Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

In the drawing-room over coffee the hostess remarked, again too aggressively, ‘You’re forgetting your duties as host, Arnold. Aren’t you going to offer us a liqueur?’

He did so with a punctiliousness only slightly rattled by his omission.

Lal said she’d have one of those green things. ‘Don’t they call it a “starboard light”? I’m told it’s a whore’s drink.’ Like other plain, dowdy women she would try springing a surprise.

‘And what do you fancy, Mrs Hunter?’ Mr Wyburd asked.

‘Thank you, Arnold. I’m still my doctor’s victim.’ She looked at her nurse, half appealing for confirmation, or perhaps not in connection with the matter at all.

Later, when the gathering was threatening to break up, she aimed her voice very pointedly at the colourless couple, ‘You can’t have missed reading that Athol Shreve has almost finished his sentence.’

The husband and wife appeared wretchedly uncomfortable, as though they felt themselves responsible for something. The husband remarked that, to his mind, Athol Shreve was the greatest disappointment, ever, in Australian political life.

‘I wasn’t surprised.’ Mrs Hunter scorned those who were. ‘I mistrusted him from the beginning. You remember the night we met at the Radfords’ dinner, and he gave us all the lift? Oh, I shan’t say I wasn’t intrigued, too. He had something crude and real about him. Well, that was his reality — that of a thief.’ She gave two or three short laughs, which for some reason increased the distress of the two friends for whom she was performing.

Not long after, the gathering did break up, and the couple were again gratefully smiling for the attentions of this rich and important woman. Sister de Santis realized they were not friends, only slight acquaintances. The Wyburds who were more inured to Mrs Hunter’s friendship, might have felt sorry for, or contemptuous of them.

When nurse and patient were at last alone, drinking delicious, thirst-quenching, private draughts of cold water, Elizabeth Hunter confessed, ‘Those Stevensons — I often wonder why I don’t drop them, except that there are certain things — past events — which have to be faced in perpetuity. I suppose that is the reason for the Stevensons: now and then they lend themselves to one’s self-mortification. And the poor creatures do enjoy a good dinner.’

The two women were passing through the hall. Elizabeth Hunter had linked herself with, and was leaning on, the one who for that moment was wholly her nurse.

‘Why,’ Sister de Santis noticed, ‘you haven’t read your letter’; it had come by the morning delivery, but still lay unopened on the salver. ‘And isn’t the stamp unusual. Is it Norwegian?’ She could have been trying to encourage a patient who threatened to despond.

‘Yes. The letter is from a Norwegian,’ Mrs Hunter admitted, ‘who was in this country recently — an ecologist — by repute an intelligent man — but weak, it turned out, and something of a boor.’ She had begun tearing up the still unopened envelope.

‘Shouldn’t you at least read his letter?’ asked Sister de Santis, who seldom received one.

Mrs Hunter said no, she wouldn’t, and gave the pieces to her nurse to dispose of.

‘One day, Mary, I shall tell you about it. Dorothy and I were invited by some friends to stay on their island, and this Norwegian, Professor Pehl, was our fellow guest. I’m too tired for it tonight.’ Suddenly Mrs Hunter looked so old and haggard Mary de Santis decided she would always resist hearing the story; she herself was weak, sensual enough, to crave intermittently for the luxury and refreshment of physical beauty.

Normally Elizabeth Hunter appeared astoundingly young and beautiful for one who, from what she told, must be around seventy. Her face would certainly crinkle under the influence of impatience or anger, but only, you felt, to become the map of experience in general, of passion in particular. Untouched by any of this, her body had remained almost perfect: long, cool, of that white which is found in tuberoses, with their same blush pink at the extremities. If it had not been for professional detachment, the nurse might have found herself drugged by a pervasive sensuousness as she helped her patient out of the bath and wrapped her in towels, during her ‘illness’. As it was, physical languor was absorbed into a ritual; physical beauty became an abstraction, in its way far more desirable to anyone hungry for a work of art or of the spirit, and who had not in fact come across one, apart from the dark icons inherited from her mother.

Elizabeth Hunter responded even to the abstract admiration she inspired, most noticeably at the dressing-table: her eyes opened to their fullest; her hair lent itself to tenderest weaving; the line of her cheek was rejuvenated. She liked her nurse to hand her things, particularly on nights when dinner parties were held; because now that she was practically ‘well’ she arranged a number of more formal functions, ‘to give notice that I’m neither mewed up in a loony bin nor staggering down the ramp towards the everlasting bonfire. One’s enemies, one’s friends for that matter, don’t really believe unless one shows them regularly.’

Preparing for such an occasion, her blue stare suddenly expanded to embrace a reflection in the glass deeper than her own. ‘I must lend you something to wear, Mary.’

The nurse would have felt herself flush if she had not been able to see it. Her party dress looked frumpish, and though recently ironed, already crumpled; whereas the older woman shone: her form seemed to create an immaculacy out of whatever clothed it.

Now she rushed at a drawer in a burst of inspiration, tore it open, rummaged, and pulled out a broad ribbon or sash in turquoise silk, which she looped round the waist of the badly-cut muslin dress, and tied in a bow at the back as surely as impulsively.

Mary de Santis was too ashamed to move or speak. She was afraid to look at herself in the glass.

‘Wait!’ Mrs Hunter commanded.

She was fastening the strands of a pearl bracelet round a wrist too passive for resistance. Then, her hands trembling for the climax of her creative act, she tried out a pearl-and-turquoise star, first on a shoulder, before fastening it for preference on the muslin breast.

‘I like it better there — in the centre.’ She was standing back to judge her work. ‘Less self-conscious. You are too pure, Mary, to follow fashion.’

Mary de Santis was only too self-conscious: so much so, she still had not dared look at herself.

Finally she did.

‘See? I haven’t altered you.’ Mrs Hunter laughed. ‘Only heightened a mystery which was there already, and which is too valuable not to respect.’

The younger woman was trembling for this self she had sensed at times, without ever believing anyone else would recognize.

In a last burst of confession as they heard the doorbell ring, Mrs Hunter said, ‘How I wish I could have had you as a daughter. Or sister. Better a sister; then we could have told each other our secrets — and you would have helped me.’ She even laid her cheek for a moment against her nurse’s, and the latter felt the other’s jewels freezing her skin, rustling and quivering against her dress.

Mary de Santis had never felt so desperately the need to worship.

That night she must have appeared a mysterious blur, or at her most positive, a dark presence at the fashionable dinner party. At least the women were amused by what they considered one of Betty Hunter’s experiments in the outré, just as her ‘illness’ had been an eccentric character’s exhibition of caprice: they could take neither seriously. The men were at a greater loss: the knowing cats as well as the ingratiating dogs amongst them. Although the companion, or whatever, answered their questions pleasantly and accurately, she would not be rubbed up against, and it puzzled their male skins as well as their male vanity. They suspected her of holding in reserve some unidentifiable vice.