Patrick White: The Eye of the Storm

The night nurse made her way down through what was technically her employer’s house, an ugly, ostentatious one. She must remember that. It would be easier now that daylight was cracking the curtains. She must remember her framed certificate hanging beside her father’s diploma; she must remember her thirty-two years of nursing (she would be fifty in a couple of months). In Mrs Hunter’s house, furniture choked even the landings and the passages: presses and consoles and cabinets which could not be crammed into the rooms. Carpets, once rich and uniformly springy, were thinning in patches the owner would not see, and those who did, ignored; because what was the use? they expected her to die.

On the half-landing the nurse jerked at a curtain and let in more of the abrasive light. It fairly clashed with a vase of honesty standing in a niche: the silver medals on dry stems seemed to twitter as her hand withdrew. Dust hung in the light, like scentless incense, in spite of Mrs Cush: with a person operatun on er own only two mornuns a week a speck of dust can be expected.

Something walked over Sister de Santis’s grave, and she shivered. That is how they explain it, she ought to remember, not let her conscience get her down for having seen herself, that instant, laying the damp pledgets on the freckly eyelids after the last tremor had subsided. Remember, rather, that a disagreeable case drains less out of you — or so some of her colleagues maintained.

The nurse continued down the stairs, holding on to the rail as though in need of support. By night she floated, unassisted, whether up or down, her stiff white skirt barely brushing the protective hedge, its tangle of iron branches loaded with Hesperian fruit. Doubts seldom arose at night, because love and usage will invest the most material house with numinous forms and purposes, from amongst which an initiate’s thoughts will soar like multi-coloured invocations.

Whereas this morning, as she descended deeper into this stuffy well, Sister de Santis was unreasonably pursued by faint faecal whiffs, by the insinuating stench of urine from an aged bladder; while the light itself, or iron thorns, or old transparent fingernails, scratched at her viciously.

She would have to remember that no patient is entirely vicious or unreasonable.

It must have been fifteen years ago that Mr Wyburd gave warning, ‘I ought to tell you, Miss de Santis, you’re taking on what I would call a difficult case.’

The solicitor made a pyramid out of his hands, fingertip to fingertip, almost too conventionally legal. She tried to calculate his age: not old, but old enough (probably born with an elderly manner). His skin was beginning to dry out, leaving behind a relief of veins on the formal hands. On the little finger of one hand was a signet ring, its stone a matching blue for the veins.

‘Not exactly capricious — I’d rather say “changeable”,’ he emphasized in his careful voice.

While eyeing the nurse, he could have been wondering whether he might trust her with his reputation as well as the care of one of his more important clients. This was only for an instant, though: he was too respectful of the professions.

Outwardly as placid as her acquaintances accused her of being, Sister de Santis had sat forward, mentally at least, to take a better look at the difficulties, the caprices, with which the solicitor was threatening her. Something about the situation made her tingle, though a wordless mumbling, and her slow, creamy smile, conveyed disbelief.

A handsome woman: sluggish, but reliable. Her references were excellent; a colonel had left her an annuity.

Mr Wyburd coughed. ‘Mrs Hunter was something of a beauty in her day. Oh, she still has her looks. She is much admired. Many have depended on her — for opinions and advice.’ Mr Wyburd laughed; he dismantled his hands and hid them under the desk. ‘She enjoys a battle of wits, too!’

Mary de Santis smiled what was intended as appreciation. She must have looked rather stupid, she felt, but it was necessary to disguise her feelings: her excitement and expectations. Before each new case she hoped that she might prove herself afresh, but never so much as in combat with this vision of fragmented beauty. So she looked, still smiling, over the solicitor’s shoulder, at the immaculately folded documents tied with identical ribbons of a disinfectant pink: she was fascinated by these too, by their mystic anonymity.

Mr Wyburd approached something which might be giving him trouble. ‘As I mentioned, Mrs Hunter is suffering from — you could hardly call it a breakdown — a slight nervous upset. Her daughter recently returned to France — where she has lived since her marriage to a Frenchman.’ More than ever Mr Wyburd hesitated to disgorge. ‘I can hardly refer to this gentleman as her “husband”. You might say he “re-married” after a form of divorce. Which Dorothy Hunter’s adopted faith won’t allow her to recognize.’

The solicitor and the nurse were united in suitable gravity over these biographical details.

It comforted him to decide that Sister de Santis was in some ways probably obtuse: no disadvantage in a relationship with Elizabeth Hunter; nor should it weaken her sense of vocation. The solicitor caught a glimpse of the veil hovering behind her timeless hat, which his daughters might have referred to as ‘frumpish’.

‘When am I expected, Mr Wyburd?’

In the fifteen years since first acquaintance with Elizabeth Hunter, Mary de Santis had been sent for intermittently, sometimes to fulfil the needs of friendship, on several occasions to help dramatize a minor illness, and, finally, to officiate at the great showdown. In the circumstances, Sisters Badgery and Manhood, Mrs Lippmann and Mrs Cush, accepted lesser rank in the hierarchy without damage to their self-importance. None of them questioned the efficiency of their superior, while some even sensed an authority of the spirit which gave her deeper access to the heart of the creature round whom they revolved, and to whom they were all, more or less, dedicated.

Until this morning, here was the archpriestess, a heavy woman clumping down the stairs, stumbling on the last of them. In her present condition her clumsiness was doubly irritating, and to look down and find the rod had broken free, the runner come adrift. On a day of such importance the incident made Sister de Santis perspire. She could feel a trickling down her back; the pores in her nose must be looking exaggerated; night had tossed her out, a crumpled, grubby stickiness.

If she had not been so mild, something which might have passed for rage made her snatch at curtains as she passed, unlatch fastenings, heave at windows: the air surrounding her was thick as flannel. Without real justification, she could have pounced on the housekeeper if the opportunity had occurred, but Mrs Lippmann would still be in bed: it was her one fault, her only luxury. (Half my life, or before I am myself a servant, Miss de Santis, I am coming home while the maid is still only rising.)

So whether you liked it or not, the house too, was in your charge a little longer, unless this great gilded mirror swallowed its once shadowy familiar, together with a crunch of Meissen, and splintering of marquetry.

Bad enough the mirrors, worse the portraits. Bound for the pantry, Sister de Santis could not resist the drawing-room. Whether the portraits were of any value she had never been able to judge, only guess they must have cost a lot of money. Beyond this, and their ephemeral elegance, their fashionable truthlessness, they had that certain pathos of the possessions of the very rich. In spite of his curving lashes, his golden cheeks, Basil might have been a nasty little boy, Dorothy a plain sour girl, without a splendour of varnish and the protection of their gilded frames. The fall of diamonds from Elizabeth Hunter’s wrists and shoulders might have drowned the dutiful or innocent in a wave of admiration. But Mary de Santis was unimpressed by jewels. Only the face was real, through no virtue of the painter’s, she had decided long ago, or rather, the face transcended a vulgarity of superficial, slippery paint, to reveal a correspondence, as will some of the semi-precious stones, or flowers, or phrases of music, or passages of light.