If the child herself ever hesitated, she was never torn. Coming together at the centre of the suburban house, they would kiss and laugh, sometimes the parents above her head, more often all three conjoined. She realized while still small that her father and mother were in love with each other; and it remained so when the three of them were desolated.
She wasn’t born in that brown Marrickville house, but might have been. Anything which had happened before hardly concerned her, even when they talked, about it, and looked at snapshots, or broke into tears. Though when she herself was unhappy, or half asleep, or ill, the submerged wreckage of a past life sometimes floated out of the depths, and in her perceptive misery she recognized this as the important part, not the happy, thoughtless, unequivocal Australian present. She might have remained the unacceptable stranger, even to herself, if she had not adopted an attitude from which to make the most of unreason.
Before anything, the parents: Mamma a thin black stroke in any landscape; those narrow shoulders; hands too incompetent for manual labour except the dusting of icons (probably the ‘real’ in what was left of Mamma’s life flowered only in front of the icons). Papa’s hilarious scepticism transforming the Holy Roman Church into a vast elephant-house, all hands shovelling; then turning sour as his body shrank, his vision receded, don’t accuse me Mary as I see it the needle is my faith the only logical conclusion.
They kept the records, buckled and specked, in a cardboard box. Dr Enrico de Santis, 32, Italian subject … Anastasia Maria Mavromati, 24, Greek … both of Smyrna, Greece … married April 26th, 1923, at Smyrna. (It was never referred to as ‘Izmir’.) In all the snapshots, the studio portraits, Enrico had remained the glossy charmer, after the paper had turned yellow, the inscriptions and humorous comments yellower to green. But Anastasia Maria had been born, like most Greeks, with a foreknowledge of everything that will happen: in her face the faith or fatality of old blackened icons.
Mamma would attempt to make what she was careful to refer to as her Version of the Greek dishes’, wearing an apron stained with tomato, her smile bitter for the oil she had spilt; because Mamma had only been taught to read poetry, receive calls, and discuss life on marble terraces beside the Gulf. Most excellent are the soudzoukákia of Anastasia de Santis— Papa would pretend to gobble, to emphasize this excellence, though Greek food is fodder beside the subtleties of Bologna, Torino, not forgetting little Parma. It was one of the jokes Mamma accepted, because they loved each other, even in Marrickville.
After deciding for nursing, Mary de Santis had once invited her fellow probationers Eileen Dooley and Verlie Rumble to a meal. Her gesture had been spontaneous enough, but misgiving set in as she watched her friends walking from the tram towards the junction of Warnock and Cathcart Streets, that brownest, most blistered corner in the whole suburb, on it the MIXED BUSINESS (Enrico de Santis) with residence above and behind.
Her martyrdom made public, Mamma appeared more desperate than ever. The black dress probably looked like mourning to the two summery visitors. Wearing over it a freshly stained apron, she brought them her Version’ of the Greek soudzoukákia.
‘These, I believe, are also called “Smyrna sausages”,’ she explained to Eileen and Verlie, who giggled.
‘Whatever they’re called, they look tasty,’ Eileen said to encourage Mamma.
It was a hot day. They were sitting beneath the trellis, its attempt at grapes mildewed by the humidity. Papa came out from the shop with a wicker-covered demijohn. Eileen and Verlie barely allowed themselves wine, and giggled as it touched their lips.
Eileen was pushing the food around the plate with her fork. ‘Gee, they’re rich, aren’t they?’ She had meant ‘foreign.
The girls had begun looking with a changed expression at their friend Mary de Santis, who grew reckless: she raised her glass and drained it in a purple, choking gulp. She could feel the wine returning to her cheeks, and what was almost insolence replacing her normal docility.
‘This is the food it is natural for us to eat.’ It was strange hearing herself talk like a bad translation, but in keeping with her foreignness, as she looked at Eileen and Verlie, the one dumpy, freckled, red, the other simply a pale girl.
By the time Mamma brought out the snapshots Mary de Santis had recovered, her docility, and her agony was complete. Mamma sat holding the snaps, her hands like graceful paper fans gone sooty in the grate. The photographs caused so much pain, you often wondered why she had to produce them. Today in particular, under the eyes of these gawping girls, they were excruciating.
‘These are at Smyrna,’ Mamma explained, herself laid bare.
‘Aren’t they funny!’ Eileen said. ‘The houses! Do people live like that?’
‘No. They don’t exist. The houses were destroyed by the Turks. This is one of the cathedral. This is where the Turks crucified the archbishop—on the doors of his own church. Afterwards they put out his eyes.’
The two girls were gasping and perspiring for the monstrous event they were being forced to experience.
‘All these are happier pictures,’ Mamma suggested, though her sigh would not have allowed you to believe; ‘all at Athens. After the Catastrophe we fled to Metropolitan Greece, and were some years as refugees. This is where Máro has been born. See? Máro as a small baby.’
They wouldn’t have believed it! Mary de Santis: this papoose thing; and black.
Mary de Santis realized she had reached the apogee of her foreignness; that she accepted it as part of her Greek fatality she only understood in later life. Where earlier in the sequence of events wine had replaced her docility with insolence, she was now gently drunk with pride.
‘Oh, what are these, Mrs de Santis?’ Passing through the house to the street the two girls could not resist what might be another source of danger.
‘These are icons, Christian—Orthodox icons.’
The girls breathed and mumbled. They said they were Catholic.
‘My husband was a Catholic—until he thought better of it.’ Mamma gently smiled.
The girls looked pained; one of them asked, ‘What is he now?’
‘He is nothing,’ Anastasia de Santis admitted, out of her tragic depths. ‘Oh yes, my husband is a courageous man.’
Brave? Perverse? Self-destructive? It was difficult to decide; or whether he was something of each: Enrico de Santis, the fashionable gynaecologist turned refugee and shopkeeper. ‘What is the use, Anastasia? By the time they have chewed me up in examinations, and convinced themselves I am not disruptive to their system, what shall I have left to give? I shall take this shop, and make a decent living. We have each other—as capital, haven’t we? And a shop will be entertaining for the child: all that pretty prosciutto and mortadella. Think of the geography she will learn from the labels on the tins! The linguistic advantages!’ Papa was at his most ironical; while Mamma invoked her Panayia and the saints.
In retrospect, Mary de Santis realized her parents’ love for each other had been their religion. Because she had grown up excluded from this, without their being conscious of it, she had evolved tentatively, painfully, a faith of her own.
On the surface it was her vocation as a nurse. During his worst mental torments Dr Enrico de Santis would ask to see her certificate. He seemed to find comfort in knowing that she was continuing in a tradition. In the final stages he would beg her for the needle, said she had the ‘kind touch’. She had obeyed his wishes to the extent of breaking her vows. While Mamma prayed to the Panayia, Saints Anastasia, Barbara, Cosmas and Damian—the lot. Mamma’s lips and temples grew transparent with prayer, as Papa’s whole being revealed its increasing dereliction.
After several years of trial and attempted expurgation, all three had been involved in the great mystery. Mary de Santis, the only survivor, emerged as the votary of life: there were the many others she must save for it; or ease out as she had eased the failed man her father, and her equally failed saint of a mother.
In spite of her certificate and thir
ty-three years of experience, Sister de Santis still considered herself a novice; humility would not have allowed her to claim status in any hierarchy of healing, whether physical or spiritual.
But she was sometimes taken by the hand and shown.
She also enjoyed worldliness. At her first meeting with Mrs Hunter those fifteen years ago, her future employer had set out to clarify a situation. ‘Although you are my nurse, Miss de Santis—God knows why I need a nurse for this—upset—“breakdown” my bitchier friends choose to call it—I don’t want you to emphasize the fact. No ghastly uniform. I’d like people to accept you as my companion. I shall think of you as my friend.’ Then, for the first time, you experienced Mrs Hunter’s smile: a golden net she spread over the innocent or unwary; and because in those days you were both, you had been caught.
During the first weeks with this unorthodox case, the steps you took across the geometric rugs, on jarrah floors of a sullen red, were hardly more than automatic. The silence hypnotized no less than the strangely broken voice which commanded while inviting.
Mrs Hunter decided, ‘I want you to make this your home. Go into the kitchen and see what you can find to eat if you feel hungry in the night. Take yourself off to bed if I’m boring you; I know I do run on at times—from being so much alone.’
Elizabeth Hunter spoke with such a studied earnestness she made all but the most cynical, or the most callous, believe. Mary de Santis was neither. She wanted a belief, which perhaps this ageing, though still beautiful woman could give her: secondhand experience must be more enlightening than that which may never come your way; and Mrs Hunter was composed of the many relationships she had enjoyed, with the many friends she was still seeing in spite of her myth of loneliness.
Certainly her husband was dead, her children gone—the daughter so recently and mysteriously after only a brief visit—but the maid was always running to answer the doorbell, to let in callers, or receive boxes of flowers, or single luxuries such as caviare or perfume, still wrapped, it sometimes seemed, in the sender’s straining thoughtfulness.
On one occasion Mrs Hunter remarked, ‘If only one could feel more grateful for what one doesn’t want; and the poor things, I’m pretty sure they can’t afford it.’
In the intervals when she found herself undeniably alone, the silence became a suppressed twangling, which broke free on one occasion not long after her nurse-companion’s arrival. ‘I’d like to show you something, Sister—I’m going to call you Mary; I’m old enough to take liberties—this little music-box belonged to the Prince Regent, or so the friend who gave it told me.’ Elizabeth Hunter opened the lid of the pretty gilt and velvet toy, and at once the silence of the drawing room was vibrating with its gilt tune.
They stood holding the music-box between them.
‘Play it if you ever feel like it,’ Mrs Hunter invited. ‘It does one good to give way to moods—even the superficial ones.’ Then she looked very keenly at her companion to see how her suggestion had been read.
Sister de Santis did open the music-box sitting alone one afternoon in the drawing-room, stiff and guilty without the protection of the uniform she was not allowed to wear. She saw again the grime in her mother’s fine, incompetent hands, and her father’s wasted arm quivering for the drug she could not deny him in his last days. Mary de Santis was relieved when the music tottered note by note to a full stop.
But she almost ceased to be a stranger in this echoing house. She found herself running helter skelter across the slithering rugs, the waxed jarrah, to fetch something they had forgotten, thermos or handkerchief; while Mrs Hunter waited in the car. She kept a chauffeur, but liked to drive herself along the coast or into the country: drives which, the nurse suspected, bored the driver.
It was in the evening that Elizabeth Hunter came into her own. Resting on an Empire daybed while still officially ill, she expected her companion, not to make conversation, but to listen to the thoughts she was forced to project.
‘When I was a child, Mary, living in a broken-down farmhouse, in patched dresses-a gawky, desperately vain little girl,’ Airs Hunter’s eyes glittered and flickered as she flirted with the fringe of her stole, ‘I used to long for possessions: dolls principally at that age; then jewels such as I had never seen—only a few ugly ones on the wives of wealthier neighbours; later, and last of all, I longed to possess people who would obey me—and love me of course. Can you understand all this?’
The nurse hesitated. ‘I suppose I can, in a way—in a way. But you see, I’ve never had any desire for possessions. I couldn’t imagine how I might come by them—or attract people, let alone have them obey me. We were a very close family. Outside that, I’ve only wanted to serve others—through my profession—which is all I know how to do. Oh, and to love, of course,’ she laughed constrainedly; ‘but that is so vast it is difficult to imagine—how—how to achieve it.’
Mrs Hunter suddenly looked angry and suspicious. ‘What do you understand by love?’
‘Well, perhaps—sometimes I’ve thought it’s like this: love is a kind of supernatural state to which I must give myself entirely, and be used up, particularly my imperfections—till I am nothing.’
Mrs Hunter seemed agitated: she had got up and was trailing her long fleecy stole. ‘Whatever they tell you, I loved my husband. My children wouldn’t allow me to love them.’ The stole had dragged so far behind, it was lost to her by catching on what must have been an invisible splinter.
‘Oh, I know I am not selfless enough!’ When she turned she was burning with a blue, inward rage; but quickly quenched it, and drew up a stool at this girl’s feet. ‘There is this other love, I know. Haven’t I been shown? And I still can’t reach it. But I shall! I shall!’ She laid her head on her nurse’s hands.
Mary de Santis was turned to a stick, though an exalted one, on feeling someone else’s tears gush and trickle into her hands.
Next morning Mrs Hunter said, ‘I’d like to give you something, Mary;’ and produced a seal with a phoenix carved into the agate. ‘You might wear it on a bracelet’; whether her nurse had one, she might not have considered.
Mary de Santis was embarrassingly touched. ‘I couldn’t,’ she said. ‘Or I might borrow it for a little.’ Clumsily conveyed, it must have sounded ungracious.
Mrs Hunter only laughed. ‘If that is how you are.’
As soon as the patient was considered ‘semi-invalid’ little dinners were arranged for long-established friends, who did not particularly interest the hostess, her nurse observed: they had eaten into her life like wire into a tree; they were also necessary for a discipline of kindness she had to practise.
At one of these dinners the Wyburds were introduced. The nurse had already met the solicitor professionally the day he engaged her for his client. There was no marked difference in his social behaviour, except that most of the evening he kept his eyelids lowered, probably tired out by a heavy day at the office. His wife, a thin plain, beaky woman, with dark-red hair and freckles, had something comically appealing about her. She must have been younger than a rough skin and wrinkles allowed her to appear. She was certainly younger than her solicitor-husband, but their hostess made her look old and dowdy, not that she minded, judging by her slightly ironical expression.
There was a second couple, probably friends of lesser standing: they appeared too grateful, as though they had borrowed money, or been able to do a rich and beautiful woman some unexpected favour. Sister de Santis did not catch the name of this unremarkable couple (another wife on the plain side) if indeed Mrs Hunter had introduced her friends to her companion.
The hostess was dressed very simply for a simple, perhaps obligatory occasion, but was able to shine the more for that.
She happened to remember, ‘When we went over, Alfred and I, for poor Dorothy’s wedding, we were actually invited—though only briefly, thank the Lord—to the family seat, Lunegarde. Exquisite wormeaten furniture. Gobelins by the acre. But the plumbing! The family used to rub themselves d
own with eau de Cologne, or if anybody ventured on a bath, Dorothy told me, it was brought from the village by the fire brigade.’ The company was so enchanted they would have accepted almost any extravagance she dared them not to believe. ‘And worse—far worse!’ Mrs Hunter could not resist her own powers. ‘You wouldn’t believe, Constance,’ though the grateful guest was obviously prepared to, ‘the cabinet de toilette— to which nobody had to be shown: it announced itself so blatantly—the door, darling, opened outwards, so that if you valued your privacy, you had to sit holding a cord attached to the knob.’
The thin couple was most appreciative, the Wyburds less so. Mary de Santis wished Mrs Hunter had not told the funny story; it was almost as though her employer were determined to destroy somebody’s good opinion.
Mrs Hunter turned to Mrs Wyburd. ‘I’ve probably bored you, Lal. You must have heard it a hundred times.’ Simultaneously she laid her hand on the back of her friend’s, for the solicitor’s wife was seated beside her owing to the shortage of men.
Mrs Wyburd neither denied nor reassured: she preserved her air of comical irony. The name ‘Lal’ still hung above the table; it had clanged too loud, as though Mrs Hunter did not give herself many opportunities for using it.
In the drawing-room over coffee the hostess remarked, again too aggressively, ‘You’re forgetting your duties as host, Arnold. Aren’t you going to offer us a liqueur?’
He did so with a punctiliousness only slightly rattled by his omission.
Lal said she’d have one of those green things. ‘Don’t they call it a “starboard light”? I’m told it’s a whore’s drink.’ Like other plain, dowdy women she would try springing a surprise.
‘And what do you fancy, Mrs Hunter?’ Mr Wyburd asked.
‘Thank you, Arnold. I’m still my doctor’s victim.’ She looked at her nurse, half appealing for confirmation, or perhaps not in connection with the matter at all.
The Eye of the Storm Page 17