The Twyborn Affair

by Patrick White

  But on nights when overtaken by remorse, after she had moved in, though before the house was finished or staffed, she might stamp along the Embankment, face to the darkening river, its steel mirrors reflecting the underbelly of truth, unlike the domestic looking-glass which reveals the worst with cheerfully objective candour. Honestly, she couldn’t think why she had taken the direction she had. Or she could; one always can—but can’t. She would have liked to see the house razed. On the other hand she wouldn’t like. It was her work of art: its reflexions, its melting colours, the more material kitchen quarters, the less and more material girls she was bringing together, each skilled in one or other of the modes of human depravity.

  Her whores. She would expect them to obey what she saw as almost a conventual rule. If she had been artist or mystic enough, she would have inspired her troupe, or order, to chasten with boredom and self-examination those whose lust they indulged. As she was chastened by her own unrealisable desires. As she tramped the Embankment, her hand skimming the parapet between herself and the river, she was touching Gravenor’s squamous skin: the ignoble lord, her would-be and rejected lover, who might have wrecked the structure of life by overstepping the limits set by fantasy.

  She turned back and reached her half-finished house, which was smelling of sawdust, paint, new carpets, and a pork chop Ada had been frying for her. The chop was served on a kitchen plate, a kidney still prettily attached, and accompanied by onion rings and apple quarters. She sat down to it without even shedding her cape, in her greed her jewelled hands clattering against whatever she touched, Ada hovering in close attendance.

  While she was living in Hendrey Street Ada had come to her as cleaner: a squat, dour woman from the North, which part of it Eadith could never remember, if she had ever known. Unwilling to share the details of her own life, she did not expect others to offer autobiographies, unless it was their vice to expose themselves. Ada might have been a gloomy companion, black hair scraped back from the forehead, thick, glistening eyebrows, high cheekbones and a heavy mouth, which suggested Slav origins, or the face of Verlaine. What saved her from being a menace were her bursts of electrifying laughter for some private joke, usually unfunny when it was coaxed out of her, and a sweet, illuminating smile for those in whom she had put her trust. That somebody had betrayed her trust seemed probable. It was what drew her closer to her mistress. In time Eadith grew to believe that Ada might die for her. It was a sad thought for one who had made up her mind that she herself would die by an act of God and not from the wounds of human love.

  Ada (Potter was her other name) would be dressed in self-knitted silk jumpers while surrounded by her brooms, her mops, and buckets of grey water. She had lived somewhere Kennington way; even that wasn’t pinpointed. In Beckwith Street, promoted to a higher rank, she was got up in browns, or black, with white eyeletted or lace collars, a conventual habit if it hadn’t been for a cameo of nymphs and satyrs Mrs Trist ordained her deputy should wear at her throat. Ada grew sterner with authority, her smile the sweeter when it reappeared on the heavy face. Eadith began to include Ada in the list of those she had loved: Angelos Vatatzes, Edward Twyborn, Peggy Tyrrell (grudgingly, the frightful Prowse), the cold, squamous Gravenor. She wondered how she could show her love apart from leaving this servant a jewel. Love can never be conveyed except by the wrong gestures. So poor Ada of the sweet smile, too hairy no doubt in the context of her womanhood, would never know.

  The flowers for her hothouse Mrs Trist took time to acquire, intending them to be as exquisite, as diverse, as unexpected as satiated man might desire. Seeming to sense they would look out of place, Bobbie and Mercedes faded away without rancour before the Hendrey Street flat changed tenants, while aesthetic standards saved Mrs Trist from the extremes of conscience. An artist must guard against the tendency to sentimental indulgence, an abbess resist threats to a vocational ideal. The inspired bawd has in her a little of each.

  (Only when giving way to her inner nature after a few brandies, masticating with the ugly greed which a gob of chewing-gum induces, seated at a dressing-table opposite a probably fake rococo mirror in the small but splendid room referred to by the innocent or generous as ‘Madam’s boodwah’, she could have cried, in fact she did let out a yelp or two, for the actuality she had been grasping at all her life without ever coming to terms with it. On reaching one of the lower levels of her dilemma, she would fart at her own reflexion in the glass, and after pressing the flavourless gum into a crevice of rococo plaster, fall on the bed, ruffling her body-hair, heaving and sobbing, and if favoured by images and orgasm, perhaps drop off for an hour or two.)

  Her girls, the lubricious sisters composing the order of which she was head, only saw her in perfect command. She liked to have them cluster round her: her ranks of mimulus, and leopard lilies, and pale orchids on resilient stems.

  There was a black orchid from Sierra Leone.

  There was an unexpected, contrasting tuft of pink oxalis, from Leamington. A schoolteacher still in her spectacles. Mrs Trist insisted on the spectacles.

  All her spring flowers, her vernal nuns, appeared scrupulously sprayed. She aimed at cultivating in them that effect between the tremulous and the static which the flowers in an expensive florist’s window derive from artificial dew. Their clothes she chose herself, and she made it a rule that clients should not see their prospects naked in the public rooms; nakedness, she felt, discourages desire, though many would have dismissed her view as morbid idiosyncrasy.

  Sometimes in the late afternoon her girls might assemble without their gorgeous habits in what had been the withdrawing room, which extended the whole of the first-floor front, and expose themselves to the pigeon-tones of light slanting down the street from the river, their nipples and the soles of their feet emblazoned with rose and gold, a suggestion of ashen mauve adrift in the clefts between breasts and thighs.

  It might be the rosy spiral of a navel at the apex of an embossed belly, or elephant-creases in upturned buttocks, or the sculptured ebony fetish from the hills above Freetown, which most delighted Madam when she came in at a slack hour to consort with the roly-poly of girls, clustered on divans and overflowing on to the pile of the still untrampled Heal’s carpet. Herself always fully clothed, she sat amongst them, caressing tender flesh with her tongue, dabbling her fingertips, almost making music as she combed youthful skin with her brittle crimson talons.

  ‘God, madam, you’ll wear out the stock before the shop opens!’ Helga groaned; a frail blonde, she was in actual life the lover of Jule, the Sierra Leone negress.

  Mrs Trist laughed and moved to the couch where Elsie the ex-teacher was reclining, sharp pink nipples tantalising in the light sifted through beige net, trickles of light settling in a moist, prickling crotch.

  Elsie hoisted an elbow. ‘If you don’t let me alone, Eadith, I might bite off the first cock I catch sight of. And no one but Madam to blame.’

  Mrs Trist withdrew her lips from a Mount of Venus in oxalis pink.

  She sat up and said, ‘Let’s see what we’ve got for tea. Better get up our strength, girls, before the lions prowl in, looking for the jungle.’

  The girls jumped up, giggling, squeaking, flopping, exchanging slaps and kisses, and got into old comfortable shifts, most of these the worse for rouge, liquid powder, and other signs of their trade, before trooping down to the kitchen to see what Mrs Parsons had for them. It might be faggot-and-peas, or chitterlings, or bangers and mash, followed by the strong Indian tea most of them could not have done without. Elsie enjoyed a glass of ginger beer, and Melpo brewed her own coffee in a mbriki. (‘That prick of yours, Melp! The sound of the word gives me the shudders at five o’clock of an afternoon.’)

  All mucking in together at the long, scoured, kitchen table. All the clatter and yammer of a platoon of whores. Lashing their tongues round a mouthful of good, solid fare. Then reckoning with their stomachs, their thoughts, in the steam from strong tea, or over an eggshell of muddy Greek coffee.

/>   Mrs Trist herself often joined in, plumes trailing through chitterlings as a long sinewy arm reached out across the communal table for another boiled potato. Her mouth gone to pot. Her over-strong chin piled with mauve to purple shadow.

  When satisfied, they sat around in their comfy gowns and sleazy kimonos picking their teeth with their nails, scratching breast, armpit, or crotch in the practical manner a girl’s anatomy demands. Assuming little faint airs of ladies they had known or thought themselves to be. Those more convinced of their own superior origins farting and burping to apologise for what their colleagues could not boast.

  Till the doorbell might sound, when the whole order tingled to its nerves’ ends and the Mother Superior became the Sergeant-Major.

  ‘Go on, youse! Shoot!’ she shouted. ‘The lot of yer!’

  And they all shot, in their bedraggled, bedrizzled, comfortable garments. To become the creatures of caprice and fantasy the evening might demand. The sulky amongst them more hesitant: those who had seen a penis too many preparing to give notice like any overworked maid, who couldn’t carry up another tray or black another grate, or on a higher level, wall-jumping nuns who imagined an outside world in which love was less abstract and choice free.

  They filed out to their dressing rooms, or cells, and were soon patting and smearing themselves, or asking forgiveness and guidance of Our Lady (not forgetting the Panayia.)

  At this hour Mrs Trist was superb, at her most forbidding, stalking through the public rooms in her bracelets, plumping a cushion, to the vast irritation of the noble sisters opposite drawing brocade over net which had ceased to be opaque, filling japanned or Fabergé boxes with cigarettes, rose- mauve- or gold-tipped, their perfumes mingling with the smell from stale tobacco-crumbs left inside, ordering Ada, Ida and Vi to fetch the dishes of salted almonds, oily olives, sheathed pistachios which blunt Anglo-Saxon fingers avoided entirely, or on being caught out, heeled under velvet fringes of sofa or divan, or in the case of more reticent or passive clients, waiting for expert nails to split the phallus-shaped pistachio and pop it, if not an oily olive, into a complacently fleshed, or thin and chapped, though equally greedy, male mouth.

  These were the preliminaries. Only a girl or two at first shuffling amongst the empty nutshells. Bored. Mrs Trist in attendance, encouraging participation and choice. Frowning on any individual who did not appreciate the favour he was being done in her superior house, and anyone who threatened to pass out too soon. For those who met with her approval, for his looks, or for having paid somebody else’s unpaid bill, she was likely to cook a dish of kidneys and onion rings at dawn, before going out for her walk through a deserted park.

  To get the stale air, cigarette smoke, kidney fumes out of her hair.

  To receive the kiss of morning, the more acceptable for being so delicate and abstract compared with the sweaty, abrasive, rib-cracking embraces of venal men.

  Herself was able to avoid those; no one would have dared, not even Gravenor her patron.

  He was driving her to look at a famous garden thrown open to the public for some charitable purpose. It would have pleased him better to take her on a normal occasion and force the owners (family again) to receive his companion, the proprietress of a fashionable brothel, if she hadn’t preferred anonymity outside her professional sphere.

  ‘I still wonder why you got yourself into such an ugly business,’ he told her while driving down a Sussex lane.

  ‘But it’s not all ugly. You of all men should know that. Some of my girls are superb, some of my jewels are collectors’ pieces.’ She laughed her laugh, dry enough for a dilettante to appreciate; as he obviously did. ‘Besides, I didn’t get myself into it. I was nudged at first, then pushed, the way one is. Certainly I could have resisted but oh well, I didn’t. We go along with the times, don’t we? If that’s the way the current is flowing, most of us are carried.’

  Rocked by the car between stuffy hedgerows, the grass verges full of cow-parsley and hay fever, they were growing indolent.

  A little farther on he put out a hand, and took the hand nearest him. Yet a little farther, on sensing danger, she withdrew.

  ‘I’d say you take full advantage of all my house has to offer. And helped found it, for God’s sake.’

  ‘For God’s sake, the reason I keep coming back is for you—not any of your boring whores. Risking every bone in my body with some thrashing negress, exposing my parts to an angular Midlands schoolteacher. If you won’t let me fuck you, darling, what I enjoy is the supper, or best of all, breakfast when you cook it for me.’

  They rocked, and laughed.

  ‘It’s as simple as that. Or could be,’ he said.

  In any of its permutations her life had never been simple. Would she have enjoyed it more if it had? She thought she wouldn’t, then that she would. And again, not; she did not covet the confidence, the ‘strength’, the daguerreotype principles of even the most admirable one-track male, nor, on the other hand, those mammary, vaginal, ovarian complications, the menopausal hells of a sex pledged to honour and obey. Yet she would have loved to receive this dry-cool man Gravenor inside her, to leave her mark on his skin for acquaintances to discuss and deplore, as though teeth-marks and bruises preclude love and respect. She could have loved and respected Gravenor in spite of his flaws, which she understood for their being to a great extent her own. She envied those in a position to love without reservation of any kind. Probably there were few such loves. At the heart of most marriages, even spiritual attachments, lurks the whore-nun or the nun-whore.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  Arrived at the stately home, they drove between heraldic gateposts, and were soon immaculately sauntering through historic gardens, admiring the azaleas, losing themselves in the yew maze. The alpines were exquisite that year.

  She was proud of her parade of girls. On better nights the ritual developed a refulgent swank. Not only in the public rooms, but in the private consummation of the client’s lust.

  A craftsman had fitted a concealed eye to each cell of this elaborate comb of which she was the animating principle. She would not have disclosed to anybody the existence of what was in a sense a humiliating toy, least of all to Gravenor, whom she must continue to admire, but who, as voyeur, would have been reduced in her estimation. She could not have explained how a common peep-hole becomes an omniscient eye, how it illuminated for her the secret hopes and frustrations struggling to escape through the brutality, the thrust and recoil, the acts of self-immolation, the vicious spinsterly refinements which shape the depravity of men—her own included. She would have liked to believe that, even if it did not purify, lust might burn itself out, and at the same time cauterise that infected part of the self which, from her own experience, persists like the core of a permanent boil.

  She was devoted to her more dedicated girls, and decorated with her jewels those most likely to act out her gospel. The nucleus of her order lived in. Then there were the novices, on call. They were unreliable on the whole; they even got married and quietly distributed themselves through outer suburbs and provincial cities, where they upheld virtue against those they suspected of backsliding. Mrs Trist couldn’t blame them, but distinguished between amateurs and those in whom she recognised a vocation.

  Whatever their rank, they all got together in the kitchen, sitting over bacon-rind and the sludge of congealing egg as they discussed the night’s activities, rehearsing a gimmick for the next session, wondering what unnecessary goods to splurge their earnings on, the more silent, she could tell from confidences made on private occasions, mentally adding to the balance of pretty substantial savings accounts. Some of them were supporting aged parents, a husband, or a sponging lover. A certain girl handed over most of her money to a church.

  Lydia was one of Mrs Trist’s most beautiful and accomplished whores. She had hoped to become a concert pianist, and worked hard enough at the piano at the convent where she was educated. In spite of the enth
usiasm of the nun who was her teacher, and the prospect of going to Paris to study with a famous virtuoso, she realised her music was less a vocation than the desire to dazzle.

  ‘Oh, and I was lazy too, Mrs Trist. The everlasting practice!’

  ‘I’d have thought that being a whore was as demanding in its way—and everlasting.’

  ‘Yes, but you just let it happen.’

  ‘From what I hear, the men who have had you are impressed by your great virtuosity. That must be more than just letting it happen.’

  ‘Oh no, it’s the same as virtuosity in music—when there’s just that—nothing more than the desire to astonish—no heart or compulsion.’

  Lydia sighed and looked at her watch. ‘I’ll be late,’ she said, ‘if I don’t get a move on.’ Every morning she went to early mass, and evenings to confession. Some of Lydia’s clients, her boss suspected, had left their cassocks behind them.

  ‘I feel fucked out, Mrs Trist,’ Lydia confessed, driving the lipstick down on her mouth, clothing her lips decently before receiving the sacrament. ‘I’m thinking of giving the game away.’

  ‘I wonder anybody so religious ever thought of taking it on.’ The whore-mistress sounded prim.

  ‘If it gives pleasure …’ Lydia smoothed her lips with her lips.

  Staring at herself in the glass she had never looked so lustrous; the white parting in the blue-black hair, the delicate nostrils, and bland mouth. Her confessor could only have found Lydia’s sins forgivable.

  ‘But any day I could give it away.’

  ‘What would you do instead?’

  ‘I’d really like to fall asleep and wake in Heaven.’

  Mrs Trist could not quiz the girl on her conception of Heaven because Lydia would have been late for mass.

  The bawd went to her own room and fell asleep so deep that, on waking, she could not remember where she had been.