The Twyborn Affair (54 page)

She touched her hair and went down to find Gravenor, who called to her from the kitchen.

It was a small, improvised, littered room. She saw at first glance that the expensive utensils were dented or chipped—genuinely used, unless he threw them at himself when alone. Or at someone else if he weren't.

‘I don't eat lunch,' he apologised, ‘but we'll have something.'

They sat at a scarred table putting away lashings of indifferent cheese perilously perched on hunks of bread. She could see her violent lipstick coming off on the crust of a cottage loaf. They were both cramming in too hard the food which was, for Rod at least, another apology to common man; while Eadith's apology was for herself and that phoenix inside her which in the nature of things would never experience re-birth.

She put out a hand, and they were holding each other's, in her case holding off, fingers buttery, smelling of chain-store Cheddar.

He made coffee and they began listening—oh, no, she might have protested—to the
Grosse Fuge
on the gramophone. When they had descended—and it was no escalator, no apparition on the way up, only the dentist drilling at the ultimate in nerves—she got up out of the low-slung sofa, hoping he was not aware of what she heard as a strangulated fart.

She said, ‘Rod, darling—I think I'll go for a walk—by myself. It's what I need.'

She stood above him, like a soubrette swinging the organdy hat, about to launch into a number, whereas in her self of selves she might have been preparing to drown in Wagnerian waves of love and redemption.

‘You know what to avoid,' he told her. ‘On the sea side, the
Army. If they're not on hand to prevent you clambering through the barbed wire, there are mines along the beach.'

He had a coldsore breaking out. She could have fallen on it and sucked it dry. But contented herself with a few little half-coughs, half-sobs, which he probably interpreted as dispassion.

All through the grey-green landscape, the colour of succulents, samphire, dirty sand, lichened stone, blown cloud, war was gathering, she could feel. She could smell blanco, Brasso, male armpits, sergeant-majors' crotches, the phlegm in their screamed orders from away down beyond the uvula, as a prelude to the scream of shells.

Her clothes were almost falling off her as she struggled through the soft sandy soil held together by stones and the sea plants which struggle to maintain themselves between salt air and sand. Her ankles were swelling, she thought. She must struggle back to the lover she had failed, and would continue failing, because of the importance his illusions held for both of them. As she went, her expensive version of the tart's shoe was grinding the starved, dirty-pink pig's face, leaving a trail of inevitable desolation.

She avoided her host until having to face him at dinner. Looking out of her window, she was alerted by a smutch of bronze light glowering on this Anglo-Flemish landscape. Downstairs, Rod was working in the kitchen, wearing a waterproof apron edged with a fly-specked frill.

In what was part-library part-dining room he had lit candles, illuminating the spines of collected works, encyclopaedias, reference books, none of them, from what she saw, complete, certainly none relevant to an insoluble personal relationship, and not much more helpful in a universal context now that the accumulation of human wisdom had been withdrawn from circulation, the voice of percipience silenced, during a re-shuffling of the cards.

Rod came mumbling into the room. Rather than fiddle with black-out curtains, and to enjoy the lingering natural light, he pinched out the candle-flames with his fingers. The room was filled with dusk and a smell of dying candles.

Regardless of his waterproof apron, Lord Gravenor sat graver
than ever at the head of the table while they ate the meal he had cooked for her: none of the village body's stew and rice pudding, but a soup so delicate she failed to identify its origins, chicken breasts in cream with slivered truffle, no sweet, but grapes which actually tasted of grape. Lord Gravenor's wartime dinner would have encouraged cynicism if it hadn't been for the air of last supper about it.

When what must have been the last of her lipstick had come off on the napkin, she looked at him and said, ‘I'm touched that you should go to so much trouble for somebody so unresponsive,' hastening to add something, anything, to disguise the wound she had inflicted on herself, ‘That's the kind of remark I'd have made to my parents if I hadn't been numbed by youth, cruelty—yes, a bit—and fear.' But it didn't help matters at all.

Gravenor didn't comment. He sat behind the shambles of their finished meal, hands clamped between his knees, a travesty in a moustache and a frilly waterproof apron. It was she who seemed invested with the authority and arrogance of manhood; till anger or regret forced her up. She gathered the dishes and started slinging them about in the sink.

Through the window a dollop of yellow moon had appeared in a slate-coloured sky above the black coils of protective wire. By moonlight the concrete defence measures were more than ever irregular teeth.

She plunged, and again plunged, her talons into greasy water. Whatever she handed him he meekly dried, then began to organise the black-out curtains.

The house became stifling.

She escaped to her room, though it wasn't by any means an escape, for she could not lock her door against this kindly man as she had locked it in his sister's exclusive whore-house.

He came to her of course. He lay beside her. The weight of his body tightening the bedclothes over hers, distressed her. She was moved to turn, but either way might have distressed Gravenor more. It seemed that his intention was not to possess her, but to give expression to what he saw as their relationship.

‘You're what I always wanted, Eadith. Not that I can explain, exactly. Not that I'd want to. It might be embarrassing for both of us. Baby would be horrified.'

Eadith found some comfort exploring a whorl in the nape of his neck, and buried under the sandy hair, the crater of a boil extinct since little-boyhood. ‘If you don't want to, don't tell me, then,' she tried to reason with him.

‘Nanny might have understood. The jokes she had with Elsie were pretty borderline as I remember. Elsie did the dirty work of the nursery—brought the food from hatch to table—mopped up when we vomited those boiled brains. Nanny was in many ways an imitation of my mother, but touchable. She had a moustache. I used to put up my hand—and stroke this soft black—animal.'

He was drowsing by now in Nanny's bed. She held him to her.

How the Bellasis children if left to themselves returned to the nursery, in refuge from the noble parents, sycophant guests, and the hierarchy of downstairs servants.

She told him. ‘Your fingers still smell of candle-wick. That was a big show-off downstairs in the dining room. I've always been afraid of burning myself.'

They were both more than a little drunk, but fortunately not drunk enough. When she suggested he leave her, he obeyed without protest, so that their relationship remained intact, which was how she must keep it.

 

She must have been awakened by protesting cries from other voices. It was the same room, except that all but the essentials of furniture had been removed. In this bare, clinical interior the light did not come from the bedside lamp, which she could remember switching on and off, nor was it related to normal daylight. As the room was windowless, she saw, the light falling around her could only have been shed from within, yet from no visible light fittings.

Throughout this flesh-coloured, infra-natural light, she became aware of a fluttering of the bird-voices, moth-like hands, of a brood of children she did not attempt to count. They were too many and
too unearthly, also too frightening, in particular the eyes and mouths, which were those of flesh-and-blood children, probing, accusing the room's focal point, herself.

She understood by degrees that the children wanted out; the safe, windowless room (its walls even upholstered, she noticed) was the cause of their distress and she the one they held responsible for their unreasonable imprisonment.

‘But my darlings,' her voice sounded as odd as her use of a term she had always tended to avoid, ‘here you'll be safe, don't you see?'

But the children continued battering with flat hands on the unresponsive walls, a drumming to which was added, she could hear, sounds of gathering confusion outside, as of wind rising, waves pounding, and worse, human voices screaming hatred and destruction as some monstrous act, explosive and decisive, was being prepared.

She, too, had begun screaming as she tore free from the hospital sheets pinning her down. ‘Can't I make you realise?' She lunged among the milling children, trying to gather them into her arms as though they had been flowers. ‘Safe—as you'll never be outside.'

Almost all of them eluded her. Only one little crop-headed boy she succeeded in trapping. She was holding his pink head against her breast, when he tore the nightdress she was wearing, and it fell around her, exposing a chest, flat and hairy, a dangling penis and testicles. To express his disgust, the pink-stubbled boy bit into one of the blind nipples, then reeled back, pointing, as did all the children, laughing vindictively as their adult counterparts might have, at the blood flowing from the wound opened in the source of their deception, down over belly and thighs, gathering at the crotch in such quantities that it overflowed and hid the penis. The dripping and finally coagulating blood might have gushed from a torn womb.

 

She awoke again, this time to the less hostile reality of Gravenor's guest room, her comparatively smooth body slimy with sweat inside an intact nightdress. A steely light of false dawn entering by a crack between the black-out curtains had replaced the sterile
timeless light of her windowless dream. She got up chafing her arms. She could hear what was either a thunderstorm or gunfire, but far out at sea. Along the coast the black coils of wire, the white dragons' teeth, were beginning to materialise.

After dressing she walked some way through the Anglo-Flemish landscape, at each step experiencing the same struggle to withdraw her by no means exaggerated heels from the grey sand and mangled pig's-face.

She must have walked for over an hour. A red sun was rising out of a northern sea. At points along the coast one of the dun-coloured figures would train binoculars on the seascape. Obsessed by the prospect of invasion, they showed no interest whatsoever in what might have been a rewarding suspect in their rear.

When she got in she returned to her room to make up her face before going in search of Gravenor. Her natural lips tasted of salt; there were encrustations at the corners of her eyes, a mingling of sea salt, tears, the detritus which dreams leave.

She found him in his room doing press-ups in his underpants: the long form of an almost transparent, pink grasshopper.

‘Why don't you join me?' he suggested. ‘The exercise would do you good' as he went on pressing his chest against the carpet, and up.

‘I've taken my exercise. Along the coast. For quite two hours.'

‘What a glutton! You might have been arrested by a captain. Or raped by a sergeant.'

‘I think I've learnt enough to hold them off.'

Gravenor carried on with his press-ups. Feathered like a bronze cockerel on the shoulders, the pronounced vertebrae so exposed, the calves and Achilles tendons so strained, the heels polished almost as white as the bone beneath the skin, she was overcome by a tenderness which made her avoid them. She went and looked out the window at a view which was becoming hateful to her, as hateful as the blind room in her dream.

‘I'm going to leave you today,' she said. ‘It was foolish of me to come. And you to have asked me.'

‘If that's how you feel, I'll run you over to the station.'

All the banalities of human intercourse were called into play in the kitchen as he served her with a coddled egg, Oxford marmalade, and burnt toast.

He told her she had made herself look ‘extraordinarily attractive' and she cackled back at him in self-defence, like an ageing whore who would not have given up doing the boat-trains if the boat-trains hadn't been taken over.

For all that, he didn't seem discouraged.

Although unpunctual at the station, they arrived at the moment the train came in sight.

‘I'll write to you,' he told her as they broke free from a hurried kiss.

She couldn't say she would reply because, from the little she had been able to gather, she wouldn't know how to find him. By the same token, he might never reach her.

She looked back out of the narrow window for a last glimpse of this sandy man, standing in his baggy, wind-blown clothes in a flat landscape.

Tentacles from a frayed and grubby antimacassar were trying for a hold on her hair as she lay back against the upholstery and closed her eyes to the press-ups, the pronounced vertebrae, the tense buttocks trembling inside cotton drawers, images she didn't succeed in shutting out; they were projected in even more vivid detail on the dark screen her eyelids had let down.

 

In Beckwith Street the train of events provoked the house's longstanding patrons to higher flights of lechery. Then there was a newer breed of client, his motives more obscure, often tortuous. If he was less dishonest than the regulars, it was because his unconscious reasons for disguising the truth were usually pure. These survivors of lost battles seemed intent on avoiding any accusation of heroism, let alone experience of transcendence, which some of them had evidently undergone. Those whose prayers had been answered no longer appeared to have faith, as though prayer were a drug which
can outlive its virtue and fail to arrest future threats, more especially the constantly recurring disease of recollection. Now the survivors were falling back on brutishness; not only to absolve them of the sins of embarrassing heroism and shameful spirituality, but to dissolve memories of cowardice, authorised murder, dying friends, the faces of unknown families escaping with their bundles from the wreckage of their normal lives, the mummified death-throes of figures in a burnt-out tank, or a form shrouded in a parachute casually hanging from a tree.