The Eye of the Storm Read online

  Sister Manhood walked through the hall swinging her orange plastic handbag. She went out to the kitchen where Mrs Lippmann would be dishing up lunch. Although it was agreed in writing that Sister Badgery should be given lunch before going off, it was never more than silently accepted that Sister Manhood should arrive in time to eat her share. Only reasonable, as Flora Manhood saw it.

  ‘So! We thought you was going to be late, Floradora!’ The housekeeper’s solecisms went oddly with her civilized monkey’s face: they roused Jessie Badgery’s scorn—a scorn for all foreigners; but Flora Manhood was by moments at least something of an anarchist.

  Now she nibbled at the housekeeper’s unresisting ear. ‘Anyway, I saw Her—the Queen Maree Antoinette Mother of all the Russias the Princess Lascabum.’

  The housekeeper shrieked, and scraped the pan harder than ever; she wagged her behind as though stroked by the long feathers of light which float out across the empty floor, out of darkness, the moment before the act begins.

  ‘Wenn Mutter in die Manage ritt,’ Mrs Lippmann sang, and helped it along with the iron spoon.

  ‘What’s all these jokes I’m not in on?’ Sister Badgery called from the breakfast room, in which she was already seated, and where Mrs Lippmann served the nurses’ lunch.

  Surprisingly, Sister Badgery had an appetite, though in manoeuvring the food past her lips her fork implied disparagement, and she emphasized her disapproval with an occasional flick of her accurate veil. What she could not disguise was a stomach like a small melon under the starched uniform, or her opinion of her colleague, who had sat down in her street dress and was scoffing the scrambled eggs, slithery with too much butter, in their cornets of smoked ham.

  There was cucumber too, in sour cream, under a pretty sprinkling of dill; and a chocolate Torte oozing on to a paper doily in a Meissen dish. ‘Ooh! Yummy yummy!’ Flora Manhood squealed, her eye on the Torte. ‘You’ve given away the milshig-fleishig today, Lottie!’

  ‘No milchig-fleischig,’ Mrs Lippmann muttered, from round what could have been an obstructive cigar. ‘Only when I am at my lowest. I don’t know why I am not today. But I am not.’ If she had been smoking that cigar, her nostrils would have blown two streams of the fiercest smoke.

  Sister Manhood examined her thumb and what was a fleck of sour cream; then she slowly licked the cream off. ‘Can’t think why you stick around here cooking for us and old Mother Swizzlestick upstairs.’

  ‘Poor Mrs Hunter! Such names!’ Sister Badgery protested. ‘Why “Swizzlestick”, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘Because she likes to believe there’s still a duty male, somewhere, drinking champers to her out of a shoe.’

  Lotte Lippmann cackled. ‘That’s why I stick around cooking for Mrs Swizzlestick! Ich weiss auch was Liebe ist!’

  ‘But the career and all, Lottie—how can you be content as a cook?’ Sister Manhood’s attempt at seriousness and gentility was sabotaged by her mouth closing on a forkful of Torte.

  Mrs Lippmann hawked up her reply. ‘Ach, die Karriere! My art was a tiny, satiric one—to find what in all things is ridiculous—and all things are ridiculous if you look.’ She laughed flat, and you could see her broad, purple tongue; you could see Lotte Lippmann tugging at the brim of her top hat, settling a cane under an armpit. ‘My art was destructive—and soon finished—prick! pouff! along with all that it had pricked—alles so schrecklich komisch! Do you understand, ladies?’ The cook was staggering under the weight of her exposition.

  Sister Badgery did not like it at all when the housekeeper carried on like this; Sister Manhood, on the other hand, sat with her elbows on the table, her face in her hands, and felt she was experiencing life.

  ‘No, it was not altogether like this,’ Mrs Lippmann seemed to remember. ‘My career ended in the gas ofens—in the smoke from Jews.’ It could have been ashes choking the seams of her burnt-out face.

  ‘Oh, stopput, Lot!’ Flora Manhood wanted to cry; she could have cried for everything, but principally herself.

  While Sister Badgery was wondering how she might slip away and release the cucumber seeds trapped under her denture.

  ‘So now I cook. That too is an art—a creative one, I tell myself—though I should be doing it in some huddle of Jews—all together mortifying ourselves and remembering the smoke from the incinerators of Germany.’

  Mrs Lippmann laughed gently; but Sister Manhood burst into a spate of noisy sobs.

  ‘You’ve been overdoing it, Sister. I can tell,’ Sister Badgery said. ‘You don’t get your proper quota of sleep.’

  ‘It isn’t that.’ Sister Manhood tried to wipe her messy cheeks. ‘Well, it is too, I suppose—when you are involved with somebody—and can’t make up your mind how deep.’

  Sister Badgery sucked her teeth in sympathy or disapproval, and by so doing, managed to work out several of the pointed cucumber seeds; after which success, and the rich meal, she meditated, ‘We’ve all of us got our job;’ and swallowed the seeds.

  Mrs Lippmann offered, ‘I make you a double strong coffee, Floradora.’

  Just then they heard a tinkling in the upper air. They sat and listened, and could have gone on sitting and listening: it was such a frail tinkling, of a little handbell, both supplicating and peremptory. All three became ashamed.

  Sister Manhood said, after taking a good look at her watch, ‘I must go up to the old bag. Bet she’s wet the bed, or worse.’

  Sister Badgery frowned and winced, and whipped the veil off her neutral, almost non-existent hair.

  ‘Unser armer Schatz!’ Mrs Lippmann sighed, sweeping crumbs off the table with her hand.

  ‘Shan’t be a couple of ticks, love, unless it’s something urgent,’ Sister Manhood called through Mrs Hunter’s door, and her practised, nurse’s voice would have convinced all but the most sceptical.

  Mrs Hunter, who had decided that it was one of her more pitiful moments, accepted the convention meekly enough. ‘Nothing urgent,’ she quavered back. ‘Only they’ve left me alone for hours, and I feel I’m due for some sort of human attention.’

  Nobody on either side ever bothered to wonder how much anybody believed in the untruths to which you were driven by self-pity and old age. Then there were those other genuine occasions when two minutes can encompass acons of slow rot: that was something you couldn’t explain to human beings who measure time by the clock.

  Actually Sister Manhood was quick at changing from dress into uniform, because Jessie would be chafing to change and catch the bus. Sister Badgery insisted on absolute privacy: she couldn’t bear to show herself even from behind a bra; and no wonder. So Flora Manhood resisted the temptation to contemplate her own body. She made do with her face, sucking in her cheeks after she had adjusted the veil, after she had pasted her lips a deeper pink for whoever would see them, not old Betty Hunter that was for sure.

  ‘Well, here we are then! Did you have an exciting morning, Mrs Hunter?’ Sister Manhood asked in a brisk voice unlike the one she knew to be hers.

  ‘My daughter isn’t an exciting girl.’

  ‘It must have been nice, though. Wasn’t it? After all this time.’

  The nurse had to repair the bed: that was her duty; she began to do it.

  ‘I suppose it was nice,’ Mrs Hunter said as she was tossed about from side to side. ‘But you can never really tell with people—what they like. My children—when they were children—always claimed to like the opposite of what I knew they did.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Flora Manhood couldn’t care. What she herself liked she sometimes wondered: rich, yummy food; sleep; cosmetics; making love; not making love.

  She remembered and asked, ‘Supposing we rub your back? Or don’t you want to be bothered?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ Mrs Hunter answered blissfully.

  She could take any amount of treatment from little Manhood, whether buffeting or caresses, even her out and out bad tempers: an animal presence is something the mind craves the farther the body shrivels i
nto skin and bone.

  Sister Manhood had hoped her patient might refuse the back-rubbing; she had given her the opportunity; but it hadn’t worked.

  Once, while receiving Sister Manhood’s ministrations, Mrs Hunter had put up her hands and encountered her nurse’s throat. She had decided to feel it, and for a moment her hands had contained this strong vessel of flesh and muscle, inside which, it seemed, the whole of life was palpitating. Sister Manhood had pretended to be embarrassed; but that didn’t deceive.

  Now when the nurse had fetched the flask of alcohol, and turned the old thing over on her side, like a half-open pocketknife, or deck chair upset by the wind, she too remembered the time Mrs Hunter had held her by the throat: such a frail rat-tat she was subjected to, but subjected. She smiled to herself; now there was no question who had the upper hand.

  How powerless I am, Mrs Hunter thought, the saliva becoming bitter in her mouth, till she realized: not quite powerless while my mind is a match for the lot of them—on its better days.

  She was comforted by this fact as much as by Sister Manhood’s soothing hand.

  As she rubbed, the nurse droned, ‘Mrs Lippmann has something lovely for your dinner, Mrs Hunter. You’ll go crazy; it’s so scrumptious.’

  ‘Don’t tell me. That will spoil the surprise.’ Then she asked, from behind closed eyelids, ‘What colour is it?’

  ‘Shan’t tell!’ Sister Manhood giggled; she didn’t have the vaguest idea what Lottie had got for the old girl’s dinner, but this was one of the games they played.

  When, as she rubbed, she was overcome by a revulsion, almost a paralysis of her strong golden arm. Oh God, my life is slipping away! Where the fumes from the alcohol had cauterized her nostrils, and straying farther, exhilarated her thoughts, now they disgusted, though not so much as this loathsome back streaked with sickly brown-yellow, the frail, fluttering ribs, and however clean, the browner cleft becoming a funnel to the anus.

  What am I living for? The nurse crimped her forehead. One rabbit-blow might finish the party. Then she would run away, never set eyes on this house again, never see Col, Snow, or anyone, run till she arrived at some long, empty beach, and still running, by now miraculously out of her clothes, fall into the shallow foam, the bubbles fizzing and filling wherever there was entry, soothing wherever she was physically bruised or mentally troubled.

  But even as she ran, he (or some other) would be running after, waving his thing to bludgeon her into childbirth and endless domestic slavery. So there was no escaping: on the one hand it was snotty noses, nappies, and a man’s weight to increase your body’s exhaustion; on the other, it was rubbing backs (grind your knuckles into the unsuspecting tissue-paper skin) and wiping the shit off sick or senile bottoms. She wished she was a plant or something.

  Mrs Hunter’s tone was one of resignation, ‘I often wonder why more old people aren’t murdered by those who look after them. A lot are, but usually by the relatives: those cases of “mercy-killing”.’

  ‘What ideas you get!’ Sister Manhood could have bitten her own tongue off; when it was her thoughts which had given her secret away.

  ‘I’m trying to be objective.’ Mrs Hunter had trouble with that.

  As for Sister Manhood, she had never known what ‘objective’ meant: it was a word Col used.

  ‘That should have freshened you up,’ she said, pulling the nightie down over the withered rump.

  Flora Manhood felt frightened: the way the old witch could plug into your thoughts; she was frustrated, too, by what Col called ‘your intellectual deficiencies’. She had never hoped, never wanted to be, clever, only to live, to know contentment, if she could discover what that was.

  As the nurse stood the alcohol on the dressing-table—you could hear the flask jostling all your precious things—Mrs Hunter said, ‘I expect you’ve been with that young man again.’

  ‘Young man? Which?’

  Mrs Hunter could tell from the thick voice that her nurse’s lips must be looking swollen. ‘The one—that chemist down at Kingsford—who doesn’t mind delivering personally when we ring up about a prescription.’

  Sister Manhood was so furious she wouldn’t reply. She turned the body over and jerked it up against the pillows preparatory to pinning it down. At the beginning of her training she had persistently reminded herself that patients must remain bodies. (Yet bodies became pathetic, or, worse, vindictive.)

  Mrs Hunter said, ‘I can remember hearing a theory—that after a woman has been with a man you can smell her—like a doe after she’s been to the buck.’

  Sister Manhood was more furious than before. ‘Sounds to me a pretty dirty theory!’ She fixed the upper, hemstitched sheet under Mrs Hunter’s chin, but never tight enough: everything you had ever been taught would always come undone.

  The old thing laughed. ‘Reasonable—and natural. I never kept a goat, but know from looking at one or two that we might have understood each other.’

  Sister Manhood bashed one of the hairbrushes so hard with the jar of alcohol the brush fell on the floor. ‘I’m not interested in men,’ she said. ‘Not anyway in Col Pardoe. That’s just about over. Nobody—Col or anybody else—is going to dictate to me. I’ve seen the light. As a matter of fact my cousin Snow Tunks has asked me to share her flat.’

  ‘Snow Tunks?’

  ‘Yes. My only surviving relative. That makes you close—when there’s only the two of you left.’

  ‘But what—what is Snow?’

  ‘A bus conductress.’

  Mrs Hunter’s lips continued mouthing incredulously, as though what should have been a meringue had turned into a stale bun; in the circumstances she could only finally answer, ‘Oh!’

  And Sister Manhood had said enough; the cool she cultivated was letting her down.

  Fortunately, at that point, the housekeeper pushed the door open with a tray. ‘Mahlzeit!’ Mrs Lippmann called.

  An ugly, ridiculous expression, but Mrs Hunter loved to hear it; she loved food; if she could have remembered what she had eaten she would have spent more time thinking about it as she lay and waited.

  ‘What have you got?’ she asked, and tried to forestall the housekeeper by snuffing.

  It is beautiful steamed whitings—with a sauce. Ach, such a sauce!’

  ‘Not out of a bottle, I hope.’

  ‘Ach, Mrs Hunter, what you say and do to me! But I suppose we must have our jokes.’

  ‘Which colour?’ whispered Mrs Hunter; out of the whole of life the colours were perhaps what she missed most.

  ‘It is very delicate—this colour.’ Head held at an angle, Mrs Lippmann contemplated the possibilities; then she said, ‘Flesh—I think.’

  ‘Too variable.’ Mrs Hunter sighed.

  It made Sister Manhood sick, anyway this afternoon, to listen to such a game. After stooping for the fallen hairbrush, she grabbed the jar of alcohol. Flesh was variable all right: from her own smooth golden kind, to that great red angry club, enslaving and enslaved; you wouldn’t think they were of the same stuff.

  ‘Sister Manhood,’ Mrs Hunter called as she was escaping; and you could tell it was going to be some awful drag because the old girl had postponed the first taste of her ‘luncheon’, ‘there’s something I want you to do for me—later on—after I’ve had my rest—when I’m in my chair.’ Mrs Hunter paused before transposing her voice into another key, which made it so sweetly supplicating that many of those who knew her might have been filled with dread: ‘Something only you can do, Sister. I want you to make me up for my son’s arrival.’

  Sister Manhood didn’t go so far as to say she wouldn’t have any part in it; instead, every sound she made as she left the room had a calculated clumsy ugliness.

  Mrs Hunter was not deceived: she knew how to flatter little Manhood; while here was the faithful Lippmann sulking slightly because her thunder had been stolen: she had been prevented finishing the catalogue of praise for her own art.

  Now she merely said, ‘There’s Sachertorte.’
Her lips, Mrs Hunter guessed, had tightened.

  And this gave you your next lead. ‘I was never much interested in pudding.’ Because, from the first day, Lippmann had made it clear that her greatest longing was always to feel more deeply hurt.

  Actually it was true about the pudding: Alfred hadn’t cared for it; on the whole the men hadn’t; the best part of the dinner was always at the end as you watched them fork up their angels on horseback or whatever, their lips fatty with satisfaction while telling about their achievements and their aspirations. Your shoulders were at their whitest then, the mirrors showed, and your cleavage, from one or two glances, at its most mysterious: at such moments you were superbly conscious of your own power.

  ‘So!’

  The housekeeper was helping guide a forkful of whiting drenched with sauce, whether flesh-tinted or not, to its destination. Such power as she had exercised over other people, Wolf’s love for instance, or her hold on an audience, had always been of secondary importance to her own enslavement; and now, with all her gods brutalized or gone up in smoke, or almost all, where else would she offer her limbs for shackling?

  So Mrs Lippmann moaned, ‘Careful! Careful, Mrs Hunter! I have seen one enormous bone I have overlooked go into your mouth. Masticate with greatest caution, and put out the bone on the end of your tongue so that I may secure it, please.’

  Mrs Hunter was snoozing awake. Though she wouldn’t have admitted it to her housekeeper, her lunch whatever it was—chicken? had been incredibly delicious; but light: she could have managed as much again. And a sauce: she remembered that. Sauce maltaise, Mrs Lippmann had said; flesh-coloured. It was too delicate to suggest anything human; it tasted of the scent of oranges.

  Mrs Hunter rumbled, then she burped, without detecting, however, the origins of her recent pleasure.

  She was greedy, always had been, though they hadn’t guessed when she was younger because she had been so careful of her figure. Instead they accused her of devouring people. Well, you couldn’t help it if they practically stuck their heads in your jaws. Though actually you had no taste, or no sustained appetite, for human flesh. There was this other devouring desire for some relationship too rarefied to be probable.