The Twyborn Affair (43 page)

Mrs Trist herself often joined in, plumes trailing through chitterlings as a long sinewy arm reached out across the communal table for another boiled potato. Her mouth gone to pot. Her over-strong chin piled with mauve to purple shadow.

When satisfied, they sat around in their comfy gowns and sleazy kimonos picking their teeth with their nails, scratching breast, armpit, or crotch in the practical manner a girl's anatomy demands. Assuming little faint airs of ladies they had known or thought themselves to be. Those more convinced of their own superior origins farting and burping to apologise for what their colleagues could not boast.

Till the doorbell might sound, when the whole order tingled to its nerves' ends and the Mother Superior became the Sergeant-Major.

‘Go on, youse! Shoot!' she shouted. ‘The lot of yer!'

And they all shot, in their bedraggled, bedrizzled, comfortable garments. To become the creatures of caprice and fantasy the evening might demand. The sulky amongst them more hesitant: those who had seen a penis too many preparing to give notice like any overworked maid, who couldn't carry up another tray or black another grate, or on a higher level, wall-jumping nuns who imagined an outside world in which love was less abstract and choice free.

They filed out to their dressing rooms, or cells, and were soon patting and smearing themselves, or asking forgiveness and guidance of Our Lady (not forgetting the Panayia.)

At this hour Mrs Trist was superb, at her most forbidding, stalking through the public rooms in her bracelets, plumping a cushion, to the vast irritation of the noble sisters opposite drawing brocade over net which had ceased to be opaque, filling japanned or Fabergé boxes with cigarettes, rose- mauve- or gold-tipped, their perfumes mingling with the smell from stale tobacco-crumbs left inside,
ordering Ada, Ida and Vi to fetch the dishes of salted almonds, oily olives, sheathed pistachios which blunt Anglo-Saxon fingers avoided entirely, or on being caught out, heeled under velvet fringes of sofa or divan, or in the case of more reticent or passive clients, waiting for expert nails to split the phallus-shaped pistachio and pop it, if not an oily olive, into a complacently fleshed, or thin and chapped, though equally greedy, male mouth.

These were the preliminaries. Only a girl or two at first shuffling amongst the empty nutshells. Bored. Mrs Trist in attendance, encouraging participation and choice. Frowning on any individual who did not appreciate the favour he was being done in her superior house, and anyone who threatened to pass out too soon. For those who met with her approval, for his looks, or for having paid somebody else's unpaid bill, she was likely to cook a dish of kidneys and onion rings at dawn, before going out for her walk through a deserted park.

To get the stale air, cigarette smoke, kidney fumes out of her hair.

To receive the kiss of morning, the more acceptable for being so delicate and abstract compared with the sweaty, abrasive, rib-cracking embraces of venal men.

Herself was able to avoid those; no one would have dared, not even Gravenor her patron.

 

He was driving her to look at a famous garden thrown open to the public for some charitable purpose. It would have pleased him better to take her on a normal occasion and force the owners (family again) to receive his companion, the proprietress of a fashionable brothel, if she hadn't preferred anonymity outside her professional sphere.

‘I still wonder why you got yourself into such an ugly business,' he told her while driving down a Sussex lane.

‘But it's not all ugly. You of all men should know that. Some of my girls are superb, some of my jewels are collectors' pieces.' She laughed her laugh, dry enough for a dilettante to appreciate; as he obviously did. ‘Besides, I didn't get myself into it. I was nudged at
first, then pushed, the way one is. Certainly I could have resisted but oh well, I didn't. We go along with the times, don't we? If that's the way the current is flowing, most of us are carried.'

Rocked by the car between stuffy hedgerows, the grass verges full of cow-parsley and hay fever, they were growing indolent.

A little farther on he put out a hand, and took the hand nearest him. Yet a little farther, on sensing danger, she withdrew.

‘I'd say you take full advantage of all my house has to offer. And helped found it, for God's sake.'

‘For God's sake, the reason I keep coming back is for you—not any of your boring whores. Risking every bone in my body with some thrashing negress, exposing my parts to an angular Midlands schoolteacher. If you won't let me fuck you, darling, what I enjoy is the supper, or best of all, breakfast when you cook it for me.'

They rocked, and laughed.

‘It's as simple as that. Or could be,' he said.

In any of its permutations her life had never been simple. Would she have enjoyed it more if it had? She thought she wouldn't, then that she would. And again, not; she did not covet the confidence, the ‘strength', the daguerreotype principles of even the most admirable one-track male, nor, on the other hand, those mammary, vaginal, ovarian complications, the menopausal hells of a sex pledged to honour and obey. Yet she would have loved to receive this dry-cool man Gravenor inside her, to leave her mark on his skin for acquaintances to discuss and deplore, as though teeth-marks and bruises preclude love and respect. She could have loved and respected Gravenor in spite of his flaws, which she understood for their being to a great extent her own. She envied those in a position to love without reservation of any kind. Probably there were few such loves. At the heart of most marriages, even spiritual attachments, lurks the whore-nun or the nun-whore.

‘What is it?' he asked.

‘Nothing.'

Arrived at the stately home, they drove between heraldic gateposts, and were soon immaculately sauntering through historic
gardens, admiring the azaleas, losing themselves in the yew maze. The alpines were exquisite that year.

 

She was proud of her parade of girls. On better nights the ritual developed a refulgent swank. Not only in the public rooms, but in the private consummation of the client's lust.

A craftsman had fitted a concealed eye to each cell of this elaborate comb of which she was the animating principle. She would not have disclosed to anybody the existence of what was in a sense a humiliating toy, least of all to Gravenor, whom she must continue to admire, but who, as voyeur, would have been reduced in her estimation. She could not have explained how a common peep-hole becomes an omniscient eye, how it illuminated for her the secret hopes and frustrations struggling to escape through the brutality, the thrust and recoil, the acts of self-immolation, the vicious spinsterly refinements which shape the depravity of men—her own included. She would have liked to believe that, even if it did not purify, lust might burn itself out, and at the same time cauterise that infected part of the self which, from her own experience, persists like the core of a permanent boil.

She was devoted to her more dedicated girls, and decorated with her jewels those most likely to act out her gospel. The nucleus of her order lived in. Then there were the novices, on call. They were unreliable on the whole; they even got married and quietly distributed themselves through outer suburbs and provincial cities, where they upheld virtue against those they suspected of backsliding. Mrs Trist couldn't blame them, but distinguished between amateurs and those in whom she recognised a vocation.

Whatever their rank, they all got together in the kitchen, sitting over bacon-rind and the sludge of congealing egg as they discussed the night's activities, rehearsing a gimmick for the next session, wondering what unnecessary goods to splurge their earnings on, the more silent, she could tell from confidences made on private occasions, mentally adding to the balance of pretty substantial savings accounts. Some of them were supporting aged parents, a
husband, or a sponging lover. A certain girl handed over most of her money to a church.

Lydia was one of Mrs Trist's most beautiful and accomplished whores. She had hoped to become a concert pianist, and worked hard enough at the piano at the convent where she was educated. In spite of the enthusiasm of the nun who was her teacher, and the prospect of going to Paris to study with a famous virtuoso, she realised her music was less a vocation than the desire to dazzle.

‘Oh, and I was lazy too, Mrs Trist. The everlasting practice!'

‘I'd have thought that being a whore was as demanding in its way—and everlasting.'

‘Yes, but you just let it happen.'

‘From what I hear, the men who have had you are impressed by your great virtuosity. That must be more than just letting it happen.'

‘Oh no, it's the same as virtuosity in music—when there's just that—nothing more than the desire to astonish—no heart or compulsion.'

Lydia sighed and looked at her watch. ‘I'll be late,' she said, ‘if I don't get a move on.' Every morning she went to early mass, and evenings to confession. Some of Lydia's clients, her boss suspected, had left their cassocks behind them.

‘I feel fucked out, Mrs Trist,' Lydia confessed, driving the lipstick down on her mouth, clothing her lips decently before receiving the sacrament. ‘I'm thinking of giving the game away.'

‘I wonder anybody so religious ever thought of taking it on.' The whore-mistress sounded prim.

‘If it gives pleasure …' Lydia smoothed her lips with her lips.

Staring at herself in the glass she had never looked so lustrous; the white parting in the blue-black hair, the delicate nostrils, and bland mouth. Her confessor could only have found Lydia's sins forgivable.

‘But any day I could give it away.'

‘What would you do instead?'

‘I'd really like to fall asleep and wake in Heaven.'

Mrs Trist could not quiz the girl on her conception of Heaven because Lydia would have been late for mass.

The bawd went to her own room and fell asleep so deep that, on waking, she could not remember where she had been.

Lydia didn't return from mass. Days later her body was found in a North London canal. Her confessor was arrested for her murder.

 

Bridie was another Catholic, but a lapse. She had blue eyes, black-fringed, in a white, Irish skin. She was strongly built, with broad shoulders. There were some who suspected her of being a pretty man in disguise. Mrs Trist knew otherwise, even before she had positive proof of the Irish whore's womanhood.

Bridie had brown hair so thick and curly it had that matted look. In fact, ‘There are men,' she confessed, ‘who accuse me of housin' lice in me curls. Sure, I tell 'em, bein' Irish-born, I've had experience of the nits, but their creepun and crawlun would never let me entertain 'em permanent like.'

Though Mrs Trist saw to it that the girl was as beautifully presented as the others, Bridie was the perfect slut in her room. On the first occasion when Eadith found a litter of prawn shells on a Bokhara rug, along with balls of combed-out hair, and in one corner a sanitary pad, she had to protest.

‘There are some clients,' the girl began excusing herself, ‘who enjoy a bit of natural clutter. And if the prawns 'uv gone off, so much the better—the men feel at home.'

Admittedly Bridie had a rather more esoteric clientele; she specialised in whips and chains. (‘If I draw the line, madam,' she said at the first interview, ‘it's when it comes to the shit-eaters.')

The bawd would have liked to think the expression a metaphor, but from her experience of life she knew that shit means shit.

She engaged Bridie for her good humour, her intrinsic beauty, and what she sensed to be a gift for dealing with the perverse in human beings without condescending to the afflicted or martyring herself.

She dressed the girl in a timeless style, not unlike the one she affected to disguise her own peculiarities: long, trailing, romantic skirts which at that period could have looked ludicrous if a woman
were unable to carry them off. Eadith did, through her authority, and the mystery surrounding her. Bridie was a different matter. Her shoulders and bosom were allowed to reveal their magnificence. But the trailing skirt acted as a curtain which, as the performance got under way, was raised by fits and starts to excite her audience.

Bridie had a club foot. ‘Some gentlemen,' she laughed in her slow, good-natured way, lowering the thick black fringes on the blue of her eyes, ‘some of 'em come in their pants at sight of me surgical boot.'

Mrs Trist recoiled momentarily for her own power to pander to the worst in human nature. In the beginning, while still inexperienced, she had had her doubts about what she was doing, but as time itself seemed to pander, and from scattered inklings, to be preparing some kind of cataclysm, she allowed her power to overpower.

Most of those who patronised her outwardly discreet house were to some extent lusting to be consumed. In the age in which they were living it had become the equivalent of consummation. She was never more aware of it than when passing Bridie's closed door in policing the premises for which she was responsible, she heard men's knees grinding prawn shells deeper into her Bokhara rug, the thinning knees of minor civil servants, and on one occasion the more opulent pin-stripes of a Home Secretary.

If at times her moral self condemned the rites she had initiated, she realised that the sensualist in her would always raise a frustrated head. Her torments were only a muted version of the more theatrica shriek overheard on one occasion by a noble lady across the street.

 

Ada came to Madam. ‘There's a feller downstairs. I wouldn't see him if I were you.' Net ballooning at the window opened on its catch of river light.

‘Better to face it,' Mrs Trist decided.

‘This,' hissed Ada, ‘could be one of the big-time cops.'

‘I'll see him, Ada. If you'll tell him.'

Freckled by the past, wrinkled by encroaching age, her hands
trembled: you can disguise them temporarily in a mail of rings, trailing sleeves, eventually gloves.