Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

Then Madame Siderous announced, ‘I’m going to get myself a stiff gin — what else hardly matters — I can face the evening.’

But Eadith remained set in her sobriety.

During dinner she looked for Gravenor but did not find him. Without being asked, Ursula explained casually from down table that he had been called away; she expected him back later that night. Maufey’s awaited Australians still had not arrived, which was cause for thankfulness as far as Mrs Trist was concerned.

She spilled some gravy on her bronze tunic and fell to rubbing surreptitiously. All the stains in her life were concentrated in this greasy emblem as she rubbed and rubbed with the spotless napkin. She reduced it at last enough to satisfy her conscience. More startling was the bloody mark left on the napkin by nervous lips; he hid it with such vehemence he might have been sitting with Prowse amongst the mutton fat in Peggy Tyrrell’s kitchen.

Nobody could have noticed. They were all hanging on a story told to one of them by ‘Ribb’s closest friend’. Their eyes seemed to be probing the rather innocuous anecdote for a clue to their whole future.

Back in her cell, Eadith was afraid she might re-enter her dream of the night before. She heard what could have been the ten-year-old Bentley swirling over gravel, then rolling more evenly on the paving-stones laid as an approach to what were the stables in the days when life at ‘Wardrobes’ was sedate and indestructible.

During the night she heard laughter in the passages and on the landing, doors opening, closing, and opening. Her own door was tried several times, but she had thought to lock it. Whoever it was retreated after threatening to wring off the knob.

She fell into a sleep as blank as a paving-stone.

The warm, muzzy days might have been created expressly for the professional guests at country house-parties. At the same time they were too bland, too languid to refuse admittance to an outsider. She was free to disintegrate in the overall pointilliste haze of woods and fields, in particular the marigolden water meadows. The more demanding nights, the dinner table, the dressing, the door-knobs, the dreams were what made her apprehensive.

The following evening, those who showed interest enough were told that the Australians Reg and Nora Quirk had arrived.

On the terrace before dinner Eadith recognised the Decent Bloke and the Good Sort; she quailed for antipodal innocence exposed to hereditary expertise.

Introducing the new arrivals, Ursula was exercising what she understood as infallible charm.

As she called the roll, her friends were looking exceptionally grave. ‘Diana — Cecily —Muff— Hugo — Waldo — Miles — Giles … Dennis you know, of course,’ when what they knew was the least part of him.

On finishing the introductions, Ursula opened her cornflower eyes to their fullest, to beg a favour. ‘I hope you’ll let me call you Nora and Reg,’ she appealed in a sustained whisper which revealed the transparent tips of her teeth.

The Quirks could only smile and mumble back to convey their humble gratitude, till Reg got up the courage to suggest, ‘Names make it more homely, don’t they?’ and Nora, though hardly a girl, let off a corroborative, girl’s giggle.

Like a ventriloquist not sure of his skill, Dennis Maufey stood mouthing his way too obviously through his dolls’ performance. The Quirks could only be vastly rich to subject him to such agony.

In her unhappiness, Eadith Trist had remained on the edge of darkness. She was dressed even more sombrely tonight, in black, and for this reason perhaps, Ursula had failed to notice, till it could have been a glint from the cocks’ feathers with which her long sleeves were edged, drew attention to her presence.

‘And Eadith Trist — one of the friends I value most.’ Her eyelids batted, not so much for an exaggeration, as to project her charm more shamelessly.

‘How lucky I’d consider myself to be one of the friends Lady Ursula values most.’ A small spry woman with a practical denture, Nora Quirk might not have been so innocent after all; the female of the species often isn’t, Eadith remembered from her antipodal past.

While drinks were brought, the Quirks and Mrs Trist remained entangled on the outskirts, as though it had arranged itself thus, outsiders drawn to the arch-outsider.

Reg Quirk implanted his confidences more firmly by driving a shoulder into the person he was addressing (she was more or less his equal in height). ‘I’m not apologising for we Australians, but you’ve got the edge on us when it comes to culture — tradition. All this,’ he nudged her and looked around. ‘Democracy’s right enough. The stuff’s there for anyone to take if you grab quick. Then you sort of hole up. Out with us, the Lady Ursulas aren’t gunner let you horn in without you have an English accent. They’re the jealousest mob on earth.’ He followed up his semi-indictment with a metallic laugh.

Nora muttered something like, ‘The Australian twang’ll get you in over here, but don’t let it outstay its welcome.’

Eadith saw that the Quirks were recent vintage Golson. In the course of the evening she observed that although Reg normally wore the expression of a pole-axed bullock, he was revitalised at mention of investments, dividends, holdings, debentures, the magic word PROPERTY. This latterday Curly hankered after the paraphernalia of irrelevant living, at the same time dreaming on the image of the Gothic spire and myths such as Progress and Royalty.

‘It was our greatest day, wasn’t it, Nora? when we went down to Buckingham Palace, and stood outside the railings, and watched the King and Queen come out.’

Nora was moodier than Reg, less willing to join in the game. ‘The little princesses are adorable.’ She smiled an automatic, enamelled smile; Nora would most likely come clean with another woman while rinsing the smile under the tap after dinner.

Tonight Mrs Trist found herself seated between Dennis Maufey and Gravenor. The latter was smiling in almost any other direction, but Dennis touched her sleeve.

‘How brilliant, Eadith, to have thought of cocks’ feathers!’ He stroked the sleeve in a purely abstract gesture of understanding.

She turned to Gravenor when there was a lull in his intercourse with cronies across the table, and on his left, Jill Watmore Blood, an aspiring actress who never let you forget she was also the Admiral’s daughter. Jill had tickets on Rod, and was keeping an eye on the Maufey-Quirk relationship (she was on cheek-rubbing terms with Dennis) no doubt hoping for a part in the play.

Eadith aimed at Gravenor between mouthfuls of a consommé so exquisitely clarified there was no longer any substance in it beyond the several carrot stars shuddering in its transparent shallows. ‘We thought we’d lost you,’ she tried, ‘when you swirled off, without giving us any sign that you might come back.’

‘We? Us? I can’t believe the gang was broken-hearted!’

He had deflated her with one slash. The tears were pricking behind her eyeballs, and at the back of her throat, where she was scalding her uvula with the routine soup. He must have known. Or didn’t men experience the sensation of desperate, suppressed tears? She couldn’t remember. Rod, a dry one, gave no clue, his lips pleating in apparent disdain below a clipped, sandy moustache.

‘It was only a manner of speaking,’ she said, ‘to quote yourself and others.’

She could hear Reg Quirk in the distance hurling opinions heavy enough to demolish Ursula’s table arrangements, ‘Now, out with us … But you over here …’ The bellows of the pole-axed bullock were ruffling the waters in which, as centrepiece, a dove carved out of white jade was gazing at her own reflection, while the little dishes of salted almonds and crystallised fruits glittered with increasing intensity.