The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  At least the actor would go away, and need not know. It was the rightful father who would remain and know. Passing them in the street or sitting opposite in the bus, he would look for his own features in what should have been his child. Oh, but she would take her boy away to another city, and there perhaps she would be able to love him enough to prevent him suspecting her deceit and ending up hating her.

  While Basil Hunter, the more he looked at her brooding over her secret thoughts, wanted to make amends for what must have seemed a capricious seduction: on the contrary, he had been feeling tired and dispirited, not to say disgusted with himself for his intentions towards that old woman who was also his mother. Actually there should not have been any question of making amends to Flora Manhood; he was by now sure—or as sure as you can ever be—that it was not merely a matter of sexual desire: he could love this girl for the beauty of her simplicity, and her still unformed character would respond gratefully and happily.

  ‘What is it?’ She didn’t really want an answer, but felt that, for politeness’s sake, she was bound to ask.

  ‘I’d like you to kiss me.’

  His request was so simple she laughed, and bent over him; she more than kissed him: she raised his shoulders with her strong arms, and began dashing her lips against his forehead, his hair, as though trying to give expression to some deep-seated, natural passion.

  So that, from being at first only her patient, he became her baby. He could have been wanting that. He did in fact nuzzle at those breasts overflowing with kindness and—and ‘nourishment’, unlike the reluctant official tit recoiling from his importunity.

  As he sucked, and made all the sounds of gratified fulfilment, she felt herself to be doubly a deceiver: for she was holding the past in her arms, under the staggy orange trees, amongst the hummocks, in the green haze of Noamurra. When the haze cleared, and here was this ugly substitute.

  But she went through her part in the play, of wife and mother, without showing her distress, let alone disgust.

  Basil was saying, ‘Don’t you feel this is real, Flora?’ He did honestly want to believe it.

  She smiled, and began putting on her clothes.

  ‘When shall we see each other?’ he asked. ‘It’s going to be a right old lark phoning you in that house! Don’t you appreciate the irony?’

  She pounced on finding her mislaid shoes.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘I’ll get into something and come out to the gate with you.’

  ‘Won’t there be somebody at the desk?’

  ‘Only a man at this hour. And a man is less likely to chalk it up against me.’

  For the moment she couldn’t think which sex she despised more; neither man nor woman would silence the objections which kept raising their heads in her mind.

  So she preferred to kiss him formally, and go. She had a thumping appetite too: she could eat a plate of bacon, and a couple of Vid’s numbered eggs fried till the whites were crisp round the edges.

  While Basil got back, looking forward to another stretch. Till now his thoughts had been mostly of love; but he might even marry the girl. Himself as husband. In the days when marriage had implied Shiela’s drunken slanging or Enid’s spiked epigrams, he couldn’t take it; matured since, he was again tempted by this peculiarly exacting role; above all, the idea of a woman keeping the bed permanently warm, was beginning to exercise its appeal. And a nurse: look after you; go out and work if necessary. It wouldn’t be. There was the money, your own and rightful. Little Flora could only respond with gratitude.

  Half asleep he tried out the variations on a name: Sister Manhood; Lady Hunter; Sir Basil’s wife; all of them strong, and the total woman a conspicuously attractive addition to the cast of his play.

  He continued drowsily smiling, till a hair bent in one of his nostrils, making him sneeze.

  Flora Manhood looked in at the breakfast room where Badgery had begun her lunch, Lottie Lippmann in attendance.

  ‘You’re late, darling.’ The housekeeper was not accusing. ‘We began to wonder.’ If anything, there was awe in her voice, as though she believed in the sanctity of youth and beauty; she would have liked to start at once stuffing this pretty young thing with food, because it was the only way in which she could express her belief.

  ‘I’m not staying. I’m not hungry.’

  ‘You’re not ill, are you?’ Badgery asked rather too loud through a mouthful of chicken liver and rice.

  ‘I’m late. I got up late.’

  ‘Not ill!’ Mrs Lippmann’s scorn rang out. ‘Sie sieht so reizend aus! Strahlend!’ she chanted.

  ‘What is that, may I ask, when translated for ordinary persons to understand?’ Sister Badgery might have looked provoked if the foreign language had not allowed her to feel complacent as she sat spooning more of the sauce over her food. (She never understood how people could ‘make a practice of foreign food’, but she tried to do justice to it.)

  Herself reduced to Sister Badgery’s earthly level, Mrs Lippmann answered in dulled tones, ‘It means, if you’d like to know, Floradora is looking good.’

  ‘Ah, dear!’ Sister Badgery sighed; she gave a peck or two, for propriety’s sake, then settled down to gobbling her mash.

  Sister Manhood didn’t feel good. Going upstairs, going on duty, she could not have described her feelings. On arriving home she had eaten four of the Vidler eggs and as many rashers of bacon. She had slept too long and too heavy, and jumped up, and got into her clothes too quick. If she looked good to other people, it was, to put it crudely, on account of the friction: there’s nothing like the friction of one human skin against another, she had often noticed, for bringing the complexion to life.

  At least Mrs Hunter wouldn’t notice your complexion. But what would she know? What would she smell? Remembering their talk about the goats, Sister Manhood was possessed by dread, her whole body numbed with it, on the soft, relentless stairs. With, her own Basil involved, Mrs Hunter’s sense of smell would surely be all the more acute.

  Much as Sister Manhood would have liked to change quickly, to avoid Jessie Badgery in the Nurses’ Room, she had no wish to go bursting in on her patient, to act the spirit of light when she was feeling the complete leaden bod. So she camped around a bit, making mouths at herself in the glass, and peering into the crammed cupboards. It cheered her to some extent to think that Lottie must soon come with the tray, after which Mrs Hunter would indulge in her guessing game of what there was to eat.

  ‘Ooh, pardon me!’ Sister Badgery put her hand to her mouth, as they did, no doubt, on tea plantations and P. & O. liners, before observing to her colleague, ‘She’s spent really—whatever she may tell you—a cheery morning. Pulse normal—bowels open at ten-thirty—everything the relieving nurse could desire. Oh, and Dr Gidley called. Doctor couldn’t have been better pleased. He’s such fun, isn’t he? I do think Doctor’s a jolly man.’ Then Sister Badgery shook her wattles, her comb, and raised her disdainful beak, as though suddenly remembering she was superior, in the hierarchy of the yard, to this shapely but scatterbrained pullet. ‘Appetite excellent.’ She shuttered a yellow eye. ‘Mrs Lippmann says Mrs Hunter ate an enormous luncheon, and asked for more—which of course she wasn’t allowed,’ Sister Badgery added.

  ‘She’s had her lunch?’

  ‘She’s had her lunch. Because you were late. We couldn’t keep her waiting, could we?’ Sister Badgery was so cheerful to be going off duty.

  Then Sister Manhood knew that nothing stood between herself and her patient: she had the whole afternoon before her, and some of the evening, with Mrs Hunter.

  She went in.

  More often than not a wind would be blowing through the house in Moreton Drive, but this was only a wafting breeze fidgeting the muslin curtains, the rather grubby folds of which could become convulsed at other times, with violent shudders, or swell into great majestic sails. This agreeable afternoon breeze would in the long run dull the furniture by laying a film of moisture on its rosewood and ma
hogany. On the dressing-table, too far off to benefit the patient, was one of the vases of roses Sister de Santis made a point of standing beside the bed, and Sister Badgery of moving to a distance. Sister Manhood could never make up her mind which side she was on in the Wars of the Roses. Because nobody had ever brought her flowers, she failed to see a reason for them, unless plastic: plastic lasts. The current roses had wilted, and she hated both the feel and smell of dead roses. Later on she must remember to throw them out: something to do in the desert of the afternoon.

  Mrs Hunter was looking gentle. The breeze from the ocean might have laid its film of moisture on her forehead already: the skin glittered where light caught it. Once or twice she stuck out her under lip blowing at a non-existent lock of hair; her actual hair, thin, dank, indeterminate stuff, lay along her cheeks and on the pillow.

  Matching her patient’s gentleness, or obeying her own wariness, the nurse made a silent approach and felt for the pulse: there was much else she must investigate, but warily.

  Mrs Hunter said, ‘The butterflies—there used to be those big red ones—brick red, as I remember—making love above the lantana. I often wondered why they chose horrid stuff like lantana. Its smell. He hated it. It used to make him sneeze. So that was an excuse: I had it rooted out.’

  It was one of the many moments in life when Flora Manhood could not think what to answer; and the remark, which started by seeming to accuse, had fluttered off in some other direction; or perhaps it was still hovering, not for you to see or understand, but for those who control their own and other people’s lives.

  So the nurse asked, ‘Did you have your lunch, love?’ to make certain this too was not something Lottie and Badgery had dreamed up: like what you were supposed to have done to the cloakroom loo.

  ‘Yes, and it was lovely—if I could remember what it was. Breakfast was better. Kedgeree. I can remember better the things that happened long ago. Except that this foreign woman I’ve engaged isn’t in the kedgeree tradition. But he was so kind—talked so sympathetically. I’m the one who should have had more understanding. But of course, the breakfast—he always loved kedgeree. He likes an early breakfast.’

  In her disbelief Sister Manhood ran the tip of her tongue along the line of her lipstick, but said, ‘That was fine, wasn’t it? To both have enjoyed yourselves so much.’

  This slack man panting on top of you in his fur bra then dashing off to early breakfast with his old mother when you read that actors lie in bed till afternoon exhausted by acting in the play and love and suppers. Basil hadn’t had the supper, though. He hadn’t exactly acted in a play; though it is always hungry work. Perhaps it was pure hunger drove him out to early breakfast. Or else, the love he imagined he felt for you, had done a boomerang and come back as thoughtfulness for Mum.

  Either way, Sister Manhood’s sense of her own deceit returned.

  While Mrs Hunter had brightened: she had begun to kindle, to shine, as she did when following up an inspiration; her shoulders twitched on and off. ‘I’ve thought of something—’ she was spitting slightly, ‘something I want to give you, Sister—to wear.’

  ‘I’ve got all I need, love.’ It was a lie anybody must see through; but you couldn’t be in any way indebted to old Mrs Betty Hunter: the next moment she would turn the thumbscrews.

  ‘What you need! Praise, love, beauty—anyone can do without them.’ Mrs Hunter snorted. ‘They aren’t necessary. You can live on potatoes and a cup of milk—like an Irish peasant—in a bog!’

  Flora Manhood was convinced that, without the least encouragement, Elizabeth Hunter had started tightening the thumbscrews.

  When she had licked her lips, Mrs Hunter ordered, ‘Fetch me the box, Sister.’

  Sister Manhood brought the jewel case from where it was kept, and the old piebald fingers began actively running over its contents till they found what they could more or less identify.

  ‘These,’ Mrs Hunter said, and showed. ‘Alfred took to giving me sapphires: one year he gave me the blue, the following year the pink. He had a passion for star sapphires. I never liked them,’ she confessed; ‘too much like lollies. But lovely trans—cend—ental? lollies;’ she gave a hiccup, and the jewels rattled in spite of their velvet nest. ‘Well—aren’t they?’

  Because she didn’t know what ‘transcendental’ meant (she couldn’t remember Col ever using the word) Flora Manhood brooded. Or sulked.

  Mrs Hunter must have decided to ignore her nurse’s mood and develop her theme. ‘You will have to tell me’, she was forced to admit, ‘which is which. Which is the pink, Sister?’

  ‘Why the pink?’

  ‘It’s feminine, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Yes, I think so. Blue is more intellectual—spiritual,’ she hiccuped again, ‘compared with lush lollypink.’

  Flora Manhood had begun to feel unhappy, both for herself and her patient, then, incidentally, for others. ‘That’s the pink,’ she said, stroking it where it lay in the palm of Mrs Hunter’s hand.

  ‘Take it.’

  ‘If I don’t want it?’

  ‘But you must. You must wear it for your engagement.’

  ‘I’m not engaged.’

  ‘You will be. There’s hardly anyone doesn’t go through it.’

  ‘I might be an old maid.’ Sister Manhood cackled.

  So did Mrs Hunter.

  Then the latter composed her lips before delivering the gipsy’s warning which rings a bell in most women, and which surely this silly nurse would hear. ‘It’s your fate. And he loves you,’ Mrs Hunter said.

  Flora Manhood pouffed. ‘I don’t know so much about that. They make use of you. In any case, I could never ever marry a man so much older than myself.’

  ‘A boy!’

  To his monument of a mother, no doubt.

  But an old man: he had let out a short fart, his buttocks quivering and hesitating, before he came; she had felt the elderly lips tasting her eyelids, bunting at her breasts. Then he had run hungry to his mother, and they had hatched this Hunter plot over the early kedgeree.

  ‘Even if there was any question of my getting engaged, oughtn’t the man to give me the ring?’ Because she was afraid of falling into one of a number of traps, she made herself sound as ungracious as she could.

  ‘He might be embarrassed—if I gave him the ring and told him to give it,’ Mrs Hunter replied. ‘He’ll see it as a practical arrangement if you explain why you’re wearing it. Women are more practical. Some men know—though they mostly won’t admit.’

  Since you had allowed the old thing to transfer the pink lolly to your hand, you were growing greedy for it: from certain angles the buried star would come alive.

  ‘It’s all very well for me to take the ring.’ Flora Manhood sounded harsher still. ‘There’d be nothing to show I hadn’t snitched it, if—supposing—you died all of a sudden, say.’ It was she who wished to die: she was so ashamed; but had been pushed to it. ‘You did say we’re practical,’ she blurted, ‘didn’t you?’

  ‘You are perfectly right. Telephone to—What’s-his-name—my solicitor, Sister. Ask him to look in—to write it down that the ring has become your property.’

  It sounded awful: she had never owned any property until this ring, her right to which existed only in the old girl’s attic of a mind.

  So she went out mumbling, neither agreeing nor refusing; though she had gone so far as to put the ring in her pocket.

  The afternoon was the desert she had feared, in which she invented little unnecessary jobs for herself and disciplines to impose on her patient.

  Twice Mrs Hunter remembered to ask, ‘Did you get through to Arnold—to come about the sapphire—to put it on paper?’ On the first occasion Sister Manhood was able to avoid answering: she was engaged in seating her patient on the commode; at the second inquiry, she snapped back, ‘I wonder if half his clients realize what a busy man Mr Wyburd is?’ That would not have entered into it if she hadn’t been afraid of how th
e solicitor might look at her, for winkling a jewel out of Elizabeth Hunter. But she would have to keep the ring; she knew by now: from its continued presence in her pocket, from its smooth motions against her thigh, from its burning itself into her flesh.

  Then it was time at last for de Santis to arrive; soon you would escape to your own room, to fondle your jewel. Which would never fulfil its purpose, because you wouldn’t accept a proposal, not even another proposition, from Basil Hunter, however hard his mother worked to prostitute you to her son.

  This evening de Santis appeared unusually thoughtful. And was wearing (good grief) an orange hat.

  ‘I decided to take your advice,’ she explained, ‘and buy myself something gay. How do you like it?’

  It was more than awful; there was something sort of sacrilegious about Mary de Santis in this orange hat, not worse if she had bent down, switched her skirt over her back, and shown she was wearing a naked bum underneath.

  ‘Or don’t you?’ Sister de Santis was waiting.

  ‘It’ll take a bit of getting used to. It isn’t part of your—your image, Sister.’ Flora Manhood was sweating with her own daring.

  But she was able to start giving the details of their patient’s condition during the afternoon. I’d say she’s a bit constipated, whatever ideas Badgery may have. Badgery sees things as it suits her. The old girl could do, perhaps, with an enema. If you like, Sister, I’ll stay back and give you a hand with the enema.’

  Sister de Santis smiled; she was so thoughtful: was it of her own reflection in that hat? ‘Is she?’ she said. ‘We’ll see. I might phone Dr Gidley and ask what he thinks. In any case, there’s no need for you to stay. I can manage the enema. Poor old thing, she’s only a husk.’ All the while Sister de Santis continued smiling, for her own thoughts, or the orange hat.

  Sister Manhood was beginning to lose patience, when her colleague said, ‘I’m going to let you into a secret, dear.’ Never in history had Sister de Santis called you ‘dear’.