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,
‘Warn Mutter in die Manage ritt,
Wie jauchzt’ mein Herz auf Schritt und Tritt
Hoppla, hoppla, tripp, trapp, trapp …’
And Mrs Cush, who must have taken part in it before, echoed, ‘Oppler!’
‘Bis mir die Schuppen von den Augen fielen
Ich sah den Dreck in alien Dielen
Hoppla, hoppla, tripp, trapp, trapp!
Es ist das alte, fade Lied
Nichts macht mehr einen Unterschied
Es ist ’ne Welt für leere Laffen,
Ein Zirkus mit dressierten Affen
Die Löwen und die Löwenkätzchen
Die Dame ohne Unterleib,
Die Hohe Schul’ mit allen Mätzchen,
Was ist es schon? Ein Zeitvertreib!’
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,
‘Jede Nacht, seit ich geboren,
Hat meine Seel’ ihre Unschuld verloren.
Verdammt sie nicht, versteht es nur,
Sie war zu schwach in der Struktur
So geht’s einmal in der Natur.
Am selben Platz wo sie verwelken,
Da wachsen wieder andere Nelken.
Sie gehen nie verloren,
sind ewig neugeboren.’
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.