The Eye of the Storm (63 page)

Mrs Cush was so distressed she flipped with her duster and sent a
little silver tray spinning off the dressing-table. It clattered through Sister Manhood's nerves like wind bashing into a curtain of metal beads.

‘If that's how you feel,' said the nurse, ‘it's better for you to take a nap.'

‘Oh, I have! Haven't I been sleeping all my life? That's why I asked Mrs Cush to tell me something real.'

‘I'll give you something to help.' It was not like Sister Manhood to make offers.

‘I may take you up on that, Mrs Pardoe. But not now. I want Sister Lippmann to dance for me.'

Sister Manhood went to fetch this old clown from the dressing-room where she was waiting to perform.

Lotte Lippmann had her nose in one of the cupboards.

‘What are you up to? Fossicking through other people's things!' It was at least an opportunity for the nurse to revive her collapsed self-righteousness.

Lotte Lippmann said, ‘This is the dress she has promised me after she dies. Only, as I see it, they will not believe. Or if I shall take my dress, they will say I have stolen it.'

‘Have it put on paper, dear.' Sister Manhood snorted with some bitterness. ‘That's what the solicitor's for. To see that debts are paid, and everybody legally tidied up.'

‘But Mrs Hunter is in no way indebted.' As Lotte Lippmann stood fumbling the dress, it did seem that this rustling, materially insubstantial stuff, of foggy moonlight as well as gauze and sequins, absolved the owner from obligations other than that of continued being.

Inklings of transcendence had washed against Flora Manhood before, if only by brief moments: after some dream had driven her out from a house of threatened cardboard into a solid white night, to which her own white particle suddenly and miraculously belonged; or swimming with Col Pardoe against the tide of music, where inadmissible eddies would occur in which she was almost whirled to an understanding of mysteries such as love, beauty
fulfilment, death. Now, thanks to this crazy Jewess, she was again troubled: by the shimmer from a grotty dress in Elizabeth Hunter's wardrobe. When, like every good Australian, she must continue to believe only in the now which you can see and touch. But did she make sense? She had given away all that is most touchable along with Col Pardoe: the ribs which enclosed his thudding heart; in her own groin a trickle of semen she had made a show of wiping off and secretly let dry on her finger. Or their children: however hard they pummelled, and hollered for life, she had seen to it that she would never allow them their rightful features.

‘Stop mauling that mouldy old dress!' Sister Manhood's sticky finger was rankling with her. ‘We'd better go in, Lot. She's waiting for you—to
dance
!'

So they went in to Mrs Hunter's room.

‘… I always sweared by the bark meself but Mavis would never do it without she used a hairpin.' Mrs Cush was having trouble removing from the pierglass a reflection she was rubbing with a damp rag.

‘Here is Mrs Lippmann,' Sister Manhood announced in her classiest voice. ‘She's come to dance for you, Mrs Hunter.'

Elizabeth Hunter replied, ‘So I see,' without opening her eyes.

Lotte Lippmann put on her napless hat. The cane protruding from her left armpit wobbled for the human being in her as she stared out of the chalky face at the figure on the bed, or farther, probably much farther. For that reason she could not resist, finally, whatever it was that took place: translation, or dislocation. A whip almost audibly cracked: the limbs twitched into jerky action; the face was split by a patent-leather smile, the more deathly for clenched jawbones and one or two gaps somewhere earwards. Lotte Lippmann was again breathing the spotlit dust as she went into her song-and-dance,
ein zwei drei,
the painful pumps thumping the carpet, a voice unfurling like a raucous favour from away back around the uvula.

Out of the gaps and the gold in her crimson slot of a mouth, accompanied by her possessed body, she sang,

And Mrs Cush, who must have taken part in it before, echoed,
‘Oppler!
'

Poor Lottie! Flora Manhood was reminded of a golliwog moneybox on a nursery mantelpiece.

While Lotte Lippmann persisted with her perpetually unsuccessful trick of trying to disentangle her voice from its distinctive raucousness, she continued to point her toe, or hobble in pursuit of the authoritarian spot, tapping with the dented knob at the end of her cane on tables which were not there. Screeching. Choking once. Fighting with gloved fingers a hair stuck to her lips. Always smiling. The neck muscles screwed tighter by the
clack clack
of the patent-leather words.

Sister Manhood could get on with the job at least, take her patient's temperature, feel her pulse, plump the pillows; whereas the cleaner, who appeared to have finished her work, was stranded in the middle of a pantomime which frightened rather than amused. Even less sure how she ought to react when grabbed round the waist and dragged into a wheezy, undulating waltz,
Mrs Cush might have got the wind up if she had not bumped foreheads with Lottie, breaking up their partnership.

After re-settling the topper, Lotte Lippmann danced alone; and as she danced, she sang,

Mrs Hunter, who had not yet opened her eyes, did so as she rejected the thermometer with her tongue. ‘No longer necessary, thank you, Sister. This morning they drove the temperature out of me for good and all.'

Even so, Elizabeth Hunter's smile, her eyes, suggested a slight fever as she lay looking inwards at an image possibly invoked by Lotte Lippmann's song-and-dance: was it herself? light slithering off the long legs, men's eyes not to be detached from the stockings; ignore it of course, but that is another convention which deceives no one.

Elizabeth Hunter's head was beating a different time to the music to the brisk pebbles of the kettle-drum and goo from the foggier saxophone: as you dance you pretend you are not practically naked you are what is accepted as virtuous but men call cold.

‘Not cold.' Elizabeth Hunter's head lolled. ‘Part of you will never be touched. That's all it is. Not even by Alfred.' She turned to her nurse. ‘That's what nuns understand, isn't it, Sister?'

‘I wouldn't know.' Sister Manhood was busy disinfecting the thermometer.

‘No. You're the breeder. Sister de Santis would know. Where's Mary? I haven't seen her since we were girls.'

‘She was here last night.' Sister Manhood corrected; ‘and will come again this evening,' she offered as consolation.

‘Oh, yes.' Mrs Hunter accepted it.

So they were all dancing: the nurses lined out even skinny Badgery that potato sack is Milly Cush all pelting the patrons with crimson rosebuds from little trays attached to the neck by halters of variegated ribbons.

The singer withdrew to one side, apparently about to reveal the reason for their shenanigans. The stale-perfumed, over-throaty words faltered as the line broke and re-formed; and there at the apex stood Elizabeth Hunter.

Nursing at her breast an ammunition of roses (hers were white) she hesitated a moment to allow her patrons to recover from the dazzle, then took aim. Thanks to her height and her supple body she could throw farther than anyone. She threw the handfuls of white petals, torn off so extravagantly they might have been paper, or flesh, sometimes an eye fringed with stamens, and stems which made her hands rim. She flung her offerings over the men's smarmed heads and those of their jealous tight-permed women, to lob amongst the pyramidal waves of deepest cobalt, the muslin balconies dissolving around them to be thrown up afresh and contorted by the storm of applause.

‘Oh yes,' she smiled at her human satellites, ‘I have only to learn to re-enter and I shall be accepted. Their beaks were crimson, with staring nostrils, but innocent of cruelty.'

She must have known that her attempts to convince others would remain hopeless and might even be interpreted as pretentious, not only by a sceptical audience, but her fellow artists, for she opened her eyes as wide as she could, to shock the lot of them by exposing those opalescent cataracts.

Her impromptu had electrifying consequences: a voice tore itself
out by the roots and lashed the air with an excruciating scream. It was her housekeeper, Mrs Hunter realized.

‘Ich kann nicht mehr weiter. Ich fürchte mich. Immer. Immer. Dieser entsetzliche Gestank. Ich halt's nicht aus.'

Mrs Hunter heard what sounded like a silk hat bowling across the carpet on its cardboard brim till abruptly halted by furniture. She felt Mrs Lippmann's cotton gloves grappling her; and—please not! convulsive lips fastening themselves on the backs of her hands.

‘Barmherzigkeit! Ich verlier' auch SIE! Verweile doch!'

Because she was so repelled physically, not to say otherwise embarrassed, Mrs Hunter replied, ‘Every serious German I ever came across fell back on quoting from Goethe in a crisis—if not the real thing, their own version of him. I don't understand this dependence—unless the absolute stinker in a great man makes him more human.'

It did not persuade Mrs Lippmann to release the hand she was slobbering on. ‘I am no German. I am a black Jew from anywhere between Hamburg and Bessarabia—who have escaped the gas
Ofens
by my own imperishability—and since than a
Gunst
you have shown me—till that too, will be taken from me.' She began slobbering afresh, or trying to devour the relic she would not otherwise be allowed to possess for her own desperate purposes.

Mrs Cush, herself an expert on slobbering, gnashing, and possession, slunk off.

A wind had risen. The muslin curtain which Sister Manhood had flung back to dismiss the smells of exertion, soggy powder, musty clothes, and perhaps a whiff of putrefaction from the corpses she had laid out in the course of her short career, was billowing and fluctuating inside Mrs Hunter's room.

Shuttled between controlling a curtain and dragging the housekeeper off her patient, Flora Manhood's voice was trembling, ‘Mrs Lippmann—come, please! I'll have to give you something if you can't get a hold of yourself.'

‘I am again sedate, Flora.'

She did appear all of a sudden surprisingly calm. Above the craters
and runnels of the cheeks and advanced deliquescence of the lips, the eyes were afloat, if darker for their recent plunge.

‘I do not see why I should fear what I have already always known.' She rubbed her cheek with her coat sleeve, then looked dispassionately at the evidence she found on the cuff.

The nurse accompanied the housekeeper along the passage as far as the door which separated the servants' quarters from the landing.

‘You will leave Mrs Hunter unattended,' Mrs Lippmann asked, ‘after her—experience?' Though her own life depended on the mortality of this old woman, exhaustion made her sound disinterested.

‘She'll sleep now. This is her time for a nap, and she'd hold it against anyone who made her miss it. Specially today, when it may help her forget what they're going to do to her.' Sister Manhood listened to her own chatter while guiding a friend who had been proved almost less calculable than herself.

At the baize door she longed for the housekeeper to invite her in to the bare, but emotionally overcharged room, in which she slept. Flora Manhood would willingly have allowed Lottie to tuck her up in the narrow bed and afterwards take her temperature; from behind closed lids she would have listened for the verdict: you are several lines above normal Floradora as you would expect of somebody who imagines herself with child by this crumby old farting famous actor sleep and you will wake up to find you are under obligation to nobody but yourself least of all to a geriatric case approaching the expected conclusion.

As she could not be cured so simply, the situation continued billowing in Sister Manhood's mind like the live curtain in the room to which she must return. Till the front doorbell rang. And that same muslin of her uncontrollable mind was ripped to flapping shreds, then scattered in what had become snippets of tinkling zinc.

Mrs Lippmann was again the golliwog money-box in cast iron, its paint martyred by inhuman children. ‘Is it these murderers coming already about their business?' The possibility was more than she could face. ‘You will answer for me, Flora? You see I am not after
all in my own control.' The baize door, expiring on its hinges, masked a whimper.

Left alone on the landing, Sister Manhood could feel her hypothetical child become a fact: he jumped inside her long before his time. She went downstairs. Colin Pardoe would be standing in the porch with the parcel of drugs Badgery had forgotten to mention, and which Col himself had perversely decided to bring. He would begin staring immediately at the little window with which her womb had just been fitted, to make it easier for him to identify a foetus by its features. If she could snatch the deadly drugs Dr Gidley had prescribed for his patient in a moment of misguided compassion (he little knew it was the nurse who needed his help) Flora Manhood thought her shame and desperation would help her tear the wrapping, fumble out the plug of cotton wool, and in spite of Col's iron fingers, nails pared to the quick as she remembered, and brutal thwack of male arms bare as far up as the biceps, she would more than swallow, she would first chew the bitter-tasting capsules, only for the necessary instant, because she would feel the poison thrust its prongs through her entire system, and fall oh God briefly convulsed before the cold took over on the chequered tiles at Colin Pardoe's feet.