She came to terms with reality between the two dawns in the deserted park. Somewhere between the fragrant scent of fresh cow-pats and the reek of human excrement. Between cold roses, their perfume still to be aroused by sunlight, and the great blast of overheated scrub. The damp hem of her unfashionable dress dragged behind her as she left the park and crossed the other bridge.
In Beckwith Street she might wave an arm in a last romantic gesture at the scarified faces of the noble ladies at Ninety-One before disappearing through the red-brick façade of Eighty-Four, the house she owned thanks to her patron, into the atmosphere of spent cigarettes, stale cigar, dried semen (and again, human shit.)
Girls were grumbling, moaning, snoring, while a last client knotted his tie and prepared to face respectability. If he were among those she favoured, she might fry him a dish of bacon and eggs to speed him on his way. At that hour the smell of frying bacon came as nostalgic as lost youth. So Mrs Trist considered, in her dawn dishabille, in what some people referred to as her whore-house.
She had started in a small way, almost without realising, while healing her own wounds in the maisonette in Hendrey Street. She was too disgusted with herself, and human beings in general, ever to want to dabble in sex again, let alone aspire to that great ambivalence, love. She could only contemplate it as an abstraction, an algebra. She was very lonely; for a time her only friends were trades-people and servants, who offered her a comforting reality.
She had a job with a fashionable West End florist. They respected her, though she provided them, she understood, with the kind of cynical joke the English, or anyway sophisticated Londoners, enjoy. She was also something of a mystery, which they didn’t enquire into because of her efficiency, and in her peculiar way, the woman had a distinction which warned them off. Customers depended on Mrs Trist for advice, and ignoring her somewhat bizarre appearance, recognised her taste. Even the more sophisticated and cynical respond to the pressure of a strong hand.
Of the other assistants, Annabel might have appealed more, Eadith thought, but they could not take her seriously: she was too pretty, too scatty, too much the professional amateur. She had abandoned the solid architecture of her noble origins, running out hatless into the labyrinth of lapsed values. Inside the labyrinth, of course, she was not bereft of her own kind: they met and lost one another in the search, playing at hide-and-seek in Harrods, falling drunk in gutters, shooting one another in some amusing mews, developing abscesses from jabbing themselves too often through their stockings. No, it was not the Honourable Annabel that her own kind, far less the rigid, hatted ranks from which she had defected, felt they were able to rely on; it was the rather odd Mrs Trist, of the pronounced jawline, as she appeared above the artificially bedewed banks of lilacs and lilies, and exquisitely unnatural long-stemmed rosebuds, her searching, bedazzling eyes the climax of the mystery which so intrigued those she impressed. No one, finally, would have cared to investigate her peculiarities or origins for fear of dispelling a myth they wished to cultivate. (Not that some didn’t indulge in a tentative stab over the brown-bread ices at Gribble’s.)
Annabel confided in her. They became friends. It was a case of faute de mieux on either side. Mrs Trist enjoyed the girl’s wide-eyed, loose-mouthed prettiness, her clear, tea-rose skin, the whole effect belonging to those banks of artificial-real flowers at the florist where they were both employed. Annabel was drawn to the older woman’s composure, her strength, the severe line of the pronounced jaw.
On one occasion Annabel confessed over the martini Eadith had just mixed, ‘If there were anything of the Lesbian in me — which there isn’t, quite definitely — I expect I’d want to sleep with you.’
Eadith said, though perhaps with a shade less conviction, she thought there was nothing of the Lesbian lurking in herself.
‘My trouble is,’ Annabel gulped almost the whole of her martini, ‘I need men — a constant supply — and how to get it I don’t know — short of going on the streets — and that’s so sordid, isn’t it? You might find yourself accosting your relations on a dark night.’
Eadith suggested, ‘Couldn’t you handpick a few by daylight and book them for later?’
That too, Annabel thought, kicking at the toe of one of Eadith’s shoes, might bring complications with it. Considering where she lived. Unless she took a room, which would be an expense — unless she charged.
‘And then, Eadith, shouldn’t I be a whore, darling?’
‘I expect you would.’
The two women laughed their way deeper into the situation which was preparing.
Eadith poured another martini.
Annabel thought, ‘Perhaps you could let me a room, darling. We might go into business together.’
Eadith said, ‘I don’t think I want to become a whore. Once, perhaps. Not any longer.’
Annabel gulped a second martini. ‘At least you could let me the room. Look after me, so to speak. I’ll pay you a percentage. We’ll make it a business arrangement.’ Annabel threw back her head, exposed her slender throat, and laughed. ‘That bloody florist’s!’ Her flower-mouth looked downright ugly.
‘It won’t be very pretty, you know.’
‘Oh — yes!’ Annabel stamped her glass on the table be with such force she broke the stem. ‘I know, I know!’
That neither of them knew, Eadith Trist only realised after they were into the business venture.
Not that Annabel’s handpicked men didn’t pay a handsome dividend. While Eadith continued working for the florist, Annabel gave up her job: she was too tired, or too indolent; after the night’s activities she had to sleep in.
Eadith had not yet begun to see herself as a bawd, because Annabel, her sole investment, was so independent. Sometimes after Eadith had brought in her grapefruit and coffee before leaving for the florist’s, Annabel would cast off her sloth and start loading her mouth with lipstick. ‘I must get myself some sex,’ she announced, snapped her suspenders, and set out for Victoria Station.
After a time, Eadith decided to engage Bobbie, a healthy girl originally from Derbyshire who was now unhappy working in a post-office. Bobbie suffered from B.O. and had to have a few facts explained, but attracted certain men, some of them highly connected.
Annabel’s connections were among the highest, those relations she had been afraid of accosting in the dark. (It was through Annabel that Eadith Trist met Gravenor, some degree of distant cousin, and discovered that she too was related, if not through blood, in spirit.)
The two girls Annabel and Bobbie found each other sympathetic. Eadith might come in from work and discover them seated in her armchairs chewing at apples. Annabel lusted after Cox’s Orange. She would grow quite childish shaking her apple to hear whether the pips rattled, to be able to identify her favourite.
Annabel looked petulant and trivial, whereas Bobbie suggested a cottage apple, not die Cox’s Orange Pippin, but a windfall of some larger variety. One of her breasts was blemished: it hung lower than the other, but did not detract from her charms, it seemed.
Brought back by Annabel, Gravenor preferred the blemished Bobbie.
He told Eadith, ‘Sleeping with even a distant cousin is a little bit incestuous.’
Gravenor was a reddish, anyway a sandy, man. Mrs Trist decided in the beginning that she was not physically attracted to him; she mustn’t be, and in any case, she still had in her nostrils the equivocal smell of orange fur.