Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

During the evening a gloom seemed to possess Mrs Hunter: she developed a staccato manner for the maids, and her irritation extended itself to her guests; perhaps she had undertaken more than she should have, or drunk too much. Anyway when the guests had gone, you felt it was a riddance. Or not to be simplified to that extent.

She approached, and her eyes were terrible: at the point where concentration becomes fragmentation. ‘You know as well as I do, Mary, it would be self-indulgence on my part to continue making use of you now that I am well. I must ask you to go when you’ve found a suitable case.’

‘Oh — yes? Mrs Hunter .’ It was pitched somewhere between agreement and query: you too, were exhausted, or dizzy from the wines; or a dunce of a little girl in a turquoise sash.

What could have been interpreted as bland acceptance of her proposition might have increased Mrs Hunter’s irritation: her mouth had taken on an ugly shape to express a bitterness. ‘I wouldn’t want to expose anyone of your worth and dedication — indefinitely — to a flawed character like mine.’ It was as though, for some obscure reason of the moment, she had decided that love, whether given or received, was more dangerous than contempt; or else she saw the good in herself as an immodesty it was her duty to conceal.

As she climbed the stairs, her shoulder blades and a diamond clasp made her look more solitary. But this seemed her chosen intention.

Left standing below, Sister de Santis untied the turquoise sash with which Mrs Hunter had bound her. What she could not reject were the implications, human as well as super-human, which she had accepted while they were dressing for the party. Even her agnostic father had failed to commit her to unbelief.

Sister Manhood was given to speculating aloud to her colleagues, ‘One day — any day now — one of us will go in there and find the old thing lying dead. I wonder which of us it will be? Bet I’m the one who’ll cop it!’

It was an event Sister de Santis no longer contemplated. If Flora Manhood insisted on its possibility it could not be through fear of becoming emotionally involved with death. Flora’s emotions were centred on Flora, and she simply didn’t want the trouble of ringing Doctor and tidying up the body. Nor would Sister de Santis herself have been emotionally involved by this stage with Mrs Hunter’s death: she was more concerned with the spirit she tended nightly, and which, in spite of a deceptive flickering, might have come to an arrangement with death. Sister de Santis would not have discussed this, of course, with any of the others, not even Mrs Lippmann. In spite of a broadminded attitude to life and contact with death on a grand scale, the housekeeper dreaded IT as an end; she could not see beyond the handful of ashes.

Mrs Hunter herself said, early the morning after her children had flown in, ‘Now that my body allows me a certain amount of freedom, I can roam about more — not my mind — I know my mind is a shambles; you’re at liberty to tell me, Sister — but myself — all that I have been and seen, though not always done. I am free to gallop as far and as fast as I like along the banks of the river — nobody to call me back for meals or baths — or take the sword out of my hand because they consider it dangerous. Not understanding I may need it to cut my way through the last layer. Or that wind flows thicker and blacker than water. And hair. You didn’t know one of the wigs is black, did you — Mary? Nor did Lilian. She only experienced murder — because that was what she believed — that her end was in death by her Russian lover. Poor Lilian — my other Nutley! She hadn’t begun to learn that love is not a matter of lovers — even the least murderous one. So she had to die.’

The old woman under the eclipsed silver sun, which radiated by day in the head of her great rosewood bed, sounded so far distant the night nurse took her pulse. Sister de Santis did not believe she would find the pulse had weakened, but this was what she had been taught to do.

‘You see?’ Mrs Hunter smiled, or forced her lips as close as she could to a display of affectionate sarcasm.

‘Go to sleep,’ the nurse advised.

‘I may — if I’m favoured.’ The nurse brought a pill. ‘No! No! Not while there’s work to do.’ She clacked with her sticky tongue against her palate. ‘Pills are all very well if you want to dispose of yourself, but I have an idea I’m not mine — to do what I want with.’

The nurse filled a glass with water and held it to her patient’s lips.

Mrs Hunter’s nostrils stiffened. ‘You’re not poisoning me, are you? I’m the one must decide — not Basil — Dorothy — Lal Wyburd — any of you. No, not even I.’

The nurse said, ‘I thought you were thirsty. I brought you a glass of water.’

‘Then I’ll risk the water. It’s my conscience I’m worried about: the pan mightn’t hold it.’ But when she had drunk, she seemed reassured. ‘Did you have a kind night, Nurse?’

‘Yes, thank you. About an hour ago I went down to the kitchen and fried myself some sausages.’

Mrs Hunter was laughing in her nose as if about to share a funny secret. ‘Nurses were always whacking into sausages in the small hours.’ When she became more serious. ‘Quite right too. Feed the spirit. And kitchens are fascinating at night: full of things you don’t notice by day. Sometimes a chair you haven’t been seeing for years. Or a bowl of fat with fur growing out of its skin. I can believe such things interest you, Sister — because you are religious.’

Whether religious or not (that was something she would not have breathed about, not even to Mrs Hunter asleep) Sister de Santis admitted to a belief in common objects. If you depend on something to any extent, you might as well learn to respect it; so she never kicked the furniture or threw the crockery about.

Clocks had begun to ping and reverberate in the depths of the house. In another suburb the hour was counted out, though so remotely, it had not much connection with time.

‘Don’t you think you might rest?’ asked the nurse.

‘I could have rested if I hadn’t heard the doorbell ringing.’

‘That was hours ago. It shouldn’t disturb you now.’

‘Who was it?’

‘Sister Manhood’s friend — the chemist. He wanted to know where she was, and I couldn’t help him.’

‘Ask the bus conductress!’

‘I didn’t think of that. But surely he must know about the cousin?’

Mrs Hunter had floated far enough not to feel concerned about anyone else, or so it appeared to the nurse.

Sister de Santis fetched the skirt she had brought for mending. As her rather naked-looking hands stitched at the torn hem, she thought how her legs, even in the finer flesh-coloured stockings she wore to the city or to afternoon tea with one or two nursing acquaintances, had never drawn much attention to themselves. When she was younger she used to wonder what she would do if a pervert started stroking her legs, as she read they did, in cinemas. But it had never happened, perhaps partly because she had lost her taste for films; she was too tired, anyway, by the time she came off duty. Only occasionally in buses an old man’s watery stare would wash around her ankles and mount higher, though not high, for her skirts had never been of the shortest. Colonel Askew, another old man, and the patient who had left her an annuity, had sometimes gripped her knee, and she had not bothered to remove his cold blue claw; the colonel could not always remember his motive in raising food to his mouth, or why he had gone to the lavatory.

Comfortably and profitably occupied with her mending Sister de Santis should have felt protected. She was not, though: some disturbance kept heaving at the placid surface of her consciousness. She tried going over details of the voyage recommended for Colonel Askew’s health, and one of the happier episodes in her own eventless life: how they had sat ‘in mufti’ (it was the colonel’s joke) at a table for two in the dining saloon of the liner which was taking them, and eaten fish rolled in sawdust, and thin grey slices of roast beef; before lunch and dinner, the colonel always drank the one prescribed Scotch (he prescribed a white lady for his nurse, ‘because’, he remembered, ‘women enjoy the sweet things’) while informed eyes at the smoke room tables diagnosed a geriatric folly (‘can’t you see the old boy kneading her like dough; that hard, narrow berth must make a perfect kneading board’).