Kate and her eldest brother were in a tangle at cat’s-cradle.
‘Look, Mrs Roxburgh! We’re stuck. It’s Tom.’
‘It ain’t!’ growled Tom, giving her a kick under cover of a chair. ‘That’s how girls go on when they’ve got themselves into a mess.’
Mrs Roxburgh stooped, and after some slight manipulation transferred the string back to Kate in the shape required for the game’s logical progression. Kate was entranced. She adored Mrs Roxburgh, and did not doubt that her love was returned. The incident of the mutilated fledgeling seemed to have bound them more closely together.
It was Mr Jevons who brought Mrs Roxburgh her tea, together with a slice of cake so moist with fruit it might have been studded with precious stones. Mr Jevons was advancing, all manly authority and calm, when by some incredible mischance he stumbled, whether against child or chair-leg, or over a ruck in the carpet, nobody saw. Or was it by infernal intervention? Whatever the cause of his downfall, Mr Jevons saw the cake flying off its plate, the cup shooting out of its saucer.
On his knees, he watched the tea-stain widening, darkening, in the folds of Mrs Roxburgh’s skirt. Needless to say, the uproar was immense, so much so that Mr Jevons got the shakes. There was no disguising it as he mopped the stain with his ineffectual handkerchief.
Mrs Roxburgh sat looking down at this troubled bull-frog of a man with what almost amounted to languid acceptance of her due, until she made an effort, and returned to the human situation.
Sitting forward, she charged him, ‘Dun’t! ‘Tis nothing.’
‘But I spoiled yer dress!’ the bull-frog croaked wretchedly.
‘’Tisn’t mine, and ’tisn’t spoiled,’ she insisted.
She may have touched his hand an instant, for the trembling was stilled, more by surprise than by command.
‘It is nothing, I do assure you, Mr Jevons,’ she repeated in what passed for her normal voice.
Because their exchange had been spoken so low and only for each other, and because of the children scrummaging after pieces of cake, and Miss Scrimshaw’s squawks as she retrieved the fragments of smashed cup, and sponged the stain, probably nobody heard or noticed strangers sharing a secret.
When calm had re-settled, Mrs Roxburgh accepted another cup, offered by Tom. Her eyes grew moist, her vision blurred, but steam was rising out of the tea, and if she felt breathless, restless, her stays, she told herself, were not yet broken in.
Mr Jevons, again the substantial merchant, was no longer conscious of the stain, worsened though it was by his and Miss Scrimshaw’s attentions. He could not give over contemplating the smouldering figure in garnet silk beside the pregnant mother in her nest of drowsy roly-poly children, a breathing statuary contained within the same ellipse of light.
He did not see that Kate kicked Tom, and that Tom retaliated with a punch; they were in a different orbit. Nor did Miss Scrimshaw attempt to enforce the discipline she advocated: she was too engrossed, her onyx going click click, shooting down possible doubts; for however much crypto-eagles aspire to soar, and do in fact, through thoughtscape and dream, their human nature cannot but grasp at any circumstantial straw which may indicate an ordered universe.
About the Novels
Patrick White THE AUNT’S STORY
With the death of her mother, middle-aged Theodora Goodman contemplates the desert of her life. Freed from the trammels of convention she leaves Australia for a European tour and becomes involved with the residents of a small French hotel. But creating other people’s lives, even in love and pity, can lead to madness. Her ability to reconcile joy and sorrow is an unbearable torture to her. On the journey home, Theodora finds there is little to choose between the reality of illusion and the illusion of reality. She looks for peace, even if it is beyond the borders of insanity …
‘Patrick White makes us care about human beings of all kinds who have themselves failed to learn to care, failed to break through the barriers of class and money and egotism and bitterness and playacting, who have never ceased to feel lost and alone. And he makes us care about them without ever sparing their frailties and follies a single lash of his supple, witty, forked tongue’
Angus Wilson, Observer
‘A tour de force of the most unexpecting kind’
Daily Telegraph
Patrick White THE EYE OF THE STORM
In the Sydney suburb of Centennial Park, three nurses, a housekeeper and a solicitor attend to Elizabeth Hunter as her son and daughter convene at her deathbed. But, in death as in life, Elizabeth remains a destructive force on those who surround her.
The Eye of the Storm is a savage exploration of family relationships-and the sharp undercurrents of love and hate, comedy and tragedy, which define them.
‘One seeks among debased superlatives for words that would convey the grandeur of The Eye of the Storm … its high intellect, its fidelity to our victories and confusions, its beauty and heroic maturity … every passage merits attention and gives satisfaction’
New York Times Book Review
‘In his major post-war novels, the pain and earnestness of the individual’s quest for ‘meaning and design’ can be felt more intensely than perhaps anywhere else in con temporary Western prose’
Sunday Times
Patrick White THE LIVING AND THE DEAD
Set in thirties London, The Living and the Dead portrays the complex ebb and flow of relationships within the Standish family. Mrs Standish, ageing but still beautiful, is drawn into secret liaisons, while her daughter Eden experiments openly with left-wing politics and love affairs. Only the son, Elyot, remains an aloof and scholarly observer-until dramatic developments shock him into sudden self-knowledge.
‘Scene after scene is worked out with exactness and subtlety which no second-string novelist can scent, far less nail to paper’
Daily Telegraph
‘An unmistakably major writer who commands a scope, power and sheer technical skill which put other more ambitious novelists into the shade’
A. Alvarez
‘Brilliant and masterful’
Nation
Patrick White RIDERS IN THE CHARIOT
Through the crumbling ruins of the once splendid Xanadu Miss Hare wanders, half-mad, yet seeming less alien among the encroaching wildlife than among the inhabitants of Sarsaparilla. In this wilderness she stumbles firstly upon a half-cast aborigine and then upon a Jewish refugee. They each place themselves in the care of a local washerwoman. Existing in a world of pervasive evil, all four have been independently damaged and discarded. Now in one shared vision they find themselves bound together, understanding the possibilities of redemption.
‘Stands out among contemporary novels like a cathedral surrounded by booths. Its forms, its impulse and its dedication to what is eternal all excite a comparison with religious architecture’
Sunday Times
‘This is a book which really defies review; for its analysable qualities are overwhelmed by those imponderables which make a work “great” in the untouchable sense. It must be read because, like Everest, “it is there” ’