The Eye of the Storm (86 page)

Now that she had eaten her meal, Sister Badgery had to go: to a former patient become a friend. ‘Say goodbye to Mrs Lippmann, dear. I can see it's one of her moody days.'

The day itself was moody. Sister Badgery was thankful she had brought her brolly. Already as she opened it, big cold drops were falling out of purple clouds.

‘Oops!' she called as she went dickering down the path. ‘Shall I make it?'

She would not have stayed on though, not for anything, in that ownerless house. Spooky too. She thought of the cosy chats she would have with her friend Win Huxtable inside the coach as the New Zealand scenery went whizzing past: scenery, like silence, depressed Sister Badgery.

Sister de Santis lingered a moment on the path to watch the
lightning: the enormous drops of cold rain flattened themselves on her face as though it were their chosen target; the white lightning was directed at her, though without malevolence.

About five, when the storm had cleared, Mrs Lippmann made them a cup of coffee. After watching Sister Badgery eat a meal in the middle of the day, the two women could not have raised an appetite between them.

Sitting quietly sipping their coffee in the kitchen, the nurse was humiliated to realize that, in her state of excited anticipation, and in spite of the affection she felt for the housekeeper, she had forgotten to ask Mrs Lippmanns plans for tomorrow.

‘What do you think you will do?' Sister de Santis asked with what she hoped would convey intensified interest and rekindled warmth.

‘I shall be with friends,' Mrs Lippmann answered in her normal, grave, low voice; then raised it to the raucous pitch she had used in her performances for Mrs Hunter, ‘or,' she grimaced, ‘I may take my things to Central Railway waiting room, to sit a while, and assemble my thoughts.' As she closed one eye, the other glittered with irony.

They laughed together, and Sister de Santis caught a glimpse of the top hat, the wilted bow, and the little cane with dented knob quivering under Lotte Lippmann's armpit.

Presently the nurse left to start her packing. The housekeeper, though she had finished hers, went to the room in which her belongings had always only waited to be packed: it had served, in fact, as the barest waiting-room. Except that on the dressing-table, propped against the glass, on the lace runner which might have been worked by one of Mrs Hunter's dead maids, the lovers continued holding each other in front of the empty bandstand, in spite of the faded sepia, and fingerprints eating into them.

When she had undressed, Mrs Lippmann went in to take her bath. The heater, with its permanent smell of gas and flames roaring inside the copper cylinder, had terrified her in the beginning, but she had grown used to all such minor effects. Outside the window of the maids' bathroom the sky was more convincingly on fire, the blaze smudged by fingers of smoke from the chimneys of Alexandria
and Waterloo. It was suffocating in the narrow room, but it did not occur to her to open the window.

Lying in the steaming bath, Mrs Lippmann watched the hair, more like ferns or the roots of water-plants, floating around the shoulders, straggling towards the breasts of this still curiously solid body. Then she reached up and felt along the ledge behind her head for her most practical, recently purchased vegetable knife. The pulses in her wrists were winking at her: all this time her fate had been knotted in her wrists. She cut each knot of veins with care.

Closing her eyes she floated with the dead maids, the entwined lovers. Or if she cared to look, she was faced with a flush of roses, of increasing crimson. Opening and closing her eyelids growing drier brittler. Her eyes afloat, so it seemed. If she smiled, or sank, she would drink the roses she was offering to those others pressed always more suffocatingly close around her.

After a long attempt at sleeping, Sister de Santis realized she would not succeed. She got up. Her veins, her heart, were throbbing with life as she went from room to room throwing open the windows. Furniture groaned and cracked; some of it seemed preparing to topple. At moments she became aware of her own creaking, her thumping clumsiness, and went more softly so as not to disturb the housekeeper.

The light in Mrs Hunter's room was at this hour neither moon nor day. Here and there stood the empty vases: columns of crystal and trumpets of silver. The great empty bed fluctuated like a sheet of dreaming water. What she knew to be a silver sun let into the rosewood bedhead had more the appearance of a stationary crab suspicious of an intrusion on its shallows.

Mooning around a room shortly to be emptied of its associations and emotions along with the furniture, Sister de Santis wondered how she would convey to this entombed girl, her future patient, the beauty she herself had witnessed, and love as she had come to understand it. She felt herself again the bungling novice. Perhaps she was ageing. But she continued throbbing, flickering, inside her clumsy flesh.

Seeing the dark was beginning to thin, she went down presently.
She put a coat over her nightdress. She took the rusted can which she kept filled with seed. In the garden the first birds were still only audible shadows, herself an ambulant tree.

The hem of her nightdress soon became saturated, heavy as her own flesh, as she filled the birds' dishes. Reaching up, her arms were rounded by increasing light.

In the street an early worker stared as he passed, but looked away on recognizing a ceremony.

A solitary rose, tight crimson, emerged in the lower garden; it would probably open later in the day.

Light was strewing the park as she performed her rites. Birds followed her, battering the air, settling on the grass whenever her hand, trembling in the last instant, spilt an excess of seed.

Her throat swelled as the light climbed, as she trudged back, trailing her sodden nightdress along the path where ‘at least two people have broken their legs'. The little scoop clattered against the rusty can.

At the topmost step it occurred to her that she must take this first and last rose to her patient Irene Fletcher. She would return and cut it before leaving: perfect as it should become by then.

She poured the remainder of the seed into the dish on the upper terrace. The birds already clutching the terracotta rim, scattered as she blundered amongst them, then wheeled back, clashing, curving, descending and ascending, shaking the tassels of light or seed suspended from the dish. She could feel claws snatching for a hold in her hair.

She ducked, to escape from this prism of dew and light, this tumult of wings and her own unmanageable joy. Once she raised an arm to brush aside a blue wedge of pigeon's feathers. The light she could not ward off: it was by now too solid, too possessive; herself possessed.

Shortly after she went inside the house. In the hall she bowed her head, amazed and not a little frightened by what she saw in Elizabeth Hunter's looking glass.