The Eye of the Storm (28 page)

Alfred said, ‘It's the best month of the year at “Kudjeri”;' as though this were her first visit.

‘Oh, there'll be all the months, if you let me stay.'

As a man he was trying to pick up the larger of the two bags, and found he no longer could. Instead of going into the house, leaving the luggage to the groom, as would have happened normally, they began struggling, panting, for possession of the handle, converting a minor into a major issue; they needed to. By the time she had got control they were saved: Alfred must have decided he would not degrade himself morally by carrying the smaller dressing-case; she would lug the larger bag up the steps if it tore her side open.

Opening still on special feast days for Sister de Santis to put her hand in and touch the remains even that most unregenerate non-nun Sister Flora Pudenda is reconciled to a relic only it is not mine it is Alfred's whose liver is recommended worship remember any stench is sanctity the odour of each time a panful I lie again if I'm lucky in the arms of my
DEAR LORD
whose strength increases as he weakens I the guilty I will never be eaten away never purged because sin won't come out in the bedpan like what the walls call shit I like Kleenex best Sister it's softer and some nuns are heavy handed send for St Mary de Kleenex funny how the sinless overlook the stains understand the insufferable sins which can't escape or perhaps no one is sinless otherwise how would the night nurse get through her nights.

In spite of his autumnal complexion and the altered, more refined structure of his face, the first days were like a convalescence rather than an illness. Or perhaps that was how she wanted to see it. Alfred himself never referred to his condition in her presence.

Twice a week the doctor came out from Gogong. He was never
without a sleepless, often a glazed look. He drove himself to such an extent she sometimes wondered whether it was without assistance.

Once as she approached the pantry where he was sterilizing a syringe, she heard voices. Eldred the groom must have come in, and was addressing the doctor with an unashamed callousness, ‘If you don't mind my saying so, Doc, you look like the ghost that wasn't laid.'

Dr Treweek was squirting the syringe at the ceiling as she reached the doorway. ‘Not laid, but near enough,' he admitted. ‘I feel just about fucked, Eldred.'

The groom looked shocked to see the mistress, and made his getaway.

She could not conceal from the doctor what was a mixture of dislike, apprehension, and petulance. ‘Is the pain increasing, then?'

‘Yes.' He sawed at a capsule till its neck broke. ‘I'm going to show you how to give the needle. He'll probably want it more regularly now. If he seems real bad, you can ring me and I'll come out, but I'm nearly run off my feet as it is.' His contempt for her was obvious.

‘I'm sure I can manage on my own,' she replied as coldly as she could; ‘if you'll show me.' She was looking down her nose from under her lowered eyelids, but the effect was wasted because Dr Treweek had turned his back.

When he had filled the syringe, she followed him into the bedroom, where Alfred was lying waiting. He had a mysterious greedy expression which excluded her from the rite the doctor was about to perform. Even so, she was determined to help: she pulled down the pyjama pants over the wasted buttock, and only trembled on catching sight of the slender testicles, the blue head of the shrivelled penis.

‘There we are,' said Dr Treweek.

‘What—not now?' He thrust the hypodermic at her, when she hadn't bargained for it this side of some very vague interval of time.

As he explained the technique she stood holding the evil weapon she was expected to drive into her husband's flesh. Resistance to the whole idea almost made her vomit.

‘Fire away!' the doctor commanded. ‘If you‘re honest, I expect you've done worse in your time.' He laughed through what must have been phlegm.

Because of the truth in his remark she couldn't feel injured. But plunged the needle.

The doctor said, ‘You'll make an expert, Mrs Hunter.'

While she withdrew the needle under cover of the wad of cotton wool, Alfred was lying, eyes closed, throat working, mouth relaxed in advance of relief: he might have experienced the perfect orgasm.

Then the doctor changed his tactics, his voice, bent down over his patient, and touched the sweat-stained pyjama shoulder. ‘You'll be feeling better now, old feller.' It sounded as though he was speaking through a megaphone.

Again Mrs Hunter was excluded; till Alfred gasped in an unrecognizable voice, ‘Thank you—Elizabeth.'

She asked the doctor, ‘May I give you some lunch before the drive back?'

He accepted, and she served him herself, with a dish of spiced beef and salad, afterwards leaving him to it. Several rooms away she heard him belch, and as she was seeing him off, withstood the metallic blast of the pickled onions he had devoured too hastily.

‘Don't hesitate to ring me,' he reminded while settling himself in his car. ‘I'd do anything for old Bill.'

As the doctor predicted, she became adept at giving the injection, but all this was only later, after the ‘convalescence' period of Alfred Hunter's fatal illness.

In the beginning they enjoyed this sere honeymoon of the hopeful spirit. They were full of consideration for each other, and hungrily discussed everyday matters in minutest detail.

‘Send for Stanilands, Betty, in the morning. I'd like to ask him whether he thinks we could use Kilgallen. Still immature, I know, but a fine ram in the making. I'd be interested to see his progeny—if that will be possible.' At this first hint that it might not be, he began wriggling his neck inside the collar which had grown too large for him, and twitching at one corner of his mouth.

She brought him a pear she had specially picked; taking it from its muslin bag, she stood holding this enormous, perfect, golden fruit humbly in her two hands. ‘Do you feel tempted? Let me peel it for you at least, so that you can enjoy the perfume.'

He agreed to that, and because he loved her, allowed her to feed him slivers which he tried to swallow, while the juice ran down amongst the stubble on his chin.

She coaxed Eldred to shave her patient. Alfred liked him; he had mentioned naming the groom's family in his will. She too, was revived by the man's presence, one of physical strength and health, none the worse for sometimes bringing with it smells of the stable, or of milk from the house cows in his charge.

Do you like
…? was one of the games she and Alfred played. It was shameful how little they knew about each other, at least those childish tastes to which they confessed; if their honesty did not cut deeper, it was because the knife could not have prolonged their relationship: better to cherish surfaces in the time left to them.

Now that it was late autumn the evenings were what they most looked forward to. ‘Ask Eldred to bring in another log before he goes down to the cottage.' After the groom had built up the fire and taken his leave, they would look through books together.

‘What a funny old thing you are! To have been collecting this hoard of books over the years and kept so quiet about it!'

‘You've never been interested in books.'

It was true; it had suited her purposes to adopt the opinion that to read is to live at second hand.

Now she could only murmur, ‘I've read myself to sleep night after night. I'd say Goethe is my most effective pill.' She made a wry face to match her trumped-up explanation; farther than that she didn't go; nor did his kindness let him force her into an admission of frivolous tastes.

In fact, from the anxious way he immediately shifted his position, he seemed to fear she might have sensed a criticism he had not intended to offer. ‘You had your life to live. It's different in the country—when you're on your own.' It was the bitterest reproach
he had made: in one instant she experienced interminable nights aching with frost and silence.

She was looking through a book of French engravings and lithographs. Added to Alfred's remark, the artist's insistence on death, his marsh flowers, and detached, blandly staring eyeballs made her material self seem even more trivial and ephemeral. She quickly turned the pages to escape her unwilling fascination by reaching the end of the book; when she became spellbound by the artist's image of what he called a skiapod: not her own actual face, but the spiritual semblance which will sometimes float out of the looking-glass of the unconscious. Unlike most of the other monsters in the book, this half-fish half-woman appeared neither allied to, nor threatened by, death: too elusive in weaving through deep waters, her expression a practically effaced mystery; or was it one of dishonesty, of cunning?

‘What are you looking at?' Alfred asked.

‘Glimpses of the morbid mind of Odilon Redon.' She made this attempt at complacency as she snapped the book together.

He loved her to read to him. They were halfway through
The Charterhouse of Parma,
which he admired, he said, ‘almost more than anything else'. Her own pleasure in it was sometimes lost in its longueurs, but she improved on those by listening to the sound of her own voice: when she made the effort, she read well.

That night Alfred began staring at her in what appeared like suddenly feverish, hitherto unrealized, admiration. ‘Isn't she splendid?' he interrupted. ‘What a dazzler of a woman—the Sanseverina!'

‘A bit female at times.' If her voice sounded dry, it was from the length of time she had spent reading aloud.

‘Womanly women don't much care for one another, I suppose.'

She herself certainly had never counted overmuch on her women friends. ‘There's something else—a kind of freemasonry which brings them together, and they feel they must obey some of the rules.'

He laughed: they were united in a moment of such understanding
she went and knelt beside his chair and started desperately kissing his hands. It was as close as they came to physical desire during those last weeks. But the hands remained cold and yellow.

Shortly after, he said, ‘If you don't mind, Bet—you'll have to give me a shot tonight.'

As his strength left him, Eldred would carry him down to his chair in the library. Still later in his decline, she would call the groom to lift him out of or into his bed, till the day she discovered she could manage this bundle of dwindling flesh herself.

At once their relationship changed. Where she had loved, now she pitied. It was not pity in the ordinary sense, but an emotional need to merge herself with this child who might have sprung in the beginning from her body, by performing for him all the more sordid menial acts: tenderly wiping, whether faeces, or the liquid foods he mostly vomited back. Sometimes in the dependency of this new relationship she thought of her actual children: she had never felt pity for those, walled up in themselves, armed for emergencies with formidable moral weapons. But perhaps she had been wrong: they may have needed her pity; she might have earned their love.

On a day of steely, straight rain, she was forced to approach a subject Alfred was determined to avoid. ‘Surely now you should allow me to write and tell the children?'

‘I don't want to disrupt their lives.'

‘If, when you go, they haven't been told, they may resent it terribly.' Of course she could not truthfully answer for their children, only for herself, the remorse boiling up in her.

Whatever Alfred's wishes, she took it upon herself to write.

Dorothy, in the grip of her unhappy marriage, replied in a translation from the French:

My dearest Father,

You can imagine my feelings on receiving this truly shocking news. It grieves me deeply to be unable to do anything to ease your suffering. Here I am, living, though neither fruitfully nor
happily, at the other end of the earth, yet with certain obligations towards those who have become by marriage my family. Hubert I rarely see; we play Cox and Box between Lunegarde and Passy. But I shall not allow myself to hate my husband, nor shall anyone have cause to blame me for not trying, if our marriage appears to fail. The dreadful old princess my mother-in-law is eternally waiting to pounce, but I refuse to offer myself as her mouse.

So you will understand, my darling father, it is impossible for me to obey my instincts and come to you. This is how our lives have been arranged, and however brutally, in your case, or foolishly in mine, there is little we can do about it, beyond praying to God for deliverance from our sufferings.

You are always in my prayers and thoughts; in ever-increasing appreciation and affection—

DOROTHY

Basil was more genuinely Basil:

My dear old Dad,

You are the last man I'd like to think a victim of this most horrible injustice: as I remember you, the kindest and most generous of human beings. I am the more depressed for being unable at the moment to concentrate all my thoughts on you: we are in the throes of rehearsal (opening at the New a week from now in
Macbeth).
Since receiving Mother's letter, this is literally the first opportunity to sort out my feelings and attempt to reply. Even now it is only a few moments snatched in an empty auditorium. While a troupe of actors continues to agonize on stage, here I sit unshaven, unwashed, with a weight on my stomach after swallowing a wretched, fatty sandwich too fast; but I wanted to send you my very deepest sympathy however inadequately expressed.

We scarcely ever spoke to each other, did we? And yet, on looking back, I can sense that some kind of empathy existed between us. Oh, if we had our lives over again, I believe I'd
choose to live! Not to renounce life for the grubby business of creating an appearance of it.

I'd like to sit a few minutes longer, Dad, and try to share your feelings at this moment of awfulness, but they are calling for me, so there is nothing for it but to leave you most regretfully.

Blessings!

BASIL

P.S
. Nobody can realize the strain experienced by an actor who has taken on Macbeth.