Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

‘True friendship,’ Eadith decided after wiping off the cream and most of the hateful magenta lipstick, ‘if there is anything wholly true — certainly in friendship — comes, I’d say, from the woman in a man and the man in a woman.’

Ursula’s agitated ankle was stilled. She appeared aghast. Was her new friend perhaps more intellectual than she’d bargained for?

She came as close as Baby had ever got to a giggle. ‘You make it sound almost perverse, Eadith!’

After which, she stood up, strolled round the bloody shambles on her Georgian tea-tray, and looking at herself in a minor glass, its frame studded with semi-precious stones, touched up her flawless helmet a little.

While Eadith glanced at a clock, equally exquisite, though less prominent than the studded mirror; not so inconspicuous, however, that it might not speed the lingering guest. By now she realised Gravenor would not appear, whether by his own inclination, or his sister’s design.

‘I do hope,’ Ursula ventured on their reaching the chequered hall, ‘that you’ll spend a few days with me at “Wardrobes”.’

She glanced at Eadith, and if earlier on, Baby had never come so close to a giggle, she had never come closer to a kiss than in the peck she bored into the cheek of her unlikely friend. ‘Rod would love it,’ she encouraged.

Mrs Trist went out, and after lowering her head, climbed inside the cab Peacock had called. Though the butler offered physical assistance, she was too ignorant, ‘independent’, or perhaps too colonial, to avail herself of his attentions.

Two or three weeks later Mrs Trist received a letter.

Dearest Eadith,

You will remember we discussed your coming down to ‘Wardrobes’. I am writing to suggest you choose your week-end — and do make it a long one — Friday till Monday — Thursday till Tuesday if you feel expansive and can tear yourself away from your business . (Ada appeared so competent.)

Most of us lead such busy lives we need our little distractions. I’d particularly like you to come while Spring is still with us.

Yours affectly,

Ursula

P.S. Rod would love to drive you down.

As the bawd had not set eyes on Rod since the afternoon he brought his sister to Beckwith Street she doubted he would love to drive her down. Yet there was evidence that she had not fallen entirely from grace in that she received indirect guidance from him at a moment when she most needed it.

Mrs Trist could have become involved in a tiresome scandal following the death of a brigadier, whose brother, a worldly cleric, had also been known to patronise her house (in discreet mufti, needless to say.) Brigadier Blenkinsop, whose death might have caused Mrs Trist such vexation, had in fact died astride Jule the negress from Sierra Leone. Jule could not resist boasting, ‘Had a general die on top of me last night. You should’ve heard the clatter his medals made as he left off spurring me on.’ While Helga her lover grew tearful, hysterical, remorseful for the life they were leading, so far removed from her ideal of love between women.

It was Gravenor, Eadith gathered, who sent her a lawyer, as well as a man of some importance from Scotland Yard whose sympathy might have extended itself had Mrs Trist been willing.

In the circumstances she had not answered Ursula Untermeyer’s letter. She was too distracted, not only by a scandal fortunately averted by the skill and sympathy of her advisers, and not a little of her own money. She was also emotionally unsettled by an episode of a different kind following on the brigadier’s death and Ursula’s invitation.

Mrs Trist had been to visit an aged, ailing prostitute known to her slightly from her sojourn in Hendrey Street. Elderly even in those days, Maisie specialised in meeting trains, but would sometimes venture as far as the Dilly and the scornful jeers of the plushy mob in their silver foxes, mink, and squirrel, whose beat it was.

Maisie had been let live in the attic of a house belonging to a rich benevolent queer, who was in the habit of siphoning off some of her rougher trade. On her patron’s death, the house became the subject of endless legal wrangles, with Maisie a forgotten part of it. On the ground floor, in what had been the dining-room, there was a claw-footed bath lying on its side, for no reason Eadith had ever heard explained. All the lower part of the house was unfurnished, the stairs uncarpeted and dry-rotten, rickety banisters with whole sections of the uprights missing. Only on the attic floor did life return, in a flowering of crochet and knick-knacks, the lank bodies of empty dresses hanging half-hidden by a faded cretonne curtain, face powder merging with spilt flour, tea becoming grit on an unswept floor. It was pretty much of a mouse-hole, but snug.

Eadith found Maisie toothless for her illness, though as she remembered, the Victoria Station prostitute had always been inclined to do without her teeth when not professionally engaged.

Now she cackled at Mrs Trist through the general squalor, leaking gas, and sickroom smells, ‘Love isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, love — or is it?’

Eadith did not know how to answer, except by sternly mopping up Maisie’s incontinence, and flushing its more solid parts down a grey and reluctant lavatory on a lower landing.

Maisie wheezed, ‘Don’t worry, love. I’ll be at it again when I’m on me feet.’ Lying side by side with an organdy hat and the grubbiest, most lifeless Arctic fox, the monstrous heels of her glacé shoes bore witness to the torments her feet must suffer. ‘Won’t ever let it get me down. I’ll go straight up amongst those snooty molls on the Dilly. One of ’em, you know, has a wotchermecall — a chow-chow dog on the beat with ’er. Says the bloody dog brings the customers on by pissin’ on their legs.’

Maisie paused to clear some phlegm out of her throat.

‘Those girls are pros. My trouble is — I’ve always been an amatcher. Not that I don’t give an honest-to-God professional fuck. And collect the money that’s due for it. But I always done it — now don’t laugh, Eadie Trist — I done it for love. Whether it was with some Hindu steward, or Gyppo stoker, or poxy British corporal. That was ’ow I built up me business. Anyways, I think it was.’

Her cheeks were growing flushed as her mind wafted her. If the five-bob tart was raised by her delusions towards apotheosis, the successful bawd was racked by the clearsighted view she had of her own failures, her anxieties, her disproportion. There was little more she could do for the present beyond leaving an assortment of notes beside the oiled carton in use as a sputum mug, and in the kitchen, a saucepan of soup she had brewed up. Maisie, if she ever awoke, would probably ignore the soup in favour of her gin.

Heading for ‘home’ across the great squares with their classical mansions and fuzz of elms, Mrs Trist was conscious of entering another world of make-believe. At a church the curtain was going up on a fashionable wedding; at a house the guests, both invited and parasitic, were boring into a reception for a Balkan princess. Mrs Trist had read about both these functions while still only projected, in newspapers which the ephemeral chic, including herself, read less and less for fear of what they did not wish to find.

In the central, proprietorial garden of one of the squares, a gang of men was digging a pit for what people had begun referring to as a ‘shelter’. They paused in their work for a look at the woman passing the other side of the railings. Their expressions, half of them serious, half jocular, did not intimidate her. If she had turned on them and offered what Maisie would have called an ‘honest-to-God professional fuck’, these solid British workmen would have grown sheepish, too bashful to respond, at any rate by daylight, to a lady’s improper suggestion.