‘When will they be here?’ She might have been making plans to leave.
‘Possibly tomorrow. There was talk of polo with a prince today — or was it cricket with some grisly duke? Anyhow, they’ll come. They’ve bought a left-over Turner.’ He almost dislocated himself with his worst giggle yet. ‘Nora’s going to be presented if a war doesn’t prevent her wearing her feathers to the circus. Poor darlings, I love them — such a vigorous country — I’ve great hopes … We’ll always need plays, shan’t we? particularly when the bombs are falling.’
After the hopeful playwright had cast her off, Mrs Trist was appropriated by the Honourable Mrs Spencer-Parfitt, who stood clutching to the grubby beige blouse worn inside her tailor-made a glass of the buttermilk Ursula provided specially for Muff.
‘I can’t think why I turn up at Baby’s house parties. I’m not wanted. And I don’t want.’ She looked sternly at the woman of whom she had heard tell. ‘Are you? And do you?’ she asked.
‘I shouldn’t have come if I hadn’t been invited. Your second question is harder to answer,’ Mrs Trist replied.
‘You’re as bad as any of ’em,’ muttered Muff, whose christened names were Constance Grace Aurelia. ‘People on the whole stink, I think — as the dreadful Americans say.’ Then turning on what might have been intended as encouragement, ‘Some of ’em stink sweeter than others.’
Muff by now was stinking of the buttermilk past and present she had spilt on her beige blouse, and the cats she slept with in Kensington. Increasing whiffs of Eadie Twyborn began to trouble Eadith Trist.
‘I’ve heard all about you,’ warned the honourable lady, slopping some more of the buttermilk, ‘but only believe half of what I hear. Nothing is wholly believable today. Nothing is true. Except Dinky my old seal-pointed Siamese, and Dinky — but I shan’t talk about that.’
Mrs Spencer-Parfitt started dabbing at herself with a grey, snotted-up Irish hanky.
‘Purity …’ she snuffled. ‘That daisy at any rate is pure.’ She pointed with the toe of an abraded brogue at a clump of pink-to-white daisy which had shot up since the lawn-mower razed Ursula’s lawn to perfection. ‘I’d like to think you were,’ she turned abruptly to the bawd. ‘In spite of what I hear, my instincts as a cat-lover tell me you may be. Too pure even for your own good.’
Eadith was aghast. ‘I’ve never aspired to virtue. As for purity — truth — I’ve still to make up my mind what they amount to. But hope I may. Eventually.’
‘Good for you!’
Somewhere an invisible servant was beating a gong, summoning people to a late lunch; a cold one considering the unreliability of the idle. It was no less sumptuous for being cold, and everybody tucked in, remembering what they would return to in their service flats, the eternal tins they would open in the mews, and the cockroach in the Charlotte Street ragù bolognese.
After lunch, and resumption of their hats, most of the guests returned to the garden and arranged themselves in deck chairs, to snooze, or continue their destruction of literature, art, and political careers, the dissection of adulteries they suspected or knew their friends to be conducting, and speculation on Hitler’s next possible move in developing the Grave Threat to England.
With nothing to contribute beyond her incongruity Mrs Trist remained unnoticed. She was able to escape to her room. She could have been suffering from indigestion, or going to the lavatory.
Except for a sound of cutlery from the kitchen quarters, the house was heavy with silence, which did not prevent slabs of the past moving round in it. They pursued her as she fled upstairs past Courbet’s peasant of the livery jowl. A cloying tortoiseshell light clung as insidiously as the misty future in her dream of the night before.
She stood bathing her face in front of the bathroom glass.
He burped back at her, out of the past or the future.
She felt the better for it, however.
Evening was as uneventful and discursive. The promised Australians, somewhat to Maufey’s relief, hadn’t arrived. The only incident to affect the displaced bawd was when Madame Siderous beckoned and drew her aside amongst the flower borders at dusk.
‘Darling,’ Diana began, and her perfume, her breath, overpowered the evening scents of the garden, ‘do you realise how you fail to keep your promises?’
Mrs Trist could not imagine for what she was about to stand accused.
‘You’ve never given me the Arab woman’s number. The one who knows the wax-and-honey method for removing superfluous hair.’
Madame Siderous was looking at her intently as though expecting the coded reply to a coded question.
‘She isn’t on the telephone. We’ll come to an arrangement next time I see her.’
It couldn’t have been the correct answer, for Diana frowned, while seeming to offer a second chance. ‘You’re surely not one of those tiresome people who, when they discover something special, feel they’ve got to keep it to themselves.’ A mole between her right nostril and the arch of a smoothly painted lip threatened reprisal.
‘Yes and no,’ Eadith replied; whatever the outcome in friendship or war, she would not be lured into surrendering her closer secrets to the likes of Madame Siderous.
Diana’s exasperation returned them both to reality. ‘These boring English house-parties!’ She reached out and beheaded a delphinium with a quick flick of her brown fingers. ‘All these F.O. pin-stripes and sculptured M.I. jaws! Not to mention the pansy artists! And noble crypto-Lesbians! Some of the women here would be more use than most of the men.’ Suddenly Diana Siderous seized Eadith Trist by the nose with fingers smelling of nicotine, and sap from the slaughtered delphinium. ‘Odd we never thought of doing it together …’
Almost at once she must have decided to reduce her gesture and remark to the level of the ridiculous.
‘Don’t worry, darling,’ she screeched, ‘I’m sure we’ll never feel as bored as that. And disillusion poor old Ursula.’
She took her friend by the arm and was leading her back into what could pass for focus. ‘Seriously,’ and Madame Siderous did apparently consider herself capable of seriousness, ‘I believe you’re Ursula’s big disappointment. As a collector, I mean. When you should have been her grand coup—the whore-mistress of Beckwith Street, exposing her nipples, gnashing her teeth at the men — and here you are, as sombre as a nun.’
The bronze tunic Eadith was wearing, the skirt susurrating as it scuffed the ground, the long, fluted sleeves, did suggest a nun, or priestess, while the Siderous plastered to her ribs forced on her a stride more stilted than was normal.
When she answered her accuser, the gravity of her expression and movements seemed to have rubbed off on her voice, ‘I like to think I’m sometimes capable of more than is expected of me.’
They continued towards the house and the nets of light which had by now been spread for them. The light caught their disappointments and illusions, and for a brief moment portrayed the wooden attitudes, the formal eyes, of a pair of worm-eaten Coptic saints.
Then Madame Siderous announced, ‘I’m going to get myself a stiff gin — what else hardly matters — I can face the evening.’
But Eadith remained set in her sobriety.
During dinner she looked for Gravenor but did not find him. Without being asked, Ursula explained casually from down table that he had been called away; she expected him back later that night. Maufey’s awaited Australians still had not arrived, which was cause for thankfulness as far as Mrs Trist was concerned.
She spilled some gravy on her bronze tunic and fell to rubbing surreptitiously. All the stains in her life were concentrated in this greasy emblem as she rubbed and rubbed with the spotless napkin. She reduced it at last enough to satisfy her conscience. More startling was the bloody mark left on the napkin by nervous lips; he hid it with such vehemence he might have been sitting with Prowse amongst the mutton fat in Peggy Tyrrell’s kitchen.