Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

For some time after, she did not see her protector, nor rustle up the courage or effrontery to make an advance; she was too ashamed of the musty smell her plumes exuded, a hint of verdigris in the settings of her jewels, and other more personal signs of decay — or was it the vapours rising from a river at low tide?

It was downright absurd to imagine she was less the woman they recognised: hair still kempt and naturally black except for a faint frosting of silver above the forehead; beneath the drifts of mauve powder, a bone structure time would probably never erode; lips immaculate, except when a stray camel-hair had remained stuck to the impasto. As she prospered, her jewels had become increasingly elaborate, tortuous, inspiring amazed gasps rather than passive admiration. Like her clothes, they delighted those who enjoy a touch of the bizarre in the uniform present. If she remained a joke for children, and affronted or frightened a majority puzzled by what they had not seen before and could never have envisaged, she was inured to the scorn of these comparatively simple souls, and worse, the hatred of others for what might not have been fully revealed.

Ladies, admittedly the more eccentric or raffish, began frequenting Mrs Trist’s house. Two who considered it fun to be on ‘darling’ terms with a procuress were Diana Siderous and Cecily Snape.

One of the outwardly flawless English flowers, Cecily had been forced to leave the country for a while after an affair with an entire negro band ending in the death of a drummer and exposure of a drug ring.

Eadith found Cecily, for all her amoral swank, rather an insipid girl, yet touching in her desire to explore what she conceived to be ‘life’. Her origins were never revealed, though she affected a vaguely aristocratic aura probably signifying Wimbledon.

Cecily confessed, ‘Sometimes I think I’ll become a whore — not for the money — just for the game.’

‘Then why become it?’ Eadith suggested. ‘I’d say you’d be happier keeping on as an amateur.’

It nettled the pink Cecily. ‘I detest amateurs in any department.’

On one or two occasions Cecily and Diana stood in for Mrs Trist’s girls when someone had fallen ill or defected.

After one such experience Cecily grimaced. ‘You were right, darling, I hated that. If at least I could have felt something for the paunchy brute riding me. Pity, or something. My trouble is I can’t feel .’

Eadith was forced to reply, ‘I guess you can’t — if you didn’t after an entire negro band.’

Cecily giggled. ‘Who told you? Aren’t people outrageous! Actually, it wasn’t more than a couple — the one who died, and the one who did him in.’

She became weepy, and after that, perhaps genuinely sincere. ‘I’d settle down in the country tomorrow if I could discover an honest man.’

(On losing sight of Cecily, Eadith had asked Gravenor’s sister, Ursula, ‘What became of Cecily Snape? It’s ages since I set eyes on her. She told me she aspired to an honest man. Did she find one?’

‘Poor darling, no!’ A collector of rare objects, Ursula replied through her most exquisitely brittle smile. ‘She’s living with herself and fifteen dogs in a cottage near Saffron Walden. She goes for endless walks in the rain, and curls up in bed with the dogs without even taking her gumboots off. However, perhaps she’s happier than she would have been with the honest man.’)

Her equal in amorality, Cecily’s friend Diana had ridden at life with less abandon, greater calculation, and in consequence had fared better, materially at any rate. If what her Orthodox forebears would have referred to as her ‘soul’ had suffered to any extent, Madame Siderous did not allow herself to consider; one was born with a soul, like that other hindrance a maidenhead, but any practical woman got rid of the one and forgot about the other as soon as was decently possible without damaging her chances of success. Of Smyrna-Liverpool extraction, she had married a rich Alexandrian Copt, but had left her husband and two rapidly acquired children, the better to circulate in the world, which in Diana’s case amounted to London, Paris, and Antibes. She was liberally endowed by her Copt, and along with the settlement allowed to keep her jewels, including a ruby necklet both friends and enemies claimed was in fact a present from somebody of vast importance.

Madame Siderous had a leathery voracious face, its complexion suggestive of tropical fruits in the early stages of going off. Perfumed expensively, her presence conjured up the scents of Egypt, predominant among them guava, toasted sesame, and cottonseed oil. The bracelets she wore from wrist to elbow of one arm were in the fashionable French paste, but rustled like the metal waves beaten out thin by smiths in an Eastern souk .

Looking in at Eadith’s on an afternoon when Bridie was the worse for an orgy of Guinness and oysters, Diana volunteered to entertain a client who had booked the Irish girl in advance because she understood his temperament. Though Diana’s repertoire was extensive and included the game of whips and chains, she hadn’t bargained for what she got: she had never been on the receiving end.

She emerged more than ever the bruised and rotting tropic fruit. ‘ Et la chambre de cettegarce! Comme elle pu-ait! ’ Disgust rattled at the back of her throat as she restored her lips at Eadith’s rococo glass ‘This nauseating girl’s oyster-shells and bottle-tops!’

‘Bridie is a natural slut, which is why she is popular with certain men. The physical wounds they enjoy are only half of what they suffer morally.’

‘But I was the one who suffered the physical wounds — inflicted on me by this species of pervert!’

What Mrs Trist did not disclose was that Bridie’s regular had declined to pay for the services of an amateur.

Not until Madame Siderous had got herself back into the paste bracelets, her cabuchons and pearls again nestling at her ears and throat, and doctored her nerves with a powerful slug of Armagnac, could she consider translating this gross physical outrage into an anecdote to amaze a dinner party of intimate friends.

She tried a little of it on the bawd. ‘My poor hands, martyrised by oyster shells! My knees, crucified on the lust — of some little — civil servant— or mingy professor! Man Dieu , my sweet, what these girls consent to! Does it excite their bodies? Does it stimulate their minds? Do you think they can enjoy an orgasm?’

‘I don’t expect so,’ Eadith replied. ‘They’re too exhausted. Or too bored. They do it for the money, you know — as everybody does — politicians, butchers, most artists. Their professional skill or artistic dedication doesn’t prevent them expecting a material reward. Isn’t it natural?’

Madame Siderous grew thoughtful; her eyelids began flickering. ‘Are you suggesting, Eadith, that I’m going to receive a material reward for my services? That would only be natural, wouldn’t it? And I could buy some little nothing of a bibelot as memento of what I underwent one afternoon as a professional whore.’

Mrs Trist laughed. ‘I shan’t degrade you, Diana darling, by paying you money for your working holiday in a brothel. I’d rather give you — well, the little trinket you can remember it by.’

The bawd unlocked the wall-safe where she kept her less important jewels, and chose a ring on which an ancient black scarab was rolling in perpetuity a ball of agate dung.

‘Pah!’ Madame Siderous exclaimed and frowned. ‘It’s Egyptian, for God’s sake!’

‘Yes, and very valuable — if what I was told is true. You never can tell, of course.’

‘No,’ agreed Diana. ‘You never can tell.’ But she seemed cheered by the possibility that what she was fitting on her poor martyred finger was a priceless fragment of antiquity.