The Eye of the Storm (76 page)

And now here below her Mrs Hunter's lips were probing trembling around at nothing.

Quickly Mrs Wyburd stooped: she kissed the air just short of the older woman's face.

Elizabeth Hunter must have heard it. She sank back on her pillows looking fairly well satisfied. ‘Love me!' she murmured, scarcely for her caller.

It might have been another conquest, not so much of an individual as of the abstract: in any case, she would chalk it up along with the others.

Mrs Wyburd left. She was glad neither the housekeeper nor the nurse was anywhere in sight: they might have asked questions, or worse, complimented her in some way. She walked downstairs looking at her feet, holding her handkerchief to her mouth, to stop up an emptiness where that kiss should have been. Still, she had her husband, whom beauty had failed to destroy. Nor would death if she could prevent it.

Mrs Wyburd cried, though.

After being dismissed from her employer's room Sister Manhood had gone outside and was walking around in the garden, sort of doodling, with her body for pencil and her mind as lead. She had only ever bothered about what is called landscape while she was a kid, when you have the time to take notice of a leaf or insect (perhaps amuse yourself killing the insect) or cowpat (pick up the dry ones and bowl them along) later there is always yourself standing in the way of trees and things to prevent you seeing them except as dim and superfluous.

Walking in Mrs Hunter's garden she tore off a leaf, or two, sucked one, dropped the other, before taking refuge in the sleeves of her fluffy cardigan. She hid her hands. She wondered how much longer she would be able to hide the shape of her body from practised eyes, or whether the solicitor's wife had already got the message.

The nurse watched old Mrs Wyburd leave the house and pass through the garden on her way to the street, so busy with her own thoughts she was not noticing anything around her. Even so, Flora Manhood slightly smoothed the skirt over her stomach. Then she folded her fluffy pink arms above her fallen breasts.

The gate squeaked. Mrs Wyburd had gone.

Over the indistinct garden the sky was clear and watery with one torn-out cotton wool cloud piled high above the racecourse and the convents. Flora Manhood touched her face; that too, had swollen: its white, turnip skin. She would have allowed a mere stranger (not quite true) to kiss away her independence if that had been possible.

Then the tingle tinkle of the little bell: it was the relic summoning you to a duty, of which Mary de Santis would have made a devotion.

Sister Manhood walked very firmly up the swirling, not to say dangerous path (Mrs Hunter liked to tell how two people had broken their legs) towards her non-devotional duty. Her arms were hanging perfectly indifferent inside the cardy. When that wasn't her at all. If only she could have felt cold and indifferent Col Pardoe might never have happened; Sir Basil bloody Hunter would not have entered into it.

The garden at dusk encouraged in Flora Manhood's mind too much that was distinctly irretrievable: speckles on birds' eggs
wotcher do with the muck Snow when you've sucked it out? why you spit it
dogs with dots above their eyes freckles on an old woman's lids moles in the angle of a man's arm
teeth Flo what's got into you? you don't understand only books and
MAHLER
not that what you love you want to eat oh Coll-urnn.

Lottie Lippmann was standing in the darkening hall looking like a small rat come out of a creek bank.

‘What is it, Floradora? Are you sick?'

Flora Manhood said, ‘I got a bit of a bellyache.' Though Lottie was solid gold, and had been around, she was too pure to confide in.

‘She's been ringing for you,' Mrs Lippmann said.

‘You're telling
me
! Couldn't you have answered—Lot?'

‘I am preparing myself. She expects me later,' Mrs Lippmann said.

The nurse realized that the housekeeper, who at first sight in the dusk, and through the shutter of her own disturbed thoughts, had suggested some small wary animal, was excessively calm and in some way resplendent. Though still wearing an old woollen kitchen-stained shift and her comfortable felt slippers, she had dressed her hair smoother than ever before; the roots were visibly straining at the straight white parting even by that light, the eyes more luminous for the dim hall and state of anticipation.

‘Later I shall come to her,' Mrs Lippmann repeated through
naturally dark lips, lowering oiled eyelids on a confidence she was not at liberty to share, though the nurse probably guessed.

It was too spooky for Flora Manhood. She went upstairs. In passing the bathroom she felt a nausea rise in her, and went in to give way to it. She stood looking into the lavatory bowl in an attitude of penitence; but nothing came. Nothing would be made easy. Except that the nausea passed. And Lottie must have taken the tea things she was glad to see on going into the patient's room.

The remains of a voice succeeded at last in detaching itself from where it was stuck. ‘I want you to make up my face, Sister Manhood.'

Her own name sounded repellent to the nurse, who snapped back, ‘That's just what you wouldn't have when there was some reason for doing it.'

‘Mrs Wyburd mightn't have understood.'

If there were any implication that Flora Manhood might be included in the hierarchy of those who understood, it was wasted on her: she was too distressed by her own condition. She was plain cranky in fact, and in no mood for games.

She jerked at the cord of the bedside lamp, and when the light flew out, Mrs Hunter did not preach her usual sermon about who pays the bills. This evening the old thing meekly waited, already holding her face to receive.

Because of the mood she was in, Sister Manhood slammed around a bit before bringing the vanity case and dumping it hard on the bedside table. Mrs Hunter did not comment. Though the gristle was taut in her throat, her face smiled for grace about to descend.

Tonight as she smeared and moulded the cheeks with cream Flora Manhood did not even ask what her client was going for. Nor did Mrs Hunter suggest; she submitted. It could not have occurred to her, in her trance, that an apostasy might have taken place.

Certainly the custodian of the sacred image had never felt less religiously inclined. What if she did a real hatchet job for once? So she dusted, and pasted on, the shimmering greens of all fiends; the idol's brutal mouth would scarcely overflow after she had
contained its crimson with a thick wall of black; if steely lids sharpened the swords those eyes could flash in their most vindictive moments, at least their victims would go down laughing.

Flora Manhood was laughing for her own art.

‘Is it all right?' Mrs Hunter inquired. ‘She is going to dance for me presently.'

‘It would send you if you could see!' Sister Manhood grinned. ‘You'll both give a performance tonight.'

When she had wrapped the body in what used to be a robe of rose brocade, and seated it in the chrome chair, Sister Manhood shivered, as though the lift were rising, and the masks waiting for more than the patient at the end of the aseptic corridor.

To remember and fetch the wig was some distraction. She found herself bringing the green one, which Mrs Hunter had worn only once, and never asked for again.
(Though I can't see it Sister I don't feel it comes off—as an idea.
Tonight it did.)

When she had arranged the lifeless hair, Sister Manhood patted it as nonchalantly as she could. ‘Flowing free!'

Acceptant in every department, Mrs Hunter smiled and said, ‘That is what I visualized;' then remembered, ‘But my jewels, Nurse! Have you forgotten?' Anxiety almost produced a hiccup.

Whether she had or not, the girl brought the case. As the jewels were loaded on her, Mrs Hunter appeared to appreciate their shuddering collisions. ‘How we enjoyed suffering!' she giggled at one point.

The two great emeralds Sister Manhood had screwed to her ears were clubbing her cheeks before settling down. If it had not been for support from the chrome chair-back, an emerald stomacher might have dragged her down into a horizontal position, or lethal pin pierced her to the heart.

Sister Manhood had, in fact, pricked the skin in bridging the eroded cleavage; but as you saw it, the old biddy was too far gone with vanity and age to feel.

The nurse lightly wiped away a drop of blood from a superficial wound; even when she dabbed the place with alcohol, neither fumes nor pain seemed to reach the actual Elizabeth Hunter.

Instead her breath gathered to ask, ‘Have you given me my star? My sapphire?'

‘But your fingers must be just about paralysed with rings. And the sapphire won't go. Not with what I've already put.' The artist in Flora Manhood was offended.

‘It must!' Mrs Hunter insisted.

They both began scrabbling through the velvet trays. When it came to jewels, Mrs Hunter's fingers were more agile than her nurse's.

‘It isn't here!' Sister Manhood shouted louder than her patient's deafness required.

‘My star! Could it have fallen on the floor? I gave you one, didn't I? the pink—but only the pink, Dorothy.'

Sister Manhood was crawling groping round the chair. ‘Yes, the pink—the pink's in writing. You don't imagine
I
took your other sapphire? I didn't want either of them.'

Mrs Hunter smiled and said, ‘No.'

Dusty and breathless, Sister Manhood was also snivelling by the time she righted herself.
‘Anybody
could have stolen the thing.'

‘Yes.' Mrs Hunter smiled. ‘Or I might have given it as a present. Kate had so many dolls she was always giving them away and often couldn't remember. It doesn't matter—in the end—does it?' She did not exactly settle the rose brocade but let it slither around her shoulders into a more natural line. ‘Now will you call her?' The lips had grown tremulous with unusually controlled impatience. ‘Tell her I am ready.'

From the doorway Flora Manhood looked back, afraid of what she might have created. Old Betty Hunter's green and silver mask glittered and glimmered in the depths of the room. Nobody could accuse you of malice when you had only emphasized the truth. As for Mrs Hunter, she looked for the moment conscious of her own fiend, and was resigned to accepting responsibility for it.

You, on the other hand, would never know for sure how much of the evil in you was of your own making, and how much had been forced on you by others, by Col Pardoe, Mrs Hunter, people you simply brush up against—or God, if there was one; only there
wasn't: there was no scientific evidence. Not like this child, playing on your nerves, threatening to split your head and make you throw up. The child was real enough: your own deliberate creation, whether for good or evil; nobody, least of all Sir Basil Hunter, could be blamed for that.

Flinging back the door, not so much to summon the housekeeper as to dash for the bathroom, Flora Manhood almost collided with what she did not at first recognize as Mrs Lippmann.

She was wearing this grotty dress she claimed Mrs Hunter had promised her, and which in theory anyone of right mind would have considered a ghastly joke. But in practice the dress worked. For in the days when Elizabeth Hunter of audacious legs had glided out through the dusty light in the opening steps of the next foxtrot, the chiffon frothing and lapping in waves from beneath the spangled surface of what must have given an impression of liquid metal, or restless water, the skirt would barely have reached her knees; so now this stumpy Jewess was able to wear it, certainly not with dash, rather with a reverence suited to the austere tunic the dress had become.

Gravely the Jewess inclined her large head with its coil of hair as she passed the nurse. Eyes already fixed on the heights to which she aspired, Lotte Lippmann must have forgotten the pains in her feet. If she was conscious of garishness in the seated figure, she chose to ignore it: she was too devoted, or entranced. And-Mrs Hunter smiled. She held out a hand so tremulous with jewels it appeared to be establishing a beat. Lotte Lippmann accepted the hand together with any other conventions.

Flora Manhood had never taken part in a mystery: almost with Col Pardoe, if she had not resisted; almost, if she had been equal to it (less clumsy, ignorant, frightened) with Elizabeth Hunter at moments when the old woman had been willing to share her experience of life. Now the nurse's lips were muttering and jumbling as she stood in the doorway holding her belly and watching for what was about to happen.

On advancing into the centre of the room, Lotte Lippmann smartly clicked her heels twice, and bent a knee in a girlish curtsey,
or obeisance. That much Flora Manhood understood. What she saw was only the dancer's back: all those vertebrae like beads where Elizabeth Hunter's nakedness had been, now ending in the coil of hair gathered tight at the nape of Lotte Lippmann's neck.

Lulled by the heavy devotional air which filled the room (ought to slip round and open the window to ventilate) Flora from her distance began telling the vertebrae. Though she wasn't a mick. And Lot a Jew.

Oh but you felt sick get away and vomit it up or get rid of the whole packet (would somebody find it in the lavatory bowl and accuse you of it?)

None of this deterred the immediate participants, Elizabeth Hunter conducting a rite with one green hand, or Lotte Lippmann, who had turned, and begun interpreting their dance.

The dancer at first moved haltingly: the stumpy arms hesitated to fling an impulse skyward. This was a dance she had never performed before: every twig on which she trod, alarmed; leaves turning to metal tore at her sleeked hair. So she ducked her head. While her ‘public' was reaching out to snatch her back into their midst: paws fringed with reddish hair, or alternately, the white lollipop imitations of fingers, were preparing to tweak her nipples and evaluate her undersized breasts, her conic-sectional hips.