Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

‘Well, here we are then! Did you have an exciting morning, Mrs Hunter?’ Sister Manhood asked in a brisk voice unlike the one she knew to be hers.

‘My daughter isn’t an exciting girl.’

‘It must have been nice, though. Wasn’t it? After all this time.’

The nurse had to repair the bed: that was her duty; she began to do it.

‘I suppose it was nice,’ Mrs Hunter said as she was tossed about from side to side. ‘But you can never really tell with people — what they like. My children — when they were children — always claimed to like the opposite of what I knew they did.’

‘Oh?’

Flora Manhood couldn’t care. What she herself liked she sometimes wondered: rich, yummy food; sleep; cosmetics; making love; not making love.

She remembered and asked, ‘Supposing we rub your back? Or don’t you want to be bothered?’

‘Yes, please,’ Mrs Hunter answered blissfully.

She could take any amount of treatment from little Manhood, whether buffeting or caresses, even her out and out bad tempers: an animal presence is something the mind craves the farther the body shrivels into skin and bone.

Sister Manhood had hoped her patient might refuse the back-rubbing; she had given her the opportunity; but it hadn’t worked.

Once, while receiving Sister Manhood’s ministrations, Mrs Hunter had put up her hands and encountered her nurse’s throat. She had decided to feel it, and for a moment her hands had contained this strong vessel of flesh and muscle, inside which, it seemed, the whole of life was palpitating. Sister Manhood had pretended to be embarrassed; but that didn’t deceive.

Now when the nurse had fetched the flask of alcohol, and turned the old thing over on her side, like a half-open pocketknife, or deck chair upset by the wind, she too remembered the time Mrs Hunter had held her by the throat: such a frail rat-tat she was subjected to, but subjected. She smiled to herself; now there was no question who had the upper hand.

How powerless I am, Mrs Hunter thought, the saliva becoming bitter in her mouth, till she realized: not quite powerless while my mind is a match for the lot of them — on its better days.

She was comforted by this fact as much as by Sister Manhood’s soothing hand.

As she rubbed, the nurse droned, ‘Mrs Lippmann has something lovely for your dinner, Mrs Hunter. You’ll go crazy; it’s so scrumptious.’

‘Don’t tell me. That will spoil the surprise.’ Then she asked, from behind closed eyelids, ‘What colour is it?’

‘Shan’t tell!’ Sister Manhood giggled; she didn’t have the vaguest idea what Lottie had got for the old girl’s dinner, but this was one of the games they played.

When, as she rubbed, she was overcome by a revulsion, almost a paralysis of her strong golden arm. Oh God, my life is slipping away! Where the fumes from the alcohol had cauterized her nostrils, and straying farther, exhilarated her thoughts, now they disgusted, though not so much as this loathsome back streaked with sickly brown-yellow, the frail, fluttering ribs, and however clean, the browner cleft becoming a funnel to the anus.

What am I living for? The nurse crimped her forehead. One rabbit-blow might finish the party. Then she would run away, never set eyes on this house again, never see Col, Snow, or anyone, run till she arrived at some long, empty beach, and still running, by now miraculously out of her clothes, fall into the shallow foam, the bubbles fizzing and filling wherever there was entry, soothing wherever she was physically bruised or mentally troubled.

But even as she ran, he (or some other) would be running after, waving his thing to bludgeon her into childbirth and endless domestic slavery. So there was no escaping: on the one hand it was snotty noses, nappies, and a man’s weight to increase your body’s exhaustion; on the other, it was rubbing backs (grind your knuckles into the unsuspecting tissue-paper skin) and wiping the shit off sick or senile bottoms. She wished she was a plant or something.

Mrs Hunter’s tone was one of resignation, ‘I often wonder why more old people aren’t murdered by those who look after them. A lot are, but usually by the relatives: those cases of “mercy-killing”.’

‘What ideas you get!’ Sister Manhood could have bitten her own tongue off; when it was her thoughts which had given her secret away.

‘I’m trying to be objective.’ Mrs Hunter had trouble with that.

As for Sister Manhood, she had never known what ‘objective’ meant: it was a word Col used.

‘That should have freshened you up,’ she said, pulling the nightie down over the withered rump.

Flora Manhood felt frightened: the way the old witch could plug into your thoughts; she was frustrated, too, by what Col called ‘your intellectual deficiencies’. She had never hoped, never wanted to be, clever, only to live, to know contentment, if she could discover what that was.

As the nurse stood the alcohol on the dressing-table — you could hear the flask jostling all your precious things — Mrs Hunter said, ‘I expect you’ve been with that young man again.’

‘Young man? Which?’

Mrs Hunter could tell from the thick voice that her nurse’s lips must be looking swollen. ‘The one — that chemist down at Kingsford — who doesn’t mind delivering personally when we ring up about a prescription.’

Sister Manhood was so furious she wouldn’t reply. She turned the body over and jerked it up against the pillows preparatory to pinning it down. At the beginning of her training she had persistently reminded herself that patients must remain bodies. (Yet bodies became pathetic, or, worse, vindictive.)

Mrs Hunter said, ‘I can remember hearing a theory — that after a woman has been with a man you can smell her — like a doe after she’s been to the buck.’

Sister Manhood was more furious than before. ‘Sounds to me a pretty dirty theory!’ She fixed the upper, hemstitched sheet under Mrs Hunter’s chin, but never tight enough: everything you had ever been taught would always come undone.

The old thing laughed. ‘Reasonable — and natural. I never kept a goat, but know from looking at one or two that we might have understood each other.’

Sister Manhood bashed one of the hairbrushes so hard with the jar of alcohol the brush fell on the floor. ‘I’m not interested in men,’ she said. ‘Not anyway in Col Pardoe. That’s just about over. Nobody — Col or anybody else — is going to dictate to me. I’ve seen the light. As a matter of fact my cousin Snow Tunks has asked me to share her flat.’

‘Snow Tunks? ’

‘Yes. My only surviving relative. That makes you close — when there’s only the two of you left.’

‘But what — what is Snow ?’

‘A bus conductress.’

Mrs Hunter’s lips continued mouthing incredulously, as though what should have been a meringue had turned into a stale bun; in the circumstances she could only finally answer, ‘Oh!’

And Sister Manhood had said enough; the cool she cultivated was letting her down.

Fortunately, at that point, the housekeeper pushed the door open with a tray. ‘Mahlzeit!’ Mrs Lippmann called.

An ugly, ridiculous expression, but Mrs Hunter loved to hear it; she loved food; if she could have remembered what she had eaten she would have spent more time thinking about it as she lay and waited.

‘What have you got?’ she asked, and tried to forestall the housekeeper by snuffing.

It is beautiful steamed whitings — with a sauce. Ach, such a sauce !’

‘Not out of a bottle, I hope.’

‘Ach, Mrs Hunter, what you say and do to me! But I suppose we must have our jokes.’

‘Which colour?’ whispered Mrs Hunter; out of the whole of life the colours were perhaps what she missed most.