Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

For the children were being evacuated. Taking a short cut across a railway station, Eadith Trist had come across one of the first of these contingents. Where children had gaped or hooted at her in the past, none of these seemed to notice the baroque figure pushing her way through their masses, as they stood silent, or were carried on variable, directionless currents in the girdered gloom of the railway station. They were too obsessed by the approaching journey, or tearful for a permanence they might never find again. Some of them bright and sharp as broken glass, others pallid and soggy as the layer between the pastry and the meat of the pork pies they were biting into. The piddle was already running down the legs of some, by rivulets, to gather in pools on the station grime. There were pregnant mothers, mothers giving suck, mothers flushed and aggressively jolly, others who mopped their own cheeks more often than their children’s. Whether the mothers were accompanying the army or not, the whole operation was being conducted by a corps of selfless ladies, almost the antithesis of womanhood, in oblong dresses, hats in mole or rust tones, and in some cases coats trimmed with apologetic snatches of fur. Everybody slung with gas-masks. Surrounded by cases, bundles, parcels.

Mrs Trist fled through the expectant or smeary children, past the officers marshalling their platoons. She could not face the reflections in these women’s spectacles, not so much reproachful as compassionate.

She regained the street.

After that, a miasma of inertia seemed to invade the lives of ordinary people. However Whitehall might tinker, and intentions gather beyond the Rhine, war was no concern of theirs, unless in the waking hours of night. At the same time, in their benumbed workaday consciousness, the faithful were scarcely less faithful in their devotions after being frightened almost out of their minds, or the sensual less licentious having dropped to the potentialities of licence.

In Beckwith Street Mrs Trist was doing a roaring trade. The boom brought with it an increase in minutiae. Whatever else, she must not relax the standards of her house in echoing the common cry, ‘There’s a war on.’

‘Why wasn’t it paid?’ the bawd demanded irritably, while fitting a pair of enamelled macaws into pierced ears and wincing for the pain her weighty ear-rings inflicted on her.

‘Because I slipped up,’ Ada admitted.

As it happened, it was only the baker’s bill, but her deputy’s omission rankled in the bawd along with her own shortcomings.

In these unnatural times there were many other not unnaturally neglected details, such as the corporal’s champagne which should have been chalked up to the banker (why not to those who were more affluent?) and compensation for Helga while laid off after the clap she got, she was pretty certain, from a colonel in the Welsh Guards.

In the lull after the outbreak of war, the minutiae might have made it appear that life had settled down to normal, had it not been for the barrage balloons, the sandbags, the gas masks, and the exodus of children. As for the black-out, only puritans regretted what others saw as a cloak for normal human behaviour.

Mrs Trist was coming downstairs, a hand barely connected with the elegant polished rail, which over the years palms had clutched, seared, brutalised on the way up. She herself felt cool and detached, the dress she was wearing, its tropical leaves and archetype birds, collaborating effortlessly with her recently bathed and anointed body. She put up a hand in a purely conventional and quite unnecessary gesture, smoothing hair which the Mauritian devoted to its upkeep had worked on the day before. Her legs, her arms, her jaw, were as smooth as marble, for Fatma the Arab from Mansoura had spent the morning at Beckwith Street. So Mrs Trist was at her best, enjoying a confidence she rarely possessed unless in the eyes of others.

She reached the foot of the stairs, her dress floating agreeably around her figure, her own image greeting her in the glass ahead. His lordship, Ada had told her, with ‘that nephew’, and some other gentleman she couldn’t place, were waiting for her in the small untidy room referred to as the ‘office’ or the ‘parlour’ according to the circumstances.

A sense of pleasurable anticipation made her linger an instant in the hall rearranging a bowl of florist’s rosebuds.

Tonight she seemed to make a noticeable impression on Rod. When she went in, they swam ahead of the casual greeting they exchanged as a matter of course from a distance. Without so much as touching hands they were at once united in a sober bliss unrelated to their sensual bodies or the period of time in which they were living.

The moment’s perfection made her anxious to notice and include those Gravenor had brought with him. The nephew Philip Thring was a nice, inconspicuous youth, of fluffy cheeks, bitten nails, and nervous manner. Introduced to her house by his uncle, he had come there once or twice without taking part in its activities. He was too diffident, or too effeminate. They served him supper, while upstairs, Gravenor was having one of the girls, or if later in the morning, they dished up bacon and eggs for the boy, without ceremony in the kitchen, where he sat friendly but aloof amongst a bunch of whores tearing into their food and the quirks revealed by their clients of the night.

On one occasion a certain drunken Guards’ officer, a friend of the uncle’s, exploded. ‘I swear that boy’s a bloody pansy. I wish, Eadith, you’d lay on one of your girls to find out.’

To which she replied, ‘I can’t, Hugo, if Philip himself isn’t inclined. You can only lead a horse to water …’

‘If you shove their noses in it, they’ll sometimes see their way to drink.’

‘He mightn’t be able to afford it,’ she suggested lamely.

‘If that’s what’s biting you,’ he fumed, ‘I’ll set up a fund — to prove my point.’

‘Your point,’ she said, ‘is not the one that matters.’

This evening Gravenor’s nephew was looking more diffident than ever, his cheeks fluffier, his complexion more noticeably Englishroses blemished by thrip. His eyes appealed to her not to reveal a secret, the key to which she may or may not have possessed; while Gravenor ignored or accepted the boy as little more than an inevitable accompaniment, as family ends by being, or the overcoat he had left with the maid who let them in.

Still under the influence of this evening’s reunion with the uncle, Eadith was all kindness for the nephew. Not that she could pay much attention to him after recognising in the third man, Reg Quirk, the original Decent Australian Bloke. She was unnerved by the pale blue eyes, the texture of the tanned skin, most of all by the slight connection with Eadie Twyborn, even before the voice began to rasp.

‘Glad to catch up with you again, Eadith. I’ve come to sample what you’ve got to offer. Nora won’t have me around while she packs. I reckon she doesn’t want me to count what she calls the few miserable rags she’s picked up at the dressmakers’. We’re off home tomorrow.’

There was no reason why he should mention Eadie Twyborn, and of course he didn’t.

Reg Quirk was more intent on apologising for their prudent retreat from a danger zone. ‘Can’t stay on eating our heads off in London while the English are up against it, can we?’

He glanced to see whether his excuse was accepted or condemned. He must have found her looking exceptionally grave, for he flinched somewhat.

Should she sound him on Eadie’s whereabouts?

At the point of doing so, she couldn’t. Instead, she led the party upstairs to her reception- or show-room, and assembled a handful of girls for her clients to choose from. Gravenor her ‘lover’ could only be numbered among the clients. Heavy lids and quizzical lips implied it was her own fault. He chose a new acquisition, a girl she hadn’t taken to the moment after engaging her. She had not been able to rationalise her antipathy for Elspeth, who was slender, refined, diffident, submissive. Her insipid manner and milk-and-roses complexion were not unlike those of Gravenor’s nephew, Eadith suddenly realised. She was unable to give further thought to what might have been a bitter situation, because she was busy accommodating the randy Australian.