The Twyborn Affair

by Patrick White

  Eadith got up. ‘If you want,’ she told her guest. ‘There’s nothing I need hide.’

  Everybody has his lie, and for that reason the others would not have questioned her remark. Gravenor hoped to preserve his grotesque ideal, Baby had decided to see life such as she had never wished to face.

  Eadith was leading the way upstairs, one sinewy arm slid along the banister-rail for support, bracelets slithering, gliding, grating, wounding the already tortured woodwork. Ursula following. She tripped on one of the lower stairs, but recovered herself without assistance. It wasn’t offered anyway.

  Rod had stayed below. (Serve bloody Baby right if she’d bumped her nose and injured that perfect detail on the Heal’s runner. Thanks to Baby’s insistence their whole family came crowding into Mrs Trist’s whore-house: darling Mums, selling off this one and that before dying of cancer, the Old Man, tradition’s profile, perhaps no more than either of his unsatisfactory sons, or Deborah, Toto, Karl Heinz, Wally Miller and others, and others; those he respected, he not so suddenly realised, were Julius Untermeyer the toothpaste Jew, and his own non-mistress, Eadith Trist the bawd.)

  As they approached the first landing, the two women on the stairs were subjected to the reason for those rumours only faintly heard in the office-parlour below. Several girls in a state of almost total undress were crowding into a renovated Edwardian bathroom. The object of their concern, as well as the cause of their alarm, not to say hysteria, was a stark naked figure seated on the blue-and-white porcelain lavatory bowl, or rather, slumped forward, arms lolling listlessly, in a faint or worse. The only live-looking thing about her was the torrent of glossy brown hair streaming floorwards from a head too heavy for its owner to raise, if indeed she was in possession of it.

  ‘Who is it?’ Mrs Trist called in a blatant voice such as her visitor had not heard during their politer conversation.

  ‘It’s Dulcie,’ answered a tall honey-coloured girl in nothing but her high heels and a pair of chandelier ear-rings.

  At the same instant Ada appeared from behind a door along the landing. She was carrying a huge white bath-towel. Her manner and the brisk sound of her cinnamon habit suggested that she had the situation under control.

  ‘Yes—Dulcie—silly girl!’ Her sigh was for human folly in any of its manifestations. ‘Had a go at herself with the knitting-needle.’

  ‘When I engaged her she swore she’d had the op!’ the bawd exploded.

  ‘It’s what you can expect of amateurs.’ As Ada reached the casualty, the girl’s companions raised her up; the hair opened on a livid mask, a body the colour of bruises, the glitter of blood dribbled over thighs and ankles.

  From neighbouring rooms the two business gentlemen were making a shaken getaway, one of them smarming his hair with a rigid, yet tremulous hand, the old-school tie slung round his neck, his companion forcing buttons into holes which seemed to have shrunk in the stress of the moment.

  In the general commotion, and telephoning Dr Pereira, Mrs Trist quite forgot about her guest.

  While Ada, who was wrapping the towel round the listless body, announced with conviction, ‘She’s not dead—only bled. I’ve seen too many of ’em.’

  It started her helpers giggling in a shamed way, then laughing outright as they staggered, tits joggling, heels going over, in removing to an upper floor the figure shrouded in the bloodstained towel.

  By the time Mrs Trist returned downstairs Gravenor must have carried off his sister. How much Ursula had seen of the aftermath of Dulcie’s attempt at abortion, Eadith doubted she would ever hear. In her present state of physical exhaustion and moral despair she had no desire to see Ursula again. Nor, for that matter, Gravenor.

  She was only deluding herself, she knew. More than ever before she longed for Gravenor’s company. She was prepared to accept his silences, his censure, the disturbing aspects of proximity and repressed physical attraction. In her hopelessness she found herself scratching a buttock in a way which could only have shocked Lady Ursula. What the hell! She blew a fart at all Ursulas, at every spurious work of art. Herself included. In the glass a ravaged mess, a travesty no amount of lipstick and powder and posturing would ever disguise to her own satisfaction. A ‘woman of character’ to her clients and her girls, she continued swimming out of mirrors and consciousness, her elasticity her only strength, like a cat which refuses to drown.

  Once at dawn she looked down over the parapet, and there was the corpse of this actual cat, fur opening and closing on patches of skin like blue-white scars, as the tide carried it, rolling and grimacing, rolling and grimacing. She might have chosen to join it had she been offered a choice by the blue-black immensity surrounding them. As she could not feel she was, she returned to the limbo of Beckwith Street, to the moaning and sighing of whores as the leftovers among their pseudo-lovers, the prickling pursy or smooth sinewy male animals, ground between their thighs or squelched against their buttocks.

  On the stairs and on the landings it seemed as though the bawd alone must fail to drown in this loveless social orgasm. She could have been saved up for some event more tumultuous.

  Several mornings after Ursula Untermeyer’s visit and Dulcie’s messy abortion, Eadith missed her early walk. She had gone to bed in broad daylight after a heavy night in which she had drunk too much while jollying or restraining, on the one hand the diffident and regretful, on the other the rorty drunken. She fell into bed recoiling from what should have rejoiced her: solid sunlight the other side of the curtains.

  Physically exhausted, she felt herself reduced to moral slag. Most of her girls did their jobs without at least calling on their nerves. It was Eadith Trist the bawd who was the fucked-out whore. Ageing, too. In a professional capacity, she would have been fit only for meeting the late or early trains at Victoria Station.

  She fell asleep in spite of the insomnia which at this time in her life had begun plaguing her. She must have been dreaming. She was standing in someone else’s house, the furniture less pretentious, the real tables and chairs chosen by those who lead ‘normal’ lives.

  She was waiting in a passage for some explanation of why she was there, when she heard a voice calling to her from a nearby room. She went in. There was nothing to make her immediately aware of the room’s function, except that a closeness, a warmth, a benign light converging on the centre of the carpet suggested an intangible cocoon. There was a young woman, her face softened by the light to a blur in which her features were lost, just as the details of the room were lost in a timeless blur. Everything about the young woman was familiar, but the dreamer could not identify her. She was kneeling on the fleecy carpet, bathing a recently born child. As the mother (so the dreamer sensed) squeezed the sponge, the child lay propped partly against the scuttle back of the enamel bath, partly by the mother’s other solicitous hand.

  The child was the rosiest, the most enviable the dream-walker had ever encountered. She dropped to her knees beside the bath, to join in the simple game of bathing this most radiant of all children. The mother seemed to have invited collaboration, but as their hands met over soap or sponge, resentment set in: the dreamer became an invader. She was warned back, at first not overtly, but by implication, till finally the fleece on which both were kneeling turned to grit, stones, road-metal. Dishwater, sewage, putrid blood were gushing out of the faceless mother from the level at which her mouth should have been. The intruder was desolated by a rejection she should have expected.

  Eadith awoke. It was about lunchtime by the normal rule. She continued snoozing, protecting her arms and shoulders from the dangers to which they had been exposed. In spite of them, she would have chosen to return to her dream for the sake of the radiant child. She must recall every feature, every pore, every contour of wrists and ankles, and the little blond comma neatly placed between the thighs.

  She must have fallen asleep again. She could feel the water wrinkling around her as she lay propped in her enamel bath. And finally awoke to the summer warmth of her act
ual sheets, and synthetic perfumes of the creams with which she anointed herself for synthetic reasons.

  It had occurred to her in her half-doze: what if I adopt a child? The half-thought half-dream was still glowing in her when several miles down the dusty road of half-sleep she fell to wondering, almost aloud: what sort of questions would my child ask me?

  She gathered her chest inside her arms, and was subsiding into the sheets again when Ada looked in to tell her employer that business already showed signs of becoming brisk.

  Mrs Trist got out of bed to renew her mouth. Her body was still supple. It was also hairless, since the Arab woman came regularly to give her the wax-and-honey treatment. She sat on the bedside a moment, stretching herself, then pointing her elbows at the curtains which created what was neither gloom nor daylight, but an unnatural glow in which her figure had been posed, not necessarily by herself, a shell without echo.

  On drawing back the curtains and the entanglement of net, she shouted at a dog, an English setter chasing a tortoiseshell cat down the street. She retreated from view on realising from the dog-owner’s face that he had witnessed something unmentionable. She covered her nakedness with a robe.

  Ada returned in a waft of coffee and toast slightly burnt, on the tray she was carrying, the newspaper, and a clutch of mail for the most part bills.

  Eadith Trist sat scratching herself. She might have felt more at ease had she heard the body-hair answer back. Her person, her life, her arts, constantly failed to convince her, though others seemed taken in.

  She bit off a corner of toast and looked through the batch of bills. Sipping the blessed coffee, she tore open an envelope, the native toughness of its texture vying with discreet arrogance. A monogram of simple, yet withal, imperious design was cleanly incised in the opulent weave, the letter signed by a hand which promised warmth while remaining enslaved to its authority:

  Yours, with affection,

  Ursula

  Eadith read the letter, chewing toast by ugly mouthfuls, or so she felt; scalding herself on coffee which had begun to taste of burnt beans. (The toast was even more repulsively burnt; she would have to tell that bossy know-all, the indispensable Ada.)

  My dear Eadith,

  We did agree, didn’t we? that we should call each other by our first names. I do detest formality, and never feel at ease in it.

  I am writing these few lines to say how much I enjoyed our meeting, our conversation, in your charming house. My brother is an old stick-in-the-mud. In spite of what some consider a wild life, he disapproves of practically everything. I adore him!

  If you are not too busy, Eadith, and could bear the thought, I’d love you to come here to a cup of tea or drink, whichever you prefer. Please telephone me. It would give me still greater pleasure if you would come down to ‘Wardrobes’ and spend a week-end with a few chosen friends. Some of them you already know.

  After adding that ‘affection’, Ursula had tacked on:

  I was ravished by your tea-things—and scrumptious cinnamon toast.

  U.

  Eadith continued sipping her coffee as she re-read Ursula’s parchment letter, from which nothing so vulgar as perfume arose, only a whiff of distinction. She mused over ‘ravished by your tea-things … cinnamon toast …’ She could not remember whether Ada had served tea as a prelude to Dulcie’s abortion, yet they must have sat drinking it if this was what Ursula chose to remember. In spite of Ursula’s ravishment, Eadith detected a common clinking from her honest, though aesthetically acceptable, cups and saucers. As for ‘scrumptious cinnamon toast’, she did remember, now she came to think, too much butter oozing out over delicate fingers.

  She was too sensitive of course. The Duke’s children as she saw them again, cheeks bulging, lips glossy, eyes glazed, were re-living life in the nursery while masticating the buttery toast in the whorehouse in Beckwith Street.

  Longing in and out of season for the cosiness of the nursery fire, with Nanny and a fender to protect them from its perils, in their still childish middle-age they hankered after other, more perverse dangers which Nanny Trist was able to provide. Or so Eadith sensed in trying to explain why Ursula and Rod were attracted to her. They were excited by their own perverse behaviour, yet if her noble charges were to detect in Nanny a flaw they had not bargained for, she suspected they would not hesitate to reduce the whole baroque façade of her deception to a rubble of colonial wattle-and-daub; no compunction would save Nanny from the sack.

  Mrs Trist dismissed her cab and rang the bell. There was a slight, cold wind lifting the edges of whatever stood in its way, an air of presage, a mould of green on the elms and the grass verges of the favoured gardens in the precinct. It was one of the chillier spring days, crocuses trembling, jonquils blowing but recovering themselves, like frail but erect Englishwomen.

  The columned portico towered above the intruder, who felt wrong in a squirrel coat the rats must have gnawed the night before she put it on. She should not have worn her common, balding squirrel. Her lips were thickly coated with grease. Stalactites were dripping from her armpits. She must have looked everyone’s idea of a woman who keeps a brothel.

  Lady Ursula Untermeyer could still command a butler. He had a skull’s ivory face with some hair drawn across the cranium.

  Oh, yes! He must have heard about the madam.

  He sat her in a small, not unsympathetic room, to await the august lady whose strange whims he was paid to obey.

  Eadith shuffled about inside the squirrel coat she had made the mistake of wearing, in the small japanned room where the discreet butler had placed her. On the wall opposite, there was a small exact portrait of Ursula.

  Eadith continued rearranging the collar of her unfortunate coat, and regretting she had come. There were no copies of the Illustrated London News, but the room was like a waiting-room at some fashionable doctor’s or dentist’s—or disguised abortionist’s.

  Ursula appeared. ‘I can’t think why Peacock put you in here!’ Ursula, too, was possibly disguised; for a moment Eadith feared her hostess might administer a charitable non-kiss, but she went off instead into a high treble laugh.

  She was plainly dressed. She looked like an exquisite plank with grain in it, her hair a perfectly incised helmet. She was wearing no jewels beyond a brooch in what was probably a rare, leached-out jade. Her manicurist must have been in constant attendance on the long pale nails.

  She put out a hand at the end of its arm to encourage her amusing friend who was running that house in Beckwith Street, and smiled her tight little smile by way of encouraging herself.

  Eadith was led back across the hall. This time she noticed a larger, more formal portrait of the mistress of the house in white satin and long white gloves, the highlights and the blue shadows in satin, kid, and diamonds suggesting a noble icicle. Beneath the golden urn of upswept hair the face might have looked warmer if the painter had been interested as well as paid, or perhaps he had not detected warmth, or perhaps his subject was unfeeling. The cheeks of a young Ursula looked like crisp little apples which had not been bitten into.

  As they crossed the hall Ursula murmured incidentally the famous painter’s name. The lowered voice did not prevent it bouncing off the chequered floor, to be reverberated by surrounding walls, before wrapping itself round fluted columns. Ursula added a dry little, mock-apologetic cough, and that, too, became echoed through what was virtually a Parthenon.

  On their reaching an upper floor, Eadith was led through a succession of smaller though no less imposing rooms filled with furniture too valuable to be lived on. In every room hung a portrait, of varying importance, of the collector’s widow. Halting for an instant in front of each, she paid the same mock-diffident homage, accompanied by what was half cough half laugh, and nervous hair-touching, as she named whichever fashionable artist. Her late husband must have schooled her in guiding the select tourist.

  Though the painted reflection in each room showed Ursula herself to be the Athena of this Parthenon,
there were other works of art as well, from Goya and Renoir to Lavery and Munnings, together with the inevitable signed photographs jostling one another in casual ranks: Marie of Rumania rubbing up against d’Annunzio, Lifar, Noel—not yet Eadith Trist, though Lady Ursula may have set her sights on such a prize. As for the books on the Untermeyer shelves, not one, you felt, could fail to reveal a personal inscription above the autograph of some mythical monster. Some of the monsters had even known Julius, and liked him enough to pander to a vice by which his widow continued doing her duty.

  When at last the two women had reached a boudoir-cum-study, less constricting, more personal than the japanned waiting-room in which the butler had seated the visitor in the beginning, Ursula sighed and explained, ‘This is where Wogs liked to sit.’

  ‘Wogs?’

  ‘My husband.’

  His widow produced a small etching in a silver frame from somewhere in amongst the Baroness Popper, Sir Thomas Beecham, Gladys Cooper, Gladys Cooper, James Elroy Flecker.

  The toothpaste millionaire who had collected Baby the Duke’s youngest daughter, was shown exposing a noble forehead, to either side a drift of startled hair, the nose’s curve more benign than cutting, the eyes expressive of unfulfilled longing. Julius Untermeyer had everything of the artist manqué he might have been Mahler’s failed brother.

  After treating the etching of her husband almost as though it were an oblation, she returned it to where it had been standing, with a moue which suggested, ‘There, darling, we’ve got it over; I loved him, but …’

  Peacock brought in a silver tray, followed by a maid with a second. The ‘things’ were arranged. Where Eadith Trist had been innocent enough to present Worcester, Ursula came out with Lowestoft.