Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

Immediately Alfred Hunter’s mouth, the lips with their rime of dried salt, was stretched to its utmost, to utter, ‘Whyyy?’ before the last of his fire froze.

What remained of the night she spent mostly stumbling through a labyrinth of rooms, trailing the gown she had bundled into so hastily she looked lopsided from unequal sleeves. Motion saved her. Often in the past she had wondered how she might behave as a widow, and enjoyed in her imagination comfortable and respected status. For the time being she was neither widow, nor wife, not even a woman. She could not yet bear to think of ‘Alfred’. For a moment or two she dipped her toes in hell, and made herself remember the bodies of men she had dragged to her bed, to wrestle with: her ‘lovers’.

Towards morning she caught sight of a reflection in a glass and was faced with her Doppelgänger: aged, dishevelled, ravaged, eyes strained by staring inward, in the direction of a horizon which still had to be revealed.

‘My God, what a fright you can look!’ she said aloud.

Somebody — a nurse? was holding her by the wrist: they never stop taking your pulse or or

‘What is it, Mrs Hunter? Were you dreaming?’

Then you realized, less by the voice than through the fingertips on your skin, that it was Mary de Santis, and not in her professional capacity: she was trying to make amends for something.

‘Not dreaming — living,’ Mrs Hunter gasped out. ‘Alfred has just died. I shall have to ring Dr Treweek. That is what I don’t look forward to. It’s one thing to know, another to tell.’

‘Lie still, and all these bad dreams will pass,’ Sister de Santis advised.

To a certain degree it was practical advice. The palmetto leaf in your side was agitating at cyclone strength; but those at sea level, including St Mary de Santis, could never understand that this was only a physical aspect of the storm: you alone had experienced transcendence by virtue of that visit to the Warmings’ island. There was Dorothy’s Dutchman, too. The Dutchman may have recognized the sanctity and peace reflected in the eye of the storm, but to dry Dorothy, who ran away from Brumby and storms of her own imagining, the Dutchman’s vision would have appeared like the fascinating though constricted view from the wrong end of the telescope. Dorothy had wasted her Dutchman.

‘Or do you think we’ll be wasting time ringing the doctor? He’ll never forgive. Treweek is afraid of tenderness.’

‘I know nothing about Dr Treweek,’ the nurse replied. ‘If we ring anybody, Dr Gidley is the one.’

‘Gidley?’

‘Isn’t he the doctor you like? The one you chose?’

‘Fat, soft Gidley!’ Mrs Hunter was grinning. ‘If you could look, there’d be yellow wax in his ears. Treweek is a man: hateful, ugly, dirty — all those foodspots — and the dandruff. But tormented. I think Treweek has suffered. That is why he understands. What he doesn’t understand is that he’s a man’s man: that’s why he won’t forgive me my failings as a woman.’ ‘Don’t get worked up, Mrs Hunter. It’s morning.’

‘I know it’s morning. Haven’t I been measuring out the night?’

‘Let me bring you the roses. As soon as it was light, I went down and cut them. There’s such a flush.’

‘Oh — the roses — yes.’

On leaving her patient asleep Sister de Santis had forced herself to descend once more into the dark body of the house where she had betrayed her vocation earlier that night. She passed the study: lights still burning filled the room with glaring reminders. She went to switch off the lights, but changed her mind, and fetched a cloth to mop up a pool the housekeeper had overlooked in clearing away the decanters and his glass. Wiping the slops, Sister de Santis thought she might have exorcised her lust, if not her shame. Probably, she would not be allowed to forget that; certainly not if Mrs Hunter, at her most cunning, cornered the reason for a moment of panic at the foot of the bed. Now on guard against those other snares, the scents of cigarette smoke, whiskey, and leather, Sister de Santis moved imperviously around and through them.

She went back into the kitchen. This was Mrs Cush’s day, and the night nurse sometimes started it for her. Mrs Cush the cleaner suffered from varicose veins, a smoker’s cough, heart murmurs, an epileptic husband, and logorrhea. (You’re the real pal Sister Mary don’t know what we’d do without yer Mrs Hunter Lottie any of us would yer believe it Sister Dad went off again Tuesday evenun threw isself on the stove took Donald Mavis all three of us all our time to pull im back Sister e fell down at last such a eavy man bit through the cork would you believe it e bit Donald’s finger I been under sedation ever since poor Dad the bruises ooh Sister don’t bear lookun at Mavis took me to a picture ter cheer me up it wasn’t the one Sister with the nice scenery and the lovely music it was about a mob of sailors trapped in a submarine we come out Mavis bought me a brandy and dry in the Ladies Lounge at the Lancaster we went ome Sister Mary after that because it was time ter get the tea.)

If Sister de Santis genuinely wished to compensate the cleaner for some of the injustices suffered by her, she was not unaware that her acts of charity could also be sly attempts to lighten her own darkness through a discipline of drudgery. This morning after taking off her uniform, she got down and began scrubbing out the kitchen. She worked in wide sweeps at first, tossing ahead of her the veils of suds she gathered back into the bucket. The electric light was pursuing a policy of flattery: wherever she had knelt the lino blazed; her arms, her shoulders, looked and felt strong and white; if her bra was torn (by whatever accident) her full breasts were less constrained. She continued scrubbing, ruffling the night silence without threatening their relationship. As an emanation of night she could flow like water and back into her secret self. Whether there was anything narcissistic or sensual in her behaviour, she was saved from toppling over by the precedent of her failed father and the threads which bound her to the human object of her dedication.

By the time Mary de Santis, still plodding on all fours, backed into the scullery, her shoulders had begun to ache, her knees were numbed, the glory had gone out of penance. She saw herself as the eternal novice, muddling around this narrow cell, thrown back off its walls whenever she blundered in the wrong direction; yet her attempts, like any of her other bursts of desperate clumsiness, would be registered as experience in the eyes of innocents. Only Mrs Hunter was aware; Papa had seen, perhaps: reflected in a white-to-ivory skin his own failures and permissiveness. Mamma of course had her relationship with the saints, which prevented her identifying the sins of those she loved,

The penitent bumped her head on a strut supporting one of the scullery shelves. The heavy breasts quaked and settled. Grey water, no longer sudsy, had seeped into the knees of her stockings. She lumbered up, staggered by the change of attitude, and found herself staring dizzily into a bowl of oil in which a light was shining. The light floated and rocked, not by grace of the electric bulb: she saw through the bars on the window that day had come.

When she had dressed herself again in uniform and veil, and generally restored professional neatness, the nurse took another look at her patient. A breeze was very slightly lifting the curtain of grey light. The old woman lay breathing and murmuring through one of the calmer passages of sleep. Once the lips fluttered apart; the words dragged themselves unstuck, and forced their way between the gums, ‘Still only thorns. Locked buds. This long frost.’ By a gigantic, creaking manoeuvre she pushed away a strand of shabby hair. ‘Speak to each other beautifully in silence.’ Till wrapping the spiral of a sigh, ‘My darling silence’, around a cherished privacy.