Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

So the noble sisters lapsed in their intention to resist corruption and parade their virtue, and the house opposite became good for a giggle over their own drinks. For Kitty had dived headlong into the cocktail age, while Maud sipped a nervous sherry on occasions when nephews and nieces remembered the old girls in Beckwith Street.

‘We’ll just have to be broadminded.’

‘But do you see anything, Aunt Maud?’ asked a tickled nephew.

‘Oh no, we don’t see . But we’re inclined to hear in the small hours. Last night I definitely heard screams.’

‘I didn’t — but perhaps there were,’ Kitty reluctantly admitted.

‘Definitely,’ Maud insisted, slopping her sherry.

‘Poor girl!’ It was Esmé Babington, who later entered an Anglican order.

‘Well, I think it was a woman, but it might have been a man,’ Maud considered.

‘I hope a man,’ Kitty sounded most vehement, ‘a husband,’ she added in the bass.

After an oblique fashion the sisters began shedding their opposition to the establishment across the street. Perhaps they were too old to resist, or so old that they derived a voluptuous pleasure in associating themselves with imagined rituals of a sexual nature.

Exonerated by senility, Nanny told her former charges, ‘One of Mrs Trist’s girls gave me a sweetie on my way back from the grocer’s. It was lovely. Done up in gold. It was full of drink. Do you think I’m drunk?’

‘No, darling. Only old. Though as we grow older, drink does have its way with us.’

‘I think they’re nice,’ said Nanny, ‘Mrs Trist’s girls — and Mrs Trist.’

‘Mrs Trist can be most charming — whatever else.’

‘Yes, yes, charming — charming,’ Maud echoed Kitty’s verdict.

‘That doesn’t mean we must condone ,’ warned Kitty, ‘in any sense, what most people would consider reprehensible.’

But condone they did: Kitty of the floral chiffons and tuberous begonia mouth, Maud’s tremulous, paler lips, and lavender voile with its flickering white polka dot.

What persuaded the ladies to condone was, more than anything, Gravenor’s patronage. Not that they saw much of their favourite nephew. Taken up as he was by living, they would not have expected to. But he sent them a case of champagne at Christmas and on their birthdays, and occasionally took them for a drive. More than this they would not have expected of Roderick: he was too busy shooting birds, landing salmon, yachting, motoring, escaping from the toils of mothers who wished him to marry their daughters, and fluctuating more generally between watering places, the stock exchange, and the House of Lords. From time to time, if they were lucky enough, they caught sight of their favourite, if elusive nephew arriving at or leaving the house which played the most considerable part in their withering, insomniac lives.

SHE appeared, usually at unorthodox hours, speeding her guests (exclusively male), her bracelets refracting the street lighting. More often than not she would reappear at dawn, the jewels shed, her garments soberly, almost anonymously, reflective. If on her return by more blatant light the Bellasis girls were looking out from their separate bedrooms, as they mostly were, she took to waving a long arm, and smiling out of a chalky face, for she had shed her make-up along with the jewels.

What she could be doing at that hour they often discussed: not banking the takings, it was far too early; walking for her health more likely, or listening to the birds, heavenly even in a post-War London.

Like London itself, Maud and Kitty in their reduced circumstances were distinctly post-War, without realising to what extent they were also pre-. Perhaps Mrs Trist realised, looking as she did like a Norn, in her long sweeping colourless garments of the false dawn, as opposed to the hectic colours and lamplit jewels of earlier.

Mrs Eadith Trist.

It was Evadne who came up with what one could hardly refer to as the woman’s ‘Christian’ name, together with the unsolicited detail that you spelt it with an ‘a’. Evadne was one of the long line of incompetent cooks death duties had forced on them: Evadne the most incompetent of all, because so knowledgeable, a crypto-novelist the sisters suspected from her habit of shutting herself in her bedroom and rattling away on a typewriter while potatoes melted and veal scallops shrank to slivers of wood.

The Bellasis girls still had not broken down enough of their inbuilt discretion to ask the cook what she was up to on the typewriter, when the wretch left, perhaps having got what she wanted. But there was an occasion shortly before, when the sisters had caught sight of their cook coming out of the house opposite, and Kitty could not resist asking, while Maud stood breathing over her shoulder, ‘What was it like inside, Evadne?’ And Evadne had replied, ‘Lush!’ her rather goitrous eyes shining, the moist lips in natural puce hanging open in what was halfway between a smile and the savouring of an experience.

The sisters were too mortified. In discussing with Maud their cook’s expression, Kitty described it as ‘obscene’. They were relieved when she left and they could settle down in peace to poaching their own eggs and burning their omelettes before the next incompetent arrived. While thanks to Evadne, their imagination flowered more luxuriantly, in marble halls where odalisques reclined on satin cushions in gold and rose, and gentlemen with familiar faces, cousins and nephews, their favourite Gravenor, even their father the late duke, unbuttoned their formal black.

It was preposterous, monstrous, but delicious, neither Maud nor Kitty would have confessed.

Instead they settled down to the humdrum of living, hardly life, in which they no longer had a part, except as extras stationed at a window, waiting for the real actors to appear. In the absence of these there was the passage of clouds above narrow red houses, and earthbound plane-trees exchanging dead hands for live members in clapping green.

Whatever the climatic or seasonal diversions, the sisters continued to observe the activities at Eighty-Four, perhaps a little less avidly for coping with Nanny’s incontinence, a leaking roof, tuck-pointing which needed renewing, and drains which nobody would come to unblock. Sometimes after midnight each sister would admit that she was ageing, but only to herself, as she counted the ticking of a secret — the word they had been brought up not to mention — turning and turning on the turgescence of a sour stomach.

Unlike Maud, who scarcely ever dreamed, or if she did, was spared remembering, Kitty once found herself taking part in a dream involving a clamorous plane-tree, its foliage replaced by the faces of girls, as flat and formal as those on a pack of cards, till fleshing out, jostling, leaping, tumbling, Kitty among them, strewing the roots of the tree with a turmoil of quaking buttocks and sticky bellies.

SHE preferred the hour when dawn takes over from darkness. Ada could be relied on to deal with any fag-ends of trade, and allow her to indulge her passion for strolling unnoticed through streets to which the colours were returning, the life beginning to trickle back. Her route was almost always the same, down Beckwith Street to the river, along the Embankment, and over the bridge to Battersea. Best of all, she loved her stroll through the deserted park (thanks to the keys which patronage had provided her with.) Hair damp, a naked face somewhat haggard in a light turning from oyster to mauve.

Mauve was her colour when in full panoply. While following a timeless fashion, she dressed with extravagant thought. Strangers stared, barbarians commented aloud, and small boys hooted at her in the street, but those who knew her, patrons and those she patronised, ended by accepting with sentimental affection the more baroque aspects of her self-indulgence: the encrustations of amethysts and diamonds, the swanning plumes, her make-up poetic as opposed to fashionable or naturalistic.