They sat holding hands regardless of the incised masks of the Mileses and Gileses, the Muffs and Cecilys, at Baby’s party — all of them nourished on the boiled brains and milky rice prescribed by Nanny and rammed home by the under-nursemaids, the pap which under-housemaids, their cracked fingers black with coal dust, produced off trays, or in more impressive households, from the nursery hatch.
Rising out of a taut throat, Ursula’s laughter rustled as minute diamond chips might have if released in a shower. She was no match for Diana Siderous, whose throatiness had the brazen clang of an Arab fantasia. Yet their targets were usually the same.
Hand in hand, Rod and Eadith sat looking at each other from time to time; perennial children, they could not believe in their situation however much they longed.
Jill Watmore Blood, who was falling out of her uppers, had to break up something, she wasn’t sure what. ‘A message from Daddy, Rod duckie: he hopes you’ll join us at Cowes. Daisy and Buster will be there, so it’s practically a royal command. But that’s up to you. I probably shan’t make it. It looks as though the piece at the Shaftesbury won’t have folded.’ She grimaced, picked at her canines with a vivid nail, planted a carnation in her cleavage, directed a smile at Reg Quirk, and a more virginal one at Nora.
Rod looked at Eadith. ‘I’ll never know what you think because you’re not going to tell me.’
‘Then I must have caught the English disease.’
She laughed. She was so happy watching the bristles of his pink moustache moving as he masticated, the chapped lips folding themselves around morsels of chicken, and finally, out-of-season peach. She knew there would be pockets of his body lined with soft peach-skin in contrast to the overall expanse of aggressive, male bristle.
She looked across, and found Nora Quirk looking her way, composing her blenched lips on her denture. Again Eadith looked, and Ursula suggested some oriental bird stilled by the eighteenth century on the surface of an English artificial lake. Attracted by a spectacle, cattle were descending the other side of a ha-ha, amongst them Reg Quirk, his Australian museau de bæuf parted.
Eadith was so in love with the unattainable Rod, she might have submitted to Reg had a beefy shoulder chafed her flank.
Glances had reached the interlocking stage at Lady Ursula’s dinner table.
They served coffee on the terrace, where the English began breaking out, quivering with daring, brandy, and malice. They were discussing the Australian coo-ee, of which the more travelled and more generally knowledgeable among them had experienced or heard tell.
‘Can you do it, Nora?’ Maufey enquired of his still not fully controlled puppet.
‘I’ll say I can!’ Nora nearly giggled her head off, snapping her denture shut in time to avert disaster.
Reg only muttered ‘I reckon …’ and plodded off in the direction of the copse below.
After ploughing through shaven lawns, shaggy with dew by this time of night, and reaching the descent into natural grass, beeches, and darkness, he turned and called, ‘Come on, Nora, let ’em have ut!’
Nora filled her lungs, which everyone saw were considerable, and let fly through the Wiltshire dark, her navel straining at her Schiaparelli.
‘Coo-ee?’ she called.
And Reg called back, ‘Coo-EE!’
The upright English were falling about inside their skins, while the Australians called back and forth like a couple of currawongs nourished on Wahroonga milk.
Only Eadith Trist had watched a currawong perching on an angophora’s elbow, his free claw clenched on the finch whose head he was chewing.
The Quirks might have extended their performance longer than was expected of Maufey’s amusing Australians, if the admiral’s actress daughter hadn’t declared, ‘I’m sure I can do it — but from a distance. I’m going down to Reg Thingamy.’
At which, Currawong Nora failed to answer her mate’s call. She had, in fact, that bird’s vindictive eye. As Miss Watmore Blood glided over the shaggy dew before plunging into the natural grass, where the daffodils had been tied down at the end of the season, Nora Quirk’s silence pulsated, as did her bust against the Schiaparelli, awaiting the cards fate might deal.
‘Reg will teach me,’ Jill burbled back, but failed to reach her goal for falling into the lily pond. ‘Oh, God! Oh, Christ! Oh, fuck!’
Everybody was rushing to disentangle the actress from the lily-pads.
Though Baby (‘… my precious lilies …’) might have wished her drowned.
So lean, so loose-swinging, so weed-bedraggled, Jill was almost unrecognisable.
‘Take her away, somebody,’ Ursula commanded. ‘What she needs is a hot bath. And a rub down with a warmed towel.’
‘But I don’t!’ Miss Watmore Blood protested. ‘It’s a warm night. What I need is Reg — Rod — Reg — no bloody towel!’ She was led away, her escaped breasts jumping like the frogs she had disturbed underneath the lily-pads.
After her too impulsive guest had been removed, Lady Ursula ordered beer to quench everybody’s thirst, though perhaps more especially that of her re-united Australians. These stood on the perimeter of light enclosing Baby’s disorganised party. Not ungratefully, the Quirks drank their warm beer. Reg might have been ‘consuming’ his. The demonstration and his climb back from the copse below had left him breathless. He should by rights have joined the British males, but was intimidated more than he would have cared to admit: they were talking shop, or same thing — foreign affairs.
He felt more at ease with this woman, this Mrs Trist — this Eadith — whatever they told you about her ‘house’. (Might try it out some afternoon while Nora was at the dress shows.)
Reg confessed to Mrs Trist, ‘The wife and I were saying only the other day, however much you feel at home in England it’s good to hear your own language again. Just now you come across it all over London. It’s odds on you’ll run into friends. Last week it was Joanie Golson — next table at the Savoy …’
‘No, dear, Claridge’s.’ Nora sighed.
‘… Joanie — Sir Boyd’s widow — of Sydney’s most go-ahead store.’
If there was no holding Reg after a couple of warm beers, Nora only faintly preened.
‘And yesterday on the Mall, it was Eadie — Mrs Justice Twyborn.’
‘Hardly friends, dear — the Twyborns. Once or twice we shook their hands.’
‘As you say, we’ve shaken hands, and I’m proud to have shook the Judge’s hand — one of our most distinguished Australians.’
Mrs Trist dared ask, ‘Is the Judge with Mrs Twyborn in London?’
Checking up on the menfolk! Well, it was her business.
Mr Quirk stood swirling the dregs of beer at the bottom of his glass with appropriate solemnity. ‘The Judge recently passed on,’ he had to inform her.
Flushed by social triumphs and the success of their little performance, death could have been the Quirks’ least concern. There was not yet any sign that they would ever be threatened. The croaking of disturbed frogs, the clatter and splintering of human laughter at its most inhuman, a night bird calling more poignantly than the self-possessed currawongs of earlier, cannot have entered their consciousness. So why was this woman acting queer?
For the invisible bird, throbbing and spilling like blood or sperm, had brought Eddie Twyborn to the surface. Abandoning what the Quirks would still work into their travelogue as a cosy occasion, he started skittering across the lawn, the brutally illuminated terrace, into the house, in his ridiculous drag, the wisps of damp-infested cocks’ feathers, trailing skirt, stockings soaked with dew.