Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

Certainly her husband was dead, her children gone — the daughter so recently and mysteriously after only a brief visit — but the maid was always running to answer the doorbell, to let in callers, or receive boxes of flowers, or single luxuries such as caviare or perfume, still wrapped, it sometimes seemed, in the sender’s straining thoughtfulness.

On one occasion Mrs Hunter remarked, ‘If only one could feel more grateful for what one doesn’t want; and the poor things, I’m pretty sure they can’t afford it.’

In the intervals when she found herself undeniably alone, the silence became a suppressed twangling, which broke free on one occasion not long after her nurse-companion’s arrival. ‘I’d like to show you something, Sister — I’m going to call you Mary; I’m old enough to take liberties — this little music-box belonged to the Prince Regent, or so the friend who gave it told me.’ Elizabeth Hunter opened the lid of the pretty gilt and velvet toy, and at once the silence of the drawing room was vibrating with its gilt tune.

They stood holding the music-box between them.

‘Play it if you ever feel like it,’ Mrs Hunter invited. ‘It does one good to give way to moods — even the superficial ones.’ Then she looked very keenly at her companion to see how her suggestion had been read.

Sister de Santis did open the music-box sitting alone one afternoon in the drawing-room, stiff and guilty without the protection of the uniform she was not allowed to wear. She saw again the grime in her mother’s fine, incompetent hands, and her father’s wasted arm quivering for the drug she could not deny him in his last days. Mary de Santis was relieved when the music tottered note by note to a full stop.

But she almost ceased to be a stranger in this echoing house. She found herself running helter skelter across the slithering rugs, the waxed jarrah, to fetch something they had forgotten, thermos or handkerchief; while Mrs Hunter waited in the car. She kept a chauffeur, but liked to drive herself along the coast or into the country: drives which, the nurse suspected, bored the driver.

It was in the evening that Elizabeth Hunter came into her own. Resting on an Empire daybed while still officially ill, she expected her companion, not to make conversation, but to listen to the thoughts she was forced to project.

‘When I was a child, Mary, living in a broken-down farmhouse, in patched dresses-a gawky, desperately vain little girl,’ Airs Hunter’s eyes glittered and flickered as she flirted with the fringe of her stole, ‘I used to long for possessions: dolls principally at that age; then jewels such as I had never seen — only a few ugly ones on the wives of wealthier neighbours; later, and last of all, I longed to possess people who would obey me — and love me of course. Can you understand all this?’

The nurse hesitated. ‘I suppose I can, in a way — in a way. But you see, I’ve never had any desire for possessions. I couldn’t imagine how I might come by them — or attract people, let alone have them obey me. We were a very close family. Outside that, I’ve only wanted to serve others — through my profession — which is all I know how to do. Oh, and to love, of course,’ she laughed constrainedly; ‘but that is so vast it is difficult to imagine — how — how to achieve it.’

Mrs Hunter suddenly looked angry and suspicious. ‘What do you understand by love?’

‘Well, perhaps — sometimes I’ve thought it’s like this: love is a kind of supernatural state to which I must give myself entirely, and be used up, particularly my imperfections — till I am nothing.’

Mrs Hunter seemed agitated: she had got up and was trailing her long fleecy stole. ‘Whatever they tell you, I loved my husband. My children wouldn’t allow me to love them.’ The stole had dragged so far behind, it was lost to her by catching on what must have been an invisible splinter.

‘Oh, I know I am not selfless enough!’ When she turned she was burning with a blue, inward rage; but quickly quenched it, and drew up a stool at this girl’s feet. ‘There is this other love, I know. Haven’t I been shown? And I still can’t reach it. But I shall! I shall!’ She laid her head on her nurse’s hands.

Mary de Santis was turned to a stick, though an exalted one, on feeling someone else’s tears gush and trickle into her hands.

Next morning Mrs Hunter said, ‘I’d like to give you something, Mary;’ and produced a seal with a phoenix carved into the agate. ‘You might wear it on a bracelet’; whether her nurse had one, she might not have considered.

Mary de Santis was embarrassingly touched. ‘I couldn’t,’ she said. ‘Or I might borrow it for a little.’ Clumsily conveyed, it must have sounded ungracious.

Mrs Hunter only laughed. ‘If that is how you are.’

As soon as the patient was considered ‘semi-invalid’ little dinners were arranged for long-established friends, who did not particularly interest the hostess, her nurse observed: they had eaten into her life like wire into a tree; they were also necessary for a discipline of kindness she had to practise.

At one of these dinners the Wyburds were introduced. The nurse had already met the solicitor professionally the day he engaged her for his client. There was no marked difference in his social behaviour, except that most of the evening he kept his eyelids lowered, probably tired out by a heavy day at the office. His wife, a thin plain, beaky woman, with dark-red hair and freckles, had something comically appealing about her. She must have been younger than a rough skin and wrinkles allowed her to appear. She was certainly younger than her solicitor-husband, but their hostess made her look old and dowdy, not that she minded, judging by her slightly ironical expression.

There was a second couple, probably friends of lesser standing: they appeared too grateful, as though they had borrowed money, or been able to do a rich and beautiful woman some unexpected favour. Sister de Santis did not catch the name of this unremarkable couple (another wife on the plain side) if indeed Mrs Hunter had introduced her friends to her companion.

The hostess was dressed very simply for a simple, perhaps obligatory occasion, but was able to shine the more for that.

She happened to remember, ‘When we went over, Alfred and I, for poor Dorothy’s wedding, we were actually invited — though only briefly, thank the Lord — to the family seat, Lunegarde. Exquisite wormeaten furniture. Gobelins by the acre. But the plumbing! The family used to rub themselves down with eau de Cologne, or if anybody ventured on a bath, Dorothy told me, it was brought from the village by the fire brigade.’ The company was so enchanted they would have accepted almost any extravagance she dared them not to believe. ‘And worse — far worse!’ Mrs Hunter could not resist her own powers. ‘You wouldn’t believe, Constance,’ though the grateful guest was obviously prepared to, ‘the cabinet de toilette— to which nobody had to be shown: it announced itself so blatantly — the door, darling, opened outwards, so that if you valued your privacy, you had to sit holding a cord attached to the knob.’

The thin couple was most appreciative, the Wyburds less so. Mary de Santis wished Mrs Hunter had not told the funny story; it was almost as though her employer were determined to destroy somebody’s good opinion.

Mrs Hunter turned to Mrs Wyburd. ‘I’ve probably bored you, Lal. You must have heard it a hundred times.’ Simultaneously she laid her hand on the back of her friend’s, for the solicitor’s wife was seated beside her owing to the shortage of men.

Mrs Wyburd neither denied nor reassured: she preserved her air of comical irony. The name ‘Lal’ still hung above the table; it had clanged too loud, as though Mrs Hunter did not give herself many opportunities for using it.