The Eye of the Storm (2 page)

The nurse could only bite her lip; the hand had been dragged away from hers.

‘Of course you know about the dolls. Don't say I didn't tell you.' The old woman was threatening to become vindictive. ‘We were living beside the—oh, some—some
geographical
river. My father had given me a hundred dolls. Think of it—a hundred! Some of them I didn't look at because they didn't interest me, but some I loved to distraction.'

Suddenly Mrs Hunter turned her head with such a doll's jerk Sister de Santis held her breath.

‘You know it isn't true,' the old child complained. ‘It was Kate Nutley had the dolls. She was spoilt. I had two—rather battered ones. And still didn't love them equally.'

Sister de Santis was troubled by the complexities of a world she had been forced to re-enter too quickly.

‘I tore the leg off one,' Mrs Hunter admitted; her recovered calm was enviable.

‘Didn't they mend it?' the nurse dared inquire.

‘I can't remember.' Mrs Hunter gave a little whimper. ‘And have to remember everything today. People try to catch you out—accuse you—of not—not loving them enough.'

She was staring at the increasing light, if not glaring, frightfully.

‘And look my best. Bring me my looking-glass, Nurse.'

Sister de Santis fetched the glass: it was of that same ivory set as the brushes with lovers' knots in gold and lapis lazuli. Holding it by its fluted handle she tilted the glass for her patient to look. The nurse was glad she could not see the reflection: reflections can be worse than faces.

Mrs Hunter was panting. ‘Somebody must make me up.'

‘Sister Badgery will see to that.'

‘Oh, Badgery! She's awful. If only little Manhood were here—she knows how to do it properly. She's the one I like.'

‘Sister Manhood won't be here till lunch.'

‘Why can't somebody telephone her?'

‘She'll still be asleep. And later she'll probably have some shopping to do.'

Mrs Hunter was so upset she let her head drop on the pillow: tears gushed surprisingly out of the half-closed eyes.

Sister de Santis heard her own voice sound more placid than she felt. ‘If you rest your mind you'll probably look far more beautiful as your natural self. And that is how they'll want to see you.'

But the old woman fully closed her eyes. ‘Not now. Why, my lashes are gone—my complexion. I can
feel
the freckles, even on my eyelids, without having to look for them.'

‘I'm sure you're exaggerating, Mrs Hunter.' Small comfort; but the nurse's feet were aching, nor had her mind, her eyes, adjusted themselves to daylight: the withdrawal of darkness had left her puffy and moth-like.

When she noticed her patient staring at her too obsessively. ‘I'd like you to bring me something to drink. And something else—' putting out a hand at its oldest and feeblest, ‘I want you to forgive
me, Mary. Will you?' stroking no longer with bones, but the tips of feathers.

The sensation experienced by Sister de Santis was scarcely sensual; nor did it lift her to that state of disembodiment they sometimes enjoyed together. It was disturbing, though.

For her own protection the nurse ignored half the request, while agreeing too heartily to the other. ‘All right! What do you fancy?'

‘Nothing milky.' Mrs Hunter made a smacking sound with her lips, because those two glutinous strips did not release each other easily. ‘Something cold and pure,' she added after rejecting pap.

Sister de Santis had to relent; she had to look; and at once added to the caress of feathers, there were the eyes, some at least of their original mineral fire burning through the film with which age and sickness had attempted to obscure it. ‘I'd like a glass of water,' Mrs Hunter said.

Sister de Santis was reduced to feeling embarrassed and lumpish. ‘It'll be cold,' she promised, ‘from the fridge. I can't answer for its purity. It's what the Water Board provides.'

As she left the room, a glare from furniture and a bedpan scarcely covered by a towel, sprang at the high priestess, stripping her of the illusions of her office, the night thoughts, speculations of a mystical turn few had ever guessed at, and certainly, thank God, no one shared, except, perhaps, one malicious old woman. In her daytime form, Mary de Santis of thumping bust and pronounced calves, might have been headed for basket-ball.

Left alone, which after all was how she wanted to be, with due respect to poor broody faithful de Santis, Mrs Hunter lay with her eyes closed listening to her house, her thoughts, her life. All around her clocks were ticking, not to mention that muffled metronome which might have been her heart. In some ways it was an advantage to be what they refer to as ‘half blind'. She had always seen too clearly, it seemed: opaque friends had been alarmed by it; a husband and lovers had resented; worst of all, the children—they could have done murder. She scrabbled after the handkerchief a nurse had
hidden; so she cried without it.
I've never seen you cry, Elizabeth, unless you wanted something.
Alfred would lower his chin as though riding at an armoured opponent. And she would raise hers, accepting the challenge.
It hadn't occurred to me. But must be right if you've noticed.
Opposing a husband with the weapon of her profile: she had perfect nostrils, so they told her; she had also seen for herself in the glass. Only Alfred had not told her; was it out of delicacy? His friends all referred to him as ‘Bill'. Most of his life he had spent trying to disguise himself as one of the costive, crutch-heavy males who came to discuss wool and meat: so slow and ponderous, like rams dragging their sex through a stand of lucerne. There were also the would-be cuddly females making up to ‘Bill', unaware how immaculate he was.

Mrs Hunter laughed.

You know, Betty, you are the only one who has never called me by a friendly name.
Not ‘Bill': just to attempt it made her feel she was shaking her jowls like a bloodhound.
How can I? When ‘Alfred' is the name you've been given. I mean it's your
NAME—
as mine is ‘Elizabeth'.
She raised her voice and drew down her mouth to produce a dimple she held in reserve; but on this occasion it failed to persuade him.

Though he had never accused her of being cold, others had suggested that she was: satellite spinsters hopeful of prolonging schoolgirl crushes; wives in need of a receptacle in which to pour an accumulation of injustices; a man like Athol Shreve (she had only done it as an essay in sensuality; the hair alone disgusted her); that young Norwegian—no, or had he? (wasn't his subject fish?)—on the Warmings' island.

Not everyone is an island: they loved ‘Bill', while admiring Elizabeth Hunter. It is the children who are the most forbidding, the least hospitable of islands, though you can light a fire if you know how to scrape together the wherewithal.

She sucked the corner of a pillowslip remembering the children. What were their names? Dor-o-thy? And Bsl? Bas-il! Words of love at the time, ugly and pretentious in the end.

Mrs Hunter fell into a snooze trying to remember something else
she had discovered, not in any hairy embrace, or under threat by wet-kissing females, or children's butterfly-flickers alternating with denunciations. Falling into her light snooze she would have liked to experience a state of mind she knew existed, but which was too subtle to enter except by special grace.

The night nurse made her way down through what was technically her employer's house, an ugly, ostentatious one. She must remember that. It would be easier now that daylight was cracking the curtains. She must remember her framed certificate hanging beside her father's diploma; she must remember her thirty-two years of nursing (she would be fifty in a couple of months). In Mrs Hunter's house, furniture choked even the landings and the passages: presses and consoles and cabinets which could not be crammed into the rooms. Carpets, once rich and uniformly springy, were thinning in patches the owner would not see, and those who did, ignored; because what was the use? they expected her to die.

On the half-landing the nurse jerked at a curtain and let in more of the abrasive light. It fairly clashed with a vase of honesty standing in a niche: the silver medals on dry stems seemed to twitter as her hand withdrew. Dust hung in the light, like scentless incense, in spite of Mrs Cush:
with a person operatun on er own only two mornuns a week a speck of dust can be expected.

Something walked over Sister de Santis's grave, and she shivered. That is how they explain it, she ought to remember, not let her conscience get her down for having seen herself, that instant, laying the damp pledgets on the freckly eyelids after the last tremor had subsided. Remember, rather, that a disagreeable case drains less out of you—or so some of her colleagues maintained.

The nurse continued down the stairs, holding on to the rail as though in need of support. By night she floated, unassisted, whether up or down, her stiff white skirt barely brushing the protective hedge, its tangle of iron branches loaded with Hesperian fruit. Doubts seldom arose at night, because love and usage will invest the most material house with numinous forms and purposes, from
amongst which an initiate's thoughts will soar like multi-coloured invocations.

Whereas this morning, as she descended deeper into this stuffy well, Sister de Santis was unreasonably pursued by faint faecal whiffs, by the insinuating stench of urine from an aged bladder; while the light itself, or iron thorns, or old transparent fingernails, scratched at her viciously.

She would have to remember that no patient is entirely vicious or unreasonable.

It must have been fifteen years ago that Mr Wyburd gave warning, ‘I ought to tell you, Miss de Santis, you're taking on what I would call a
difficult
case.'

The solicitor made a pyramid out of his hands, fingertip to fingertip, almost too conventionally legal. She tried to calculate his age: not old, but old enough (probably born with an elderly manner). His skin was beginning to dry out, leaving behind a relief of veins on the formal hands. On the little finger of one hand was a signet ring, its stone a matching blue for the veins.

‘Not exactly capricious—I'd rather say “changeable”,' he emphasized in his careful voice.

While eyeing the nurse, he could have been wondering whether he might trust her with his reputation as well as the care of one of his more important clients. This was only for an instant, though: he was too respectful of the professions.

Outwardly as placid as her acquaintances accused her of being, Sister de Santis had sat forward, mentally at least, to take a better look at the difficulties, the caprices, with which the solicitor was threatening her. Something about the situation made her tingle, though a wordless mumbling, and her slow, creamy smile, conveyed disbelief.

A handsome woman: sluggish, but reliable. Her references were excellent; a colonel had left her an annuity.

Mr Wyburd coughed. ‘Mrs Hunter was something of a beauty in her day. Oh, she still has her looks. She is much admired. Many
have depended on her—for opinions and advice.' Mr Wyburd laughed; he dismantled his hands and hid them under the desk. ‘She enjoys a battle of wits, too!'

Mary de Santis smiled what was intended as appreciation. She must have looked rather stupid, she felt, but it was necessary to disguise her feelings: her excitement and expectations. Before each new case she hoped that she might prove herself afresh, but never so much as in combat with this vision of fragmented beauty. So she looked, still smiling, over the solicitor's shoulder, at the immaculately folded documents tied with identical ribbons of a disinfectant pink: she was fascinated by these too, by their mystic anonymity.

Mr Wyburd approached something which might be giving him trouble. ‘As I mentioned, Mrs Hunter is suffering from—you could hardly call it a breakdown—a slight nervous upset. Her daughter recently returned to France—where she has lived since her marriage to a Frenchman.' More than ever Mr Wyburd hesitated to disgorge. ‘I can hardly refer to this gentleman as her “husband”. You might say he “re-married” after a
form
of divorce. Which Dorothy Hunter's adopted faith won't allow her to recognize.'

The solicitor and the nurse were united in suitable gravity over these biographical details.

It comforted him to decide that Sister de Santis was in some ways probably obtuse: no disadvantage in a relationship with Elizabeth Hunter; nor should it weaken her sense of vocation. The solicitor caught a glimpse of the veil hovering behind her timeless hat, which his daughters might have referred to as ‘frumpish'.

‘When am I expected, Mr Wyburd?'

In the fifteen years since first acquaintance with Elizabeth Hunter, Mary de Santis had been sent for intermittently, sometimes to fulfil the needs of friendship, on several occasions to help dramatize a minor illness, and, finally, to officiate at the great showdown. In the circumstances, Sisters Badgery and Manhood, Mrs Lippmann and Mrs Cush, accepted lesser rank in the hierarchy without damage to their self-importance. None of them questioned the
efficiency of their superior, while some even sensed an authority of the spirit which gave her deeper access to the heart of the creature round whom they revolved, and to whom they were all, more or less, dedicated.

Until this morning, here was the archpriestess, a heavy woman clumping down the stairs, stumbling on the last of them. In her present condition her clumsiness was doubly irritating, and to look down and find the rod had broken free, the runner come adrift. On a day of such importance the incident made Sister de Santis perspire. She could feel a trickling down her back; the pores in her nose must be looking exaggerated; night had tossed her out, a crumpled, grubby stickiness.

If she had not been so mild, something which might have passed for rage made her snatch at curtains as she passed, unlatch fastenings, heave at windows: the air surrounding her was thick as flannel. Without real justification, she could have pounced on the housekeeper if the opportunity had occurred, but Mrs Lippmann would still be in bed: it was her one fault, her only luxury.
(Half my life, or before I am myself a servant, Miss de Santis, I am coming home while the maid is still only rising.)