Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

He came to drive her down on the dot of the time specified. She heard his cold, precise voice asking Ada to announce his arrival to ‘Mrs Trist’, as though it had been a normal house. She was already downstairs, standing in the small office-parlour where she had received them the day he brought his sister.

Now he said he wouldn’t come in; he’d wait in the sun. She could hear his feet, restive on the tessellated walk between street and entrance.

She realised she was trembling. She hoped she would be able to control her hands, her lips, not only at this artificial reunion with her protector, but on meeting his sister’s friends. Herself the whore-mistress. In its state of mid-afternoon sloth the house gave nothing away. It was a Thursday as Ursula had wished.

She went out carrying her own bag, not gushing and gnashing as she had rehearsed, and as she had seen and heard Diana, Cecily, even Ursula herself, though in the latter’s case, the gush was a cold one, the gnash more the champing of an exquisitely poised Arab mare. Eadith felt in advance that the impression she would make on the one she most wanted to impress could only be sombre.

She arrived on the step without yielding the bag Ada had wanted to wrest from her. Gravenor did not attempt. His back was turned as he contemplated the car in which he was preparing to drive his sister’s friend down to Wiltshire.

He did look at her at last. ‘I haven’t come too early, have I?’

‘You couldn’t be more punctual,’ she assured him.

He had something of the school prefect, or undergraduate obeying custom by fetching a girl down for May Week, except that he was a middle-aged man in shabby, once expensive tweeds, and freckles on the pouches under his eyes.

He took his dressing-case from her. ‘Is this all?’ he asked, with the air of one who had vaguely expected hat-boxes and a wardrobe trunk.

‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘this is all.’ In her heart of hearts she was returning before she had arrived.

He threw the case, one could not have said vindictively, into the back seat, then fastened down the waterproof cover.

Rod was driving a sports-Bentley of ten years back, pretty shabby if its owner hadn’t been in a position to indulge his taste in shabbiness. As well as eccentric women.

He did not look at her, or help much, beyond opening the door to admit her to the passenger seat. Crackled but still luxurious, the upholstery matched the shabbiness affected by the owner. The chassis, mudguards, and bonnet testified on the other hand to the pride in ownership of some anonymous minion still devoted to nobility.

They drove through the grey fringes of London, a reality which did not cancel out the more brilliant frivolous world of Gravenor and Ursula and their friends, or the half-world of Beckwith Street. Eadith herself might have claimed that Maisie, the bronchial septuagenarian prostitute, had for her a reality which the housewives of Lambeth and Southwark would never convey. Whatever compassion she had in her was roused by overtones of purple, not by grey surfaces. No doubt the grey world would condemn her for coldness and ‘perversion’.

Gravenor appeared disinclined to talk and in her present mood she was happy to fall in with his silence.

Until as they whizzed through some mock-Tudor township, he turned to her and asked, ‘How’s business, Eadith?’

She admitted to being satisfied, then that she was doing very well indeed.

‘You’ll be able to retire and marry. Marriage is what I’m told successful whores and madams aspire to. I’ve heard of one — perhaps we ought to call her “courtesan”—who built a convent to her favourite saint in gratitude for her patronage.’

It was a conceit they could enjoy together, though she detected in his laughter a slight edge which was meant to cut.

‘Unfortunately,’ she told him, ‘I wasn’t born a Catholic, and conversions have never convinced me.’

‘A pity. You might have set yourself up as the patron saint of chastity.’

A little farther on, in a peaceful stretch of road, he put out a hand and she accepted it. She must persuade herself to be grateful for the crumbs.

For a mile or two they remained gently united, when anger made him exert his strength, which she was forced to return. Their knuckles whitened into fists; her fingers developed a wiriness they should not have possessed.

She tore free.

She sat shivering, the scarf she had tied round her head for the journey by open car streaming out behind them.

She admitted to feeling nervous: nothing to do with Ursula, whom she now knew as well as one ever knows a woman of such fragile composition, but the prospect of facing Ursula’s friends.

He laughed. ‘You’ll find “Wardrobes” more like a whorehouse than Baby would ever let herself see.’ Then he added, ‘I don’t guarantee it’ll make you feel more at home, Eadie. But we’ll have each other, shan’t we?’

Whether spoken in irony or not, it warned her. ‘I can’t remember you ever calling me “Eadie”. Why, suddenly, now?’

‘To make you feel at home.’ He spoke with perfect gravity, but still she suspected irony.

‘Wardrobes’ was less pretentious than she had imagined: no palace, not even a country mansion, but a compact, rather chubby manor embellished only by its gateposts and chimneys, and dormer windows set in the striations of its grey roof. Across one more sheltered wing, beech and birch had cast an afternoon shadow, like mauve lichen invading by creeping inches a stone shoulder of this house standing firm and grey in an altering landscape. For spring had swollen to early summer since Ursula issued her invitation, neglected on account of the barely averted scandal of Brigadier Blenkinsop’s unseemly death.

Eadith could see at a glance that the house, if blessedly more modest, was as perfect as she would have expected of its owner. If there was a dash of complacency, that, too, was not unexpected.

More surprising were the two little King Charles spaniels wagging and swivelling, amiably sycophantic, as Ursula advanced to greet her guest. She was holding an old, ivory-tinted, ivory-handled parasol to protect her complexion from a watery sun. There was a scent of lavender from the dogs’ brushing against its borders. Ursula looked down, frowning in the midst of her smiling welcome, drawing aside from the antics of her dogs who were obviously there only for effect, as were the borders of English and tussocks of Italian lavender, the clumps of white candytuft advanced to seeding stage by now. Ursula could have been frown-laughing as much for the no longer perfect candytuft as for the gambollings of her not-so-pet dogs. She herself was as unnatural in that casually devised work of art, an English garden, as would have been a meticulously executed Persian miniature fallen amongst a herbaceous border.

‘Darling,’ Baby’s giggle had an ivory scroll to it, ‘I can’t tell you how honoured I am!’

Her brother turned back to attend to his car, leaving Eadith Trist to galumph as best she could beside her hostess while a servant carried the dressing-case. In the presence of so much management, perfection, contrivance, Mrs Trist felt she might have been wearing a surgical boot — or had sprouted a beard. At least Lady Ursula would not allow herself to notice anything peculiar.

The house was cool to cold, furnished with mock simplicity to disguise genuine luxury.

Ursula apologised. ‘Country — you may even find it a bit primitive, Eadith darling. But isn’t that the point?’

As they went upstairs, a peasant-woman hauling up a bucket from a well faced them on the wall of a half-landing.

‘Could never make up my mind about Courbet,’ Ursula murmured. ‘Wogs adored him.’

Without waiting for the anonymous servant meekly carrying the Vuitton bag, the hostess broke open cupboards, tore open drawers, on the perfumes of lavender and verbena. Till on introducing her guest to the bathroom, she affected an akimbo stance, perhaps in keeping with her Courbet peasant. As in Mrs Trist’s own house, the bathroom fittings were sympathetically antique, the lavatory bowl not unlike that on which Dulcie’s faint had been witnessed by Lady Ursula.