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.’)