Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

She raised her head to show off rather a fine throat. The glass on the wall opposite confirmed that she was looking her best, in fact a charming picture, the light glittering on still perfect teeth behind the faint tangerine of lipstick, her blue eyes widened under the little bronze veil. She could afford to be magnanimous towards one who deserved pity.

‘None of life — shelling peas, peeling potatoes — digging holes for fenceposts— need be humdrum if you give yourself to it,’ Eadith replied.

As one who had never shelled a pea or peeled a potato, let alone stopped to think that holes must be dug to accommodate fenceposts, Ursula could only toss her head and laugh for the extravagant answer she had just received.

(For no reason that she had time to consider she recalled an incident when she had dropped her passport and her keys down the hole between the footprints in a horrid Breton toilette .)

Rod was increasingly embarrassed, because poor Baby bored him, and he sensed his imagined mistress was bored too. From looking at Eadith’s hand, he longed to take it and press it between his thighs.

Just then the doorbell rang, and Ada came to answer it. She admitted two individuals who would have claimed to be gentlemen. In the thin and thick of them, each looked exceedingly prosperous, with their Bond Street watches and signet rings, their club or old-school ties, and expertly tailored suits. They must also have lingered over lunch and were somewhat the worse for it.

Ada whisked them upstairs with professional aplomb.

Convinced that she was seeing life, Lady Ursula looked spellbound. ‘ Fasc inating,’ she breathed, but at once averted her eyes from her thoughts.

In rootling round for a theme with which to distract observers, Ursula Bellasis’ blue eyes, which had so successfully decoyed the elderly Julius Untermeyer, lighted on a ring the woman Eadith Trist was wearing.

‘What an extraordinarily beautiful ring!’ Lady Ursula exclaimed. ‘Pigeon’s blood, surely. Is it Indian?’

Eadith said it was while taking off the ring, its ruby carved in the form of a rose, and set in a cluster of silver leaves. ‘… given me by an Indian who carried off one of my girls. Into worse than slavery. I’m told she died of luxury — an over-indulged liver.’

The two women laughed, Ursula in envy of the ruby spoils, and delight at the ring’s aesthetic perfection, Eadith more cautious, for a reminder of the cynicism behind a casually constructed human fate.

‘I do hope you’ll keep it, Ursula, if it appeals to you.’

Rod began mumbling, protesting, his sandy moustache growing sparser with the embarrassment caused him by these two women. At any moment he might drag himself out of the uncomfortable chair, and go upstairs, and fuck one of Eadith’s girls to get his own back.

‘But, darling, I couldn’t — truly! Your ring!’ Ursula was becoming ecstatic in her refusal.

She adored this rather peculiar woman.

‘But take it. It means nothing to me.’

Ursula’s hand closed on the formal Indian rose. In the blue eyes behind the scrap of a veil lurked the suspicion that she might be expected to give something in return, like on the rare occasions when Julius had got into her bed and started upsetting her hair. It was an agonising moment, but looking into Eadith’s eyes, a mosaic of experience and elusive beauty so unlike her own unblemished blue, she could detect no signal confirming her worst fears.

She was most relieved because, as her family and friends all knew, the millionaire’s widow was pretty stingy.

Perhaps they should have expected it. As the prettiest of the Duke’s daughters she had been reared to get them out of a mess. All those law suits. She was married off to old Untermeyer, a man almost her father’s age, of unimpeachable honour and unfailing aesthetic instinct, whose only flaw was that of being Jewish. Ursula didn’t care a jot about the Jewish, anyway in life as it has to be lived, and the family swallowed what pays off. An eldest son had been packed off to South Africa, leaving debts for which a car smash saved him further responsibility. Roderick the younger boy, dilettante, drifter, womaniser, though lovable fellow, could not be relied on. Of two elder daughters one was married to a decorative, impecunious German princeling; the other had taken an actor as the first of several husbands. Ursula (‘Baby’) was their saviour. It didn’t occur to them that they were underestimating Julius Untermeyer when they did him the honour of accepting him into the family.

A decent enough creature, this Jew, who had made his fortune out of toothpaste and other toilet commodities — soap far commoner than Ursula was used to buying in Jermyn Street. Others of his race considered Julius simple-minded, or pretentious, not to have bought himself a title to trade against his wife’s. Mr Untermeyer slept on a truckle bed, but bought the Kensington Gardens mansion to house his various admired collections. ‘Wardrobes’, the Wiltshire manor, was little more than an annexe to the principal museum, and the fat pony which jogged him on visits to his tenant farmers, an excusable Jewish conceit. (If he had a racing stable besides, a yacht, and a villa at Cannes, it would have been hypocritical of him to pretend not to be rich, and Ursula sold all those to help pay for her husband’s death.)

She did love him, she believed, but was herself the rarest objet d’art of those the Jew had collected: a situation which tends to freeze love in the beloved. Though stunned by his death, she was harder hit by the death duties. She had no wish for another man. She had not desired her elderly husband in terms of flesh, because how can one surrender to a father without a vague sense of disgust? She continued to honour his name as a nominal director of the toiletry business on which the Untermeyer fortune was founded, and as custodian of the paintings, ceramics, porcelain, glass, which ‘in due course’ would go to the nation. Her mind would not dwell on her ascent, possessionless, into a comfortless Protestant Heaven, still less her possible descent into its alternative for having married the Jew. Nobody would have imagined Ursula’s predicament, none of her rackety non-friends, not the writers, painters, connoisseurs she patronised, not even her brother Roderick, in London in the Nineteen-Thirties, but that was the way she had been brought up by Nanny and the governesses, and poor darling Daddy dying of a drawn-out bout with unconfessed syph.

On easing the Indian ruby in amongst her own rings, Lady Ursula looked at Mrs Trist. ‘We must keep in touch. I do hope, darling, you’ll come and see me — in town — and at “Wardrobes”.’ Her voice and her charming tangerine mouth clamped down on every second word. ‘I hope you won’t find us boring after the interesting life you lead.’

An impasse might have occured if two girls hadn’t let themselves in through the front door. Their fresh, though rather blank faces immediately radiated respect for those they found in the office-parlour.

Mrs Trist did the honours. ‘Audrey — Helga — Lady Ursula Untermeyer.’

Without the protection of make-up or jewellery the girls smiled nervously.

‘Rod you know.’

The girls’ eyes slid away from knowledge, and from that luminary with whom they were already familiar through Tatler and Sketch .

In Ursula’s assessment, Audrey and Helga were charming simple girls in unpretentious floral frocks. It was such a normal occasion. The girls had been to an afternoon session at the Curzon, to a French film much discussed at that moment.

‘It sounds most significant ,’ the noble visitor murmured.

‘Depends on what’s sig-nificant.’