Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

There was no lift at ‘Miami’ and the several flights of steps had a look of brawn. On one landing the smell of gas was so intense it added to Flora Manhood’s expectations: though she had never liked the idea of mouth to mouth resuscitation, being cousins could make it emotional, not to say heroic.

The flat was a small one and Snow appeared soon after you rang the bell, after she had squeezed aside a pleated curtain and tried to see through the frosted glass.

‘Bugger me ! Thought you must be dead, Florrie.’ Snow stood holding open the stained pitch pine door.

Flora Manhood felt irritated. ‘If I was dead you would have been notified. Haven’t I named you as my next of kin?’

Snow laughed, and something — it was the fumes of gin — shot out of her. ‘That’s correct. Arr dear, it’s lovely to see yer, love.’

All the while Snow Tunks was narrowing her eyes and smiling at her cousin Flora Manhood; it irritated Flora worse, when she had wanted to feel warm. But here were the white lashes, the blast of gin, and Snow’s stomach sticking out, which she had eased by unzipping a hip since she came off duty from the depot.

Still, you had to come up with an explanation. ‘It’s a long time, Snow, I know. But I’m tired out with this case — this old tartar of a woman. I often think about you, though.’ All considered, it was a necessary lie.

They were passing under the pink-beaded lampshade, with the same fly shit on it, and along the narrow, pitch pine and parchment hall.

‘Arr dear,’ Snow said, ‘I reckon we oughter incinerate the old folks. What can they get out of it? You and me can’t complain, Florrie — all of ours passing on.’

Flora Manhood hadn’t come about death; she decided to hurry things and put the question. ‘I’ve been wondering about the proposition — that suggestion you made — Snow — that I move in and share the flat. Does it still stand?’

Snow sort of burped.

Flora Manhood said, ‘A person can’t make up her mind without giving a matter thought.’

They had reached the back, the kitchen, and its other half, the dinette, its benches upholstered in a floral cretonne which might have looked brighter before the grease got worked in.

‘You never ever gave me to understand you were so much as thinking of it,’ said Snow. ‘And now there’s my friend Alix. Alix was sold on the idea from the start. She’ll be home any moment.’ Snow looked at her wrist. ‘She’s a sales-lady — at Parker’s in the lonjeray.’ Again Snow looked at her wrist, freckled either side of the watch strap.

She poured a drink for her cousin, who didn’t go much on gin, but explored its shifting, blue glaze with extended, pink lip.

Flora knew by now she couldn’t have stood her cousin’s white-lashed lids, her protruding stomach, or her unzipped hip. Snow was sitting, knees apart, like a man sits, the cigarette hanging from the skin of her mouth. She had let herself go all right; you couldn’t remember any such crude deportment in the old days at home, or even more recently, after she got with the public transport. On top of everything else, you felt that Snow was probably jealous, not as a man, which is bad enough, but something left over from being born a woman.

As they continued sitting on the cretonned bench, Flora said, ‘I wouldn’t want to butt in, Snow, on anybody’; testing the blue gin with her lip.

‘Well, I realize that,’ said Snow, looking up and down your wrists, your arms, your thighs — made you pull your skirt down — into the past perhaps, amongst the bananas, along the white road at home.

‘This Alix,’ Flora asked, ‘is she a close — an old friend.’

‘Well, she’s close. I can’t say she’s old .’

‘I mean, you’ve known each other a long time.’

‘A coupler weeks.’

‘No, you can’t call that old.’ Flora was determined not to show she was griped.

While Snow grumbled, ‘You’ve gotter begin somewhere, haven’t yer?’

They sat listening to the fridge. Snow was probably lit, from waiting for Alix who was late. Said Alix was first in as a rule, and put the tea on: that was what they were used to.

Flora Manhood wondered whether she would be able to submit to Snow if Alix didn’t last a second fortnight. At least you came off duty too late to be expected to get the tea.

Just then they heard a key feeling its way inside a lock.

Snow laughed; her pleasure brought her out in strawberry blotches. ‘That’s her now,’ she said.

Alix was a clotted-creamy woman, with the necklaces of Venus, and black hair built up high, which made her look taller than she was.

‘Alix is late, Butch,’ she explained unnecessarily. ‘But I know you’ll forgive her, won’t you, love?’

Alix was less interested in Snow’s forgiveness than in someone she hadn’t been asked to meet; her eyelids, heavy with a load of shadow, or alcohol, were lowered specially for the stranger.

Snow had decided on manliness. ‘We’re not gunner chew the rag all night over why you was late and nothing in the pot, because here’s my cousin Florrie Manhood dropped in as a surprise like.’

‘Oh, rurlly? You didn’t tell me you had a cousin. Or did you, Butch?’ Alix put on what she understood as a smile, and approached the gin by little steps. ‘Is she in business?’ she asked, squinting at the bottle.

‘Florrie’s a fully trained nursing sister.’

‘Rurlly? Perhaps she’ll give us some free advice.’

Although she had already drunk, Alix was still thirsty; when she recovered her breath she asked, ‘Which hospital do you favour, Sister Manhood? looking down her own cleavage.

Flora explained, while feeling too sober and too cool, that she was nursing privately at present.

‘That would be more in my line — Florrie, did Butch say? Only exclusive homes of course. I believe the loot is incredible if you know how to pick your cases.’

Alix was staring with such concentrated intensity, not at the prospects of private nursing, but into what she must have decided was the innermost Flora Manhood, that Flora looked to Snow to take her part; but her cousin had moved down the kitchen end of the kitchen, and was slinging the pots around. And chops — yes, chops.

A silence had fallen, outside the fridge and other kitchen noises, when Alix addressed Snow. ‘Isn’t she pretty, Snowy? Your little coz. Sweet.’

But Snow either didn’t hear, or wasn’t going to, and Alix, after she had tiptoed back towards the bottle, went and started rubbing up against her friend.

‘You’re not cranky with me, Butch, just because I wasn’t on the dot? Darl?’

Though Alix was rubbing up and down against Snow’s backview like a grater on a lump of cheese, Snow continued peeling a potato, holding it well away from her.

Finally she asked, ‘Who wasut, I’d liketer know?’

‘Not what you think.’ Alix sighed into her glass. ‘It was a gentleman.’

‘Those bloody two-ball screwballs!’

‘A buyer,’ Alix extenuated, smoothing the black sateen over rather plump hips. ‘You’ve got to stay the right side of the buyers.’

‘Which side?’ Snow hollered out of the corner of her mouth.

Alix said darl how could she, and soon afterwards Snow put down that long-distance potato; she turned and started kneading Alix, who submitted to the bumpy going.

Suddenly Snow remembered. ‘’Ere, we’re forgettun the guest!’ she shouted.

She poured her cousin a snifter, which Flora at once recognized as a snorter.

‘She’s pretty — your cousin,’ Alix repeated, and sighed. ‘Chawming.’ She gargled a few notes. ‘I think she’s probably sensitive.’

Flora drank the gin because she had nothing else to do, except explore her own thoughts. These were occupied, she soon realized, almost exclusively by Col Pardoe: she saw him emptying the spittle out of the bowl of his stinking pipe; she saw that particular mole above the line of his pubic hair. By the time she could smell the chops Snow must have thrown on the grill, she had conjured Col into this kitchenful of drunken women. Seeing what would disgust him most, she began twisting in and out Snow and Alix. The woman shrieked; they loved it; they just on shot their hips out in imitation of a rumba from one of those old movies they drag up on the box; and as they pranced and wagged their bums they began to make a play for Snow’s cousin Florrie Manhood. While Col’s image, the mouth which in her weaker moments she liked to think of as ‘strong’, writhed for the obscenities he was being made to witness.