Patrick White: The Eye of the Storm

This actual morning old Mrs Hunter opened her eyes and said to her nurse,’ Where are the dolls?’

‘Where you left them, I expect,’ Because her inept answer satisfied neither of them, the nurse developed a pained look.

‘But that’s what they always say! Why don’t they bring them?’ Mrs Hunter protested.

The nurse could only bite her lip; the hand had been dragged away from hers.

‘Of course you know about the dolls. Don’t say I didn’t tell you.’ The old woman was threatening to become vindictive. ‘We were living beside the — oh, some — some geographical river. My father had given me a hundred dolls. Think of it — a hundred! Some of them I didn’t look at because they didn’t interest me, but some I loved to distraction.’

Suddenly Mrs Hunter turned her head with such a doll’s jerk Sister de Santis held her breath.

‘You know it isn’t true,’ the old child complained. ‘It was Kate Nutley had the dolls. She was spoilt. I had two — rather battered ones. And still didn’t love them equally.’

Sister de Santis was troubled by the complexities of a world she had been forced to re-enter too quickly.

‘I tore the leg off one,’ Mrs Hunter admitted; her recovered calm was enviable.

‘Didn’t they mend it?’ the nurse dared inquire.

‘I can’t remember.’ Mrs Hunter gave a little whimper. ‘And have to remember everything today. People try to catch you out — accuse you — of not — not loving them enough.’

She was staring at the increasing light, if not glaring, frightfully.

‘And look my best. Bring me my looking-glass, Nurse.’

Sister de Santis fetched the glass: it was of that same ivory set as the brushes with lovers’ knots in gold and lapis lazuli. Holding it by its fluted handle she tilted the glass for her patient to look. The nurse was glad she could not see the reflection: reflections can be worse than faces.

Mrs Hunter was panting. ‘Somebody must make me up.’

‘Sister Badgery will see to that.’

‘Oh, Badgery! She’s awful. If only little Manhood were here — she knows how to do it properly. She’s the one I like.’

‘Sister Manhood won’t be here till lunch.’

‘Why can’t somebody telephone her?’

‘She’ll still be asleep. And later she’ll probably have some shopping to do.’

Mrs Hunter was so upset she let her head drop on the pillow: tears gushed surprisingly out of the half-closed eyes.

Sister de Santis heard her own voice sound more placid than she felt. ‘If you rest your mind you’ll probably look far more beautiful as your natural self. And that is how they’ll want to see you.’

But the old woman fully closed her eyes. ‘Not now. Why, my lashes are gone — my complexion. I can feel the freckles, even on my eyelids, without having to look for them.’

‘I’m sure you’re exaggerating, Mrs Hunter.’ Small comfort; but the nurse’s feet were aching, nor had her mind, her eyes, adjusted themselves to daylight: the withdrawal of darkness had left her puffy and moth-like.

When she noticed her patient staring at her too obsessively. ‘I’d like you to bring me something to drink. And something else—’ putting out a hand at its oldest and feeblest, ‘I want you to forgive me, Mary. Will you?’ stroking no longer with bones, but the tips of feathers.

The sensation experienced by Sister de Santis was scarcely sensual; nor did it lift her to that state of disembodiment they sometimes enjoyed together. It was disturbing, though.

For her own protection the nurse ignored half the request, while agreeing too heartily to the other. ‘All right! What do you fancy?’

‘Nothing milky.’ Mrs Hunter made a smacking sound with her lips, because those two glutinous strips did not release each other easily. ‘Something cold and pure,’ she added after rejecting pap.

Sister de Santis had to relent; she had to look; and at once added to the caress of feathers, there were the eyes, some at least of their original mineral fire burning through the film with which age and sickness had attempted to obscure it. ‘I’d like a glass of water,’ Mrs Hunter said.

Sister de Santis was reduced to feeling embarrassed and lumpish. ‘It’ll be cold,’ she promised, ‘from the fridge. I can’t answer for its purity. It’s what the Water Board provides.’

As she left the room, a glare from furniture and a bedpan scarcely covered by a towel, sprang at the high priestess, stripping her of the illusions of her office, the night thoughts, speculations of a mystical turn few had ever guessed at, and certainly, thank God, no one shared, except, perhaps, one malicious old woman. In her daytime form, Mary de Santis of thumping bust and pronounced calves, might have been headed for basket-ball.

Left alone, which after all was how she wanted to be, with due respect to poor broody faithful de Santis, Mrs Hunter lay with her eyes closed listening to her house, her thoughts, her life. All around her clocks were ticking, not to mention that muffled metronome which might have been her heart. In some ways it was an advantage to be what they refer to as ‘half blind’. She had always seen too clearly, it seemed: opaque friends had been alarmed by it; a husband and lovers had resented; worst of all, the children — they could have done murder. She scrabbled after the handkerchief a nurse had hidden; so she cried without it. I’ve never seen you cry, Elizabeth, unless you wanted something. Alfred would lower his chin as though riding at an armoured opponent. And she would raise hers, accepting the challenge. It hadn’t occurred to me. But must be right if you’ve noticed. Opposing a husband with the weapon of her profile: she had perfect nostrils, so they told her; she had also seen for herself in the glass. Only Alfred had not told her; was it out of delicacy? His friends all referred to him as ‘Bill’. Most of his life he had spent trying to disguise himself as one of the costive, crutch-heavy males who came to discuss wool and meat: so slow and ponderous, like rams dragging their sex through a stand of lucerne. There were also the would-be cuddly females making up to ‘Bill’, unaware how immaculate he was.

Mrs Hunter laughed.

You know, Betty, you are the only one who has never called me by a friendly name. Not ‘Bill’: just to attempt it made her feel she was shaking her jowls like a bloodhound. How can I? When ‘Alfred’ is the name you’ve been given. I mean it’s your NAME— as mine is ‘Elizabeth’. She raised her voice and drew down her mouth to produce a dimple she held in reserve; but on this occasion it failed to persuade him.

Though he had never accused her of being cold, others had suggested that she was: satellite spinsters hopeful of prolonging schoolgirl crushes; wives in need of a receptacle in which to pour an accumulation of injustices; a man like Athol Shreve (she had only done it as an essay in sensuality; the hair alone disgusted her); that young Norwegian — no, or had he? (wasn’t his subject fish?) — on the Warmings’ island.

Not everyone is an island: they loved ‘Bill’, while admiring Elizabeth Hunter. It is the children who are the most forbidding, the least hospitable of islands, though you can light a fire if you know how to scrape together the wherewithal.

She sucked the corner of a pillowslip remembering the children. What were their names? Dor-o-thy? And Bsl? Bas-il! Words of love at the time, ugly and pretentious in the end.

Mrs Hunter fell into a snooze trying to remember something else she had discovered, not in any hairy embrace, or under threat by wet-kissing females, or children’s butterfly-flickers alternating with denunciations. Falling into her light snooze she would have liked to experience a state of mind she knew existed, but which was too subtle to enter except by special grace.