The Eye of the Storm Read online

  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.)

  So whether you liked it or not, the house too, was in your charge a little longer, unless this great gilded mirror swallowed its once shadowy familiar, together with a crunch of Meissen, and splintering of marquetry.

  Bad enough the mirrors, worse the portraits. Bound for the pantry, Sister de Santis could not resist the drawing-room. Whether the portraits were of any value she had never been able to judge, only guess they must have cost a lot of money. Beyond this, and their ephemeral elegance, their fashionable truthlessness, they had that certain pathos of the possessions of the very rich. In spite of his curving lashes, his golden cheeks, Basil might have been a nasty little boy, Dorothy a plain sour girl, without a splendour of varnish and the protection of their gilded frames. The fall of diamonds from Elizabeth Hunter’s wrists and shoulders might have drowned the dutiful or innocent in a wave of admiration. But Mary de Santis was unimpressed by jewels. Only the face was real, through no virtue of the painter’s, she had decided long ago, or rat
her, the face transcended a vulgarity of superficial, slippery paint, to reveal a correspondence, as will some of the semi-precious stones, or flowers, or phrases of music, or passages of light.

  It was the children who finally routed the nurse by reminding her of a desiccated carcase, blotched with brown, streaked with yellow, scarred by knives: the body from which they had sprung to force their purposes on life. This morning the portraits of Mrs Hunter’s children made Sister de Santis shudder. (I love all kiddies; don’t you love the kiddies, Sister? At least Sister Badgery never waited for anyone else’s opinion.)

  Sister de Santis did not stop to draw the curtains in the dining-room, but hurried through its brown-velvet hush, past the portrait of Alfred Hunter (‘Bill’ to his friends). Mr Hunter’s portrait was smaller than his wife’s; it must have cost considerably less: even so, a lot of money, if you read the signature in the corner. For a man of wealth Mr Hunter looked rather diffident: he probably disappointed the painter, except by writing out his cheque. The nurse moderated her pace, walking with the reverence accorded to those you have not known in their lifetime, but might have. Out of respect, she endowed Mr Hunter with virtues she could remember in her father.

  I wanted very badly to love my husband. Sister, even after I knew I didn’t—or couldn’t enough. Mrs Hunter’s admissions had been embarrassing at first: you had to persuade yourself you were not overhearing.

  Sister de Santis pushed the baize which would admit her to the pantry. The door sighed like a human being; it might have felt like one too, if she had allowed herself to think so.

  She had half filled a little crystal jug from the pantry fridge when she heard a thumping in the kitchen beyond. She went in. It was the housekeeper throwing her arms around while getting herself into an apron. Her face hidden by the bib, her contortions looked grotesque: she was still probably stupefied by sleep.

  ‘Early for you, isn’t it?’ the night nurse remarked while the housekeeper was still submerged.

  ‘Ach, but I’m so—nervös!’ As she struggled free the effect was even more grotesque: the stiffened lips in the stone face might have been designed as an escape in times of downpour. ‘So nervous!’ she gasped. ‘It’s the visitors. And Mr Wyburd expected to breakfast.’

  ‘Mr Wyburd will cope with the visitors.’

  ‘Yes, but it is still so very early. And I do not easily leave my bett. Übrigens,’ it cheered Mrs Lippmann to realize, ‘aren’t you later than usual, Sister?’

  ‘Out of shameful curiosity.’

  The housekeeper returned at once to looking racked; the knuckles she was clenching appeared to have aged sooner than her face, mock-youthful in almost all its conscious expressions. ‘Oh, this is always the frightful hour! Why you cannot stay every morning, Miss de Santis, till Sister Badgery shows herself? Diese Badgery kann nie nie pünktlich kommen—never! What if she should roll out of bett while I am all alone with her? Or what if she have another stroke?’ Mrs Lippmann began a series of laments which led her to the core of tragedy, sounds which shocked Badgery and Manhood, but which Sister de Santis’s foreign blood made it easier for her to accept.

  Foreignness alone did not always help her comfort this small unhappy Jewess. ‘Probably nothing of what you imagine will happen,’ was the best she could offer this morning. ‘By the way, Mrs Lippmann, we never talk about the stroke. In any case, it was only a very slight one: a blood vessel broke somewhere behind one of her eyes.’

  Although corrected, Mrs Lippmann seemed elated by this hint of conspiracy over medical matters: she danced a few steps across the considerable kitchen, jiggling her buttocks, wagging her head, before coming to a standstill, every piece of her anatomy exaggeratedly taut.

  ‘That is so! And our visitors will bring life. I am almost out of myself to see them. Auch ein wirklicher Künstler! I have made the betts. I have put flowers as she wishes.’

  ‘You needn’t have put the flowers.’

  ‘But while she is in her chair she may ask somebody to wheel her in.’

  ‘She wouldn’t see.’

  ‘Mrs Hunter will see through a wall if she is determined to.’

  ‘What I should have said was: your flowers will be wasted on the visitors. They’re not staying—not in the house.’

  ‘But I have made the betts! That was her order.’

  ‘They’re not staying.’

  ‘Somebody must tell her.’

  ‘Mr Wyburd must. He’s had plenty of practice at that sort of thing.’ On realizing that she had neglected her duty, Sister de Santis frowned at the little jug she was holding.

  Mrs Lippmann’s eyebrows reached towards each other like glistening, palpitating caterpillars. ‘I will never understand why Anglo-Saxons reject the warm of the family.’

  ‘They’re afraid of being consumed. Families can eat you.’

  ‘Something will always consume: if not the family, then it’s the incinerators,’ Mrs Lippmann moaned.

  All the way up the stairs the glass clinked against the jug Sister de Santis was carrying carefully on a salver. Like all the silver in the house, the salver bore someone else’s arms.

  When she arrived at the bedside she saw that her patient had fallen asleep: the parted lips were sucked back repeatedly against the gums; the chalky claws, hooked into the hem of the sheet, were lifted by a regular breathing.

  Sister de Santis stood the salver so expertly on the bedside table there was not a single clink of crystal, not the slightest jarring of silver.

  ‘I’m not asleep, you know, Sister,’ Mrs Hunter’s voice informed. ‘The worst symptom of my—condition—I practically hardly ever sleep.’

  Sister de Santis filled the glass. When she had raised her patient’s shoulders, the neck worked; the lips reached out, and supped uglily at the water. The lips suggested some lower form of life, a sea creature perhaps, extracting more than water from water. As humanity was not what one got from Elizabeth Hunter, one should not have felt disillusioned.

  By the time she had done her duty the silver sun set in the rosewood bed had started duelling with the actual one. Sister de Santis took brief refuge in what Sister Badgery liked to refer to as the Nurses’ Retiring Room, but which was really a wardrobe in which were hoarded most of the dresses Mrs Hunter had bought in her lifetime. Seated in front of the mirror Mary de Santis unpinned her hair. What, she tried to remember, had she expected, ever? Her face, inside the dark, streaming hair, continued haunting the looking glass.

  Whether asleep or awake—in fact her life had become one long waking sleep—Mrs Hunter slipped back into the dream she had left. She found it easy enough to resume these waking dreams of which her life was constituted; sometimes she could even manipulate the deep dreadful dreams which belonged to the sleep she would not admit to.

  Now the water her dutiful, but possibly sulking nurse had brought her, helped her return to this other, shallower kind of experience or dream. They were walking, she and Kate Nutley, their arms full of dolls, beside this great river. No, it wasn’t: it was the shallow and often drought-stricken stream which meandered through everybody’s place, through Salkelds’, Nutleys’ and Hunters’ that is, a brown ribbon ruffling over stones, under willows. At its best the river was all joyous motion, though in its less pleasing backwaters scum formed, and sometimes a swollen sheep floated. Elizabeth, never Kate, had to prod the bloated sheep. When they had reached a certain point where the water swirled deeper round a bend, Elizabeth Salkeld and Kate Nutley halted. Elizabeth started throwing in the dolls. Some of them bobbed on the surface of the water; the limbs of others grew soggy and dragged them under. Kate began to cry. She was a serious child, as well as a simple soul, Elizabeth sensed from the beginning. Why are you crying when you’ve got so many? And isn’t it interesting to see what happens? Kate had a habit of sniffling: I wasn’t crying for the dolls, but for what happened to my sister. Don’t you know about it? Elizabeth grunted to hide her shame; the Salkelds lowered their voices more than most parents in the distri
ct, and she hadn’t yet found out what had happened to Lilian, Kate’s elder sister. Kate was ready to explain, Lilian ran away with someone, a Russian or something. Oh, you knew about that! And now she has been murdered. How could they be sure? People you know don’t get murdered. But Kate seemed to have grown up all of a sudden: she was even more serious than before. They found Lilian’s body on the banks of some great river—in China, or Siberia. So there was this other river! The blood was drying on her neck. Kate could not tell any more because she was crying again. But Elizabeth Salkeld could not cry for Kate’s sister Lilian galloping wildly towards her death on the banks of the great Asiatic river. By comparison, their own shallow life, their stagnant days, were becoming unbearable. Elizabeth Salkeld could have slapped her friend for not hearing the thud of hooves, or seeing the magnificence of Lilian’s full gallop. Instead, she whipped the water with a willow switch.

  ‘Horrid little girl I was!’ Mrs Hunter muttered. ‘Most children are horrid except in theory.’

  She also knew she had no desire to die however stagnant her life became: she only hoped she would be allowed to experience again that state of pure, living bliss she was now and then allowed to enter. How, she wasn’t sure. It could depend on Sister de Santis; she needed Mary to hold her hand.

  When she opened her eyes, and started groping for her little handbell, to accuse her nurse of abandoning her, there was another figure, taller and thinner, standing in the doorway, but so misty she could not guess, except that, she fancied, she could smell a man.

  ‘Is it you, darling?’ she tried out. ‘What a long time I’ve been waiting.’

  A dry silence told her she had given herself away.

  Then a voice, ‘It is I—Wyburd.’ He had hesitated from wondering how to compose his reply; his grandchildren, sometimes even his daughters, laughed at his correct grammar.

  ‘Oh, it is! I suppose I’m glad to see you, Arnold. I knew you were coming. Of course I’m glad!’ She put on a bit more than the voice you use for the solicitor, because Arnold Wyburd was: a bit more than the solicitor; he couldn’t very well help it after all this time.