Reg fancied Jule. ‘As smooth a swatch of black velvet as I ever clapped eyes on.’
The two men were taken by the girls to their rooms. Everyone appeared satisfied, excepting Eadith, faced with entertaining the nephew in between receiving officers of the Armed Forces and turning away the rowdies bred by the black-out and wartime clubs.
In her own boredom, exasperation, and resentment at Rod’s choosing Elspeth, she said to the youth she was landed with, ‘How boring for you, Philip, to hang around unemployed in a thriving brothel.’
The boy blushed. ‘I can’t say it isn’t a bore, Mrs Trist, and I shouldn’t be here if my uncle didn’t expect it of me.’
Irritation forced her to answer, ‘You hardly live up to his expectations, I’d say.’
The young man might have been more embarrassed, and she regretful of her cruelty, if Gravenor hadn’t returned to the room and beckoned the whore-mistress from the doorway.
‘Surely one of your girls can take it from him. Do try, Eadith darling. We may all be dead a year from now.’ He smiled his gentlest, most haggard smile, patted her arm, and was gone to enjoy the wilting Elspeth.
Eadith was torn by desire for revenge on those unconscious of their guilt, while dreading discovery by the lover she most desired.
On returning to Philip Thring she must have appeared agitated. He looked away discreetly.
‘I mean,’ he said, blushing again as he resumed their broken conversation, ‘what I find at Beckwith Street interests me aesthetically — and for its perversity, morally. But it doesn’t rouse me physically. Even if my uncle despises me for it — his friends do, and I think he must — I can’t take part.’
Mrs Trist said, ‘I believe you’ve almost told me a secret.’
The tremulous mirror he was offering her must have reflected the sympathy she felt for this boy. More than that: they were shown standing together at the end of a long corridor or hall of mirrors, which memory becomes, and in which they were portrayed stereoscopically, refracted, duplicated, melted into the one image, and by moments shamefully distorted into lepers or Velasquez dwarfs.
The tatters of diseased skin and hydrocephalic deformities were in the end what brought them closest.
The young man allowed her to take his hand. Ada passing along the landing opened Mrs Trist’s own door with a superficial unconcern to disguise a celebratory gesture. Closing the door on the celebrants, she continued on her way to some other more mundane business of a bawdy house.
Gravenor and Reg Quirk had finished the eggs and bacon served them it seemed some time ago. Into the room where they were sitting, there floated a pallid London light through the rather sooty gauze protecting an equivocal interior from a curious outside world.
‘Where the devil has the boy got to?’ Gravenor complained.
Reg was extracting splinters of bacon with a gold toothpick. He looked older under his tan and not so much wiser as blank.
Ada assured the uncle, ‘Mr Thring’ll come when he’s ready.’
‘Which girl took it from him, Ada?’
But Ada was less communicative than ever. ‘I’m not the one to tell your lordship. I only saw him go upstairs with Madam.’
By now Gravenor was quite tormented, his pink, clipped moustache prickling, his used, freckled skin jumping, most noticeably in the pouch under his left eye. This must have been where Gravenor’s main pulse was located.
After Ada had refreshed their coffee and laced it with a liberal tot of brandy, he couldn’t prevent himself blurting, ‘Don’t tell me my nephew is the only man known to have bedded Eadith Trist!’
‘How am I to say, sir?’ Ada answered. ‘I’ve not known Madam all her life, and can’t speak for every moment of the time I’ve known her.
It was too reasonable for Gravenor not to accept, and his friend disrupted further speculation by interjecting, ‘A fine woman — I wouldn’t mind screwing ’er meself.’
Presently Philip came downstairs, his air so discreet nobody could have found fault with it.
‘Shall I bring you some breakfast, sir?’ Ada suggested.
Philip appeared undecided. He sank down, elbows planted in the table at which his uncle and this friend were sitting, the one surly, the other gross and drowsy from sexual repletion.
‘Go on, Philip,’ Gravenor ordered. ‘Ada knows what’s good for you. Get your strength back after a night in the whore-house!’
While the sound and smells of grilling bacon, tomatoes, and kidneys mounted from Mrs Parsons’s kitchen, the uncle grew increasingly irritated, not to say maddened, at sight of his nephew’s skin coarsening under the girlish down. So he imagined, or so it was.
He was goaded into calling out to Ada while the boy was devouring the plate of food, ‘Isn’t Mrs Trist coming down? To gorge herself on bloody kidneys?’
‘I couldn’t say, sir, but don’t expect so,’ Ada replied.
Gravenor became contrite, resigned, respectful of Ada’s convention.
He paid up, and after recovering from his amazement at watching Philip lick the last vestige of bacon fat from the blade of his knife (there’s a war on, Rod had to tell himself), asked for his overcoat.
The three men left the house and went their various ways.
A second golden summer accompanied the waves of invasion, the retreats, the numb scramble to defend what was left. Yet the People’s War was still by no means everybody’s. Figures strolled in the parks in their shirtsleeves, lolled in deck chairs at lunchtime, offering their cheeks to an indulgent sun. There were the letters from across the Atlantic, where the Dianas and Cecilys had installed themselves to their advantage in New York apartments. The Australians — who could blame them? — were returning home by droves. So there was, and there wasn’t, a war. There were the barrage balloons, of course: amiable bloated cows, or sinister intestinal ganglia, depending on how one felt that day. The same applied to the sky-writing, which in the heat of a summer afternoon observers on the ground might interpret as an exercise on a blue slate. More disturbing were those old, indigent characters who had been overlooked, or refused to be evacuated, and who were haunting even the better streets to the discomfort of those who dismiss on principle, old age, ill-health, poverty, any phenomenon which threatens personal continuity. One might still succeed in dismissing other people’s dead and wounded, but not these ancient harbingers, their wrinkles pricked out in coal dust or soot, who looked as though they had crawled from the ruins of a structure built for eternity. As indeed it had to be. There were too many sandbags around, to protect it from blast. There were all these uniforms. One could accept the smell of khaki and sweaty socks mingling with the stench of duck droppings and urinals when so many healthy lads from the Dominions had arrived to defend all that is most worthy of defending. In the circumstances, it was easy to accept adultery, perhaps even sodomy — more difficult their dreadful accents.
But the ancient harbingers remained haunting the streets. And night thoughts evading the golden days of what might be the last summer.
This was the London in which Mrs Trist reached the apogee of her career or fate. Not that she aspired to heights. Experience in her several lives had left her with few illusions. She was sceptical of history, except at a ground-floor level. She could not believe in heroes, or legendary actors, or brilliant courtesans, or flawless beauties, for being herself a muddled human being astray in the general confusion of life. (If she had been born all of a piece, she might have become a suburban housewife or, without those brakes which impede a woman’s progress or downfall, a small-time down-to-earth whore.)