‘You’ll think I’m a shingle short! Don’t know what the woman thought or felt. There was this language difficulty, see? When suddenly she let out a yell. Me — I thought this is it — it’s ’er old man back from the turnips! So I jumped off, and started getting into me clothes — double quick, I don’t mind tellin’ yer. But she only lay there, poor cow, sort of smiling and crying — arm across ’er eyes. So it couldn’t ’uv been ’er old man she’d heard.’
The captain was scratching in his pouch for a few last crumbs of dry tobacco.
‘P’raps the husband was bloody well dead.’
He rammed the tobacco into the stinking crater of his pipe.
‘Or she could ’uv been yellin’ at the orgasm.’
He rammed and rammed.
‘Don’t know why I’m tellun yer this. About giant cockies. You’ll think I’m a nut case.’
Eddie Twyborn had to rejoin his detachment down the road.
‘An’ don’t think I’m religious!’ The captain had followed him as far as the door. ‘Because I believe in nothun!’ he shouted after one he regretted taking for a temporary mate. ‘NOTHUN!’ he screamed.
The remembered scream rang in Eadith’s ears as she listened to the men who had returned from Dunkirk, and as she walked through the warren of what was officially her brothel. She could not envisage leaving her house, or handing over to anyone else, for this was the life she had chosen, or which had been chosen for her. Yet her girls, her clients, seemed less aware of her presence than before. Ada had emerged as a person of abounding influence; her professional attitudes commanded the respect of those who had dealings with her; the brisk sound of her brown habit, the rustle of her bunch of keys, if not her rosary, could be heard in the corridors, the public rooms, and as they issued out of the individual cells under her charitable control.
That Ada might take over began to seem possible, at moments inevitable. The two principals accepted what their eyes and minds avoided, because theirs had always been a relationship of perfect trust. Now more than ever Mrs Trist relied on her deputy’s support.
Eadith believed that sooner or later she must come across Eadie Twyborn again. She sensed that the conflict of individual destinies was as inescapable, and often as fatal, as the all-embracing undertow of war. As she waited, nervousness made her snip at the hairs in her nostrils; she even found herself picking her nose. Supposing the barbarians arrived before she and Eadie could be brought face to face? She went out and stood on the marble steps to repel the invader with what remained of her own strength, and the spirit-support of a father, husband, lovers, all of whom had been frail human beings, as frail in fact as Eddie/Eadith.
There was an evening when Mrs Trist was forced to defect temporarily from her over- organised, airless house. After strolling, by a great effort of restraint, some distance along the Walk, she sat down on a bench placed almost exactly in front of the Old Church. It was before the peak hour of activity at her brotheclass="underline" when the armed services poured in, the politicians, the civil servants, the Law, the Church, refugee royalty, and those who had survived trial by fire. As she sat in the pigeon-coloured light she knew she had begun to renounce what Ada was better able to cope with: a world of fragmentation and despair in which even the perversities of vice can offer regeneration of a kind.
But perhaps she was what is called old-fashioned. Sitting on the bench on the Embankment, she saw herself as an Old Girl. Gulls flying up the estuary, wheeling above the incoming tide, were shitting on her dyed hair. She picked off a dob of white, while remembering that it was said to bring luck.
Whether that was so, she did in fact look round soon after and saw Eadie Twyborn come out of the church. She was dressed in the same black she had been wearing on recent occasions, her face as drained of human passion, the prayer-book held in black-gloved hands. If Eadith Trist was an Old Girl, Eadie Twyborn could have been the original She-Ancient.
To Eadith’s terror, this timeless figure seemed to be approaching the bench on which she was seated. Should she make her getaway before her courage dwindled, her will left her? Or should she remain and be exposed as never before? Nothing was decided for her. She continued sitting, more passive than she had known herself in the moments of her worst despair.
The equally passive, outwardly unemotional figure of the elderly woman revealed no possible reason for her decision to sit on the already occupied bench. She didn’t speak; she was not the traditional Australian looking for a stranger on whom to inflict a life story. No doubt she was only preparing to enjoy the last of the sun and the light on the river turning by now from dove to violet.
Eadith was so relieved, not to say disappointed, she could feel the tears coming into her eyes. She continued sitting, staring straight ahead, a stranger beside a stranger.
More than anything the evening light began establishing a harmony between them.
Eadith glanced sideways at the gloved hands, the skin showing white at the tip of one black forefinger pointed along the prayer-book’s shabby morocco.
The hole in the glove, together with the scruffy leather, became more than Eadith Trist could bear. Perhaps it wasn’t her mother, and she could leave without a qualm. Even if it were Eadie Twyborn, one shouldn’t delude oneself into staying, out of sentimentality, compassion, or whatever.
The aged woman began to speak in what was indisputably an aged, drained version of Eadie Twyborn’s voice. ‘I’d been promising myself one of Gribble’s brown-bread ices. I’ve only recently discovered them. But the light by the river is so delicious I’ve postponed this other delight, till now, I suppose, it’s too late.’
Eadith had decided not to think of this woman as her mother. At the same time she was unable to move.
Mrs Twyborn turned to the stranger and asked, ‘Do you know their brown-bread ices?’
Mrs Trist answered in her coldest English, ‘I find them slimy.’
‘Rich, perhaps. But a rich ice-cream or pudding is one of the few vices old age allows me to enjoy. Where I come from,’ she added (now you were for it), ‘they consider it a bit immoral to put too much cream in an ice.’
Mrs Trist failed to ask the stranger’s inevitable question, but Mrs Twyborn didn’t seem put out. She apparently took for granted a cold temperament in her anonymous acquaintance.
Presently she sighed. ‘Another thing I’ve missed doing this afternoon is mending this tear in my glove. Ah well, it’ll keep for this evening. I was never much good with my needle. I’ve always hated mending.’
Mrs Trist agreed that mending was a bore.
At this moment she was moved to look at Eadie Twyborn, even though she sensed the latter had turned and was looking at her.
They were looking into each other’s eyes, Eadith’s of fragmented blue and gold blazing in their tension, their determination not to melt, Eadie’s of a dull topaz, the eyes of an old, troubled dog. The soft white-kid face, the pale lips, began to tremble so violently she had to turn away at last.
The women continued sitting side by side, till Eadie found the strength to rummage in her bag, and when she had found the pencil she was looking for, to scribble on the prayer-book’s fly-leaf.
Eadith was offered this tremulous scribble, and read, ‘Are you my son Eddie?’
They were seated on this other bench inside the corrugated-iron shelter, sun blazing on black asphalt as the brown, bucking tram approached them.
‘I do wish, Eddie, you’d stop picking that scab on your knee. Sometimes I think you do things just to irritate me.’
‘Sometimes I think, Mother, you hate just about everything I do.’
Now in this violet, northern light, purged of her mortal sins by age, Eadie might have been prepared to accept a bit of scab-picking in others.