The Eye of the Storm

by Patrick White

  ‘It is not the lavatory only. It is Mrs Hunter.’ The housekeeper looked visionary today.

  ‘As if the old girl will know about it, Lottie—not if you don’t tell her—or care if she did.’

  ‘She will care about what they do to her,’ Mrs Lippmann said, ‘her children.’

  ‘Do you think she has any idea?’ Sister Badgery was taking off her veil and folding it; her hair had thinned at the parting, and was of a neutral or sludge colour.

  ‘Who knows?’ Mrs Lippmann had to suffer everything herself, or so it sounded.

  Much as she disliked men, Sister Manhood began to think women got on her tits as badly, anyway this afternoon. Irritations must be in her stars. She went up and found the old biddy had done it in the bed. (Bet it had happened before Badgery handed over: her so pleased with herself at lunch.)

  And Lottie Lippmann and the loo.

  As Sister Manhood stripped her patient’s bed, gathering together in one exasperated crumple of sheet anything ‘foreign’ (trust Badgery) the tears were as good as shooting. Perspiring too. And no spare deodorant, more than likely, in the Nurses’ Room.

  When Betty Hunter said, ‘I haven’t done anything, Sister—have I? I must have been dreaming. My nurse was so unkind to me. She told me I must eat the cold mutton or spend the rest of the day in my room. Or was it Kate Nutley’s nurse? I don’t—believe—we could afford one.’

  ‘P’raps it wasn’t you that did it.’ What bliss to be a geriatric nut.

  It was a long afternoon. Sister Manhood fetched a mag to have a read in an easy chair by Mrs Hunter’s window. She should have felt relieved her patient had withdrawn, it seemed, into sleep. But she wasn’t relieved, the magazine too full of old women displaying the fluffy toys they had made, and crochet bedspreads, and tea cosies, themselves with scone faces and enormous overstuffed cosies for bodies. Sister Manhood could feel the wrinkles prickling as they opened in her own cheeks. She went at one stage and patted her face with wych-hazel. This evening it didn’t soothe; it fed a burning which had taken possession of her skin.

  Then the gate squealed, and Mr Wyburd was coming up the path. Slowly. Another geriatric: if his head was still his to use, it wouldn’t be for long; you could hear the arteries hardening in him in pauses between chosen words. Just your luck old Wyburd turning up the night you wanted off early; worse luck still, de Santis (Mary the Saint of Saints!) letting you down.

  She came in at last in that same navy hat. ‘I see Mr Wyburd’s car is at the gate.’

  Flora Manhood was perked up, quickly and efficaciously. ‘He’s in with Betty—having his turn,’ she snickered.

  ‘I expect in the end he’ll be the one who’ll have to tell her what they propose doing to her.’

  ‘Oh hell—yes!’ Flora Manhood felt breathless now that she was actually faced with the prospect for her evening. ‘Yes, he might. I can’t think why I—why we’ve got to worry—not personally—about what happens in a patient’s life—outside her sick life, I mean.’

  Sister de Santis said, ‘But the princess and Sir Basil—it worries me when I find human beings more disappointing than I expected.’

  ‘I never start by expecting too much,’ Sister Manhood maintained; though she often did, of course, she knew.

  Seated on the stool, her own reflection in front of her in the dressing-table mirror, she became aware that Mary de Santis was looking at her from under the awful navy hat.

  Flora tried to protect herself. ‘And I never had tickets on Princess Dorothy—or Sir Basil Hunter.’

  De Santis didn’t answer, but continued, probably, looking. What was she trying to winkle out?

  Sister Manhood turned and said, ‘Why don’t you get yourself another hat, Sister? It’s gay colours today. And I don’t think navy suits you. Makes you look livery.’

  Sister de Santis had begun to remove the offending hat. ‘I grow attached to things.’

  ‘Not clothes, for God’s sake! They’re not for permanent, are they? It would turn women into statues, sort of—clothed statues.’

  That made Mary de Santis smile, and Flora Manhood realized her colleague did in fact have something of a statue about her: a statue with live eyes. Funny how old de Santis could make you feel inferior and you didn’t mind.

  Then she saw that Sister de Santis was not smiling for anything that had been said, but for thoughts she had been turning over. ‘I know it’s really none of my business as a nurse—it’s the doctor who could say something—but as an old friend who is fond of Mrs Hunter—that is why I feel I’m entitled to speak to Sir Basil. Not here where it’s all so cluttered—too many associations to get in the way—I might go to his hotel, and appeal to him to consider the distress he’s in danger of causing his mother.’

  Flora Manhood was surprised to see Mary de Santis had begun to blush. She had never thought of her as being exactly beautiful, and now only for a moment, because of something shocking about it all.

  ‘You’d be wasting your time,’ Sister Manhood mumbled, and got up. ‘Or that’s what I think.’ She wished it had been a hospital, when she could have produced a chart, handed over with efficient, completely impersonal cool, and swept off without further yakker.

  She did sweep off, even so.

  She couldn’t skip quick enough bang the door she didn’t care down the dark treacherous path a shrub hitting her across the eyes could have been a wire switch made her whinge she couldn’t see what some people saw in trees (it was Col Pardoe who was so sold on trees on nature: its spontaneous recurrence).

  Nobody could say she wasn’t spontaneous; it was spontaneity which had ended by making her regret the situation she was in. It was too much spontaneity which persuaded her for a time that she needed Colin Pardoe. I am not whole Col except when I feel you inside me then we are truly one person, she had been fool enough to even put it in writing; the spoken word fades out, but writing lasts for ever if a person is mean enough to want to prove something.

  After passing Wyburd’s car she began to act more—more prudently. It was not her word, but one she had heard the solicitor use: I don’t think it would be prudent Sister Manhood to allow Mrs Hunter to go for a drive she would see nothing almost certainly overtire herself and perhaps catch a chill. To live, to love prudently. That meant to think so much about it you didn’t get anywhere at all. It wouldn’t pay today. If it mightn’t be desirable in the long run.

  As she walked (more prudently) along Moreton Drive towards the bus, she wondered what and how Sister de Santis, who suggested she was capable of thinking things out, would say and do to Sir Basil Hunter. One thing for sure: he wouldn’t take her seriously wearing that hat. But perhaps St Mary would buy herself a new one, a real whirligig, on the solemn occasion of her intercession for Basil’s mother.

  Flora Manhood was slightly sorry she had brought up the subject of hats. With or without, what would de Santis know to do with any man, let alone Basil Hunter? You could only imagine her sitting alone in her room, mending, or, to turn it into a holiday, leafing through the National Geographic.

  Then Sister Manhood felt wholly sorry for the colleague she did respect. Sincerely. I am sincere aren’t I? She often thought you can never know truthfully what you are, when you are the one and only who ought to be in a position to know.

  On the bus she caught there were several men looking at her. She looked away from the dirty men. She tried to adopt a comfortable position, to pull her skirt down, but it wouldn’t come, or only so far: her green. The bus wasn’t all that full because it happened to be a between period. (She could reason things out for herself when these ran along practical lines.) There was a pretty bitch of a conductress: no dyke. (You would have died if it had been Snow.) The conductress looked down her nose at you. Well, you couldn’t deny it was you the greasy old men coming off shifts and out of pubs, scabby, horny men, were looking at, wasn’t it?

  The betweentime bus rumbled along.

  She had worked this out at least: she would catch hi
m before his dinner, perhaps changing into dinner gear for some gala occasion when the presence of a great visiting actor might be sought. She would send up her name: Flora Manhood. Miss? No, Sister Manhood. Give him a clue, for Christ’s sake.

  After she had left the bus, and found her connection, and arrived, she hung around the bright thoroughfare a while before going down the hill to the hotel at which he was staying. Take her time. She could hear the voice through the receptionist’s receiver asking for them to send her up, like a meal on a tray. Upstairs Sir Basil would have dropped to which nurse, the ‘pretty one’, the one his eye had roved over, the night of his arrival. If she was to be completely frank, it scared the shits out of her now that it was approaching.

  So she hung around a bit, looking at the cheap engagement rings in the windows; in the souvenir shops, the opals and the kangaroo claws. (Wear a kangaroo coat—white—for her first press interview—her hair a short bleached Mia Farrow.)

  But what she never ever wanted was marriage. Col had taught her that, if not about MAHL-er. She turned her back on everything that made her want to puke, and her skirt, what there was of it, swished in the plate glass. She didn’t seem able not to swish tonight however prissy she walked. Along the pavement the men were looking at her: the disguised G.I.s on leave from that war; the Hungarian Jews without, and even with, their wives; the spotty, fish-eyed kinks. A pair of poufs had a good giggle, as though recognizing their own act. She looked in a window and caught her green swishing, her body barely camouflaged by the pattern of deeper greener leaves. Shoot said the eyes of the G.I.s on leave from war the kinks picked their noses and rolled it at least the Jewish gentlemen were dry and professional in their glances a queeny giggle sprayed her up one side of her neck.

  She turned her head, looking into the shop windows. What Mrs Hunter said about goats that had been with the buck could apply also perhaps to women who were on their way there: other people scented it. As she stretched her neck, her green seemed to fit closer to her hips. You couldn’t say she hadn’t been what they call ‘chaste’ for some time now, though that didn’t mean she hadn’t let her mind roam around a bit, or hoped that some completely satisfying dream might descend on her during sleep. All the while making her calculations, by the calendar too, with pencil and paper, on Vidlers’ wiped-down laminex.

  Till you were ready according to figures.

  That was why the men were looking at her. Because she was ready. And unprotected. All men, she suspected, not only Col Pardoe, hated the pill as being unnatural. It was natural for men, even if they didn’t know it, to want to pump a woman up, then in watching, feel their self-importance expand.

  So all the men were watching her as she turned down the darker street on her planned visit to Sir Basil Hunter. If she slipped in a bit of advice on how to treat his old mother, that was to save de Santis the trouble. It was in no way related to her plan, the hands of which had begun to articulate, the feet to kick: she felt dizzy, if not crazy, with all that was forming in her head.

  The receptionist, a dark shiny girl who looked as though she didn’t do anything about her armpits, made a tight mouth, and said, ‘I fancy Sir Basil will be changing for dinner;’ which was exactly as Flora Manhood had hoped.

  The receptionist frowned before smiling at the bakelite cup she was addressing. ‘A Sister Manhood to see you, Sir Basil.’ There were the usual formal gulps and clicks from the phone; then the receptionist stuck the phone back on its stand, and without looking, condescended, ‘Up the short flight, and follow the passage to the left. It’s number Five;’ her voice as impersonal as bakelite: whose business was it if a casual, if Sir Basil Hunter (Guest of Honour on the A.B.C.) received a prostitute in his room?

  The dark shiny receptionist had already begun pressing her damp handkerchief against her catarrhal nose before Sister Manhood started mounting the short flight, to follow the passage to the left.

  The visitor had hardly given Sir Basil time to come out from under the shower; but he came, in a dressing-gown she recognized as ‘luxurious’, tousling his hair with a rough towel. ‘What can I do for you?’ The voice was natural, weary rather than elderly, at any rate not as old as Arnold Wyburd’s.

  He must have dropped to himself, because immediately he settled for a sharper expression, both mouth and eyes, and stopped drying his hair.

  She felt a spurt of fear, which might have shot deeper into her if it hadn’t been for Mary de Santis coming up with guidance. ‘It’s your mother,’ Flora Manhood said, ‘I thought I’d like to have a word with you about—Sir Basil.’

  ‘Oh, come!’ He laughed; and she reckoned the eye-teeth were probably hitching posts for the false. ‘I was hoping you were paying me a sociable visit.’

  Legs apart, back turned, rubbing stuff into his hair in front of the dressing-table glass, Sir Basil Hunter gave the impression it was the most natural thing in life to be receiving sociable visits from girls, in hotel bedrooms, in his dressing-gown. As for herself, she felt for ever rooted in her origins: in spite of your training at P. A., the diploma, the gear you had dolled yourself up in, a pretty intensive sexual life (till recently at least) and a lengthy spell nursing a rich bitch who had many cranky but often pointed answers to the questions, your basic knowledge was that of the girl reared amongst the banana palms up country from Coffs Harbour.

  All of this made her mumble past the trembling cigarette she had lit for a purpose. ‘Mrs Hunter has been my case for over a year. Why can’t you believe I have her interests at heart?’

  He stooped a bit, so that his reflection could stare back at her. Without turning, he gave her a look of what she suspected was—commiseration? Seeing that he knew the hypocrite she was, she dragged on the jittery cigarette she had only lit to help herself. (Never got more than a screen, you couldn’t say it was pleasure, out of smoking.)

  While still taken up with the hair he was dashing back into shape, the lights in it intensified by repeated blows from the brushes against the crisp waves and unctuous tonic, Sir Basil sighed. ‘Yes—Mother—poor darling!’

  After that he laid the brushes down; it was as though his visitor and he had settled a matter between them: they had done their duty by Elizabeth Hunter.

  Sir Basil brought a bottle of Scotch. He brought ice from the fridge, which was ticking over the other side of the room; while she removed from her tongue a shred of tobacco she wasn’t sure existed, but it was what they do.

  (How to raise her glass without giving herself away? There was the two-handed method she had practised while a trainee on her first dates with residents: young pukey milk-skinned doctors, themselves nervous enough not to notice the trembles in somebody else; but Sir Basil Hamlet Hunter?)

  ‘If you don’t mind, I prefer a lighter one.’ Not quite, but almost, Badgery lining up a tea planter as the sun went down on the equator.

  He added soda. She felt the draught prickling upward, and lowered her eyes. She sank her pale lipstick in the glass as she noticed the hairs on the backs of the actor’s fingers.

  ‘Right?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Even if the half of her tried on and off to kid the other half into believing her standards were basically moral, and that she was genuinely concerned for Mrs Hunter’s welfare, the more positive half had declared its intentions by choosing the sofa; just as he declared his by sitting down deliberately beside her. The sofa was neither very large nor very new; the springs protested, but the occupants were brought unavoidably closer as from the sides of a shallow funnel. More unexpected was the sudden change of climate, from temperate to tropical, as the steam from his freshly showered body burst out of the dressing-gown. For a moment or two she had trouble getting her breath.

  Sir Basil seemed unconscious of the effect he had produced without evidently trying for it; he was too intent on the touches with which he would build up a performance into something recognizably his.

  ‘Thank you for coming here tonight,’ he said, focusing a lustrous eye o
n his opposite lead. ‘You couldn’t have known you’d be saving me from myself.’

  ‘Oh?’ The most she could summon out of her stupor was this pathetic moo, like a cow sunk, but passively, in a bog.

  ‘One of my black days.’

  ‘I don’t want to latch on—not, I mean, if you have anything else in view.’ A pellet of gum flattened on a back tooth couldn’t have given worse trouble than the words her jaws were trying to get rid of. ‘The girl at the desk said you were dressing for dinner.’

  ‘Dinner with myself—unless the girl at the desk knew more than I.’ All the time he was looking at, or into her, his right hand was picking over the upholstery somewhere at the back of her head.

  She must make the effort to overcome this stranglehold of huskiness on her monotonous, her charmless voice. ‘Don’t imagine I came here expecting dinner.’ She hawked up the words, it sounded, out of her hoarse throat.

  Instead of answering he smiled at her with an indulgence to dismiss diffidence for good and all.

  He was certainly going out of his way to make it easy for her. She was by now almost sealed up with Sir Basil in his envelope of steam. She should not have had to think out a further move, only adopt a grateful expression.

  What then prevented her taking immediate advantage of his consideration? It wasn’t Mrs Hunter, though in the absence of an admissible reason, it would bloody well have to be: not the old incontinent carcase whose mind maundered after the dolls she had played with and tortured as a child, till suddenly and cruelly, she was back inside her right mind, the dolls turned into human playthings. You would have to concentrate, not on this real woman, but the pale ghost of a saint Lottie Lippmann and de Santis persuaded themselves to believe in.

  Instead, what Flora Manhood had begun to see was not the ghost-saint, it was Sir Basil Hunter’s knee—and calf—slowly released by the slippery folds of the dressing-gown. ‘I mean, I did honestly come here to ask whether you were considering your mother’s feelings in putting her in the Thorogood Village.’ She seemed to have achieved at last a low, soft, perhaps even appealing voice, while making circular passes with the palm of a hand over her own uppermost knee, unwisely, it soon appeared, because it emphasized the nakedness, not to say the closeness, of his.