Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

‘It is very delicate — this colour.’ Head held at an angle, Mrs Lippmann contemplated the possibilities; then she said, ‘Flesh — I think.’

‘Too variable.’ Mrs Hunter sighed.

It made Sister Manhood sick, anyway this afternoon, to listen to such a game. After stooping for the fallen hairbrush, she grabbed the jar of alcohol. Flesh was variable all right: from her own smooth golden kind, to that great red angry club, enslaving and enslaved; you wouldn’t think they were of the same stuff.

‘Sister Manhood,’ Mrs Hunter called as she was escaping; and you could tell it was going to be some awful drag because the old girl had postponed the first taste of her ‘luncheon’, ‘there’s something I want you to do for me — later on — after I’ve had my rest — when I’m in my chair.’ Mrs Hunter paused before transposing her voice into another key, which made it so sweetly supplicating that many of those who knew her might have been filled with dread: ‘Something only you can do, Sister. I want you to make me up for my son’s arrival.’

Sister Manhood didn’t go so far as to say she wouldn’t have any part in it; instead, every sound she made as she left the room had a calculated clumsy ugliness.

Mrs Hunter was not deceived: she knew how to flatter little Manhood; while here was the faithful Lippmann sulking slightly because her thunder had been stolen: she had been prevented finishing the catalogue of praise for her own art.

Now she merely said, ‘There’s Sachertorte .’ Her lips, Mrs Hunter guessed, had tightened.

And this gave you your next lead. ‘I was never much interested in pudding.’ Because, from the first day, Lippmann had made it clear that her greatest longing was always to feel more deeply hurt.

Actually it was true about the pudding: Alfred hadn’t cared for it; on the whole the men hadn’t; the best part of the dinner was always at the end as you watched them fork up their angels on horseback or whatever, their lips fatty with satisfaction while telling about their achievements and their aspirations. Your shoulders were at their whitest then, the mirrors showed, and your cleavage, from one or two glances, at its most mysterious: at such moments you were superbly conscious of your own power.

‘So! ’

The housekeeper was helping guide a forkful of whiting drenched with sauce, whether flesh-tinted or not, to its destination. Such power as she had exercised over other people, Wolf’s love for instance, or her hold on an audience, had always been of secondary importance to her own enslavement; and now, with all her gods brutalized or gone up in smoke, or almost all, where else would she offer her limbs for shackling?

So Mrs Lippmann moaned, ‘Careful! Careful, Mrs Hunter! I have seen one enormous bone I have overlooked go into your mouth. Masticate with greatest caution, and put out the bone on the end of your tongue so that I may secure it, please.’

Mrs Hunter was snoozing awake. Though she wouldn’t have admitted it to her housekeeper, her lunch whatever it was — chicken? had been incredibly delicious; but light: she could have managed as much again. And a sauce: she remembered that. Sauce maltaise, Mrs Lippmann had said; flesh-coloured. It was too delicate to suggest anything human; it tasted of the scent of oranges.

Mrs Hunter rumbled, then she burped, without detecting, however, the origins of her recent pleasure.

She was greedy, always had been, though they hadn’t guessed when she was younger because she had been so careful of her figure. Instead they accused her of devouring people. Well, you couldn’t help it if they practically stuck their heads in your jaws. Though actually you had no taste, or no sustained appetite, for human flesh. There was this other devouring desire for some relationship too rarefied to be probable.

What was the housekeeper’s story? something about an Aryan lover. Weren’t they planning to run away together — to England — when she was arrested? The boy’s family agreed to see her safely delivered into Switzerland — alone — and Mrs Lippmann had accepted for her lover’s good.

Another idealist, but a realistic one; in your own case, your idealism was too abstract, improbable, under cover of the dinner parties, the jewels, the lovers, some of them real, but more often only suspected; or else a few individuals, sensitive up to a point, had guessed at some mysterious, not religious or intellectual, some kind of spiritual aspiration, and labelled you a fraud when you couldn’t confront them with, not spiritual, but material evidence.

Anyway, you had eaten a mouthful of Torte to please Mrs Lippmann, only it didn’t: one mouthful made things worse. But that was what Mrs Lippmann liked. If you had full command of your senses, and your strength, and could order a spectacular bombe for a party, and take a sword and slash it just as it was ready to be brought in, Mrs Lippmann would descend into the deepest of her infernal heavens.

Never see a bombe again. Those ponderous dinners the Radfords used to give: always something on fire, or with a music box playing inside; always an important guest — in Gladys’s estimation. Betty — it’s short notice — tomorrow night — I have Athol Shreve — I need a woman — I mean, an exceptional one — Sidney tips Mr Shreve as Prime Minister two elections from now — so you see darling your meeting could be a historic one. Play Gladys for ringing you after trying probably everyone else. Do you think I’d fit into your party darling? not as you know the least politically minded — I’d half promised the Pritchetts — then a migraine hit me this afternoon — I’ve been feeling impossible — and isn’t Athol Shreve — one hardly likes to utter the word nowadays — isn’t he ‘common’? Gladys tinkled. She was one of those short thick slabs of women who project tiny voices and specialize in shapely ankles and dancing feet. He has a certain brutish charm Betty. Never liked Gladys Radford, but you remained friends over the years. One of the advantages of being a woman: you can do just that. After a clash, men sometimes don’t speak to each other again, but real women can endure the worst in one another; must be because they’re debarred from all that honest-to-God mateship, and the Masons.

Athol Shreve: upstanding hair and coarse skin in the photographs; probably had acne as a boy. You couldn’t fall — not immediately — for the Radfords’ importunate invitation; you were too obviously a pis aller.

Sidney Radford, after inheriting coal, had sat about in an office looking important, while somebody else managed the coal. Gladys had money of her own; was it from — from — biscuits? or those cakes and puddings full of burnt fruit and sand, in tins. Anyway, with their two fortunes, and the Italian statuary and mosaics, the French tapestries — said to be Gobelins — and Aubusson carpets, the Radfords could put on a show. All their parties were soirées: some of them musical. Sidney Radford played the fiddle, a famous one, which rapidly became infamous. They engaged Moiskovsky? the Russian pianist — to play sonatas with Sidney — but Moisenstein got up and walked out. Stuck to the cheque, and Sidney and Gladys were too ashamed to ask for it back.

This Athol Shreve Gladys finally hysterical was still going on about.

Perhaps you were a snob: perhaps being born into poverty had made you it. And Father’s education, and suicide. Father was frail, as in the end, dear decent Alfred; you recognized the same quality when it was too late to do more than clumsily attempt to mend the breakages.