All mucking in together at the long, scoured, kitchen table. All the clatter and yammer of a platoon of whores. Lashing their tongues round a mouthful of good, solid fare. Then reckoning with their stomachs, their thoughts, in the steam from strong tea, or over an eggshell of muddy Greek coffee.
Mrs Trist herself often joined in, plumes trailing through chitterlings as a long sinewy arm reached out across the communal table for another boiled potato. Her mouth gone to pot. Her over-strong chin piled with mauve to purple shadow.
When satisfied, they sat around in their comfy gowns and sleazy kimonos picking their teeth with their nails, scratching breast, armpit, or crotch in the practical manner a girl’s anatomy demands. Assuming little faint airs of ladies they had known or thought themselves to be. Those more convinced of their own superior origins farting and burping to apologise for what their colleagues could not boast.
Till the doorbell might sound, when the whole order tingled to its nerves’ ends and the Mother Superior became the Sergeant-Major.
‘Go on, youse! Shoot!’ she shouted. ‘The lot of yer!’
And they all shot, in their bedraggled, bedrizzled, comfortable garments. To become the creatures of caprice and fantasy the evening might demand. The sulky amongst them more hesitant: those who had seen a penis too many preparing to give notice like any overworked maid, who couldn’t carry up another tray or black another grate, or on a higher level, wall-jumping nuns who imagined an outside world in which love was less abstract and choice free.
They filed out to their dressing rooms, or cells, and were soon patting and smearing themselves, or asking forgiveness and guidance of Our Lady (not forgetting the Panayia.)
At this hour Mrs Trist was superb, at her most forbidding, stalking through the public rooms in her bracelets, plumping a cushion, to the vast irritation of the noble sisters opposite drawing brocade over net which had ceased to be opaque, filling japanned or Fabergé boxes with cigarettes, rose- mauve- or gold-tipped, their perfumes mingling with the smell from stale tobacco-crumbs left inside, ordering Ada, Ida and Vi to fetch the dishes of salted almonds, oily olives, sheathed pistachios which blunt Anglo-Saxon fingers avoided entirely, or on being caught out, heeled under velvet fringes of sofa or divan, or in the case of more reticent or passive clients, waiting for expert nails to split the phallus-shaped pistachio and pop it, if not an oily olive, into a complacently fleshed, or thin and chapped, though equally greedy, male mouth.
These were the preliminaries. Only a girl or two at first shuffling amongst the empty nutshells. Bored. Mrs Trist in attendance, encouraging participation and choice. Frowning on any individual who did not appreciate the favour he was being done in her superior house, and anyone who threatened to pass out too soon. For those who met with her approval, for his looks, or for having paid somebody else’s unpaid bill, she was likely to cook a dish of kidneys and onion rings at dawn, before going out for her walk through a deserted park.
To get the stale air, cigarette smoke, kidney fumes out of her hair.
To receive the kiss of morning, the more acceptable for being so delicate and abstract compared with the sweaty, abrasive, rib-cracking embraces of venal men.
Herself was able to avoid those; no one would have dared, not even Gravenor her patron.
He was driving her to look at a famous garden thrown open to the public for some charitable purpose. It would have pleased him better to take her on a normal occasion and force the owners (family again) to receive his companion, the proprietress of a fashionable brothel, if she hadn’t preferred anonymity outside her professional sphere.
‘I still wonder why you got yourself into such an ugly business,’ he told her while driving down a Sussex lane.
‘But it’s not all ugly. You of all men should know that. Some of my girls are superb, some of my jewels are collectors’ pieces.’ She laughed her laugh, dry enough for a dilettante to appreciate; as he obviously did. ‘Besides, I didn’t get myself into it. I was nudged at first, then pushed, the way one is. Certainly I could have resisted but oh well, I didn’t. We go along with the times, don’t we? If that’s the way the current is flowing, most of us are carried.’
Rocked by the car between stuffy hedgerows, the grass verges full of cow-parsley and hay fever, they were growing indolent.
A little farther on he put out a hand, and took the hand nearest him. Yet a little farther, on sensing danger, she withdrew.
‘I’d say you take full advantage of all my house has to offer. And helped found it, for God’s sake.’
‘For God’s sake, the reason I keep coming back is for you — not any of your boring whores. Risking every bone in my body with some thrashing negress, exposing my parts to an angular Midlands schoolteacher. If you won’t let me fuck you, darling, what I enjoy is the supper, or best of all, breakfast when you cook it for me.’
They rocked, and laughed.
‘It’s as simple as that. Or could be,’ he said.
In any of its permutations her life had never been simple. Would she have enjoyed it more if it had? She thought she wouldn’t, then that she would. And again, not; she did not covet the confidence, the ‘strength’, the daguerreotype principles of even the most admirable one-track male, nor, on the other hand, those mammary, vaginal, ovarian complications, the menopausal hells of a sex pledged to honour and obey. Yet she would have loved to receive this dry-cool man Gravenor inside her, to leave her mark on his skin for acquaintances to discuss and deplore, as though teeth-marks and bruises preclude love and respect. She could have loved and respected Gravenor in spite of his flaws, which she understood for their being to a great extent her own. She envied those in a position to love without reservation of any kind. Probably there were few such loves. At the heart of most marriages, even spiritual attachments, lurks the whore-nun or the nun-whore.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘Nothing.’
Arrived at the stately home, they drove between heraldic gateposts, and were soon immaculately sauntering through historic gardens, admiring the azaleas, losing themselves in the yew maze. The alpines were exquisite that year.
She was proud of her parade of girls. On better nights the ritual developed a refulgent swank. Not only in the public rooms, but in the private consummation of the client’s lust.
A craftsman had fitted a concealed eye to each cell of this elaborate comb of which she was the animating principle. She would not have disclosed to anybody the existence of what was in a sense a humiliating toy, least of all to Gravenor, whom she must continue to admire, but who, as voyeur, would have been reduced in her estimation. She could not have explained how a common peep-hole becomes an omniscient eye, how it illuminated for her the secret hopes and frustrations struggling to escape through the brutality, the thrust and recoil, the acts of self-immolation, the vicious spinsterly refinements which shape the depravity of men — her own included. She would have liked to believe that, even if it did not purify, lust might burn itself out, and at the same time cauterise that infected part of the self which, from her own experience, persists like the core of a permanent boil.
She was devoted to her more dedicated girls, and decorated with her jewels those most likely to act out her gospel. The nucleus of her order lived in. Then there were the novices, on call. They were unreliable on the whole; they even got married and quietly distributed themselves through outer suburbs and provincial cities, where they upheld virtue against those they suspected of backsliding. Mrs Trist couldn’t blame them, but distinguished between amateurs and those in whom she recognised a vocation.