Presently Eadith had to leave her guest to attend to a client frantic to catch his bus, and an Honourable whore in a tantrum.
Gravenor left her to it.
But he helped her establish herself in the house in Chelsea, where Mrs Trist became an institution, a cult, even with many who considered themselves far above anything like that. Among them, officially respectable women. Even Lord Gravenor’s sister. But that was later.
Eighty-Four was ideally situated in an obscure street not wholly residential. The small businesses and post-office at one end made Mrs Trist’s venture seem less an assault on gentility. Most of the houses were run down, some to the verge of seediness. A few had been converted into bedsitters, where beginners and the defeated cooked little meals on gas-rings and wondered whether they had another shilling for the meter. On the whole the householders, even those still in undisputed possession of their property, had seen better days, in theory at least: officers retired from the services, amongst them Anglo-Indians, aspiring or unsuccessful actors, a writer whose play of years before had been forgotten by all but those with total theatrical recall, a detritus of minor nobility, and recently arrived Colonials who hoped in time to master the accent and pass as English.
In most cases large, the houses were in brick of a glaring red, of a style still submerged in that limbo which exists between architectural fashions. Nobody entered Beckwith Street unless they belonged or had business there, or were passing through from a fairly spacious, but also unfashionable square, to reach the Embankment beyond. Although their relationship was only a tangential one, Beckwith was not unconscious of the river as a source of life. On gloomy days, brick which might have been reduced to a sullen ruby, seemed to respond to the glimmer off water. On brighter occasions the street acquired dash from the clatter and importance of traffic as it surged at right angles, parallel to the silent river. Some of the inhabitants preened themselves on the fame of the Great who had lived along the Walk. Others, less impressed by a plaque, hoped that by living in the neighbourhood they might be permeated by a spirit of place.
All but the most cynical or materialistic were appalled, anyway in the beginning, by what was happening at Eighty-Four. If later they became acceptant, Beckwith was the kind of London street which is permanently on the relapse. Empty milk bottles once put out seemed to stand indefinitely, unless falling like hollow skittles in the night. On sunny mornings there were skeins of cats entangled on the short tessellated walk between pavement and front doors. In houses where the vanishing race of servants was still to be found, whether the sad put-upon variety, or those who are doing an enormous favour before twisting the knife by giving notice, either sort would rise out of the areas, and from behind iron bars glance up and down the street as though in search of something they might never find — unless at Eighty-Four.
There the painters were in, the decorators, the long rolls of carpet discarding their factory fluff, vans of expensive new or antique furniture looking as though it might never belong to anybody.
Some of the disgruntled maids had caught sight of HER. Wearing dark glasses. Shielding herself with a sunshade on days when there wasn’t that much sun. She was an American, a South African millionairess whose fortune came from diamonds, a lady from Golders Green setting up a stylish knocking-shop she didn’t ought to be allowed to. Somebody must be behind her.
Only in the latter detail was the neighbourhood voice speaking the truth. Mrs Trist remained fortunate in those who were protecting her, who cajoled the police, and introduced on a paying basis Cabinet Ministers, visiting Balkan royalty, even scions of the British monarchy encouraged to ‘get it out of their systems’ before they were presented to the public as models of propriety.
Gravenor’s aunts, Lady Maud and Lady Kitty, who dropped to the state of affairs early on, ended by not batting, in the one case a pure, in the other a more raffish, freckled eyelid. What they were spared was the knowledge that another more distant connection had been actively employed by the Trist woman. It might have disturbed them too deeply, not so much the active employment as the fact that Annabel Stansfield had fallen under a train before the move to Beckwith Street.
The girl’s death shocked Mrs Trist, as though it were the first event in her life for which she could be held, however indirectly, responsible. Angelos Vatatzes had been old at the time of his death, and the flight from Les Sailles forced on them by Joan Golson’s feverish interest in Eudoxia. Again, in the Monaro (if you overlooked boredom and climate) those in whom passion was aroused were more accountable than Eddie Twyborn, its passive object. (What you do to your parents, the living deaths you may cause, Mrs Trist fleetingly considered, are their own fault for having so carelessly had you.) But poor Annabel, though a born harlot and mid-morning alcoholic, might have been Eadith’s own crime, as she now saw it: the herbaceous face, the fragile but lustful body, crushed by a train — at Clapham Junction.
Yes, Mrs Trist was devastated, to the extent of rummaging for black and hiring a car to drive her to the crematorium. The driver, a decent little fellow, asked her whether she was Australian.
Closeness to death made the details of personal history seem irrelevant, so she evaded his enquiry, whether sympathetic or inquisitive, while noticing that one of her black gloves had a hole in the index finger, that her skirt was too short for bony knees, and that her shins needed attending to. Her feet she had tucked out of sight.
Caught in the traffic somewhere to the north she found herself thinking about Hell, her own more than Annabel Stansfield’s or anybody else’s. Because your own hell is what Hell always boils down to. Her own was upholstered well enough, by Heal, and several more exclusive firms, but how well was it going to wear?
Passing through Regent’s Park, driven by this small, decent man, she wondered where the rot sets in. She was glad of her dark glasses. She had started scratching surreptitiously at various parts of her anatomy, feeling for invisible lumps, behind the upright driver’s back.
They reached the crematorium, where Annabel’s remains were consumed to the satisfaction and mild relief of a handful of relatives, and friends from earlier on — and the visible distress of a stranger seated by the door, in dark glasses, and furs in spite of a warm day.
At Eighty-Four the alterations were going ahead: builders, tilers, floor-sanders, glaziers, each trade apparently unconscious of the damage it was doing the others while pursuing its own. Still running the establishment in Hendrey Street with the help of Bobbie and Mercedes, Eadith Trist in her few hours of rest wondered whether she would ever succeed in paying for her folly. Leave alone her moral account, there was this material mansion which had taken possession of her, and which her taste was converting from a drab and musty barrack into a sequence of tantalising glimpses, perspectives opening through beckoning mirrors to seduce a society determined on its own downfall. If it had not been so determined, the puritan in her might have felt more guilty. She might have taken fright if Gravenor appearing at her elbow had not suggested at intervals that he and his friends would pay for what was no more than the transformation of an ugly and unfashionable house into a thing of beauty.
So she accepted her own corruption along with everything else and started casting the play she had been engaged to direct by a management above or below Gravenor and his exalted friends.
She realised that her poor whores, Bobbie from Derbyshire lolloping inside her blouses, Mercedes the lean Macao Jewess, even the flowerlike, defunct Annabel, were the rankest amateurs: a first essay in theatre. She set her sights on more subtle aids to depravity, such as would delight Gravenor’s friends, and as she had to admit, Gravenor himself.