The Eye of the Storm (26 page)

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.

She'd teach Col.

Alix thought she had got hold of a breast, but what she caught was a handful of air; she almost fell over.

‘Oh,
rurlly
!' Flora Manhood sang, ‘Don't say it's chops—my
favourite
cutt—
of
murr-heat
!' Then she went and sat down because the other two were so shickered it was no longer fun, toppling and giggling as they were from stored alcohol.

Only when the chops began to burn, and she smelt it, Snow brought them to the dinette. She had forgotten about potatoes, it seemed. The one she had peeled was turning brown on the draining surface beside the sink.

Snow said, ‘I always think it makes a chop tastier to eat it with the fingers—like in the outdoors.'

Alix agreed through her opening mouthful. She was less a lady with a chop. Some of the fat had drizzled down her saleswoman's sateen. Her blue eyelids, hanging heavy like some old parrot's, confessed their wrinkles.

The company sat mumbling its chops, Snow and Alix as part of a necessary exercise after gin, Flora because she was young and hungry.

When she had licked her fingers, and no pud seemed forthcoming, she asked, ‘What about the washing up?' as though it was her most natural function: the people who take you for granted are the ones who put you against things.

Alix sniggered close to the bone she was tidying, while Snow pronounced through a shower of shredded mutton, ‘Never terday what yer can termorrer! Don't yer remember that, Florrie, from Banana Land?'

Alix added, ‘It's easier after the fat's hardened.'

Flora snorted; she was so glad for what she was hearing, though melancholy in the end that these women should know better than Col. She noticed Snow's nails, bitten to the quick, and Alix's long, overhanging pearlshell ones; Col pared his nails to his broad blunt fingertips. (Though she would never have admitted, Flora Manhood was fascinated watching Col's blunt fingers perform unexceptional acts.)

Snow was yawning now, which made her look like a money-box, while Alix was inclined to hide her yawns in crumpled smiles. Flora herself suddenly felt a dead weight descending on her, from
Snow's snorter no doubt, followed by the hot meat. Her homeless-ness struck her afresh, since she couldn't face Vidlers' convertible lounge, any more than Col's possessive single. What she visualized, she dismissed almost at once, because it wasn't warm of her: she saw Mrs Hunter's great bed after the undertakers had been; she saw herself waking in its acres as the sun struck through the curtains, and Lottie Lippmann standing with breakfast on a tray.

Instead it was Snow Tunks saying, ‘Early bed for working girls.'

And old Alix grimacing and asking, ‘Is your cousin with us for the night?'

Since you had turned down the offer of a permanent lodging, perhaps Snow hadn't contemplated that, but jerked or burped at the suggestion. ‘Nobody ever knew what Flora intends.'

Flora played for cautious. ‘I could doss down here,' she said, ‘if it was convenient;' patting the grease-stained cretonne.

The two friends looked at each other. ‘We wouldn't expect
that
!' Snow was sentimentally reproachful.

Then they entwined themselves around the third party, and bumped their way as far as a black gulf which shot into light and became a bedroom.

Snow said, ‘You can't always find the time of a mornun not even to pull the bedclothes up,' as she ruffled up the pillows and smoothed a sheet.

Alix giggled. ‘Most nursing sisters can't see an unmade bed and resist making it,' she regurgitated before falling over on the one that offered.

Flora mumbled she had always found it resistible.

They were all three getting out of their clothes: Snow, that white gollywog; Alix riding a bicycle out of her black sateen; Flora, on account of what she had observed, kept her bra and panties on. Snow must have got through life without taking a look at the glass, but Alix would have liked to hide bits of herself, only she hadn't enough arms. Then they were pulling you down to be the ham in their sandwich. The two women flapping around, one white and the other black, reminded Flora of hens half paralysed by ticks.

After Snow had yanked the string which brought darkness down on them, the women became more frantic, and would have been united in a single aim if the drink hadn't sided with Flora Manhood: the drowsy dark blurred the ambitions of the two friends as well as affecting their sense of direction.

Half strangled chewed nuzzled Flora recovered enough of her wits to know she did not belong to this community of seething flesh. She managed to defect and stumble by the light of the spitting fluorescence in the street, as far as the window and what she remembered as an armchair. She flopped, but first had to jettison a well-heeled shoe buried in the nest of anonymous garments in which she finally settled to enjoy her independence. By comparison it was delicious and unlimited.

Snow's voice rose once out of the straining and muffled mumping on the bed. ‘Watch out, Someone! Florrie? Alix! Those flamun nails of yours! Watcher take me for—a joint?'

‘You know you always tole me, darl, I'm the most professional carver.'

‘Carla Who?'

The flickering fluorescence was developing other pictures on the inside of Flora Manhood's eyelids.

‘Eh? What about Carla? It wasn't that bloody buyer, then. It was Carla Abrams! Alix? Wasut?'

It will probably be a professional man a surgeon is more temperamental when you give away this private jazz dust down your ideals and go back to P.A. as theatre sister best for surgeons only counting the swabs puts the wind up you at times can't concentrate on the surgeon for concentrating on the count Sir Sir Archibald Humphrey no Valentine never knew a Valentine except the ones Col sends a black Daimler Jags are too common for Lady Valentine Parr
Parbury
not sit close riding to Admiralty House by air to seminars at Kuala Lumpur Delhi San Francisco all university men medical diplomats Prince Philip has his eye on
Lady Valentine Whatever in skinthin sheath of black leather yes the perfume is Shared Secret my husband adores it yes we are exhausted what with the seminars swab
counting the many responsibilities of diction deportment French archaeology there really isn't time except in the soundproof Daimler to discuss personal problems and for Sir Valentine to only very very occasionally put his hand under the rug.

Flora Manhood had to shift her dead arm. Her throat had dried. From ‘Miami Flats' you could just see the fiery furnace blazing down Botany way. Those women on the bed must have reached a compromise the right side of sleep. They were all sighs as they were sucked under. Flora too.

Flora? Yes, Sir Basil.
Not Sir Archibald Humphrey Valentine Whatever it's Basil Hunter you're after how could you have ever forgot remember quick the details you hardly had time for the peppersalt eyebrows meeting over what colour the biggest watch crocodile strap flattening hairs a vein suit you can tell the very best crumpled a bit up the back from sitting in a plane tie woven for winter everyone looks wrong who arrives out of the air
don't you remember your lines Flora
you can't neither lines nor anything important only the superfluous
superficial that's what I am
a swab count never chilled worse than the expression in Basil Hunter's eyes
do you think I'll learn the part Basil
so bad an actress in bra and panties too Mother Hunter would have booed you off the stage if she wasn't a lady as for Sir her son
if I teach you the technique Flora the rest is in you
coming at you bigger than the ad on a hoarding then bending down to part to look inside you for something no no you can't they're there all right all the children and none of them his pouring out and around he must recognize you are not the actress but acted on by all these children unlabelled uncounted warm and overpowering any reason you may find to offer.