She tried a little of it on the bawd. ‘My poor hands, martyrised by oyster shells! My knees, crucified on the lust—of some little—civil servant—or mingy professor! Man Dieu, my sweet, what these girls consent to! Does it excite their bodies? Does it stimulate their minds? Do you think they can enjoy an orgasm?’
‘I don’t expect so,’ Eadith replied. ‘They’re too exhausted. Or too bored. They do it for the money, you know—as everybody does—politicians, butchers, most artists. Their professional skill or artistic dedication doesn’t prevent them expecting a material reward. Isn’t it natural?’
Madame Siderous grew thoughtful; her eyelids began flickering. ‘Are you suggesting, Eadith, that I’m going to receive a material reward for my services? That would only be natural, wouldn’t it? And I could buy some little nothing of a bibelot as memento of what I underwent one afternoon as a professional whore.’
Mrs Trist laughed. ‘I shan’t degrade you, Diana darling, by paying you money for your working holiday in a brothel. I’d rather give you—well, the little trinket you can remember it by.’
The bawd unlocked the wall-safe where she kept her less important jewels, and chose a ring on which an ancient black scarab was rolling in perpetuity a ball of agate dung.
‘Pah!’ Madame Siderous exclaimed and frowned. ‘It’s Egyptian, for God’s sake!’
‘Yes, and very valuable—if what I was told is true. You never can tell, of course.’
‘No,’ agreed Diana. ‘You never can tell.’ But she seemed cheered by the possibility that what she was fitting on her poor martyred finger was a priceless fragment of antiquity.
‘It’s very fine—very unusual.’ Again her eyelids started flickering. ‘I must show it to Ursula Untermeyer—without of course telling her how I came by it.’ She raised her eyes. ‘Ursula is so knowledgeable, but within the bounds of the museum.’
As in lots of other plain women, Diana’s eyes were her best feature; they had procured her many of the benefits in what is known as polite society.
‘Ursula would adore to know you. But perhaps we should wait for her brother to arrange it. As he will, I’m sure, because she never stops insisting.’
‘I can’t think why,’ Eadith lied.
‘You’ll be the first madam she’s met—and rare objects are her obsession. She’ll add you to the Julius Untermeyer Collection.’
This was the way it went at the time, along with the hide-and-seek at Harrods and amusing hats (Ursula had been known to crown her own brittle carapace with a lacquered crab shell mounted on a doily in paper lace).
It was not Madame Siderous who introduced Mrs Trist the brothel-keeper of Beckwith Street to Lady Ursula Untermeyer. Gravenor the brother announced, ‘My sister has decided she must meet you. Such is your fame, Eadith.’
If Eadith detected a trace of acid, she could not resent what she had induced.
As though by agreement, they had been seeing each other less and less. Whether they met in Gravenor’s sleep as they did in hers, she had no means of telling. She was haunted by a Homburg and a furled umbrella, each of a black she had encountered in her waking life only in the paintings of Degas and the plumage of daws, rooks, and Australian crows. He was growing more cadaverous, more freckled; for a wealthy man his clothes were threadbare at knee and elbow in spite of a valet she knew had his interests at heart.
Gravenor appeared to be re-assessing his needs, as happens sometimes to those who are ageing and sensitive to social or political change. He might have been whole-hearted had he been an ascetic, or a voluptuary hell-bent on redemption, instead of a dilettante English gentleman. When in town he still lived in a dark rambling flat at Whitehall, and dined off crumbed veal and apple tart followed by a scooping of Stilton, its veins scrupulously tinctured with port.
Eadith hankered after tincturing his pale but unconsciously sensual lips. As she daren’t, she said instead, ‘Surely I’m accessible enough for your sister to approach? Her friends cultivate me—even her brother.’ Her smile became a leaning tower of accusation.
‘I’ll tell her to come, then?’
‘If she cares to. But won’t you bring her—to help soften the fall?’
Eadith turned her back, to feel whether she had shaved that morning. A moment of panic persuaded her that Lady Ursula couldn’t possibly find her acceptable, and worse, that the distance she had deliberately created between herself and Ursula’s brother must widen as a result.
At least they agreed on a date and hour for Ursula’s introduction to the house in Beckwith Street.
On the day arranged, Ada was dressed in her brown habit with white collar. Mrs Trist had given her deputy a pair of agate ear-rings which she felt added a touch of modest authority.
Perhaps out of diffidence on finding herself in the presence of a real live bawd, Lady Ursula was entranced by Ada. She could not compliment the servant enough, on her ear-rings, her pretty collar, the ‘atmosphere’ of the overcrowded office in which the visitors and hostess were awkwardly stranded.
Eadith remained by choice a minor figure, until Gravenor suddenly took her aside.
‘Ursula is rather shockable,’ he warned.
‘Then why did she come looking for what she knew she must find?’
‘She had to. Because her friends are coming. She doesn’t approve of Cecily, still less Diana, but would like to emulate their daring—even their lack of judgment.’
Gravenor’s lack of tact, which she should have welcomed, became Eadith’s wound.
Ada was at her most serious answering Lady Ursula’s questions, while the latter looked about her with bright birdlike glances, predatory if they hadn’t been so nervously distracted, of a lady whose title and wealth allowed her to hold tradition and possessions between herself and the shoals of life. The possibility of drowning in some catastrophic flood was one that she could continue dismissing as too abstract to be entertained, whereas she felt all at sea in this minor social disturbance in which the three of them were floundering. For Ada, the fourth, was sufficiently conscious of her place to go below and organise tea.
Lady Ursula had finally begun a vague, hiccuping kind of dialogue, high in key, dry in tone, which her rank and circumstances could only make acceptable, ‘… must congratulate you, Mrs Trist—Eadith—I’d like you to call me Ursula …’ [actually, in her family circle, she answered to ‘Baby’] ‘… congratulate you on this very charming interior …’
On getting it out, Lady Ursula immediately suspected she was sounding ‘old world’. She started smiling her apologies, or at least she parted her lips with their merest smear of tangerine, and narrowed her eyes behind the drift of eye-veil attached to her amusing little hat.
‘Thank you,’ said Mrs Trist with a humility she genuinely felt. ‘It’s always difficult to see one’s own objectively.’
She, too, ended on a smile, but one which must have made her look like a horse; at the same time she was invaded by a burst of scents and images from the past: a landslide of chaff, a trail of rat-shit, leather armchairs in the Judge’s study, documents tied with ribbon in disinfectant pink.
Ursula Untermeyer lowered her eyes from a hobbledehoy she might admire after she had accustomed herself to the eccentricity of Rod’s friend. Gravenor himself was the victim of his own bones and a chair too narrow, too low, which had forced his knees higher than was natural. He was sitting, hands outspread, as though to disguise the shiny patches to which sharp kneecaps had reduced the cloth covering them. For an instant Eadith’s glance was drawn in the direction of a pin-striped crotch.
She was at once shamed into blushing. But nobody could have noticed, or if they had, must have disbelieved. For most of those who came in contact with her thought they detected, from out of the tropic plumage and encrustations of baroque jewels, the glint of rectitude.
How Mrs Trist had overstepped the bounds of rectitude and devoted herself to satisfying the more vicious side of human nature was a subject for speculation amongst her employees
, clients, and acquaintances. And why she herself never took part in the celebrations she arranged. There were a number who would have booked her if she had been willing, but it was not known whether anyone had ever taken Eadith Trist to bed.
Her friend and would-be lover Gravenor had tried to reconcile her continued affection for him, and even signs of sensual attraction, with her constant refusal of his propositions. ‘You know, Eadith, I believe you have a savage nymphomaniac inside you, and a stern puritan holding her back. It’s this unattractive mentor who forces you to look for consummation in the lusts of others.’
‘How very ugly, but perhaps true! Truth is more often ugliness than beauty.’
Seated with Gravenor and his sister in the bawd’s parlour she was reminded of his theory; it made her wistful rather than sad. She suddenly wished she were alone with her shortcomings.
Not a woman of sensibility or feeling, Ursula sensed an emotional dilemma strong enough to rouse her conventional strain of sympathy. All she could do to express it was to assume the brightness her governesses had taught her to parade. ‘At least no one can accuse you, my dear, of leading a humdrum life.’
She raised her head to show off rather a fine throat. The glass on the wall opposite confirmed that she was looking her best, in fact a charming picture, the light glittering on still perfect teeth behind the faint tangerine of lipstick, her blue eyes widened under the little bronze veil. She could afford to be magnanimous towards one who deserved pity.
‘None of life—shelling peas, peeling potatoes—digging holes for fenceposts—need be humdrum if you give yourself to it,’ Eadith replied.
As one who had never shelled a pea or peeled a potato, let alone stopped to think that holes must be dug to accommodate fenceposts, Ursula could only toss her head and laugh for the extravagant answer she had just received.
(For no reason that she had time to consider she recalled an incident when she had dropped her passport and her keys down the hole between the footprints in a horrid Breton toilette.)
Rod was increasingly embarrassed, because poor Baby bored him, and he sensed his imagined mistress was bored too. From looking at Eadith’s hand, he longed to take it and press it between his thighs.
Just then the doorbell rang, and Ada came to answer it. She admitted two individuals who would have claimed to be gentlemen. In the thin and thick of them, each looked exceedingly prosperous, with their Bond Street watches and signet rings, their club or old-school ties, and expertly tailored suits. They must also have lingered over lunch and were somewhat the worse for it.
Ada whisked them upstairs with professional aplomb.
Convinced that she was seeing life, Lady Ursula looked spellbound. ‘Fascinating,’ she breathed, but at once averted her eyes from her thoughts.
In rootling round for a theme with which to distract observers, Ursula Bellasis’ blue eyes, which had so successfully decoyed the elderly Julius Untermeyer, lighted on a ring the woman Eadith Trist was wearing.
‘What an extraordinarily beautiful ring!’ Lady Ursula exclaimed. ‘Pigeon’s blood, surely. Is it Indian?’
Eadith said it was while taking off the ring, its ruby carved in the form of a rose, and set in a cluster of silver leaves. ‘… given me by an Indian who carried off one of my girls. Into worse than slavery. I’m told she died of luxury—an over-indulged liver.’
The two women laughed, Ursula in envy of the ruby spoils, and delight at the ring’s aesthetic perfection, Eadith more cautious, for a reminder of the cynicism behind a casually constructed human fate.
‘I do hope you’ll keep it, Ursula, if it appeals to you.’
Rod began mumbling, protesting, his sandy moustache growing sparser with the embarrassment caused him by these two women. At any moment he might drag himself out of the uncomfortable chair, and go upstairs, and fuck one of Eadith’s girls to get his own back.
‘But, darling, I couldn’t—truly! Your ring!’ Ursula was becoming ecstatic in her refusal.
She adored this rather peculiar woman.
‘But take it. It means nothing to me.’
Ursula’s hand closed on the formal Indian rose. In the blue eyes behind the scrap of a veil lurked the suspicion that she might be expected to give something in return, like on the rare occasions when Julius had got into her bed and started upsetting her hair. It was an agonising moment, but looking into Eadith’s eyes, a mosaic of experience and elusive beauty so unlike her own unblemished blue, she could detect no signal confirming her worst fears.
She was most relieved because, as her family and friends all knew, the millionaire’s widow was pretty stingy.
Perhaps they should have expected it. As the prettiest of the Duke’s daughters she had been reared to get them out of a mess. All those law suits. She was married off to old Untermeyer, a man almost her father’s age, of unimpeachable honour and unfailing aesthetic instinct, whose only flaw was that of being Jewish. Ursula didn’t care a jot about the Jewish, anyway in life as it has to be lived, and the family swallowed what pays off. An eldest son had been packed off to South Africa, leaving debts for which a car smash saved him further responsibility. Roderick the younger boy, dilettante, drifter, womaniser, though lovable fellow, could not be relied on. Of two elder daughters one was married to a decorative, impecunious German princeling; the other had taken an actor as the first of several husbands. Ursula (‘Baby’) was their saviour. It didn’t occur to them that they were underestimating Julius Untermeyer when they did him the honour of accepting him into the family.
A decent enough creature, this Jew, who had made his fortune out of toothpaste and other toilet commodities—soap far commoner than Ursula was used to buying in Jermyn Street. Others of his race considered Julius simple-minded, or pretentious, not to have bought himself a title to trade against his wife’s. Mr Untermeyer slept on a truckle bed, but bought the Kensington Gardens mansion to house his various admired collections. ‘Wardrobes’, the Wiltshire manor, was little more than an annexe to the principal museum, and the fat pony which jogged him on visits to his tenant farmers, an excusable Jewish conceit. (If he had a racing stable besides, a yacht, and a villa at Cannes, it would have been hypocritical of him to pretend not to be rich, and Ursula sold all those to help pay for her husband’s death.)
She did love him, she believed, but was herself the rarest objet d’art of those the Jew had collected: a situation which tends to freeze love in the beloved. Though stunned by his death, she was harder hit by the death duties. She had no wish for another man. She had not desired her elderly husband in terms of flesh, because how can one surrender to a father without a vague sense of disgust? She continued to honour his name as a nominal director of the toiletry business on which the Untermeyer fortune was founded, and as custodian of the paintings, ceramics, porcelain, glass, which ‘in due course’ would go to the nation. Her mind would not dwell on her ascent, possessionless, into a comfortless Protestant Heaven, still less her possible descent into its alternative for having married the Jew. Nobody would have imagined Ursula’s predicament, none of her rackety non-friends, not the writers, painters, connoisseurs she patronised, not even her brother Roderick, in London in the Nineteen-Thirties, but that was the way she had been brought up by Nanny and the governesses, and poor darling Daddy dying of a drawn-out bout with unconfessed syph.
On easing the Indian ruby in amongst her own rings, Lady Ursula looked at Mrs Trist. ‘We must keep in touch. I do hope, darling, you’ll come and see me—in town—and at “Wardrobes”.’ Her voice and her charming tangerine mouth clamped down on every second word. ‘I hope you won’t find us boring after the interesting life you lead.’
An impasse might have occured if two girls hadn’t let themselves in through the front door. Their fresh, though rather blank faces immediately radiated respect for those they found in the office-parlour.
Mrs Trist did the honours. ‘Audrey—Helga—Lady Ursula Untermeyer.’
Without the protection of make-up or jew
ellery the girls smiled nervously.
‘Rod you know.’
The girls’ eyes slid away from knowledge, and from that luminary with whom they were already familiar through Tatler and Sketch.
In Ursula’s assessment, Audrey and Helga were charming simple girls in unpretentious floral frocks. It was such a normal occasion. The girls had been to an afternoon session at the Curzon, to a French film much discussed at that moment.
‘It sounds most significant,’ the noble visitor murmured.
‘Depends on what’s sig-nificant.’
‘Don’t think I understood it.’
‘Anyway, the seats are so comfy at the Curzon.’
The girls laughed in the pause which followed, Lady Ursula joining them in full agreement.
After that, Audrey and Helga ran upstairs, pensionnaires at a finishing school, or novices in a convent. Ursula found them ‘unaffected—charming.’ Charm appeared to be the yardstick she used in exercising judgment.
Gravenor was becoming so irritated by his silly sister and the grotesque totem he had been foolish enough to imagine as his mistress that he had to suggest in his driest voice,
‘Inexperienced as yet.’
Eadith had grown sombre. She had a too heavy, almost a man’s face, Ursula decided. She regretted coming. There were uneasy tremors besides, doors opening, voices breaking out disturbing the upper landings, the whole structure of this baleful house.
‘Have you had enough, Baby?’ asked her brother, suddenly fierce.
She had known him brutal, though never to herself.
‘Why,’ she said, ‘no!’
She refused to be put upon. Even in the schoolroom, the nursery before it, she had been her own mistress.
‘Eadith,’ she demanded, ‘won’t you show me round?’
Ursula looked her coldest, her brittlest, her most imperious, her wealthiest. Gravenor hated his sister Baby because Eadith’s eyes had taken on the most poignant tones in their whole fragmented repertoire. He was brought to heel; he loved her, even though his love were as grotesque as her grotesque beauty.
The Twyborn Affair Page 36