Patrick White: The Eye of the Storm

‘Mrs Hunter wasn’t sick,’ Sister de Santis said. ‘She was old. She had been a great beauty in her day — a success. She was also cold and cruel when it suited her to be.’

‘Was she happy?’ Irene asked.

‘Not altogether. She was human. In the end I feel age forced her to realize she had experienced more than she thought she had at the time.’

Using her elbows and ugly handfuls of the bed, Irene was raising herself higher on the pillows; she had developed unusual power in her arms and shoulders, the nurse noticed, and decided not to help.

‘That’s all very well, but what shall I experience?’ the girl asked.

‘I’d say you have the will — haven’t you? to find out.’

She didn’t reply. She had resumed her original occupation of pricking a card with a pin.

‘What’s this?’ Sister de Santis asked. ‘Are you making a pattern?’

‘A pattern? NOTHING.’ Suddenly Irene leaned over and stabbed the outstretched hand with the pin.

When she had recovered from the pain and her surprise, Sister de Santis — they were both staring at the bead of blood which had risen to the surface of the skin.

The nurse asked, ‘Why did you do that, Irene?’

The girl’s lips, her eyelids, had thickened. ‘You won’t come,’ she mumbled.

‘If you want me I shall.’

The girl had slipped back to a lower position on the bed. The nurse was again reminded of the figure on the tomb, except that blotches had appeared on the cheeks, their human ugliness emphasized, if not illuminated, by tears which had oozed from under struggling lids.

When it seemed that Irene would not commit herself further, Sister de Santis left.

The mother was waiting to waylay the nurse. ‘Now you know what to expect,’ Mrs Fletcher began in a high voice which the tiled hall made sound more chittery. ‘I didn’t want to come in with you because Irene holds me responsible for everything she considers bad.’ The mother’s wrinkled prettiness tried to turn the situation into an amusing one; if her daughter had not been her cross, the pursuit of pleasure might have taken its place.

‘I shall come on Thursday,’ Sister de Santis told her, ‘if that is convenient.’

‘Thank God!’ Mrs Fletcher used the term with professional ease, and such vehemence that a scent of gin hovered around them as they stood discussing hours and the inevitable money.

‘I could live in if you wanted,’ Sister de Santis thought.

‘If you haven’t a life of your own!’ Mrs Fletcher jittered worse than ever with gratitude and amusement; then she said, ‘It wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t warn you she literally tortured the last nurse into leaving. She is so warped, she is only convinced by what is evil.’ The mother laughed.

The nurse repeated they could expect her on the Thursday.

Now as she watched Sister Badgery devouring the Torte , Mary de Santis wondered how she would have answered Mrs Fletcher if pressed to explain what constituted her own life. Memory of her parents had faded since Mrs Hunter’s death: if they recurred in physical form they had the wooden faces of the figures in time-darkened icons. Her own clothes were a habit. She sat with books more often than she read them. (Dante had died with the forgotten cadences of her father’s voice.) And desire. Incredulously she watched Sir Basil Hunter’s silken ankle as his foot beat time to boredom in the garden of the Onslow Hotel. Of all her personal life it was perhaps physical desire which had died the most painful, because the most shamefully grotesque, death. Would she have admitted wearing that hat to the funeral if she had been accounting for herself to her future employer? Her betrayal of Mrs Hunter that second time was only outdone by Sir Basil’s absence.

Sister Badgery had spooned up the last of the lovely cream, the last fleck of apricot.

Sister de Santis had thrown that orange hat away. She could have confessed truthfully to Irene’s mother that she was entirely free.

‘What is the name of this family?’ For Sister Badgery names were of considerable importance.

‘Fletcher.’

‘Which ones, I wonder?’

Sister de Santis did not know.

‘Well, there’s the flour Fletchers. Isn’t there jewellers too? Cheap jewellers, but the cheap ones often come off best. I expect you’ve fallen on your feet, Sister.’

Now that she had eaten her meal, Sister Badgery had to go: to a former patient become a friend. ‘Say goodbye to Mrs Lippmann, dear. I can see it’s one of her moody days.’

The day itself was moody. Sister Badgery was thankful she had brought her brolly. Already as she opened it, big cold drops were falling out of purple clouds.

‘Oops!’ she called as she went dickering down the path. ‘Shall I make it?’

She would not have stayed on though, not for anything, in that ownerless house. Spooky too. She thought of the cosy chats she would have with her friend Win Huxtable inside the coach as the New Zealand scenery went whizzing past: scenery, like silence, depressed Sister Badgery.

Sister de Santis lingered a moment on the path to watch the lightning: the enormous drops of cold rain flattened themselves on her face as though it were their chosen target; the white lightning was directed at her, though without malevolence.

About five, when the storm had cleared, Mrs Lippmann made them a cup of coffee. After watching Sister Badgery eat a meal in the middle of the day, the two women could not have raised an appetite between them.

Sitting quietly sipping their coffee in the kitchen, the nurse was humiliated to realize that, in her state of excited anticipation, and in spite of the affection she felt for the housekeeper, she had forgotten to ask Mrs Lippmanns plans for tomorrow.

‘What do you think you will do?’ Sister de Santis asked with what she hoped would convey intensified interest and rekindled warmth.

‘I shall be with friends,’ Mrs Lippmann answered in her normal, grave, low voice; then raised it to the raucous pitch she had used in her performances for Mrs Hunter, ‘or,’ she grimaced, ‘I may take my things to Central Railway waiting room, to sit a while, and assemble my thoughts.’ As she closed one eye, the other glittered with irony.

They laughed together, and Sister de Santis caught a glimpse of the top hat, the wilted bow, and the little cane with dented knob quivering under Lotte Lippmann’s armpit.

Presently the nurse left to start her packing. The housekeeper, though she had finished hers, went to the room in which her belongings had always only waited to be packed: it had served, in fact, as the barest waiting-room. Except that on the dressing-table, propped against the glass, on the lace runner which might have been worked by one of Mrs Hunter’s dead maids, the lovers continued holding each other in front of the empty bandstand, in spite of the faded sepia, and fingerprints eating into them.

When she had undressed, Mrs Lippmann went in to take her bath. The heater, with its permanent smell of gas and flames roaring inside the copper cylinder, had terrified her in the beginning, but she had grown used to all such minor effects. Outside the window of the maids’ bathroom the sky was more convincingly on fire, the blaze smudged by fingers of smoke from the chimneys of Alexandria and Waterloo. It was suffocating in the narrow room, but it did not occur to her to open the window.

Lying in the steaming bath, Mrs Lippmann watched the hair, more like ferns or the roots of water-plants, floating around the shoulders, straggling towards the breasts of this still curiously solid body. Then she reached up and felt along the ledge behind her head for her most practical, recently purchased vegetable knife. The pulses in her wrists were winking at her: all this time her fate had been knotted in her wrists. She cut each knot of veins with care.