The Twyborn Affair (51 page)

Eadith was so in love with the unattainable Rod, she might have submitted to Reg had a beefy shoulder chafed her flank.

Glances had reached the interlocking stage at Lady Ursula's dinner table.

They served coffee on the terrace, where the English began breaking out, quivering with daring, brandy, and malice. They were discussing the Australian coo-ee, of which the more travelled and more generally knowledgeable among them had experienced or heard tell.

‘Can you do it, Nora?' Maufey enquired of his still not fully controlled puppet.

‘I'll say I can!' Nora nearly giggled her head off, snapping her denture shut in time to avert disaster.

Reg only muttered ‘I reckon …' and plodded off in the direction of the copse below.

After ploughing through shaven lawns, shaggy with dew by this time of night, and reaching the descent into natural grass, beeches, and darkness, he turned and called, ‘Come on, Nora, let 'em have ut!'

Nora filled her lungs, which everyone saw were considerable, and let fly through the Wiltshire dark, her navel straining at her Schiaparelli.

‘Coo-
ee?
' she called.

And Reg called back, ‘Coo-EE!'

The upright English were falling about inside their skins, while the Australians called back and forth like a couple of currawongs nourished on Wahroonga milk.

Only Eadith Trist had watched a currawong perching on an angophora's elbow, his free claw clenched on the finch whose head he was chewing.

The Quirks might have extended their performance longer than was expected of Maufey's amusing Australians, if the admiral's actress daughter hadn't declared, ‘I'm sure I can do it—but from a distance. I'm going down to Reg Thingamy.'

At which, Currawong Nora failed to answer her mate's call. She had, in fact, that bird's vindictive eye. As Miss Watmore Blood glided over the shaggy dew before plunging into the natural grass, where the daffodils had been tied down at the end of the season, Nora Quirk's silence pulsated, as did her bust against the Schiaparelli, awaiting the cards fate might deal.

‘Reg will teach me,' Jill burbled back, but failed to reach her goal for falling into the lily pond. ‘Oh, God! Oh, Christ! Oh,
fuck
!'

Everybody was rushing to disentangle the actress from the lily-pads.

Though Baby (‘… my precious lilies …') might have wished her drowned.

So lean, so loose-swinging, so weed-bedraggled, Jill was almost unrecognisable.

‘Take her away, somebody,' Ursula commanded. ‘What she needs is a hot bath. And a rub down with a warmed towel.'

‘But I don't!' Miss Watmore Blood protested. ‘It's a warm night. What I need is Reg—Rod—Reg—no bloody
towel
!' She was led away, her escaped breasts jumping like the frogs she had disturbed underneath the lily-pads.

After her too impulsive guest had been removed, Lady Ursula ordered beer to quench everybody's thirst, though perhaps more especially that of her re-united Australians. These stood on the perimeter of light enclosing Baby's disorganised party. Not ungratefully, the Quirks drank their warm beer. Reg might have been ‘consuming' his. The demonstration and his climb back from the copse below had left him breathless. He should by rights have joined the British males, but was intimidated more than he would have cared to admit: they were talking shop, or same thing—foreign affairs.

He felt more at ease with this woman, this Mrs Trist—this Eadith—whatever they told you about her ‘house'. (Might try it out some afternoon while Nora was at the dress shows.)

Reg confessed to Mrs Trist, ‘The wife and I were saying only the other day, however much you feel at home in England it's good to hear your own language again. Just now you come across it all over London. It's odds on you'll run into friends. Last week it was Joanie Golson—next table at the Savoy …'

‘No, dear, Claridge's.' Nora sighed.

‘… Joanie—Sir Boyd's widow—of Sydney's most go-ahead store.'

If there was no holding Reg after a couple of warm beers, Nora only faintly preened.

‘And yesterday on the Mall, it was Eadie—Mrs Justice Twyborn.'

‘Hardly friends, dear—the Twyborns. Once or twice we shook their hands.'

‘As you say, we've shaken hands, and I'm proud to have shook the Judge's hand—one of our most distinguished Australians.'

Mrs Trist dared ask, ‘Is the Judge with Mrs Twyborn in London?'

Checking up on the menfolk! Well, it was her business.

Mr Quirk stood swirling the dregs of beer at the bottom of his glass with appropriate solemnity. ‘The Judge recently passed on,' he had to inform her.

Flushed by social triumphs and the success of their little performance, death could have been the Quirks' least concern. There was not yet any sign that they would ever be threatened. The croaking of disturbed frogs, the clatter and splintering of human laughter at its most inhuman, a night bird calling more poignantly than the self-possessed currawongs of earlier, cannot have entered their consciousness. So why was this woman acting queer?

For the invisible bird, throbbing and spilling like blood or sperm, had brought Eddie Twyborn to the surface. Abandoning what the Quirks would still work into their travelogue as a cosy occasion, he started skittering across the lawn, the brutally illuminated terrace, into the house, in his ridiculous drag, the wisps of damp-infested cocks' feathers, trailing skirt, stockings soaked with dew.

At the foot of the stairs the reduced Eadith Trist was brought up against the one she most needed but hoped to avoid at the present moment.

‘All this evening, Eadith, you would have avoided me if I hadn't practically handcuffed you under the table. I realise you must hate me.'

Again he put out a hand, as controlled as hers was trembling, and which she must resist whatever the hurt.

‘Who's to decide—love and hate—not hate,
despair—
where one ends and the other begins?'

She pushed past him, continued up the stairs, and locked the door.

Early next morning Mrs Trist organised a car to drive her to the station. It was only Sunday. She left a note for Ursula. She would have a long wait for one of the rare Sunday trains. She preferred it
that way: watching the cows munching through their idyllic pasture, alternate mouthfuls of veridian grass and pure English daisies. Perched on the platform beside her dressing case she might have dozed if images of the past had not been slid between the brown barrels of the grazing cows, and as focus point of past and present Judge Twyborn's features melting like forgotten butter amongst the undulations of the placid field.

 

Mrs Trist might never have been away from home; she found her house in perfect running order: business thriving, accounts kept, no suicides or abortions, no cockroaches or rats. She might have felt jealous of her admirable deputy if it hadn't been for recent developments and information. In the circumstances Eadith was too distracted.

She began to wonder whether her life were a collage of fantasies: her profitable whore-house, her love for Gravenor, the romantic dresses, the elaborate jewels. On the other hand she could still practically feel the calluses got by crowbar and shears, experience the voluptuous ease of entry through the gateway of Marcia Lushington's thighs, the agonies of Don Prowse's thrust, hillocks of chaff crumbling around a salt-stricken mouth, pure contact with the Judge under the honeycomb bedspread of a circuit hotel.

And now Eadie, that squalid old drunk, Joanie Golson's ex-lover. The ex-lovers, the ex-husbands, the ex-lives were all weighing on Eadith Trist.

Since Ada had shown herself capable of managing the house, Mrs Trist had taken to walking, not only at dawn, the hour of forgiveness, but also by broad daylight, and farther afield, through scorching or soaking afternoons, in which newspapers blew in her face, or wrapped themselves in wet wads, like compresses, round her ankles and shins, as she shambled low-heeled over bottle-tops and broken glass, through dead kittens and vegetables, endlessly marching, round Islington, Stepney, Bethnal Green. What she hoped to escape or discover was not clear even to herself. At least nobody questioned her, but she was constantly accused of the worst sins by the graffiti
she half-read in passing, and the face gnashing at her out of posters warned her what to expect.

After circling out east, she would be drawn westwards again, and her aim grew more palpable, more disturbing.

She first sighted Eadie Twyborn coming out of St Clement's, heading down the Strand past the great hotels and temporarily extinguished theatres. None of it looked to exist for Eadie.

She went into St Martin's. Eadith followed in her flat shoes, which long distances had worn down sideways.

In the otherwise empty church the two women sat at some distance from each other. Eadie was wearing dark gloves. She was holding what looked like a prayer-book. But did not pray, or gave no visible sign of doing so. Like Eadith, who was empty-handed, she simply sat.

Somebody was practising on the organ; the phrases of music unrolled rather jerkily, like the slats of alternate light and rattan in a blind. Somebody entering from the street let in a draught of air, a blast of light, whiter, more revealing than the illuminated slats of purely subjective organ music. The cold light from the street was trained for a moment on Eadie Twyborn. The blotched and raddled, leathery skin constantly boiling over in the past with emotion, resentment, frustration, curdled passion, had been washed white. Any ravines and craters were those of moonscape rather than skin.

Almost at once the church's padded door was sucked shut. The anonymous figures continued what amounted to a common vigil. If they were not brought closer together, the organ music, and beyond it the drone of traffic flowing into Trafalgar Square and distributed through the arteries, prevented that.

Eadie went out eventually, followed by Eadith, across the square, past the Gallery. On.

In the moil of the Circus Eadith lost sight of Eadie. As she raced backwards and forwards, down and up Pall Mall, hovering on the cusp of Regent Street, Eadith could feel herself looking like a drooping and distracted hen, beak open, throat extended, gasping amongst
the horehound during respite from a doom she both dreaded and awaited.

For better or worse, she had lost Eadie the mother of her flesh and blood if not her spirit. She sensed that the loss was only temporary. Clutching the prayer-book with tenacious gloves, Eadie must recur during what remained of life.

In one last desperate attempt to face her mother, Eadith charged into St James's, Piccadilly. Outside the church darkness was clotting; inside, the candles were lit, for a small group gathered to avert by their prayers the war which was threatening.

Eadith did not catch sight of Eadie. The possibility that she might never see her mother again forced her on her knees on a badly upholstered hassock. A waxen priest was comforting his flock. Eadith Trist plaited her fingers amongst her penitential rings. She focused on one striated agate in which she hoped to see the eye of God. But nothing worked. Perhaps if she had been Catholic, Orthodox, a humble charwoman—anything but a doubting Australian and the bawd of Beckwith Street.

Head bowed she left the church and started for home.

All down the Dilly the whores were drawn up in their irregular ranks. Some of them recognised Mrs Trist. They shrieked friendly obscenities. She should have felt rejuvenated walking amongst them along the Dilly under this translucent summer sky. But she wasn't. The shadow of Eadie Twyborn, prayer-book clamped between black gloves, was walking beside her, against this iron railing, beneath a greening sky.

Mrs Trist reached home. None of her girls or regular clients might have recognised her had she made her presence known. Ada asked no questions, but helped her mistress out of her clothes, or as far as the last layer. Ada had always respected any depths of experience her associates did not wish to reveal. She was as invaluable a presence in a brothel as she would have been in a nunnery.

 

The outbreak of war was to some extent a relief. The people could now assemble in the churches unashamed, asking for God's forgive
ness and protection. Equally shameless were those who filled the brothels and pubs to indulge themselves as they had never dared, or more simply, fucked in the streets during the black-out. Someone had sprained an ankle by tripping over a couple in the gutter; someone else had been concussed by butting into a Laocoon group enlaced against the wall of Apsley House; one of Lady Ursula's elderly housemaids had gone out to post a letter after dark and found herself sticking it into a policeman.

Many of the rich crossed the Atlantic; others fled to the fells and dales, where they settled down to backgammon and gin while lamenting the intolerable boredom to which they were being subjected. Practically a national museum, Ursula Untermeyer set about organising for herself at ‘Wardrobes' a select team of scientists or scholars in preference to a rout of snotty children. The stories one heard were terrifying.

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.