The Twyborn Affair (56 page)

‘Years ago,' Eadie said, ‘I might have been interested in visiting your house. Yes,' she gave a short dry laugh, ‘I'd have enjoyed investigating a brothel. Now I'm too old.'

She asked whether Eadith herself had enjoyed lovers.

Eadith admitted she had—if ‘enjoy' were the word; she had run into such difficulties.

Eadie agreed that love was difficult. ‘Quite a trapeze act in fact. I respected your father, and loved him, Eddie
—Eadith—
but never enough till after he died. I was fond of poor Joanie Golson—the friend I believe you disliked so much you always avoided. Joanie was too possessive. What one wants from a woman finally becomes suffocating. I only ever really loved, and was loved by, my little flea-ridden dogs. I could talk to them and they understood. Children and parents fail one another. Of course there are exceptions, but so worthy they're intolerable in a different way. No, dogs were my best relationship—until the last one of all, which I shan't attempt to explain. You might find my naked spirit as embarrassing as my shrivelled body.'

Seated in the characterless, neutral-toned cube of the steel-and-concrete hotel room, this woman of no longer alcoholic, but dotty, glittering eyes, who was also her mother, had for Eadith the fascination of anachronisms of most kinds. She was both personal and remote; those blotched hands must have pressed on her own belly to help expel in blood and anguish the child struggling out of it.

Eadie continued in the same tone of detached calm, of purged emotion, ‘I can't see why you don't come home with me, Eadith …', she hesitated before allowing the word ‘dearest' to pass her lips; it might have acted as a deterrent. ‘As late as this perhaps we'd find we could live together. I can see us washing our hair, and sitting together in the garden to dry it.'

Yes, it was the most seductive proposition: the two sitting in the steamy garden, surrounded by ragged grass, hibiscus trumpets, the bubbling and plopping of bulbuls, a drizzling of taps. But as from all such golden dreams, the awakening would surely devastate.

‘Do come!' Now it was Eadie's former voice issuing a command rather than making a plea.

‘Mother, you don't realise how difficult it would be in wartime. You're a visitor. I am not. I have no passport. I had, but years ago. No, you must go, Mother.' It was becoming a feverish situation. ‘Perhaps I'll follow eventually.'

‘I'm sure there are no difficulties which can't be overcome,' Eadie countered, with a bright smile which disbelieved her own hopes.

‘We'll see,' said Eadith as she gathered her belongings.

She had brought her mother a pomander, that pretty, perfumed toy people still offered one another in the last days of their idleness.

‘You're not going, are you, Eadith?'

‘Yes, Mother, I must make sure my whores are fed' as though Ada wouldn't see to that.

Mother and daughter nuzzled at each other's cheeks; they might have been foraging for some elusive truffle.

Eadith left after promising to return next day at her usual time.

 

Ada the inscrutable, but understanding deputy had brought the mail to her Superior. There were the usual bills, protestations of enduring affection from the Ursulas, Dianas, and Cecilys, with a few letters of abuse from envious neighbours and disgruntled clients. There was the letter from Gravenor forwarded by courtesy of the Foreign Office.

Eadith laid Gravenor's letter on a corner of the dressing-table while hearing out Ada's tale of missing towels, torn sheets, and mice in the kitchen cupboards. Eadith remembered the mouse-catcher of grey skin and smelly socks in the flat in Hendrey Street. Rightly or wrongly, the young man was one of the many she had resisted taking as lovers.

She waited till Ada had gone before re-opening the discreet official envelope enclosing Gravenor's letter. There was neither date, nor address, the message brief, neat; done with a pin, one would have thought.

Several days later, as the proprietor came downstairs, the body of the house seemed pervaded by the torpor of reluctant flesh, except in the basement, where Ada, Mrs Parsons, and Tyler the houseman were stashing away the supplies they had brought back to withstand a siege by barbarians. Some of it had a glitter, almost that of precious stones, which the last of the loot always wears: brandied
peaches, French plums, chicken breasts, caviare, none of it necessary, but all of it desirable as proof of the buyers' foresight or cunning. Not that humbler commodities on which they would depend, such as tea and sugar in bursting bags, tins of bully, bars of soap, a case of evaporated milk, even a carton of bandaids, were without an esoteric glow in the present light.

The independent servants were flushed with their perspicacity.

Mrs Parsons was telling, ‘She said to me what do you think you're preparing for—a war? I said no the end of the world!'

Her helpers Maggie and Vi shrieked and giggled, Tyler rumbling in undertone, till Ada's gravity reminded them to carry on with their work in silence. None and all of it was important.

Hanging around in the passage he caught Ada's attention through the doorway, and she left her minions and came out to him at last.

He told her, ‘I've decided to make the break tonight. I'm glad you're taking over, Ada, because you're a serious person, and practical seriousness is what a whore-house demands.' They enjoyed his joke, or she pretended to. ‘My frivolous self will now go in search of some occupation in keeping with the times.'

This brown-habited imitation of the dedicated nun stood shuffling a bit on the basement flags.

‘You know where to go if you need advice.'

‘Yes, Eddie,' she answered.

But she averted her eyes from the pepper-and-salt tonsure.

Eddie himself felt uneasy, not as a result of their confidences, but in the cheap suit he had bought in a hurry, the shirt a size too small, and shoes which not only pinched his toes, but squeaked at every step he took. There was too much hasty improvisation about the current version of Eddie Twyborn, but probably no one beyond Ada and Eadie would notice.

He said, ‘First I must go to my mother and tell her what you and I understand. She may, too. Yes, I think she does. Which will make it worse.'

Then he left, not by the kitchen stairs, but up the area steps,
supporting himself on the bars of the railing as he stumbled into the street. Whatever his partially conscious plan for positive action, it could hardly take place in Eadith Trist's whore-house.

As he crossed this seemingly deserted city, a scapegoat again in search of sacrifice, his steely tonsure parried the steely evening light. He glanced sideways through the gathering dusk and saw himself reflected in plate-glass: the distorted shoulders of the shoddy suit, the pointed shoes, the cropped hair. He was disgusted to see he had forgotten to take off Eadith's make-up. The great magenta mouth was still flowering in a chalk face shaded with violet, the eyes overflowing mascara banks, those of a distressed woman, professional whore, or hopeful amateur lover.

She slunk, or rather, he squeaked past, grateful for the support of railings in this role which he had played so many times, yet almost forgotten. On Constitution Hill the chariot poised on its pedestal appeared on the verge of taking off. The Dilly ahead was an empty slope.

The squeaking shoes carried him along. He recalled those boots, mud clotting soles and eyelets as the guns opened their evening barrage. Where he had staggered under the weight of material equipment and exhaustion, now he tottered in a fever of fragmented intentions (must be age or something) trotting up the empty Dilly on a short but painful visit to his mother's womb. A metal confetti was falling around him, slithering on the pavement, rebounding. What if his monastic scalp were hit?

He giggled on envisaging a dish of brains a nursery-maid was serving the Bellasis children. No one around to share his joke. He would have liked it, but the whores with their fox capes, their chow-chow dogs, their straying fingers, their heels perforating ancient pavements, all were vanished. (It was safer nowadays to concentrate on the exodus from business lunches.)

He had almost reached Eadie's hotel when he noticed the east blazing with a perverse sunset, if not fiery razzle-dazzle, heard the chuffing of his own heart, a clangour of racing engines, the thump and crump of history becoming unstable, crumbling.

It was happening in the city its inhabitants thought belonged to them.

In a moment it seemed to Eddie Twyborn as though his own share in time were snatched away, as though every house he had ever lived in were torn open, the sawdust pouring out of all the dolls in all the rooms, furniture whether honest or pretentious still shuddering from its brush with destruction, a few broken bars of a Chabrier waltz scattered from the burst piano, was it the Judge-Pantocrator looking through a gap in the star-painted ceiling, the beige thighs hooked in a swinging chandelier could only be those of that clumsy acrobat Marcia, all contained in the ruins of this great unstable temporal house, all but Eddie and Eadith, unless echoes of their voices threading pandemonium.

Down one of the dark tributary streets came a young soldier in battle dress and tin hat. He reached the corner in time to fall head on, making almost a straight line on the pavement, with this character from a carnival or looney bin. The young man seemed to be trying to share the brim of his protective hat with one who could hardly remain a stranger. ‘Something happening at last, eh?' At such close quarters he was little more than a white smile in skin as rough and red as a brick.

The next moment they were heaved up almost above the parapet.

Eddie Twyborn should have shouted, ‘Time to go over …' but his voice failed him.

So he prepared to advance alone into this brick no-man's-land. This time could it be despair running in the wrong direction?

It might if he had been able to move from his position on the pavement. It seemed to him that the figure head-on was melting into the worn stone, the smile congealing, the tin hat no more than a cabaret prop.

A detached hand was lying in a stream of blood nor'-nor'-west of Eddie Twyborn's left cheek. It was neither of the soldier's hands he began to realise, for these were arranged on the pavement, a dog's obedient paws had it not been for blunt fingers with nails in mourning, still attached to bristling wrists.

It was his own hand he saw as he ebbed, incredibly, away from it.

‘Fetch me a bandaid, Ada,' he croaked over his shoulder, while flowing onward, on to wherever the crimson current might carry him.

 

Mrs Twyborn had been waiting in her hotel room for the daughter she was expecting. There had been an unusually fine sunset, if to the east rather than the west it accorded with these times of illogic and apocalypse, so she had not bothered to question it.

Though a maid had drawn the black-out curtains, Eadie had dragged them open. The curtains made the room too airless and she loved to sit in the dark watching the changes in the evening sky.

She was sitting in this sterile room, a figure in seemingly enduring marble which, again in accordance with these days of unreason, was draped in black.

She was barely shaken when the building moved in time with the crump, followed by an explosion, outside. From being a bland cube, the room for a shuddering instant became a rhomb, before settling back into its normal steel-and-concrete shape.

Outside, the clangour of chariots racing towards brassy sunsets.

She sat on. It had happened as Eadith had predicted. But she could not care. At least she did not feel afraid. Age had drained her of fear, along with her vices, doubts, torments.

Down the corridor a woman was hopping screaming, as though she still belonged to the present, some young person no doubt who had not yet suffered enough.

Now the kindly maid who had drawn the black-out curtains was tearing the door open, and no longer kind, trying to bully an aggravating old imbecile.

‘Mrs Twyborn,' she shouted, ‘you must come down. I'll take you to the shelter.'

‘What was that woman screaming for?'

‘Don't you know there's a raid? The East End's on fire. Now they're going for the railway stations.'

‘But that screaming woman—was she hit?'

‘No, she wasn't. She got a fright when the bombs fell. She jumped up and zipped herself into one leg of her siren suit. Now there isn't time to unzip.'

The old woman had dismissed bombs and their consequences; she sat contemplating the image of the hopping woman.

In her exasperation, the maid was hurting Eadie Twyborn. ‘Please come—I can't wait for ever. Two men were killed at the corner.'

‘It's too late—too late to die. I'll stay and watch. Besides, I'm expecting my daughter.'

‘She'll not be so foolish to start out on a night like this. Or if she did, she'll have got in somewhere.'

Mrs Twyborn murmured, ‘I'll wait. I'll watch. Eadith will come.'

Frustrated by this stubborn old thing, the maid stormed off in pursuit of her own safety.