Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

She was waiting in a passage for some explanation of why she was there, when she heard a voice calling to her from a nearby room. She went in. There was nothing to make her immediately aware of the room’s function, except that a closeness, a warmth, a benign light converging on the centre of the carpet suggested an intangible cocoon. There was a young woman, her face softened by the light to a blur in which her features were lost, just as the details of the room were lost in a timeless blur. Everything about the young woman was familiar, but the dreamer could not identify her. She was kneeling on the fleecy carpet, bathing a recently born child. As the mother (so the dreamer sensed) squeezed the sponge, the child lay propped partly against the scuttle back of the enamel bath, partly by the mother’s other solicitous hand.

The child was the rosiest, the most enviable the dream-walker had ever encountered. She dropped to her knees beside the bath, to join in the simple game of bathing this most radiant of all children. The mother seemed to have invited collaboration, but as their hands met over soap or sponge, resentment set in: the dreamer became an invader. She was warned back, at first not overtly, but by implication, till finally the fleece on which both were kneeling turned to grit, stones, road-metal. Dishwater, sewage, putrid blood were gushing out of the faceless mother from the level at which her mouth should have been. The intruder was desolated by a rejection she should have expected.

Eadith awoke. It was about lunchtime by the normal rule. She continued snoozing, protecting her arms and shoulders from the dangers to which they had been exposed. In spite of them, she would have chosen to return to her dream for the sake of the radiant child. She must recall every feature, every pore, every contour of wrists and ankles, and the little blond comma neatly placed between the thighs.

She must have fallen asleep again. She could feel the water wrinkling around her as she lay propped in her enamel bath. And finally awoke to the summer warmth of her actual sheets, and synthetic perfumes of the creams with which she anointed herself for synthetic reasons.

It had occurred to her in her half-doze: what if I adopt a child? The half-thought half-dream was still glowing in her when several miles down the dusty road of half-sleep she fell to wondering, almost aloud: what sort of questions would my child ask me?

She gathered her chest inside her arms, and was subsiding into the sheets again when Ada looked in to tell her employer that business already showed signs of becoming brisk.

Mrs Trist got out of bed to renew her mouth. Her body was still supple. It was also hairless, since the Arab woman came regularly to give her the wax-and-honey treatment. She sat on the bedside a moment, stretching herself, then pointing her elbows at the curtains which created what was neither gloom nor daylight, but an unnatural glow in which her figure had been posed, not necessarily by herself, a shell without echo.

On drawing back the curtains and the entanglement of net, she shouted at a dog, an English setter chasing a tortoiseshell cat down the street. She retreated from view on realising from the dog-owner’s face that he had witnessed something unmentionable. She covered her nakedness with a robe.

Ada returned in a waft of coffee and toast slightly burnt, on the tray she was carrying, the newspaper, and a clutch of mail for the most part bills.

Eadith Trist sat scratching herself. She might have felt more at ease had she heard the body-hair answer back. Her person, her life, her arts, constantly failed to convince her, though others seemed taken in.

She bit off a corner of toast and looked through the batch of bills. Sipping the blessed coffee, she tore open an envelope, the native toughness of its texture vying with discreet arrogance. A monogram of simple, yet withal, imperious design was cleanly incised in the opulent weave, the letter signed by a hand which promised warmth while remaining enslaved to its authority:

Yours, with affection,

Ursula

Eadith read the letter, chewing toast by ugly mouthfuls, or so she felt; scalding herself on coffee which had begun to taste of burnt beans. (The toast was even more repulsively burnt; she would have to tell that bossy know-all, the indispensable Ada.)

My dear Eadith,

We did agree, didn’t we? that we should call each other by our first names. I do detest formality , and never feel at ease in it.

I am writing these few lines to say how much I enjoyed our meeting, our conversation, in your charming house. My brother is an old stick-in-the-mud. In spite of what some consider a wild life, he disapproves of practically everything. I adore him!

If you are not too busy, Eadith, and could bear the thought, I’d love you to come here to a cup of tea or drink, whichever you prefer. Please telephone me. It would give me still greater pleasure if you would come down to ‘Wardrobes’ and spend a week-end with a few chosen friends. Some of them you already know.

After adding that ‘affection’, Ursula had tacked on:

I was ravished by your tea-things — and scrumptious cinnamon toast.

U.

Eadith continued sipping her coffee as she re-read Ursula’s parchment letter, from which nothing so vulgar as perfume arose, only a whiff of distinction. She mused over ‘ravished by your tea-things … cinnamon toast …’ She could not remember whether Ada had served tea as a prelude to Dulcie’s abortion, yet they must have sat drinking it if this was what Ursula chose to remember. In spite of Ursula’s ravishment, Eadith detected a common clinking from her honest, though aesthetically acceptable, cups and saucers. As for ‘scrumptious cinnamon toast’, she did remember, now she came to think, too much butter oozing out over delicate fingers.

She was too sensitive of course. The Duke’s children as she saw them again, cheeks bulging, lips glossy, eyes glazed, were re-living life in the nursery while masticating the buttery toast in the whorehouse in Beckwith Street.

Longing in and out of season for the cosiness of the nursery fire, with Nanny and a fender to protect them from its perils, in their still childish middle-age they hankered after other, more perverse dangers which Nanny Trist was able to provide. Or so Eadith sensed in trying to explain why Ursula and Rod were attracted to her. They were excited by their own perverse behaviour, yet if her noble charges were to detect in Nanny a flaw they had not bargained for, she suspected they would not hesitate to reduce the whole baroque façade of her deception to a rubble of colonial wattle-and-daub; no compunction would save Nanny from the sack.

Mrs Trist dismissed her cab and rang the bell. There was a slight, cold wind lifting the edges of whatever stood in its way, an air of presage, a mould of green on the elms and the grass verges of the favoured gardens in the precinct. It was one of the chillier spring days, crocuses trembling, jonquils blowing but recovering themselves, like frail but erect Englishwomen.

The columned portico towered above the intruder, who felt wrong in a squirrel coat the rats must have gnawed the night before she put it on. She should not have worn her common, balding squirrel. Her lips were thickly coated with grease. Stalactites were dripping from her armpits. She must have looked everyone’s idea of a woman who keeps a brothel.

Lady Ursula Untermeyer could still command a butler. He had a skull’s ivory face with some hair drawn across the cranium.

Oh, yes ! He must have heard about the madam.

He sat her in a small, not unsympathetic room, to await the august lady whose strange whims he was paid to obey.

Eadith shuffled about inside the squirrel coat she had made the mistake of wearing, in the small japanned room where the discreet butler had placed her. On the wall opposite, there was a small exact portrait of Ursula.