Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

‘You’ll be comfortable — and happy, I hope,’ she enjoined the one who might be the catch of her house party. ‘At least nobody,’ she said, ‘is arriving till tomorrow evening. In the meantime we can be together —en famille so to speak.’

With a last smile she left Mrs Trist to her meagre unpacking. A maid was prepared to take over, but she dismissed her assistant, not knowing what she would have done after turning on the HOT and COLD, flushing the antique lavatory, and feeling the bed to ascertain its temperament; it was hardly ascetic.

Rod appeared, and kissed her on the mouth with the cold gravity she could not accuse him of adopting since it was she who had forced it on him.

‘They have tea for us,’ he told her, ‘in what Baby calls the library.’

They went down like an engaged couple, hand in hand, or stars of an operette from which the organdy frills were missing.

Baby was waiting for them behind silver trays better stocked than the ones in town. They were seemingly prepared for those who had been on a tramp through the woods, and returned smelling of leaf-mould, fungus, sweaty woollens, with an appetite for butter-sodden muffins. In addition to the muffins, there was a plate of little pink-iced cakes for Nanny’s charges, and a fruit-cake which might have been the archetype, breathing brandy even at a distance, glittering with cherries and candied peel, and coagulations of moist black currants.

Although she claimed that a ‘good old-fashioned tea’ was her favourite meal and that the country air worked wonders with her appetite, Ursula remained almost as abstemious as she had been in town. She broke off a piece from the innocuous base of one of the small pink cakes while making a little face at the icing.

Gravenor tucked into the muffins after spreading a handkerchief over bony knees, then wiping bony fingers on a second. He gave up rather grumpily on noticing that he had spotted his none too spotless tweeds.

The guest alone did justice to the tea, sampling everything more than once, and emptying three cups to Ursula’s languid half. Eadith left off only out of guilt, wondering how much her hosts could have noticed.

But they probably hadn’t; they were too busily engaged in discussing family affairs: what to do about Nanny Watkins now that she was senile and all but paralysed.

‘Something must be done,’ Gravenor decided.

‘Something must be done,’ Ursula agreed piercingly.

‘We can’t abandon poor Nanny.’

‘No, we can’t abandon her. Or at least I can’t — because I see that I’m the one who will have to do whatever is done.’

‘For the moment you’re in the best position.’ Gravenor sat rubbing ever more furiously at the butter spots on his shaggy tweed. ‘We can expect nothing from the Old Man — with Zillah draining him as she is.’

‘Oh, Zillah! No !’ Ursula tossed her immaculate helmet. ‘I am the one — it is always I.’

‘Well, Baby, you have the toothpaste money behind you.’

‘Not in realisable cash. Most of it’s invested in what will be left to the nation.’ She waved her hand vaguely to indicate the objects in her house. ‘That was what Julius wanted.’

‘You can’t tell me that an old fox like Wogs — and a vixen like you, darling — didn’t allow yourself a few peanuts, golden ones, to play around with.’

‘How horrid you can be!’ Ursula was so put out by her adored brother she was only too glad of friendship however recent and superficial. ‘Rod has never understood, Eadith, what I’ve been through. As if death weren’t enough — on top of it the death duties! I can only believe it suits my brother not to realise. Having frittered away his own, he expects me to fritter what is left of what in fact I don’t control.’

Perhaps as a relief from her exasperation she poured a saucer of milky tea for her unwanted decorative dogs, which, in their clumsiness, they slopped over a Persian rug.

All the perfection, the elegant contrivances against sordid life, seemed to be deserting Ursula. She had got up and was striding jerkily round the room.

‘Nobody,’ she moaned, ‘can imagine my responsibilities. The tenants alone! Down in the village they expect me to install a flushing lavatory in every cottage. At the rents they pay!’

Rod remained preserved in calm. ‘If you don’t,’ he suggested, ‘your head will roll the quicker at the Revolution.’

‘By now I don’t care. And you, darling Eadith,’ she had approached her friend and, bending down, embraced her almost passionately, ‘what you must think of us! At least I know part of what you’re thinking: how glad I am to have held off and escaped a monster.’

After this the lady of the house announced she was a wreck and must lie down before dinner.

Gravenor might have decided, not necessarily that he, too, was a wreck, but that he had had enough of an outsider who had seen and heard too much. He withdrew, smelling of gunpowder, Eadith thought, in an opposite direction from his sister.

Left alone, the guest went out on a paved terrace guarded by a balustrade, and urns from which trailers of a small white flower, suggestive of premature moonlight, were spilling over. Early though it was, the dark had begun gathering, or not so much dark as mist rising through a beech copse in a hollow. Ursula herself could not have planted such mature trees, though she might have deployed them thus if she had. They went with her, as did the white flowers and the deceptively unostentatious house, its grey now deepening to overall mauve.

Eadith wandered some distance from the house through the moist air of the gathering darkness and perfectly tended informal surroundings. Hungry for colour, she looked for the delphiniums Ursula must surely have had her gardeners plant, but on this evening of mist their few early spires seemed to have been drained, or infused with the prevailing white. The one sustaining note, she owed to memory: that of a crimson hibiscus trumpet which suddenly blared through the scoring of this lovely effete damp-laden garden.

The mist, the monochrome, warnings in her bronchial tubes, reminded her of failures. Failed love in particular. Her every attempt at love had been a failure. Perhaps she was fated never to enter the lives of others, except vicariously. To enter, or to be entered: that surely was the question in most lives.

As she turned back, someone was approaching down the lawn from the balustraded terrace.

‘We shan’t be dressing,’ he announced, ‘the three of us on our own.’

It was meant to encourage, and his leading her back towards the house they did not share.

They spent a rather boring evening, the Bellasis siblings yawning their heads off after a saddle of lamb large enough to feed a whole feudal household, followed by a cosy treacle pudding.

Ursula asked, while they were yawning their way up to bed, ‘This Hitler — need one worry?’

Gravenor replied, ‘Not while Neville’s around.’ Then he snorted. ‘It’s comforting. Whether it’s morally desirable — that’s another matter.’

Ursula sighed. ‘Karl Heinz tells me not to worry.’

Suddenly she remembered her guest. ‘Eadith darling, if you’re hungry in the night …’ With her lacquered nails she prised open a japanned tin on the bedside table; and smiled.

When her hostess had left her, Mrs Trist drew back the stiff curtains to let in some air, without which the room would have been suffocating. The night outside was cold and damp in spite of summer. The mist rising from out of the beech wood below had by now almost enfolded the house, nourishing its lichens. She remained leaning out the window, shivering as she breathed the foggy air, like one of those cheap prostitutes, she realised, breasts propped on cushions, on a sill overlooking the drenched brickwork of a side street.