Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

Eadith continued rearranging the collar of her unfortunate coat, and regretting she had come. There were no copies of the Illustrated London News , but the room was like a waiting-room at some fashionable doctor’s or dentist’s — or disguised abortionist’s.

Ursula appeared. ‘I can’t think why Peacock put you in here!’ Ursula, too, was possibly disguised; for a moment Eadith feared her hostess might administer a charitable non-kiss, but she went off instead into a high treble laugh.

She was plainly dressed. She looked like an exquisite plank with grain in it, her hair a perfectly incised helmet. She was wearing no jewels beyond a brooch in what was probably a rare, leached-out jade. Her manicurist must have been in constant attendance on the long pale nails.

She put out a hand at the end of its arm to encourage her amusing friend who was running that house in Beckwith Street, and smiled her tight little smile by way of encouraging herself.

Eadith was led back across the hall. This time she noticed a larger, more formal portrait of the mistress of the house in white satin and long white gloves, the highlights and the blue shadows in satin, kid, and diamonds suggesting a noble icicle. Beneath the golden urn of upswept hair the face might have looked warmer if the painter had been interested as well as paid, or perhaps he had not detected warmth, or perhaps his subject was unfeeling. The cheeks of a young Ursula looked like crisp little apples which had not been bitten into.

As they crossed the hall Ursula murmured incidentally the famous painter’s name. The lowered voice did not prevent it bouncing off the chequered floor, to be reverberated by surrounding walls, before wrapping itself round fluted columns. Ursula added a dry little, mock-apologetic cough, and that, too, became echoed through what was virtually a Parthenon.

On their reaching an upper floor, Eadith was led through a succession of smaller though no less imposing rooms filled with furniture too valuable to be lived on. In every room hung a portrait, of varying importance, of the collector’s widow. Halting for an instant in front of each, she paid the same mock-diffident homage, accompanied by what was half cough half laugh, and nervous hair-touching, as she named whichever fashionable artist. Her late husband must have schooled her in guiding the select tourist.

Though the painted reflection in each room showed Ursula herself to be the Athena of this Parthenon, there were other works of art as well, from Goya and Renoir to Lavery and Munnings, together with the inevitable signed photographs jostling one another in casual ranks: Marie of Rumania rubbing up against d’Annunzio, Lifar, Noel — not yet Eadith Trist, though Lady Ursula may have set her sights on such a prize. As for the books on the Untermeyer shelves, not one, you felt, could fail to reveal a personal inscription above the autograph of some mythical monster. Some of the monsters had even known Julius, and liked him enough to pander to a vice by which his widow continued doing her duty.

When at last the two women had reached a boudoir-cum-study, less constricting, more personal than the japanned waiting-room in which the butler had seated the visitor in the beginning, Ursula sighed and explained, ‘This is where Wogs liked to sit.’

‘Wogs?’

‘My husband.’

His widow produced a small etching in a silver frame from somewhere in amongst the Baroness Popper, Sir Thomas Beecham, Gladys Cooper, Gladys Cooper, James Elroy Flecker.

The toothpaste millionaire who had collected Baby the Duke’s youngest daughter, was shown exposing a noble forehead, to either side a drift of startled hair, the nose’s curve more benign than cutting, the eyes expressive of unfulfilled longing. Julius Untermeyer had everything of the artist manqué he might have been Mahler’s failed brother.

After treating the etching of her husband almost as though it were an oblation, she returned it to where it had been standing, with a moue which suggested, ‘There, darling, we’ve got it over; I loved him, but …’

Peacock brought in a silver tray, followed by a maid with a second. The ‘things’ were arranged. Where Eadith Trist had been innocent enough to present Worcester, Ursula came out with Lowestoft.

‘Cottage stuff,’ she apologised.

She was short on the eats: a plate of Nanny’s bread-and-butter, and a sponge hidden under a cushion of raspberry-embroidered cream.

The two women were beginning to feel cosier.

‘I do admire you,’ Ursula said, after nibbling for propriety’s sake at a corner of her bread-and-butter, ‘for your originality and independence — in choosing the life you wanted to lead.’

‘In choosing? I’d like to think it, but never feel anything but chosen.’

Having introduced her theory, Ursula was not to be deflected. ‘In our case — in mine, I mean — it’s so much more difficult to break the mould in which one has been set.’

Here she deliberately hesitated, hoping for a clue to the mould in which her friend had been set originally, by fate, if not by tradition.

But Eadith was in no way helpful. She only mumbled a sort of agreement, and devoured the rest of her bread-and-butter, like a hungry man after a day on the moors.

Ursula might have been reminding herself that Eadith Trist was a woman of strong will.

‘I mean,’ said Lady Ursula, ‘it’s all mapped out for us . Marriage with someone desirable. Wogs — well, Wogs was a family necessity, but don’t think I didn’t come to adore him. He was my halfway house to freedom. I could never have kicked over the traces like Cecily Snape — God knows — or you, Eadith darling.’ She hesitated, it seemed interminably. ‘I’m told,’ she said at last, ‘you’re from one of the — Dominions, which no doubt made it easier.’

Even she must have heard how terrible it sounded, for she seized a knife and cut into the cake. It proved stale, but for the moment looked ghastly rich, with raspberry blood trickling down snowy crevasses.

Again Eadith was most unhelpful. ‘Ah, the Dominions — yes,’ she sighed, her voice dying on a note the English themselves might have approved.

She accepted a wedge of Ursula’s cake, and wallowed in it, in spite of the staleness of the sponge. She was hungry, and perhaps also indiscriminate. She enjoyed a good blow-out when it offered itself, which may have explained Gravenor’s remark about the nymphomaniac inside her.

She sniggered inexplicably. It made Ursula glance at this grotesque creature with cream and raspberry smeared over magenta lipstick.

Because of all she had been taught, Ursula was quick to ask, ‘That lipstick, Eadith — tell me the shade, and where you get it.’

Only then Eadith came out with, ‘I hate it! It makes me look old, ugly, and common.’ She visualised her tongue sticking out from between her lips like that of some frilly lizard baited by a terrier bitch.

‘Oh, but darling !’

‘No. It’s true.’

Ursula sat tossing her ankle in Alice-in-Wonderland style. She was reared an expert at ignoring. Eadith knew by now that Ursula would never refer to Dulcie’s amateurish abortion.

‘My dear brother is what I want to talk about,’ Ursula said. ‘You’ve been so good for him — darling. Women fall for Rod right and left. He’s in perpetual danger of making a dire mistake. You, Eadith, save him by holding off. I want you to know I’m truly grateful.’

Surprising even to herself, Eadith replied, ‘I love Rod, and for that reason, would rather remain his friend.’

Ursula looked startled as she studied the implications. ‘I’ve always felt friendship, to a man, is something from which women are excluded — just as a woman can only rely on a woman as her friend. None of those abnormal relationships of course!’ she was quick to add.