Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

‘Don’t think I understood it.’

‘Anyway, the seats are so comfy at the Curzon.’

The girls laughed in the pause which followed, Lady Ursula joining them in full agreement.

After that, Audrey and Helga ran upstairs, pensionnaires at a finishing school, or novices in a convent. Ursula found them ‘unaffected — charming.’ Charm appeared to be the yardstick she used in exercising judgment.

Gravenor was becoming so irritated by his silly sister and the grotesque totem he had been foolish enough to imagine as his mistress that he had to suggest in his driest voice,

‘Inexperienced as yet.’

Eadith had grown sombre. She had a too heavy, almost a man’s face, Ursula decided. She regretted coming. There were uneasy tremors besides, doors opening, voices breaking out disturbing the upper landings, the whole structure of this baleful house.

‘Have you had enough, Baby?’ asked her brother, suddenly fierce.

She had known him brutal, though never to herself.

‘Why,’ she said, ‘no!’

She refused to be put upon. Even in the schoolroom, the nursery before it, she had been her own mistress.

‘Eadith,’ she demanded, ‘won’t you show me round?’

Ursula looked her coldest, her brittlest, her most imperious, her wealthiest. Gravenor hated his sister Baby because Eadith’s eyes had taken on the most poignant tones in their whole fragmented repertoire. He was brought to heel; he loved her, even though his love were as grotesque as her grotesque beauty.

Eadith got up. ‘If you want,’ she told her guest. ‘There’s nothing I need hide.’

Everybody has his lie, and for that reason the others would not have questioned her remark. Gravenor hoped to preserve his grotesque ideal, Baby had decided to see life such as she had never wished to face.

Eadith was leading the way upstairs, one sinewy arm slid along the banister-rail for support, bracelets slithering, gliding, grating, wounding the already tortured woodwork. Ursula following. She tripped on one of the lower stairs, but recovered herself without assistance. It wasn’t offered anyway.

Rod had stayed below. (Serve bloody Baby right if she’d bumped her nose and injured that perfect detail on the Heal’s runner. Thanks to Baby’s insistence their whole family came crowding into Mrs Trist’s whore-house: darling Mums, selling off this one and that before dying of cancer, the Old Man, tradition’s profile, perhaps no more than either of his unsatisfactory sons, or Deborah, Toto, Karl Heinz, Wally Miller and others, and others; those he respected, he not so suddenly realised, were Julius Untermeyer the toothpaste Jew, and his own non-mistress, Eadith Trist the bawd.)

As they approached the first landing, the two women on the stairs were subjected to the reason for those rumours only faintly heard in the office-parlour below. Several girls in a state of almost total undress were crowding into a renovated Edwardian bathroom. The object of their concern, as well as the cause of their alarm, not to say hysteria, was a stark naked figure seated on the blue-and-white porcelain lavatory bowl, or rather, slumped forward, arms lolling listlessly, in a faint or worse. The only live-looking thing about her was the torrent of glossy brown hair streaming floorwards from a head too heavy for its owner to raise, if indeed she was in possession of it.

‘Who is it?’ Mrs Trist called in a blatant voice such as her visitor had not heard during their politer conversation.

‘It’s Dulcie,’ answered a tall honey-coloured girl in nothing but her high heels and a pair of chandelier ear-rings.

At the same instant Ada appeared from behind a door along the landing. She was carrying a huge white bath-towel. Her manner and the brisk sound of her cinnamon habit suggested that she had the situation under control.

‘Yes — Dulcie — silly girl!’ Her sigh was for human folly in any of its manifestations. ‘Had a go at herself with the knitting-needle.’

‘When I engaged her she swore she’d had the op!’ the bawd exploded.

‘It’s what you can expect of amateurs.’ As Ada reached the casualty, the girl’s companions raised her up; the hair opened on a livid mask, a body the colour of bruises, the glitter of blood dribbled over thighs and ankles.

From neighbouring rooms the two business gentlemen were making a shaken getaway, one of them smarming his hair with a rigid, yet tremulous hand, the old-school tie slung round his neck, his companion forcing buttons into holes which seemed to have shrunk in the stress of the moment.

In the general commotion, and telephoning Dr Pereira, Mrs Trist quite forgot about her guest.

While Ada, who was wrapping the towel round the listless body, announced with conviction, ‘She’s not dead — only bled. I’ve seen too many of ’em.’

It started her helpers giggling in a shamed way, then laughing outright as they staggered, tits joggling, heels going over, in removing to an upper floor the figure shrouded in the bloodstained towel.

By the time Mrs Trist returned downstairs Gravenor must have carried off his sister. How much Ursula had seen of the aftermath of Dulcie’s attempt at abortion, Eadith doubted she would ever hear. In her present state of physical exhaustion and moral despair she had no desire to see Ursula again. Nor, for that matter, Gravenor.

She was only deluding herself, she knew. More than ever before she longed for Gravenor’s company. She was prepared to accept his silences, his censure, the disturbing aspects of proximity and repressed physical attraction. In her hopelessness she found herself scratching a buttock in a way which could only have shocked Lady Ursula. What the hell! She blew a fart at all Ursulas, at every spurious work of art. Herself included. In the glass a ravaged mess, a travesty no amount of lipstick and powder and posturing would ever disguise to her own satisfaction. A ‘woman of character’ to her clients and her girls, she continued swimming out of mirrors and consciousness, her elasticity her only strength, like a cat which refuses to drown.

Once at dawn she looked down over the parapet, and there was the corpse of this actual cat, fur opening and closing on patches of skin like blue-white scars, as the tide carried it, rolling and grimacing, rolling and grimacing. She might have chosen to join it had she been offered a choice by the blue-black immensity surrounding them. As she could not feel she was, she returned to the limbo of Beckwith Street, to the moaning and sighing of whores as the leftovers among their pseudo-lovers, the prickling pursy or smooth sinewy male animals, ground between their thighs or squelched against their buttocks.

On the stairs and on the landings it seemed as though the bawd alone must fail to drown in this loveless social orgasm. She could have been saved up for some event more tumultuous.

Several mornings after Ursula Untermeyer’s visit and Dulcie’s messy abortion, Eadith missed her early walk. She had gone to bed in broad daylight after a heavy night in which she had drunk too much while jollying or restraining, on the one hand the diffident and regretful, on the other the rorty drunken. She fell into bed recoiling from what should have rejoiced her: solid sunlight the other side of the curtains.

Physically exhausted, she felt herself reduced to moral slag. Most of her girls did their jobs without at least calling on their nerves. It was Eadith Trist the bawd who was the fucked-out whore. Ageing, too. In a professional capacity, she would have been fit only for meeting the late or early trains at Victoria Station.

She fell asleep in spite of the insomnia which at this time in her life had begun plaguing her. She must have been dreaming. She was standing in someone else’s house, the furniture less pretentious, the real tables and chairs chosen by those who lead ‘normal’ lives.