Patrick White: The Eye of the Storm

‘Sister Huxtable and I have planned a coach tour of New Zealand — both islands,’ she informed them after controlling her wind: that sauce again.

Sister de Santis held up her throat and smiled encouragingly at the wall.

Mary de Santis is putting on weight. ‘It’s thanks to Mrs Hunter — her gift,’ Sister Badgery said rather loudly. ‘The five hundred dollars.’ She crooked her finger above the still unused pudding spoon. ‘Do you — I ask you in confidence, Sister — do you think it all above board? I would have expected more of Mrs Hunter, such a generous woman — and lovely lady. What I mean to say is, she mightn’t have had her own way. Others may have dictated, so to speak.’

Sister de Santis might have been listening; she might not.

‘Don’t think I’m not grateful,’ Sister Badgery insisted. ‘It’s thanks to Mrs Hunter that I’m doing this little tour of New Zealand with Win Huxtable. Only if the legacy had been slightly larger — Win has had quite a windfall — we might have got as far as Japan.’

The silence was awful in the breakfast room where they still had to finish what Mrs Hunter had always, and now Sister Badgery herself, referred to as ‘luncheon’.

Sister Badgery suddenly snorted down her nose. ‘It looks as if I have a lust for travel!’ The confession made her giggle. ‘You will understand that, Mrs Lippmann.’ She turned to the housekeeper who had brought this ‘tort’.

‘Oh, I have travelled. But have no lust.’

The Germans are a heavy lot.

As the housekeeper dished up the pudding, Sister Badgery noticed a bandage.

‘Damaged yourself, have you, dear?’

‘It is nothing. I have cut my finger. It is my new little vegetable knife, which is sharper than I have thought.’

Sister Badgery sucked her teeth. ‘There’s nothing like a superficial cut for incapacitating a person.’ She had done her duty, and might be allowed to return to graver issues. ‘This will,’ she said, ‘if you won’t think I’m harping on it. Mr Wyburd, though a good soul, was always too soft. Sir Basil Hunter is the perfect gentleman — you can tell. I know nothing about actors, but can recognize a gentleman.’ Something forced Sister Badgery to pause. ‘It’s Princess Dorothy — I feel — would not be above manipulating.’

Sister de Santis looked down at her plate; Mrs Lippmann was too far off: perhaps on her travels.

‘And the sapphire. Did they ever find it?’

‘Not as far as I know,’ Sister de Santis replied. ‘It may come to light when the furniture is gone and the carpets have been taken up.’

‘It may. But I think I know it won’t.’

‘Possibly.’

‘I have my— intuitions.’ Sister Badgery was proud of that. ‘In fact, if I wasn’t a nurse — but I wouldn’t give up nursing, not for worlds — I often think I might offer my services to the police. I am always right.’ Laughter exposed almost the whole of the pale gums before the mouth closed abruptly; she might have overdone it, owning to psychic powers in front of a colleague.

‘Will you take a little trip yourself, Sister?’

‘Oh, no! I couldn’t! After sitting here all these months.’ Thought of her recent inactivity seemed to agitate Sister de Santis; she shifted heavily in her chair.

Though she wasn’t one to criticize, Sister Badgery had always considered de Santis rather on the stout side. At the same time she had admired her colleague for a certain stateliness of manner. Today and out of uniform, she had shed the stateliness. Tactful is tactful, but in the course of luncheon, de Santis had not expressed a single opinion, not even with her face. You could not say she looked unhappy, not like the Jewess. Sister de Santis was more sort of calm: she had the smooth, washed look of some of the more simple-minded nuns.

Sister de Santis raised her voice; the tablecloth in front of her subsided. ‘As a matter of fact I’ve accepted a case, f m expected tomorrow. It was the obvious thing — since the auctioneers are taking over.’

‘We have our professional duty of course.’ Sister Badgery was very firm on that score. ‘Is it a difficult case, Sister?’

‘A young girl paralysed in both legs.’

Sister Badgery shook her head, sympathy straying between her vision of this young girl and the slice of Torte the housekeeper had put before her. ‘Win Huxtable had a private case — a boy in an iron lung; it got her down in the end.’ By which time Sister Badgery considered she might decently help herself to cream.

‘Cream, Mrs Lippmann? I must say the tort looks scrumptious. Your puddings were always lovely.’

Neither Mrs Lippmann nor Sister de Santis was prepared to touch the Torte.

Sister de Santis might have removed herself already. Though she was faintly smiling, the smile was an impersonal one, stranded on her lips as she withdrew behind her eyes, amongst her thoughts.

She was, in fact, again seated at the bedside of this young girl, where she had been ushered and left.

‘What is your name?’ she heard herself asking to break the silence.

‘Irene.’

‘You’re lucky to have such a beautiful name.’

‘Is it?’

‘To me it is.’

‘I loathe it!’

Although it was around eleven o’clock Irene was lying stretched on her bed pricking a card with a pin. Her rather lifeless hair was laid along the sides of her cheeks and over her shoulders almost as far as the small, but aggressively mature breasts. The long gown, printed with a yellowish green design, must have been carefully arranged in those folds where the skirt covered the legs: the folds were too formal, like stone. Sister de Santis was reminded of a figure she had seen on a tomb.

The girl continued pricking at the card.

‘Wouldn’t you be better sitting in your chair?’ the nurse asked.

‘Oh, I’ll sit in my chair! I’ll sit in my chair all right! Today and tomorrow. And tomorrow.’ She drove the pin savagely into the card.

‘Do you enjoy reading?’

The girl shook off the whole idea. ‘I watch the box — if ever there’s anything of interest.’

‘What interests you most?’

The girl dropped the card. ‘I like to watch brutes exerting themselves. Specially killing one another.’ She laughed to herself, then looked sideways at this stodgy nurse. ‘Do you think you’ll like me?’

‘Perhaps I shall if I get to know you as you really are.’

‘Oh, I’m worse — worse than you could possibly imagine!’ A convulsion of the hand on the long green skirt dragged at it and rucked it above the little-girl’s feet and useless legs.

The nurse got up to arrange the skirt in its original folds. The girl’s hostility appeared to have increased now that the stranger was introduced to the unmentionable.

Sister de Santis noticed a bowl of anemones standing on the sill of a bow window. The garden beyond was a labyrinth, not without glimmers of fruitfulness.

‘Did these anemones come from your garden?’ she asked for the sake of saying something.

‘I don’t know. Yes, I suppose they did.’ The girl seemed unwilling to consider anything beyond the fringe of her inturned thoughts.

‘My last case loved flowers. She was blind, but she enjoyed their scent, and she liked to touch them. Roses were her particular flower. I used to cut the roses early in the morning and stand them in her room with the dew still on them.’

You could almost hear the girl listening: her eyelashes. ‘Sick people must be disgusting,’ she said. ‘To have to handle them! I’d always rather be surrounded by beautiful, perfect people. Even if they’re cold and cruel. I don’t want anyone I have to pity. To offer pity — that’s the most disgusting act of all.’