Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

Lotte Lippmann was certainly dancing, but with eyes closed, nostrils pinched, as though the risen dead might stand before her, still trailing the stench of burning.

Mrs Hunter’s brocaded knees were slightly moving as they pursued a course of their own through mornings full of the smell of cow manure and frost, and linseed cake and steaming milk. If you dance Kate you’ll dance the chilblains out of your blood. That old plaid skirt with the burn below the pocket ballooning as you twirl. What became of Kate Nutley? Probably still waiting outside the dairy. Kate wet her pants because the cold. If they were mine I’d dance till they dried and nobody know I’m going to be a professional dancer. You had spoken the truth, in a sense. How the sky used to whirl on frosty mornings. The past is so much clearer than the purblind present. Every pore of it.

Lotte Lippmann had embraced her dance at last, or was embraced by it. She was dancing caressing her own arms, her shoulders, with hands which could not press close enough, fingers which could not dig deep enough into her dark, blenching flesh. She opened her fearful eyes, parted her lips, to receive an approbation she might not be strong enough to bear.

Nor might Elizabeth Hunter. Her wired limbs were creaking as she sank lower in her steel chair; the bones of her knees stuck out through the brocaded gown; the flannel nightie, the lamb’s wool bootees, were no comfort. She moaned for what the dancers had coming to them. All around her she could hear the sound of the woman’s breathing as she fought the dance by which she was possessed. You don’t at first re-live the tenderness: it’s the lashing, the slashes, and near murder. So Elizabeth Hunter moaned. Like a stricken cow lying on its side.

IT yes it is a dying a beige cow its ribs showing white through the hide (they couldn’t surely have showed up white but perhaps they did.) The eyes. There was nothing you could do for the cow — any more than for yourself. Gently touch the ribs with your toe (in actual fact if you want to be honest you kicked that cow because of the immensity of dying and ran to look for Kate to tell her about this one scraggy paralysed cow not about the immensity she would not have understood it but Kate was never to be found when wanted). They were calling from the back door. Elizabeth? Where have you been? Don’t you realize we worry about you? You danced to show you were not in the wrong that you didn’t belong to them except as the child they ‘loved’ you ‘loved’ them in return everybody doing what is expected. I found a half-dead cow. Pooh! Putrid! It couldn’t get up. An old cow. They said the poor thing can’t because it is the drought don’t you know Elizabeth Salkeld haven’t you any pity in you? You danced because you knew more than the people who loved you more than the stones of the walls of houses. (Pity is such a private matter something between yourself and the object you must hide it from.)

Elizabeth Hunter was trying to plant her bungling lips on the wind the dancer was creating round her. She tried to grasp hold of something. She couldn’t. She was the prisoner of her chair. Her attempts were as needless as ineffectual as drunkenness. She subsided.

Now that her other self had been released from their lover’s attempts to express tenderness in terms of flesh (no less touching, tragic even, for being clumsy and impotent) their movements became more fluid. They were dancing amongst what must have been trees the light at first audibly flickering between the trunks or was it trains roaring rushing you towards incurable illness old age death corruption no it was the dying away you must be hearing through moss-padded doors a bird’s glistening call then the gulls scraping colour out of the sky. (What was that sooty one got pierced?)

Lotte Lippmann’s hair had come undone. Though still part of her, it was leading a separate life. Flinging itself in opposite directions. A tail of coarse hair lashed Mrs Hunter across the mouth.

It stung. It was bitter-tasting, as might have been expected from the pace at which both were galloping.

As she closed in towards the climax of her dance, Lotte Lippmann was shedding her sequins; though the structure of the moonlit dress held.

Mrs Hunter was dribbling: to hear the waves open and close at this hour of morning in nacred shallows carrying the shells back and forth whole Chinaman’s fingernails and the fragments the fragments becoming sand.

It was sand which Mrs Hunter could feel grating. Ask the night nurse for Optrex. A cold eyeball in blue glass. Or was it That Girl still? Maids used to fly off the handle and mope in such a way on discovering they were pregnant.

A woman was still dancing dancing for no apparent reason.

When Mrs Lippmann suddenly flopped. ‘What more do you expect of me?’ she panted into Mrs Hunter’s knees.

‘Nothing. Go! You’re hurting. I don’t feel like being touched.

It caused the housekeeper pain: she was not yet wholly released from the ceremony of exorcism.

But Mrs Hunter was relentless. ‘Send my nurse to me,’ she ordered. ‘I want to relieve myself.’

She had a hollow tooth she was not prepared to spend on till she had paid off the lay-by on the caffee o’lay caftan.

Standing at the bathroom glass Sister Manhood probed her tooth with the quill pick she kept for that purpose. The pain she sent shooting up the tooth was almost ready to shriek (Would the quill, perhaps, do? … I always ever used the bark but Mavis she swears by a hairpin … Ugh, not a pin!)

Coot crying round the lake in the park poured the darkness thicker on. They found the body floating in the lake: it was a man, though. Lottie galumphing in the old girl’s bedroom is enough to bring the plaster down. Dancing. Join the witches and dance it out — ha-ha! Or go up to the Cross when you had handed over to St Mary, hang around a street corner, or a more likely lurk, do the motel foyers and get yourself murdered. (Investigation has revealed that the 25-year-old trained nurse found strangled with her own scarf on the floor of a Pacific Towers bedroom was two months pregnant. Sister Flora Manhood lived alone in rooms at Randwick. Her landlord Mr Fred Vidler 63 was thunderstruck. ‘Can’t understand,’ Mr Vidler said, ‘what motive anyone would have in taking the life of suck a fine girl.’ Mrs Vidler 57 was too upset to give an opinion. ‘Almost my own daughter,’ she whispered from under sedation. The nurse’s most recent case, 86-year-old wealthy socialite and grazier’s widow Mrs Elizabeth Hunter of Moreton Drive informed the police, ‘Yes, I expect she was honest. Who’s to say what “honest” is? She was engaged to my son, or the chemist, I forget which. I gave her my pink sapphire to clinch the deal. Not the blue as well, mind you. Personally I always thought her a twit, nothing more than a breeder, as she proved by starting too soon. But I suppose you would have called her honest. Can you claim the same for yourself — what are you? Sergeant?’)

Sister Manhood was getting a certain amount of enjoyment out of her own post-mortem. If she had been less pregnant the stolen sapphire might have swelled into a large boil on her inflamed mind. Now it only intermittently throbbed. Though of course it must burst sooner or later, when the accusations began.

That her legs were already trickling she did not at first realize what with the tooth the coot the thumping dance the sapphire and the sensation in her lower abdomen.

When it was trickling oozing not actually flooding.

She was wet, however.

Her lovely blessed BLOOD oh God o Lord who she didn’t believe in but would give her closer attention to as soon as she had the time and as far as she was capable.