Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

Out of the wraith a voice asking, ‘Mrs Hunter? Did you have a nice rest? Are you ready for your sponge?’ It is Sister Manhood with the Spode basin they are allowed to use for menial purposes.

‘I had such horrid dreams.’

‘I thought you didn’t sleep.’

‘Oh, you can dream, can’t you? without sleeping?’

‘I don’t know.’ The nurse had embarked, if not conscientiously, then at least professionally, on one of the duties for which she was paid: to sponge a geriatric case.

Mrs Hunter smiled. She would wait. She knew she could play Flora Manhood without her suspecting she was on the hook. In the meantime, the sponging made you feel better.

The nurse might have been peeling a fruit: she was so detached. In theory powerful. When it was the soft, tepid sponge which exercised the power, seeping into crevices, smoothing the wrinkles out of thoughts. Objects, including the human ones, are often more powerful than people.

‘Anyway,’ said Sister Manhood, ‘it’s a lovely evening, Mrs Hunter.’

‘Is it?’

The life of Sydney was streaming past and around, you could sense as well as hear, pouring out of factories and offices: by this hour men in bars, a confraternity of Athol Shreves, had begun inflating their self-importance with beer; ambulances were hurtling towards disasters in crumpled steel and glass confetti; in semi-private houses, mothers would have started sponging little boys, their still empty purses, while nubile girls looked in glasses to pop their spots cream their skins dreaming of long-hoped-for but unlikely lads.

The children: thank God they didn’t know it, they were the all-powerful — not that silly princess, nor, judging by his letters, the famous bankrupt actor, but Dorothy and Basil, more devastating in their silences than Elizabeth and Alfred Hunter with all their authority, money, experience of life, and practical, but finally useless, advice. Parents are wraiths beside their children, who are drained in turn by the business of living; sometimes their candour and perception are returned, but almost too late, when they have become thinking objects.

If Alfred hadn’t died too soon it might have been different: you were learning to speak to each other in what seemed a revealed language, discovering unexpected meanings.

‘Did I hurt you?’ Sister Manhood asked.

‘It was Alfred I was dreaming about. Did you know my husband died of cancer?’

‘Oh, how dreadful!’ It wasn’t convincing: a nurse performing her professional duties shouldn’t be called upon too suddenly to turn into a human being.

‘And I nursed him. You didn’t know that,’ Mrs Hunter said, and laughed.

‘No, I didn’t.’ Nor did she believe it: that was what made you laugh in advance.

‘How did you manage — without the experience — if the illness was a prolonged one?’

‘Oh, it was long — not in years, or months even. I managed. By will. Which I don’t think you believe in, Sister. By instinct too, I suppose. Why do people start writing poems — or making love? You ought to know that — some of it at least.’

Sister Manhood had done with the sponge. This was the sort of thing which drove you up the wall: at times when you had got past pitying to liking, or farther, to almost having a love affair, the two of you and a sponge, the old bitch would start hacking, to remind you that you really hated her.

‘Sister Manhood, you’re making my nightie grate the length of my skin.’

Let it grate. ‘P’raps it’s a cheap nightie.’

‘You’re not angry with me, are you?’

…

‘Sister?’

…

‘About what I said? After all — isn’t it our instinct to love — or try to? Surely you must understand that ? By instinct!’

‘I don’t know.’ There was nothing you really understood, or so they told you regularly — Col Pardoe and old Mrs Betty bloody Hunter; you were either a body for fucking, or a log for the axemen (or — women) to hack at.

‘Where are you going, Sister Manhood?’

‘To throw out the dirty water.’ If you could have thrown the baby with it.

‘You won’t forget your promise, will you?’

…

‘Sister?’

…

‘The promise!’

Like hell you wouldn’t. Not for a moment. You were never ever allowed to forget what you were there for.

Sister Manhood flung the water into the bath; sometimes it was the lavatory, but because she needed greater scope, tonight it had to be the bath. In that great bloody carpeted bathroom as big as somebody’s whole flat. The smooth mahogany seat on which Her rich bloody arse hadn’t rested since God knew when. The sealed jars of bath salts, the bowl of brown dusty potpourri, were what best explained the unused bathroom in terms of Elizabeth Hunter. One day, Flora Manhood sourly decided, she was going to take off her clothes and make use of that fucking bath, take her time on the polished mahogany ledge, before slipping down the white, sloping sides into untroubled waters.

Tonight the west was on fire outside the window: the bathroom was Flora Manhood’s furnace. From which she stumbled panting, gasping, into the cooler, what Jessie Badgery called, Nurses’ Retiring Room (I ask you: as if you could ever retire with Her around the corner) to dab the wych-hazel.

Col’s favourite perfume: said it was neither nursey nor tarty one of the sweet natural smells just what I’d expect of you Flo. Oh yeah? I may be natural but nobody could call me sweet. Not when you could never tell for sure the sincere from the sarky in other people; they never let you know, or else you were stupid. Your trouble Flo you’ve got wrong ideas about yourself for that matter nobody knows what he really is. Not according to Her: only oneself can know what one is really like Sister. So it was always this: hacking into you from either side.

Along the edges of the park the pines deepening in the silvery light grass whitening the lake silver which from close up was a mud colour smelling of mud invisible dead fish and the droppings from long-legged ugly birds. Coot, Col said they were.

Always Col! Or Mrs Betty Hunter. What if the old girl wouldn’t let you go if you said you wanted to chuck up the job? E. Hunter was more powerful than any man you could remember. Or Snow. Must be from living so long that Mrs Hunter got the stranglehold. She’d sucked the living daylights out of all the people she’d killed: that husband for instance; or half-killed: Princess Dorothy you could see at a first glance had almost been swallowed; the real proof would be the son arriving tonight, whether he had survived the mother to become the great actor, or whether he would start acting her tame zombie.

Be fair though, Flora: wasn’t the old girl always saying this man Sister you’re going with I can tell by your touch I can tell by his voice when he brings — no need — the medicines we’ve telephoned for — they’ve got the boy with the bicycle haven’t they to deliver — that this is the man you’re intended for. As if it was any of her business. Oh reely Mrs Hunter? (snicker snicker). Made you feel such a silly drip. But the point was, she couldn’t want to hang on to you for her own ends. Then there was nothing that you could truthfully accuse her of, except her scratchy bitchy ways; but she was old and oh God tired and sick.

So there was no one to protect or save you from Col Pardoe.

Only Snow.

All along the parkside the dead dwindling grass. It would be dark by the time the actor came. Snow was an albino though she called it a natural ash blonde. She’d develop skin cancers later on, specially working in a burning bus, and at the depot, sitting on a bench in the sun smoking with the blokes waiting for the handover. Snow smelled like white-coloured women do: more like a man. She smelled of the coins she had been handling, and sweaty leather, and too many smokes. But you had Coff’s Harbour in common: my cousin — my only living relative.