Lila had a serene, even temper, which perfectly complemented Elsa’s tendency to overdramatize the mildest upset. Lila cared nothing for appearances, especially her own. She made no effort to get rid of facial hair, and a tooth that suddenly fell out was never replaced. Elsa wore elaborate jewellery – vast hoops of earrings – and applied mascara, powder and vivid scarlet lipstick in a manner that became ever more slapdash as she got older.
Lila was a brilliant and eccentric cook. She had hundreds of recipes at her command. The various liqueurs that relatives sent or brought back from Argentina were seldom drunk – ‘This will give the dish a kick’ – but rather used as exotic flavourings for the cakes and biscuits she was always baking. I watched her closely one December afternoon as she made a chocolate gâteau. Into the large bowl she flung flour, butter, caster sugar. An angelita appeared beside her. She stroked it tenderly, and then put her hand back into the bowl. She picked up a brown bottle and poured its entire contents into the mixture. ‘For the kick,’ she explained. I was to remember the floury hand on the cat’s arched back when my sister requested a second slice of the chocolate cake on Christmas morning, declaring it the most delicious she had ever eaten.
We were gathered in the state apartments, as the sisters described the dining room, that Christmas. The dining table could accommodate twenty people. A heavy iron chandelier dominated the room. The furniture was of dark, solid wood. It might have been the setting for a play by Lorca – except that these two sisters had satisfied desires the wretched daughters of Bernarda Alba were forbidden to experience. Elsa had mixed the drinks in anticipation of the guests’ arrival – gins and tonic; whiskies and soda. In her anxiety to discover if she had got the measure right, she had taken a sip from every glass, each one of which bore a sizeable trace of her scarlet lipstick. My fastidious mother could not conceal the disgust she felt when Elsa handed her a gin. In common with everyone else, she drank from the unstained side of the glass, though at a moment when Elsa was out of sight she dipped into her handbag and produced a tissue with which she wiped the rim.
Elsa and Lila were frequent guests at the Royal Opera House on ballet nights. They sat in the centre stalls, in aisle seats. Elsa wore a long green evening dress and pearls and earrings, while Lila dressed in discreet black. In winter, both donned furs. They refused to eat or drink in either the stalls bar or the Crush Bar, finding the prices exorbitant. So they took their dinner with them, in a picnic basket and a bedraggled shopping bag. They were not, it has to be said, popular with the balletgoers sitting near them, who had to step over the picnic basket and endure the smell of hard-boiled eggs after the first interval. They ate cold meats and salads, and drank red wine and hot coffee from a Thermos flask. The meal lasted until the curtain calls, and sometimes beyond. Elsa was in the habit of muttering obscenities in Spanish if a dancer or choreographer displeased her, and those in the audience who understood the meaning of coño de puta were either amused or shocked. Regular patrons were inclined to ask at the box office if they could be kept at a safe distance from those two ‘appalling old women’, one of whom refused to be silenced, even after threat of being removed from the theatre. Elsa and Lila were, as my sister noted appreciatively, ‘proper characters’.
Elsa was returning to bed one night with a glass of milk when she heard a curious sound coming from the state apartments. Her decision not to investigate probably saved her life, for the noise she heard was of the chandelier hitting the dining table. It had proved too weighty to hold for the burglars who had unscrewed it from the ceiling, and the sisters were to see it the following day, embedded in the ruined table, amid other wreckage. The thieves had been thwarted, and in their frustration and haste to leave they stole an album containing photographs of parents, brothers, uncles, aunts and cousins. The loss of these precious souvenirs upset Elsa and Lila deeply, motivated as their theft was by spite, not gain. The men also took some gold doubloons – family heirlooms, beyond value.
It had rained steadily before and after the burglary. Lila, venturing into the garden, chanced upon the tools the men had used to break into the house. They were covered in mud. She picked them up and carried them into the kitchen and washed them at the sink. Then she dried and polished them clean with a towel, little realizing that she had got rid of incriminating fingerprints along with the mud. The police were not pleased when she presented them with what she referred to as the ‘evidence’.
In the years of our friendship with Elsa and Lila, David and I lived happily – if somewhat histrionically – in the flat in Paddington. My first and second novels were published, and David left Covent Garden to work as a freelance costumier. (He loathed the word ‘costume’, which suggested something arcane and dead to him. He produced period clothes for living people.) The minute dining room became his increasingly cluttered workroom, for he loved to function in seeming chaos. I had daily employment too, as a reader for my publisher Jonathan Cape. The phrase ‘proud breasts’ appeared in one trashy spy novel after another, all written under the influence of Ian Fleming. ‘Why are the breasts always proud?’ I asked my fellow reader, William Plomer. ‘Ah,’ he replied, ‘I think it’s because they’re imposing. The girls’ mothers had to eat snoek, a distinctly fatty fish, during the war, and that may explain why the breasts have this stuck-up appearance. Blame their pride on snoek.’