Later, when the gathering was threatening to break up, she aimed her voice very pointedly at the colourless couple, ‘You can’t have missed reading that Athol Shreve has almost finished his sentence.’
The husband and wife appeared wretchedly uncomfortable, as though they felt themselves responsible for something. The husband remarked that, to his mind, Athol Shreve was the greatest disappointment, ever, in Australian political life.
‘I wasn’t surprised.’ Mrs Hunter scorned those who were. ‘I mistrusted him from the beginning. You remember the night we met at the Radfords’ dinner, and he gave us all the lift? Oh, I shan’t say I wasn’t intrigued, too. He had something crude and real about him. Well, that was his reality—that of a thief.’ She gave two or three short laughs, which for some reason increased the distress of the two friends for whom she was performing.
Not long after, the gathering did break up, and the couple were again gratefully smiling for the attentions of this rich and important woman. Sister de Santis realized they were not friends, only slight acquaintances. The Wyburds who were more inured to Mrs Hunter’s friendship, might have felt sorry for, or contemptuous of them.
When nurse and patient were at last alone, drinking delicious, thirst-quenching, private draughts of cold water, Elizabeth Hunter confessed, ‘Those Stevensons—I often wonder why I don’t drop them, except that there are certain things—past events—which have to be faced in perpetuity. I suppose that is the reason for the Stevensons: now and then they lend themselves to one’s self-mortification. And the poor creatures do enjoy a good dinner.’
The two women were passing through the hall. Elizabeth Hunter had linked herself with, and was leaning on, the one who for that moment was wholly her nurse.
‘Why,’ Sister de Santis noticed, ‘you haven’t read your letter’; it had come by the morning delivery, but still lay unopened on the salver. ‘And isn’t the stamp unusual. Is it Norwegian?’ She could have been trying to encourage a patient who threatened to despond.
‘Yes. The letter is from a Norwegian,’ Mrs Hunter admitted, ‘who was in this country recently—an ecologist—by repute an intelligent man—but weak, it turned out, and something of a boor.’ She had begun tearing up the still unopened envelope.
‘Shouldn’t you at least read his letter?’ asked Sister de Santis, who seldom received one.
Mrs Hunter said no, she wouldn’t, and gave the pieces to her nurse to dispose of.
‘One day, Mary, I shall tell you about it. Dorothy and I were invited by some friends to stay on their island, and this Norwegian, Professor Pehl, was our fellow guest. I’m too tired for it tonight.’ Suddenly Mrs Hunter looked so old and haggard Mary de Santis decided she would always resist hearing the story; she herself was weak, sensual enough, to crave intermittently for the luxury and refreshment of physical beauty.
Normally Elizabeth Hunter appeared astoundingly young and beautiful for one who, from what she told, must be around seventy. Her face would certainly crinkle under the influence of impatience or anger, but only, you felt, to become the map of experience in general, of passion in particular. Untouched by any of this, her body had remained almost perfect: long, cool, of that white which is found in tuberoses, with their same blush pink at the extremities. If it had not been for professional detachment, the nurse might have found herself drugged by a pervasive sensuousness as she helped her patient out of the bath and wrapped her in towels, during her ‘illness’. As it was, physical languor was absorbed into a ritual; physical beauty became an abstraction, in its way far more desirable to anyone hungry for a work of art or of the spirit, and who had not in fact come across one, apart from the dark icons inherited from her mother.
Elizabeth Hunter responded even to the abstract admiration she inspired, most noticeably at the dressing-table: her eyes opened to their fullest; her hair lent itself to tenderest weaving; the line of her cheek was rejuvenated. She liked her nurse to hand her things, particularly on nights when dinner parties were held; because now that she was practically ‘well’ she arranged a number of more formal functions, ‘to give notice that I’m neither mewed up in a loony bin nor staggering down the ramp towards the everlasting bonfire. One’s enemies, one’s friends for that matter, don’t really believe unless one shows them regularly.’
Preparing for such an occasion, her blue stare suddenly expanded to embrace a reflection in the glass deeper than her own. ‘I must lend you something to wear, Mary.’
The nurse would have felt herself flush if she had not been able to see it. Her party dress looked frumpish, and though recently ironed, already crumpled; whereas the older woman shone: her form seemed to create an immaculacy out of whatever clothed it.
Now she rushed at a drawer in a burst of inspiration, tore it open, rummaged, and pulled out a broad ribbon or sash in turquoise silk, which she looped round the waist of the badly-cut muslin dress, and tied in a bow at the back as surely as impulsively.
Mary de Santis was too ashamed to move or speak. She was afraid to look at herself in the glass.
‘Wait!’ Mrs Hunter commanded.
She was fastening the strands of a pearl bracelet round a wrist too passive for resistance. Then, her hands trembling for the climax of her creative act, she tried out a pearl-and-turquoise star, first on a shoulder, before fastening it for preference on the muslin breast.
‘I like it better there—in the centre.’ She was standing back to judge her work. ‘Less self-conscious. You are too pure, Mary, to follow fashion.’
Mary de Santis was only too self-conscious: so much so, she still had not dared look at herself.
Finally she did.
‘See? I haven’t altered you.’ Mrs Hunter laughed. ‘Only heightened a mystery which was there already, and which is too valuable not to respect.’
The younger woman was trembling for this self she had sensed at times, without ever believing anyone else would recognize.
In a last burst of confession as they heard the doorbell ring, Mrs Hunter said, ‘How I wish I could have had you as a daughter. Or sister. Better a sister; then we could have told each other our secrets—and you would have helped me.’ She even laid her cheek for a moment against her nurse’s, and the latter felt the other’s jewels freezing her skin, rustling and quivering against her dress.
Mary de Santis had never felt so desperately the need to worship.
That night she must have appeared a mysterious blur, or at her most positive, a dark presence at the fashionable dinner party. At least the women were amused by what they considered one of Betty Hunter’s experiments in the outré, just as her ‘illness’ had been an eccentric character’s exhibition of caprice: they could take neither seriously. The men were at a greater loss: the knowing cats as well as the ingratiating dogs amongst them. Although the companion, or whatever, answered their questions pleasantly and accurately, she would not be rubbed up against, and it puzzled their male skins as well as their male vanity. They suspected her of holding in reserve some unidentifiable vice.
During the evening a gloom seemed to possess Mrs Hunter: she developed a staccato manner for the maids, and her irritation extended itself to her guests; perhaps she had undertaken more than she should have, or drunk too much. Anyway when the guests had gone, you felt it was a riddance. Or not to be simplified to that extent.
She approached, and her eyes were terrible: at the point where concentration becomes fragmentation. ‘You know as well as I do, Mary, it would be self-indulgence on my part to continue making use of you now that I am well. I must ask you to go when you’ve found a suitable case.’
‘Oh—yes? Mrs Hunter.’ It was pitched somewhere between agreement and query: you too, were exhausted, or dizzy from the wines; or a dunce of a little girl in a turquoise sash.
What could have been interpreted as bland acceptance of her proposition might have increased Mrs Hunter’s irritation: her mouth had taken on an ugly shape to express a bitterness. ‘I wouldn’t want to expose anyone of y
our worth and dedication—indefinitely—to a flawed character like mine.’ It was as though, for some obscure reason of the moment, she had decided that love, whether given or received, was more dangerous than contempt; or else she saw the good in herself as an immodesty it was her duty to conceal.
As she climbed the stairs, her shoulder blades and a diamond clasp made her look more solitary. But this seemed her chosen intention.
Left standing below, Sister de Santis untied the turquoise sash with which Mrs Hunter had bound her. What she could not reject were the implications, human as well as super-human, which she had accepted while they were dressing for the party. Even her agnostic father had failed to commit her to unbelief.
Sister Manhood was given to speculating aloud to her colleagues, ‘One day—any day now—one of us will go in there and find the old thing lying dead. I wonder which of us it will be? Bet I’m the one who’ll cop it !’
It was an event Sister de Santis no longer contemplated. If Flora Manhood insisted on its possibility it could not be through fear of becoming emotionally involved with death. Flora’s emotions were centred on Flora, and she simply didn’t want the trouble of ringing Doctor and tidying up the body. Nor would Sister de Santis herself have been emotionally involved by this stage with Mrs Hunter’s death: she was more concerned with the spirit she tended nightly, and which, in spite of a deceptive flickering, might have come to an arrangement with death. Sister de Santis would not have discussed this, of course, with any of the others, not even Mrs Lippmann. In spite of a broadminded attitude to life and contact with death on a grand scale, the housekeeper dreaded IT as an end; she could not see beyond the handful of ashes.
Mrs Hunter herself said, early the morning after her children had flown in, ‘Now that my body allows me a certain amount of freedom, I can roam about more—not my mind—I know my mind is a shambles; you’re at liberty to tell me, Sister—but myself—all that I have been and seen, though not always done. I am free to gallop as far and as fast as I like along the banks of the river—nobody to call me back for meals or baths—or take the sword out of my hand because they consider it dangerous. Not understanding I may need it to cut my way through the last layer. Or that wind flows thicker and blacker than water. And hair. You didn’t know one of the wigs is black, did you—Mary? Nor did Lilian. She only experienced murder—because that was what she believed—that her end was in death by her Russian lover. Poor Lilian—my other Nutley! She hadn’t begun to learn that love is not a matter of lovers—even the least murderous one. So she had to die.’
The old woman under the eclipsed silver sun, which radiated by day in the head of her great rosewood bed, sounded so far distant the night nurse took her pulse. Sister de Santis did not believe she would find the pulse had weakened, but this was what she had been taught to do.
‘You see?’ Mrs Hunter smiled, or forced her lips as close as she could to a display of affectionate sarcasm.
‘Go to sleep,’ the nurse advised.
‘I may—if I’m favoured.’ The nurse brought a pill. ‘No! No! Not while there’s work to do.’ She clacked with her sticky tongue against her palate. ‘Pills are all very well if you want to dispose of yourself, but I have an idea I’m not mine—to do what I want with.’
The nurse filled a glass with water and held it to her patient’s lips.
Mrs Hunter’s nostrils stiffened. ‘You’re not poisoning me, are you? I’m the one must decide—not Basil—Dorothy—Lal Wyburd—any of you. No, not even I.’
The nurse said, ‘I thought you were thirsty. I brought you a glass of water.’
‘Then I’ll risk the water. It’s my conscience I’m worried about: the pan mightn’t hold it.’ But when she had drunk, she seemed reassured. ‘Did you have a kind night, Nurse?’
‘Yes, thank you. About an hour ago I went down to the kitchen and fried myself some sausages.’
Mrs Hunter was laughing in her nose as if about to share a funny secret. ‘Nurses were always whacking into sausages in the small hours.’ When she became more serious. ‘Quite right too. Feed the spirit. And kitchens are fascinating at night: full of things you don’t notice by day. Sometimes a chair you haven’t been seeing for years. Or a bowl of fat with fur growing out of its skin. I can believe such things interest you, Sister—because you are religious.’
Whether religious or not (that was something she would not have breathed about, not even to Mrs Hunter asleep) Sister de Santis admitted to a belief in common objects. If you depend on something to any extent, you might as well learn to respect it; so she never kicked the furniture or threw the crockery about.
Clocks had begun to ping and reverberate in the depths of the house. In another suburb the hour was counted out, though so remotely, it had not much connection with time.
‘Don’t you think you might rest?’ asked the nurse.
‘I could have rested if I hadn’t heard the doorbell ringing.’
‘That was hours ago. It shouldn’t disturb you now.’
‘Who was it?’
‘Sister Manhood’s friend—the chemist. He wanted to know where she was, and I couldn’t help him.’
‘Ask the bus conductress!’
‘I didn’t think of that. But surely he must know about the cousin?’
Mrs Hunter had floated far enough not to feel concerned about anyone else, or so it appeared to the nurse.
Sister de Santis fetched the skirt she had brought for mending. As her rather naked-looking hands stitched at the torn hem, she thought how her legs, even in the finer flesh-coloured stockings she wore to the city or to afternoon tea with one or two nursing acquaintances, had never drawn much attention to themselves. When she was younger she used to wonder what she would do if a pervert started stroking her legs, as she read they did, in cinemas. But it had never happened, perhaps partly because she had lost her taste for films; she was too tired, anyway, by the time she came off duty. Only occasionally in buses an old man’s watery stare would wash around her ankles and mount higher, though not high, for her skirts had never been of the shortest. Colonel Askew, another old man, and the patient who had left her an annuity, had sometimes gripped her knee, and she had not bothered to remove his cold blue claw; the colonel could not always remember his motive in raising food to his mouth, or why he had gone to the lavatory.
Comfortably and profitably occupied with her mending Sister de Santis should have felt protected. She was not, though: some disturbance kept heaving at the placid surface of her consciousness. She tried going over details of the voyage recommended for Colonel Askew’s health, and one of the happier episodes in her own eventless life: how they had sat ‘in mufti’ (it was the colonel’s joke) at a table for two in the dining saloon of the liner which was taking them, and eaten fish rolled in sawdust, and thin grey slices of roast beef; before lunch and dinner, the colonel always drank the one prescribed Scotch (he prescribed a white lady for his nurse, ‘because’, he remembered, ‘women enjoy the sweet things’) while informed eyes at the smoke room tables diagnosed a geriatric folly (‘can’t you see the old boy kneading her like dough; that hard, narrow berth must make a perfect kneading board’).
Her recollections, in the end, were little more protection than her mending. She thought about the meaning of ‘smug’, what exactly it conveyed: in her mind’s eye she saw the suet crust of a steak-and-kidney pudding, like the texture of an unpowdered nose. Colonel Askew used to enjoy his steak-and-kidney, but had been warned off salt by that stage, and was afraid they might put some in. He died at Brown’s Hotel of a final, anticipated thrombosis. Before returning home, she had taken a brief holiday in Suffolk: the frosted roads, the hedgerows with their beads of scarlet bryony on withered umbilical cords, her own solitariness (when hadn’t it been? though never a colder, harder one) shocked any smugness out of her. Her footsteps followed her hollowly. Safe behind the textbook flatness of her training she should always have been able to resist calculating death’s dimensions. Just as the study of ana
tomy should ensure against preoccupation with the physical.
Sister de Santis threw aside her mended skirt. Before going downstairs she looked at her patient without seeing. All the way down, through the felted air of the staircase, the nurse’s starched uniform might have been trying to remind her of possible missions. She couldn’t very well cook herself another plate of sausages. There was her interest in objects, as Mrs Hunter had sensed. In a wire safe she found the basin of fat Mrs Hunter knew about: the green fur sprouting from the skin. There was a knot in the kitchen table polished by her own hand as she sat at night eating sausages and left-over scraps of potato.
Again she saw the whorl of hair close-clipped against the nape of a neck. ‘She went off duty as usual. I’m sorry I don’t know where she is,’ she had repeated out of sympathy for the young man standing at the door. Mr Pardoe (Sister de Santis had been taught to use Christian names only after agreement and a ceremony) was not unlike another object in wood, turning bluntly away, smelling of nicotine agitated by hot spittle.
‘If she isn’t in her room I don’t know what to suggest.’ She could have hung on all night in the lighted porch offering non-suggestions to this knotty object of a young man; how would that whorl of hair feel if you touched it?
Mr Pardoe was moving off, when he turned, his teeth flashing ferociously. ‘Did the actor come?’ He laughed in no particular direction.
‘Sir Basil Hunter? Oh yes, he arrived this evening. His mother was so excited; we all were,’ she heard herself. ‘He had his dinner here, and went afterwards to a hotel.’
‘I bet Flora got a thrill out of meeting the great actor.’
‘Oh, she barely met him.’ To comfort the knotty object she added, ‘And actors are like anybody else—in essentials, I should say.’
‘Yes. In essentials,’ he agreed; whether comforted or not, he decided finally to leave.
Watching him go down the badly lit path, she called after him, ‘Don’t forget those three steps just before you reach the bottom. They’re dangerous in the dark.’ In spite of her sympathy for him, and her faith in the honesty of ordinary objects, she knew it was herself she was trying to help: she was like a woman deep in the country trying to hold a stranger whose departure would leave her alone. Which she was at last. She was left picking the needles from a rosemary bush beside the porch. The perfume increased her isolation.
The Eye of the Storm Page 18