Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

The nurse recognized the silence which comes when night has almost exhausted itself; light still barely disentangled from the skeins of mist strung across the park; at the foot of the tiered hill on which the house aspired, a cloud of roses floating in its own right, none of the frost-locked buds from Elizabeth Hunter’s dream, but great actual clusters at the climax of their beauty.

After she had rummaged for the shears and the ravelled basket under the pantry sink, Mary de Santis let herself into the garden. A dew was falling, settling on her skin; vertical leaves were running moisture; trumpets of the evening before had furled into crinkled phalluses; grass was wearing a bloom it loses on becoming lawn. Encouraged by the rites of innocent sensuality in which she was invited to take part, she tore off a leaf, sucked it, finally bit it to reach the juicy acerbity inside. Not a single cat appeared to dispute her possession of its spiritual enclave as she rubbed, shamefully joyous, past shaggy bark, through flurries of trickling fronds. If her conscience attempted to restrain her, it was forcibly appeased by the tribute of roses she saw herself offering Elizabeth Hunter.

As soon as arrived, she began to snatch like a hungry goat. Dew sprinkling around her in showers. Thorns gashing. Her heels tottered obliquely when not planted in a compost of leaves and sodden earth. Nothing could be done about the worms, lashing themselves into a frenzy of pink exposure: she was too obsessed by her vice of roses. When she stooped to cut into the stems, more than the perfume, the pointed buds themselves could have been shooting up her greedy nostrils, while blown heads, colliding with her flanks, crumbled away, to lie on the neutral earth in clots of cream, splashes of crimson, gentle heart-shaped rose rose.

Breathing deeply, still automatically snipping by spasms at the air, she regained the grass verge, her basket of spoils heavy on her arm. Poured in steadily increasing draughts through the surrounding trees, the light translated the heap of passive roseflesh back into dew, light, pure colour. It might have saddened her to think her own dichotomy of earthbound flesh and aspiring spirit could never be resolved so logically if footsteps along the pavement had not begun breaking into her trance of roses.

A man of dark, furrowed face and inquiring eyes was asking the way to Enright Street. Though looking at her closely, he did not appear to be soliciting. She knew the street, and directed him with a care which the early hour and its exquisite details seemed to demand, the man listening intently, his eyes concentrated half on her directions, half, though in an abstracted way, on her rose-embowered figure.

When she had finished he smiled and thanked. They were both smiling for different and the same reasons. From his humble, creaking boots and still apologetic glance, he was not only a stranger to the street, but to the country, she suspected. She was reminded of her own alien birth and childhood; whether the man guessed it or not, he gave the impression that he recognized an ally.

Nodding at her veil he suddenly asked, ‘Somebody sick?’

‘Not really. There’s an old lady living here, who has to be taken care of.’

‘How old?’

‘We don’t know exactly. I don’t think it matters once you’ve reached a certain age. You’re no longer altogether a person: more like an electric bulb going on and off, and perhaps, if you’re lucky, you may throw a light on something that hasn’t been noticed before — by you or anybody. At least that’s the way I see it.’ Truthfully she had never looked at it from that aspect; it was the early morning leading her on, and her audience of one simple foreigner.

The stranger seemed seriously trying to visualize the image she had offered. Then he smiled full at her, and she looked down to hide her pleasure, and noticed that her white shoes were caked with soil.

The nurse was at once recalled to duty. ‘I must go in now,’ she said, awkwardly, almost harshly. ‘My case may be needing me.’

The man’s sculptured boots were creaking into motion. ‘Yes. I also go.’ By the expression of his eyes he had already left her; when he turned, as though at the last moment he must force her to admit to something. ‘Tí ximaíroma kánomay! ’

The words went shivering and chiming through her veins. If their meaning was lost on her by now, they echoed through her head in her mother’s voice. All the way up the path, the stairs, a melancholy murmuring recurred: of words, and bells, and women’s voices rejoicing or lamenting, she could no longer have told which.

The sweetness and distraction of only partial union with the past began to mingle with anxiety that her patient might be preparing a crisis. Sister de Santis only gave herself time to stuff the roses by thorny handfuls in an old washstand jug left over in the mahogany bathroom, before she hurried in. At the same moment, the relic in her charge was tossed up out of whatever infernal depths, and stranded on the shores of consciousness.

Taking the fairly normal pulse, the nurse had become irrationally and unprofessionally afraid. ‘What is it, Mrs Hunter? Were you dreaming?’ she began the constant reprise.

‘Not dreaming — living. Alfred,’ Mrs Hunter gasped, ‘has died.’

For all her sympathy, Sister de Santis could only follow the trail of the stranger’s words, pursuing her ximaíroma.

‘Ring Dr Treweek …’ Mrs Hunter was panting.

‘… Gidley is the one …’ Sister de Santis heard herself bleat; then in desperation, ‘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.’

The nurse ran to fetch the chipped, washstand jug. The resplendent roses scattered their dew their light their perfumed reflections over the sheet into the straining nostrils the opalescent eyes staring out through this paper mask.

‘Look!’ Mary de Santis forgot.

Elizabeth Hunter answered, ‘Yes. I can see, Mary — our roses.’

And at once Mary de Santis heard in her mother’s voice the words she had not understood when the peasant-migrant spoke them, ‘What a sunrise we are making!’

It was: the roses sparkled drowsed brooded leaped flaunting their earthbound flesh in an honourably failed attempt to convey the ultimate.

‘Yes — our roses,’ Elizabeth Hunter repeated.

Which Mary de Santis interpreted as: we, the arrogant perfectionists, or pseudo-saints, shall be saved up out of our shortcomings for further trial.

WELCOMING THE princess, the president of the club had pointed out that the room was a cheery one. Madame de Lascabanes supposed it was; but the flowered chintz (green and beige) and the reproduction of a landscape with daringly stylized eucalypts, aggravated the disease of foreignness from which she suffered. There was a white telephone which intimidated her fearfully; what if it went off before she was prepared to cope with it? She felt better when her things, collected from Moreton Drive after a long delay by that decent soul Arnold Wyburd, were delivered below. Just to unpack her toothpaste calmed her nerves; and in the meantime she had begged a headache powder from a maid. Yes, she was feeling better.

Unless reminded of her escape from where she wanted but feared to be: that housekeeper hovering with something raw and German; and the mummified head of Santa Chiara Hubert insisted on visiting elle a quand même une influence extraordinaire which the jealous Franciscan refuted vous savez c’est une tête quelconque que les soeurs se sont procurées pour en tirer profit. Alone in the lift on her way down to dinner, Dorothy de Lascabanes whimpered a little thinking of poor Mummy.