The Twyborn Affair (48 page)

He came to drive her down on the dot of the time specified. She heard his cold, precise voice asking Ada to announce his arrival to ‘Mrs Trist', as though it had been a normal house. She was already downstairs, standing in the small office-parlour where she had received them the day he brought his sister.

Now he said he wouldn't come in; he'd wait in the sun. She could hear his feet, restive on the tessellated walk between street and entrance.

She realised she was trembling. She hoped she would be able to control her hands, her lips, not only at this artificial reunion with
her protector, but on meeting his sister's friends. Herself the whore-mistress. In its state of mid-afternoon sloth the house gave nothing away. It was a Thursday as Ursula had wished.

She went out carrying her own bag, not gushing and gnashing as she had rehearsed, and as she had seen and heard Diana, Cecily, even Ursula herself, though in the latter's case, the gush was a cold one, the gnash more the champing of an exquisitely poised Arab mare. Eadith felt in advance that the impression she would make on the one she most wanted to impress could only be sombre.

She arrived on the step without yielding the bag Ada had wanted to wrest from her. Gravenor did not attempt. His back was turned as he contemplated the car in which he was preparing to drive his sister's friend down to Wiltshire.

He did look at her at last. ‘I haven't come too early, have I?'

‘You couldn't be more punctual,' she assured him.

He had something of the school prefect, or undergraduate obeying custom by fetching a girl down for May Week, except that he was a middle-aged man in shabby, once expensive tweeds, and freckles on the pouches under his eyes.

He took his dressing-case from her. ‘Is this all?' he asked, with the air of one who had vaguely expected hat-boxes and a wardrobe trunk.

‘Yes,' she answered, ‘this is all.' In her heart of hearts she was returning before she had arrived.

He threw the case, one could not have said vindictively, into the back seat, then fastened down the waterproof cover.

Rod was driving a sports-Bentley of ten years back, pretty shabby if its owner hadn't been in a position to indulge his taste in shabbiness. As well as eccentric women.

He did not look at her, or help much, beyond opening the door to admit her to the passenger seat. Crackled but still luxurious, the upholstery matched the shabbiness affected by the owner. The chassis, mudguards, and bonnet testified on the other hand to the pride in ownership of some anonymous minion still devoted to nobility.

They drove through the grey fringes of London, a reality which did not cancel out the more brilliant frivolous world of Gravenor and Ursula and their friends, or the half-world of Beckwith Street. Eadith herself might have claimed that Maisie, the bronchial septuagenarian prostitute, had for her a reality which the housewives of Lambeth and Southwark would never convey. Whatever compassion she had in her was roused by overtones of purple, not by grey surfaces. No doubt the grey world would condemn her for coldness and ‘perversion'.

Gravenor appeared disinclined to talk and in her present mood she was happy to fall in with his silence.

Until as they whizzed through some mock-Tudor township, he turned to her and asked, ‘How's business, Eadith?'

She admitted to being satisfied, then that she was doing very well indeed.

‘You'll be able to retire and marry. Marriage is what I'm told successful whores and madams aspire to. I've heard of one—perhaps we ought to call her “courtesan”—who built a convent to her favourite saint in gratitude for her patronage.'

It was a conceit they could enjoy together, though she detected in his laughter a slight edge which was meant to cut.

‘Unfortunately,' she told him, ‘I wasn't born a Catholic, and conversions have never convinced me.'

‘A pity. You might have set yourself up as the patron saint of chastity.'

A little farther on, in a peaceful stretch of road, he put out a hand and she accepted it. She must persuade herself to be grateful for the crumbs.

For a mile or two they remained gently united, when anger made him exert his strength, which she was forced to return. Their knuckles whitened into fists; her fingers developed a wiriness they should not have possessed.

She tore free.

She sat shivering, the scarf she had tied round her head for the journey by open car streaming out behind them.

She admitted to feeling nervous: nothing to do with Ursula, whom she now knew as well as one ever knows a woman of such fragile composition, but the prospect of facing Ursula's friends.

He laughed. ‘You'll find “Wardrobes” more like a whorehouse than Baby would ever let herself see.' Then he added, ‘I don't guarantee it'll make you feel more at home, Eadie. But we'll have each other, shan't we?'

Whether spoken in irony or not, it warned her. ‘I can't remember you ever calling me “Eadie”. Why, suddenly, now?'

‘To make you feel at home.' He spoke with perfect gravity, but still she suspected irony.

‘Wardrobes' was less pretentious than she had imagined: no palace, not even a country mansion, but a compact, rather chubby manor embellished only by its gateposts and chimneys, and dormer windows set in the striations of its grey roof. Across one more sheltered wing, beech and birch had cast an afternoon shadow, like mauve lichen invading by creeping inches a stone shoulder of this house standing firm and grey in an altering landscape. For spring had swollen to early summer since Ursula issued her invitation, neglected on account of the barely averted scandal of Brigadier Blenkinsop's unseemly death.

Eadith could see at a glance that the house, if blessedly more modest, was as perfect as she would have expected of its owner. If there was a dash of complacency, that, too, was not unexpected.

More surprising were the two little King Charles spaniels wagging and swivelling, amiably sycophantic, as Ursula advanced to greet her guest. She was holding an old, ivory-tinted, ivory-handled parasol to protect her complexion from a watery sun. There was a scent of lavender from the dogs' brushing against its borders. Ursula looked down, frowning in the midst of her smiling welcome, drawing aside from the antics of her dogs who were obviously there only for effect, as were the borders of English and tussocks of Italian lavender, the clumps of white candytuft advanced to seeding stage by now. Ursula could have been frown-laughing as much for the
no longer perfect candytuft as for the gambollings of her not-so-pet dogs. She herself was as unnatural in that casually devised work of art, an English garden, as would have been a meticulously executed Persian miniature fallen amongst a herbaceous border.

‘Darling,' Baby's giggle had an ivory scroll to it, ‘I can't tell you how honoured I am!'

Her brother turned back to attend to his car, leaving Eadith Trist to galumph as best she could beside her hostess while a servant carried the dressing-case. In the presence of so much management, perfection, contrivance, Mrs Trist felt she might have been wearing a surgical boot—or had sprouted a beard. At least Lady Ursula would not allow herself to notice anything peculiar.

The house was cool to cold, furnished with mock simplicity to disguise genuine luxury.

Ursula apologised. ‘Country—you may even find it a bit primitive, Eadith darling. But isn't that the point?'

As they went upstairs, a peasant-woman hauling up a bucket from a well faced them on the wall of a half-landing.

‘Could never make up my mind about Courbet,' Ursula murmured. ‘Wogs adored him.'

Without waiting for the anonymous servant meekly carrying the Vuitton bag, the hostess broke open cupboards, tore open drawers, on the perfumes of lavender and verbena. Till on introducing her guest to the bathroom, she affected an akimbo stance, perhaps in keeping with her Courbet peasant. As in Mrs Trist's own house, the bathroom fittings were sympathetically antique, the lavatory bowl not unlike that on which Dulcie's faint had been witnessed by Lady Ursula.

‘You'll be comfortable—and happy, I hope,' she enjoined the one who might be the catch of her house party. ‘At least nobody,' she said, ‘is arriving till tomorrow evening. In the meantime we can be together
—en famille
so to speak.'

With a last smile she left Mrs Trist to her meagre unpacking. A maid was prepared to take over, but she dismissed her assistant, not knowing what she would have done after turning on the
HOT
and
COLD
, flushing the antique lavatory, and feeling the bed to ascertain its temperament; it was hardly ascetic.

Rod appeared, and kissed her on the mouth with the cold gravity she could not accuse him of adopting since it was she who had forced it on him.

‘They have tea for us,' he told her, ‘in what Baby calls the library.'

They went down like an engaged couple, hand in hand, or stars of an operette from which the organdy frills were missing.

Baby was waiting for them behind silver trays better stocked than the ones in town. They were seemingly prepared for those who had been on a tramp through the woods, and returned smelling of leaf-mould, fungus, sweaty woollens, with an appetite for butter-sodden muffins. In addition to the muffins, there was a plate of little pink-iced cakes for Nanny's charges, and a fruit-cake which might have been the archetype, breathing brandy even at a distance, glittering with cherries and candied peel, and coagulations of moist black currants.

Although she claimed that a ‘good old-fashioned tea' was her favourite meal and that the country air worked wonders with her appetite, Ursula remained almost as abstemious as she had been in town. She broke off a piece from the innocuous base of one of the small pink cakes while making a little face at the icing.

Gravenor tucked into the muffins after spreading a handkerchief over bony knees, then wiping bony fingers on a second. He gave up rather grumpily on noticing that he had spotted his none too spotless tweeds.

The guest alone did justice to the tea, sampling everything more than once, and emptying three cups to Ursula's languid half. Eadith left off only out of guilt, wondering how much her hosts could have noticed.

But they probably hadn't; they were too busily engaged in discussing family affairs: what to do about Nanny Watkins now that she was senile and all but paralysed.

‘Something must be done,' Gravenor decided.

‘Something must be done,' Ursula agreed piercingly.

‘We can't abandon poor Nanny.'

‘No, we can't abandon her. Or at least
I
can't—because I see that I'm the one who will have to do whatever is done.'

‘For the moment you're in the best position.' Gravenor sat rubbing ever more furiously at the butter spots on his shaggy tweed. ‘We can expect nothing from the Old Man—with Zillah draining him as she is.'

‘Oh,
Zillah! No
!' Ursula tossed her immaculate helmet. ‘I am the one—it is always I.'

‘Well, Baby, you have the toothpaste money behind you.'

‘Not in realisable cash. Most of it's invested in what will be left to the nation.' She waved her hand vaguely to indicate the objects in her house. ‘That was what Julius wanted.'

‘You can't tell me that an old fox like Wogs—and a vixen like you, darling—didn't allow yourself a few peanuts, golden ones, to play around with.'

‘How horrid you can be!' Ursula was so put out by her adored brother she was only too glad of friendship however recent and superficial. ‘Rod has never understood, Eadith, what I've been through. As if death weren't enough—on top of it the death duties! I can only believe it suits my brother not to realise. Having frittered away his own, he expects me to fritter what is left of what in fact I don't control.'

Perhaps as a relief from her exasperation she poured a saucer of milky tea for her unwanted decorative dogs, which, in their clumsiness, they slopped over a Persian rug.

All the perfection, the elegant contrivances against sordid life, seemed to be deserting Ursula. She had got up and was striding jerkily round the room.

‘Nobody,' she moaned, ‘can imagine my responsibilities. The tenants alone! Down in the village they expect me to install a
flushing lavatory
in every cottage. At the rents they pay!'

Rod remained preserved in calm. ‘If you don't,' he suggested, ‘your head will roll the quicker at the Revolution.'

‘By now I don't care. And you, darling Eadith,' she had approached
her friend and, bending down, embraced her almost passionately, ‘what you must think of us! At least I know part of what you're thinking: how glad I am to have held off and escaped a monster.'

After this the lady of the house announced she was a wreck and must lie down before dinner.

Gravenor might have decided, not necessarily that he, too, was a wreck, but that he had had enough of an outsider who had seen and heard too much. He withdrew, smelling of gunpowder, Eadith thought, in an opposite direction from his sister.

Left alone, the guest went out on a paved terrace guarded by a balustrade, and urns from which trailers of a small white flower, suggestive of premature moonlight, were spilling over. Early though it was, the dark had begun gathering, or not so much dark as mist rising through a beech copse in a hollow. Ursula herself could not have planted such mature trees, though she might have deployed them thus if she had. They went with her, as did the white flowers and the deceptively unostentatious house, its grey now deepening to overall mauve.

Eadith wandered some distance from the house through the moist air of the gathering darkness and perfectly tended informal surroundings. Hungry for colour, she looked for the delphiniums Ursula must surely have had her gardeners plant, but on this evening of mist their few early spires seemed to have been drained, or infused with the prevailing white. The one sustaining note, she owed to memory: that of a crimson hibiscus trumpet which suddenly blared through the scoring of this lovely effete damp-laden garden.