‘Ursula would adore to know you. But perhaps we should wait for her brother to arrange it. As he will, I’m sure, because she never stops insisting.’
‘I can’t think why,’ Eadith lied.
‘You’ll be the first madam she’s met — and rare objects are her obsession. She’ll add you to the Julius Untermeyer Collection.’
This was the way it went at the time, along with the hide-and-seek at Harrods and amusing hats (Ursula had been known to crown her own brittle carapace with a lacquered crab shell mounted on a doily in paper lace).
It was not Madame Siderous who introduced Mrs Trist the brothel-keeper of Beckwith Street to Lady Ursula Untermeyer. Gravenor the brother announced, ‘My sister has decided she must meet you. Such is your fame, Eadith.’
If Eadith detected a trace of acid, she could not resent what she had induced.
As though by agreement, they had been seeing each other less and less. Whether they met in Gravenor’s sleep as they did in hers, she had no means of telling. She was haunted by a Homburg and a furled umbrella, each of a black she had encountered in her waking life only in the paintings of Degas and the plumage of daws, rooks, and Australian crows. He was growing more cadaverous, more freckled; for a wealthy man his clothes were threadbare at knee and elbow in spite of a valet she knew had his interests at heart.
Gravenor appeared to be re-assessing his needs, as happens sometimes to those who are ageing and sensitive to social or political change. He might have been whole-hearted had he been an ascetic, or a voluptuary hell-bent on redemption, instead of a dilettante English gentleman. When in town he still lived in a dark rambling flat at Whitehall, and dined off crumbed veal and apple tart followed by a scooping of Stilton, its veins scrupulously tinctured with port.
Eadith hankered after tincturing his pale but unconsciously sensual lips. As she daren’t, she said instead, ‘Surely I’m accessible enough for your sister to approach? Her friends cultivate me — even her brother.’ Her smile became a leaning tower of accusation.
‘I’ll tell her to come, then?’
‘If she cares to. But won’t you bring her — to help soften the fall?’
Eadith turned her back, to feel whether she had shaved that morning. A moment of panic persuaded her that Lady Ursula couldn’t possibly find her acceptable, and worse, that the distance she had deliberately created between herself and Ursula’s brother must widen as a result.
At least they agreed on a date and hour for Ursula’s introduction to the house in Beckwith Street.
On the day arranged, Ada was dressed in her brown habit with white collar. Mrs Trist had given her deputy a pair of agate ear-rings which she felt added a touch of modest authority.
Perhaps out of diffidence on finding herself in the presence of a real live bawd, Lady Ursula was entranced by Ada. She could not compliment the servant enough, on her ear-rings, her pretty collar, the ‘atmosphere’ of the overcrowded office in which the visitors and hostess were awkwardly stranded.
Eadith remained by choice a minor figure, until Gravenor suddenly took her aside.
‘Ursula is rather shockable,’ he warned.
‘Then why did she come looking for what she knew she must find?’
‘She had to. Because her friends are coming. She doesn’t approve of Cecily, still less Diana, but would like to emulate their daring — even their lack of judgment.’
Gravenor’s lack of tact, which she should have welcomed, became Eadith’s wound.
Ada was at her most serious answering Lady Ursula’s questions, while the latter looked about her with bright birdlike glances, predatory if they hadn’t been so nervously distracted, of a lady whose title and wealth allowed her to hold tradition and possessions between herself and the shoals of life. The possibility of drowning in some catastrophic flood was one that she could continue dismissing as too abstract to be entertained, whereas she felt all at sea in this minor social disturbance in which the three of them were floundering. For Ada, the fourth, was sufficiently conscious of her place to go below and organise tea.
Lady Ursula had finally begun a vague, hiccuping kind of dialogue, high in key, dry in tone, which her rank and circumstances could only make acceptable, ‘… must congratulate you, Mrs Trist — Eadith — I’d like you to call me Ursula …’ [actually, in her family circle, she answered to ‘Baby’] ‘… congratulate you on this very charming interior …’
On getting it out, Lady Ursula immediately suspected she was sounding ‘old world’. She started smiling her apologies, or at least she parted her lips with their merest smear of tangerine, and narrowed her eyes behind the drift of eye-veil attached to her amusing little hat.
‘Thank you,’ said Mrs Trist with a humility she genuinely felt. ‘It’s always difficult to see one’s own objectively.’
She, too, ended on a smile, but one which must have made her look like a horse; at the same time she was invaded by a burst of scents and images from the past: a landslide of chaff, a trail of rat-shit, leather armchairs in the Judge’s study, documents tied with ribbon in disinfectant pink.
Ursula Untermeyer lowered her eyes from a hobbledehoy she might admire after she had accustomed herself to the eccentricity of Rod’s friend. Gravenor himself was the victim of his own bones and a chair too narrow, too low, which had forced his knees higher than was natural. He was sitting, hands outspread, as though to disguise the shiny patches to which sharp kneecaps had reduced the cloth covering them. For an instant Eadith’s glance was drawn in the direction of a pin-striped crotch.
She was at once shamed into blushing. But nobody could have noticed, or if they had, must have disbelieved. For most of those who came in contact with her thought they detected, from out of the tropic plumage and encrustations of baroque jewels, the glint of rectitude.
How Mrs Trist had overstepped the bounds of rectitude and devoted herself to satisfying the more vicious side of human nature was a subject for speculation amongst her employees, clients, and acquaintances. And why she herself never took part in the celebrations she arranged. There were a number who would have booked her if she had been willing, but it was not known whether anyone had ever taken Eadith Trist to bed.
Her friend and would-be lover Gravenor had tried to reconcile her continued affection for him, and even signs of sensual attraction, with her constant refusal of his propositions. ‘You know, Eadith, I believe you have a savage nymphomaniac inside you, and a stern puritan holding her back. It’s this unattractive mentor who forces you to look for consummation in the lusts of others.’
‘How very ugly, but perhaps true! Truth is more often ugliness than beauty.’
Seated with Gravenor and his sister in the bawd’s parlour she was reminded of his theory; it made her wistful rather than sad. She suddenly wished she were alone with her shortcomings.
Not a woman of sensibility or feeling, Ursula sensed an emotional dilemma strong enough to rouse her conventional strain of sympathy. All she could do to express it was to assume the brightness her governesses had taught her to parade. ‘At least no one can accuse you, my dear, of leading a humdrum life.’
She raised her head to show off rather a fine throat. The glass on the wall opposite confirmed that she was looking her best, in fact a charming picture, the light glittering on still perfect teeth behind the faint tangerine of lipstick, her blue eyes widened under the little bronze veil. She could afford to be magnanimous towards one who deserved pity.
‘None of life — shelling peas, peeling potatoes — digging holes for fenceposts—need be humdrum if you give yourself to it,’ Eadith replied.