The Eye of the Storm (50 page)

Sister de Santis heard herself explode while half-glancing at the blue-haired ladies to ask their permission. It was too late. Her example had put them against laughter: their flaked lips were working restrainedly against their teeth as they stared out over the solemn sea from above the bones of the fish they had devoured. One of the ladies was massaging a pearl ear-ring.

Sister de Santis was appalled by the unlikelihood of her own behaviour. But laughed. It was the wine. It was not all that funny. But was. She vaguely wondered whether she should feel sorry for the purple man flopping around and scratching his wreckage against the concrete. Somebody would pick him up. So she continued laughing. Till plunging her mouth in her glass, she drank a
great, choking draught. The wine had not lost its cool, but tasted more insipid than before. She went on laughing, for nothing funny, merely settling whimpering down. Exhausted.

She was shaken by what she had in her without having realized. ‘I'm so sorry. But it
was
very funny,' she protested guiltily to her host, when perhaps it had never been that.

‘Yes, I expect it was funny,' Sir Basil answered; he had spilt some barbecue sauce on his thigh.

Distressed by the way things had gone she finished her wine. ‘Tell me, won't you? about the play,' she sighed, ‘about
King Lear.'

As if their small frail table would have allowed either of them to rise to it: his hollow lobster was battering the plate; the remains of her scallops encouraged his worst memory of a Channel crossing.

Welladay, Sir Basil broke bread; he drank the lees of the wine (unfortunately he had a head for it, at any rate today, whereas the nurse, drunk or sober, could be absolved for her innocence). ‘Lear—' he had got it out from amongst the shreds of lobster with which his teeth were stuck, ‘nobody has ever entirely succeeded as Lear, because I don't think he can be played by an actor—only by a gnarled, authentic man, as much a storm-tossed tree as flesh.' He looked to see whether he had dared too much, but encountered fleshy scallops of eyelids. ‘So he can probably never be played.' Sir Basil hit the lobster shell with his fork. ‘Blake could have, perhaps. Or Swift.' That didn't mean you wouldn't have another go at it yourself.

He tried to decide how much the nurse had gathered, and saw her swaying, very slightly, above her shambles.

‘I see,' she said, solemnly, thickly.

At no stage had she looked more opaque: a giant scallop, and raw.

He felt suddenly maddened: not by this heavy woman, not even at her worst, putting on a social voice for the occasion, or giggling and shrieking when the business bum landed smack on the concrete; no, what infuriated him was his own worst, or what she had seen of it. Mercifully not all. She would have to be profoundly innocent,
if not downright mad, to suspect him of hoping to commit so much as a discreet murder.

But his uneasiness increased as she continued brooding opposite. Perhaps she was preparing to accuse him.

In fact, Sister de Santis was accusing herself of her own fall from grace which had begun with the arrival of Mrs Hunter's son. She would scarcely have believed she had given way to lust, if she had not found as proof, those tears in her clothes, scratches in her flesh; there were times when her breasts, becoming snouted, were still pointed at her, when all desire for this man was dead. She would have liked to substitute pity, which is one aspect of pure love. But between Basil and her soul's eye, hovered the face of her pitiful father. Whom she had desired to love in some way never made clear to her during his lifetime, only recently in the line of Basil Hunter's jaw, the veins in his temples, the bones of a silken ankle. Her whole vocation of selflessness was threatened if she offered this man her pity, grown as it was on decomposed lust. Now too, in the context of slovenliness and apathy presented by the half-deserted restaurant, she knew she would never find the strength or opportunity to bear witness to her true faith and plead for the one who was also, incidentally, Elizabeth Hunter.

Sir Basil turned, partly to avoid the nurse's eyes, partly to pick with a finger nail at the worst of the lobster shreds nagging at him from between his teeth. He too was oppressed by the squalor to which their surroundings had been reduced: disordered tables, crumpled napkins, lipstuck glasses, the skeletons and shells of fish. Only the party of executives, silenced by business still in hand, continued guzzling food and drink. The sweat gathering in enormous balls round Basil's eyes was almost ready to fall; if it did he was afraid Sister de Santis might notice it bounce.

So he wrenched himself round, and still avoiding the patch of silence in his audience, began to declaim, ‘There, you see—this is where we must concentrate our attention—on all this which was given to us to take pride in, to cherish;' at the same time indicating with what had become his jewelled glove, embracing with the
sweep of his heavy, fur-trimmed sleeve, a vision of sky and sea, towers and domes, conjured up for his wimpled queen.

But he no longer had the power (he had known his delivery temporarily affected before this, by physical exhaustion, indigestion, mental strain, or quite simply, if he over-moistened his vocal cords). Now he was sucking on his words, audibly, though he would have liked to think it was one of the businessmen at work on a lobster claw behind him. The sun had gone in besides, behind a drift of dirty cloud. And once your vision is withdrawn from you, there remain the lapping shallows, the littered sand, one competing with the other for the sludge to which the human spirit can sense itself rendered: an aimless bobbing of corks which have served their purpose, and scum, and condoms, and rotting fruit, and rusted tins, and excrement.

‘Yes, isn't it glorious?' murmured Sister de Santis from memory.

But she was too conscious of the wicker-sheathed demijohn floating at a drunken, slanted level a little way out. To recognize those purple stains round the mouth pained her more than anything else.

When Sir Basil Hunter began dragging on the tablecloth, practically shouting, ‘What's that? That filthy object—the black thing!' hysterically for a man.

Then she caught sight of it: something black drenched swollen and obscene rolling slightly in imitation of life somewhat like the full waterskins Colonel Askew pointed out the Arabs were holding as the liner sailed through the Canal.

The thing was slowly washed or rolled on to the sand almost directly in front of where they were sitting. It was the corpse of a dog, a not-too-well pickled Labrador. A sick stench was rising out of the natural smells of salt and weed.

Sir Basil appeared to take it personally. ‘Isn't this the ultimate in filth? This barbarism! But only what can be expected,' he screeched, like an old parrot she thought, its tongue stuck out, hard and blue; like—oh no, his mother caught in what could be a seizure, at the point of aiming her deadliest insult, or curse.

Unlike Sir Basil, Sister de Santis was not immediately shocked by the drowned dog; she was more passive of course, and less articulate; while most of her life she had been personally, though objectively, involved with the physical aspects of death. Till now a nameless anguish began seeping, and she put her handkerchief to her mouth, to stanch it. She could do nothing about the smell: this continued penetrating, and would probably haunt her nostrils, cling to her clothes for ever; or the gelatinous sockets where the dog's eyes had been: they were staring at her so intently they gave the mask a live expression.

Sir Basil got up as though meaning to go in search of the waiter and ask for the bill, but the waiter was already approaching, carrying a saucer with the bill on it. Sir Basil passed him, walking on as straight a line as his somnambulant condition allowed, and disappeared at the back of the restaurant.

Only then Sister de Santis noticed the wire eating into the dog's neck.

After putting down the saucer, the waiter grinned, and said, ‘Never know what next! Last month they fished out a woman. I been looking for the case in the papers, but nothing come up yet. It adds interest when you've taken part in it like.'

Sister de Santis had been sitting staring a lifetime at the strangled dog when a man dressed in eroded jersey and washed-out pants rolled above the knees, seized the tail, and dragged the corpse farther down the beach.

‘Good on yer, Joey!' the waiter called. ‘Takin' on the undertakin', eh?' He followed for some distance, flicking the air with a stained napkin.

While two little boys ran squealing, ploughing the sand, pitching pebbles at the carcase. One of them caught up and gave it a kick with his bare toes. But fell back afterwards.

The businessmen were all applauding, though what, they might not have been able to tell: they were too full, their faces running over with sweat and melted butter. One of them seemed to imagine the sea air had tarnished his ex-service badge: he had raised a sleeve
to his buttonhole, and was rubbing the brass with exaggerated, yet completely detached, solicitude.

Basil returned. A tautening of the skin had dismissed the blur from the edges of his face; his hair was grooved, steely, again perfect; his clothes had resumed the careless worldliness of an important man who grants interviews to journalists.

He clapped his hands together, looking at her whimsically, when it might have been his intention to convey forcefulness. ‘We must go!' he announced. ‘Oh yes, the bill—the bill!'

He plumped down (none of the restaurant chairs seemed too stable) and dragged the wallet out of his pocket. Distantly she noticed it as a beautiful crocodile, monogrammed affair, and no dearth of money.

Basil doled the notes out, then hesitated, mumbling and fumbling.

‘What is it?' she asked, leaning forward from her side.

‘The tip. I can never work out the percentage.'

‘Just like Colonel Askew,' she consoled; ‘he could never work it out either.'

Basil offered a handful of coins from which his nurse, kindly and gently, extracted the necessary.

‘It's so much easier with dollars,' Sister de Santis reminded.

‘Yes. One has to admit it's easier with dollars.' Perhaps this was what he had needed all along: to be nursed by some such competent but impersonal creature.

Both were rehabilitated, or so it seemed on the drive back.

Till Sister de Santis, remembering, looked at her practical, man's wristwatch, and began to murmur, ‘How late it is! For me at least.' Unexpectedly for someone so placid, she was twitching. ‘I ought to be resting. My patient.'

It was the performance again, he realized; she had his sympathy.

He tried to console her from his own experience of life. ‘Well, yes—I know. We cling to our principles—arrive two hours before curtain-up—go into a trance—get the smell of the greasepaint in our nostrils. Then, sometimes, you may have been held up rather
delightfully. You run in at the last moment, make a few passes at your cheeks, go on stage and—take wing as never before.'

He could not see whether she understood: she was too self-absorbed probably; and he driving: nothing mechanical ever came naturally to him.

They got into a traffic jam between ‘Santa Monica' on one side and ‘Key West' on the other. The nurse began to sway, to rock, to grunt. The hold-up allowed him to look at her.

It must have triggered her off. ‘I can't help it!' she burst out. ‘It
was very
funny, wasn't it?'

‘What?' The stink had risen again; the wire was cutting into the throat: which probably only he had seen.

‘The man falling through his chair!' She was rocking beside him in the stationary car. ‘I thought it was a scream!' It went on echoing in her memory
screama screama:
it was Lily Lake chambermaid at Brown's Hotel to whom she had sent post-cards till several years after the replies had stopped coming; there were so few people to write to.

Basil Hunter was relieved when the traffic started moving and he was no longer forced to look at or listen to Sister de Santis. It was his own fault: he must have got her more than a little drunk.

By the time they reached the block in which she lived her face had recovered its characteristically refined expression, though her lips looked twisted, her eyelids crimped: she could have been suffering physically.

‘I do hope I never—in any way—let your mother down.' She had to force it.

‘How would you expect to?'

‘Oh, I don't know—
by being late'
she suddenly thought up.

Already she had hunched herself, and was halfway out of the small car. He would have liked to put out his hand, to touch her; but would not risk causing further damage.

As for Sister de Santis, she made the extra effort to drag herself out through the car door, and had practically reached her full and normally impressive height, when she stumbled, and fell forward
on her knees. For a moment she stayed kneeling on the pavement, her shuddering back turned towards him.

By the time he had raced round and almost reached her, she was again on her feet. ‘Don't!' she gasped. ‘There's no point. It's nothing.'

One knee had burst through its stocking. She was trembling, horrorstruck by more than her fall, when he was to blame, for the second time he was made to see: he could not have felt guiltier if he had come to his senses and found that, not even of his own will, but by malicious inspiration, under some cloud of unreason, he had denied this pale nun.

The details of their parting were not clear to him, only that she reeled away into a dark hall with its accumulated gas and cooking smells, and up a narrow stair, to bathe her face, compose herself, perhaps pray for a remission of unorthodox sins, before presenting herself as usual at her evening devotions in Moreton Drive. Blood which had risen to the surface of the unusually white flesh was left smeared across his mind's eye.

His mechanical self drove off by jerks in the tinny car. Because he never felt at home in one, he knew he would be sitting upright, his shoulders narrowed.
Pray you, undo this button. Thank you, sir.
Why? Only that on his last performance as the old king he had never felt so personally bereft, so bankrupt; technique could not protect him from it. This last gasp; and the poverty of a single bone-clean button. In this you may have conveyed the truth, if in nothing else.