The Eye of the Storm (23 page)

Certainly her husband was dead, her children gone—the daughter so recently and mysteriously after only a brief visit—but the maid was always running to answer the doorbell, to let in callers, or receive boxes of flowers, or single luxuries such as caviare or perfume, still wrapped, it sometimes seemed,
in
the sender's straining thoughtfulness.

On one occasion Mrs Hunter remarked, ‘If only one could feel more grateful for what one doesn't want; and the poor things, I'm pretty sure they can't afford it.'

In the intervals when she found herself undeniably alone, the silence became a suppressed twangling, which broke free on one
occasion not long after her nurse-companion's arrival. ‘I'd like to show you something, Sister—I'm going to call you Mary; I'm old enough to take liberties—this little music-box belonged to the Prince Regent, or so the friend who gave it told me.' Elizabeth Hunter opened the lid of the pretty gilt and velvet toy, and at once the silence of the drawing room was vibrating with its gilt tune.

They stood holding the music-box between them.

‘Play it if you ever feel like it,' Mrs Hunter invited. ‘It does one good to give way to moods—even the superficial ones.' Then she looked very keenly at her companion to see how her suggestion had been read.

Sister de Santis did open the music-box sitting alone one afternoon in the drawing-room, stiff and guilty without the protection of the uniform she was not allowed to wear. She saw again the grime in her mother's fine, incompetent hands, and her father's wasted arm quivering for the drug she could not deny him in his last days. Mary de Santis was relieved when the music tottered note by note to a full stop.

But she almost ceased to be a stranger in this echoing house. She found herself running helter skelter across the slithering rugs, the waxed jarrah, to fetch something they had forgotten, thermos or handkerchief; while Mrs Hunter waited in the car. She kept a chauffeur, but liked to drive herself along the coast or into the country: drives which, the nurse suspected, bored the driver.

It was in the evening that Elizabeth Hunter came into her own. Resting on an Empire daybed while still officially ill, she expected her companion, not to make conversation, but to listen to the thoughts she was forced to project.

‘When I was a child, Mary, living in a broken-down farmhouse, in patched dresses-a gawky, desperately vain little girl,' Airs Hunter's eyes glittered and flickered as she flirted with the fringe of her stole, ‘I used to long for possessions: dolls principally at that age; then jewels such as I had never seen—only a few ugly ones on the wives of wealthier neighbours; later, and last of all, I longed
to possess people who would obey me—and love me of course. Can you understand all this?'

The nurse hesitated. ‘I suppose I can, in a way—in a way. But you see, I've never had any desire for possessions. I couldn't imagine how I might come by them—or attract people, let alone have them obey me. We were a very close family. Outside that, I've only wanted to serve others—through my profession—which is all I know how to do. Oh, and to love, of course,' she laughed constrainedly; ‘but that is so vast it is difficult to imagine—how—how to achieve it.'

Mrs Hunter suddenly looked angry and suspicious. ‘What do you understand by love?'

‘Well, perhaps—sometimes I've thought it's like this: love is a kind of supernatural state to which I must give myself entirely, and be used up, particularly my imperfections—till I am nothing.'

Mrs Hunter seemed agitated: she had got up and was trailing her long fleecy stole. ‘Whatever they tell you, I loved my husband. My children wouldn't allow me to love them.' The stole had dragged so far behind, it was lost to her by catching on what must have been an invisible splinter.

‘Oh, I know I am not selfless enough!' When she turned she was burning with a blue, inward rage; but quickly quenched it, and drew up a stool at this girl's feet. ‘There is this other love, I know. Haven't I been shown? And I still can't reach it. But I shall! I shall!' She laid her head on her nurse's hands.

Mary de Santis was turned to a stick, though an exalted one, on feeling someone else's tears gush and trickle into her hands.

Next morning Mrs Hunter said, ‘I'd like to give you something, Mary;' and produced a seal with a phoenix carved into the agate. ‘You might wear it on a bracelet'; whether her nurse had one, she might not have considered.

Mary de Santis was embarrassingly touched. ‘I couldn't,' she said. ‘Or I might borrow it for a little.' Clumsily conveyed, it must have sounded ungracious.

Mrs Hunter only laughed. ‘If that is how you are.'

As soon as the patient was considered ‘semi-invalid' little dinners
were arranged for long-established friends, who did not particularly interest the hostess, her nurse observed: they had eaten into her life like wire into a tree; they were also necessary for a discipline of kindness she had to practise.

At one of these dinners the Wyburds were introduced. The nurse had already met the solicitor professionally the day he engaged her for his client. There was no marked difference in his social behaviour, except that most of the evening he kept his eyelids lowered, probably tired out by a heavy day at the office. His wife, a thin plain, beaky woman, with dark-red hair and freckles, had something comically appealing about her. She must have been younger than a rough skin and wrinkles allowed her to appear. She was certainly younger than her solicitor-husband, but their hostess made her look old and dowdy, not that she minded, judging by her slightly ironical expression.

There was a second couple, probably friends of lesser standing: they appeared too grateful, as though they had borrowed money, or been able to do a rich and beautiful woman some unexpected favour. Sister de Santis did not catch the name of this unremarkable couple (another wife on the plain side) if indeed Mrs Hunter had introduced her friends to her companion.

The hostess was dressed very simply for a simple, perhaps obligatory occasion, but was able to shine the more for that.

She happened to remember, ‘When we went over, Alfred and I, for poor Dorothy's wedding, we were actually invited—though only briefly, thank the Lord—to the family seat, Lunegarde. Exquisite wormeaten furniture. Gobelins by the acre. But the plumbing! The family used to rub themselves down with eau de Cologne, or if anybody ventured on a bath, Dorothy told me, it was brought from the village by the fire brigade.' The company was so enchanted they would have accepted almost any extravagance she dared them not to believe. ‘And worse—far worse!' Mrs Hunter could not resist her own powers. ‘You wouldn't believe, Constance,' though the grateful guest was obviously prepared to, ‘the
cabinet de toilette—
to which nobody had to be shown: it announced itself
so blatantly—the door, darling, opened outwards, so that if you valued your privacy, you had to sit holding a cord attached to the knob.'

The thin couple was most appreciative, the Wyburds less so. Mary de Santis wished Mrs Hunter had not told the funny story; it was almost as though her employer were determined to destroy somebody's good opinion.

Mrs Hunter turned to Mrs Wyburd. ‘I've probably bored you, Lal. You must have heard it a hundred times.' Simultaneously she laid her hand on the back of her friend's, for the solicitor's wife was seated beside her owing to the shortage of men.

Mrs Wyburd neither denied nor reassured: she preserved her air of comical irony. The name ‘Lal' still hung above the table; it had clanged too loud, as though Mrs Hunter did not give herself many opportunities for using it.

In the drawing-room over coffee the hostess remarked, again too aggressively, ‘You're forgetting your duties as host, Arnold. Aren't you going to offer us a liqueur?'

He did so with a punctiliousness only slightly rattled by his omission.

Lal said she'd have one of those green things. ‘Don't they call it a “starboard light”? I'm told it's a whore's drink.' Like other plain, dowdy women she would try springing a surprise.

‘And what do you fancy, Mrs Hunter?' Mr Wyburd asked.

‘Thank you, Arnold. I'm still my doctor's victim.' She looked at her nurse, half appealing for confirmation, or perhaps not in connection with the matter at all.

Later, when the gathering was threatening to break up, she aimed her voice very pointedly at the colourless couple, ‘You can't have missed reading that Athol Shreve has almost finished his sentence.'

The husband and wife appeared wretchedly uncomfortable, as though they felt themselves responsible for something. The husband remarked that, to his mind, Athol Shreve was the greatest disappointment, ever, in Australian political life.

‘I wasn't surprised.' Mrs Hunter scorned those who were. ‘I
mistrusted him from the beginning. You remember the night we met at the Radfords' dinner, and he gave us all the lift? Oh, I shan't say I wasn't intrigued, too. He had something crude and real about him. Well, that was his reality—that of a thief.' She gave two or three short laughs, which for some reason increased the distress of the two friends for whom she was performing.

Not long after, the gathering did break up, and the couple were again gratefully smiling for the attentions of this rich and important woman. Sister de Santis realized they were not friends, only slight acquaintances. The Wyburds who were more inured to Mrs Hunter's friendship, might have felt sorry for, or contemptuous of them.

When nurse and patient were at last alone, drinking delicious, thirst-quenching, private draughts of cold water, Elizabeth Hunter confessed, ‘Those Stevensons—I often wonder why I don't drop them, except that there are certain things—past events—which have to be faced in perpetuity. I suppose that is the reason for the Stevensons: now and then they lend themselves to one's self-mortification. And the poor creatures do enjoy a good dinner.'

The two women were passing through the hall. Elizabeth Hunter had linked herself with, and was leaning on, the one who for that moment was wholly her nurse.

‘Why,' Sister de Santis noticed, ‘you haven't read your letter'; it had come by the morning delivery, but still lay unopened on the salver. ‘And isn't the stamp unusual. Is it Norwegian?' She could have been trying to encourage a patient who threatened to despond.

‘Yes. The letter is from a Norwegian,' Mrs Hunter admitted, ‘who was in this country recently—an ecologist—by repute an intelligent man—but weak, it turned out, and something of a boor.' She had begun tearing up the still unopened envelope.

‘Shouldn't you at least read his letter?' asked Sister de Santis, who seldom received one.

Mrs Hunter said no, she wouldn't, and gave the pieces to her nurse to dispose of.

‘One day, Mary, I shall tell you about it. Dorothy and I were
invited by some friends to stay on their island, and this Norwegian, Professor Pehl, was our fellow guest. I'm too tired for it tonight.' Suddenly Mrs Hunter looked so old and haggard Mary de Santis decided she would always resist hearing the story; she herself was weak, sensual enough, to crave intermittently for the luxury and refreshment of physical beauty.

Normally Elizabeth Hunter appeared astoundingly young and beautiful for one who, from what she told, must be around seventy. Her face would certainly crinkle under the influence of impatience or anger, but only, you felt, to become the map of experience in general, of passion in particular. Untouched by any of this, her body had remained almost perfect: long, cool, of that white which is found in tuberoses, with their same blush pink at the extremities. If it had not been for professional detachment, the nurse might have found herself drugged by a pervasive sensuousness as she helped her patient out of the bath and wrapped her in towels, during her ‘illness'. As it was, physical languor was absorbed into a ritual; physical beauty became an abstraction, in its way far more desirable to anyone hungry for a work of art or of the spirit, and who had not in fact come across one, apart from the dark icons inherited from her mother.

Elizabeth Hunter responded even to the abstract admiration she inspired, most noticeably at the dressing-table: her eyes opened to their fullest; her hair lent itself to tenderest weaving; the line of her cheek was rejuvenated. She liked her nurse to hand her things, particularly on nights when dinner parties were held; because now that she was practically ‘well' she arranged a number of more formal functions, ‘to give notice that I'm neither mewed up in a loony bin nor staggering down the ramp towards the everlasting bonfire. One's enemies, one's friends for that matter, don't really believe unless one shows them regularly.'

Preparing for such an occasion, her blue stare suddenly expanded to embrace a reflection in the glass deeper than her own. ‘I must lend you something to wear, Mary.'

The nurse would have felt herself flush if she had not been able to
see it. Her party dress looked frumpish, and though recently ironed, already crumpled; whereas the older woman shone: her form seemed to create an immaculacy out of whatever clothed it.

Now she rushed at a drawer in a burst of inspiration, tore it open, rummaged, and pulled out a broad ribbon or sash in turquoise silk, which she looped round the waist of the badly-cut muslin dress, and tied in a bow at the back as surely as impulsively.

Mary de Santis was too ashamed to move or speak. She was afraid to look at herself in the glass.

‘Wait!' Mrs Hunter commanded.

She was fastening the strands of a pearl bracelet round a wrist too passive for resistance. Then, her hands trembling for the climax of her creative act, she tried out a pearl-and-turquoise star, first on a shoulder, before fastening it for preference on the muslin breast.

‘I like it better there—in the centre.' She was standing back to judge her work. ‘Less self-conscious. You are too pure, Mary, to follow fashion.'