Eadith poured another martini.
Annabel thought, ‘Perhaps you could let me a room, darling. We might go into business together.’
Eadith said, ‘I don’t think I want to become a whore. Once, perhaps. Not any longer.’
Annabel gulped a second martini. ‘At least you could let me the room. Look after me, so to speak. I’ll pay you a percentage. We’ll make it a business arrangement.’ Annabel threw back her head, exposed her slender throat, and laughed. ‘That bloody florist’s!’ Her flower-mouth looked downright ugly.
‘It won’t be very pretty, you know.’
‘Oh—yes!’ Annabel stamped her glass on the table be with such force she broke the stem. ‘I know, I know!’
That neither of them knew, Eadith Trist only realised after they were into the business venture.
Not that Annabel’s handpicked men didn’t pay a handsome dividend. While Eadith continued working for the florist, Annabel gave up her job: she was too tired, or too indolent; after the night’s activities she had to sleep in.
Eadith had not yet begun to see herself as a bawd, because Annabel, her sole investment, was so independent. Sometimes after Eadith had brought in her grapefruit and coffee before leaving for the florist’s, Annabel would cast off her sloth and start loading her mouth with lipstick. ‘I must get myself some sex,’ she announced, snapped her suspenders, and set out for Victoria Station.
After a time, Eadith decided to engage Bobbie, a healthy girl originally from Derbyshire who was now unhappy working in a post-office. Bobbie suffered from B.O. and had to have a few facts explained, but attracted certain men, some of them highly connected.
Annabel’s connections were among the highest, those relations she had been afraid of accosting in the dark. (It was through Annabel that Eadith Trist met Gravenor, some degree of distant cousin, and discovered that she too was related, if not through blood, in spirit.)
The two girls Annabel and Bobbie found each other sympathetic. Eadith might come in from work and discover them seated in her armchairs chewing at apples. Annabel lusted after Cox’s Orange. She would grow quite childish shaking her apple to hear whether the pips rattled, to be able to identify her favourite.
Annabel looked petulant and trivial, whereas Bobbie suggested a cottage apple, not die Cox’s Orange Pippin, but a windfall of some larger variety. One of her breasts was blemished: it hung lower than the other, but did not detract from her charms, it seemed.
Brought back by Annabel, Gravenor preferred the blemished Bobbie.
He told Eadith, ‘Sleeping with even a distant cousin is a little bit incestuous.’
Gravenor was a reddish, anyway a sandy, man. Mrs Trist decided in the beginning that she was not physically attracted to him; she mustn’t be, and in any case, she still had in her nostrils the equivocal smell of orange fur.
This was how she became established as a bawd. There was soon a third girl called Mercedes, a Jewess from Macao, whom Lord Gravenor also fancied.
Not long after the advent of Mercedes, who lived out and came in at night to collect a client, there was a plague of mice in the flat, in the whole house as Eadith found out from the other tenants, with whom she had succeeded in remaining on amiable terms.
In her kitchen, little more than a cupboard, there were mice hanging from the shelves; she found their droppings scattered like the spillings from a packet of tea. One morning early she awoke to feel a dead mouse in her pyjamas. She had evidently crushed it by jamming her legs together in her sleep.
The time had come to send for the mouse-catcher.
He was a pallid, but stockily built young man, with a smell of socks. As he moved about the flat distributing his baits, little squares of bread soaked in some lethal liquid, she found herself following him for a reason she could not have made sound rational: she was fascinated by a whorl of hair just above the nape of his neck.
‘Soon clean the little bastards up. Poor little buggers!’ he kept repeating.
It pleased her that he did not modify his speech in her presence, and at the same time she wondered at it. What was it that made people have confidence in her when she had so little in herself?
Over a cup of tea, which he accepted in preference to coffee, he talked a bit about himself. He was a Geordie, from outside Newcastle. As a young lad he had gone to sea in the merchant navy, but nearly bloody well killed himself by falling down a hold.
They fell silent after the episode of near death. He sat staring at her, his legs stretched out in front of him, feet encased in heavy shoes. His confidences and their de-mousing operation had brought them close. His expression suggested he would not have been surprised, in fact he might have welcomed it, had she expected something of him.
She had stopped him going into Annabel’s room. ‘There’s a friend in there. She works on a night shift. She’s asleep. She wouldn’t thank me if I let you wake her.’
‘That’s just where the little buggers might have their hideout—behind the skirting. If you’d let me lay me baits we’d nab the lot that much quicker.’
She wouldn’t allow it. She even laid her hand on his arm to emphasise her disapproval.
As they sat over their tea he told her he was qualified to exterminate all kinds of pests: rats, cockroaches, bugs, beetles in the woodwork. He gave her his firm’s card.
He said somewhat surprisingly, ‘A lady like you won’t have heard of crab lice. I caught the crabs when I was with me ship and we put in at Port Said.’
Taken unawares, she all but confessed she had caught crabs while in Paris on leave from the trenches.
‘They’re the tenacious buggers,’ he said.
His pallid north-country skin was pricked out in black. She found herself becoming bored.
‘Did your wife knit you those socks?’ she faintly asked from behind her cigarette smoke.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘me mum.’
He told her he was not married, but going steady with a decent girl.
They lapsed again, while his grey eyes continued staring at her, the smell drifting from the large stitch of the grey woollen socks.
‘Are you foreign?’ he asked.
So it was only that.
‘I suppose you might call it foreign,’ she said, and did not choose to elaborate.
It was curious that she should be more attracted to the mouse-catcher than to Annabel’s relation Lord Gravenor—though she could have loved the latter, she believed, if she allowed herself to fall from the trapeze into the trampoline of love.
She did not intend to, however, while waiting for Gravenor’s appearances, then flexing her nostrils, smiling too much, playing with her rings, lighting too many cigarettes.
He reminded her of the creeks running through her Australian childhood, clear water flowing over sand, pebbles, skeleton leaves, a rusty tin, the possible discovery of a fortune in zircons. Then again, he had rusty, chapped joints and knuckles, in spite of noble English lineage. There were times when he chilled her, others when, without touching, he chafed her into life, like sandpaper on calloused skin. Unlike other men she had known, he always smelled delicious, usually of French Fern expensively bought in Jermyn Street.
There was a period when he stopped patronising them. She could think of no explanation for it. Increasingly petulant and usually sloshed by lunchtime, Annabel had an idea her cousin was somewhere in the South of France.
Eadith, who had given up her job with the florist to manage her troupe, still only consisting of Annabel the defected Honourable, Bobbie the blemished cottage apple, and Mercedes the Macao Jewess, suddenly found her mouse-free flat impossibly full. She must expand, but how and where? To her mortification she was too passive to decide.
At this point Gravenor returned, his absence unexplained, nor was there any reason why he should account for his movements to Eadith Trist of all people.
He came to the flat one afternoon while the girls were out, either shopping in their desultory fashion for things they didn’t
need, or drooling at a cinema, in Annabel’s case literally exploring the darkness at the same time.
Eadith told Gravenor, ‘I must get out of here. I’ve had enough of this appalling huggermugger life in a flat.’
‘I’ve always wondered why you do what you do.’
‘As I wonder why a man like you should want to take advantage of what we offer.’
‘Men are different.’
‘Not so different as they’d like to think.’
They sat looking at each other.
Gravenor said, ‘It’s curious we’ve never slept together.’
‘I expect, instinctively, we didn’t want to spoil something better.’
‘According to tradition it needn’t be like that.’
‘But most likely would—a noble lord and a common bawd.’
They continued observing each other, the lines on their faces straining and widening like the circles on water.
‘It isn’t natural,’ he said before they burst out laughing.
‘Who’s to decide,’ she replied, ‘what is natural and what isn’t? The most touching marriage I’ve known was that between an imbecile and an incestuous strumpet.’
‘Then wouldn’t ours stand a chance? Or at least, a trial?’
‘You’re talking nonsense!’ She got up angrily and started stamping round the narrow room in front of its extinct gas fire. ‘What I wanted to say when we shot off at a tangent was that I’d like your help in establishing myself in a large house, for purposes the world considers immoral, but which can be aesthetic—oh yes, and immoral, we know—but no more so than morality can often be. Better to burn than to suppurate.’
He too, had stood up, wanting to brush, to touch, to console her. She avoided his attempts and, soon after, Mercedes and Bobbie came in with the fruits of their shopping, and Annabel with the man she had picked up at the Bioscope.
The man said, ‘When I sat down to enjoy Captains Courageous I didn’t expect to have a bird in hand when the lights went up. This dame’s insatiable. And I’ve got to be at Upper Norwood by seven.’
Gravenor and Eadith stood looking at each other with unexpressed pleasure, smoking Turkish, their elbows resting on the narrow ledge which had replaced the mantelpiece in this improved flat while the others got on with their various activities. Bobbie had bought a jumper she wasn’t at all sure about; nursing an incipient toothache which made her look like a white camellia turned yellow at the edges, Mercedes hung around on the off chance that she might be needed.
Presently Eadith had to leave her guest to attend to a client frantic to catch his bus, and an Honourable whore in a tantrum.
Gravenor left her to it.
But he helped her establish herself in the house in Chelsea, where Mrs Trist became an institution, a cult, even with many who considered themselves far above anything like that. Among them, officially respectable women. Even Lord Gravenor’s sister. But that was later.
Eighty-Four was ideally situated in an obscure street not wholly residential. The small businesses and post-office at one end made Mrs Trist’s venture seem less an assault on gentility. Most of the houses were run down, some to the verge of seediness. A few had been converted into bedsitters, where beginners and the defeated cooked little meals on gas-rings and wondered whether they had another shilling for the meter. On the whole the householders, even those still in undisputed possession of their property, had seen better days, in theory at least: officers retired from the services, amongst them Anglo-Indians, aspiring or unsuccessful actors, a writer whose play of years before had been forgotten by all but those with total theatrical recall, a detritus of minor nobility, and recently arrived Colonials who hoped in time to master the accent and pass as English.
In most cases large, the houses were in brick of a glaring red, of a style still submerged in that limbo which exists between architectural fashions. Nobody entered Beckwith Street unless they belonged or had business there, or were passing through from a fairly spacious, but also unfashionable square, to reach the Embankment beyond. Although their relationship was only a tangential one, Beckwith was not unconscious of the river as a source of life. On gloomy days, brick which might have been reduced to a sullen ruby, seemed to respond to the glimmer off water. On brighter occasions the street acquired dash from the clatter and importance of traffic as it surged at right angles, parallel to the silent river. Some of the inhabitants preened themselves on the fame of the Great who had lived along the Walk. Others, less impressed by a plaque, hoped that by living in the neighbourhood they might be permeated by a spirit of place.
All but the most cynical or materialistic were appalled, anyway in the beginning, by what was happening at Eighty-Four. If later they became acceptant, Beckwith was the kind of London street which is permanently on the relapse. Empty milk bottles once put out seemed to stand indefinitely, unless falling like hollow skittles in the night. On sunny mornings there were skeins of cats entangled on the short tessellated walk between pavement and front doors. In houses where the vanishing race of servants was still to be found, whether the sad put-upon variety, or those who are doing an enormous favour before twisting the knife by giving notice, either sort would rise out of the areas, and from behind iron bars glance up and down the street as though in search of something they might never find—unless at Eighty-Four.
There the painters were in, the decorators, the long rolls of carpet discarding their factory fluff, vans of expensive new or antique furniture looking as though it might never belong to anybody.
Some of the disgruntled maids had caught sight of HER. Wearing dark glasses. Shielding herself with a sunshade on days when there wasn’t that much sun. She was an American, a South African millionairess whose fortune came from diamonds, a lady from Golders Green setting up a stylish knocking-shop she didn’t ought to be allowed to. Somebody must be behind her.
Only in the latter detail was the neighbourhood voice speaking the truth. Mrs Trist remained fortunate in those who were protecting her, who cajoled the police, and introduced on a paying basis Cabinet Ministers, visiting Balkan royalty, even scions of the British monarchy encouraged to ‘get it out of their systems’ before they were presented to the public as models of propriety.
Gravenor’s aunts, Lady Maud and Lady Kitty, who dropped to the state of affairs early on, ended by not batting, in the one case a pure, in the other a more raffish, freckled eyelid. What they were spared was the knowledge that another more distant connection had been actively employed by the Trist woman. It might have disturbed them too deeply, not so much the active employment as the fact that Annabel Stansfield had fallen under a train before the move to Beckwith Street.
The girl’s death shocked Mrs Trist, as though it were the first event in her life for which she could be held, however indirectly, responsible. Angelos Vatatzes had been old at the time of his death, and the flight from Les Sailles forced on them by Joan Golson’s feverish interest in Eudoxia. Again, in the Monaro (if you overlooked boredom and climate) those in whom passion was aroused were more accountable than Eddie Twyborn, its passive object. (What you do to your parents, the living deaths you may cause, Mrs Trist fleetingly considered, are their own fault for having so carelessly had you.) But poor Annabel, though a born harlot and mid-morning alcoholic, might have been Eadith’s own crime, as she now saw it: the herbaceous face, the fragile but lustful body, crushed by a train—at Clapham Junction.
Yes, Mrs Trist was devastated, to the extent of rummaging for black and hiring a car to drive her to the crematorium. The driver, a decent little fellow, asked her whether she was Australian.
Closeness to death made the details of personal history seem irrelevant, so she evaded his enquiry, whether sympathetic or inquisitive, while noticing that one of her black gloves had a hole in the index finger, that her skirt was too short for bony knees, and that her shins needed attending to. Her feet she had tucked out of sight.
Caught in the traffic somewhere to the north she found herself th
inking about Hell, her own more than Annabel Stansfield’s or anybody else’s. Because your own hell is what Hell always boils down to. Her own was upholstered well enough, by Heal, and several more exclusive firms, but how well was it going to wear?
Passing through Regent’s Park, driven by this small, decent man, she wondered where the rot sets in. She was glad of her dark glasses. She had started scratching surreptitiously at various parts of her anatomy, feeling for invisible lumps, behind the upright driver’s back.
They reached the crematorium, where Annabel’s remains were consumed to the satisfaction and mild relief of a handful of relatives, and friends from earlier on—and the visible distress of a stranger seated by the door, in dark glasses, and furs in spite of a warm day.
At Eighty-Four the alterations were going ahead: builders, tilers, floor-sanders, glaziers, each trade apparently unconscious of the damage it was doing the others while pursuing its own. Still running the establishment in Hendrey Street with the help of Bobbie and Mercedes, Eadith Trist in her few hours of rest wondered whether she would ever succeed in paying for her folly. Leave alone her moral account, there was this material mansion which had taken possession of her, and which her taste was converting from a drab and musty barrack into a sequence of tantalising glimpses, perspectives opening through beckoning mirrors to seduce a society determined on its own downfall. If it had not been so determined, the puritan in her might have felt more guilty. She might have taken fright if Gravenor appearing at her elbow had not suggested at intervals that he and his friends would pay for what was no more than the transformation of an ugly and unfashionable house into a thing of beauty.
So she accepted her own corruption along with everything else and started casting the play she had been engaged to direct by a management above or below Gravenor and his exalted friends.
She realised that her poor whores, Bobbie from Derbyshire lolloping inside her blouses, Mercedes the lean Macao Jewess, even the flowerlike, defunct Annabel, were the rankest amateurs: a first essay in theatre. She set her sights on more subtle aids to depravity, such as would delight Gravenor’s friends, and as she had to admit, Gravenor himself.
The Twyborn Affair Page 33