The idea of Mrs Hunter, more than the old woman herself, made her feel superior.
They went in to what was, incredibly, a body laid out on Mrs Hunter’s bed. The damp pledgets prevented you seeing what was underneath, whether human eyelids, or slits cut out of a painted mask. The green shadows on the cheeks had been emphasized by the nurse’s tying up the jaw with a bandage and removing the teeth. A thick black line surrounding the lips had melted and overflowed into the cracked crimson, making the mouth look like a stitched seam, and increasing the mask effect.
The doctor laughed low. ‘Kinky games the pair of you got up to!’ He took hold of what had been a wrist, lifted what proved to be eyelids, flourished a nonchalant stethoscope; then he flicked once or twice at the object on the bed by catapulting a forefinger off a thumb. ‘Elizabeth Hunter’s bought it all right.’
Sister Manhood was suitably disgusted. No, she was! Hadn’t she loved, not Mrs Hunter herself, but something she stood for? Life, perhaps. She whipped you on. Like when the menstrual blood had begun to flow again, and you felt it warm and sticky on your legs, something of love and life was restored. So Flora Manhood hated Dr Gidley, because it now appeared he had hated Mrs Hunter.
While he sat in the easiest chair to write out his certificate, she began busying herself. She must wash the body, and hoped to do so privately. But when she had fetched the basin, the doctor seemed prepared to continue sitting.
‘I have to wash my patient, Doctor,’ she reminded.
‘Why not, Sister?’ Didn’t he know by heart every inch of Elizabeth Hunter’s body?
She would screen the bed with her back.
‘Expect you’ll come out of it pretty well — isn’t your name “Flora”?’
‘I don’t expect a thing.’ If this dirty man forced her into talking virtuous, for once she needn’t feel a hypocrite.
‘The meanest of the rich remember their nurses in the will. If they don’t, the solicitor reminds them. To remind them of the doctor too, would be logical, wouldn’t it? But they almost never get round to that. Sometimes, of course, the patient’s in love with the doctor. That’s different.’ He laughed his thickest.
Dr Gidley (‘Graham’) always on the up and up, with his young (monied) wife, his two little boys at the right school, his practice desirably situated, subscriber to the opera and orchestral concerts, and member of the A.J.C., called out Flora Manhood’s bile.
When faced with her first, real death, she should have been capable of tenderness. She would learn, though. Washing these terrible withered limbs, and the little shabby, shammy leather pouches of breasts, a kind of love began to jerk rather than flow along her straining arms. Because Elizabeth Hunter herself was apt to ward off tenderness if ever you tried it out on her, anything of that nature had always been rather clumsily implied. At least the physical strain of washing her body now helped you endure the doctor.
‘A very passionate woman, so they say. Well, you could tell.’
Flora Manhood at work leaned farther over: she had to protect Her; before anything, she must sponge away the signs of her own vicious handiwork. The mask did seem to be taking on the expression of original purity, and in assuming, to assure. Elizabeth Hunter’s beauty, anyway as idea, hovered on the face of a skull to which a reality had been restored.
She had given the mouth its last wipe with the flannel when she realized from the breathing that Dr Gidley was close behind her, or closer stilclass="underline" he was rubbing himself, blubbery man, against her buttocks.
‘Flora, eh?’ At the same time making his obscene thrust.
‘Dr Gidley,’ she said into his face, because now that she had turned she could not avoid any part of him: neither blond bristles sprouting from the chin, nor belly threatening to pin her against or bludgeon her over the end of the bed, ‘if you’ve forgotten your wife, I haven’t forgotten my patient. I’d like to treat her respectfully.’
The doctor let out a sharp, whiskey sigh, and recovered a balance the nurse had almost upset. ‘All the right sentiments! Like in the textbook. But don’t you know a textbook is never for real?’
By now he was more wind than piss. She could have thrown him out if Sister de Santis hadn’t appeared. In her street clothes. And her eyes.
The presence of such a professional figure as the night nurse called for a return to business. ‘You’ll see, Sister,’ the doctor said, ‘we’ve had a death in the family.’ Then he laughed, perhaps for himself and little Manhood.
Sister de Santis advanced to the bed and touched the feet. She went to change into her uniform.
So Dr Gidley was free to leave. He winked, and cocked his head, whether at the pretty nurse, the corpse of his late patient, or a reflection of himself in the glass, it was difficult to tell; though the reflection was most likely: with its moist lips, swelling torso, and dandiacal tufts of hair frizzed out on either cheek, his was the image his mind’s eye could most agreeably entertain. While Sister Manhood was left with the vision of a pair of naked calves, or immense blond bulbs grown to bursting, before they uprooted themselves from the carpet.
She had finished washing the dead by the time Mary de Santis returned. It was de Santis who dried the body, who plugged it (thank God) and tied the knees.
The two nurses exchanged remarks, both practical and comforting, in subdued voices. Sister Manhood brought a fresh sheet to cover the body. After they had spread it, and smoothed it over the major peaks and ridges, Manhood trimmed the nails. But it was de Santis who laid the handkerchief over the face. As their hands touched during their work, or they bumped against each other, or rubbed shoulders in passing, Flora Manhood came closest to expressing the love she might have been too abashed to feel for Elizabeth Hunter.
Finally Sister de Santis said, ‘Don’t you realize it’s long past your time?’
‘Yes, I’ll go. And never come back. Not even for the bloody uniform.’ She explained she intended to give up nursing: she had just realized.
‘I expect you’ll think better of it, Flora.’
‘Not on your life!’
Her decision might have given her greater cause for rejoicing if St Mary had not used her Christian name. Instead she went out soberly, to guard against possible damage to a fragility she had not suspected was in her. She changed, and did not return to the bedroom. She would write to Sister de Santis, if she could summon up the spelling and the grammar, to thank her for her moral support. As for Mrs Hunter, she did not want to look at her again: not with the handkerchief over her face.
And now turning in this narrow dark a coffin can’t be narrower than insomnia in a hard bed well you ought to be able to replace what more or less belongs to you or anyway suggest it Lottie is the only one who will want to lie and suffer to feel those tinny handles pressing cutting into her flesh the night Elizabeth Hunter. It is still this same night. O Lord.
Again Flora Manhood almost switched the light on. But did not dare face up to the present in all its varnish and sharp corners and clutter of unwashed crockery. Better the past, however dark and humiliating some of the details.
So you are still running down the reeling path this night of Elizabeth Hunter’s death feel the branch not cutting whipping the cheek it is still with you like the unnecessary lint a love offering for a scratch snuff the collodion right up and be grateful yes you are.
Flora Manhood drew breath when she had pulled the gate to: it is never fixed because old Betty is too dotty, Arnold Wyburd almost gaga, and nurses enjoy bellyaching. Those furnaces refineries whatever along the Botany skyline look real scary sometimes specially the one which turns into a fiery cross if you look at it through a fly screen. Well, you need never look at it again, not through the screen at Moreton Drive.