In fact Eddie Twyborn did. But the Chabrier did not swirl to the same extent as the head waiter, whose gyrations were constantly bouncing the tips of his tails off the convexity of his splendid calves.
Eadie grumbled. ‘I don’t know why you brought us, Edward. We could have lunched much more happily at home. Instead the servants — Etty and Thatcher anyway; it’s Mildred’s afternoon off — will be eating their heads off at your expense and blaming me for being their mistress.’
‘I brought us, my dear,’ said the Judge, trying out the surface of his brown Windsor, ‘for the sake of old times, and to give our son a little treat.’ Here Judge Twyborn might have been blowing on his soup or laughing up his sleeve.
‘Old times …’ Eadie mumbled; then, as though stung by memories, she cried, ‘I think I was born before my time!’ and hit the rim of her plate with her spoon.
‘Sshhh!’ It was the Judge.
‘How do you see it, Eddie darling?’
Eddie was, wrongly, seated between them. The Judge should have been the centre-piece.
Dragged out of focus, and scalding his palate, Eddie said, ‘I like to think, Mother, we’re all of us timeless.’
She began whimpering at her untouched soup.
It could have become embarrassing if a lady had not borne down on them in a braided costume of another age, leaving after an early luncheon; she might have referred to it as ‘dinner’.
She said, ‘It’s such a joy to see you, Mrs Twyborn — Judge,’ smirking at the son of whom she had heard, ‘one of our most distinguished families, re-united.’ Nodding her little postillion hat, she showed them her teeth, in one of which the nerve had died.
‘The War might have destroyed us, but didn’t,’ the lady told them.
‘So kind,’ Eadie murmured, and bowed her head above the untouched soup.
Eddie asked, ‘Who is she?’
‘Red Cross or something like that, I think. I met her when we were knitting for you, darling.’ The nerves had not died in Eadie’s teeth, but nicotine had coated them; everybody had been through it.
The slaves removed the plates and produced others. There was the roast beef with its ruffle of yellow fat, and Yorkshire pudding baked in the shape of a tight bun.
‘Everything in order, Judge?’ asked Mr Effans, who had not yet received recognition for his favours.
‘Everything. Why not?’ the Judge demanded, laughing.
In deference to an old hand, the head waiter smiled and withdrew.
Eadie was again bent on disapproval. ‘Now that is a woman I can’t take to.’
After advancing some way into the dining room, the object of her aversion had seated herself on the opposite side. If she was aware of the disapproval Mrs Judge Twyborn was aiming at her, she gave no indication of it.
The two women sat not exactly looking at each other.
‘Who?’ asked the Judge, glancing out like some noble beast interrupted in his grazing.
‘Marcia Lushington,’ Eadie hissed.
‘She didn’t go back with Greg,’ their son remarked, to take an interest in a world which was shortly to include himself.
Eadie said, ‘I think they suit themselves. But stay together for convenience. I suppose we shouldn’t hold it against them.’ She petered out in a racketty cough.
The Judge was slopping around in the shallows of gravied pumpkin and beans.
Mrs Lushington blew two streams of smoke down her nostrils, which must have irritated Mrs Twyborn almost beyond control, for she ground out her cigarette, not in the ashtray provided, but in her practically untouched beef.
The Judge laid his knife and fork together in the puddles of gravy, the sludge of greens, as humbly as he might have in any railway refreshment- or country tea-room while on circuit.
From admiring his father’s velvet muzzle, Eddie fell to observing Mrs Lushington.
Her dress proclaimed her a rich dowdy, or fashionable slattern. If the monkey fur straggling down from a Venetian tricorne gave her head the look of a hanging basket in a fernery, the suit she wore was buttoned and belted in a loosely regimental style, an effect contradicted in turn by several ropes of pearls which she slung about while studying the menu.
Marcia reminded Eddie somewhat of a raw scallop, or heap of them, the smudged, ivory flesh, the lips of a pale coral. Undaunted by her surroundings, her tongue suddenly flickered out and drew in a straggle of monkey fur, which she sucked for a second or two before rejecting. As she continued studying the menu, torturing the enormous pearls, glancing up from time to time at nobody and everybody, the faintly coral lips worked against her teeth, as though she had already eaten, and was trying to free them from fragments of something unpleasant.
Eadie couldn’t bear her apple pie. ‘I don’t know why you insisted, darling, when you know I don’t care for sweets.’
The Judge, who enjoyed his pud, was masticating gently, and ignoring.
Eddie asked his mother, ‘What have you got against Mrs Lushington?’ His schoolboy treat was making him feel magnanimous.
‘Nothing — actually — nothing,’ Eadie admitted. ‘Except that she’s a common piece — who came off a cow farm at Tilba — and caught old Greg Lushington — and led him by the nose ever since.’
‘Come on, Eadie, aren’t you unfair?’ the Judge intervened. ‘Greg may have wanted to be led.’
‘It’s no less deplorable — from whichever side.’ After making this virtuous pronouncement Eadie lowered her eyes.
Just then Mrs Lushington blew two fiercer blasts from her nostrils, and without ordering, rose from the mock-Chippendale, and began to leave the dining room, her slouch as contemptuous as it was fashionable.
‘Good on ’er!’ Mrs Justice Twyborn remarked.
Her son was left with his own image in the glass on the opposite wall. He was surprised to find himself look as convincing as he did, and wondered whether this had been Marcia’s impression too. Probably not. For the reflexion was already fluctuating, in the satin shoals, the watery waves of the mottled glass, as well as in his own mind. He was faced, as always, with an impersonation of reality.
All night, it seemed to him, he heard the twitter of birds migrating. In the luminous dark and his half-sleep he saw their eyes outlined with white pencil, as Eudoxia had touched up hers with black.
As Marcia Lushington had, what’s more.
Marcia was lying, buttocks upturned, an abandoned china doll.
Eddie could not bring himself to respond to the breakfast bell, but waited for his parents to disperse. Then he went into the kitchen where Etty and Mildred were scurrying in bleached-out blue and Thatcher was smoking a vile pipe.
The girls chittered, ‘Oh, Mr Eddie!’ and Etty dished up strips of a leathery omelette.
The spittle seethed in the bowl of Thatcher’s pipe. ‘It’s yer last day, eh?’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Well, isn’t it?’ the gardener persisted.
He could not have denied what his parents might have.
He continued sitting over this late and fragmentary breakfast, but realised he was embarrassing the servants: the cook and maid taken up with their work, the gardener too, after his fashion.
Later in the morning, on packing his shamefully new clothes, the few indispensable possessions, the tube of toothpaste he had ruptured with his heel, he went down to face his mother.