The Twyborn Affair

by Patrick White

  ‘Cottage stuff,’ she apologised.

  She was short on the eats: a plate of Nanny’s bread-and-butter, and a sponge hidden under a cushion of raspberry-embroidered cream.

  The two women were beginning to feel cosier.

  ‘I do admire you,’ Ursula said, after nibbling for propriety’s sake at a corner of her bread-and-butter, ‘for your originality and independence—in choosing the life you wanted to lead.’

  ‘In choosing? I’d like to think it, but never feel anything but chosen.’

  Having introduced her theory, Ursula was not to be deflected. ‘In our case—in mine, I mean—it’s so much more difficult to break the mould in which one has been set.’

  Here she deliberately hesitated, hoping for a clue to the mould in which her friend had been set originally, by fate, if not by tradition.

  But Eadith was in no way helpful. She only mumbled a sort of agreement, and devoured the rest of her bread-and-butter, like a hungry man after a day on the moors.

  Ursula might have been reminding herself that Eadith Trist was a woman of strong will.

  ‘I mean,’ said Lady Ursula, ‘it’s all mapped out for us. Marriage with someone desirable. Wogs—well, Wogs was a family necessity, but don’t think I didn’t come to adore him. He was my halfway house to freedom. I could never have kicked over the traces like Cecily Snape—God knows—or you, Eadith darling.’ She hesitated, it seemed interminably. ‘I’m told,’ she said at last, ‘you’re from one of the—Dominions, which no doubt made it easier.’

  Even she must have heard how terrible it sounded, for she seized a knife and cut into the cake. It proved stale, but for the moment looked ghastly rich, with raspberry blood trickling down snowy crevasses.

  Again Eadith was most unhelpful. ‘Ah, the Dominions—yes,’ she sighed, her voice dying on a note the English themselves might have approved.

  She accepted a wedge of Ursula’s cake, and wallowed in it, in spite of the staleness of the sponge. She was hungry, and perhaps also indiscriminate. She enjoyed a good blow-out when it offered itself, which may have explained Gravenor’s remark about the nymphomaniac inside her.

  She sniggered inexplicably. It made Ursula glance at this grotesque creature with cream and raspberry smeared over magenta lipstick.

  Because of all she had been taught, Ursula was quick to ask, ‘That lipstick, Eadith—tell me the shade, and where you get it.’

  Only then Eadith came out with, ‘I hate it! It makes me look old, ugly, and common.’ She visualised her tongue sticking out from between her lips like that of some frilly lizard baited by a terrier bitch.

  ‘Oh, but darling!’

  ‘No. It’s true.’

  Ursula sat tossing her ankle in Alice-in-Wonderland style. She was reared an expert at ignoring. Eadith knew by now that Ursula would never refer to Dulcie’s amateurish abortion.

  ‘My dear brother is what I want to talk about,’ Ursula said. ‘You’ve been so good for him—darling. Women fall for Rod right and left. He’s in perpetual danger of making a dire mistake. You, Eadith, save him by holding off. I want you to know I’m truly grateful.’

  Surprising even to herself, Eadith replied, ‘I love Rod, and for that reason, would rather remain his friend.’

  Ursula looked startled as she studied the implications. ‘I’ve always felt friendship, to a man, is something from which women are excluded—just as a woman can only rely on a woman as her friend. None of those abnormal relationships of course!’ she was quick to add.

  ‘True friendship,’ Eadith decided after wiping off the cream and most of the hateful magenta lipstick, ‘if there is anything wholly true—certainly in friendship—comes, I’d say, from the woman in a man and the man in a woman.’

  Ursula’s agitated ankle was stilled. She appeared aghast. Was her new friend perhaps more intellectual than she’d bargained for?

  She came as close as Baby had ever got to a giggle. ‘You make it sound almost perverse, Eadith!’

  After which, she stood up, strolled round the bloody shambles on her Georgian tea-tray, and looking at herself in a minor glass, its frame studded with semi-precious stones, touched up her flawless helmet a little.

  While Eadith glanced at a clock, equally exquisite, though less prominent than the studded mirror; not so inconspicuous, however, that it might not speed the lingering guest. By now she realised Gravenor would not appear, whether by his own inclination, or his sister’s design.

  ‘I do hope,’ Ursula ventured on their reaching the chequered hall, ‘that you’ll spend a few days with me at “Wardrobes”.’

  She glanced at Eadith, and if earlier on, Baby had never come so close to a giggle, she had never come closer to a kiss than in the peck she bored into the cheek of her unlikely friend. ‘Rod would love it,’ she encouraged.

  Mrs Trist went out, and after lowering her head, climbed inside the cab Peacock had called. Though the butler offered physical assistance, she was too ignorant, ‘independent’, or perhaps too colonial, to avail herself of his attentions.

  Two or three weeks later Mrs Trist received a letter.

  Dearest Eadith,

  You will remember we discussed your coming down to ‘Wardrobes’. I am writing to suggest you choose your week-end—and do make it a long one—Friday till Monday—Thursday till Tuesday if you feel expansive and can tear yourself away from your business. (Ada appeared so competent.)

  Most of us lead such busy lives we need our little distractions. I’d particularly like you to come while Spring is still with us.

  Yours affectly,

  Ursula

  P.S. Rod would love to drive you down.

  As the bawd had not set eyes on Rod since the afternoon he brought his sister to Beckwith Street she doubted he would love to drive her down. Yet there was evidence that she had not fallen entirely from grace in that she received indirect guidance from him at a moment when she most needed it.

  Mrs Trist could have become involved in a tiresome scandal following the death of a brigadier, whose brother, a worldly cleric, had also been known to patronise her house (in discreet mufti, needless to say.) Brigadier Blenkinsop, whose death might have caused Mrs Trist such vexation, had in fact died astride Jule the negress from Sierra Leone. Jule could not resist boasting, ‘Had a general die on top of me last night. You should’ve heard the clatter his medals made as he left off spurring me on.’ While Helga her lover grew tearful, hysterical, remorseful for the life they were leading, so far removed from her ideal of love between women.

  It was Gravenor, Eadith gathered, who sent her a lawyer, as well as a man of some importance from Scotland Yard whose sympathy might have extended itself had Mrs Trist been willing.

  In the circumstances she had not answered Ursula Untermeyer’s letter. She was too distracted, not only by a scandal fortunately averted by the skill and sympathy of her advisers, and not a little of her own money. She was also emotionally unsettled by an episode of a different kind following on the brigadier’s death and Ursula’s invitation.

  Mrs Trist had been to visit an aged, ailing prostitute known to her slightly from her sojourn in Hendrey Street. Elderly even in those days, Maisie specialised in meeting trains, but would sometimes venture as far as the Dilly and the scornful jeers of the plushy mob in their silver foxes, mink, and squirrel, whose beat it was.

  Maisie had been let live in the attic of a house belonging to a rich benevolent queer, who was in the habit of siphoning off some of her rougher trade. On her patron’s death, the house became the subject of endless legal wrangles, with Maisie a forgotten part of it. On the ground floor, in what had been the dining-room, there was a claw-footed bath lying on its side, for no reason Eadith had ever heard explained. All the lower part of the house was unfurnished, the stairs uncarpeted and dry-rotten, rickety banisters with whole sections of the uprights missing. Only on the attic floor did life return, in a flowering of crochet and knick-knacks, the lank bodies of empty dresses hanging half-hidden by a
faded cretonne curtain, face powder merging with spilt flour, tea becoming grit on an unswept floor. It was pretty much of a mouse-hole, but snug.

  Eadith found Maisie toothless for her illness, though as she remembered, the Victoria Station prostitute had always been inclined to do without her teeth when not professionally engaged.

  Now she cackled at Mrs Trist through the general squalor, leaking gas, and sickroom smells, ‘Love isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, love—or is it?’

  Eadith did not know how to answer, except by sternly mopping up Maisie’s incontinence, and flushing its more solid parts down a grey and reluctant lavatory on a lower landing.

  Maisie wheezed, ‘Don’t worry, love. I’ll be at it again when I’m on me feet.’ Lying side by side with an organdy hat and the grubbiest, most lifeless Arctic fox, the monstrous heels of her glacé shoes bore witness to the torments her feet must suffer. ‘Won’t ever let it get me down. I’ll go straight up amongst those snooty molls on the Dilly. One of ’em, you know, has a wotchermecall—a chow-chow dog on the beat with ’er. Says the bloody dog brings the customers on by pissin’ on their legs.’

  Maisie paused to clear some phlegm out of her throat.

  ‘Those girls are pros. My trouble is—I’ve always been an amatcher. Not that I don’t give an honest-to-God professional fuck. And collect the money that’s due for it. But I always done it—now don’t laugh, Eadie Trist—I done it for love. Whether it was with some Hindu steward, or Gyppo stoker, or poxy British corporal. That was ’ow I built up me business. Anyways, I think it was.’

  Her cheeks were growing flushed as her mind wafted her. If the five-bob tart was raised by her delusions towards apotheosis, the successful bawd was racked by the clearsighted view she had of her own failures, her anxieties, her disproportion. There was little more she could do for the present beyond leaving an assortment of notes beside the oiled carton in use as a sputum mug, and in the kitchen, a saucepan of soup she had brewed up. Maisie, if she ever awoke, would probably ignore the soup in favour of her gin.

  Heading for ‘home’ across the great squares with their classical mansions and fuzz of elms, Mrs Trist was conscious of entering another world of make-believe. At a church the curtain was going up on a fashionable wedding; at a house the guests, both invited and parasitic, were boring into a reception for a Balkan princess. Mrs Trist had read about both these functions while still only projected, in newspapers which the ephemeral chic, including herself, read less and less for fear of what they did not wish to find.

  In the central, proprietorial garden of one of the squares, a gang of men was digging a pit for what people had begun referring to as a ‘shelter’. They paused in their work for a look at the woman passing the other side of the railings. Their expressions, half of them serious, half jocular, did not intimidate her. If she had turned on them and offered what Maisie would have called an ‘honest-to-God professional fuck’, these solid British workmen would have grown sheepish, too bashful to respond, at any rate by daylight, to a lady’s improper suggestion.

  So Mrs Trist spanked on her way, and on reaching a more populous thoroughfare, was faced with an incident involving another elderly woman, of a slightly higher social level than Maisie the sick whore.

  The person in question was falling to her knees. She arrived on them just as Eadith Trist reached the opposite kerb. The woman landed with the dull thump of some commodity unrelated to her station or appearance: flour perhaps, or pollard, or even cement. Her handbag and hat were flung in opposite directions. Exposed by her fall, her hair was of a fashionable cut and tint, at odds with the veined face, the puffy body of a woman of substance rather than rank.

  From kneeling, she had collapsed, and was lying on her side moaning and panting as Mrs Trist reached the opposite shore.

  Too many rescues in one afternoon, Eadith would have liked to decide, till she caught sight of the woman’s knee through a torn stocking, and felt she was to some extent responsible. (The nun inside her would not allow evasion, any more than Gravenor’s ‘nymphomaniac’ could resist the perversions of her own brothel and Maisie’s pavement life.)

  Eadith stood looking down. The victim lay moaning, toadfish mouth smeared with coral lipstick, cheeks, for which the prescribed facials had done next to nothing, palpitating under their network of veins. Dimmed by glaucoma, cataract, or whatever, the staring eyes were not necessarily those of the toad but of any variety of stale fish laid out on the slab at an unreliable fishmonger’s.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ the rescuer, now the victim, advised; ‘I’m going to help you.’

  The woman, or she might have preferred ‘lady’, kept grinding her golden coiffure against the unresponsive pavement. ‘Oh, what will become of us? I’m so grateful, my dear. I’d only like you to know I mustn’t suffer any pain. Money is no object.’ She stretched her arm in the direction of the bag from which she had been separated by an act of God; then began a disconnected whimpering against all acts human or divine.

  Her rescuer helped her into a nearby chemist’s, where she was treated for her few scratches and abrasions. What worried her most was the torn stocking, through which dimpled her milk-white knee, and her restored handbag, for wondering what she might have lost while separated from it. She kept rummaging through the bag, checking its contents: passport, keys, keys, passport; never satisfied, it appeared, until after patting the coils of flesh upholstering her middle, her ribs, her thorax, she hauled up a little chamois bag which must have been lodged somewhere between her breasts.

  Reassured, she sat smiling, if tremulously, on the chemist’s stool. ‘You don’t know what I owe you, darling,’ she informed the one who had cut the strings trussing her as she lay, incredibly, on a London pavement. ‘I am Australian,’ she confessed between gasps, in case her saviour had got it wrong. ‘My husband used to tell me that being Australian had given me an inferiority complex. Well, it isn’t true! It’s simply that one doesn’t want people to mistake one’s better nature for a worse.’

  As on other painfully personal occasions the past began reaching out to Eadith through that shuddering of water which memory becomes visually, till out of time’s wake, and this bloated body straining at the seams of its expensive black, surfaced Joanie Sewell Golson.

  If memory troubled Eadith/Eddie/Eudoxia, there was only a slight presentiment of recognition in Joanie’s blurred eyes and at the corners of her lipstuck mouth, of a colour someone like herself would have considered a ‘pretty feminine tone’.

  Joanie kept peering up. ‘My eyesight isn’t what it used to be. Actually, it’s pretty ghastly. But I shan’t go blind—though they’ve more or less told me that I shall. I’ve begun investigating Christian Science. A bore really. But if it works …’

  She kept on blinking at her rescuer, eyes outlined in rheum, tears, and in spite of Christian Science, the drops with which she would be treating her ailment.

  Old. Or at any rate, older than Eadith.

  Inside her skin Mrs Trist recoiled from Joan Golson’s predicament.

  ‘Shouldn’t I call you a cab?’ she suggested. ‘And help you home?’

  Obsessed by the aura of her benefactress, if not her image, Mrs Golson must have forgotten what had happened, but suddenly remembered she was an object for pity, and slipped back too easily into the cloak of martyrdom.

  ‘Oh dear, yes! If you’d be so kind,’ she whimpered at the woman on whose goodness she depended; and when Eadith had telephoned the cab-rank, and paid for the call, ‘Though my eyesight isn’t what it was, I can tell you’re kind, my dear. I can feel it.’ In spite of her perception, a hand reached out in its black kid glove, a diamond bracelet rustling at the wrist—to touch, to reassure herself, to possess.

  By the time the taxi arrived Mrs Golson had grown very old indeed. Wheezing, groaning, panting, hobbling, she let herself be helped into it. The burden fell on her nurse-companion; the chemist had had enough, and the casualty might have had enough of the chemist the way she shrugged h
im off.

  When the two women were at last alone in the airless taxi, Mrs Golson told, ‘Since my husband died, I seem to have been at the mercy of every-body and everything.’ She might have thrown in God as well if she had known her companion better. ‘Mind you, Curly—poor lamb—had his limitations. He was a man—but we need them, don’t we?’

  Had Mrs Trist tried to free her hand from the black kid vice grasping it, she might not have succeeded. For the present, she let things be.

  ‘Are you married?’ Mrs Golson asked on what seemed like an impulse.

  ‘I expect you could call it that,’ Mrs Trist answered.

  ‘Like most of us.’ Her fellow sufferer sighed; then she brightened. ‘I always enjoyed our breakfasts together. At least I think I did.’

  All the while the stale-fish eyes were directed at the figure beside her. ‘I wish I could see better. I know I’d find something to encourage me to live.’

  They were approaching the hotel Mrs Golson had named as her London address.

  ‘I hope you’ll come, my dear—and we’ll pick a chop together.’

  Only at this point did the black-kid hand relinquish a hand. ‘I’ll give you my card,’ Joanie threatened, and began rummaging again in her overstuffed crocodile bag for the gold card-case. ‘Telephone me,’ the coral mouth, the blear eyes commanded, ‘and I’ll get them to keep us a table in the grill room. So difficult today, but Aldo and I understand each other. Curly used to say, “Got to make it worth their while. Have no illusions about the lower classes”.’ She laughed, exposing her gold bridges for this new and sympathetic friend. ‘I hope to see you,’ she added, without sounding overconfident.

  After the stout person had been ejected from the cab and handed into the keeping of a porter as prolifically hung with brass as any dray-horse, Mrs Trist had herself driven away.

  She sat bowed above the visiting card:

  LADY GOLSON

  38 MORWONG CRESCENT

  VAUCLUSE