The Eye of the Storm (39 page)

He might have snoozed a little.

Because the tree was writhing around him none of the flattering palmate hands but the human denuded ones in bone stringing him up not against the halcyon cyclorama the Department of Tourism advertises but on branches of the pure anguish this is why He is unplayable by actors anyway at those moments when the veins are filled with lightning the Fool flickering in counterpoint like
conscience conscience dies first so that you can feel more thoroughly destitute nothing else matters but this pure destitution not all the stalking the blood Goneril and Dorothy not jellied eyes not even the misunderstood Cordelia nothing is truly solved unless at the last button why Mother is closest but how close to the undoing Mitty the Jacka would cut it off before its time in one of those bursts of negative fulfilment.

Basil—Hunter? woke back. The salvias were stifling him. He (or He?) had undone the button. Not surprising: it had eaten into his throat.

He began to decide against visiting his old mum that evening. No, he would write a rather
charming
Letter of Thanks which all the nurses—and the neurotic Jewish housekeeper—would read and variously interpret. They would read it to Elizabeth Hunter, who cannot see except by flashes of lightning. (Has Mother inherited a lost art?)

Basil Hunter leant forward on the park bench, trying to interpret the blades of grass. There had been a time when he saw clearly, right down to the root of the matter, before his perception had retired behind a legerdemain of technique and the dishonesties of living.

M
ISS
H
AYGARTH
announced, ‘It's the second week the housekeeper hasn't collected her money.'

Though the nurses had called, in accordance with Mrs Hunter's original decree, and received their weekly due, it was Miss Haygarth who had attended to them. Mr Wyburd would have been unwilling to admit, but he had avoided contact with Moreton Drive since becoming an unwilling accessory to the Hunter children's ‘plan'. If Basil and Dorothy had visited their mother since the meeting at his office, he presumed they had not raised the subject of her future; if they had, they would have been proud to mention it; he was only relieved they had not reproached him for not acting as their emissary.

Now he told his secretary, ‘I shall go out there, I expect. Yes, I must;' and took from Miss Haygarth the two envelopes intended for Mrs Lippmann.

When the housekeeper opened the door to him, she appeared overcome by a diffidence as palpable as his. In fact, Mr Wyburd's recent guilty involvement made him feel so awkward he came to the point with unusual directness. ‘You've forgotten these, haven't you?'

‘Money keeps, Mr Wyburd.' As she accepted the envelopes she stuck out her lower lip. ‘And I was so depressed all these days.' She drew down the corners of her mouth, determined as always to exaggerate her ugliness by her most grotesque mannerisms.

‘What can have been depressing you?'

‘Oh,' she was searching for a focus point apparently in his right shoulder, ‘it is the cloakroom lavatory. It will not—spill?'

‘“Flush” is the word. But we had it put right. And in any case, you only have to ring for the plumber. He's been coming here for years, and knows its habits.'

Relieved to fix his mind on the temperamental lavatory, the solicitor made for the cloakroom.

‘I have rung Mr Jackson. He came. And now it spills correctly.' She was following in the slippers Mrs Hunter allowed her to wear on account of the pains in her feet. ‘Yes, it
flushes,
Mr Wyburd.'

In the dark closet he had to switch on the light. Together he and the housekeeper stood looking into the lavatory bowl. After he had pulled the chain once, and the bowl was flushed perfectly, they continued looking into it a while, as though expecting oracular guidance.

‘Well, Jackson has done his job. And you have no reason for being depressed.' He began to laugh too heartily, and at once felt foolish. ‘Did you pay?' he asked, ‘Or tell him to send his bill?'

‘There is no bill.' Mrs Lippmann's eyes were lowered to concentrate on the settling water. ‘Mr Jackson has said he will not think of payment over such a simple matter. He is a so honest man,' she added.

The solicitor made his clicking sound: they couldn't stay for ever round the bowl waiting on an oracle who had withdrawn her patronage.

‘Mr Wyburd—' now perhaps Mrs Lippmann's real preoccupations were beginning to unfold, ‘it is not only the affair of the lavatory which has made me so—
so furchtbar furchtbar deprimiert.
It is this plan to remove Mrs Hunter to a home, or convent, or somewhere—
ich weiss nicht genau.'

‘A
home?
At any rate, it's no plan of mine!' He was escaping into the hall with the housekeeper in pursuit.

‘It is dreadful only by contemplating,' she continued in a high voice which must draw attention from upstairs to the scene she was making here below.

There was no avoiding it; and he might calm her. ‘Where did this rumour originate?' he asked when he was facing her.

‘I don't know. I think it was Mrs Badgery—and Mrs Cush—that were talking of it.'

‘But this is a monstrous babble—whoever's to blame! Has Mrs Hunter herself been told?'

‘I cannot be sure. But Mrs Hunter has her ways of knowing.'

‘If she doesn't know about this, I hope none of it will go any farther.' The solicitor spoke with the vehemence of a once upright man.

‘Yes, Mr Wyburd,' Mrs Lippmann said, and went away.

In her absence he was threatened by the not quite silent house. The light was retreating from rooms in which furniture had begun to swell and brood. At intervals ill-regulated clocks were sounding the hour. Bill Hunter, with his passion for clocks, had distributed them throughout his wife's house at Moreton Drive as well as his own ‘Kudjeri'. For Arnold Wyburd, the clash or tinkle of the sounding clocks was the worst accusation yet: of his part betrayal of a trust.

All the way up the stairs his feet seemed to pad dishonestly; the sickness in his stomach made it the predominant part of him; his knee was grazed by the formally tangled iron hedge which stood between himself and the hall below, but he was scarcely conscious of what in ordinary circumstances would have struck him as physical pain.

Arrived at the landing, he wondered which of the acolytes he would have to face: better Manhood than de Santis, he decided; though it still left Mrs Hunter who, asleep or awake, would remain the irremoveable cause of his distress.

Sister Manhood came out from what he had heard referred to as the ‘Nurses' Retiring Room'. She might have been waiting for him. She had already changed from her uniform, which should have made her less formidable: the dresses young women were wearing gave them so little protection, or that was how he would have liked to see it at the moment. But Sister Manhood was clothed in addition with a threatening air; she was standing with her legs apart, and the legs looked aggressively youthful: she had something of the swashbuckler about her, or the principal boy from a pantomime, who, he reminded himself, is only a girl in disguise.

‘Good evening, Sister Manhood!' His intended cheeriness sounded wretched to his own ears.

Sister Manhood cleared her throat. ‘… Mr Wyburd' was as much as he caught; the fact that she had swallowed the rest of her greeting added something ominous to it.

He must keep in mind that the girl was surly by temperament, and clearly sulking now. ‘Getting ready to go off duty?' He couldn't shed the cheeriness.

‘If Sister de Santis remembers she's taking over. She promised to be early tonight.' Sister Manhood glanced at her wrist. ‘Because of something important I'm planning on doing.'

‘How is your patient?' Mr Wyburd was forced to ask.

‘Not bad,' the nurse answered casually. ‘In fact, pretty good—considering.'

She looked at the solicitor, and her mouth was full of accusations; or the sulks, he hoped.

‘She's sleeping now.' Was the girl throwing him a rope?

‘Then I shan't go in.'

‘Oh yes, do! That's what she loves—the coming and going. That's why she says she never sleeps. Mrs Hunter would like to be always awake—ready for a brawl.' Sister Manhood laughed brutally.

So he would have been forced to go in at once if the nurse hadn't felt the need, he now realized, to play him a little longer.

‘Mr Wyburd,' he heard as soon as he had passed her, ‘may I have a word with you?'

It was impossible to refuse her, and already she was drawing him into the room behind, a place he had always avoided as a repository of the concentrated past: that row of built-in cupboards with Mrs Hunter's dresses still hanging in them.
(One day I shall surprise you Arnold I may get up and go for a drive and what should I wear if I didn't keep a few dresses to choose from? Nowadays I'm told one can look fashionable in almost anything that's been put away.)
One of the cupboards was standing ajar, and a smell, half antiquity, half musk, but faint and stale, rubbed off on him from the shadows inside; in his present state of anguish, the shadows in the wardrobe suggested figures rather than limp, empty dresses.

Even if he had felt the desire to let his memory fossick amongst the contents of the cupboards, he would not have been so imprudent: the Manhood girl was staring at him moodily.

‘I just wanted to make sure', she said in a significantly lowered voice, ‘that Mrs Lippmann didn't give you a wrong impression. Most of these foreigners are so hysterical at times—particularly the Jewish ones. Don't think I have anything against Mrs Lippmann—she's a heart of gold—but that doesn't prevent her getting wrong ideas. I did
not,
Mr Wyburd, throw anything down the cloakroom toilet.'

The solicitor heard himself laughing quite crazily. ‘I assure you Mrs Lippmann made no such accusation.' He even patted the girl's arm.

But Sister Manhood wasn't reassured. ‘There's another matter I might as well mention, now that we've got down to talking.'

Mr Wyburd's wretchedness returned as sweat.

Her eyes had grown distant, glassy, moist. ‘It's the job,' she said. ‘For some time now I've been thinking of turning it in.'

Recurrent reprieve was becoming too much for the solicitor. ‘Then you haven't thought it over enough,' he gabbled. ‘What should we do without you, Sister Manhood? Aren't you—I understand—Mrs Hunter's favourite? You can't possibly let her down.' Hearty overtones were turning the situation into something incongruously schoolboyish: better that, however.

‘The truth is,' she said, halfway between the giggles and a blubber, ‘I no longer know what I really want. I don't seem to have control over myself.'

Was she about to twitch back the curtain from some other equally distasteful problem of her own? He wanted that no more than this.

‘I should have thought a position like yours would have given you a sense of security: good money; at least one excellent meal a day,'
to which you aren't entitled,
he prevented himself adding; ‘and your patient's appreciation and affection.'

‘Nobody's appreciation and affection helps, Mr Wyburd, when
it comes to making decisions for yourself.' Then Sister Manhood's voice inflated, and he was reminded of a windsock filling and tearing at its mooring, only the wind was a noisy one, at a deserted country airstrip on which they stood facing each other. ' Anyhow, if I stay, what good will it do Mrs Hunter when you dump her at the Thorogood Village?'

The solicitor began backing into the passage. ‘No decision has been made. That is, nobody has the intention, I'm sure, of forcing Mrs Hunter to do anything against her will.' Desperation was fuddling him. ‘Is this another of Mrs Lippmann's delusions?' In asking, he felt he was wildly grabbing.

Sister Manhood said, through swollen lips and what sounded like a blocked nose, ‘It was Sister de Santis who told me. That's why I have to believe it.' Then, growing panicky, ‘I don't want to get Sister into trouble. You won't go for her, Mr Wyburd?'

‘Nobody will be “got into trouble”. We must only—all of us—keep our heads.' How could he console others, himself a ricketty thing even before the termites had gone to work?

Sometimes Arnold Wyburd wondered whether his being surrounded in his family life by too many women had nourished a streak of weakness in him. As he escaped from Sister Manhood he was pursued by some of the sounds he most disliked hearing: the sniffs, the sighs, tissues ripped from the box, the blown (female) nose. Much as he loved and depended on his regiment of women he often regretted their sogginess. He feared rather than despised their weakness: now especially it seemed to equate»-let's face it—with masculine duplicity.

So he not exactly scuttled down the passage towards Elizabeth Hunter's door, where he was brought up sharply against woman's strength. This, perhaps, was what he feared, not the flattering demands of feminine weakness.

And yet, when he stealthily opened the door, the concrete reason for his almost physical fear was reduced by the enormous bed to the form and the feverish innocence of a sleeping child. Not even a child, her breathing or dreams were stirring her like a
hank of old grey chiffon; the cheeks, sucked in on time, were puffed out as regularly against the breathing; a strand of hair blew less frantically than a moth. Yes, that was how he saw her finally; because it would have been to his advantage to stoop quickly, crush the soft creature between his hands, and be saved or damned for ever: each a remote possibility, for the soft moth's steeliness precluded her destruction.

‘Arnold,' Mrs Hunter said, ‘I've been trying to cal—cul—ate,' the breath of a sigh tormented her, ‘how many weeks you've neglected me.'

‘It's only last week, Mrs Hunter—or anyway, the week before—ten days I should say,' her whippersnapper was actually trying to tot it up. ‘Not neglect, surely?'