Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

So Mrs Trist spanked on her way, and on reaching a more populous thoroughfare, was faced with an incident involving another elderly woman, of a slightly higher social level than Maisie the sick whore.

The person in question was falling to her knees. She arrived on them just as Eadith Trist reached the opposite kerb. The woman landed with the dull thump of some commodity unrelated to her station or appearance: flour perhaps, or pollard, or even cement. Her handbag and hat were flung in opposite directions. Exposed by her fall, her hair was of a fashionable cut and tint, at odds with the veined face, the puffy body of a woman of substance rather than rank.

From kneeling, she had collapsed, and was lying on her side moaning and panting as Mrs Trist reached the opposite shore.

Too many rescues in one afternoon, Eadith would have liked to decide, till she caught sight of the woman’s knee through a torn stocking, and felt she was to some extent responsible. (The nun inside her would not allow evasion, any more than Gravenor’s ‘nymphomaniac’ could resist the perversions of her own brothel and Maisie’s pavement life.)

Eadith stood looking down. The victim lay moaning, toadfish mouth smeared with coral lipstick, cheeks, for which the prescribed facials had done next to nothing, palpitating under their network of veins. Dimmed by glaucoma, cataract, or whatever, the staring eyes were not necessarily those of the toad but of any variety of stale fish laid out on the slab at an unreliable fishmonger’s.

‘Don’t worry,’ the rescuer, now the victim, advised; ‘I’m going to help you.’

The woman, or she might have preferred ‘lady’, kept grinding her golden coiffure against the unresponsive pavement. ‘Oh, what will become of us? I’m so grateful, my dear. I’d only like you to know I mustn’t suffer any pain. Money is no object.’ She stretched her arm in the direction of the bag from which she had been separated by an act of God; then began a disconnected whimpering against all acts human or divine.

Her rescuer helped her into a nearby chemist’s, where she was treated for her few scratches and abrasions. What worried her most was the torn stocking, through which dimpled her milk-white knee, and her restored handbag, for wondering what she might have lost while separated from it. She kept rummaging through the bag, checking its contents: passport, keys, keys, passport; never satisfied, it appeared, until after patting the coils of flesh upholstering her middle, her ribs, her thorax, she hauled up a little chamois bag which must have been lodged somewhere between her breasts.

Reassured, she sat smiling, if tremulously, on the chemist’s stool. ‘You don’t know what I owe you, darling,’ she informed the one who had cut the strings trussing her as she lay, incredibly, on a London pavement. ‘I am Australian,’ she confessed between gasps, in case her saviour had got it wrong. ‘My husband used to tell me that being Australian had given me an inferiority complex. Well, it isn’t true ! It’s simply that one doesn’t want people to mistake one’s better nature for a worse.’

As on other painfully personal occasions the past began reaching out to Eadith through that shuddering of water which memory becomes visually, till out of time’s wake, and this bloated body straining at the seams of its expensive black, surfaced Joanie Sewell Golson.

If memory troubled Eadith/Eddie/Eudoxia, there was only a slight presentiment of recognition in Joanie’s blurred eyes and at the corners of her lipstuck mouth, of a colour someone like herself would have considered a ‘pretty feminine tone’.

Joanie kept peering up. ‘My eyesight isn’t what it used to be. Actually, it’s pretty ghastly. But I shan’t go blind — though they’ve more or less told me that I shall. I’ve begun investigating Christian Science. A bore really. But if it works …’

She kept on blinking at her rescuer, eyes outlined in rheum, tears, and in spite of Christian Science, the drops with which she would be treating her ailment.

Old. Or at any rate, older than Eadith.

Inside her skin Mrs Trist recoiled from Joan Golson’s predicament.

‘Shouldn’t I call you a cab?’ she suggested. ‘And help you home?’

Obsessed by the aura of her benefactress, if not her image, Mrs Golson must have forgotten what had happened, but suddenly remembered she was an object for pity, and slipped back too easily into the cloak of martyrdom.

‘Oh dear, yes! If you’d be so kind,’ she whimpered at the woman on whose goodness she depended; and when Eadith had telephoned the cab-rank, and paid for the call, ‘Though my eyesight isn’t what it was, I can tell you’re kind, my dear. I can feel it.’ In spite of her perception, a hand reached out in its black kid glove, a diamond bracelet rustling at the wrist — to touch, to reassure herself, to possess.

By the time the taxi arrived Mrs Golson had grown very old indeed. Wheezing, groaning, panting, hobbling, she let herself be helped into it. The burden fell on her nurse-companion; the chemist had had enough, and the casualty might have had enough of the chemist the way she shrugged him off.

When the two women were at last alone in the airless taxi, Mrs Golson told, ‘Since my husband died, I seem to have been at the mercy of every-body and everything.’ She might have thrown in God as well if she had known her companion better. ‘Mind you, Curly — poor lamb — had his limitations. He was a man — but we need them, don’t we?’

Had Mrs Trist tried to free her hand from the black kid vice grasping it, she might not have succeeded. For the present, she let things be.

‘Are you married?’ Mrs Golson asked on what seemed like an impulse.

‘I expect you could call it that,’ Mrs Trist answered.

‘Like most of us.’ Her fellow sufferer sighed; then she brightened. ‘I always enjoyed our breakfasts together. At least I think I did.’

All the while the stale-fish eyes were directed at the figure beside her. ‘I wish I could see better. I know I’d find something to encourage me to live.’

They were approaching the hotel Mrs Golson had named as her London address.

‘I hope you’ll come, my dear — and we’ll pick a chop together.’

Only at this point did the black-kid hand relinquish a hand. ‘I’ll give you my card,’ Joanie threatened, and began rummaging again in her overstuffed crocodile bag for the gold card-case. ‘Telephone me,’ the coral mouth, the blear eyes commanded, ‘and I’ll get them to keep us a table in the grill room. So difficult today, but Aldo and I understand each other. Curly used to say, “Got to make it worth their while. Have no illusions about the lower classes”.’ She laughed, exposing her gold bridges for this new and sympathetic friend. ‘I hope to see you,’ she added, without sounding overconfident.

After the stout person had been ejected from the cab and handed into the keeping of a porter as prolifically hung with brass as any dray-horse, Mrs Trist had herself driven away.

She sat bowed above the visiting card:

LADY GOLSON

38 MORWONG CRESCENT

VAUCLUSE

SYDNEY

She felt guilty she had not known enough to react appreciatively to Joanie’s ladyhood. In itself an epitaph, she saw it carved in stone, rising above the couch-grass runners and paspalum ergot of a colonial democracy. Which of her own epitaphs would she choose if she had a say in the matter? Or would she settle for the anonymity of dust?

As she was driven away Mrs Trist could not bring herself to look back, for fear of being faced on the one hand with Sir Boyd and Lady Golson, on the other Judge and Mrs Twyborn, huddled round the Pantocrator on the steps of the Connaught Hotel.