path which climbed towards the house, he found himself snatching the ribbons of leaves from native shrubs and inhaling their scent to the depths of his lungs: to restore his own toughness perhaps? at the same time bashing senselessly at the heavy panicles of overhanging blossom, like a boy expressing helplessness confused by spite.

Something had happened to blunt his intention by filling him with his present malaise. If he hadn't committed a blunder of the kind which those who are jealous of you—wives, for instance, and certain actors, and crypto-friends—chalk up as a major crime, his age and a veneer of dignity made of this too recent incident a pretty squalid minor mistake.

Yes, Bangkok: thunder in the ears; a stickiness inside your unsuitable clothes; the bright, unquenchable inefficiency of the gentle
Thai airport officials; the equally unquenchable English hostess holding her chin high to boost her frustrated efficiency as the scrambled voice announced a four-hour delay, for repairs of such an esoteric nature no layman would have asked for further explanation.

He wouldn't, anyway, although it had been written,
there is nobody like Hunter for doing his homework.
Given a part which interested him, yes, he would ferret out the last refinement of lust in a Bosola, say, or just to show them, wrap up a homosexual bread-carter in all the oblique motivation required by the Royal Court. What concerned him now was how to keep himself company in the four-hour wilderness; none of the faces of his fellow passengers would have helped populate a ten-minute interval. The Scotch had been doctored. He sat on his stool, sideways to the bar, not entirely unaware of his own predicament as reflected in the peach-tinted mirrors: that of a vessel waiting to be filled. Had he always been empty, and not realized? God knows, actors can be! But not yourself: not with the press cuttings, the knighthood, memories of occasions when words and emotions fermented inside you, seethed upwards through the throat in a delirium to which you might have succumbed if you had been without the skill to direct it through the darkness at the many-faced monster. Hardly heard the applause sometimes; if there wasn't any, then you heard; that, and ruder sounds, were mostly on the road; a few occasions in the West End, for bad plays and mediocre support (politeness can also be daunting).

Everyone has had their failures: John, Edith, poor old Donald. (Donald would have had a damn sight more if he had allowed himself to think about them; or perhaps he used to. Anyway, dead now, and you mustn't muck about with the dead: least of all, dead actors. A wonder nobody had thought about that for a dressing-room superstition.)

You only couldn't prevent mirrors mucking about with empty disintegrating faces. At least before crumbling they acquire a kind of patina; and emptiness is not emptiness when it serves a purpose.
Many of the greatest have been empty. How else could they have filled with those necessary flashes of inspiration, the surge of words, emotion, if they had been a bunch of intellectuals stuffed with theories and ‘taste'? Or Shiela
(not Sheila)
Sturges, the cerebral actress to bury other contenders.
What's eating you now Shiely?
Those intense, protruding, all but goitrous eyes.
I'm having a terrible time Basil with my self.
Always knotting herself tighter. Some critic had committed the crime of telling Shiela she was the ‘second Meggie Albanesi'. Unlike Meggie, Shiela hadn't died, except mentally, daily, in her efforts to work things out, and in trying to coax inside her head a dead woman she hadn't seen, couldn't even imagine, only cerebrate on the theme of.
For God's sake you're late Shiela. What's got into you this morning? Here we are half an hour in rehearsal!
That was after you had separated, physically at least—for a long time Shiela continued to expect her professional perks—after Imogen was born.
I'm late Basil because I had to get off the bus—and rub earth into my hands. I felt it might help me understand this woman—this peasant;
how she mashed what she considered the more virtuous words. Poor Shiela: still having fits of cerebration when the grog allowed her; so you gathered from Imogen on her duty visits.

This is Imogen
(pause)
my daughter.
What else could you tell actors about an actor's daughter who was a hospital almoner or something? They would have laughed,
oh really? how original, darling. I mean—so warm—helping people.
In any case, as old pros, the whole bang lot of them would be able to fill in the gaps in the story:
Shiela Sturges and Basil Hunter—he divorced her before the title; she never enjoyed her ladyhood, only the booze and L. C. Bottomley—hee hee!

L. C. Bottomley, a reliable character actor and boring man (he played cricket) was always ready to give you a hand with your traps between station and digs, run out and buy you the evening paper, paid a bill or two on occasions and let you forget about it. A thin Bottomley; and Imogen a big, thick-ankled girl throwing back God knows where.
Daddy darling I want you to know that in any kind of fix—regardless of everything—and my living with Mother—you
can rely on me.
She must have inherited that from the Bottomleys.

It was a sad script if you were forced to study it:

THE ACTORS.
Imogen—such a lovely name.

SHIELA
(dead serious as usual).
I hoped it might help her grow up steadfast.

BASIL HUNTER
picks up his Number 9 and works steadfastly on his face.