‘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.
Because this was what the dancer had experienced of life she was tempted to continue clodhopping amongst familiar swine though it might not be what her mentor expected of her.
The metronome was growing erratic. ‘Is this what we’re paying for? There’s too much of yourself tonight.’ The emeralds glared.
Lotte Lippmann might have looked more desolated if she had not grown used to carrying a cross of proportions such as no Christian could conceive.
‘Give it time, Mrs Hunter. I must feel my way, mustn’t I?’ she called back in her only slightly desolated voice.
Balancing on one deformed foot, she stretched a leg, with its knots and ladders of blue veins ending in a scarred pump. If it had not been for the dress she might have flopped down in a heap amongst her own physical shortcomings. But the dress hinted at a poetry which her innermost being might help her convey; it reflected a faith in love and joy to which she tentatively subscribed.
‘All the old cabaret stuff,’ Mrs Hunter continued nagging because her housekeeper liked to suffer; ‘I got that out of my system a hundred years ago.’
But know about it too well the ein zwei drei men poking their snouts against an ear lobe as they push you past the saxophones oh yes bestiality is familiar didn’t you choose to rut with that that politician Athol Thingummy you know it down to the last bristle the final spurt of lust and renounce men anyway for tonight.
Now surely, at the end of your life, you can expect to be shown the inconceivable something you have always, it seems, been looking for. Though why you should expect it through the person of a steamy, devoted, often tiresome Jewess standing on one leg the other side of a veil of water (which is all that human vision amounts to) you could not have explained. Unless because you are both human, and consequently, flawed.
To encourage her housekeeper Mrs Hunter called, ‘I expect your arabesque will be exquisite, darling, when it has firmed up a bit.’
Lotte Lippmann got such exasperated giggles she almost toppled over. Then they were both contentedly snorting.
‘A couple of crazy bitches!’ Sister Manhood stamped across the room, to let in some air, and left them to it: she could not stand any more; she could not see what was funny; she belonged nowhere tonight; she shut herself in the bathroom.
Nor did Lotte Lippmann, a serious person and satirist, know why she was laughing. But her ribs were aching, for some adolescent sacrilege she might have committed. At least she was liberated. She was free to unite in pure joy with the source of it (not this travesty Floradora had been cruel enough to introduce). So Lotte did a little dance she might have remembered from earlier in time, down the street, twitching her apron, pigtails gambolling behind her.