Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

When the gown was arranged, the chair at the bedside, the nurse gathered up the bundle of creaking bones and acerbated flesh, and manoeuvred it into a seated position.

‘So healthy,’ Mrs Hunter murmured, inhaling the draught from her nurse’s movements, under it the scented warmth of youth. ‘And strong.’

‘There, love. Are you comfy?’ Suddenly Flora Manhood was filled with pity: not for Mrs Hunter specifically, but she had to spend it on somebody; and there below the nightie, between the panels of rose brocade and edgings of real, moth-eaten sables, were those legs like sticks of grey spaghetti.

The nurse knelt to put slippers on the chilly, transparent feet.

Mrs Hunter sounded almost tearful. ‘Your hands feel kind, Sister. I hope you haven’t forgotten your promise to make me up.’

Sister Manhood was ashamed: she would have given anything to be gentle, serene, loving by nature. It didn’t come easy, and perhaps she would never learn.

‘No, I haven’t forgotten.’ In standing up she curbed any further tendency to emotion.

‘I hope it doesn’t bore you.’

‘No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t bore me.’ In fact it was the only part of the performance she genuinely enjoyed; they both knew it.

Mrs Hunter grunted; she was happy at last.

Sister Manhood fetched the vanity case, of later period than Mrs Hunter herself. In blue glacé leather with silver fittings, it was as much out of keeping as a chorus girl would have looked under the great silver sun which radiated from the head of Mrs Hunter’s rosewood bedstead.

Mrs Hunter was happy; she snuffed up the smell of cosmetics which escaped when the case was opened.

Sister Manhood went to work, you could not have said Voluptuously’, because of a certain air of reverence; while her subject submitted her cheeks with pride. As Sister Manhood worked the foundation cream into the droughty wrinkles, even Sister de Santis might have respected such obvious dedication. Not the technique, though: some of it was voluptuous.

Elizabeth Hunter was at the first stage transformed into a glimmering ghost of the past. She could feel her cheeks rounding out. Those white dresses she used to wear: people stopped talking whenever she started coming downstairs.

‘Turn the light on, Sister.’

‘But there’s still daylight enough, Mrs Hunter. Truly. I can see perfectly.’

‘Go on — switch it on, please. I like to feel the light round me. It’s so much warmer.’

Sister Manhood turned her annoyance into a mild sigh: smearing foundation cream on the switch. ‘I was only thinking of the expense — using electric light so early.’ At least the right sentiments.

‘I have always been extravagant,’ Mrs Hunter said, and smiled.

I bet you were — when it was yourself, Sister Manhood didn’t say.

Something was hurting Mrs Hunter, it seemed. ‘Alfred — my husband, considered that nobody learns to switch off lights or turn off taps till they have to pay the bills. That’s true in most cases. Nobody ever thought of Alfred,’ she said.

Sister Manhood was rootling around in the vanity case amongst the jars and cartridges. She had begun to hum, almost to sing, what was intended as ‘I could have danced all night’.

‘Where is my husband?’ Mrs Hunter asked; the anxiety gathering on her face was undoing much of her acolyte’s work.

The nurse was frightened for a moment; she didn’t know how to handle it; then she said, ‘I expect something has delayed him. He’ll come, though.’

‘Yes, he’ll come.’

With the back of her hand Flora Manhood brushed the perspiration from where her moustache would have been. ‘Which tones do we fancy this evening?’ she asked in her brightest, classiest voice.

‘“Dusk Rose” for the cheeks, “Deep Carnation” for the lips,’ Mrs Hunter answered with conviction.

‘Mmmh? I’d have thought “Crimson Caprice” for the lips. Not if you don’t fancy it, of course.’

‘“Deep Carnation”.’

Mrs Hunter’s cheeks took dusky wing. She closed her eyes: the perfumes rising out of the blue glacé leather might have been drugging her.

Comparatively languid dashing away at the cheeks, Sister Manhood was nursing the subtler resources of her art, or vocation, for the lips.

Her own lips invoked, ‘“Deep Carnation”,’ and let it die in a breathy hush.

‘You’ve forgotten the teeth, Sister. The teeth ! You can’t possibly work on my mouth before you’ve stuck the teeth in. Don’t you realize?’

Sister Manhood was corrected. She fetched the expensively created, natural-yellow teeth: never without a shiver. It was Mrs Hunter who began to hoist; but you had to shove, until you were both involved in what must have looked like part suicide, part murder.

When she had sucked and glugged, the old thing would loll back exhausted. ‘Hateful things, teeth!’

It couldn’t concern a young woman preoccupied by her devotions; nor was the object of these rites more than a moment humanly distressed: breath held, eyes closed, she reached out towards the necessary level of abstraction.

After shooting the lipstick out of its gilt cartridge and making one or two conventionally mystic passes at nothing, the white-robed priestess began weaving deep carnation into the naked, crinkled lips. Anything she knew of art, all that she had learnt of sensuality, Sister Manhood drove into this mouth which was not her own. If she had never before attained to selflessness she succeeded now, forcing an illusion to assume a purple reality.

Not all selfless, however: her act became a longing; she could have cried out through her own brooding, swollen lips; she would have accepted humbly, if only for that moment, any delicious indignity he might have demanded of her.

‘Mmmhhh!’ Mrs Hunter dragged her mouth sideways with an unexpected suddenness and strength which almost ruined the work of art, and certainly curtailed any advances Sister Manhood might have been making in the direction of ecstasy. ‘I’m not a thing, am I?’ Or if you were, you didn’t like other people’s behaviour to confirm it.

‘Oh, you’re going to — you already are — looking gorgeous !’ Sister Manhood sounded so throaty she must have meant it.

‘Am I?’ Mrs Hunter whispered softly.

‘“I could have danced all night”,’ Sister Manhood distinctly sang; then she murmured, ‘Are we going for eyeshadow?’

Mrs Hunter revived. ‘Just a dash.’ She smiled up like a little girl thrilled by her own daring.

‘Blue?’

‘Blue,’ she agreed. ‘No!’ she luckily remembered. ‘“Delphinium-silver.” ‘

Flora Manhood knew what to do: she traced on Elizabeth Hunter’s eyelids the dreamiest of moonlit snail-tracks. Elizabeth Hunter, all but transmuted, lolled in a delphinium-silver bliss.

Till it occurred to her, ‘You know Alfred never approved of make-up?’

‘Didn’t he?’

‘Not even when it had become acceptable.’

Their weaknesses brought nurse and patient close. At times their unhappiness was transferable; at others, it was their joys.

Sister Manhood stood back after whisking a hair off the lips she had recently created. ‘Are you thinking of a wig, love?’

‘The lilac’ Mrs Hunter was definite on that.

‘How will you wear it?’

‘Flowing free.’

‘For a big occasion?’ The priestess had been prepared to give her all on a feast day.

‘Yes. Flowing. I have decided to appear utterly natural.’

‘I won’t try to persuade you against. But I did think of bouffing it up a bit.’

The other members of the order, Sisters de Santis and Badgery, and the lay sisters, Lippmann and Cush, were aware it was Sister Manhood who renewed whatever was required for the ritual of anointment; what they didn’t know was that Mrs Hunter had paid for Flora’s course in the upkeep of wigs. The secret was one the two of them enjoyed, though Sister Manhood was inclined to disguise her doubly esoteric knowledge under a crust of irony, and to swing her hips and crook her fingers as guardian of the wigs.