The Twyborn Affair (50 page)

She stood bathing her face in front of the bathroom glass.

He burped back at her, out of the past or the future.

She felt the better for it, however.

 

Evening was as uneventful and discursive. The promised Australians, somewhat to Maufey's relief, hadn't arrived. The only incident
to affect the displaced bawd was when Madame Siderous beckoned and drew her aside amongst the flower borders at dusk.

‘Darling,' Diana began, and her perfume, her breath, overpowered the evening scents of the garden, ‘do you realise how you fail to keep your promises?'

Mrs Trist could not imagine for what she was about to stand accused.

‘You've never given me the Arab woman's number. The one who knows the wax-and-honey method for removing superfluous hair.'

Madame Siderous was looking at her intently as though expecting the coded reply to a coded question.

‘She isn't on the telephone. We'll come to an arrangement next time I see her.'

It couldn't have been the correct answer, for Diana frowned, while seeming to offer a second chance. ‘You're surely not one of those tiresome people who, when they discover something special, feel they've got to keep it to themselves.' A mole between her right nostril and the arch of a smoothly painted lip threatened reprisal.

‘Yes and no,' Eadith replied; whatever the outcome in friendship or war, she would not be lured into surrendering her closer secrets to the likes of Madame Siderous.

Diana's exasperation returned them both to reality. ‘These boring English house-parties!' She reached out and beheaded a delphinium with a quick flick of her brown fingers. ‘All these F.O. pin-stripes and sculptured M.I. jaws! Not to mention the pansy artists! And noble crypto-Lesbians! Some of the women here would be more use than most of the men.' Suddenly Diana Siderous seized Eadith Trist by the nose with fingers smelling of nicotine, and sap from the slaughtered delphinium. ‘Odd we never thought of doing it together …'

Almost at once she must have decided to reduce her gesture and remark to the level of the ridiculous.

‘Don't worry, darling,' she screeched, ‘I'm sure we'll never feel as bored as that. And disillusion poor old Ursula.'

She took her friend by the arm and was leading her back into what could pass for focus. ‘
Seriously
,' and Madame Siderous did apparently consider herself capable of seriousness, ‘I believe you're Ursula's big disappointment. As a collector, I mean. When you should have been her
grand coup—
the whore-mistress of Beckwith Street, exposing her nipples, gnashing her teeth at the men—and here you are, as sombre as a nun.'

The bronze tunic Eadith was wearing, the skirt susurrating as it scuffed the ground, the long, fluted sleeves, did suggest a nun, or priestess, while the Siderous plastered to her ribs forced on her a stride more stilted than was normal.

When she answered her accuser, the gravity of her expression and movements seemed to have rubbed off on her voice, ‘I like to think I'm sometimes capable of more than is expected of me.'

They continued towards the house and the nets of light which had by now been spread for them. The light caught their disappointments and illusions, and for a brief moment portrayed the wooden attitudes, the formal eyes, of a pair of worm-eaten Coptic saints.

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.

Nora was more reserved than Reg. Eadith was conscious of eyes glancing in her direction, anxious to establish a relationship inspired by womanly sympathy as she understood it.

Whereas the more worldly Eadith Trist was all at sea in this world of splintering light, cool, slanted accents, and oblique references, as she conducted her courtship of a lover who wasn't. In the circumstances Nora Quirk's sympathetic glances only assailed her, and each time Reg opened his big Australian mouth she was scarified: her flesh still reeked of the branding-iron which had seared it in her Australian past.

Dennis Maufey's claw had left off exploring the cocks' feathers; it was actually Rod's hand asking for assurance under cover of the table.

They sat holding hands regardless of the incised masks of the Mileses and Gileses, the Muffs and Cecilys, at Baby's party—all of them nourished on the boiled brains and milky rice prescribed by Nanny and rammed home by the under-nursemaids, the pap which under-housemaids, their cracked fingers black with coal dust, produced off trays, or in more impressive households, from the nursery hatch.

Rising out of a taut throat, Ursula's laughter rustled as minute diamond chips might have if released in a shower. She was no match for Diana Siderous, whose throatiness had the brazen clang of an Arab
fantasia
. Yet their targets were usually the same.

Hand in hand, Rod and Eadith sat looking at each other from time to time; perennial children, they could not believe in their situation however much they longed.

Jill Watmore Blood, who was falling out of her uppers, had to break up something, she wasn't sure what. ‘A message from Daddy, Rod duckie: he hopes you'll join us at Cowes. Daisy and Buster will be there, so it's practically a royal command. But that's up to you. I probably shan't make it. It looks as though the piece at the Shaftesbury won't have folded.' She grimaced, picked at her canines with a vivid nail, planted a carnation in her cleavage, directed a smile at Reg Quirk, and a more virginal one at Nora.

Rod looked at Eadith. ‘I'll never know what you think because you're not going to tell me.'

‘Then I must have caught the English disease.'

She laughed. She was so happy watching the bristles of his pink moustache moving as he masticated, the chapped lips folding themselves around morsels of chicken, and finally, out-of-season peach. She knew there would be pockets of his body lined with soft peach-skin in contrast to the overall expanse of aggressive, male bristle.

She looked across, and found Nora Quirk looking her way, composing her blenched lips on her denture. Again Eadith looked, and Ursula suggested some oriental bird stilled by the eighteenth century on the surface of an English artificial lake. Attracted by a spectacle, cattle were descending the other side of a ha-ha, amongst them Reg Quirk, his Australian
museau de bæuf
parted.