The Twyborn Affair (52 page)

Mrs Trist fled through the expectant or smeary children, past the officers marshalling their platoons. She could not face the reflections in these women's spectacles, not so much reproachful as compassionate.

She regained the street.

After that, a miasma of inertia seemed to invade the lives of ordinary people. However Whitehall might tinker, and intentions gather beyond the Rhine, war was no concern of theirs, unless in the waking hours of night. At the same time, in their benumbed workaday consciousness, the faithful were scarcely less faithful in their devotions after being frightened almost out of their minds, or the sensual less licentious having dropped to the potentialities of licence.

In Beckwith Street Mrs Trist was doing a roaring trade. The boom brought with it an increase in minutiae. Whatever else, she must not relax the standards of her house in echoing the common cry, ‘There's a war on.'

‘Why wasn't it paid?' the bawd demanded irritably, while fitting a pair of enamelled macaws into pierced ears and wincing for the pain her weighty ear-rings inflicted on her.

‘Because I slipped up,' Ada admitted.

As it happened, it was only the baker's bill, but her deputy's omission rankled in the bawd along with her own shortcomings.

In these unnatural times there were many other not unnaturally neglected details, such as the corporal's champagne which should have been chalked up to the banker (why not to those who were more affluent?) and compensation for Helga while laid off after the clap she got, she was pretty certain, from a colonel in the Welsh Guards.

In the lull after the outbreak of war, the minutiae might have made it appear that life had settled down to normal, had it not been for the barrage balloons, the sandbags, the gas masks, and the exodus of children. As for the black-out, only puritans regretted what others saw as a cloak for normal human behaviour.

 

Mrs Trist was coming downstairs, a hand barely connected with the elegant polished rail, which over the years palms had clutched, seared, brutalised on the way up. She herself felt cool and detached, the dress she was wearing, its tropical leaves and archetype birds, collaborating effortlessly with her recently bathed and anointed body. She put up a hand in a purely conventional and quite unnecessary gesture, smoothing hair which the Mauritian devoted to its upkeep had worked on the day before. Her legs, her arms, her jaw, were as smooth as marble, for Fatma the Arab from Mansoura had spent the morning at Beckwith Street. So Mrs Trist was at her best, enjoying a confidence she rarely possessed unless in the eyes of others.

She reached the foot of the stairs, her dress floating agreeably around her figure, her own image greeting her in the glass ahead. His lordship, Ada had told her, with ‘that nephew', and some other gentleman she couldn't place, were waiting for her in the small untidy room referred to as the ‘office' or the ‘parlour' according to the circumstances.

A sense of pleasurable anticipation made her linger an instant in the hall rearranging a bowl of florist's rosebuds.

Tonight she seemed to make a noticeable impression on Rod. When she went in, they swam ahead of the casual greeting they exchanged as a matter of course from a distance. Without so much as touching hands they were at once united in a sober bliss unrelated to their sensual bodies or the period of time in which they were living.

The moment's perfection made her anxious to notice and include those Gravenor had brought with him. The nephew Philip Thring was a nice, inconspicuous youth, of fluffy cheeks, bitten nails, and nervous manner. Introduced to her house by his uncle, he had come there once or twice without taking part in its activities. He was too diffident, or too effeminate. They served him supper, while upstairs, Gravenor was having one of the girls, or if later in the morning, they dished up bacon and eggs for the boy, without ceremony in the kitchen, where he sat friendly but aloof amongst a bunch of
whores tearing into their food and the quirks revealed by their clients of the night.

On one occasion a certain drunken Guards' officer, a friend of the uncle's, exploded. ‘I swear that boy's a bloody pansy. I wish, Eadith, you'd lay on one of your girls to find out.'

To which she replied, ‘I can't, Hugo, if Philip himself isn't inclined. You can only lead a horse to water …'

‘If you shove their noses in it, they'll sometimes see their way to drink.'

‘He mightn't be able to afford it,' she suggested lamely.

‘If that's what's biting you,' he fumed, ‘I'll set up a fund—to prove my point.'

‘Your point,' she said, ‘is not the one that matters.'

This evening Gravenor's nephew was looking more diffident than ever, his cheeks fluffier, his complexion more noticeably Englishroses blemished by thrip. His eyes appealed to her not to reveal a secret, the key to which she may or may not have possessed; while Gravenor ignored or accepted the boy as little more than an inevitable accompaniment, as family ends by being, or the overcoat he had left with the maid who let them in.

Still under the influence of this evening's reunion with the uncle, Eadith was all kindness for the nephew. Not that she could pay much attention to him after recognising in the third man, Reg Quirk, the original Decent Australian Bloke. She was unnerved by the pale blue eyes, the texture of the tanned skin, most of all by the slight connection with Eadie Twyborn, even before the voice began to rasp.

‘Glad to catch up with you again, Eadith. I've come to sample what you've got to offer. Nora won't have me around while she packs. I reckon she doesn't want me to count what she calls the few miserable rags she's picked up at the dressmakers'. We're off home tomorrow.'

There was no reason why he should mention Eadie Twyborn, and of course he didn't.

Reg Quirk was more intent on apologising for their prudent
retreat from a danger zone. ‘Can't stay on eating our heads off in London while the English are up against it, can we?'

He glanced to see whether his excuse was accepted or condemned. He must have found her looking exceptionally grave, for he flinched somewhat.

Should she sound him on Eadie's whereabouts?

At the point of doing so, she couldn't. Instead, she led the party upstairs to her reception- or show-room, and assembled a handful of girls for her clients to choose from. Gravenor her ‘lover' could only be numbered among the clients. Heavy lids and quizzical lips implied it was her own fault. He chose a new acquisition, a girl she hadn't taken to the moment after engaging her. She had not been able to rationalise her antipathy for Elspeth, who was slender, refined, diffident, submissive. Her insipid manner and milk-and-roses complexion were not unlike those of Gravenor's nephew, Eadith suddenly realised. She was unable to give further thought to what might have been a bitter situation, because she was busy accommodating the randy Australian.

Reg fancied Jule. ‘As smooth a swatch of black velvet as I ever clapped eyes on.'

The two men were taken by the girls to their rooms. Everyone appeared satisfied, excepting Eadith, faced with entertaining the nephew in between receiving officers of the Armed Forces and turning away the rowdies bred by the black-out and wartime clubs.

In her own boredom, exasperation, and resentment at Rod's choosing Elspeth, she said to the youth she was landed with, ‘How boring for you, Philip, to hang around unemployed in a thriving brothel.'

The boy blushed. ‘I can't say it isn't a bore, Mrs Trist, and I shouldn't be here if my uncle didn't expect it of me.'

Irritation forced her to answer, ‘You hardly live up to his expectations, I'd say.'

The young man might have been more embarrassed, and she regretful of her cruelty, if Gravenor hadn't returned to the room and beckoned the whore-mistress from the doorway.

‘Surely one of your girls can take it from him. Do try, Eadith darling. We may all be dead a year from now.' He smiled his gentlest, most haggard smile, patted her arm, and was gone to enjoy the wilting Elspeth.

Eadith was torn by desire for revenge on those unconscious of their guilt, while dreading discovery by the lover she most desired.

On returning to Philip Thring she must have appeared agitated. He looked away discreetly.

‘I mean,' he said, blushing again as he resumed their broken conversation, ‘what I find at Beckwith Street interests me aesthetically—and for its perversity, morally. But it doesn't rouse me physically. Even if my uncle despises me for it—his friends do, and I think he must—I can't take part.'

Mrs Trist said, ‘I believe you've almost told me a secret.'

The tremulous mirror he was offering her must have reflected the sympathy she felt for this boy. More than that: they were shown standing together at the end of a long corridor or hall of mirrors, which memory becomes, and in which they were portrayed stereoscopically, refracted, duplicated, melted into the one image, and by moments shamefully distorted into lepers or Velasquez dwarfs.

The tatters of diseased skin and hydrocephalic deformities were in the end what brought them closest.

The young man allowed her to take his hand. Ada passing along the landing opened Mrs Trist's own door with a superficial unconcern to disguise a celebratory gesture. Closing the door on the celebrants, she continued on her way to some other more mundane business of a bawdy house.

 

Gravenor and Reg Quirk had finished the eggs and bacon served them it seemed some time ago. Into the room where they were sitting, there floated a pallid London light through the rather sooty gauze protecting an equivocal interior from a curious outside world.

‘Where the devil has the boy got to?' Gravenor complained.

Reg was extracting splinters of bacon with a gold toothpick. He looked older under his tan and not so much wiser as blank.

Ada assured the uncle, ‘Mr Thring'll come when he's ready.'

‘Which girl took it from him, Ada?'

But Ada was less communicative than ever. ‘I'm not the one to tell your lordship. I only saw him go upstairs with Madam.'

By now Gravenor was quite tormented, his pink, clipped moustache prickling, his used, freckled skin jumping, most noticeably in the pouch under his left eye. This must have been where Gravenor's main pulse was located.

After Ada had refreshed their coffee and laced it with a liberal tot of brandy, he couldn't prevent himself blurting, ‘Don't tell me my nephew is the only man known to have bedded Eadith Trist!'

‘How am I to say, sir?' Ada answered. ‘I've not known Madam all her life, and can't speak for every moment of the time I've known her.

It was too reasonable for Gravenor not to accept, and his friend disrupted further speculation by interjecting, ‘A fine woman—I wouldn't mind screwing 'er meself.'

Presently Philip came downstairs, his air so discreet nobody could have found fault with it.

‘Shall I bring you some breakfast, sir?' Ada suggested.

Philip appeared undecided. He sank down, elbows planted in the table at which his uncle and this friend were sitting, the one surly, the other gross and drowsy from sexual repletion.

‘Go on, Philip,' Gravenor ordered. ‘Ada knows what's good for you. Get your strength back after a night in the whore-house!'

While the sound and smells of grilling bacon, tomatoes, and kidneys mounted from Mrs Parsons's kitchen, the uncle grew increasingly irritated, not to say maddened, at sight of his nephew's skin coarsening under the girlish down. So he imagined, or so it was.

He was goaded into calling out to Ada while the boy was devouring the plate of food, ‘Isn't Mrs Trist coming down? To gorge herself on bloody kidneys?'

‘I couldn't say, sir, but don't expect so,' Ada replied.

Gravenor became contrite, resigned, respectful of Ada's convention.

He paid up, and after recovering from his amazement at watching
Philip lick the last vestige of bacon fat from the blade of his knife (there's a war on, Rod had to tell himself), asked for his overcoat.

The three men left the house and went their various ways.

 

A second golden summer accompanied the waves of invasion, the retreats, the numb scramble to defend what was left. Yet the People's War was still by no means everybody's. Figures strolled in the parks in their shirtsleeves, lolled in deck chairs at lunchtime, offering their cheeks to an indulgent sun. There were the letters from across the Atlantic, where the Dianas and Cecilys had installed themselves to their advantage in New York apartments. The Australians—who could blame them?—were returning home by droves. So there was, and there wasn't, a war. There were the barrage balloons, of course: amiable bloated cows, or sinister intestinal ganglia, depending on how one felt that day. The same applied to the sky-writing, which in the heat of a summer afternoon observers on the ground might interpret as an exercise on a blue slate. More disturbing were those old, indigent characters who had been overlooked, or refused to be evacuated, and who were haunting even the better streets to the discomfort of those who dismiss on principle, old age, ill-health, poverty, any phenomenon which threatens personal continuity. One might still succeed in dismissing other people's dead and wounded, but not these ancient harbingers, their wrinkles pricked out in coal dust or soot, who looked as though they had crawled from the ruins of a structure built for eternity. As indeed it had to be. There were too many sandbags around, to protect it from blast. There were all these uniforms. One could accept the smell of khaki and sweaty socks mingling with the stench of duck droppings and urinals when so many healthy lads from the Dominions had arrived to defend all that is most worthy of defending. In the circumstances, it was easy to accept adultery, perhaps even sodomy—more difficult their dreadful accents.

But the ancient harbingers remained haunting the streets. And night thoughts evading the golden days of what might be the last summer.