The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  Sister de Santis looked down at her plate; Mrs Lippmann was too far off: perhaps on her travels.

  ‘And the sapphire. Did they ever find it?’

  ‘Not as far as I know,’ Sister de Santis replied. ‘It may come to light when the furniture is gone and the carpets have been taken up.’

  ‘It may. But I think I know it won’t.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘I have my—intuitions.’ Sister Badgery was proud of that. ‘In fact, if I wasn’t a nurse—but I wouldn’t give up nursing, not for worlds—I often think I might offer my services to the police. I am always right.’ Laughter exposed almost the whole of the pale gums before the mouth closed abruptly; she might have overdone it, owning to psychic powers in front of a colleague.

  ‘Will you take a little trip yourself, Sister?’

  ‘Oh, no! I couldn’t! After sitting here all these months.’ Thought of her recent inactivity seemed to agitate Sister de Santis; she shifted heavily in her chair.

  Though she wasn’t one to criticize, Sister Badgery had always considered de Santis rather on the stout side. At the same time she had admired her colleague for a certain stateliness of manner. Today and out of uniform, she had shed the stateliness. Tactful is tactful, but in the course of luncheon, de Santis had not expressed a single opinion, not even with her face. You could not say she looked unhappy, not like the Jewess. Sister de Santis was more sort of calm: she had the smooth, washed look of some of the more simple-minded nuns.

  Sister de Santis raised her voice; the tablecloth in front of her subsided. ‘As a matter of fact I’ve accepted a case, f m expected tomorrow. It was the obvious thing—since the auctioneers are taking over.’

  ‘We have our professional duty of course.’ Sister Badgery was very firm on that score. ‘Is it a difficult case, Sister?’

  ‘A young girl paralysed in both legs.’

  Sister Badgery shook her head, sympathy straying between her vision of this young girl and the slice of Torte the housekeeper had put before her. ‘Win Huxtable had a private case—a boy in an iron lung; it got her down in the end.’ By which time Sister Badgery considered she might decently help herself to cream.

  ‘Cream, Mrs Lippmann? I must say the tort looks scrumptious. Your puddings were always lovely.’

  Neither Mrs Lippmann nor Sister de Santis was prepared to touch the Torte.

  Sister de Santis might have removed herself already. Though she was faintly smiling, the smile was an impersonal one, stranded on her lips as she withdrew behind her eyes, amongst her thoughts.

  She was, in fact, again seated at the bedside of this young girl, where she had been ushered and left.

  ‘What is your name?’ she heard herself asking to break the silence.

  ‘Irene.’

  ‘You’re lucky to have such a beautiful name.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘To me it is.’

  ‘I loathe it!’

  Although it was around eleven o’clock Irene was lying stretched on her bed pricking a card with a pin. Her rather lifeless hair was laid along the sides of her cheeks and over her shoulders almost as far as the small, but aggressively mature breasts. The long gown, printed with a yellowish green design, must have been carefully arranged in those folds where the skirt covered the legs: the folds were too formal, like stone. Sister de Santis was reminded of a figure she had seen on a tomb.

  The girl continued pricking at the card.

  ‘Wouldn’t you be better sitting in your chair?’ the nurse asked.

  ‘Oh, I’ll sit in my chair! I’ll sit in my chair all right! Today and tomorrow. And tomorrow.’ She drove the pin savagely into the card.

  ‘Do you enjoy reading?’

  The girl shook off the whole idea. ‘I watch the box—if ever there’s anything of interest.’

  ‘What interests you most?’

  The girl dropped the card. ‘I like to watch brutes exerting themselves. Specially killing one another.’ She laughed to herself, then looked sideways at this stodgy nurse. ‘Do you think you’ll like me?’

  ‘Perhaps I shall if I get to know you as you really are.’

  ‘Oh, I’m worse—worse than you could possibly imagine!’ A convulsion of the hand on the long green skirt dragged at it and rucked it above the little-girl’s feet and useless legs.

  The nurse got up to arrange the skirt in its original folds. The girl’s hostility appeared to have increased now that the stranger was introduced to the unmentionable.

  Sister de Santis noticed a bowl of anemones standing on the sill of a bow window. The garden beyond was a labyrinth, not without glimmers of fruitfulness.

  ‘Did these anemones come from your garden?’ she asked for the sake of saying something.

  ‘I don’t know. Yes, I suppose they did.’ The girl seemed unwilling to consider anything beyond the fringe of her inturned thoughts.

  ‘My last case loved flowers. She was blind, but she enjoyed their scent, and she liked to touch them. Roses were her particular flower. I used to cut the roses early in the morning and stand them in her room with the dew still on them.’

  You could almost hear the girl listening: her eyelashes. ‘Sick people must be disgusting,’ she said. ‘To have to handle them! I’d always rather be surrounded by beautiful, perfect people. Even if they’re cold and cruel. I don’t want anyone I have to pity. To offer pity—that’s the most disgusting act of all.’

  ‘Mrs Hunter wasn’t sick,’ Sister de Santis said. ‘She was old. She had been a great beauty in her day—a success. She was also cold and cruel when it suited her to be.’

  ‘Was she happy?’ Irene asked.

  ‘Not altogether. She was human. In the end I feel age forced her to realize she had experienced more than she thought she had at the time.’

  Using her elbows and ugly handfuls of the bed, Irene was raising herself higher on the pillows; she had developed unusual power in her arms and shoulders, the nurse noticed, and decided not to help.

  ‘That’s all very well, but what shall I experience?’ the girl asked.

  ‘I’d say you have the will—haven’t you? to find out.’

  She didn’t reply. She had resumed her original occupation of pricking a card with a pin.

  ‘What’s this?’ Sister de Santis asked. ‘Are you making a pattern?’

  ‘A pattern? NOTHING.’ Suddenly Irene leaned over and stabbed the outstretched hand with the pin.

  When she had recovered from the pain and her surprise, Sister de Santis—they were both staring at the bead of blood which had risen to the surface of the skin.

  The nurse asked, ‘Why did you do that, Irene?’

  The girl’s lips, her eyelids, had thickened. ‘You won’t come,’ she mumbled.

  ‘If you want me I shall.’

  The girl had slipped back to a lower position on the bed. The nurse was again reminded of the figure on the tomb, except that blotches had appeared on the cheeks, their human ugliness emphasized, if not illuminated, by tears which had oozed from under struggling lids.

  When it seemed that Irene would not commit herself further, Sister de Santis left.

  The mother was waiting to waylay the nurse. ‘Now you know what to expect,’ Mrs Fletcher began in a high voice which the tiled hall made sound more chittery. ‘I didn’t want to come in with you because Irene holds me responsible for everything she considers bad.’ The mother’s wrinkled prettiness tried to turn the situation into an amusing one; if her daughter had not been her cross, the pursuit of pleasure might have taken its place.

  ‘I shall come on Thursday,’ Sister de Santis told her, ‘if that is convenient.’

  ‘Thank God!’ Mrs Fletcher used the term with professional ease, and such vehemence that a scent of gin hovered around them as they stood discussing hours and the inevitable money.

  ‘I could live in if you wanted,’ Sister de Santis thought.

  ‘If you haven’t a life of your own!’ Mrs Fletcher jittered worse than ever with
gratitude and amusement; then she said, ‘It wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t warn you she literally tortured the last nurse into leaving. She is so warped, she is only convinced by what is evil.’ The mother laughed.

  The nurse repeated they could expect her on the Thursday.

  Now as she watched Sister Badgery devouring the Torte, Mary de Santis wondered how she would have answered Mrs Fletcher if pressed to explain what constituted her own life. Memory of her parents had faded since Mrs Hunter’s death: if they recurred in physical form they had the wooden faces of the figures in time-darkened icons. Her own clothes were a habit. She sat with books more often than she read them. (Dante had died with the forgotten cadences of her father’s voice.) And desire. Incredulously she watched Sir Basil Hunter’s silken ankle as his foot beat time to boredom in the garden of the Onslow Hotel. Of all her personal life it was perhaps physical desire which had died the most painful, because the most shamefully grotesque, death. Would she have admitted wearing that hat to the funeral if she had been accounting for herself to her future employer? Her betrayal of Mrs Hunter that second time was only outdone by Sir Basil’s absence.

  Sister Badgery had spooned up the last of the lovely cream, the last fleck of apricot.

  Sister de Santis had thrown that orange hat away. She could have confessed truthfully to Irene’s mother that she was entirely free.

  ‘What is the name of this family?’ For Sister Badgery names were of considerable importance.

  ‘Fletcher.’

  ‘Which ones, I wonder?’

  Sister de Santis did not know.

  ‘Well, there’s the flour Fletchers. Isn’t there jewellers too? Cheap jewellers, but the cheap ones often come off best. I expect you’ve fallen on your feet, Sister.’

  Now that she had eaten her meal, Sister Badgery had to go: to a former patient become a friend. ‘Say goodbye to Mrs Lippmann, dear. I can see it’s one of her moody days.’

  The day itself was moody. Sister Badgery was thankful she had brought her brolly. Already as she opened it, big cold drops were falling out of purple clouds.

  ‘Oops!’ she called as she went dickering down the path. ‘Shall I make it?’

  She would not have stayed on though, not for anything, in that ownerless house. Spooky too. She thought of the cosy chats she would have with her friend Win Huxtable inside the coach as the New Zealand scenery went whizzing past: scenery, like silence, depressed Sister Badgery.

  Sister de Santis lingered a moment on the path to watch the lightning: the enormous drops of cold rain flattened themselves on her face as though it were their chosen target; the white lightning was directed at her, though without malevolence.

  About five, when the storm had cleared, Mrs Lippmann made them a cup of coffee. After watching Sister Badgery eat a meal in the middle of the day, the two women could not have raised an appetite between them.

  Sitting quietly sipping their coffee in the kitchen, the nurse was humiliated to realize that, in her state of excited anticipation, and in spite of the affection she felt for the housekeeper, she had forgotten to ask Mrs Lippmanns plans for tomorrow.

  ‘What do you think you will do?’ Sister de Santis asked with what she hoped would convey intensified interest and rekindled warmth.

  ‘I shall be with friends,’ Mrs Lippmann answered in her normal, grave, low voice; then raised it to the raucous pitch she had used in her performances for Mrs Hunter, ‘or,’ she grimaced, ‘I may take my things to Central Railway waiting room, to sit a while, and assemble my thoughts.’ As she closed one eye, the other glittered with irony.

  They laughed together, and Sister de Santis caught a glimpse of the top hat, the wilted bow, and the little cane with dented knob quivering under Lotte Lippmann’s armpit.

  Presently the nurse left to start her packing. The housekeeper, though she had finished hers, went to the room in which her belongings had always only waited to be packed: it had served, in fact, as the barest waiting-room. Except that on the dressing-table, propped against the glass, on the lace runner which might have been worked by one of Mrs Hunter’s dead maids, the lovers continued holding each other in front of the empty bandstand, in spite of the faded sepia, and fingerprints eating into them.

  When she had undressed, Mrs Lippmann went in to take her bath. The heater, with its permanent smell of gas and flames roaring inside the copper cylinder, had terrified her in the beginning, but she had grown used to all such minor effects. Outside the window of the maids’ bathroom the sky was more convincingly on fire, the blaze smudged by fingers of smoke from the chimneys of Alexandria and Waterloo. It was suffocating in the narrow room, but it did not occur to her to open the window.

  Lying in the steaming bath, Mrs Lippmann watched the hair, more like ferns or the roots of water-plants, floating around the shoulders, straggling towards the breasts of this still curiously solid body. Then she reached up and felt along the ledge behind her head for her most practical, recently purchased vegetable knife. The pulses in her wrists were winking at her: all this time her fate had been knotted in her wrists. She cut each knot of veins with care.

  Closing her eyes she floated with the dead maids, the entwined lovers. Or if she cared to look, she was faced with a flush of roses, of increasing crimson. Opening and closing her eyelids growing drier brittler. Her eyes afloat, so it seemed. If she smiled, or sank, she would drink the roses she was offering to those others pressed always more suffocatingly close around her.

  After a long attempt at sleeping, Sister de Santis realized she would not succeed. She got up. Her veins, her heart, were throbbing with life as she went from room to room throwing open the windows. Furniture groaned and cracked; some of it seemed preparing to topple. At moments she became aware of her own creaking, her thumping clumsiness, and went more softly so as not to disturb the housekeeper.

  The light in Mrs Hunter’s room was at this hour neither moon nor day. Here and there stood the empty vases: columns of crystal and trumpets of silver. The great empty bed fluctuated like a sheet of dreaming water. What she knew to be a silver sun let into the rosewood bedhead had more the appearance of a stationary crab suspicious of an intrusion on its shallows.

  Mooning around a room shortly to be emptied of its associations and emotions along with the furniture, Sister de Santis wondered how she would convey to this entombed girl, her future patient, the beauty she herself had witnessed, and love as she had come to understand it. She felt herself again the bungling novice. Perhaps she was ageing. But she continued throbbing, flickering, inside her clumsy flesh.

  Seeing the dark was beginning to thin, she went down presently. She put a coat over her nightdress. She took the rusted can which she kept filled with seed. In the garden the first birds were still only audible shadows, herself an ambulant tree.

  The hem of her nightdress soon became saturated, heavy as her own flesh, as she filled the birds’ dishes. Reaching up, her arms were rounded by increasing light.

  In the street an early worker stared as he passed, but looked away on recognizing a ceremony.

  A solitary rose, tight crimson, emerged in the lower garden; it would probably open later in the day.

  Light was strewing the park as she performed her rites. Birds followed her, battering the air, settling on the grass whenever her hand, trembling in the last instant, spilt an excess of seed.

  Her throat swelled as the light climbed, as she trudged back, trailing her sodden nightdress along the path where ‘at least two people have broken their legs’. The little scoop clattered against the rusty can.

  At the topmost step it occurred to her that she must take this first and last rose to her patient Irene Fletcher. She would return and cut it before leaving: perfect as it should become by then.

  She poured the remainder of the seed into the dish on the upper terrace. The birds already clutching the terracotta rim, scattered as she blundered amongst them, then wheeled back, clashing, curving, descending and ascending, shaking the tassels of ligh
t or seed suspended from the dish. She could feel claws snatching for a hold in her hair.

  She ducked, to escape from this prism of dew and light, this tumult of wings and her own unmanageable joy. Once she raised an arm to brush aside a blue wedge of pigeon’s feathers. The light she could not ward off: it was by now too solid, too possessive; herself possessed.

  Shortly after she went inside the house. In the hall she bowed her head, amazed and not a little frightened by what she saw in Elizabeth Hunter’s looking glass.