Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

So the women passed each other smiling and murmuring, each suspecting who the other was, while avoiding confirmation. The princess tested the marble steps with wary feet, propping even more warily around the drastic swirl of path which would lead eventually to the gate and the taxi she had not ordered: to escape from the house was enough. During it all the relieving nurse was able to enjoy the luxury of a last look from her possessed doorway. Madame de Lascabanes did not glance back: it would not have been correct. Remembering her forgotten luggage (have Arnold Wyburd fetch it) she did not even pause. Carefully watching her classic shoes, she narrowed her French nostrils at the strange body-scent of Australian gumleaves, and sighed; while the nurse stood, legs apart, thighs radiating light and strength below the dazzle of minimal skirt. She might have slammed the door at last, if she hadn’t been trained to control her antipathies in the presence of the sick.

Sister Manhood walked through the hall swinging her orange plastic handbag. She went out to the kitchen where Mrs Lippmann would be dishing up lunch. Although it was agreed in writing that Sister Badgery should be given lunch before going off, it was never more than silently accepted that Sister Manhood should arrive in time to eat her share. Only reasonable, as Flora Manhood saw it.

‘So! We thought you was going to be late, Floradora!’ The housekeeper’s solecisms went oddly with her civilized monkey’s face: they roused Jessie Badgery’s scorn — a scorn for all foreigners; but Flora Manhood was by moments at least something of an anarchist.

Now she nibbled at the housekeeper’s unresisting ear. ‘Anyway, I saw Her — the Queen Maree Antoinette Mother of all the Russias the Princess Lascabum.’

The housekeeper shrieked, and scraped the pan harder than ever; she wagged her behind as though stroked by the long feathers of light which float out across the empty floor, out of darkness, the moment before the act begins.

‘ Wenn Mutter in die Manage ritt,’ Mrs Lippmann sang, and helped it along with the iron spoon.

‘What’s all these jokes I’m not in on?’ Sister Badgery called from the breakfast room, in which she was already seated, and where Mrs Lippmann served the nurses’ lunch.

Surprisingly, Sister Badgery had an appetite, though in manoeuvring the food past her lips her fork implied disparagement, and she emphasized her disapproval with an occasional flick of her accurate veil. What she could not disguise was a stomach like a small melon under the starched uniform, or her opinion of her colleague, who had sat down in her street dress and was scoffing the scrambled eggs, slithery with too much butter, in their cornets of smoked ham.

There was cucumber too, in sour cream, under a pretty sprinkling of dill; and a chocolate Torte oozing on to a paper doily in a Meissen dish. ‘Ooh! Yummy yummy!’ Flora Manhood squealed, her eye on the Torte. ‘You’ve given away the milshig-fleishig today, Lottie!’

‘No milchig-fleischig, ’ Mrs Lippmann muttered, from round what could have been an obstructive cigar. ‘Only when I am at my lowest. I don’t know why I am not today. But I am not.’ If she had been smoking that cigar, her nostrils would have blown two streams of the fiercest smoke.

Sister Manhood examined her thumb and what was a fleck of sour cream; then she slowly licked the cream off. ‘Can’t think why you stick around here cooking for us and old Mother Swizzlestick upstairs.’

‘Poor Mrs Hunter! Such names!’ Sister Badgery protested. ‘Why “Swizzlestick”, for heaven’s sake?’

‘Because she likes to believe there’s still a duty male, somewhere, drinking champers to her out of a shoe.’

Lotte Lippmann cackled. ‘That’s why I stick around cooking for Mrs Swizzlestick! Ich weiss auch was Liebe ist! ’

‘But the career and all, Lottie — how can you be content as a cook?’ Sister Manhood’s attempt at seriousness and gentility was sabotaged by her mouth closing on a forkful of Torte.

Mrs Lippmann hawked up her reply. ‘Ach, die Karriere! My art was a tiny, satiric one — to find what in all things is ridiculous — and all things are ridiculous if you look.’ She laughed flat, and you could see her broad, purple tongue; you could see Lotte Lippmann tugging at the brim of her top hat, settling a cane under an armpit. ‘My art was destructive — and soon finished — prick! pouff! along with all that it had pricked— alles so schrecklich komisch ! Do you understand, ladies?’ The cook was staggering under the weight of her exposition.

Sister Badgery did not like it at all when the housekeeper carried on like this; Sister Manhood, on the other hand, sat with her elbows on the table, her face in her hands, and felt she was experiencing life.

‘No, it was not altogether like this,’ Mrs Lippmann seemed to remember. ‘My career ended in the gas ofens — in the smoke from Jews.’ It could have been ashes choking the seams of her burnt-out face.

‘Oh, stopput, Lot!’ Flora Manhood wanted to cry; she could have cried for everything, but principally herself.

While Sister Badgery was wondering how she might slip away and release the cucumber seeds trapped under her denture.

‘So now I cook. That too is an art — a creative one, I tell myself — though I should be doing it in some huddle of Jews — all together mortifying ourselves and remembering the smoke from the incinerators of Germany.’

Mrs Lippmann laughed gently; but Sister Manhood burst into a spate of noisy sobs.

‘You’ve been overdoing it, Sister. I can tell,’ Sister Badgery said. ‘You don’t get your proper quota of sleep.’

‘It isn’t that.’ Sister Manhood tried to wipe her messy cheeks. ‘Well, it is too, I suppose — when you are involved with somebody — and can’t make up your mind how deep.’

Sister Badgery sucked her teeth in sympathy or disapproval, and by so doing, managed to work out several of the pointed cucumber seeds; after which success, and the rich meal, she meditated, ‘We’ve all of us got our job;’ and swallowed the seeds.

Mrs Lippmann offered, ‘I make you a double strong coffee, Floradora.’

Just then they heard a tinkling in the upper air. They sat and listened, and could have gone on sitting and listening: it was such a frail tinkling, of a little handbell, both supplicating and peremptory. All three became ashamed.

Sister Manhood said, after taking a good look at her watch, ‘I must go up to the old bag. Bet she’s wet the bed, or worse.’

Sister Badgery frowned and winced, and whipped the veil off her neutral, almost non-existent hair.

‘Unser armer Schatz! ’ Mrs Lippmann sighed, sweeping crumbs off the table with her hand.

‘Shan’t be a couple of ticks, love, unless it’s something urgent,’ Sister Manhood called through Mrs Hunter’s door, and her practised, nurse’s voice would have convinced all but the most sceptical.

Mrs Hunter, who had decided that it was one of her more pitiful moments, accepted the convention meekly enough. ‘Nothing urgent,’ she quavered back. ‘Only they’ve left me alone for hours, and I feel I’m due for some sort of human attention.’

Nobody on either side ever bothered to wonder how much anybody believed in the untruths to which you were driven by self-pity and old age. Then there were those other genuine occasions when two minutes can encompass acons of slow rot: that was something you couldn’t explain to human beings who measure time by the clock.

Actually Sister Manhood was quick at changing from dress into uniform, because Jessie would be chafing to change and catch the bus. Sister Badgery insisted on absolute privacy: she couldn’t bear to show herself even from behind a bra; and no wonder. So Flora Manhood resisted the temptation to contemplate her own body. She made do with her face, sucking in her cheeks after she had adjusted the veil, after she had pasted her lips a deeper pink for whoever would see them, not old Betty Hunter that was for sure.