Patrick White: The Eye of the Storm

Closing her eyes she floated with the dead maids, the entwined lovers. Or if she cared to look, she was faced with a flush of roses, of increasing crimson. Opening and closing her eyelids growing drier brittler. Her eyes afloat, so it seemed. If she smiled, or sank, she would drink the roses she was offering to those others pressed always more suffocatingly close around her.

After a long attempt at sleeping, Sister de Santis realized she would not succeed. She got up. Her veins, her heart, were throbbing with life as she went from room to room throwing open the windows. Furniture groaned and cracked; some of it seemed preparing to topple. At moments she became aware of her own creaking, her thumping clumsiness, and went more softly so as not to disturb the housekeeper.

The light in Mrs Hunter’s room was at this hour neither moon nor day. Here and there stood the empty vases: columns of crystal and trumpets of silver. The great empty bed fluctuated like a sheet of dreaming water. What she knew to be a silver sun let into the rosewood bedhead had more the appearance of a stationary crab suspicious of an intrusion on its shallows.

Mooning around a room shortly to be emptied of its associations and emotions along with the furniture, Sister de Santis wondered how she would convey to this entombed girl, her future patient, the beauty she herself had witnessed, and love as she had come to understand it. She felt herself again the bungling novice. Perhaps she was ageing. But she continued throbbing, flickering, inside her clumsy flesh.

Seeing the dark was beginning to thin, she went down presently. She put a coat over her nightdress. She took the rusted can which she kept filled with seed. In the garden the first birds were still only audible shadows, herself an ambulant tree.

The hem of her nightdress soon became saturated, heavy as her own flesh, as she filled the birds’ dishes. Reaching up, her arms were rounded by increasing light.

In the street an early worker stared as he passed, but looked away on recognizing a ceremony.

A solitary rose, tight crimson, emerged in the lower garden; it would probably open later in the day.

Light was strewing the park as she performed her rites. Birds followed her, battering the air, settling on the grass whenever her hand, trembling in the last instant, spilt an excess of seed.

Her throat swelled as the light climbed, as she trudged back, trailing her sodden nightdress along the path where ‘at least two people have broken their legs’. The little scoop clattered against the rusty can.

At the topmost step it occurred to her that she must take this first and last rose to her patient Irene Fletcher. She would return and cut it before leaving: perfect as it should become by then.

She poured the remainder of the seed into the dish on the upper terrace. The birds already clutching the terracotta rim, scattered as she blundered amongst them, then wheeled back, clashing, curving, descending and ascending, shaking the tassels of light or seed suspended from the dish. She could feel claws snatching for a hold in her hair.

She ducked, to escape from this prism of dew and light, this tumult of wings and her own unmanageable joy. Once she raised an arm to brush aside a blue wedge of pigeon’s feathers. The light she could not ward off: it was by now too solid, too possessive; herself possessed.

Shortly after she went inside the house. In the hall she bowed her head, amazed and not a little frightened by what she saw in Elizabeth Hunter’s looking glass.