Patrick White: The Eye of the Storm

It was the children who finally routed the nurse by reminding her of a desiccated carcase, blotched with brown, streaked with yellow, scarred by knives: the body from which they had sprung to force their purposes on life. This morning the portraits of Mrs Hunter’s children made Sister de Santis shudder. (I love all kiddies; don’t you love the kiddies, Sister? At least Sister Badgery never waited for anyone else’s opinion.)

Sister de Santis did not stop to draw the curtains in the dining-room, but hurried through its brown-velvet hush, past the portrait of Alfred Hunter (‘Bill’ to his friends). Mr Hunter’s portrait was smaller than his wife’s; it must have cost considerably less: even so, a lot of money, if you read the signature in the corner. For a man of wealth Mr Hunter looked rather diffident: he probably disappointed the painter, except by writing out his cheque. The nurse moderated her pace, walking with the reverence accorded to those you have not known in their lifetime, but might have. Out of respect, she endowed Mr Hunter with virtues she could remember in her father.

I wanted very badly to love my husband. Sister, even after I knew I didn’t — or couldn’t enough. Mrs Hunter’s admissions had been embarrassing at first: you had to persuade yourself you were not overhearing.

Sister de Santis pushed the baize which would admit her to the pantry. The door sighed like a human being; it might have felt like one too, if she had allowed herself to think so.

She had half filled a little crystal jug from the pantry fridge when she heard a thumping in the kitchen beyond. She went in. It was the housekeeper throwing her arms around while getting herself into an apron. Her face hidden by the bib, her contortions looked grotesque: she was still probably stupefied by sleep.

‘Early for you, isn’t it?’ the night nurse remarked while the housekeeper was still submerged.

‘Ach, but I’m so — nervös!’ As she struggled free the effect was even more grotesque: the stiffened lips in the stone face might have been designed as an escape in times of downpour. ‘So nervous!’ she gasped. ‘It’s the visitors. And Mr Wyburd expected to breakfast.’

‘Mr Wyburd will cope with the visitors.’

‘Yes, but it is still so very early. And I do not easily leave my bett. Übrigens,’ it cheered Mrs Lippmann to realize, ‘aren’t you later than usual, Sister?’

‘Out of shameful curiosity.’

The housekeeper returned at once to looking racked; the knuckles she was clenching appeared to have aged sooner than her face, mock-youthful in almost all its conscious expressions. ‘Oh, this is always the frightful hour! Why you cannot stay every morning, Miss de Santis, till Sister Badgery shows herself? Diese Badgery kann nie nie pünktlich kommen — never ! What if she should roll out of bett while I am all alone with her? Or what if she have another stroke?’ Mrs Lippmann began a series of laments which led her to the core of tragedy, sounds which shocked Badgery and Manhood, but which Sister de Santis’s foreign blood made it easier for her to accept.

Foreignness alone did not always help her comfort this small unhappy Jewess. ‘Probably nothing of what you imagine will happen,’ was the best she could offer this morning. ‘By the way, Mrs Lippmann, we never talk about the stroke. In any case, it was only a very slight one: a blood vessel broke somewhere behind one of her eyes.’

Although corrected, Mrs Lippmann seemed elated by this hint of conspiracy over medical matters: she danced a few steps across the considerable kitchen, jiggling her buttocks, wagging her head, before coming to a standstill, every piece of her anatomy exaggeratedly taut.

‘That is so! And our visitors will bring life. I am almost out of myself to see them. Auch ein wirklicher Künstler! I have made the betts. I have put flowers as she wishes.’

‘You needn’t have put the flowers.’

‘But while she is in her chair she may ask somebody to wheel her in.’

‘She wouldn’t see.’

‘Mrs Hunter will see through a wall if she is determined to.’

‘What I should have said was: your flowers will be wasted on the visitors. They’re not staying — not in the house.’

‘But I have made the betts! That was her order.’

‘They’re not staying.’

‘Somebody must tell her.’

‘Mr Wyburd must. He’s had plenty of practice at that sort of thing.’ On realizing that she had neglected her duty, Sister de Santis frowned at the little jug she was holding.

Mrs Lippmann’s eyebrows reached towards each other like glistening, palpitating caterpillars. ‘I will never understand why Anglo-Saxons reject the warm of the family.’

‘They’re afraid of being consumed. Families can eat you.’

‘Something will always consume: if not the family, then it’s the incinerators,’ Mrs Lippmann moaned.

All the way up the stairs the glass clinked against the jug Sister de Santis was carrying carefully on a salver. Like all the silver in the house, the salver bore someone else’s arms.

When she arrived at the bedside she saw that her patient had fallen asleep: the parted lips were sucked back repeatedly against the gums; the chalky claws, hooked into the hem of the sheet, were lifted by a regular breathing.

Sister de Santis stood the salver so expertly on the bedside table there was not a single clink of crystal, not the slightest jarring of silver.

‘I’m not asleep, you know, Sister,’ Mrs Hunter’s voice informed. ‘The worst symptom of my — condition — I practically hardly ever sleep.’

Sister de Santis filled the glass. When she had raised her patient’s shoulders, the neck worked; the lips reached out, and supped uglily at the water. The lips suggested some lower form of life, a sea creature perhaps, extracting more than water from water. As humanity was not what one got from Elizabeth Hunter, one should not have felt disillusioned.

By the time she had done her duty the silver sun set in the rosewood bed had started duelling with the actual one. Sister de Santis took brief refuge in what Sister Badgery liked to refer to as the Nurses’ Retiring Room, but which was really a wardrobe in which were hoarded most of the dresses Mrs Hunter had bought in her lifetime. Seated in front of the mirror Mary de Santis unpinned her hair. What, she tried to remember, had she expected, ever? Her face, inside the dark, streaming hair, continued haunting the looking glass.

Whether asleep or awake — in fact her life had become one long waking sleep — Mrs Hunter slipped back into the dream she had left. She found it easy enough to resume these waking dreams of which her life was constituted; sometimes she could even manipulate the deep dreadful dreams which belonged to the sleep she would not admit to.

Now the water her dutiful, but possibly sulking nurse had brought her, helped her return to this other, shallower kind of experience or dream. They were walking, she and Kate Nutley, their arms full of dolls, beside this great river. No, it wasn’t: it was the shallow and often drought-stricken stream which meandered through everybody’s place, through Salkelds’, Nutleys’ and Hunters’ that is, a brown ribbon ruffling over stones, under willows. At its best the river was all joyous motion, though in its less pleasing backwaters scum formed, and sometimes a swollen sheep floated. Elizabeth, never Kate, had to prod the bloated sheep. When they had reached a certain point where the water swirled deeper round a bend, Elizabeth Salkeld and Kate Nutley halted. Elizabeth started throwing in the dolls. Some of them bobbed on the surface of the water; the limbs of others grew soggy and dragged them under. Kate began to cry. She was a serious child, as well as a simple soul, Elizabeth sensed from the beginning. Why are you crying when you’ve got so many? And isn’t it interesting to see what happens? Kate had a habit of sniffling: I wasn’t crying for the dolls, but for what happened to my sister. Don’t you know about it? Elizabeth grunted to hide her shame; the Salkelds lowered their voices more than most parents in the district, and she hadn’t yet found out what had happened to Lilian, Kate’s elder sister. Kate was ready to explain, Lilian ran away with someone, a Russian or something. Oh, you knew about that! And now she has been murdered. How could they be sure? People you know don’t get murdered. But Kate seemed to have grown up all of a sudden: she was even more serious than before. They found Lilian’s body on the banks of some great river — in China, or Siberia. So there was this other river! The blood was drying on her neck. Kate could not tell any more because she was crying again. But Elizabeth Salkeld could not cry for Kate’s sister Lilian galloping wildly towards her death on the banks of the great Asiatic river. By comparison, their own shallow life, their stagnant days, were becoming unbearable. Elizabeth Salkeld could have slapped her friend for not hearing the thud of hooves, or seeing the magnificence of Lilian’s full gallop. Instead, she whipped the water with a willow switch.