Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

‘Not clothes, for God’s sake! They’re not for permanent, are they? It would turn women into statues, sort of — clothed statues.’

That made Mary de Santis smile, and Flora Manhood realized her colleague did in fact have something of a statue about her: a statue with live eyes. Funny how old de Santis could make you feel inferior and you didn’t mind.

Then she saw that Sister de Santis was not smiling for anything that had been said, but for thoughts she had been turning over. ‘I know it’s really none of my business as a nurse — it’s the doctor who could say something — but as an old friend who is fond of Mrs Hunter — that is why I feel I’m entitled to speak to Sir Basil. Not here where it’s all so cluttered — too many associations to get in the way — I might go to his hotel, and appeal to him to consider the distress he’s in danger of causing his mother.’

Flora Manhood was surprised to see Mary de Santis had begun to blush. She had never thought of her as being exactly beautiful, and now only for a moment, because of something shocking about it all.

‘You’d be wasting your time,’ Sister Manhood mumbled, and got up. ‘Or that’s what I think.’ She wished it had been a hospital, when she could have produced a chart, handed over with efficient, completely impersonal cool, and swept off without further yakker.

She did sweep off, even so.

She couldn’t skip quick enough bang the door she didn’t care down the dark treacherous path a shrub hitting her across the eyes could have been a wire switch made her whinge she couldn’t see what some people saw in trees (it was Col Pardoe who was so sold on trees on nature: its spontaneous recurrence).

Nobody could say she wasn’t spontaneous; it was spontaneity which had ended by making her regret the situation she was in. It was too much spontaneity which persuaded her for a time that she needed Colin Pardoe. I am not whole Col except when I feel you inside me then we are truly one person, she had been fool enough to even put it in writing; the spoken word fades out, but writing lasts for ever if a person is mean enough to want to prove something.

After passing Wyburd’s car she began to act more — more prudently. It was not her word, but one she had heard the solicitor use: I don’t think it would be prudent Sister Manhood to allow Mrs Hunter to go for a drive she would see nothing almost certainly overtire herself and perhaps catch a chill. To live, to love prudently. That meant to think so much about it you didn’t get anywhere at all. It wouldn’t pay today. If it mightn’t be desirable in the long run.

As she walked (more prudently) along Moreton Drive towards the bus, she wondered what and how Sister de Santis, who suggested she was capable of thinking things out, would say and do to Sir Basil Hunter. One thing for sure: he wouldn’t take her seriously wearing that hat. But perhaps St Mary would buy herself a new one, a real whirligig, on the solemn occasion of her intercession for Basil’s mother.

Flora Manhood was slightly sorry she had brought up the subject of hats. With or without, what would de Santis know to do with any man, let alone Basil Hunter? You could only imagine her sitting alone in her room, mending, or, to turn it into a holiday, leafing through the National Geographic.

Then Sister Manhood felt wholly sorry for the colleague she did respect. Sincerely. I am sincere aren’t I? She often thought you can never know truthfully what you are, when you are the one and only who ought to be in a position to know.

On the bus she caught there were several men looking at her. She looked away from the dirty men. She tried to adopt a comfortable position, to pull her skirt down, but it wouldn’t come, or only so far: her green. The bus wasn’t all that full because it happened to be a between period. (She could reason things out for herself when these ran along practical lines.) There was a pretty bitch of a conductress: no dyke. (You would have died if it had been Snow.) The conductress looked down her nose at you. Well, you couldn’t deny it was you the greasy old men coming off shifts and out of pubs, scabby, horny men, were looking at, wasn’t it?

The betweentime bus rumbled along.

She had worked this out at least: she would catch him before his dinner, perhaps changing into dinner gear for some gala occasion when the presence of a great visiting actor might be sought. She would send up her name: Flora Manhood. Miss? No, Sister Manhood. Give him a clue, for Christ’s sake.

After she had left the bus, and found her connection, and arrived, she hung around the bright thoroughfare a while before going down the hill to the hotel at which he was staying. Take her time. She could hear the voice through the receptionist’s receiver asking for them to send her up, like a meal on a tray. Upstairs Sir Basil would have dropped to which nurse, the ‘pretty one’, the one his eye had roved over, the night of his arrival. If she was to be completely frank, it scared the shits out of her now that it was approaching.

So she hung around a bit, looking at the cheap engagement rings in the windows; in the souvenir shops, the opals and the kangaroo claws. (Wear a kangaroo coat — white — for her first press interview — her hair a short bleached Mia Farrow.)

But what she never ever wanted was marriage. Col had taught her that, if not about MAHL-er. She turned her back on everything that made her want to puke, and her skirt, what there was of it, swished in the plate glass. She didn’t seem able not to swish tonight however prissy she walked. Along the pavement the men were looking at her: the disguised G.I.s on leave from that war; the Hungarian Jews without, and even with, their wives; the spotty, fish-eyed kinks. A pair of poufs had a good giggle, as though recognizing their own act. She looked in a window and caught her green swishing, her body barely camouflaged by the pattern of deeper greener leaves. Shoot said the eyes of the G.I.s on leave from war the kinks picked their noses and rolled it at least the Jewish gentlemen were dry and professional in their glances a queeny giggle sprayed her up one side of her neck.

She turned her head, looking into the shop windows. What Mrs Hunter said about goats that had been with the buck could apply also perhaps to women who were on their way there: other people scented it. As she stretched her neck, her green seemed to fit closer to her hips. You couldn’t say she hadn’t been what they call ‘chaste’ for some time now, though that didn’t mean she hadn’t let her mind roam around a bit, or hoped that some completely satisfying dream might descend on her during sleep. All the while making her calculations, by the calendar too, with pencil and paper, on Vidlers’ wiped-down laminex.

Till you were ready according to figures.

That was why the men were looking at her. Because she was ready. And unprotected. All men, she suspected, not only Col Pardoe, hated the pill as being unnatural. It was natural for men, even if they didn’t know it, to want to pump a woman up, then in watching, feel their self-importance expand.

So all the men were watching her as she turned down the darker street on her planned visit to Sir Basil Hunter. If she slipped in a bit of advice on how to treat his old mother, that was to save de Santis the trouble. It was in no way related to her plan, the hands of which had begun to articulate, the feet to kick: she felt dizzy, if not crazy, with all that was forming in her head.

The receptionist, a dark shiny girl who looked as though she didn’t do anything about her armpits, made a tight mouth, and said, ‘I fancy Sir Basil will be changing for dinner;’ which was exactly as Flora Manhood had hoped.