Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

‘Matron Aspden phoned me to ask what sort of woman Mrs Alfred Hunter is — whether she would adapt herself to life at the Village. Matron and I were same year at P.A. She’s good. She’s down to earth.’ The flatness of their conversation might have been a comfort to both of them.

Sister de Santis was setting her veil in the orthodox folds. ‘So tomorrow they will drive out — to interview Matron and Mr Thackray the chaplain — to decide — officially, that is.’

Sister Manhood stopped tweaking the corner of the document she had stuck, for want of a better place, under the pincushion. ‘I’ll go now,’ she said.

She did, but shortly returned, to collect for safety’s sake, Mrs Hunter’s written promise.

Strange in one so professional, Sister de Santis would have liked to postpone appearing in her patient’s room. Later, in the small hours, it might be easier to convert this old woman into an abstraction of age, or justification for your own existence, or see her in both physical and metaphoric terms, as the holy relic to which your faith bowed down in worship; but for the present, as mother of her children, Mrs Hunter remained distressingly human. Mary de Santis turned once or twice in the narrow cupboard-lined room, itself a narrow cupboard, or suddenly transparent repository in which those other relics were piled hugger-mugger: a silken ankle; a shrunken, needle-punctured arm; a woman’s white, bloodied knee; the body of a strangled dog. The least brutal of these images flickered in Mary de Santis the most subtly and persistently. Grace would never abound in one who was frivolous, sensual, irresponsible enough to shiver still in contemplating the relic of Sir Basil Hunter’s silken ankle.

Fortunately, it was given to her to escape her thoughts in remembering the calomel.

Sir Basil’s mother was asleep at least in theory. As the nurse approached the bed the old woman’s breathing grew more complicated: it sounded like a crumpling, then a tearing, of tissue paper. The level of the barley water slightly swayed.

Sister de Santis was moving around.

‘What are you doing, Mary?’

‘They left your jewel box open.’

The old woman lay managing her bones, grimacing.

‘Did you have a good time?’ Sister de Santis asked. ‘Did Sister dress you up?’

‘No. I’ve been giving some presents.’

‘I hope they were appreciated.’ Mary de Santis felt duller, heavier for her sententiousness; the darkened room shook as she tiptoed around: a hypocrite’s movements should have been more skilful.

Mrs Hunter said, ‘I’ve never given you anything. Or nothing of consequence. You seem to me complete, Mary.’

The nurse mumbled.

‘What did you say?’

Oh, Lord! ‘I said there’s nothing I need.’

The old woman floated off again.

The nurse pulled up her usual chair. At first she sat forward, arms round knees, gasping, panting, till noticing in a mirror the white contortions of a throat, dark lips struggling to contain the hole which opened in them. What if she lost control and sounds blared out across the silence?

She sat back after that, to await the motions of a patient’s bowels. She had her work, which was her faith. Whatever images might distract, seduce, even spiritually strengthen her in the course of this life, her formal faith would remain as plain as a bedpan. Nobody could destroy her .

Yes, she had her faith her work her work.

BASIL WAS driving very cautiously amongst the concrete mixers, the semi-trailers, the lopsided vegetable trucks, and parti-coloured Holden sedans. The long road out of the city repeated itself in hills and hollows, in rows of red identical villas, and blocks of equally conformist shops. The used-car racketeers added something of daring by mooring their fleets under canopies of garish pennants permanently fidgeted by a wind. Still, the predominant colour of the highway was that of cement dust.

Basil drove sitting too upright. Neither of them was yet resigned to the circumstances they alone had wanted: they had badgered Arnold Wyburd into organizing their visit to ‘Kudjeri’ against his wish.

‘But they’re very ordinary, quiet people;’ the solicitor tried to fob his clients off.

It clashed with Dorothy’s sense of what was due to her. ‘Are we such hectic monsters that we shall disjoint the lives of ordinary quiet people? And? she turned on the vox humana Australian style, ‘isn’t “Kudjeri” our old home?’

So it was engineered. It would be one way of killing time while the details of Mother’s future were fully arranged. And yet, having satisfied her wishes, Dorothy narrowed herself as they drove north. Was it in imitation of her brother? Basil was so unnaturally erect he would surely break this side of Gogong. She preferred on the whole to be driven by somebody she did not know; knowing a driver made her nervous. The exception was the man she still referred to as her husband: with Hubert at the wheel, she accepted the wall which would spring up straight ahead of them.

Now ostensibly driving on a positive mission with her brother, they were in fact allowing the past to suck them back through this choked intestine recorded on maps as the Parramatta Road. Faces to either side of them were watching it happen: streaming, muscular men and their drier, scorched women aimed sideways glances at the couple swaying with assumed discretion in their unconvincingly modest car. Emotionally at least, things were what they used to be, the tall poppies bowing mock apologies to those who held them guilty of the worst.

At an intersection a truck had spilt half its load in slewing to avoid collision with a milk van: burst open or slackly contorted, the flour bags lying on the grey concrete had a disconcerting dead look. A tall young policeman was noting details of an accident which only lacked blood.

Dorothy began to snigger.

‘What is there to laugh at?’ As a driver Basil was incensed.

‘Nothing,’ Dorothy admitted, but the laughter bumped out of her. ‘Actually, I was thinking of that woman — Matron Whatnot at the Thorogood Village — the day we went.’

‘A stout lady, and worthy.’ Superior to Dorothy, Basil did not laugh; he smiled.

‘Worthy — yes — I grant you! I’m only too thankful!’ Dorothy laughed with greater restraint, till a veil of flour draped across the road, and in her mind’s eye an image of blancoed shoes severed from a pair of ankles, shocked her short; she was relieved when Basil had driven her past.

Basil, too, was uneasy for something. ‘Seriously though, Dorothy, with plenty of warm-hearted attention — and Matron Aspden is obviously the personification of what they call “warmth”,’ Dorothy could not resist a giggle, ‘there’s no reason why Mother shouldn’t be happy at the Thorogood Village.’

‘In her day she was an intelligent woman, and is still, au fond, reasonable.’

‘She thrives on flattery of course.’

‘Don’t we know! And she’ll get that. Mother is one of those who generate in their slaves the flattery they’re hungry for.’

Basil drove. The factories were gone; the shops, the houses were thinning out, offering glimpses of a still shamefaced landscape. He tried coughing away a suspicion that trees appear real only when artificially lit. At ‘Kudjeri’ perhaps he would re-discover the real thing — if there was enough of him left to fill so large a stage.

‘What I thought most frightening,’ he formed his words with foresight because the road had some treacherous bends in it, ‘was the row of inmates sitting along the veranda as we pulled up — before Matron came out to jolly them. That was an audience I shouldn’t care to play to. You could act your head off, and they wouldn’t let you know how they were responding.’