The Eye of the Storm (64 page)

She wrenched so hopelessly at the door she sent the pains shooting down her side, and found old Wyburd standing, not inside the porch, but out from it in the sunlight. He was holding his hands edgeways to his face as though saying his prayers.

‘What is it, Mr Wyburd?' she practically bellowed: his attitude was no more than slightly peculiar; she only felt so relieved it was not the person she had imagined, and yet, a man. ‘Is anything wrong?' She laughed, and it would not disperse afterwards; it hung in the air, the same brassy tones as her spoken words.

‘Nothing
wrong,'
he answered, removing his hands from his face. ‘I've been smelling this.'

‘O-ow-hh?' she ended up giggling through her nose, and it might come back through her mouth as the raspberry vinegar had, she was a kid, in Con's Caff, at Coff's Harbour.

‘It's rosemary,' Mr Wyburd explained. ‘My wife is an expert. She can identify any plant you care to show her. I couldn't compete—but do know rosemary when I see it.'

The solicitor too was laughing by now. It made him look rather silly: old men's dentures, the cleanest of them, have a look of slime, their mauve gums.

‘Go on! Is that rosemary?' She peered into his open hands though he was not really offering them to her; she looked inside the cradle the old fingers and creased palms were making for the crushed silvery spikes smelling of furniture polish.

‘Yes, of course. I can tell now. Isn't it a—nostalgic perfume?' The woman visitor at P. A. who brought, instead of the pink carnations, what she said was ‘pinks' (actually they were wine colour) in a twist of crumpled brown paper:
it's the hot day making them smell nostalgic.

The solicitor was saying, ‘You can stuff fish with rosemary. You sew them up afterwards.' Then they were both giggling, himself and this Sister Manhood, together. ‘I've never tried it. My wife and I prefer plain, wholesome food.'

Though she could take it as rich as it came, Sister Manhood was only too ready to agree. From giggling too much she would probably end up with a goitre. There was no medical reason; she might though, from the knotting and unknotting of a convulsive throat.

The solicitor was looking at her from under the brim of his Akubra: the way she saw it a hat is only one more thing to lose.

‘Won't you come in, Mr Wyburd?' she remembered, and started coaxing.

When she had got him past the door, he asked, ‘How is Mrs Hunter?' as though he might find her in some way different from what she had been at any time that century.

‘You know they were here this morning?' She had lowered her voice, and was treating the latch with the greatest care.

‘I don't know, Sister. Who? You must be more explicit.' He wanted to hold it off.

‘The children.'

If it did not occur to Sister Manhood to see the princess and Sir Basil as anything but evil and elderly behind the label she had given them, they flickered through Arnold Wyburd's mind with the attributes he would have liked them to keep: grass-stained, scab-kneed, still a vision of potential good.

Irritated by the presence of this nurse, waiting like anybody else to accuse him, he mumbled, ‘Isn't it natural to want to visit their mother?'

‘It could be, but isn't—knowing what we do,' Sister Manhood persisted as they accompanied each other towards the stairs.

Annoyance made Arnold Wyburd bluster. ‘I'm sure I don't know what you're hinting at. None of us knows for certain what Dorothy and Basil's intentions are. And in any case, they may change their minds.'

He was so furious with himself for letting Sister Manhood trap him into what amounted to an admission, and for referring to the Hunters as ‘Dorothy and Basil' in her presence, he stubbed his toe on a stair, and might have fallen forward on his knees if the nurse had not grabbed him by an arm, as though he were one of the geriatrics she was experienced in nursing.

‘Are you all right?' she asked with unnecessary concern.

‘I only came here this afternoon,' he panted, ‘because Sister Badgery rang me about a document Mrs Hunter wants drawn up.'

Ah, then he must have known all along! Badgery could never bottle up information of importance, and what more important than the Hunters' visit?

‘About what time were the princess and Sir Basil here?' he lowered himself enough to inquire.

‘I don't imagine it was too early. People like that don't get moving early.'

His voice brightened. ‘You're quite right. When Sister Badgery rang, I had just reached my office. She knew nothing about a projected visit from the young Hunters—which no doubt they decided to make on the spur of the moment.' He hoped he had shown this girl that there was no good reason for bullying him.

Actually she would not have dreamt of it. She was too busy wondering what the ‘document' could be. Was it a fresh will, perhaps? It was almost certainly a will. If she herself was dishonest enough to sleep with the son behind his mother's back and conceive without his ever knowing, Badgery and Wyburd might be cooking up some plan to forestall the children by diddling the old girl out of her lolly. Naturally the solicitor would lie. Flora Manhood knew she would have perjured herself all the way, denying that she had seduced Sir Basil, anyway till she was certain of a positive result.

It was understandable that she and Wyburd, a couple of crims more or less, should nurse their silences for the rest of the climb.

Outside Mrs Hunter's door, Sister Manhood whispered, ‘You must be very gentle with her, Mr Wyburd: she's had such a dreadful morning.' But you could not tell from glancing at him whether he suspected what was genuine anxiety.

When they went in, the room was practically filled with the ballooning curtain, though as soon as the solicitor closed the door the muslin was sucked back, flapping and battering, before subsiding in tremors, to cling like a transparent skin to the face on the pillow.

The nurse ran forward to deliver her neglected charge from this great caul. ‘There, dear. You're all right. We're here.' Her sense of guilt quickened by thought of her own future trials, Flora Manhood comforted her baby.

Mrs Hunter emerged working her gums. ‘You know I'm not all right,' she gasped, ‘and your being here can't make me any better. I'm past that. Though nobody can do me harm either—or not in ways that matter.'

The solicitor thought her body had shrunk since he was last with her; on the other hand her spirit seemed to billow around them more forcefully.

So he attempted a jolly voice to boost his own flagging spirit. ‘I've come, Mrs Hunter—you remember me, don't you? Arnold Wyburd,' then sotto voce, ‘to discuss the document you have in mind.'

Sister Manhood began rearranging several unimportant objects in case the old bloke might show his hand. He wouldn't, though. And it didn't matter. Betty Hunter was right: she couldn't be harmed, any more than you could kill your baby, if you had conceived it; you might get rid of the embryo, but its spirit would haunt you for ever after.

‘Oh yes,' Mrs Hunter was feeling her way, ‘it's you,' she said. ‘I sent for you—because—I must try to remember.'

Sister Manhood could have slipped out to the nurses' room, free at last to do her nails, consult the stars, or just sit mooning away the flattest stretch of the afternoon, if it wasn't for having to satisfy herself about the blessed ‘document'.

‘It couldn't be the rates and taxes, could it?' Mrs Hunter asked.

‘You've never had to bother yourself, Mrs Hunter, about the rates and taxes.'

‘Always,' she said. ‘Only oneself bothers enough. But perhaps this was more personal. Oh, yes! Nurse, fetch me paper—for Arnold. Something formal, and white. Arnold was the whitest—and the smoothest.'

Poor old Arnold, what he came in for! Sister Manhood almost started giggling again. She would have if the solicitor had encouraged it, but when she looked he ignored her. Nor would he look at Betty Hunter. He was all for his own thoughts, it seemed. He had turned red, except where his jawbones showed up white. Arnold Wyburd, she saw, would look a very naked man when stripped.

As Sister Manhood returned from the nurses' room with the pad, Mrs Hunter was making her solicitor recite, ‘… Marjorie four, Heather three.'

‘Surely there were more? For years the talk was all of babies. Some of them must have died, then?'

‘Yes, some of them died; some miscarried. They don't count, I should have thought.'

Sister Manhood was pretty sure she was right: the ‘document' would be a will, and Arnold Wyburd would influence it.

For a moment Mrs Hunter's attention was distracted by matters more important than life and death: her fingers were flittering over the topmost sheet of the writing-pad her nurse had fetched. She was feeling for concrete evidence.

‘What's this?' The fingers almost gouged out the upper edge of the paper. ‘This isn't it. Not important enough—Nurse. A common
pad
! Go down to the study—to Alfred's desk—the
embossed
paper from Sands.'

Old snob.

‘I want it done properly,' Mrs Hunter insisted.

When Sister Manhood trailed back with a wad of the super parchment, old Betty was explaining, ‘… people think if it isn't in writing, it's stealing.'

Mrs Hunter's hearing was good enough for her to fall silent after that, and the solicitor of course was too discreet to show he knew she had been talking at all.

Flora Manhood would have liked to cry, not only for the unnecessary journey she had been forced to make, but also because these inhuman beings were letting her see the outsider they thought her.

‘I was explaining', Mrs Hunter took up the thread again, ‘that you are going to marry a man you don't value enough.'

‘Marry?
What man, I'd like to know?' Sister Manhood exploded.

Elizabeth Hunter went off into what might once have convinced as laughter. ‘Come on, Arnold. Did you bring him a pen, Sister? And ink?'

Now it was the solicitor who was pleased to explain: he had his Parker, a present from the staff on his seventieth.

‘But who can the fellow be? Who I don't intend to marry?' Sister Manhood raged.

‘Write something, Arnold—in your beautiful hand, which I hope you haven't lost—put something like, “I hereby confirm that I give my pink sapphire to Florrie …” Is it Florrie? “… Manhood—to celebrate her engagement …” Or do you think “betrothal” sounds less suburban? her—her …? But that is beside the point.
What it all amounts to is her—
marriage
with …' Mrs Hunter started coughing, so her nurse was able to occupy herself offering a glass of barley water.

When the coughing fit had passed, Flora Manhood announced, ‘I am not going to be conned into marrying any man—however important. Anyway, you don't know what was behind it. You're mad', she said, ‘to get any such idea. I won't! And you can keep your ring!' She would bring it back from Vidlers' tomorrow, and better if Sir Basil was here: she would show the pair of them, mother and son, how little a pink sapphire impressed her.

‘But we must mention the man's name, Mrs Hunter.' The solicitor paused, suitably grave above his presentation pen.

‘How do I know?' Mrs Hunter grumbled. ‘I can't remember names any more. But liked his voice. Once when he brought the prescript—the medcins!' She smiled the taste of words down. ‘I liked the feel of his skin. I don't know why they brought him up to my room. Perhaps I asked for him. I have always liked men around me.'

Sister Manhood stood the glass so abruptly it chinked with the crystal jug. She removed herself so quickly these cold old devils probably didn't even notice; though you were the reason for the game they were playing, its only object to cause distress.

Well, she would take her child to anywhere—to buggery—or Adelaide—throw the ring out of the bus window, rear her poor bastard with the love she already felt for him, and hope he would not end up murdering her with a hammer for forcing life on him.

Mrs Hunter said, ‘That should pacify her. Give it to me, Arnold.' He did, and she put what she remembered as her signature, slashed across the paper, after which he witnessed it in his deliberate hand.

‘Now,' she said, ‘another matter. Bring me the jewel case. Well,' she said, ‘it's where it's always been—over on that what-not I've had to put up with because it was a present from Emily.'

He fetched the case. She sprang the catch, and her fingers went to
it, verifying. ‘Oh, that! Ugly! Now this—this is what—I've often thought of—of giving Lal Wyburd.' She collected herself immediately. ‘Your wife, Arnold.'

Turquoises were clustered at intervals along the chain she was drawing out.

‘Very simple, as you see. We were poor farmers. (My father died of mortgages.) This chain of my mother's I was wearing when the storm struck. Otherwise it would have gone the way of everything else.' The voice was reduced to such an introspective key, the solicitor might have lost track if it had not been suddenly raised to a pitch of blatancy which suggested Elizabeth Hunter had manned her battering ram. ‘Do you think Lal will care for anything so unimportant? People expect you to hand out something showy when they've decided you're sitting on treasures. So she may be hurt—by the insignificance—of this little chain. When one doesn't set out—deliberately—to ruffle these sensitive souls. If she doesn't like it, at least she can wear it on family occasions.' The mouth rasped shut.

‘Yes.' He was tired. ‘She will like it.' His eyelids were the heaviest part of him.

He was no master of disguises: he could not have watched the condescension with which their benefactress would have received thanks for her gift to his wife; so he simply put the chain in his pocket.

She had sunk back, gummy-eyed and thoughtful, before remembering, ‘Have you got the paper? To give that nurse?'