Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

At a point when the small box enclosing her seemed about to fly apart, from the orange light, the sounds of traffic, the fumes of petrol collected in it, she was forced up. If only to wash some stockings and hang them on a line at her viewless window. To sit a while over the morning paper without deciphering the print. Before she began bathing herself, putting up her hair, examining the angles of her appearance, all according to some more than ordinarily complex ritual, performed it could have been, for the first time.

When she was ready, she had no doubts about putting on her usual navy hat, and a matching, old, but presentable coat (which Flora M. dismissed for being as dowdy as the hat). Though not wearing a uniform, she looked as though she were, Sister de Santis realized, not disapprovingly: she felt safer in her unofficial uniform.

It was neither too early for actors, nor yet too late to have lost one of such charm and fame, she had calculated; and the receptionist’s words, so carefully enunciated at the telephone, her smile so beautifully evoked, together with the single dimple she must keep for favourites, made it at once clear that Sir Basil was in his room.

‘He’ll be down presently,’ the girl announced through the last glimmer of her waning smile.

Gratefully enough the nurse accepted the receptionist’s bounty. She sat down to wait opposite the desk, crossing her ankles as though seated beside Colonel Askew on the liner’s deck or in the lounge at Brown’s Hotel. It also occurred to her, but fleetingly, embarrassingly, that Mamma had claimed descent from three Emperors of Byzantium. Mary de Santis averted her thoughts, settled the crown of her navy hat, coughed to clear her voice of a suspected huskiness which might obscure the meaning of what she had to say.

And Sir Basil Hunter came running down the last short flight of stairs, presenting a figure she would not have expected, perhaps because his clothes were more casual than she — well, she had not attempted to foresee’, but they were in fact casual: silk paisley-patterned scarf, its crimson reflected upward on to his already ruddy, shaven skin; suede jacket, the cuffs of which were turned back over shirt cuffs of a halcyon blue. But it was not, after all, the details of his dress which surprised her, so much as a breathless jollity, his soles squelching across the foyer carpet in what would have seemed a parody of loose-limbed boyishness if the actor had not ended by persuading you that it was the real thing.

Sir Basil made Sister de Santis feel artificial: she must have looked like one of those great soft ponderous dolls in felt or kid sometimes referred to nowadays as sculpture; and as though that were not perverse enough, she heard herself giggling like some trainee nurse telling about an evening spent at a night club with a reprobate surgeon.

While Sir Basil tried to raise her to a less ignominious level, by squeezing her elbow, sinking his chin in the paisley foulard, and directing his stare full at her face, his eyes as charismatic as Mrs Hunter’s were in the beginning. ‘This is a most agreeable surprise,’ he admitted in the greatest confidence.

‘Oh, I didn’t want to disturb?’ Sister de Santis protested in painfully lumbering contralto. ‘I only looked in,’ she blundered on, ‘to say how much I — how we all —appreciate Mrs Hunter.’ There she fizzled out, the dismally inept bungler of a mission.

Sir Basil was leading her somewhere, into the garden it began to appear from the yellow light which was filtered on their faces through the leaves of autumn plane trees.

‘Mother — yes — isn’t she an extraordinary-beautiful — exceptional person?’ His boyishness let him down at last, and he began to look the grave man she had anticipated; still not wholly grave, however. ‘I’m glad you’ve come,’ he continued confiding, ‘even if you’ve stolen a march on me, in a sense.’ He laughed, for her personally, making it clear she was not to take his remark as an accusation. ‘Because I’ve been meaning to see more of those who — who’ve been devoting themselves to Mother’s care — to — to get to know you more intimately.’

At his most hesitant he was also at his gravest. It was what she had hoped for, and now that she had found it, must resist. It was Papa: an elderly, distinguished, but weak man, asking for love and understanding as well as the drug he depended on. Mary de Santis was so shaken she lowered her eyes.

Sir Basil came almost too promptly to the rescue. ‘What, I wonder, can I offer you to drink?’

‘Oh, it’s early, isn’t it?’ She laughed. ‘I didn’t come here expecting hospitality,’ she added, and blushed.

But Sir Basil was waiting for her to name her fancy, and as her confusion mounted she was unable to think; then remembered the White Ladies Colonel Askew had prescribed before lunch (the name prevented her asking for one now) and before dinner, knew she had enjoyed a sherry (sweet). She might have settled for the sherry if she had not gathered, long after the colonel’s death, that there was something shameful in confessing to a taste for sweet sherry.

Sir Basil Hunter was growing impatient, shooting his cuffs. ‘My lunchtime poison,’ he said, ‘is a dry martini.’

‘Very well.’ She laughed and blushed again. ‘A dry martini would be perfect.’

‘How dry?’ He raised his eyebrows and cocked his head, as though to show he recognized a knowledgeable guest.

‘Oh, dry!’ If she had been true to herself she would have in some way resisted the cloak of incongruous worldliness he was laying on her shoulders; but she rather liked it.

Then he had gone inside to give the order, and she was left amongst the white furniture, the plaster storks, and a bird bath painted in mock brick. A sadness began to filter through to her, perhaps caused by the jaundiced light, together with the blotched leaves, and seed-clusters in moulting plush, of the expatriate planes. She was alone in the hotel garden. She sat down on one of the mass-produced iron chairs. There was a dusting of smuts on the iron-lace table. As she waited for her host, bag still wedged between arm and side, she was tempted to forget the reason for her being there, and slip away through the smell of fallen, half-rotted leaves, rescuing her susceptibility from a disturbing presence. But she owed it to Mrs Hunter to stay.

Very resolutely Sir Basil returned. He had decided to adopt a dogged look, for the part of a tarnished ex-brigadier in a play which didn’t appeal to him. It couldn’t be helped: for the moment, there was nothing else offering.

‘Incredibly lackadaisical service,’ he nattered, ‘at the Onslow.’

And this Sister de What’s-it raised her incredible eyebrows: they were broad and glossy, almost furry, reminding him of moth down; only he had never seen, as far as he could remember, a black moth.

‘Though nowadays, isn’t it the same everywhere?’ he continued tediously, while resigning himself to the cast-iron acorns already eating his buttocks. ‘London and Paris are, if anything, worse.’ He looked to her for the confirmation she would not be able to give.

He knew it was wrong of him, but she did so intensely bore him: in her fright of a hat; when he had half expected the little Manhood to return for the other half. Surely this deadly Hera had not taken it upon herself to warn him off, or worse still, stand in for the nymph she was protecting?

But it was his mother’s nurse reacting in earnest monotone to his (pretty lamentable, he had to admit) cosmopolitan ostentation. ‘I remember the year I travelled over with Colonel Askew, the poor colonel never stopped complaining — often with reason — in hotels and restaurants. It was not long after the War. Everything was down at heel, I suppose. Certainly the people were depressed. And the colonel was old, and sick — a cardiac case. But for me it was enough to have arrived in a great city of which I knew nothing. After the colonel died I took a short holiday in the country. I roamed around on my own, along those wet, narrow lanes. The trees were bare by then — everything very austere — but somehow strengthening.’