If Eadith could have unbent. But if she had, she might have broken. At least she couldn’t have trusted her lips.
Instead, she seized the pencil and slashed the fly-leaf of the prayer-book with a savagery she did not feel.
Eadie Twyborn read when the book was handed back, ‘No, but I am your daughter Eadith.’
The two women continued sitting together in the gathering shadow.
Presently Eadie said, ‘I am so glad. I’ve always wanted a daughter.’
The searchlights had begun latticing the evening sky.
‘How I look forward to our talks,’ said Eadie. ‘I’ll give you my address. You’ll come to my hotel, won’t you? We’ll have so much to tell now that we’ve found each other.’
‘But aren’t you afraid, Mother? This war. Shouldn’t you be starting for home? The lull may break at any moment.’
‘What have I to lose but the fag-end of life? Rather that than miss a last conversation with my daughter.’
Their harmony by now was a perfect one; until it occurred to Eadie, ‘If I do go home, Eadith, is there any reason why you shouldn’t come with me?’
The searchlights had woven their subtle aluminium cage.
‘I mightn’t be allowed,’ Eadith replied.
She promised, however, to take her mother back to her hotel, and to visit her for conversations.
Eadie refused her daughter’s company this evening. She said she would take a cab. She could not have borne sitting in the dark cab with Eadith, falling silent, wondering whether they dare hold hands. But she did look forward to long talks on future occasions.
Or were they losing each other? she wondered, looking back through the window of the cab.
Back at Beckwith Street, Eadith and Ada avoided each other for unavoidable reasons.
In an attempt to clothe the silence, Ada called from a distance that Nonie had got herself engaged to a lieutenant in the Grenadiers, and that their wartime clientele was lifting the ashtrays, even towels, as souvenirs.
Eadith might not have heard. She locked herself in her room, and began brushing her hair, snuffling at herself in the glass. She longed to caress her mother, regardless of the embarrassment she would probably cause them both. She saw herself embracing Gravenor with a passion far removed from the austere, sisterly affection she showed her lover.
But Gravenor, since their last meeting, had been swallowed up by anonymity and Europe, while she remained trapped in this house, and the walls of that other prison, her self.
Eadith visited her mother the following afternoon, and then regularly. They had many delightful conversations, others more disquieting.
Eadie asked her daughter how she had been spending her life, and Eadith told her how she had drifted into becoming a bawd and running a brothel as a profitable business.
‘Years ago,’ Eadie said, ‘I might have been interested in visiting your house. Yes,’ she gave a short dry laugh, ‘I’d have enjoyed investigating a brothel. Now I’m too old.’
She asked whether Eadith herself had enjoyed lovers.
Eadith admitted she had — if ‘enjoy’ were the word; she had run into such difficulties.
Eadie agreed that love was difficult. ‘Quite a trapeze act in fact. I respected your father, and loved him, Eddie—Eadith—but never enough till after he died. I was fond of poor Joanie Golson — the friend I believe you disliked so much you always avoided. Joanie was too possessive. What one wants from a woman finally becomes suffocating. I only ever really loved, and was loved by, my little flea-ridden dogs. I could talk to them and they understood. Children and parents fail one another. Of course there are exceptions, but so worthy they’re intolerable in a different way. No, dogs were my best relationship — until the last one of all, which I shan’t attempt to explain. You might find my naked spirit as embarrassing as my shrivelled body.’
Seated in the characterless, neutral-toned cube of the steel-and-concrete hotel room, this woman of no longer alcoholic, but dotty, glittering eyes, who was also her mother, had for Eadith the fascination of anachronisms of most kinds. She was both personal and remote; those blotched hands must have pressed on her own belly to help expel in blood and anguish the child struggling out of it.
Eadie continued in the same tone of detached calm, of purged emotion, ‘I can’t see why you don’t come home with me, Eadith …’, she hesitated before allowing the word ‘dearest’ to pass her lips; it might have acted as a deterrent. ‘As late as this perhaps we’d find we could live together. I can see us washing our hair, and sitting together in the garden to dry it.’
Yes, it was the most seductive proposition: the two sitting in the steamy garden, surrounded by ragged grass, hibiscus trumpets, the bubbling and plopping of bulbuls, a drizzling of taps. But as from all such golden dreams, the awakening would surely devastate.
‘Do come!’ Now it was Eadie’s former voice issuing a command rather than making a plea.
‘Mother, you don’t realise how difficult it would be in wartime. You’re a visitor. I am not. I have no passport. I had, but years ago. No, you must go, Mother.’ It was becoming a feverish situation. ‘Perhaps I’ll follow eventually.’
‘I’m sure there are no difficulties which can’t be overcome,’ Eadie countered, with a bright smile which disbelieved her own hopes.
‘We’ll see,’ said Eadith as she gathered her belongings.
She had brought her mother a pomander, that pretty, perfumed toy people still offered one another in the last days of their idleness.
‘You’re not going, are you, Eadith?’
‘Yes, Mother, I must make sure my whores are fed’ as though Ada wouldn’t see to that.
Mother and daughter nuzzled at each other’s cheeks; they might have been foraging for some elusive truffle.
Eadith left after promising to return next day at her usual time.
Ada the inscrutable, but understanding deputy had brought the mail to her Superior. There were the usual bills, protestations of enduring affection from the Ursulas, Dianas, and Cecilys, with a few letters of abuse from envious neighbours and disgruntled clients. There was the letter from Gravenor forwarded by courtesy of the Foreign Office.
Eadith laid Gravenor’s letter on a corner of the dressing-table while hearing out Ada’s tale of missing towels, torn sheets, and mice in the kitchen cupboards. Eadith remembered the mouse-catcher of grey skin and smelly socks in the flat in Hendrey Street. Rightly or wrongly, the young man was one of the many she had resisted taking as lovers.
She waited till Ada had gone before re-opening the discreet official envelope enclosing Gravenor’s letter. There was neither date, nor address, the message brief, neat; done with a pin, one would have thought.
My dearest Eadith,
How I miss our unsatisfactory encounters. Unfulfilling though our meetings were, they would fill the void of wherever I am, surrounded by anonymous automata. I like to think those other automata you and I created for ourselves out of our inhibitions were human beings underneath, and that we might have loved each other, completely and humanly, if we had found the courage. Men and women are not the sole members of the human hierarchy to which you and I can also claim to belong.
I can see your reproving face, your explosive jaw rejecting my assertion. If I can’t persuade you, I shall continue to accept you in whatever form your puritan decides you should appear, if we survive the holocaust which is preparing.
‘Love’ is an exhausted word, and God has been expelled by those who know better, but I offer you the one as proof that the other still exists.
R.
Several days later, as the proprietor came downstairs, the body of the house seemed pervaded by the torpor of reluctant flesh, except in the basement, where Ada, Mrs Parsons, and Tyler the houseman were stashing away the supplies they had brought back to withstand a siege by barbarians. Some of it had a glitter, almost that of precious stones, which the last of the loot always wears: brandied peaches, French plums, chicken breasts, caviare, none of it necessary, but all of it desirable as proof of the buyers’ foresight or cunning. Not that humbler commodities on which they would depend, such as tea and sugar in bursting bags, tins of bully, bars of soap, a case of evaporated milk, even a carton of bandaids, were without an esoteric glow in the present light.