They were driving away.
She couldn’t stop moving around turning over from on her side knees practically up to her chin to on her back the legs stretched unnaturally straight stiff pointing into darkness. For the rest of the night. She was prepared. Began counting how many times she had changed from one side to the other but started her count too late. At a stage when she must have been not sleeping, lying (never sleeping is what She goes on about) she had hurt the cartilage (like Mrs Hunter) in one ear crushed it felt it would stay bent. (Shall I massage it for you dear? No thank you Sister it will pass.)
HUNTER, Elizabeth, widow of … Mr Wyburd will put it in the Herald. Not tomorrow it is too late but the day after. Amongst the names. Some of those real ones are good for a breakfast laugh when you’ve the time. Death is only something to believe when it has happened in the DEATHS to people you don’t know it has to happen to some to parents who again you hardly you never knew. Or patients a certain percent. Patients in the end though real you also luckily don’t know. Till HUNTER, Elizabeth … at her home … peacefully …
She reached for the lamp to switch the light on. Topheavy thing knock it over wouldn’t be worth it. She gave up. Turned.
Ought to properly swab the mouthpiece from Badgery calling taxis after scrambled egg peugh might infect the lot of you oh yes Doctor Doctor Gidley is it? (Who else but fat silky smarmy Gidley?) This is Sister Manhood speaking Doctor I have to report my patient — Mrs Hunter — has died.
Said he would come right over. (Gidley favoured the American language, except in Mrs Hunter’s presence, when he became more sort of English.) Sounded excited. So he might be over the death of a wealthy senile woman.
Ow-eugh— this ruined ear! Fully awake, Flora Manhood massaged her cartilage. There was nobody else to do.
She had flung off the pillows from under the body laid on the bed. She stretched the limbs as straight as they allowed. She closed what had been Mrs Hunter’s eyes. As she went for the cotton wool the furniture was wobbling, toppling, almost meeting overhead, before righting itself. She arranged the wool pledgets, dampened so that they would sit steady on the lids. (Betty Hunter in other days might have turned cranky and thrown off ‘a lot of unnecessary rubbish’.) Would all be neat enough for St Mary who must surely come?
Flora longed for Sister de Santis. What she desired more than anything was a feeling of continuity which, in Mrs Hunter’s absence, de Santis might restore. Turning those cowey eyes on you: to forgive. Elizabeth Hunter never forgives: she lines you up for more of the same; which can amount to the same thing.
Between looking at her watch, expecting Gidley or de Santis, Sister Manhood remembered Mrs Lippmann ought to be told. Though unpleasant in some respects, it would be a mission of sorts. She went along the passage to what had been the maids’ quarters, where an illuminated crack outlined the housekeeper’s door.
‘Mrs Lippmann?’ She knocked formally, twice; the doors in the servants’ quarters were a thinner, cheaper timber as opposed to the owners’ indestructible cedar.
After a pause, Mrs Lippmann answered, ‘I cannot see you, Flora.’
‘But I have something important to tell you.’ She opened.
‘You need not tell me. The whole house already knows.’ Lotte Lippmann was sitting on the floor of her narrow room, against the chest, directly opposite the doorway. ‘Unser Alles ist uns genommen worden.’
Dishevelled by her dance, Mrs Lippmann’s hair was still hanging in loose tails, her face the colour of damp ashes, except for the eyelids and the lips, by nature darker, like brown figs, and down the cheeks, yellow weals scored with scarlet.
‘If you know, then,’ Sister Manhood’s intention petered out; surprise had at least tidied up her nerves and poised her on the balls of her feet in the doorway.
Over the mirror on the rickety chest the housekeeper had hung a towel, which stirred as she rocked the chest with her head, in turning first one cheek, then the other, to press against the drawers behind, and retreat farther, if possible, from an intrusion on her nakedness. The handles on the drawers were shuddering.
It was all foreign enough to bring out the bossy nurse in Flora, when she had meant to be kind. ‘Tt-tt, you’ve torn your dress!’ she had to remark on noticing what was so obvious.
A wonder the dress had survived at all. Time and the more recent frenzy of the dance had certainly reduced it to a state of final tatters; but this did not account for a wilful, passionate rending, downwards from the yoke. Mrs Lippmann’s breast had been laid bare by the destruction of her inherited dress.
All the while she kept her cheek turned, but the sounds she made were like as if you heard the cattle trucking through the night to market, up the coast.
In different circumstances it could have tickled Flora; or again, you might have given way to something deeper in yourself, that you preferred to hide; but were now too pressed and responsible, already the front-door bell ringing. If this was Gidley, he had got here so quick he must have been sitting waiting for Mrs Hunter to die.
So she too made it brisk. ‘I advise you to get up off the floor. You’ll regret it, Lot, if your joints set.’ Fairly pleased with herself for upholding a tradition, she added, ‘Later on I’ll give you something for your face;’ but stopped.
The contusions of the grey skin, with its open pores, had a look of pumice, but a pumice which was breathing and choking, while the head stirred the tinny handles on the drawers, against which the Jewess continued to press and rock. You might have got the creeps if it hadn’t been for running down to the hall, to open and let Gidley in.
Because here was this creep of a doctor: no amount of Badgery salestalk would ever disguise the fact, or that Jessie herself, in falsies and interlock combs, was a sucker for doctors, and teaplanters, and actors’ voices.
Since that first telescoping instant when she discovered that it had happened, Sister Manhood had salvaged something which looked like dependability. Her reflection in the hall glass was convincing: pretty, too. She bashed a shade more hair from under the veil to hang above her forehead: not for Gidley, for God’s sake! for her own morale, and it could have been what She would expect.
The fat slob of a doctor was standing in the porch under the light she had switched on before opening the door. He was carrying his medical bag as usual. He appeared no different, except that his eyes were shining. Probably an attempt to assume reverence for what was a sad as well as an important occasion had given him the guilty air.
Dr Gidley said in his fat-manly voice, ‘Lucky you caught me. My wife and I were out at one of those silly cocktail parties. We’d just got home.’
(‘My wife’ must be something of a pressed flower.)
‘She died quietly — behind my back.’ Sister Manhood was glad to find it coming so easy.
‘I don’t expect she’ll regret it.’ He sounded a bit thick and awkward till realizing the drink inside him helped. ‘Eighty-four, wasn’t it?’
‘-six.’ It gave the nurse greater confidence, not to say power over the doctor, to be able to correct him. ‘She was in her best form tonight. All for make-up and jokes. The housekeeper danced for her.’ The doctor’s lower lip was unable to accept that part. ‘Then she asked to relieve herself.’ The nurse was leading the way upstairs. ‘She was dead when I went to take her off.’
‘Caught napping for the first time in her life!’ The nurse didn’t seem to appreciate it.