The Eye of the Storm (44 page)

She turned her head, looking into the shop windows. What Mrs Hunter said about goats that had been with the buck could apply also perhaps to women who were on their way there: other people scented it. As she stretched her neck, her green seemed to fit closer to her hips. You couldn't say she hadn't been what they call ‘chaste' for some time now, though that didn't mean she hadn't let her mind roam around a bit, or hoped that some completely satisfying dream might descend on her during sleep. All the while making her calculations, by the calendar too, with pencil and paper, on Vidlers' wiped-down laminex.

Till you were ready according to figures.

That was why the men were looking at her. Because she was ready. And unprotected. All men, she suspected, not only Col Pardoe, hated the pill as being unnatural. It was natural for men, even if they didn't know it, to want to pump a woman up, then in watching, feel their self-importance expand.

So all the men were watching her as she turned down the darker street on her planned visit to Sir Basil Hunter. If she slipped in a bit of advice on how to treat his old mother, that was to save de Santis the trouble. It was in no way related to her plan, the hands of which had begun to articulate, the feet to kick: she felt dizzy, if not crazy, with all that was forming in her head.

The receptionist, a dark shiny girl who looked as though she didn't do anything about her armpits, made a tight mouth, and said, ‘I fancy Sir Basil will be changing for dinner;' which was exactly as Flora Manhood had hoped.

The receptionist frowned before smiling at the bakelite cup she was addressing. ‘A Sister Manhood to see you, Sir Basil.' There were the usual formal gulps and clicks from the phone; then the receptionist stuck the phone back on its stand, and without looking, condescended, ‘Up the short flight, and follow the passage to the left. It's number Five;' her voice as impersonal as bakelite: whose business was it if a casual, if
Sir
Basil Hunter (Guest of Honour on the A.B.C.) received a prostitute in his room?

The dark shiny receptionist had already begun pressing her damp handkerchief against her catarrhal nose before Sister Manhood started mounting the short flight, to follow the passage to the left.

The visitor had hardly given Sir Basil time to come out from under the shower; but he came, in a dressing-gown she recognized as ‘luxurious', tousling his hair with a rough towel. ‘What can I do for you?' The voice was natural, weary rather than elderly, at any rate not as old as Arnold Wyburd's.

He must have dropped to himself, because immediately he settled for a sharper expression, both mouth and eyes, and stopped drying his hair.

She felt a spurt of fear, which might have shot deeper into her if it hadn't been for Mary de Santis coming up with guidance. ‘It's your mother,' Flora Manhood said, ‘I thought I'd like to have a word with you about—Sir Basil.'

‘Oh, come!' He laughed; and she reckoned the eye-teeth were probably hitching posts for the false. ‘I was hoping you were paying me a sociable visit.'

Legs apart, back turned, rubbing stuff into his hair in front of the dressing-table glass, Sir Basil Hunter gave the impression it was the most natural thing in life to be receiving sociable visits from girls, in hotel bedrooms, in his dressing-gown. As for herself, she felt for ever rooted in her origins: in spite of your training at P. A., the diploma, the gear you had dolled yourself up in, a pretty intensive sexual life (till recently at least) and a lengthy spell nursing a rich bitch who had many cranky but often pointed answers to the questions, your basic knowledge was that of the girl reared amongst the banana palms up country from Coffs Harbour.

All of this made her mumble past the trembling cigarette she had lit for a purpose. ‘Mrs Hunter has been my case for over a year. Why can't you believe I have her interests at heart?'

He stooped a bit, so that his reflection could stare back at her. Without turning, he gave her a look of what she suspected was—commiseration? Seeing that he knew the hypocrite she was, she dragged on the jittery cigarette she had only lit to help herself. (Never got more than a screen, you couldn't say it was pleasure, out of smoking.)

While still taken up with the hair he was dashing back into shape, the lights in it intensified by repeated blows from the brushes against the crisp waves and unctuous tonic, Sir Basil sighed. ‘Yes—Mother—poor darling!'

After that he laid the brushes down; it was as though his visitor and he had settled a matter between them: they had done their duty by Elizabeth Hunter.

Sir
Basil
brought a bottle of Scotch. He brought ice from the fridge, which was ticking over the other side of the room; while
she removed from her tongue a shred of tobacco she wasn't sure existed, but it was what they do.

(How to raise her glass without giving herself away? There was the two-handed method she had practised while a trainee on her first dates with residents: young pukey milk-skinned doctors, themselves nervous enough not to notice the trembles in somebody else; but Sir Basil Hamlet Hunter?)

‘If you don't mind, I prefer a lighter one.' Not quite, but almost, Badgery lining up a tea planter as the sun went down on the equator.

He added soda. She felt the draught prickling upward, and lowered her eyes. She sank her pale lipstick in the glass as she noticed the hairs on the backs of the actor's fingers.

‘Right?'

‘Thank you.'

Even if the half of her tried on and off to kid the other half into believing her standards were basically moral, and that she was genuinely concerned for Mrs Hunter's welfare, the more positive half had declared its intentions by choosing the sofa; just as he declared his by sitting down deliberately beside her. The sofa was neither very large nor very new; the springs protested, but the occupants were brought unavoidably closer as from the sides of a shallow funnel. More unexpected was the sudden change of climate, from temperate to tropical, as the steam from his freshly showered body burst out of the dressing-gown. For a moment or two she had trouble getting her breath.

Sir Basil seemed unconscious of the effect he had produced without evidently trying for it; he was too intent on the touches with which he would build up a performance into something recognizably his.

‘Thank you for coming here tonight,' he said, focusing a lustrous eye on his opposite lead. ‘You couldn't have known you'd be saving me from myself.'

‘Oh?' The most she could summon out of her stupor was this pathetic moo, like a cow sunk, but passively, in a bog.

‘One of my black days.'

‘I don't want to latch on—not, I mean, if you have anything else in view.' A pellet of gum flattened on a back tooth couldn't have given worse trouble than the words her jaws were trying to get rid of. ‘The girl at the desk said you were dressing for dinner.'

‘Dinner with myself—unless the girl at the desk knew more than I.' All the time he was looking at, or into her, his right hand was picking over the upholstery somewhere at the back of her head.

She must make the effort to overcome this stranglehold of huskiness on her monotonous, her charmless voice. ‘Don't imagine I came here expecting dinner.' She hawked up the words, it sounded, out of her hoarse throat.

Instead of answering he smiled at her with an indulgence to dismiss diffidence for good and all.

He was certainly going out of his way to make it easy for her. She was by now almost sealed up with Sir Basil in his envelope of steam. She should not have had to think out a further move, only adopt a grateful expression.

What then prevented her taking immediate advantage of his consideration? It wasn't Mrs Hunter, though in the absence of an admissible reason, it would bloody well have to be: not the old incontinent carcase whose mind maundered after the dolls she had played with and tortured as a child, till suddenly and cruelly, she was back inside her right mind, the dolls turned into human playthings. You would have to concentrate, not on this real woman, but the pale ghost of a saint Lottie Lippmann and de Santis persuaded themselves to believe in.

Instead, what Flora Manhood had begun to see was not the ghost-saint, it was Sir Basil Hunter's knee—and calf—slowly released by the slippery folds of the dressing-gown. ‘I mean, I did honestly come here to ask whether you were considering your mother's feelings in putting her in the Thorogood Village.' She seemed to have achieved at last a low, soft, perhaps even appealing voice, while making circular passes with the palm of a hand over her own uppermost
knee, unwisely, it soon appeared, because it emphasized the nakedness, not to say the closeness, of his.

The eyes of each were concentrated on the other's knee; when the telephone went off, knocking their attention, as well as their bodies, sideways.

Sir Basil handled the situation. ‘I'm not taking any calls tonight. I'm too exhausted.' To prove it he closed his eyes, and smiled rather bitterly for the switchboard before dumping the receiver in its cradle.

He was back in brisker form. ‘Nothing has been decided. It was an idea, only. And more than likely won't get any farther, if everyone who pleads for my mother is so pretty and so tenderhearted.' He squeezed her knee, very warmly, through the hose.

Touched by a famous hand, Flora Manhood jumped up; she was on fire, and liking it. What was more, she hadn't altogether ratted on old Mrs Hunter. So she was now free, not to enjoy the situation she had so carefully prepared, but to go through with it for the sake of the fruit it must bear.

‘If it was only an idea,' she panted, ‘we've got that straight at least. But your other ideas may be as crook,' she threw off in the brassier voice she used as one of her weapons of defence.

Sir Basil would have liked to follow suit by standing up as quickly from the musical sofa, but could have felt a twinge in his back. His moody smile became a bare grin as he got to his feet, but he came on in the only possible direction: he too, had his plan to carry out.

And grabbed.

Probably on account of the twinge throwing him slightly off balance, he caught hold of a handful of flesh she wasn't proud of (it was superfluous) above her right hip; and Basil Hunter looked angry that his technique should let him down, converting a smooth pass into what must look an act of vulgar clumsiness.

Even so, they were thrown together on the edge of the room, and rebounded so abruptly off the pounding fridge they almost overturned a Queen Anne walnut veneer table with piecrust edging, the lot.

‘I should have thought,' Sir Basil got it out while eating his way along her shoulder, ‘we understood each other, Sister Man—Clara, is it?'

‘Flora.'

‘Oh, yes—Flora! Perfect!
Flora!'

They were seeing eye to eye, both literally and figuratively: they understood each other's inquisitive lust as it tempered and tried them out. How much else she understood of this ageing man, desirable, if only in bursts, she could not try to think. That he had no inkling of her real intention, she was a hundred per cent sure. Which gave her the advantage.

So she collapsed somewhat in his arms and made no secret of her breathlessness.
‘Whoo!
Aren't you making the pace a bit hot?'

It gave him an opportunity to pass the buck. ‘I'm hardly responsible—am I? Flora?'

Having kicked free of her shoes, she walked across the carpet on practical, flat feet, and pulled herself out of her dress: the green.

Sir Basil remarked, ‘Now that clothes have become so rudimenary, we can't offer to help, can we?'

It did seem to become increasingly practical, and solemn. Till there she was.

‘A genuine Botticelli!' He glanced over his shoulder, half expecting some unseen spectator might have overheard his corny remark.

‘My what?' she giggled as he stood out of his dressing-gown.

The breasts of this elderly man—her lover—were developing relentlessly inside the fur bra.

‘Please,' she screwed up her eyes, ‘must we have the lights—Basil?' Mention of the sacred name seemed to add just that extra touch of obscenity.

As he switched off the lights, she had a blinding vision of that old sightless woman his mother: Mrs Hunter would surely smell out the whole circus, and to make it worse, keep her dignity.

You lay and felt Sir Basil limbering up: he might not be the artist you would have expected. Nobody is what you expect; and all great artists, you had read, suffer from nerves.

‘You don' know what you're denying me,' he said in a sort of peeved voice, ‘insisting on darkness.'

She grunted. She couldn't very well tell him
her
idea might breed more fruitfully in the dark, though Sir Basil had already shown his approval of ideas, anyway his own.

He was going on again a bit about his ‘Botterchelly Flora'.

She would have liked to ask Col about this ‘Botterchelly'. She was so
uneducated.

‘What is it, darling? Did I hurt you? Aren't you comfy?' He spoke with a tenderness which should have delighted any blessed Daddy's girl.

But she couldn't play up to it. Instead, she choked what must have begun as a whimper, or turned it into a sigh.

Which appeared to satisfy her lover.

He was all over and around her: exploring. She felt she had stopped being a woman, to become a mountain range. She saw herself spread out, under a Technicolor sky, on a picture postcard:
Greetings from the Sleeping Sister.

He seemed to be trying, unsuccessfully, to drink her eyes. Then he climbed down. He kissed the soles of her feet. It tickled.

‘What's the matter? Don't you like it?' He too, laughed, though he didn't sound amused.

Again, he was burning inside her ear. ‘Do you think you'll be able to love me, Flora?'

‘What are we doing I'd like to know?'

‘Yes,' he sighed, while undeceived.