The Twyborn Affair (44 page)

She went down to what was referred to as the ‘office', a small disordered sitting room, across the hall, filled with letters waiting to be answered, receipted bills, autographed photographs of the famous and infamous who professed to love her, and easy chairs in which cats loved to sleep.

He was seated, a domed, rather hairless head rising above the padding of the chair. She frowned to see his feet propped on a velour pouffe on which the girls sat to tell their grievances. When the sound of her clothes prompted her caller to stand up, he was of medium size, stocky build, cobby-calved, thighs too intense; they might have been those of a former rugger three-quarter.

He greeted her with a smile of sorts.

‘What can I do for you?' She smiled back after a fashion.

He said, ‘I've got an hour or two to put in, and would like to be entertained. I'm told you can arrange it for me.'

‘It depends on your interests.' One side of her smile had stuck, as smiles will catch on a gold tooth, though she hadn't one in her head.

‘A girl' was what he wanted; he might have expected his order to be wheeled in on a trolly.

She took him up to the reception room on the first floor, and rang for Ada to send in Elsie the Leamington teacher, Edwina a recent acquisition fresh from her finishing in Switzerland, and, as a gamble, Bridie from Cork, Ireland. The girls looked bleary and disgruntled in the morning light. (Edwina might easily give notice and retire to Belgravia.) There was a, blue vein almost palpitating in the customer's left temple. Elsie from Leamington did not please, Edwina might not have been there, but Bridie seemed to score.

They went along together to her room. Holding their breath, Mrs Trist and Ada dared congratulate each other; when after a few seconds they heard what sounded like the rubbery, athletic steps of the visitor returning.

He looked very grave, very neat, in his grey sideburns and grey
flannel double-breasted. He was wearing a club tie the bawd was too distracted to recognise. Overall, he appeared embarrassed.

Mrs Trist looked to Ada to leave them.

‘Wasn't Bridie to your taste?' she asked.

‘I'd better tell you straight,' he confessed., ‘I came here, Mrs Trist, hoping to spend a few hours with the owner of the house.'

‘Oh,' she said, ‘I'd be delighted to get to know you, if that's what you mean. I'll ask them to bring up coffee. Do you take it black? With cream? Or perhaps you'd rather something stronger?'

He was looking at her, by now giving her his deepest attention; in other circumstances she might have been drawn to the sideburns, attracted by eyes of a cold grey, not unlike Gravenor's, set in a less noble, but perhaps more revealing face. ‘What I meant was, I'd hoped to sleep with you,' he said.

‘Morning makes it sordid, don't you feel?' from a flicker of his face, a visual image of Bridie's room must have been passing through, ‘In any case,' she said, ‘I'm not in the habit of sleeping with my clients.'

‘Lovers, then?'

She glanced down at the blotches on her withering hands, ‘Not even lovers. No longer. I've learnt to suspect love, as you, apparently, suspect me.'

She really must manage her trembling.

‘I don't suspect you.' He produced his card. ‘We all know you're running a house of a pretty corrupt kind. How corrupt, Mrs Trist, we're not yet sure. You yourself might give the lie to our suspicions by being more frank about your own life.'

She smiled back, wondering if the bow of her lips looked too taut, and whether its magenta was flaking. ‘Do you think a brothel will corrupt those who're already corrupted—or who'll corrupt themselves somewhere else—in their own homes—in a dark street—if overtaken by lust, in a parked car, or corner of a public park? All of us—even those you consider corrupt—I'd like to think of as human beings.'

In spite of her height, her presence, and the romantic sumptuous
ness of the dress she was wearing, her trembling hands were letting her down; while the Midlands three-quarter back was determined to break through her defences.

‘Whatever you may think of me professionally,' she said, ‘surely my personal life is my own concern?'

Always smiling back, he replied, ‘I've been watching you long enough, Mrs Trist, to admire you as a woman. That's why I'd like to go to bed with you.'

‘Oh,' she sighed, gasped, ‘age apart, athletics aren't in my line. As for yourself, men often fancy what is withheld—and are less disappointed by going without.'

Her mouth, she felt, had dwindled to a rudimentary hole in her face. Her extravagant dress could only be doing her a disservice, the appliqué on its skirt grown garish, and where one of her hands rested, unstitched. From a window the normally benign light off the river was glaring at her so ferociously she found herself longing for the night lights of childhood, dipping and swimming in their chipped saucers on the borderline between sleep and waking.

How to extricate herself she could not think, when she heard a key in the lock, and footsteps approaching briskly over parquet before being subdued by carpet.

A visible melting had started in her inquisitor. ‘Good to see you, Rod, after all this time.'

Gravenor measured out his words. ‘And in a brothel, Hugh. Makes it an extra special occasion.'

Hugh might have invoked the officialdom of which Roderick knew him to be part, but didn't seem to know how to go about it. He laughed somewhat frenetically, exposing large, grooved teeth, and left after the least possible exchange of routine masculine geniality.

Eadith Trist might have wanted to reward her protector for his timely appearance in her house, but was stricken by such gaucherie she waited instead for him to leave; which he did on seeing she was suffering from too many incursions in one morning.

 

Whether the role Gravenor played in her life was that of saviour or evil genius, Eadith hadn't yet been able to decide. She both dreaded and counted the hours to their planned meetings. What appeared to be chance encounters she had sometimes induced, like dreams, by an effort of will, then if they proved to any degree requiting, she would panic and break free before consummation of her desires.

On her blackest days she willed him out of existence. Perhaps he never had existed, except as a figment; only she had his letters, his signature on business documents, and in a silver frame, his photograph illegibly inscribed. Most tangible proof were her recollections of the squamous skin, pronounced finger-joints, stone lips fleshing out whenever her mouth consented.

He had told her once, while holding her knees between his, under the table at which they were dining, ‘I've known you all my life, Eadith, but still have to teach you that you exist.'

She would have had to admit she had not existed in any of her several lives, unless in relationship with innocents, often only servants of ignoble masters, or for those who believed themselves her parents or lovers. She was accepted as real, or so it appeared, by the girls she farmed out for love, and who, if she were to be honest, amounted to fragments of a single image. Yet whatever form she took, or whatever the illusion temporarily possessing her, the reality of love, which is the core of reality itself, had eluded her, and perhaps always would.

Disentangling herself from the pressure of his knees, she said to her companion, ‘Don't let me spoil your dinner, my dear, but I've an inkling I'm needed. Though Ada's thoroughly competent, you can't run a house and escape from the responsibilities.'

She got up, and had them call her a cab. She looked back and saw Gravenor concentrated on what he was eating, delicious enough in its sauce of mussels and lobster-coral and cream. The light had sharpened the bridge of his nose while softening the rest of his face. His lips as they moved unconcernedly appeared the blander for the cream anointing them. The coquettish little pink lampshades acknowledging their own reflexions on the surface of
the water were made to appear more frivolous, ephemeral, by the river's black, oily current.

She moved off, gathering her extravagant clothes round her, the whore-mistress diners were staring at. Or were they? Perhaps they did not recognise her existence any more than they suspected her desire to be recognised: this woman looking in her bag to see whether she had the change to spend a penny or tip the taxi—or simply look for reassurance as she crossed a desert plain.

For some time after, she did not see her protector, nor rustle up the courage or effrontery to make an advance; she was too ashamed of the musty smell her plumes exuded, a hint of verdigris in the settings of her jewels, and other more personal signs of decay—or was it the vapours rising from a river at low tide?

 

It was downright absurd to imagine she was less the woman they recognised: hair still kempt and naturally black except for a faint frosting of silver above the forehead; beneath the drifts of mauve powder, a bone structure time would probably never erode; lips immaculate, except when a stray camel-hair had remained stuck to the impasto. As she prospered, her jewels had become increasingly elaborate, tortuous, inspiring amazed gasps rather than passive admiration. Like her clothes, they delighted those who enjoy a touch of the bizarre in the uniform present. If she remained a joke for children, and affronted or frightened a majority puzzled by what they had not seen before and could never have envisaged, she was inured to the scorn of these comparatively simple souls, and worse, the hatred of others for what might not have been fully revealed.

Ladies, admittedly the more eccentric or raffish, began frequenting Mrs Trist's house. Two who considered it fun to be on ‘darling' terms with a procuress were Diana Siderous and Cecily Snape.

One of the outwardly flawless English flowers, Cecily had been forced to leave the country for a while after an affair with an entire negro band ending in the death of a drummer and exposure of a drug ring.

Eadith found Cecily, for all her amoral swank, rather an insipid
girl, yet touching in her desire to explore what she conceived to be ‘life'. Her origins were never revealed, though she affected a vaguely aristocratic aura probably signifying Wimbledon.

Cecily confessed, ‘Sometimes I think I'll become a whore—not for the money—just for the game.'

‘Then why become it?' Eadith suggested. ‘I'd say you'd be happier keeping on as an amateur.'

It nettled the pink Cecily. ‘I detest amateurs in any department.'

On one or two occasions Cecily and Diana stood in for Mrs Trist's girls when someone had fallen ill or defected.

After one such experience Cecily grimaced. ‘You were right, darling, I hated that. If at least I could have felt something for the paunchy brute riding me. Pity, or something. My trouble is I can't
feel
.'

Eadith was forced to reply, ‘I guess you can't—if you didn't after an entire negro band.'

Cecily giggled. ‘Who told you? Aren't people outrageous! Actually, it wasn't more than a couple—the one who died, and the one who did him in.'

She became weepy, and after that, perhaps genuinely sincere. ‘I'd settle down in the country tomorrow if I could discover an honest man.'

(On losing sight of Cecily, Eadith had asked Gravenor's sister, Ursula, ‘What became of Cecily Snape? It's ages since I set eyes on her. She told me she aspired to an honest man. Did she find one?'

‘Poor darling, no!' A collector of rare objects, Ursula replied through her most exquisitely brittle smile. ‘She's living with herself and fifteen dogs in a cottage near Saffron Walden. She goes for endless walks in the rain, and curls up in bed with the dogs without even taking her gumboots off. However, perhaps she's happier than she would have been with the honest man.')

Her equal in amorality, Cecily's friend Diana had ridden at life with less abandon, greater calculation, and in consequence had fared better, materially at any rate. If what her Orthodox forebears would have referred to as her ‘soul' had suffered to any extent, Madame
Siderous did not allow herself to consider; one was born with a soul, like that other hindrance a maidenhead, but any practical woman got rid of the one and forgot about the other as soon as was decently possible without damaging her chances of success. Of Smyrna-Liverpool extraction, she had married a rich Alexandrian Copt, but had left her husband and two rapidly acquired children, the better to circulate in the world, which in Diana's case amounted to London, Paris, and Antibes. She was liberally endowed by her Copt, and along with the settlement allowed to keep her jewels, including a ruby necklet both friends and enemies claimed was in fact a present from somebody of vast importance.

Madame Siderous had a leathery voracious face, its complexion suggestive of tropical fruits in the early stages of going off. Perfumed expensively, her presence conjured up the scents of Egypt, predominant among them guava, toasted sesame, and cottonseed oil. The bracelets she wore from wrist to elbow of one arm were in the fashionable French paste, but rustled like the metal waves beaten out thin by smiths in an Eastern
souk
.

Looking in at Eadith's on an afternoon when Bridie was the worse for an orgy of Guinness and oysters, Diana volunteered to entertain a client who had booked the Irish girl in advance because she understood his temperament. Though Diana's repertoire was extensive and included the game of whips and chains, she hadn't bargained for what she got: she had never been on the receiving end.

She emerged more than ever the bruised and rotting tropic fruit. ‘
Et la chambre de cettegarce! Comme elle pu-ait!
' Disgust rattled at the back of her throat as she restored her lips at Eadith's rococo glass ‘This nauseating girl's oyster-shells and bottle-tops!'

‘Bridie is a natural slut, which is why she is popular with certain men. The physical wounds they enjoy are only half of what they suffer morally.'