Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

Her recollections, in the end, were little more protection than her mending. She thought about the meaning of ‘smug’, what exactly it conveyed: in her mind’s eye she saw the suet crust of a steak-and-kidney pudding, like the texture of an unpowdered nose. Colonel Askew used to enjoy his steak-and-kidney, but had been warned off salt by that stage, and was afraid they might put some in. He died at Brown’s Hotel of a final, anticipated thrombosis. Before returning home, she had taken a brief holiday in Suffolk: the frosted roads, the hedgerows with their beads of scarlet bryony on withered umbilical cords, her own solitariness (when hadn’t it been? though never a colder, harder one) shocked any smugness out of her. Her footsteps followed her hollowly. Safe behind the textbook flatness of her training she should always have been able to resist calculating death’s dimensions. Just as the study of anatomy should ensure against preoccupation with the physical.

Sister de Santis threw aside her mended skirt. Before going downstairs she looked at her patient without seeing. All the way down, through the felted air of the staircase, the nurse’s starched uniform might have been trying to remind her of possible missions. She couldn’t very well cook herself another plate of sausages. There was her interest in objects, as Mrs Hunter had sensed. In a wire safe she found the basin of fat Mrs Hunter knew about: the green fur sprouting from the skin. There was a knot in the kitchen table polished by her own hand as she sat at night eating sausages and left-over scraps of potato.

Again she saw the whorl of hair close-clipped against the nape of a neck. ‘She went off duty as usual. I’m sorry I don’t know where she is,’ she had repeated out of sympathy for the young man standing at the door. Mr Pardoe (Sister de Santis had been taught to use Christian names only after agreement and a ceremony) was not unlike another object in wood, turning bluntly away, smelling of nicotine agitated by hot spittle.

‘If she isn’t in her room I don’t know what to suggest.’ She could have hung on all night in the lighted porch offering non-suggestions to this knotty object of a young man; how would that whorl of hair feel if you touched it?

Mr Pardoe was moving off, when he turned, his teeth flashing ferociously. ‘Did the actor come?’ He laughed in no particular direction.

‘Sir Basil Hunter? Oh yes, he arrived this evening. His mother was so excited; we all were,’ she heard herself. ‘He had his dinner here, and went afterwards to a hotel.’

‘I bet Flora got a thrill out of meeting the great actor.’

‘Oh, she barely met him.’ To comfort the knotty object she added, ‘And actors are like anybody else — in essentials, I should say.’

‘Yes. In essentials,’ he agreed; whether comforted or not, he decided finally to leave.

Watching him go down the badly lit path, she called after him, ‘Don’t forget those three steps just before you reach the bottom. They’re dangerous in the dark.’ In spite of her sympathy for him, and her faith in the honesty of ordinary objects, she knew it was herself she was trying to help: she was like a woman deep in the country trying to hold a stranger whose departure would leave her alone. Which she was at last. She was left picking the needles from a rosemary bush beside the porch. The perfume increased her isolation.

A sense of anger began floating around her, and kept recurring hours after he had left. She tried to direct it at Sister Manhood, because if Flora had not been diverted from the hoped-for meeting, the young man would never have arrived, a knotty problem, on Mrs Hunter’s marble doorstep. Sister de Santis had gone in. The slammed door emphasized the silence of the house. She almost never slammed doors: that was more in Flora’s style.

And here she was, hours after the chemist had left, standing in the study, Manhood’s equal in faithlessness. The house had never been less a shrine; and you less its guardian. She walked about recklessly, nudged once or twice by a leather arm against which she bumped. Her anger was partly increased by the harsh glare from woodwork and gilding in a room she seldom entered, partly from having to admit that Flora Manhood and her knotty — oh yes, her undoubtedly honest chemist, were nowhere near the reason for her agitation.

In one of the many mirrors with which the house was overloaded, ‘the big white lily’ planted by Mrs Hunter the morning before, had begun swaying: all ready to be picked. As he bent her backwards with the smoothest, the most practised motion, her mind rooted through, her mouth lapped at, every detail in the catalogue: she drank through the pores of his just faintly bristling skin; dragged at the creases in tight clothes; inhaled the scents of brilliantine and stale tobacco; her fingers tangled with the grey-black (unfatherly) hair, laying open the bald patch she couldn’t remember, but which must have been there because here she was discovering it.

Mary de Santis was flung into one of the huge leather chairs. It sighed, and sucked at, before settling around her. Whether she imagined it or not, it still felt warm. It smelled of. You mustn’t touch the basil Máro Papa has planted. She did, though; she crushed it between her hands, and the scent of basil invaded, finally emanated from her body. She was anaesthetized by her own scent of basil.

Not entirely. Mary de Santis opened her eyes. Where two separate plants had been rubbing together so sweetly in bursts of glossy foliage and pointed spearheads of near seed, here was her knotty solitary self, trapped in the leather chair, in a distorting mirror. Not even Mrs Hunter’s ‘big lily’. Her anger broke around her. She began unbuttoning her uniform, tearing at the straitjacket beneath to free her smoothest offerings. Which he, or anyone, would have rejected, and rightly. Though dimpled under pressure, and arum white, their snouts pointed upward to accuse the parent sow.

Around her on the carpet the wasted basil seed was scattered. If Mamma were preparing to accuse, Papa would not. Nor Mrs Hunter, along with acting Basil has made a profession out of disappointing.

When St Mary de Santis was the disappointment. She heard her shoes chuffing as she escaped from the glaring room she had chosen for her self-exposure. All the way up the stairs the iron hedge, planted to protect her from space and the hall below, was catching at her skirt with iron thorns. In spite of buttoning her habit, she might arrive in the sanctuary stripped. In whatever state, she burst in. To fall on her knees at the foot of the bed. If not to recover what had passed for sanctity. She found herself pressing the palms of her hands together, in an arrowhead, as she begged (she had not been taught to pray) for grace.

HER DELIRIOUSLY patterned dress, her gyrating Perspex earrings and orange bag didn’t count for much in the dark. Not that it was real dark. Night was still in its brown stage: the sound of feet was not yet divorced from plodding bodies; you could still read the makes of cars, whereas in another quarter of an hour, all would be swallowed up in a great rubbery volume of traffic. If the lit windows of houses offered a human belief in permanence, the oil refineries ablaze down Botany way suggested other worlds, other more demoniac values.

Earthbound through her strong legs, her rather too thick, female body, Flora Manhood would have liked to destroy something tonight. She breathed deeply of the chemical air and hoped she was contracting lung cancer. What, she wondered, would happen if she picked up a stone and shattered the glass protecting one of these families seated at their monotonous meal? Rough hands; a bumpy ride in a police van; then Col would bail you out, explaining that he, more than anyone else, had the right to do so. Col’s unquestionable ‘right’: other people, amongst them many women, would no doubt see it as ‘fidelity.’