‘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.
‘Die Rosen können nie vergehen,
Die Liebe lässt sie neuerstehen …’
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.
She wrenched so hopelessly at the door she sent the pains shooting down her side, and found old Wyburd standing, not inside the porch, but out from it in the sunlight. He was holding his hands edgeways to his face as though saying his prayers.