Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

Then the taxi was honking outside.

Sister de Santis did not approve of what she was doing: she got up, and cracked the curtains enough to watch Sir Basil Hunter leave. The moon had revived in the wake of the storm, but rode the sky groggily. From the house the garden below appeared a muzz of frond and shadow threaded with the serpentine path. Down the path the figure of a man was tentatively advancing, unequally weighted by a suitcase in one hand, an overnight bag and briefcase in the other. Sir Basil was made look older than when she had first met him at the gate; exhaustion could very well have shrunk him physically, without damage of course to his reputation. No, she didn’t admire this elder brother of the great actor less; in fact, he benefited by her pity: he reminded her a little of her father, whom she had respected more than any other man, even in his frailty.

Down in the street the illuminated taxi was waiting for its passenger, its lights too brash beside the insinuating glimmer from the moon. Approaching the taxi’s beacon, Sir Basil could have been dazzled by it. At a turn in the path, where an abrupt flight of steps spoiled its serpentine flow, he put his foot in a pool of darkness, and began to topple. The bags completed his unbalance. He fell right over into a border of heliotrope and thyme under one of the smirking broken-fingered statues,

Sister de Santis shoved the window as far open as it would go. She leaned out — to do what, she couldn’t for the moment conceive, though in her mind she was already bent over the body examining it for injuries. Wasn’t it part of her job? But her efficiency might have suffered from the scents of the garden. The heavy air was making her breathe too deeply; she could feel the sill cutting into her as she leaned out over the remembered face, from which she had banished any sign of disillusion or dissipation.

The taxi door sprang open on the driver’s bronchial ribaldry, ‘No need to watch yer step, mate. That’s about the finest arse over tip I ever seen.’

Together the taxi-driver and Sir Basil were gathering up Sir Basil and his bags.

‘Once you know you’re a goner, it’s better to let yerself go. And no bones broke. But I reckon you worked that out for yerself, eh? from experience.’

She could not decode Sir Basil’s reply from its outburst of joviality overlaid by pique.

The taxi-driver carried the bags out through the gate, his passenger limping behind him.

‘What is it, Sister?’

‘Oh, I’ve woken you, have I? It was so breathless — I opened the window to let some air in.’

Through the window, you could hear the taxi driving away, alongside the silence of the park.

‘Basil left, then. I knew he would.’

‘He saw you were asleep.’

‘He didn’t want to say goodbye. Neither of us felt like it.’

‘He didn’t want to disturb you.’ Sister de Santis hoped it was true; she liked to think the best of people, and night duty allowed her to: faces asleep surrender their vices to innocence.

‘You know I never sleep,’ Mrs Hunter insisted. ‘Where is Manhood?’

‘Sister went off as usual, soon after I arrived.’

They had met that evening in the dressing-room. Sister Manhood was in her slip. Under the colourless make-up she used, she was looking hectic.

‘Have you met him?’ she asked her relief.

‘Mr Wyburd introduced us as I was coming in the gate.’

Sister Manhood was twirling: it emphasized her look of nakedness. ‘I think he’s gorgeous. Older men are so much more — distinguished.’

‘I haven’t met them all. And it’s too early to say of this one.’ Sister de Santis knew that she was not being strictly sincere, but Flora Manhood induced a show of principles.

‘Oh, aren’t you stuffy, Sister! So literal ,’ she added gingerly, because it was a word she had learnt from Col Pardoe.

Putting on her street dress she decided to provoke stuffy old Mary. ‘I wouldn’t mind sleeping with Basil Hunter.’

Sister de Santis knew she was blushing, but managed to laugh coolly enough. ‘I expect he has the lot to choose from.’ She took off the hat she knew Flora Manhood despised.

‘Oh, it’s easy for you! Have you ever had — have you ever wanted a man?

‘Surely that is my affair?’ It should have sounded more casual, but Sister de Santis had pricked herself with a safety pin on sitting down at the dressing-table to unfold her fresh veil.

Fortunately for her self-control, she remembered, ‘That friend of yours — the chemist — rang and left a message, Mrs Lippmann says. He expects you down at his place. He has some chops to grill.’

‘Like hell I’ll grill chops! I’m nobody’s wife, before or after the ceremony.’ Flora Manhood might have thrown a tantrum, with pouter breast and throat swollen to a goitre; but she thought better of it.

She nudged Sister de Santis in the small of the back with the orange plastic bag. ‘Sorry, darls, for my indecent curiosity. I’ll leave you to the pure pleasures of night duty with Mother Hunter.’

Because Sister de Santis was in no way given to frivolity, this duty would have been less a pleasure than a devotion. In her earnestness she was ready to forgive Flora Manhood her flippancy. She had tried before to explain away her colleague’s frequent scurrilous attacks on Mrs Hunter by seeing in them youth’s dread of the sacrosanct. She herself often feared the sudden slash or cumbrous intrusion of Mrs Hunter’s thoughts. But tonight, it seemed, the old woman’s weapons had been blunted in parrying the daytime intruders.

Paradox and heresy mingled with the night scents and sickroom smells after Mary de Santis had watched Sir Basil leave. She was forced to invent insignificant jobs, to prove to herself she had not lapsed from the faith which necessity and her origins made the only possible one.

‘Már-o!’ in her mother’s despairing reed of a voice; ‘Mar- i -a?’ in her father’s basso; till both parents were agreed she could only become an Australian ‘Mary’.

If the child herself ever hesitated, she was never torn. Coming together at the centre of the suburban house, they would kiss and laugh, sometimes the parents above her head, more often all three conjoined. She realized while still small that her father and mother were in love with each other; and it remained so when the three of them were desolated.

She wasn’t born in that brown Marrickville house, but might have been. Anything which had happened before hardly concerned her, even when they talked, about it, and looked at snapshots, or broke into tears. Though when she herself was unhappy, or half asleep, or ill, the submerged wreckage of a past life sometimes floated out of the depths, and in her perceptive misery she recognized this as the important part, not the happy, thoughtless, unequivocal Australian present. She might have remained the unacceptable stranger, even to herself, if she had not adopted an attitude from which to make the most of unreason.

Before anything, the parents: Mamma a thin black stroke in any landscape; those narrow shoulders; hands too incompetent for manual labour except the dusting of icons (probably the ‘real’ in what was left of Mamma’s life flowered only in front of the icons). Papa’s hilarious scepticism transforming the Holy Roman Church into a vast elephant-house, all hands shovelling; then turning sour as his body shrank, his vision receded, don’t accuse me Mary as I see it the needle is my faith the only logical conclusion.

They kept the records, buckled and specked, in a cardboard box. Dr Enrico de Santis, 32, Italian subject … Anastasia Maria Mavromati, 24, Greek … both of Smyrna, Greece … married April 26th, 1923, at Smyrna. (It was never referred to as ‘Izmir’.) In all the snapshots, the studio portraits, Enrico had remained the glossy charmer, after the paper had turned yellow, the inscriptions and humorous comments yellower to green. But Anastasia Maria had been born, like most Greeks, with a foreknowledge of everything that will happen: in her face the faith or fatality of old blackened icons.