The Eye of the Storm (14 page)

And husbands.

He said it was surprising they hadn't met before. Not at all surprising, you were tempted to reply, only you could no longer have aimed it at the heart of the matter.

There was a worm in the Radfords' de Lucca peach.

All Elizabeth Hunter's worst nightmares occurred at noon. She gritted her gums, crisped her jewelled fingers against being sucked farther down into the fug of afternoon sleep; its flannel tunnel daunted her; and to be dragged back eventually by someone who is paid to do it: that is why nurses, particularly little Manhood, remain so cool.

That man: the politician. Her lips tried, but failed to work the name free of her mind.

After dinner there was conversation and a pretence of music: two tall young men vamping at pianos; it was fashionable just then to engage them. You would have liked to slip away, but couldn't. Even accepted a curaçoa. Gladys so civil; and Sidney wanted to show you some Japanese prints he had bought: he had always bought something.

Where was Athol Shreve? she wondered. She couldn't escape him, she realized now. He was the reason she had told Lennox he needn't return with the car after the party. He was the awfulness, the reality, she had decided unconsciously to risk; if she had miscalculated the explosive force of her lust, she had felt its first tremor
that evening when misdrawing her mouth in lipstick. She went at one point into the cloakroom to whimper over Alfred. The other awfulness is: you can sincerely love those you betray. She gashed again at that not so casually planned mouth.

Then everyone was leaving. There was something about a couple who lived somewhat in the same direction: as it happened, the plain quiet woman from opposite at dinner, and a husband, her male replica. Athol Shreve knew you would expect the offer of a lift, which you didn't, and did. Furs made you shiver: tonight they were too much a forfeit.

En route the gears kept tangling grinding before the eventual grudging release. The married couple on the back seat accepted gratefully to be dropped. He was wearing a white scarf, with a fringe and black monogram, she clutching to thin breasts a narrow moiré party handbag, as they stood on the pavement outside their house, stooping to call goodbye. They were smiling for what no one could explain: not yourself, certainly; and they were too nice to want to.

Athol Shreve had more trouble with the gears. It was an ordinary car for such an opportunist, but perhaps the ordinary is a better disguise for ruthlessness. Or the car could have been an innocent oversight, or convenience. They were bumping around against and off each other inside it. A pothole bounced them: she hit her skull on the roof.

‘Seems like I'm trying to kill us!' (All your worst nightmares speak with actual mouths, but the mouths of megaphones.) ‘Mightn't look too good, eh?' his thick, megaphone laugh, ‘driving Elizabeth Hunter home, both drunk, after the shivoo.'

A sort of jollity in his voice made you wonder if it isn't a dormant instinct for evil rather than their thinking minds which drives men to dishonesty. A woman's knowledge of herself sees to it that she is aware of her guilt.

In Moreton Drive pulling up, ‘This is the terminus, isn't it?'

Even so, he had no intention of turning round; was getting out: too big for the doorway of that smallish car.

A light was blazing illuminating your own solid yet unreliable house.

‘There is this step—where the path turns: two people have broken legs.' Inwardly burning, her voice sounded cold.

Didn't listen to the joke he was making she was fumbling in her bag the gold mesh a wedding present from Alfred's mother in it the key to this house in which she was living.

Mrs Hunter groaned the cramps in her legs if night she would have allowed de Santis to give her one of Gidley's pills. After luncheon sleeping pills are immoral. Open her eyes at least. She couldn't. On the dark screen her lids provided the picture show continued flickering.

‘I expect I should pour you a drink after your so nobly bringing me home.' A silly bitchy pretty woman after a party.

He recognized it. ‘I think we had enough to know each other.'

They were driven together in a collision which sounded like that between two objects in solid bone or hard rubber so little surprising it might have happened before.

‘Not along there. The maids are sleeping. If you're not careful you'll wake them.' She distinctly added, ‘They might telephone the police thinking somebody had broken in and was assaulting or trying to murder me.' She was so sure of her innocence in the minds of everybody who didn't know her; nobody, not even Athol Shreve, knew her; only she knew herself.

‘The police—you could deny anything the maids told them, couldn't you?'

Instead of answering she smiled at him, because she had no idea what she would tell until it was necessary.

Suspicion of treachery seemed to have made him determined to devour its source: her throat her breasts.

‘If you don't mind—my dress. That might be inescapable evidence.'

He watched her prepare. They were watching each other. He had
a vein in his forehead which swelled as he bent to ease, then to drag the cloth, down from his thighs.

Disgust for his body, his exploratory hands, the rasp of hair against her skin, did not diminish her own lust. Her enraged beast could have wanted to die of his: when there was some condition she knew she had aspired to above the placid waters of marriage the eruptions of adultery finally hatred of her own aspirant.

His thundering into her ear, ‘God, Betty, we screw pretty good together, don't we?' Then squelching back out of their mutual revulsion.

You would have liked to separate, more than from your lover, from your own body.

Halfway into his clothes he began muttering, finally loudly whispering, ‘What's wrong? There's nothing wrong, is there?'

Only everything; but how tell?

She could have lain resting for ever, not thinking; but roused herself. ‘Is your wife politically minded?' That speeded his buttoning.

‘Not very. Not now. She's too sick to take an interest. What made you ask?'

As well as husbands, wives had begun to haunt her: a strained, chalky menopause, but featureless.

Again fully armoured, he came and sat on the edge of the bed, seeming inclined to return to picking at a meal he thought he had finished.

When he put his hand she reminded, ‘My husband might arrive unexpectedly from Gogong.'

Athol Shreve could behave very nervously for such a large, designated man. ‘Thought the Gogong train reached Sydney in the morning.'

‘It does. There's also a slower, daylight one Alfred sometimes takes because he enjoys looking at the country.'

She spent seconds on a total death wish.

‘Better see me out, hadn't you? Make it look more like a social visit—if anybody—one of the maids.' For this final pretence she dressed herself in what she had been wearing, even made up her mouth; there was nothing she could have done about her eyes.

At the front door he was all for fumbling kissing sentimental respects. ‘Night night, girlie. Thanks for the party. Next time we'll know each other's form better.'

She shut it out at last, not that the latch sounded convincing.

In the morning (it might have been today) Nora announced with a dignity which was a good copy of the original, ‘Mr Hunter has come, madam. He hopes you won't get a shock—Master Basil fell out of a tree and fractured an arm.'

‘Oh my God, when did they arrive?'

‘Just now. By the night train.'

Alfred's anguished face; Basil, more gloomy than suffering, was wearing a sling.

‘Oh, darlings!' She was too shattered to cry; and Alfred might have joined her if she had let herself go.

Basil was only ashamed of his parents. ‘It's not broken; it's bent, or cracked.'

Alfred was so upset trying to trace Dr Moyes, to arrange an appointment, to confirm the bone had received proper treatment from the local man, he could pay no attention to anything else till later.

Then he remembered, ‘Poor old Betty, it must have been a shock.'

She could only look at her husband: his vulnerable temples, kind mouth, eyes so much milder than her own.

It was Basil who suspected something, nothing specific, he couldn't have. It was just that he suspected his mother generally and on principle.

She used to say, ‘Why are you so full of secrets, darling? What have we got to hide from each other? You can be so charming to other people—with Mrs Wyburd.'

Would he remember that? He had a phenomenal memory. As a boy he could recite whole scenes from Shakespeare. Sometimes they would read together from the plays, she taking the women's parts.

Now they were playing this scene at the top of the stairs.

‘Anyway, a sling suits you—makes you look gorgeous: a hero back from the wars.'

‘I stink! Haven't been out of my clothes since it happened. I stink of squashed ants.' His nostrils expressed a disgust which was aimed at her as well.

‘Doesn't matter. Wait till after the doctor. Then we'll see how you can be washed.'

She could tell he was already preparing to resist her advice, let alone help.

The following day Dorothy returned from the Bullivants. If Basil was suspicious, Dorothy's absorbed little face was specially designed for locking up accusations. If she let them out, her emotions might get the better of words; though sometimes she saved them up for a better occasion. Now she was passing judgment on you for something she couldn't possibly guess, except that her stare sank deeper, her silence had intensified.

And she found a clue under the bedside table. ‘What's this?'

‘What on earth? A cuff link!'

‘Whose is it?'

‘It's one which belonged to my—my father—your Grandfather Salkeld.'

Dorothy, looking at it with a kind of horror, didn't at least ask to see its twin. ‘Isn't it ugly!'

You couldn't deny that. She gave it to you, and you would have to think where to put it, before you could throw it away somewhere—in the park grass—and forget about the whole incident, if Dorothy didn't re-discover the link.

Only Alfred was trusting: he treated you as though you, not Basil, were the victim of an accident. ‘I'll stay a few days, Elizabeth—keep you company—help you get your spirits back.'

The second day he suggested a walk together in the park. As they strolled between the formal beds he held her arm along his own, her hand clasped in his, in that position which most clearly demonstrates prerogative. His weathered face and grey eyes encouraged her convalescence from some melancholy nameless illness. In fact
it was an illness they had shared, his expression implied, at the time Basil ‘broke' his arm. Husband and wife were drawn very close inside the circle of her creamy sunshade.

‘Is there anything special you'd like to eat?' she sighed and asked, since he had persuaded her to accept their convalescence.

He squeezed her languid hand. ‘Anything simple that we can enjoy together.'

Should she drop everything, sell the house, put the children at boarding school, and leave with Alfred for ‘Kudjeri'?

She didn't. She could not have worn indefinitely the veils of tenderness with which he wanted to invest her. Nor was she, except for that one necessary instance, the rutting sow Athol Shreve had coupled with. She would have given anything to open a box containing the sum total of expectancy, but as this did not happen (except in a single comforting dream, in which she discovered in a little marquetry casket a splinter of rock crystal lying naked and unexplained on the lead lining) she must expect her answers outside boxes, in the colder contingencies preparing for her.

While Alfred looked at her with much the same expression as the plain woman on the opposite side of the Radfords' dinner table: grateful for something they imagined you to be.

If you could have said: I am neither compleat wife, sow, nor crystal, and must take many other shapes before I finally set, or before I am, more probably, shattered. But you couldn't; they would not have seen you as the eternal aspirant. Solitariness and despair did not go with what they understood as a beautiful face and a life of outward brilliance and material success.

Over the years the letters:
My dearest Elizabeth, I realize our attempts at marriage are not bringing us any closer to success. From your last visit to ‘Kudjeri' and mine to Moreton Drive I feel you find our pretences too great a strain, and that I should offer to let you divorce me. I have no further ambitions in the field of marriage, but although you don't care to admit it, you might like to look around you while there is still time to form a more satisfactory relationship. If I haven't suggested this before, it
was on account of the children. Now that they have started thinking for themselves, they may feel less resentful, and even forgive erratic behaviour in their parents
… oh the bitterness of your own inadequacies which people who give to charities interpret as selfishness yes you were selfish by some standards but did not bribe your conscience with good works or by acting as a domestic doormat certainly selfish beside Alfred's exceptional selflessness saints reap admiration when probably it is easier for them a saint is what Dorothy wanted and not getting could only blame the least of saints
it is easier for you Mother for anyone beautiful forceful to be admired praised worshipped that is what you are greedy for more and more worshippers
it was not true not when you understood your own faults better even than your children did yes praise perhaps but for some inward perfection you hadn't been able to achieve
My dear dear Alfred, how dreadfully guilty you make me feel. I am the one who should be making humble offers if there is any talk of ‘freedom'. It is you who must call the tune and I shall accept whatever you choose. Personally I don't believe there is a state of freedom greater than the one we know and ‘enjoy'—at least, not in life …
but how you longed for it.