The Eye of the Storm (29 page)

Alfred Hunter was pleased to receive these letters from his children. ‘They express themselves well, don't they?' His thread of a voice was not asking her to confirm what he wished to believe: that his clever children were the ultimate in rewards.

After reading the letters to him, his wife was still too confused to interpret them for herself. More collected, she might have used sarcasm on their considered insincerities; in the circumstances she preferred to accept their coldness, or, at best, their artificial warmth, as the formality imposed by distance and prolonged separation. As for being
her
children, she remembered them as sensations in her womb, then as almost edible, comfortingly soft parcels of fat, till later they were turned into leggy, hostile, scarcely human, beings, already preparing themselves for flight.

But she said to Alfred, ‘I'm glad we told them. We did the right thing.' She ended as virtuous as the Princesse de Lascabanes probably felt.

Then she began to realize that the brief, exquisite phase when she had been able to speak to her husband in words which conveyed their meanings was practically past; from now on, they must communicate through their skins and with their eyes. It was a climax of trustfulness; but of course they had nothing left to lose.

Dr Treweek drove out from Gogong almost every day. Technically grateful, she could not altogether overcome her irritation for his uncouth habits, nor disguise her satisfaction at having routed
his scepticism. Once she only just restrained herself from recommending a cure for dandruff.

‘We can expect it any day now,' he said.

She felt so exhausted it hardly moved her to realize the doctor was referring to death, not even when she reminded herself it was her husband's.

‘Call me if you want me.' Dr Treweek himself was glittering with weariness, and, she was pretty sure by now, the stimulus of drugs.

She replied with deadly calculation, ‘You can't expect me to want to share my husband's death. Strong as your friendship was, I think I have precedence.'

One glance at the scurfy back, and mentally she was wringing her hands. ‘Don't think I'm not—
truly—
grateful, Doctor,' she was forced to add.

He was shrugging his way into the muddy car. ‘Please yourself. Some people are afraid.'

She was not afraid, either in contemplating what must happen, or when it did. They accused her of being cold. She was not: she was involved in a mystery so immense and so rarely experienced, she functioned, it could have been truthfully said, by reverence, in particular for this only in a sense, feebly fluttering soul, her initiator.

On the night, she was roused from her half-sleep, not by sounds of death in the next room, but by her instinct to participate in a miraculous transformation. She snatched her gown, and hurried in.

Here was this dear husband of her flesh still lying waiting for her, it appeared, to come to his bed. Only now, the fading eyes implied, it was she who must take the initiative. So she laid her hand as gently as she could against the chamber of his yellow cheek.

Immediately Alfred Hunter's mouth, the lips with their rime of dried salt, was stretched to its utmost, to utter,
‘Whyyy?'
before the last of his fire froze.

What remained of the night she spent mostly stumbling through a labyrinth of rooms, trailing the gown she had bundled into so hastily she looked lopsided from unequal sleeves. Motion saved her.
Often in the past she had wondered how she might behave as a widow, and enjoyed in her imagination comfortable and respected status. For the time being she was neither widow, nor wife, not even a woman. She could not yet bear to think of ‘Alfred'. For a moment or two she dipped her toes in hell, and made herself remember the bodies of men she had dragged to her bed, to wrestle with: her ‘lovers'.

Towards morning she caught sight of a reflection in a glass and was faced with her
Doppelgänger:
aged, dishevelled, ravaged, eyes strained by staring inward, in the direction of a horizon which still had to be revealed.

‘My God, what a fright you can look!' she said aloud.

Somebody—a nurse? was holding her by the wrist: they never stop taking your pulse or or

‘What is it, Mrs Hunter? Were you dreaming?'

Then you realized, less by the voice than through the fingertips on your skin, that it was Mary de Santis, and not in her professional capacity: she was trying to make amends for something.

‘Not dreaming—living,' Mrs Hunter gasped out. ‘Alfred has just died. I shall have to ring Dr Treweek. That is what I don't look forward to. It's one thing to know, another to tell.'

‘Lie still, and all these bad dreams will pass,' Sister de Santis advised.

To a certain degree it was practical advice. The palmetto leaf in your side was agitating at cyclone strength; but those at sea level, including St Mary de Santis, could never understand that this was only a physical aspect of the storm: you alone had experienced transcendence by virtue of that visit to the Warmings' island. There was Dorothy's Dutchman, too. The Dutchman may have recognized the sanctity and peace reflected in the eye of the storm, but to dry Dorothy, who ran away from Brumby and storms of her own imagining, the Dutchman's vision would have appeared like the fascinating though constricted view from the wrong end of the telescope. Dorothy had wasted her Dutchman.

‘Or do you think we'll be wasting time ringing the doctor? He'll never forgive. Treweek is afraid of tenderness.'

‘I know nothing about Dr Treweek,' the nurse replied. ‘If we ring anybody, Dr Gidley is the one.'

‘Gidley?'

‘Isn't he the doctor you like? The one you chose?'

‘Fat, soft Gidley!' Mrs Hunter was grinning. ‘If you could look, there'd be yellow wax in his ears. Treweek is a man: hateful, ugly, dirty—all those foodspots—and the dandruff. But tormented. I think Treweek has suffered. That is why he understands. What he doesn't understand is that he's a man's man: that's why he won't forgive me my failings as a woman.' ‘Don't get worked up, Mrs Hunter. It's morning.'

‘I know it's morning. Haven't I been measuring out the night?'

‘Let me bring you the roses. As soon as it was light, I went down and cut them. There's such a flush.'

‘Oh—the roses—yes.'

On leaving her patient asleep Sister de Santis had forced herself to descend once more into the dark body of the house where she had betrayed her vocation earlier that night. She passed the study: lights still burning filled the room with glaring reminders. She went to switch off the lights, but changed her mind, and fetched a cloth to mop up a pool the housekeeper had overlooked in clearing away the decanters and his glass. Wiping the slops, Sister de Santis thought she might have exorcised her lust, if not her shame. Probably, she would not be allowed to forget that; certainly not if Mrs Hunter, at her most cunning, cornered the reason for a moment of panic at the foot of the bed. Now on guard against those other snares, the scents of cigarette smoke, whiskey, and leather, Sister de Santis moved imperviously around and through them.

She went back into the kitchen. This was Mrs Cush's day, and the night nurse sometimes started it for her. Mrs Cush the cleaner suffered from varicose veins, a smoker's cough, heart murmurs, an epileptic husband, and logorrhea.
(You're the real pal Sister Mary
don't know what we'd do without yer Mrs Hunter Lottie any of us would yer believe it Sister Dad went off again Tuesday evenun threw isself on the stove took Donald Mavis all three of us all our time to pull im back Sister e fell down at last such a eavy man bit through the cork would you believe it e bit Donald's finger I been under sedation ever since poor Dad the bruises ooh Sister don't bear lookun at Mavis took me to a picture ter cheer me up it wasn't the one Sister with the nice scenery and the lovely music it was about a mob of sailors trapped in a submarine we come out Mavis bought me a brandy and dry in the Ladies Lounge at the Lancaster we went ome Sister Mary after that because it was time ter get the tea.)

If Sister de Santis genuinely wished to compensate the cleaner for some of the injustices suffered by her, she was not unaware that her acts of charity could also be sly attempts to lighten her own darkness through a discipline of drudgery. This morning after taking off her uniform, she got down and began scrubbing out the kitchen. She worked in wide sweeps at first, tossing ahead of her the veils of suds she gathered back into the bucket. The electric light was pursuing a policy of flattery: wherever she had knelt the lino blazed; her arms, her shoulders, looked and felt strong and white; if her bra was torn (by whatever accident) her full breasts were less constrained. She continued scrubbing, ruffling the night silence without threatening their relationship. As an emanation of night she could flow like water and back into her secret self. Whether there was anything narcissistic or sensual in her behaviour, she was saved from toppling over by the precedent of her failed father and the threads which bound her to the human object of her dedication.

By the time Mary de Santis, still plodding on all fours, backed into the scullery, her shoulders had begun to ache, her knees were numbed, the glory had gone out of penance. She saw herself as the eternal novice, muddling around this narrow cell, thrown back off its walls whenever she blundered in the wrong direction; yet her attempts, like any of her other bursts of desperate clumsiness, would be registered as experience in the eyes of innocents. Only Mrs Hunter was aware; Papa had seen, perhaps: reflected in a white-to-ivory skin his own failures and permissiveness. Mamma of course
had her relationship with the saints, which prevented her identifying the sins of those she loved,

The penitent bumped her head on a strut supporting one of the scullery shelves. The heavy breasts quaked and settled. Grey water, no longer sudsy, had seeped into the knees of her stockings. She lumbered up, staggered by the change of attitude, and found herself staring dizzily into a bowl of oil in which a light was shining. The light floated and rocked, not by grace of the electric bulb: she saw through the bars on the window that day had come.

When she had dressed herself again in uniform and veil, and generally restored professional neatness, the nurse took another look at her patient. A breeze was very slightly lifting the curtain of grey light. The old woman lay breathing and murmuring through one of the calmer passages of sleep. Once the lips fluttered apart; the words dragged themselves unstuck, and forced their way between the gums, ‘Still only thorns. Locked buds. This long frost.' By a gigantic, creaking manoeuvre she pushed away a strand of shabby hair. ‘Speak to each other beautifully in silence.' Till wrapping the spiral of a sigh, ‘My darling silence', around a cherished privacy.

The nurse recognized the silence which comes when night has almost exhausted itself; light still barely disentangled from the skeins of mist strung across the park; at the foot of the tiered hill on which the house aspired, a cloud of roses floating in its own right, none of the frost-locked buds from Elizabeth Hunter's dream, but great actual clusters at the climax of their beauty.

After she had rummaged for the shears and the ravelled basket under the pantry sink, Mary de Santis let herself into the garden. A dew was falling, settling on her skin; vertical leaves were running moisture; trumpets of the evening before had furled into crinkled phalluses; grass was wearing a bloom it loses on becoming lawn. Encouraged by the rites of innocent sensuality in which she was invited to take part, she tore off a leaf, sucked it, finally bit it to reach the juicy acerbity inside. Not a single cat appeared to dispute her possession of its spiritual enclave as she rubbed, shamefully
joyous, past shaggy bark, through flurries of trickling fronds. If her conscience attempted to restrain her, it was forcibly appeased by the tribute of roses she saw herself offering Elizabeth Hunter.

As soon as arrived, she began to snatch like a hungry goat. Dew sprinkling around her in showers. Thorns gashing. Her heels tottered obliquely when not planted in a compost of leaves and sodden earth. Nothing could be done about the worms, lashing themselves into a frenzy of pink exposure: she was too obsessed by her vice of roses. When she stooped to cut into the stems, more than the perfume, the pointed buds themselves could have been shooting up her greedy nostrils, while blown heads, colliding with her flanks, crumbled away, to lie on the neutral earth in clots of cream, splashes of crimson, gentle heart-shaped rose rose.

Breathing deeply, still automatically snipping by spasms at the air, she regained the grass verge, her basket of spoils heavy on her arm. Poured in steadily increasing draughts through the surrounding trees, the light translated the heap of passive roseflesh back into dew, light, pure colour. It might have saddened her to think her own dichotomy of earthbound flesh and aspiring spirit could never be resolved so logically if footsteps along the pavement had not begun breaking into her trance of roses.

A man of dark, furrowed face and inquiring eyes was asking the way to Enright Street. Though looking at her closely, he did not appear to be soliciting. She knew the street, and directed him with a care which the early hour and its exquisite details seemed to demand, the man listening intently, his eyes concentrated half on her directions, half, though in an abstracted way, on her rose-embowered figure.

When she had finished he smiled and thanked. They were both smiling for different and the same reasons. From his humble, creaking boots and still apologetic glance, he was not only a stranger to the street, but to the country, she suspected. She was reminded of her own alien birth and childhood; whether the man guessed it or not, he gave the impression that he recognized an ally.

Nodding at her veil he suddenly asked, ‘Somebody sick?'

‘Not really. There's an old lady living here, who has to be taken care of.'