If I can claim to know your husband slightly, it is from those pompous functions in the men’s club; better since you sent me your little boy’s picture, for I went at once to Edward’s snapshot album, and there came across those ridiculous, touching glimpses of men at play while taking themselves seriously: drinking schooners of beer leaning on the bar of a country pub, smirking over the tennis net as they clumsily protect the girls who have been their partners, never so exposed as when posturing in thighboots and all that mackintoshery beside some mountain stream with the trout they have ravished from it. (I know I’d stand accused in any court, but don’t think, Mrs Lushington, that I don’t love my judge.)
If my impressions of your husband are inclined to fade, and my impression of yourself remains distinct, it is because that snap taken by my mind’s eye as you and the Twyborns sat in the dining room of the Hotel Australia shortly after my son’s return is as clear as the moment itself. That is how I see you and as I recognise you again in the snap you sent me—unmistakably your features—and those of Mr Lushington.
I believe I can detect in your letter hopes that we might meet and found a relationship on the sadness and disappointment we both know about. Let me assure you, Mrs Lushington, that much as I sympathise with you, and grieve for you as far as one can, it would be a vast mistake.
What I would like to convey to you is that losing a child in death is so much better than losing a grown—what shall I say? reasoning child, to life. As happened to me for the second time. And to my darling Edward, of course. Though I think men must—they can only feel it less, for not experiencing it in their depths—dragged bloody from their own entrails.
Oh I mustn’t go on like this. You ask what news I have of Eddie. I can only answer NOTHING. As the first time, so the second. He is swallowed up. Whether in death or life, it is the same. We should not have aspired to possess a human being. Your memories, I think, are more cherishable because more tender. He did not know enough, mine knew too much of what there is to know.
Thank you, Marcia, for the letter, and the snap, and for sharing your despair, which I expect time will help us quench in the humdrum.
Eadie Twyborn
P.S. Let me put on record that, much as I disapproved of the monkey fur, I would have loved to wear it, and envied the one who did.
Part III
With the exception of the cook, a floating member of the household, and usually young, lusty, insensitive, none of the occupants of Ninety-One any longer enjoyed the luxury of sleep. In Nanny’s case it scarcely mattered: senility was her solace, so, at least, her former charges had decided for her. Maud and Kitty were the ones who suffered, but how much worse insomnia might have been without the deplorable trafficking opposite.
At first they had been prepared to pit their prudery, their virtue, against the goings-on at Eighty-Four. Kitty’s virtue in her younger days hadn’t been much more than a theory which members of her class professed in order to divert censure, and an admirable arrangement it was, till with age and reduced circumstances she suddenly found herself set cold in the aspic of fact. As far as anybody knew, Maud the elder, flat and plain from the beginning, had never had the chance to test her virtue, and nobody, not even Kitty, would have been indiscreet enough to probe. Now she was safe, as indeed was Kitty, though less willing to resign herself to safety. Only relatives reviving a sense of duty called on the two sisters, the Ladies Maud Bellasis and Kitty Binns, for Kitty had acquired a dubious husband, at whose disappearance she had been brave or proud enough not to revert to the family name.
All this was ancient history, to which the ladies actually belonged while liking to see themselves as ‘modern’. Even Maud was given to smearing a trace of lipstick over the cracks in pale, rather tremulous lips, while Kitty went the whole hog, and blossomed like a tuberous begonia. If she no longer enjoyed sleep, and teeth made eating a difficulty, she could toy with the thought of shocking. But whom? Most of the shockable were dead. Unless, under their lipstick, Kitty and Maud themselves, who were intermittently shocked by what Kitty visualised, and the timorous Maud only dared suspect was going on at Eighty-Four.
As what was happening, however discreetly, in the house opposite became unmistakable, the sisters had considered protesting, going to the police, taking their Member a petition from a neighbourhood roused by disgust for overt immorality. But could the neighbourhood, Beckwith Street in particular, be roused? Colonel Bewlay might even be patronising the house in question, his wife too shortsighted or too simple to know; the Creeses were too common, the Feverels too much abroad, the shopkeepers at the end of the street sufficiently business-minded to welcome the woman’s advent—her drink orders alone.
So the noble sisters lapsed in their intention to resist corruption and parade their virtue, and the house opposite became good for a giggle over their own drinks. For Kitty had dived headlong into the cocktail age, while Maud sipped a nervous sherry on occasions when nephews and nieces remembered the old girls in Beckwith Street.
‘We’ll just have to be broadminded.’
‘But do you see anything, Aunt Maud?’ asked a tickled nephew.
‘Oh no, we don’t see. But we’re inclined to hear in the small hours. Last night I definitely heard screams.’
‘I didn’t—but perhaps there were,’ Kitty reluctantly admitted.
‘Definitely,’ Maud insisted, slopping her sherry.
‘Poor girl!’ It was Esmé Babington, who later entered an Anglican order.
‘Well, I think it was a woman, but it might have been a man,’ Maud considered.
‘I hope a man,’ Kitty sounded most vehement, ‘a husband,’ she added in the bass.
After an oblique fashion the sisters began shedding their opposition to the establishment across the street. Perhaps they were too old to resist, or so old that they derived a voluptuous pleasure in associating themselves with imagined rituals of a sexual nature.
Exonerated by senility, Nanny told her former charges, ‘One of Mrs Trist’s girls gave me a sweetie on my way back from the grocer’s. It was lovely. Done up in gold. It was full of drink. Do you think I’m drunk?’
‘No, darling. Only old. Though as we grow older, drink does have its way with us.’
‘I think they’re nice,’ said Nanny, ‘Mrs Trist’s girls—and Mrs Trist.’
‘Mrs Trist can be most charming—whatever else.’
‘Yes, yes, charming—charming,’ Maud echoed Kitty’s verdict.
‘That doesn’t mean we must condone,’ warned Kitty, ‘in any sense, what most people would consider reprehensible.’
But condone they did: Kitty of the floral chiffons and tuberous begonia mouth, Maud’s tremulous, paler lips, and lavender voile with its flickering white polka dot.
What persuaded the ladies to condone was, more than anything, Gravenor’s patronage. Not that they saw much of their favourite nephew. Taken up as he was by living, they would not have expected to. But he sent them a case of champagne at Christmas and on their birthdays, and occasionally took them for a drive. More than this they would not have expected of Roderick: he was too busy shooting birds, landing salmon, yachting, motoring, escaping from the toils of mothers who wished him to marry their daughters, and fluctuating more generally between watering places, the stock exchange, and the House of Lords. From time to time, if they were lucky enough, they caught sight of their favourite, if elusive nephew arriving at or leaving the house which played the most considerable part in their withering, insomniac lives.
SHE appeared, usually at unorthodox hours, speeding her guests (exclusively male), her bracelets refracting the street lighting. More often than not she would reappear at dawn, the jewels shed, her garments soberly, almost anonymously, reflective. If on her return by more blatant light the Bellasis girls were looking out from their separate bedrooms, as they mostly were, she took to waving a long arm, and smiling out of a chalky face, for she had shed her make-up along with the jewels.
What she could be
doing at that hour they often discussed: not banking the takings, it was far too early; walking for her health more likely, or listening to the birds, heavenly even in a post-War London.
Like London itself, Maud and Kitty in their reduced circumstances were distinctly post-War, without realising to what extent they were also pre-. Perhaps Mrs Trist realised, looking as she did like a Norn, in her long sweeping colourless garments of the false dawn, as opposed to the hectic colours and lamplit jewels of earlier.
Mrs Eadith Trist.
It was Evadne who came up with what one could hardly refer to as the woman’s ‘Christian’ name, together with the unsolicited detail that you spelt it with an ‘a’. Evadne was one of the long line of incompetent cooks death duties had forced on them: Evadne the most incompetent of all, because so knowledgeable, a crypto-novelist the sisters suspected from her habit of shutting herself in her bedroom and rattling away on a typewriter while potatoes melted and veal scallops shrank to slivers of wood.
The Bellasis girls still had not broken down enough of their inbuilt discretion to ask the cook what she was up to on the typewriter, when the wretch left, perhaps having got what she wanted. But there was an occasion shortly before, when the sisters had caught sight of their cook coming out of the house opposite, and Kitty could not resist asking, while Maud stood breathing over her shoulder, ‘What was it like inside, Evadne?’ And Evadne had replied, ‘Lush!’ her rather goitrous eyes shining, the moist lips in natural puce hanging open in what was halfway between a smile and the savouring of an experience.
The sisters were too mortified. In discussing with Maud their cook’s expression, Kitty described it as ‘obscene’. They were relieved when she left and they could settle down in peace to poaching their own eggs and burning their omelettes before the next incompetent arrived. While thanks to Evadne, their imagination flowered more luxuriantly, in marble halls where odalisques reclined on satin cushions in gold and rose, and gentlemen with familiar faces, cousins and nephews, their favourite Gravenor, even their father the late duke, unbuttoned their formal black.
It was preposterous, monstrous, but delicious, neither Maud nor Kitty would have confessed.
Instead they settled down to the humdrum of living, hardly life, in which they no longer had a part, except as extras stationed at a window, waiting for the real actors to appear. In the absence of these there was the passage of clouds above narrow red houses, and earthbound plane-trees exchanging dead hands for live members in clapping green.
Whatever the climatic or seasonal diversions, the sisters continued to observe the activities at Eighty-Four, perhaps a little less avidly for coping with Nanny’s incontinence, a leaking roof, tuck-pointing which needed renewing, and drains which nobody would come to unblock. Sometimes after midnight each sister would admit that she was ageing, but only to herself, as she counted the ticking of a secret—the word they had been brought up not to mention—turning and turning on the turgescence of a sour stomach.
Unlike Maud, who scarcely ever dreamed, or if she did, was spared remembering, Kitty once found herself taking part in a dream involving a clamorous plane-tree, its foliage replaced by the faces of girls, as flat and formal as those on a pack of cards, till fleshing out, jostling, leaping, tumbling, Kitty among them, strewing the roots of the tree with a turmoil of quaking buttocks and sticky bellies.
SHE preferred the hour when dawn takes over from darkness. Ada could be relied on to deal with any fag-ends of trade, and allow her to indulge her passion for strolling unnoticed through streets to which the colours were returning, the life beginning to trickle back. Her route was almost always the same, down Beckwith Street to the river, along the Embankment, and over the bridge to Battersea. Best of all, she loved her stroll through the deserted park (thanks to the keys which patronage had provided her with.) Hair damp, a naked face somewhat haggard in a light turning from oyster to mauve.
Mauve was her colour when in full panoply. While following a timeless fashion, she dressed with extravagant thought. Strangers stared, barbarians commented aloud, and small boys hooted at her in the street, but those who knew her, patrons and those she patronised, ended by accepting with sentimental affection the more baroque aspects of her self-indulgence: the encrustations of amethysts and diamonds, the swanning plumes, her make-up poetic as opposed to fashionable or naturalistic.
But at the hour between the false dawn and the real, the moment when past and future converge, she was as much herself as a human being can afford to be: lips stripped, though not without a vestige of enamel in the deeper of the vertical clefts; in the shadows created by a too pronounced jawbone traces of the mauve powder in which she veiled herself at other times. For the more normal perspectives of life she could not lay it on too thick: on high occasions she went so far as to stick a grain de beauté on her left cheekbone, a punctuation mark in the novelette she enjoyed living as much as the one Evadne Schumacher, the cook-novelist at the house across the street, was obsessed to write. Perhaps it was Evadne who had conceived the additional conceit of the violet cachou Eadith took to chewing when got up in her purple drag.
She came to terms with reality between the two dawns in the deserted park. Somewhere between the fragrant scent of fresh cow-pats and the reek of human excrement. Between cold roses, their perfume still to be aroused by sunlight, and the great blast of overheated scrub. The damp hem of her unfashionable dress dragged behind her as she left the park and crossed the other bridge.
In Beckwith Street she might wave an arm in a last romantic gesture at the scarified faces of the noble ladies at Ninety-One before disappearing through the red-brick façade of Eighty-Four, the house she owned thanks to her patron, into the atmosphere of spent cigarettes, stale cigar, dried semen (and again, human shit.)
Girls were grumbling, moaning, snoring, while a last client knotted his tie and prepared to face respectability. If he were among those she favoured, she might fry him a dish of bacon and eggs to speed him on his way. At that hour the smell of frying bacon came as nostalgic as lost youth. So Mrs Trist considered, in her dawn dishabille, in what some people referred to as her whore-house.
She had started in a small way, almost without realising, while healing her own wounds in the maisonette in Hendrey Street. She was too disgusted with herself, and human beings in general, ever to want to dabble in sex again, let alone aspire to that great ambivalence, love. She could only contemplate it as an abstraction, an algebra. She was very lonely; for a time her only friends were trades-people and servants, who offered her a comforting reality.
She had a job with a fashionable West End florist. They respected her, though she provided them, she understood, with the kind of cynical joke the English, or anyway sophisticated Londoners, enjoy. She was also something of a mystery, which they didn’t enquire into because of her efficiency, and in her peculiar way, the woman had a distinction which warned them off. Customers depended on Mrs Trist for advice, and ignoring her somewhat bizarre appearance, recognised her taste. Even the more sophisticated and cynical respond to the pressure of a strong hand.
Of the other assistants, Annabel might have appealed more, Eadith thought, but they could not take her seriously: she was too pretty, too scatty, too much the professional amateur. She had abandoned the solid architecture of her noble origins, running out hatless into the labyrinth of lapsed values. Inside the labyrinth, of course, she was not bereft of her own kind: they met and lost one another in the search, playing at hide-and-seek in Harrods, falling drunk in gutters, shooting one another in some amusing mews, developing abscesses from jabbing themselves too often through their stockings. No, it was not the Honourable Annabel that her own kind, far less the rigid, hatted ranks from which she had defected, felt they were able to rely on; it was the rather odd Mrs Trist, of the pronounced jawline, as she appeared above the artificially bedewed banks of lilacs and lilies, and exquisitely unnatural long-stemmed rosebuds, her searching, bedazzling eyes the climax of the mystery which so intrigu
ed those she impressed. No one, finally, would have cared to investigate her peculiarities or origins for fear of dispelling a myth they wished to cultivate. (Not that some didn’t indulge in a tentative stab over the brown-bread ices at Gribble’s.)
Annabel confided in her. They became friends. It was a case of faute de mieux on either side. Mrs Trist enjoyed the girl’s wide-eyed, loose-mouthed prettiness, her clear, tea-rose skin, the whole effect belonging to those banks of artificial-real flowers at the florist where they were both employed. Annabel was drawn to the older woman’s composure, her strength, the severe line of the pronounced jaw.
On one occasion Annabel confessed over the martini Eadith had just mixed, ‘If there were anything of the Lesbian in me—which there isn’t, quite definitely—I expect I’d want to sleep with you.’
Eadith said, though perhaps with a shade less conviction, she thought there was nothing of the Lesbian lurking in herself.
‘My trouble is,’ Annabel gulped almost the whole of her martini, ‘I need men—a constant supply—and how to get it I don’t know—short of going on the streets—and that’s so sordid, isn’t it? You might find yourself accosting your relations on a dark night.’
Eadith suggested, ‘Couldn’t you handpick a few by daylight and book them for later?’
That too, Annabel thought, kicking at the toe of one of Eadith’s shoes, might bring complications with it. Considering where she lived. Unless she took a room, which would be an expense—unless she charged.
‘And then, Eadith, shouldn’t I be a whore, darling?’
‘I expect you would.’
The two women laughed their way deeper into the situation which was preparing.
The Twyborn Affair Page 32