The Twyborn Affair (53 page)

This was the London in which Mrs Trist reached the apogee of her career or fate. Not that she aspired to heights. Experience in her several lives had left her with few illusions. She was sceptical of history, except at a ground-floor level. She could not believe in heroes, or legendary actors, or brilliant courtesans, or flawless beauties, for being herself a muddled human being astray in the general confusion of life. (If she had been born all of a piece, she might have become a suburban housewife or, without those brakes which impede a woman's progress or downfall, a small-time down-to-earth whore.)

In her actual situation, she did not believe that people on the whole questioned her bona fides. Dennis Maufey might have as he gibbered snide compliments and stroked the cocks' feathers edging her sleeve. Philip Thring was an idyll so tender it would not have survived a second encounter. Gravenor could not suspect or he would not have continued making discreet demands. Dear Angelos Vatatzes had accepted the anomaly, but within the bounds of Orthodoxy and madness. Distanced by time, Marcia Lushington and Don Prowse could only appear as figments of Eddie Twyborn's lust when not clothed in a human pathos of their own. The Judge and Eadie: Eadie and the Judge. Nothing more difficult than to fit the parents into the warping puzzle without committing manslaughter and condemning yourself for the monster you are and aren't.

She must find Eadie. The Quirks had gone, as had Lady Golson, removing her blood pressure, her arteriosclerosis, her widowhood, and the chamois-leather bag of rings to the safety of Vaucluse Sydney.

Eadith could only feel that Eadie, the other widow, had remained, but where to find her she would not have known, and while wanting to, might not have wanted.

She continued obsessed by the image of her mother in a church pew, black gloves clamped to the prayer-book. She had heard of Italian peasant-women crawling as they licked the floor of the church commemorating their saint, and once in a half-sleep, Eadith
visualised Eadie standing at the end of a platform in the underground, herself licking at the stretch of filth separating her from possible redemption. The crowd had parted to enjoy the spectacle of one engrossed in expressing an entertaining form of madness, but soon lost patience. They closed their ranks and started pushing to catch the train which would carry them home to their savoury mince, bangers, or poached eggs wafting veils as insubstantial as those of a first communion.

In the scrimmage the penitent lost her saint.

She must find her, even if finding doesn't necessarily reveal, nor was there any guarantee that Mrs Justice Twyborn would recognise either the elegant fiction or the down-at-heel frump with stubble sprouting from a violet jaw.

But Eadith longed to feel the texture of remembered skin.

She despaired of ever catching sight of her mother, when here she was, ascending by escalator out of the depths of the underground, Eadith herself descending, on a day of rain. All the faces on the up and down conveyed some purpose. Excepting Eadie Twyborn.

As on the first occasion, Mrs Twyborn was dressed in black, her clothes neat for Eadie, but in no way remarkable. Black gloves holding tight to the prayer-book. As she was carried higher, she was staring straight ahead, her abstracted face drained of any human expression.

For a moment of panic Eadith would have liked to think it was not her mother, that Eadie's weatherbeaten, blotched skin could never have existed under the mask of white powder, that her drunken, lipstuck mouth was in no way related to these meek, colourless lips, that the fire of a passionate disposition could not have been so thoroughly extinguished. And yet she knew that, under the ashes of resignation, the scars of retribution, the weight of grief, it had to be Eadie Twyborn.

Again seized by panic Mrs Trist wondered what on earth she could do about the situation. The climax was approaching: ascending and descending they would soon draw level. Should she lean over and touch her mother? She imagined someone like Dennis
Maufey exclaiming, ‘The hideous melodrama of it, my dear!' Whether melodrama or truth, intense emotion might bring on a heart attack, in an elderly, overwrought woman. And the embarrassment if it were not Eadie: ‘I
am
sorry—so like somebody I used to know' as they were carried apart, the relief, which finally was no relief. Alternately, the pain of, ‘Oh, my darling, where can I find you? Tell me, tell me …' as they were carried upward and downward, out of reach.

Mrs Trist did not lean over to touch. Once more her will had faltered, the moment had eluded her. She would never find out. The answers were not for her.

She looked back at narrow shoulders in a damp black raincoat disappearing into the upper reaches.

A person on Eadith's present level, glancing sideways as they crossed on the down and up, was fascinated by the despair of a strong, but curiously violet chin, the mouth in a soggy face sucking after life it seemed.

Anyhow, the moment of longed-for, but dreaded expiation had once more been evaded, and was followed by one of passionate regret.

Mrs Trist was received into the lower depths and the desirable anonymity of all those who sojourn there.

 

Gravenor rang her. He hadn't made contact since the night of Philip Thring's consummation at the brothel in Beckwith Street.

He wanted her down for the week-end at a place he had in Norfolk (he used to refer to it as his ‘folly').

‘It's quite primitive,' he warned her.

‘Comfortable-primitive, I'm sure.'

They enjoyed sharing a slight laugh.

‘You never trust me, do you? or believe me, Eadith darling.'

She ignored that. ‘But I've my “house”—my business.'

‘We know.'

‘And I'm no good at mucking in with the English in the country. They never get up in the morning.'

‘Don't accuse us, Eadith. I don't want to feel a foreigner. Anyway, where you are concerned.'

There was a long pause on the telephone.

Finally he said, ‘This call's going to work out hellishly expensive. I can only say I
want—you—
to
come
.'

She couldn't give him an answer.

‘I'm going away,' he told her from a greater distance than before.

‘To where?'

‘Out of England.'

She still couldn't bring herself to accept his invitation, but said she would think about it.

When she hung up, the recording of his voice continued playing, just as Eadie Twyborn's apparition never quite left off haunting. From the window she caught a glimpse of those passive, silver cows tethered high above the city. Around her in the house the girls who were less and less hers lay steaming on their beds, prepared to open their legs to anyone in need of their services. One day, she felt, she might walk into the modernised bathroom and take up the razor instead of the toothbrush. (The razor itself, already of antique design, had been a present from Judge Twyborn to his son Eddie.)

She did, however, decide she must accept Gravenor's invitation.

He said, ‘I'll drive up and fetch you, Eadith.'

He had told her he was there ‘sorting out his thoughts' till he went away.

‘No,' she said, ‘I'll come by train.'

‘If you'd rather. I'll meet you at the station, darling.'

She tried to resent being called his darling like some whore-bride who had acquired the label along with an expensive diamond ring; yet she knew it was what she would have chosen.

She wanted to crush her mouth on the chapped-looking lips under the clipped, pink moustache of this emaciated, freckled man. Gravenor in the flesh, and her desire for him, might not have convinced a rational mind any more than would that apparition, narrow-shouldered in its black rain coat, as it was carried upward by the escalator.

Seated in the narrow slot in the train which was jolting her into the increasing flatness of East Anglia, she turned her face away from a landscape which seemed to be moaning at her. Where the latterday Eadie had been wearing gloves and carrying a prayer-book, Eadith's hands were naked and the pressure of her locked fingers was making her rings eat into her.

She hoped she would never arrive; but of course one does.

Rod was waiting for her on the platform, hair sparser than she remembered, legs thinner for a wind blowing his trousers against them. They kissed, his lips cold, thin, yet affectionate, against those which must have felt swollen, grasping, in their otherwise unconfessed desire to be comforted.

She followed up with a rather feeble attempt at rubbing her cheek against his, but he had already withdrawn and she was rubbing instead against a salt wind off the North Sea.

She had not been wrong in thinking the landscape was moaning at her as the train jolted her dispassionately towards her destination. From the direction of the sea came a steady moan insinuating itself between a low sky and a flat landscape. The expectations of those walking through a pale light were duly flattened.

Gravenor was holding her hand, chafing her rings with bony fingers. ‘I'm so glad, Eadith, you could give me some time before I go away.'

‘But where are you going?'

‘I can't tell you.'

It increased the anonymity she had coveted intermittently. Yet Gravenor's refusal added another ominous note to a life which was becoming an orchestration of foreboding. Seated beside him in the car she visualised letters some of her girls had shown her from those they imagined to be real lovers, the dates, place names, sometimes whole lines, even paragraphs excised. Eadith was reminded of games Eddie had played under Nanny's supervision, snipping patterns out of folded paper, in a nursery sealed against draughts and asthma.

Turning to Gravenor she said, ‘Anyway, Rod, I'm glad I came—that we'll have this time together.'

‘If we do have it.'

They were driving through the East Anglian flatlands, which rose very slightly to seaward, protecting them from the forces beyond. As additional protection a straggling crown of black thorns. In one place she noticed an armoured car, dun figures of the military, concrete dragon's teeth and pillboxes, to remind that this low-keyed war was not entirely fantasy.

A flat landscape and preoccupation with war would not allow her to defer answering him for ever.

‘Well, I'm here,' she said. ‘Why shouldn't we enjoy being together?'

‘That's for you to decide. You always close down on me.'

‘I like to think we have something better than sexuality,' she half-lied. ‘Isn't a relationship richer for leaving its possibilities open?'

She turned to see whether she was beating the English at their own game.

He said, ‘Much as I enjoy your company, Eadith, I'd like to know you as a woman—because I love you—even if my temperament doesn't help me convey it.'

It was as difficult for him, she could see, as for herself. She would have liked to leave it at that, but couldn't; she must take more of the blame on herself.

‘Day and night I'm surrounded by whores,' she offered as part excuse. ‘Girls I'm exploiting, I should make clear. Even they like to think they have what they see as true lovers, sometimes only fellow prostitutes they can depend on for comfort and affection—above sexuality.'

Because she sensed she was causing him pain she was racked by her personal dishonesty. If she had been true to her deepest feelings she would have stopped the car, dragged him behind a hedge—and demolished their relationship.

At least what must be the house was beginning to take shape ahead.

‘That's it,' he nodded. ‘The camel couchant.'

The folly forming in the bleached landscape was every bit of that:
its tower-neck in nobler stone patched with mortar, the body of humbler grey flint. Bits added on contributed a ribbed effect, the buckling timber only waiting for time, weather, or invasion to send it flying apart.

‘I love it,' Mrs Trist announced with the glib spontaneity of a guest at an Untermeyer party.

No, she wasn't quite so dishonest; she didn't ‘adore' it.

What appealed to her were aspects of its homely ugliness, the local flints, like the knobs of Gravenor's finger joints. She resisted taking up the hand nearest her, which might have led to more and worse.

After the two of them had struggled inside with her bag, he resumed his apologies in an automatic silence-filling way, ‘… primitive as I warned you, darling.'

There was a fire burning in one room, then in a second. There was more than a touch of luxury, but of a subdued kind, such as the crypto-rich and the aristocratic hope will put them right with democracy.

In the same way the slaves who keep luxury in order may be discounted if they remain invisible.

Rod said, ‘There's an old body comes over from the village and cleans up. Leaves a stew—a rice pudding. Otherwise, I do for myself while I'm here.'

‘I look forward to seeing that.' She meant it tenderly, but he might have taken it as censure.

He left her after showing her her room, which looked out over the dyke, the crown of thorns, and the uncharitable light off a sea which, although invisible from where she was standing, must be lashing itself into frenzied action.

After living through the approach of one, and the early stages of a second and more equivocal war, she was sensitive to hysteria in the elements as well, yet probably, however many wars she experienced, she would not believe in their reality. Any more than she could believe in her own by now middle-aged face, in which every wrinkle was quivering as she repaired her lips in a fogged glass, driving the lipstick in as though committing a rape.

She glanced at her wrist, not so smooth as it should have been because Fatma had let her down that week. She found herself looking, she realised, for Eddie Twyborn's wristwatch: checking the time when we go over the top. The stench of sweat-rotted leather, mud, blood, and was it semen? rose disconcertingly through the concentrated perfume of French Fern.