It would give the old girl time to make up her mind — and soothe the nerves of her murderers.’ He spoke the word with saving gusto.
Dorothy laughed to please him, but without mirth and shapelessly.’ What if she makes it up the wrong way?’
‘She wont, I’ve appealed to a sense of duty which has always been there in the depths, and depths are easier to reach in senile minds.’
‘Senile minds are infinitely stubborn, let me tell you.’
He did not see it that way because it would not have suited him to.
‘Stubborn or not,’ she prepared to console, ‘our present concern is whether this ghastly village will have a vacancy in the possibly near future.’
They bounced down a flight of three steps, at that dangerous corner, still swinging hands. ‘Bless you, darling!’ At the bottom he raised her knuckle to his lips. ‘And I salute your French in-laws for bringing you up so practical.’
If ever she should have hated Basil, it was now; but the warmth of his hand, the hint of his lips, had stanched the wound from which hatred flows: in her imagination she raced ahead tied by conscience to this brother she had never accepted as a blood relation and as they bumped in the rented car the dusty miles even united them physically freshly burnished not repulsively barbecued by the sun they recognize an avatar in every skeleton tree then their own totems of casuarina and willow the oval rosebed in front of a house from which the no longer vengeful siblings tumble down the veranda steps to greet the travellers and merge at last into one another.
Basil may have sensed some of the dangers of exaltation. ‘Whatever we decide about “Kudjeri”, tomorrow it’s Matron, the clergy, and any other ghastliness the Thorogood Village has to offer.’
‘The inmates!’ Dorothy unaccountably shrieked as they reached the gate of their mother’s garden. ‘Those who aren’t vegetable will be looking us over — from the moment we arrive. Old people with nothing more to do about their lives develop a nose for weaknesses, like dogs and children — as we ought to know.’ It appalled her to think they might scent out ambitions she kept more or less veiled from her conscious mind; nor could she hope to hide behind her brother.
Nine
‘WHAT’S THIS?’ Sister Manhood owed it to her profession to disapprove of the unorthodox; but you couldn’t knock Lottie, who apart from everything else was looking such a fright in her drag.
‘Mrs Hunter asked me for to entertain her.’
‘Never in the middle of the day. First her dinner, then her shut-eye.’
‘Today she has no appetite for food. That is why I am to dance for her.’
A laugh was a laugh, but Sister Manhood was losing patience. ‘Mrs Hunter doesn’t always know best — not about everything.’
The housekeeper took off her top hat; she stood to attention as it were, balancing the scurfy cylinder on a level with her right breast. Less disciplined because expected to remain unseen, her hair also looked skimpier, from having been screwed up and stuffed inside the ancient hat; one dusty lock stuck out straight and stiff at an angle from an unexpectedly pretty little ear.
‘I’m the one who will decide.’ The nurse spoke as though she actually believed in her own infallibility, and marched down the passage.
Lotte Lippmann tagged along behind. If her pumps had not forced her to walk flatfooted, time and arthritis would have clinched the matter. In her worst moral doldrums, she thumped; and this afternoon the polka bow, flopping between throat and bosom, took on a more wilted look, grubbier for the flesh tints a performer’s sweaty painted neck leaves on oyster sateen.
‘Wait in the dressing-room, please,’ Sister Manhood ordered; but was tickled into relenting a little. ‘I’d say, darl, you’ve been to town on yourself!’ She could not bottle up the laughter frothing inside her authority: she let it rip; and went so far as to give Lottie a quick cuddle while disguising it as condescension.
‘Bin zerschplittert!’
‘Eh?’ As there was no means of deciding whether these harsh noises were tragic or merely funny-foreign, Flora Manhood went on laughing.
The lips out of which Lotte Lippmann had uttered her fierce cry were formally drawn in twin peaks almost as far as the nostrils, with a heavy crimson loop swooning in the direction of the chin. Where lips and cheeks had not burnt through, the skin was whiter than powder could make it: she had more than likely floured herself.
It was a good giggle. Till the nurse took fright.
Something in Lotte Lippmann’s eyes pierced an unhappiness at Flora Manhood’s core so that it squirmed. This baby, if she did have it inside her, was already a disaster; and how would she ever atone for all the child must suffer after she had given birth to it?
She said in her hardest voice, ‘You’ve only yourself to blame, Lottie, for letting her push you around. Making a fool of you.’
‘She is making no fool. This is what I am.’
‘Those feet alone! How you’ll ever dance!’
Swollen flesh and contorted bones had deformed the scarred, once sprightly, skintight pumps.
‘Sit, anyway,’ Sister Manhood advised more gently, ‘while I give the old cow hell for turning down her lovely din din.’
Lotte Lippmann did as told. Resigned to waiting, she sat herself on the dressing-table stool in company with the looking-glass.
As the nurse went into her patient’s room a voice was coming from under the bed, ‘… Dad threw another of ’em Thursday just after sundown a new moon too I forgot to wish what with Dad flounderin’ around Mavis and Donald pretendin’ they pretend upstairs since Donald’s finger got bit instead of the cork it turned septic I told Mavis it was time to squeeze it she rousted on me ‘er mother and Donald looked as if it was me not a sick man bit ’is bloody finger for ’im …’
If Mrs Hunter had not been strung for listening, she might have looked dead. Sister Manhood, after her first shock, realized the old thing was living someone else’s life.
‘Yairs.’ Mrs Cush crawled sighing from under the bed soaked with perspiration and O’Cedar. Her seams were grey where they weren’t pricked out in black. She was a formerly spry, smallish woman; the smaller women surrendered themselves more willingly, it seemed, to enslavement by Betty Hunter.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ and Sister Manhood no longer did; ‘it was your morning, Mrs Cush, wasn’t it? not your afternoon.’
‘She asked me to extend.’
‘Weren’t my children here this morning?’
‘Couldn’t get on with me work — not with all the yakker that was goin’ on m ’ere.’ Mrs Cush leered, and sucked her teeth back into place.
‘I asked her to stay,’ Mrs Hunter confirmed, ‘and tell me something to divert me.’
‘And that is what I was just tellun.’ Mrs Cush frowned at the snooty sister.
‘Where is my cook?’ Mrs Hunter asked. ‘I was expecting her to dance for me.’
Her patient’s whims, as well as the slaves who ministered to them, were getting Sister Manhood down; she made an effort, however. ‘What about your luncheon, Mrs Hunter? I believe you refused your luncheon. You might try to take a mouthful, and everybody will be pleased.’
‘Oh, but I did. Or didn’t I? Yes, I did! They rammed it down my throat by handfuls. Chased me round the nursery while Nurse was out. There’s nothing like older children when they have you at their mercy and want to get their own back. That’s something Lilian Nutley escaped. She galloped away, and was murdered at the foot of those orange cliffs — down the street. They found her bones amongst the oyster shells. So they say. Personally I don’t think she was murdered: she died of all she remembered.’