She was, in fact, again seated at the bedside of this young girl, where she had been ushered and left.
‘What is your name?’ she heard herself asking to break the silence.
‘Irene.’
‘You’re lucky to have such a beautiful name.’
‘Is it?’
‘To me it is.’
‘I loathe it!’
Although it was around eleven o’clock Irene was lying stretched on her bed pricking a card with a pin. Her rather lifeless hair was laid along the sides of her cheeks and over her shoulders almost as far as the small, but aggressively mature breasts. The long gown, printed with a yellowish green design, must have been carefully arranged in those folds where the skirt covered the legs: the folds were too formal, like stone. Sister de Santis was reminded of a figure she had seen on a tomb.
The girl continued pricking at the card.
‘Wouldn’t you be better sitting in your chair?’ the nurse asked.
‘Oh, I’ll sit in my chair! I’ll sit in my chair all right! Today and tomorrow. And tomorrow.’ She drove the pin savagely into the card.
‘Do you enjoy reading?’
The girl shook off the whole idea. ‘I watch the box — if ever there’s anything of interest.’
‘What interests you most?’
The girl dropped the card. ‘I like to watch brutes exerting themselves. Specially killing one another.’ She laughed to herself, then looked sideways at this stodgy nurse. ‘Do you think you’ll like me?’
‘Perhaps I shall if I get to know you as you really are.’
‘Oh, I’m worse — worse than you could possibly imagine!’ A convulsion of the hand on the long green skirt dragged at it and rucked it above the little-girl’s feet and useless legs.
The nurse got up to arrange the skirt in its original folds. The girl’s hostility appeared to have increased now that the stranger was introduced to the unmentionable.
Sister de Santis noticed a bowl of anemones standing on the sill of a bow window. The garden beyond was a labyrinth, not without glimmers of fruitfulness.
‘Did these anemones come from your garden?’ she asked for the sake of saying something.
‘I don’t know. Yes, I suppose they did.’ The girl seemed unwilling to consider anything beyond the fringe of her inturned thoughts.
‘My last case loved flowers. She was blind, but she enjoyed their scent, and she liked to touch them. Roses were her particular flower. I used to cut the roses early in the morning and stand them in her room with the dew still on them.’
You could almost hear the girl listening: her eyelashes. ‘Sick people must be disgusting,’ she said. ‘To have to handle them! I’d always rather be surrounded by beautiful, perfect people. Even if they’re cold and cruel. I don’t want anyone I have to pity. To offer pity — that’s the most disgusting act of all.’
‘Mrs Hunter wasn’t sick,’ Sister de Santis said. ‘She was old. She had been a great beauty in her day — a success. She was also cold and cruel when it suited her to be.’
‘Was she happy?’ Irene asked.
‘Not altogether. She was human. In the end I feel age forced her to realize she had experienced more than she thought she had at the time.’
Using her elbows and ugly handfuls of the bed, Irene was raising herself higher on the pillows; she had developed unusual power in her arms and shoulders, the nurse noticed, and decided not to help.
‘That’s all very well, but what shall I experience?’ the girl asked.
‘I’d say you have the will — haven’t you? to find out.’
She didn’t reply. She had resumed her original occupation of pricking a card with a pin.
‘What’s this?’ Sister de Santis asked. ‘Are you making a pattern?’
‘A pattern? NOTHING.’ Suddenly Irene leaned over and stabbed the outstretched hand with the pin.
When she had recovered from the pain and her surprise, Sister de Santis — they were both staring at the bead of blood which had risen to the surface of the skin.
The nurse asked, ‘Why did you do that, Irene?’
The girl’s lips, her eyelids, had thickened. ‘You won’t come,’ she mumbled.
‘If you want me I shall.’
The girl had slipped back to a lower position on the bed. The nurse was again reminded of the figure on the tomb, except that blotches had appeared on the cheeks, their human ugliness emphasized, if not illuminated, by tears which had oozed from under struggling lids.
When it seemed that Irene would not commit herself further, Sister de Santis left.
The mother was waiting to waylay the nurse. ‘Now you know what to expect,’ Mrs Fletcher began in a high voice which the tiled hall made sound more chittery. ‘I didn’t want to come in with you because Irene holds me responsible for everything she considers bad.’ The mother’s wrinkled prettiness tried to turn the situation into an amusing one; if her daughter had not been her cross, the pursuit of pleasure might have taken its place.
‘I shall come on Thursday,’ Sister de Santis told her, ‘if that is convenient.’
‘Thank God!’ Mrs Fletcher used the term with professional ease, and such vehemence that a scent of gin hovered around them as they stood discussing hours and the inevitable money.
‘I could live in if you wanted,’ Sister de Santis thought.
‘If you haven’t a life of your own!’ Mrs Fletcher jittered worse than ever with gratitude and amusement; then she said, ‘It wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t warn you she literally tortured the last nurse into leaving. She is so warped, she is only convinced by what is evil.’ The mother laughed.
The nurse repeated they could expect her on the Thursday.
Now as she watched Sister Badgery devouring the Torte, Mary de Santis wondered how she would have answered Mrs Fletcher if pressed to explain what constituted her own life. Memory of her parents had faded since Mrs Hunter’s death: if they recurred in physical form they had the wooden faces of the figures in time-darkened icons. Her own clothes were a habit. She sat with books more often than she read them. (Dante had died with the forgotten cadences of her father’s voice.) And desire. Incredulously she watched Sir Basil Hunter’s silken ankle as his foot beat time to boredom in the garden of the Onslow Hotel. Of all her personal life it was perhaps physical desire which had died the most painful, because the most shamefully grotesque, death. Would she have admitted wearing that hat to the funeral if she had been accounting for herself to her future employer? Her betrayal of Mrs Hunter that second time was only outdone by Sir Basil’s absence.
Sister Badgery had spooned up the last of the lovely cream, the last fleck of apricot.
Sister de Santis had thrown that orange hat away. She could have confessed truthfully to Irene’s mother that she was entirely free.
‘What is the name of this family?’ For Sister Badgery names were of considerable importance.
‘Fletcher.’
‘Which ones, I wonder?’
Sister de Santis did not know.
‘Well, there’s the flour Fletchers. Isn’t there jewellers too? Cheap jewellers, but the cheap ones often come off best. I expect you’ve fallen on your feet, Sister.’
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.