The Twyborn Affair (49 page)

The mist, the monochrome, warnings in her bronchial tubes, reminded her of failures. Failed love in particular. Her every attempt at love had been a failure. Perhaps she was fated never to enter the lives of others, except vicariously. To enter, or to be entered: that surely was the question in most lives.

As she turned back, someone was approaching down the lawn from the balustraded terrace.

‘We shan't be dressing,' he announced, ‘the three of us on our own.'

It was meant to encourage, and his leading her back towards the house they did not share.

They spent a rather boring evening, the Bellasis siblings yawning their heads off after a saddle of lamb large enough to feed a whole feudal household, followed by a cosy treacle pudding.

Ursula asked, while they were yawning their way up to bed, ‘This Hitler—need one worry?'

Gravenor replied, ‘Not while Neville's around.' Then he snorted. ‘It's comforting. Whether it's morally desirable—that's another matter.'

Ursula sighed. ‘Karl Heinz tells me not to worry.'

Suddenly she remembered her guest. ‘Eadith darling, if you're hungry in the night …' With her lacquered nails she prised open a japanned tin on the bedside table; and smiled.

When her hostess had left her, Mrs Trist drew back the stiff curtains to let in some air, without which the room would have been suffocating. The night outside was cold and damp in spite of summer. The mist rising from out of the beech wood below had by now almost enfolded the house, nourishing its lichens. She remained leaning out the window, shivering as she breathed the foggy air, like one of those cheap prostitutes, she realised, breasts propped on cushions, on a sill overlooking the drenched brickwork of a side street.

She withdrew at last, chafing lean arms, a flat chest, and after taking a hot bath in the deliriously comfortable antique bathroom, furnished not only with silver fittings but every texture of warm towel, she went to bed.

 

She couldn't have been more restless in her sleep. Eddie Twyborn was pestering his sibling. She resisted, but was taken over, replaced. She was relieved finally to have the freedom of this other body, cropped hair bristling on a strong nape, and again the body hair for which there was no longer any need to telephone Fatma and submit to her wax-and-honey treatment (only a minor form of suffering, but painful enough).

As Eddie Twyborn tossed and turned in the white gulf of Baby Untermeyer's four-poster, the mists from the beech wood must have risen higher to be pouring in waves through the open window. Foolish to have forgotten the window. The cold was glacial. He could hear barking too, no brace of wobbly toy spaniels, but that of some large vindictive breed straining at leashes to scent, and on being released, to attack and destroy. In escaping through the first-floor window of what was no longer a hiding place he suspected that escape can also mean extinction. Well he was committed to both, as the D.S.O. can be awarded to despair running in the right direction. He could detect a glint of boots as straight as beech trunks. The Judge was waiting for him below. Hand in hand they slipped between alternate slats of moonlight and shadow. If it were in fact the Judge, his thighboots were streaming with moonlit water or the slime from recently landed trout. It was not the Judge's hand, too freckled, the joints too pronounced, the skin too squamous.

He said if we lie down here they won't get us they'll fire over our heads Eddie.

Gravenor was forcing him down almost lying on him to protect him from the inevitable.

Not poor Edward Eadie's husband.

Tears were falling for the past the present for all hallowed hell on earth.

The enemy firing on them from the rising ground beyond the trees the slaver of dogs pouring down into the hollow.

You aren't hit are you Eddie?

He could barely answer such a tender question.

Yes I suppose I am he managed.

It was pouring out.

Wounded in spite of the shield this freckled other body provided.

He tried staunching the wound with his hand as the blood continued pouring out into the hollow in what was no longer a beech copse but an ever darkening pine forest.

He looked down at his fingers and saw that the blood wasn't red but white.

 

Eadith awoke to find herself in one of the guest beds at ‘Wardrobes'. Although disturbing, her mortal dream had also consoled as it ebbed from her. Drawing the nightdress round her naked shoulders, nursing a stickiness between her thighs, she turned her back finally, and after first nibbling, then devouring a Bath Oliver from the japanned tin on the bedside table, slept dreamless into a perversely sunny Wiltshire morning, to which she was introduced by a housemaid, anonymous and milky (she might have taken part in the dream), encouraging her to drink mouthfuls of tea (Ceylon for morning) in between consuming token slices of bread-and-butter.

War, death, and sex were the missing elements in this protected room.

Ursula, Roderick, and Eadith avoided one another till past eleven, when Ursula's friends, risen by supreme effort from their London beds, started arriving, trickling down the paths, clotting on the lawns, recoiling from smells, possibly those of mortality rising out of the beech copse below. Most of the guests looked out of place but seemed to enjoy the irony of it: Diana her melting mascara; returned from her exile at Saffron Walden, Cecily in flounces of crumbling-meringue organdy; an old bag of a Bellasis distant relation whose alter ego of a matted coat-and-skirt might have stood up without support like a similar garment worn by Eddie/Eadith's Eadie. The assortment of males was less vocal, but more important, the Mileses and Gileses who populate the P.O. and other Ministries more mysterious. Herself a whole entanglement of mysteries, Eadith did not intend to investigate anyone else's too deeply.

When those who had been inspecting their rooms (were they better or worse than last time?) had come downstairs, and those who had confidences to exchange had returned by trickles and driblets through the maze of garden, the guests were brought together, according to the law of quicksilver, on Ursula's paved terrace, laughing over their shoulders at the one who, technically their friend,
was far more desirably their hostess. Those who had been opening tins of beans in an amusing mews, and dropping the alarm clock together with their gin into the pan in which they were boiling the spaghetti, looked forward to the vast saddles of lamb and bleeding barons of beef they hoped she would provide to feed the starving poor-rich.

On all sides were heard murmurs of ‘Ursula darling …' if mostly followed by a snort.

Everybody was doing something: writing, painting, marrying a title, divorcing one, destroying a soul. Exposing their teeth, their long fingers clamped to their glasses, every one of them avid for the ultimate experience. If this were a war, their eyelids rejected it. Their glances lingered in rebuttal on the figure brought for their entertainment, speculating whether Mrs Trist, the accredited brothel-keeper, were not in fact a guardsman, a nun, a German, a Colonial, or the tail end of a dream nobody ever succeeds in arresting.

Mrs Trist could not have denied being their equal in crime and frustration, and was only less inquisitive because she might have had more to hide.

Most of Ursula's friends were born with that respect for the theory of discretion common to members of their class. Not so this young man approaching. He had the moist eye, the wreathed lips, the apologetic chin of one who intends to tell and be told all in the shortest possible time. In the name of friendship, naturally. Any confidences to be dished out in due course to the rest; isn't friendship a shared thing?

Dennis Maufey had written a play—indeed several, but this was the one which would be heard about. If all went well he had found backers, who were in fact expected at ‘Wardrobes'—some Australians, he lowered his voice to apologise to Ursula's incongruous friend, who was none the less desirable because for the moment fashionable.

He looked at Mrs Trist, either to see how he stood in her estimation, or more likely, whether she should sink in his. He was wearing a rag hat (the Ursula set favoured hats in the garden: rag, raffia,
rattan—anything provided it was old and tatty). Only Eadith and the elderly Honourable Bellasis lady in the smelly coat-and-skirt were going hatless.

Maufey congratulated Eadith on her success. ‘Not that I've visited your house,' he said. ‘I've only heard about it—and wouldn't go there unless you consented to take me on professionally.'

He did not leave off looking at her from under his rag brim, as though deciding how worldly she was.

She smiled back. ‘There are too many applicants. One can't take on everybody,' she answered in her coolest English.

He giggled slightly, and looked at her closer than ever. ‘I believe you've got something against us. I can tell by your tone of voice. I mean—you're not one of us, are you? The Dominions, possibly?' Always looking at her; he would have so liked to share a secret. ‘Wait till you meet my Australians. That'll serve you right, darling. Frantic bores, but they adore the English.'

While Dennis Maufey and Eadith Trist stood about in increasingly disjointed attitudes, slopping the gin poured for them as the prelude to a country lunch, Maufey must have admitted his failure to have the creature confess to the shadow on which he had obviously trodden, for he began to concentrate instead on that other stone façade behind them.

‘Ursula's house
—houses
,' he corrected himself, ‘are the most ordered I've ever come across. Open any of the cupboards and I'm sure you'll find even the skeletons are catalogued.'

He was so pleased with his epigram, his snigger developed into an outright laugh, then subsided into thought. ‘You must meet my Australians—well, you will, you can't avoid it,' looking at her always from under the frayed brim of his hat, ‘because they're coming. Oh yes, they'll come. Titles and antiques are truffles to Reg and Nora Quirk. If they're sometimes taken in by puff-balls, they get a lot of pleasure out of the deception.'

‘When will they be here?' She might have been making plans to leave.

‘Possibly tomorrow. There was talk of polo with a prince today—
or was it cricket with some grisly duke? Anyhow, they'll come. They've bought a left-over Turner.' He almost dislocated himself with his worst giggle yet. ‘Nora's going to be presented if a war doesn't prevent her wearing her feathers to the circus. Poor darlings, I love them—such a
vigorous
country—I've great hopes … We'll always need plays, shan't we? particularly when the bombs are falling.'

After the hopeful playwright had cast her off, Mrs Trist was appropriated by the Honourable Mrs Spencer-Parfitt, who stood clutching to the grubby beige blouse worn inside her tailor-made a glass of the buttermilk Ursula provided specially for Muff.

‘I can't think why I turn up at Baby's house parties. I'm not wanted. And I don't want.' She looked sternly at the woman of whom she had heard tell. ‘Are you? And do you?' she asked.

‘I shouldn't have come if I hadn't been invited. Your second question is harder to answer,' Mrs Trist replied.

‘You're as bad as any of 'em,' muttered Muff, whose christened names were Constance Grace Aurelia. ‘People on the whole stink, I think—as the dreadful Americans say.' Then turning on what might have been intended as encouragement, ‘Some of 'em stink sweeter than others.'

Muff by now was stinking of the buttermilk past and present she had spilt on her beige blouse, and the cats she slept with in Kensington. Increasing whiffs of Eadie Twyborn began to trouble Eadith Trist.

‘I've heard all about you,' warned the honourable lady, slopping some more of the buttermilk, ‘but only believe half of what I hear. Nothing is wholly believable today. Nothing is true. Except Dinky my old seal-pointed Siamese, and Dinky—but I shan't talk about that.'

Mrs Spencer-Parfitt started dabbing at herself with a grey, snotted-up Irish hanky.

‘Purity …' she snuffled. ‘That daisy at any rate is pure.' She pointed with the toe of an abraded brogue at a clump of pink-to-white daisy which had shot up since the lawn-mower razed Ursula's
lawn to perfection. ‘I'd like to think you were,' she turned abruptly to the bawd. ‘In spite of what I hear, my instincts as a cat-lover tell me you may be. Too pure even for your own good.'

Eadith was aghast. ‘I've never aspired to virtue. As for purity—truth—I've still to make up my mind what they amount to. But hope I may. Eventually.'

‘Good for you!'

Somewhere an invisible servant was beating a gong, summoning people to a late lunch; a cold one considering the unreliability of the idle. It was no less sumptuous for being cold, and everybody tucked in, remembering what they would return to in their service flats, the eternal tins they would open in the mews, and the cockroach in the Charlotte Street
ragù bolognese
.

 

After lunch, and resumption of their hats, most of the guests returned to the garden and arranged themselves in deck chairs, to snooze, or continue their destruction of literature, art, and political careers, the dissection of adulteries they suspected or knew their friends to be conducting, and speculation on Hitler's next possible move in developing the Grave Threat to England.

With nothing to contribute beyond her incongruity Mrs Trist remained unnoticed. She was able to escape to her room. She could have been suffering from indigestion, or going to the lavatory.

Except for a sound of cutlery from the kitchen quarters, the house was heavy with silence, which did not prevent slabs of the past moving round in it. They pursued her as she fled upstairs past Courbet's peasant of the livery jowl. A cloying tortoiseshell light clung as insidiously as the misty future in her dream of the night before.