The Twyborn Affair (47 page)

Ada returned in a waft of coffee and toast slightly burnt, on the tray she was carrying, the newspaper, and a clutch of mail for the most part bills.

Eadith Trist sat scratching herself. She might have felt more at
ease had she heard the body-hair answer back. Her person, her life, her arts, constantly failed to convince her, though others seemed taken in.

She bit off a corner of toast and looked through the batch of bills. Sipping the blessed coffee, she tore open an envelope, the native toughness of its texture vying with discreet arrogance. A monogram of simple, yet withal, imperious design was cleanly incised in the opulent weave, the letter signed by a hand which promised warmth while remaining enslaved to its authority:

Yours, with affection,

Ursula

 

Eadith read the letter, chewing toast by ugly mouthfuls, or so she felt; scalding herself on coffee which had begun to taste of burnt beans. (The toast was even more repulsively burnt; she would have to tell that bossy know-all, the indispensable Ada.)

After adding that ‘affection', Ursula had tacked on:

Eadith continued sipping her coffee as she re-read Ursula's parchment letter, from which nothing so vulgar as perfume arose, only a whiff of distinction. She mused over ‘ravished by your tea-things …
cinnamon toast …' She could not remember whether Ada had served tea as a prelude to Dulcie's abortion, yet they must have sat drinking it if this was what Ursula chose to remember. In spite of Ursula's ravishment, Eadith detected a common clinking from her honest, though aesthetically acceptable, cups and saucers. As for ‘scrumptious cinnamon toast', she did remember, now she came to think, too much butter oozing out over delicate fingers.

She was too sensitive of course. The Duke's children as she saw them again, cheeks bulging, lips glossy, eyes glazed, were re-living life in the nursery while masticating the buttery toast in the whorehouse in Beckwith Street.

Longing in and out of season for the cosiness of the nursery fire, with Nanny and a fender to protect them from its perils, in their still childish middle-age they hankered after other, more perverse dangers which Nanny Trist was able to provide. Or so Eadith sensed in trying to explain why Ursula and Rod were attracted to her. They were excited by their own perverse behaviour, yet if her noble charges were to detect in Nanny a flaw they had not bargained for, she suspected they would not hesitate to reduce the whole baroque façade of her deception to a rubble of colonial wattle-and-daub; no compunction would save Nanny from the sack.

 

Mrs Trist dismissed her cab and rang the bell. There was a slight, cold wind lifting the edges of whatever stood in its way, an air of presage, a mould of green on the elms and the grass verges of the favoured gardens in the precinct. It was one of the chillier spring days, crocuses trembling, jonquils blowing but recovering themselves, like frail but erect Englishwomen.

The columned portico towered above the intruder, who felt wrong in a squirrel coat the rats must have gnawed the night before she put it on. She should not have worn her common, balding squirrel. Her lips were thickly coated with grease. Stalactites were dripping from her armpits. She must have looked everyone's idea of a woman who keeps a brothel.

Lady Ursula Untermeyer could still command a butler. He had
a skull's ivory face with some hair drawn across the cranium.

Oh,
yes
! He must have heard about the madam.

He sat her in a small, not unsympathetic room, to await the august lady whose strange whims he was paid to obey.

Eadith shuffled about inside the squirrel coat she had made the mistake of wearing, in the small japanned room where the discreet butler had placed her. On the wall opposite, there was a small exact portrait of Ursula.

Eadith continued rearranging the collar of her unfortunate coat, and regretting she had come. There were no copies of the
Illustrated London News
, but the room was like a waiting-room at some fashionable doctor's or dentist's—or disguised abortionist's.

Ursula appeared. ‘I can't think why Peacock put you in here!' Ursula, too, was possibly disguised; for a moment Eadith feared her hostess might administer a charitable non-kiss, but she went off instead into a high treble laugh.

She was plainly dressed. She looked like an exquisite plank with grain in it, her hair a perfectly incised helmet. She was wearing no jewels beyond a brooch in what was probably a rare, leached-out jade. Her manicurist must have been in constant attendance on the long pale nails.

She put out a hand at the end of its arm to encourage her amusing friend who was running that house in Beckwith Street, and smiled her tight little smile by way of encouraging herself.

Eadith was led back across the hall. This time she noticed a larger, more formal portrait of the mistress of the house in white satin and long white gloves, the highlights and the blue shadows in satin, kid, and diamonds suggesting a noble icicle. Beneath the golden urn of upswept hair the face might have looked warmer if the painter had been interested as well as paid, or perhaps he had not detected warmth, or perhaps his subject was unfeeling. The cheeks of a young Ursula looked like crisp little apples which had not been bitten into.

As they crossed the hall Ursula murmured incidentally the famous painter's name. The lowered voice did not prevent it bouncing off the chequered floor, to be reverberated by surrounding walls, before
wrapping itself round fluted columns. Ursula added a dry little, mock-apologetic cough, and that, too, became echoed through what was virtually a Parthenon.

On their reaching an upper floor, Eadith was led through a succession of smaller though no less imposing rooms filled with furniture too valuable to be lived on. In every room hung a portrait, of varying importance, of the collector's widow. Halting for an instant in front of each, she paid the same mock-diffident homage, accompanied by what was half cough half laugh, and nervous hair-touching, as she named whichever fashionable artist. Her late husband must have schooled her in guiding the select tourist.

Though the painted reflection in each room showed Ursula herself to be the Athena of this Parthenon, there were other works of art as well, from Goya and Renoir to Lavery and Munnings, together with the inevitable signed photographs jostling one another in casual ranks: Marie of Rumania rubbing up against d'Annunzio, Lifar, Noel—not yet Eadith Trist, though Lady Ursula may have set her sights on such a prize. As for the books on the Untermeyer shelves, not one, you felt, could fail to reveal a personal inscription above the autograph of some mythical monster. Some of the monsters had even known Julius, and liked him enough to pander to a vice by which his widow continued doing her duty.

When at last the two women had reached a boudoir-cum-study, less constricting, more personal than the japanned waiting-room in which the butler had seated the visitor in the beginning, Ursula sighed and explained, ‘This is where Wogs liked to sit.'

‘Wogs?'

‘My husband.'

His widow produced a small etching in a silver frame from somewhere in amongst the Baroness Popper, Sir Thomas Beecham, Gladys Cooper, Gladys Cooper, James Elroy Flecker.

The toothpaste millionaire who had collected Baby the Duke's youngest daughter, was shown exposing a noble forehead, to either side a drift of startled hair, the nose's curve more benign than cutting, the eyes expressive of unfulfilled longing. Julius Untermeyer
had everything of the artist
manqué
he might have been Mahler's failed brother.

After treating the etching of her husband almost as though it were an oblation, she returned it to where it had been standing, with a moue which suggested, ‘There, darling, we've got it over; I loved him, but …'

Peacock brought in a silver tray, followed by a maid with a second. The ‘things' were arranged. Where Eadith Trist had been innocent enough to present Worcester, Ursula came out with Lowestoft.

‘Cottage stuff,' she apologised.

She was short on the eats: a plate of Nanny's bread-and-butter, and a sponge hidden under a cushion of raspberry-embroidered cream.

The two women were beginning to feel cosier.

‘I do admire you,' Ursula said, after nibbling for propriety's sake at a corner of her bread-and-butter, ‘for your originality and independence—in choosing the life you wanted to lead.'

‘In choosing? I'd like to think it, but never feel anything but chosen.'

Having introduced her theory, Ursula was not to be deflected. ‘In our case—in mine, I mean—it's so much more difficult to break the mould in which one has been set.'

Here she deliberately hesitated, hoping for a clue to the mould in which her friend had been set originally, by fate, if not by tradition.

But Eadith was in no way helpful. She only mumbled a sort of agreement, and devoured the rest of her bread-and-butter, like a hungry man after a day on the moors.

Ursula might have been reminding herself that Eadith Trist was a woman of strong will.

‘I mean,' said Lady Ursula, ‘it's all mapped out for
us
. Marriage with someone desirable. Wogs—well, Wogs was a family necessity, but don't think I didn't come to adore him. He was my halfway house to freedom. I could never have kicked over the traces like Cecily Snape—God knows—or you, Eadith darling.' She hesitated,
it seemed interminably. ‘I'm told,' she said at last, ‘you're from one of the—Dominions, which no doubt made it easier.'

Even she must have heard how terrible it sounded, for she seized a knife and cut into the cake. It proved stale, but for the moment looked ghastly rich, with raspberry blood trickling down snowy crevasses.

Again Eadith was most unhelpful. ‘Ah, the Dominions—yes,' she sighed, her voice dying on a note the English themselves might have approved.

She accepted a wedge of Ursula's cake, and wallowed in it, in spite of the staleness of the sponge. She was hungry, and perhaps also indiscriminate. She enjoyed a good blow-out when it offered itself, which may have explained Gravenor's remark about the nymphomaniac inside her.

She sniggered inexplicably. It made Ursula glance at this grotesque creature with cream and raspberry smeared over magenta lipstick.

Because of all she had been taught, Ursula was quick to ask, ‘That lipstick, Eadith—tell me the shade, and where you get it.'

Only then Eadith came out with, ‘I hate it! It makes me look old, ugly, and common.' She visualised her tongue sticking out from between her lips like that of some frilly lizard baited by a terrier bitch.

‘Oh, but
darling
!'

‘No. It's true.'

Ursula sat tossing her ankle in Alice-in-Wonderland style. She was reared an expert at ignoring. Eadith knew by now that Ursula would never refer to Dulcie's amateurish abortion.

‘My dear brother is what I want to talk about,' Ursula said. ‘You've been so good for him—darling. Women fall for Rod right and left. He's in perpetual danger of making a dire mistake. You, Eadith, save him by holding off. I want you to know I'm truly grateful.'

Surprising even to herself, Eadith replied, ‘I love Rod, and for that reason, would rather remain his friend.'

Ursula looked startled as she studied the implications. ‘I've always felt friendship, to a man, is something from which women are
excluded—just as a woman can only rely on a woman as her friend. None of those
abnormal
relationships of course!' she was quick to add.

‘True friendship,' Eadith decided after wiping off the cream and most of the hateful magenta lipstick, ‘if there is anything wholly true—certainly in friendship—comes, I'd say, from the woman in a man and the man in a woman.'

Ursula's agitated ankle was stilled. She appeared aghast. Was her new friend perhaps more intellectual than she'd bargained for?

She came as close as Baby had ever got to a giggle. ‘You make it sound almost perverse, Eadith!'

After which, she stood up, strolled round the bloody shambles on her Georgian tea-tray, and looking at herself in a minor glass, its frame studded with semi-precious stones, touched up her flawless helmet a little.

While Eadith glanced at a clock, equally exquisite, though less prominent than the studded mirror; not so inconspicuous, however, that it might not speed the lingering guest. By now she realised Gravenor would not appear, whether by his own inclination, or his sister's design.

‘I do hope,' Ursula ventured on their reaching the chequered hall, ‘that you'll spend a few days with me at “Wardrobes”.'

She glanced at Eadith, and if earlier on, Baby had never come so close to a giggle, she had never come closer to a kiss than in the peck she bored into the cheek of her unlikely friend. ‘Rod would love it,' she encouraged.

Mrs Trist went out, and after lowering her head, climbed inside the cab Peacock had called. Though the butler offered physical assistance, she was too ignorant, ‘independent', or perhaps too colonial, to avail herself of his attentions.