The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  ‘About what time were the princess and Sir Basil here?’ he lowered himself enough to inquire.

  ‘I don’t imagine it was too early. People like that don’t get moving early.’

  His voice brightened. ‘You’re quite right. When Sister Badgery rang, I had just reached my office. She knew nothing about a projected visit from the young Hunters—which no doubt they decided to make on the spur of the moment.’ He hoped he had shown this girl that there was no good reason for bullying him.

  Actually she would not have dreamt of it. She was too busy wondering what the ‘document’ could be. Was it a fresh will, perhaps? It was almost certainly a will. If she herself was dishonest enough to sleep with the son behind his mother’s back and conceive without his ever knowing, Badgery and Wyburd might be cooking up some plan to forestall the children by diddling the old girl out of her lolly. Naturally the solicitor would lie. Flora Manhood knew she would have perjured herself all the way, denying that she had seduced Sir Basil, anyway till she was certain of a positive result.

  It was understandable that she and Wyburd, a couple of crims more or less, should nurse their silences for the rest of the climb.

  Outside Mrs Hunter’s door, Sister Manhood whispered, ‘You must be very gentle with her, Mr Wyburd: she’s had such a dreadful morning.’ But you could not tell from glancing at him whether he suspected what was genuine anxiety.

  When they went in, the room was practically filled with the ballooning curtain, though as soon as the solicitor closed the door the muslin was sucked back, flapping and battering, before subsiding in tremors, to cling like a transparent skin to the face on the pillow.

  The nurse ran forward to deliver her neglected charge from this great caul. ‘There, dear. You’re all right. We’re here.’ Her sense of guilt quickened by thought of her own future trials, Flora Manhood comforted her baby.

  Mrs Hunter emerged working her gums. ‘You know I’m not all right,’ she gasped, ‘and your being here can’t make me any better. I’m past that. Though nobody can do me harm either—or not in ways that matter.’

  The solicitor thought her body had shrunk since he was last with her; on the other hand her spirit seemed to billow around them more forcefully.

  So he attempted a jolly voice to boost his own flagging spirit. ‘I’ve come, Mrs Hunter—you remember me, don’t you? Arnold Wyburd,’ then sotto voce, ‘to discuss the document you have in mind.’

  Sister Manhood began rearranging several unimportant objects in case the old bloke might show his hand. He wouldn’t, though. And it didn’t matter. Betty Hunter was right: she couldn’t be harmed, any more than you could kill your baby, if you had conceived it; you might get rid of the embryo, but its spirit would haunt you for ever after.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Mrs Hunter was feeling her way, ‘it’s you,’ she said. ‘I sent for you—because—I must try to remember.’

  Sister Manhood could have slipped out to the nurses’ room, free at last to do her nails, consult the stars, or just sit mooning away the flattest stretch of the afternoon, if it wasn’t for having to satisfy herself about the blessed ‘document’.

  ‘It couldn’t be the rates and taxes, could it?’ Mrs Hunter asked.

  ‘You’ve never had to bother yourself, Mrs Hunter, about the rates and taxes.’

  ‘Always,’ she said. ‘Only oneself bothers enough. But perhaps this was more personal. Oh, yes! Nurse, fetch me paper—for Arnold. Something formal, and white. Arnold was the whitest—and the smoothest.’

  Poor old Arnold, what he came in for! Sister Manhood almost started giggling again. She would have if the solicitor had encouraged it, but when she looked he ignored her. Nor would he look at Betty Hunter. He was all for his own thoughts, it seemed. He had turned red, except where his jawbones showed up white. Arnold Wyburd, she saw, would look a very naked man when stripped.

  As Sister Manhood returned from the nurses’ room with the pad, Mrs Hunter was making her solicitor recite, ‘… Marjorie four, Heather three.’

  ‘Surely there were more? For years the talk was all of babies. Some of them must have died, then?’

  ‘Yes, some of them died; some miscarried. They don’t count, I should have thought.’

  Sister Manhood was pretty sure she was right: the ‘document’ would be a will, and Arnold Wyburd would influence it.

  For a moment Mrs Hunter’s attention was distracted by matters more important than life and death: her fingers were flittering over the topmost sheet of the writing-pad her nurse had fetched. She was feeling for concrete evidence.

  ‘What’s this?’ The fingers almost gouged out the upper edge of the paper. ‘This isn’t it. Not important enough—Nurse. A common pad! Go down to the study—to Alfred’s desk—the embossed paper from Sands.’

  Old snob.

  ‘I want it done properly,’ Mrs Hunter insisted.

  When Sister Manhood trailed back with a wad of the super parchment, old Betty was explaining, ‘… people think if it isn’t in writing, it’s stealing.’

  Mrs Hunter’s hearing was good enough for her to fall silent after that, and the solicitor of course was too discreet to show he knew she had been talking at all.

  Flora Manhood would have liked to cry, not only for the unnecessary journey she had been forced to make, but also because these inhuman beings were letting her see the outsider they thought her.

  ‘I was explaining’, Mrs Hunter took up the thread again, ‘that you are going to marry a man you don’t value enough.’

  ‘Marry? What man, I’d like to know?’ Sister Manhood exploded.

  Elizabeth Hunter went off into what might once have convinced as laughter. ‘Come on, Arnold. Did you bring him a pen, Sister? And ink?’

  Now it was the solicitor who was pleased to explain: he had his Parker, a present from the staff on his seventieth.

  ‘But who can the fellow be? Who I don’t intend to marry?’ Sister Manhood raged.

  ‘Write something, Arnold—in your beautiful hand, which I hope you haven’t lost—put something like, “I hereby confirm that I give my pink sapphire to Florrie …” Is it Florrie? “… Manhood—to celebrate her engagement …” Or do you think “betrothal” sounds less suburban? her—her …? But that is beside the point. What it all amounts to is her—marriage with …’ Mrs Hunter started coughing, so her nurse was able to occupy herself offering a glass of barley water.

  When the coughing fit had passed, Flora Manhood announced, ‘I am not going to be conned into marrying any man—however important. Anyway, you don’t know what was behind it. You’re mad’, she said, ‘to get any such idea. I won’t! And you can keep your ring!’ She would bring it back from Vidlers’ tomorrow, and better if Sir Basil was here: she would show the pair of them, mother and son, how little a pink sapphire impressed her.

  ‘But we must mention the man’s name, Mrs Hunter.’ The solicitor paused, suitably grave above his presentation pen.

  ‘How do I know?’ Mrs Hunter grumbled. ‘I can’t remember names any more. But liked his voice. Once when he brought the prescript—the medcins!’ She smiled the taste of words down. ‘I liked the feel of his skin. I don’t know why they brought him up to my room. Perhaps I asked for him. I have always liked men around me.’

  Sister Manhood stood the glass so abruptly it chinked with the crystal jug. She removed herself so quickly these cold old devils probably didn’t even notice; though you were the reason for the game they were playing, its only object to cause distress.

  Well, she would take her child to anywhere—to buggery—or Adelaide—throw the ring out of the bus window, rear her poor bastard with the love she already felt for him, and hope he would not end up murdering her with a hammer for forcing life on him.

  Mrs Hunter said, ‘That should pacify her. Give it to me, Arnold.’ He did, and she put what she remembered as her signature, slashed across the paper, after which he witnessed it in his deliberate hand.

  ‘Now,’ she said, ‘another matter. Bring
me the jewel case. Well,’ she said, ‘it’s where it’s always been—over on that what-not I’ve had to put up with because it was a present from Emily.’

  He fetched the case. She sprang the catch, and her fingers went to it, verifying. ‘Oh, that! Ugly! Now this—this is what—I’ve often thought of—of giving Lal Wyburd.’ She collected herself immediately. ‘Your wife, Arnold.’

  Turquoises were clustered at intervals along the chain she was drawing out.

  ‘Very simple, as you see. We were poor farmers. (My father died of mortgages.) This chain of my mother’s I was wearing when the storm struck. Otherwise it would have gone the way of everything else.’ The voice was reduced to such an introspective key, the solicitor might have lost track if it had not been suddenly raised to a pitch of blatancy which suggested Elizabeth Hunter had manned her battering ram. ‘Do you think Lal will care for anything so unimportant? People expect you to hand out something showy when they’ve decided you’re sitting on treasures. So she may be hurt—by the insignificance—of this little chain. When one doesn’t set out—deliberately—to ruffle these sensitive souls. If she doesn’t like it, at least she can wear it on family occasions.’ The mouth rasped shut.

  ‘Yes.’ He was tired. ‘She will like it.’ His eyelids were the heaviest part of him.

  He was no master of disguises: he could not have watched the condescension with which their benefactress would have received thanks for her gift to his wife; so he simply put the chain in his pocket.

  She had sunk back, gummy-eyed and thoughtful, before remembering, ‘Have you got the paper? To give that nurse?’

  ‘Yes, I have it, I have it,’ he nattered.

  She was grinning at him from the pillows. One of her non-breasts had worked free of the nightdress. As he put the jewel case back where it belonged, his discomfiture was laced with a spirt of horror. He stumbled on his way out of the room.

  ‘Sister Manhood?’ He knocked on the door shut between them.

  She took so long to open, he had begun to wonder whether she would, but she did, and he told her, ‘Here’s Mrs Hunter’s statement. Which you wanted,’ he added, to hold her partly responsible.

  ‘I didn’t want it! Because I don’t want her bloody ring!’

  She took the paper, if only because this old man, the older for being Mrs Hunter’s solicitor, had withdrawn so deep into his thoughts he might continue standing at the door.

  ‘Mr Wyburd,’ she said in a burst of exasperation with herself and desperation over almost everybody else, ‘you are the one who must reason with them—a legal man and their father’s friend.’

  ‘Mrs Hunter is the one who will decide,’ Mr Wyburd hoped.

  He went away.

  Faced with the remainder of the afternoon Sister Manhood engaged in the most elaborate succession of activities she could invent: she opened windows which were closed, and closed those which she found open; she fetched a duster and dusted ledges and corners Mrs Cush had conveniently left to occupy a nurse; she generally tidied the already tidy. In doing so, she was forced to ignore Mrs Hunter’s official declaration, which she had shoved for the time being under the pin cushion on the nurses’ dressing-table; why, she couldn’t think, when she meant to tear it up.

  Nor would she have known whether a tinkled summons by her patient’s hand-bell was a godsend or an evil omen.

  When she went in, Mrs Hunter ungummed her voice. ‘I want to use the seat, Sister.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re strong enough, dear? Hadn’t you better let me bring the pan?’

  ‘I am strong enough,’ Mrs Hunter said.

  Though normally Sister Manhood hated the business of bundling the old mummy on to the ugly-looking commode, today after all that dusting and emotional hullabaloo, she made a soothing ceremony of it. The commode itself, if you were in the right mood, had a kind of half-cocked dignity, with its knobs and scrolls, and the curved handrails ending as swans’ heads. Flora was reminded of the picture of a real throne in the history book at school.

  When she had enthroned her ravaged queen, the waiting-woman upheld procedure, ‘Say if we’re not comfy, love.’

  Because everybody ought to know she had not felt comfortable in years, Mrs Hunter did not answer. She sat as though resigned to face a moment of self-imposed terror in a fun fair, clutching rails polished by the hands of other compulsive thrill-addicts rather than the flannel Mrs Cush loved to saturate with O’Cedar.

  Flora Manhood, all bash and busyness till lately, felt curiously lulled. ‘When I was a kid,’ she could feel her lips opening, swelling with a lovely warmth and indolence, ‘I seemed to spend half my life in the dunny. Half of that time only looking. Or dreaming. Or reading ads from the papers Mum had cut into squares. I dunno—they can’t have been there that long, but all these papers had turned yellow. In the dunny up the yard. There was always fowls outside picking around amongst the mallows. They’d come and peck at your toes, like they thought your toenails were grains of white corn.’ Never before had she talked to Mrs Hunter like this: it made her feel sort of drunk. ‘Some of the hens used to roost on the seat at night. I could never ever decide if it was the hens that smelt of lime, or the lime of hen dirt.’

  Flora stopped. She was ashamed.

  Mrs Hunter cleared her throat, and it was going to be serious. ‘What did you dream about—when you were at the—lavatory?’

  ‘About getting rich, I reckon. Escaping to the city, away from the humdrum of the farm. Oh, and love!’ She was careful not to make it ‘marriage’.

  Mrs Hunter was considering the gravest issue. ‘Do you love me, Nurse?’

  ‘What a thing to ask! Of course I love you. We all love you.’ It was too bright and bouncy, too Big Sister; though it mightn’t strike an old person.

  ‘If you love me as you say, perhaps you would do me a favour,’ Mrs Hunter persisted. ‘Even if it went against what I suppose one would call your better judgment.’

  Sister Manhood smelt a rat. ‘I don’t know about “better judgment”. It all depends what you want me to do.’

  The old girl’s eyes were clenched so tight she was more than straining on the loo. ‘The little capsules Doctor prescribed—to make me sleep—would you leave them by me, Sister? So that I could help myself?’

  Sister Manhood felt herself perspiring: her upper lip must be wearing a moustache of sweat. ‘Not likely!’ she cried. ‘What a thing to expect! It wouldn’t be ethical.’ She was genuinely shaken.

  ‘Love is above ethics. And you love me. You said.’

  ‘That’s unfair, Mrs Hunter. How would I stand if anything happened?’

  ‘If you love me.’ Her eyes still screwed up.

  Flora Manhood shepherded her breasts inside her arms, no longer a nurse, but a woman defending her threatened virtue. (Well, more or less: when technically no virgin, and ethically not altogether blameless, there’s still a theory of good you like to hang on to.)

  Mrs Hunter said, ‘Let us forget about it. There are other ways.’

  ‘But it’s downright immoral—wanting to do away with yourself!’ Oh, cock, cock; the way things were going, you might have to come at it too. ‘And not so simple, believe me.’ As though anybody would.

  ‘Simple enough. My will shall withdraw, if I decide it’s necessary.’

  Sister Manhood blew her top. ‘This may be the time your will doesn’t work. See?’

  A silence fell between them.

  Flora fumbled for her handkerchief; the old thing would never realize what she did to people.

  Presently the nurse asked, ‘Have you finished, dear?’ However others might study to break the rules, there were still formalities to be observed.

  ‘Have I finished? I haven’t begun !’

  Flora remembered Mum used to whistle: that was for the other, though.

  Then she heard the pink pink, of one or two pellets, or three, as from an afterthoughtful, or costive, goat.

  ‘I believe I’ve finished, Sister.’

 
; When she had wiped, and was preparing to hoist the bundle back into bed, Sister Manhood asked, ‘Would you like me to make you beautiful tonight? Wigs and all?’

  Mrs Hunter smiled, and answered, ‘No.’ But enjoyed the bosomy waves into which her nurse was lowering her. ‘No,’ she repeated, and her voice rocked and settled. ‘I’m looking forward to a cup of tea. Do you think my cook-housekeeper will have made me anchovy sandwiches? Not if they’re not thin.’

  Sister Manhood’s thinned-out smile was the visible expression of her sigh. ‘We’ll see,’ she said.

  She had to admit the old cracked gramophone records they played together, over and over, sent her at times, but she would be glad this evening when night came, and with it her relief.

  Then as the last quarter approached, and she dusted the crumbs off her embalmed patient’s chin, and sorted out in her mind what to report to de Santis, Flora Manhood knew that for some reason she would have given anything to defer her colleague’s arrival.

  You could as easily hold off the night as defer de Santis. Soft and silent, she was standing in the dressing-room. In her navy hat. She was more than usually considerate: just when human was what you mightn’t be able to take.

  Sister said, ‘You’ll be glad of your rest, Sister. You’re looking drawn. Nothing wrong, is there?’ Taking off that hat, she held it raised for a moment, detached and purposeless, above her head. ‘Nothing personal, I mean?’

  Sister Manhood snort-laughed. ‘Nothing that a boiled egg and a hot bath won’t put right.’ Jesus Christ!

  Sister de Santis was airing her dark, rather matted hair by lifting it in places with a hatpin.

  ‘She must be upset, isn’t she?’ she asked; ‘so much happening too suddenly.’

  The grotty old pin, which you had seen often enough before, had an onyx knob: tonight the streaks dividing it were whiter.

  ‘Upset?’ Sister Manhood would not have liked it known, let alone confirmed. ‘She’s constipated—anyway, a bit—last time on. I’ve dished out the calomel, Sister. You’ll have that to brighten your night.’

  De Santis was taking off her coat in such a way it became some kind of dark robe.