The Twyborn Affair (20 page)

In this evening's silence, nobody, at least for the time being, was suggesting anything for his good. His isolation was not the target for the sounds breaking around it: the chitter of crickets, the twitter from a formation of small migrating birds, a gibber of possums, more human for the demands they were making on one another, the crash of a tram as it rounded a corner in a sputtering of violet sparks.

Shouldn't he
do
something instead of becoming a fixture in this room which had received him back? What rituals were performed before dinner in the house to which he belonged? Did they bathe? Change their clothes? To be on the safe side, he decided not to prepare in any way. Stick to the day's patina of grime and sweat, an additional layer of himself as protection against the moment when he must beard the Judge in the garden.

A figure, he realised, had come down the steps from the drawing room and was hovering amongst the more amorphous masses of shrubs. Impossible to tell whether it were Edward or Eadie. Cigar smoke was no indication of sex. If Edward, would Eadie have warned him of what to expect? Or had she decided to submit him to the same shock as she had undergone, only intensified by darkness, night perfumes, and fragmentation of distant lights? Perhaps you had done wrong to plan the meeting in the dark garden. Face to face in the dim lighting favoured in this house might have been less unnerving, underwater shapes drifting harmlessly around as they took each other's measure. Too bad if a predator appeared. But Eadie had probably been frightened off. She would keep away till the worst was over.

Anyway, he had to go down.

Crossing the drawing room he overheard a voice bullying servants. ‘Can we be sure of the soufflé, Etty? You know what a flop the last one was—when Mrs Golson came to lunch …' A clattering of crockery. ‘By all means take her on your lap, Thatcher. But you did nothing, absolutely nothing, about the cyst between her toes. My poor dear! My darling Biffy! Sentimentality is all very well, but practical attention, Thatcher, is what little dogs respond to.' A cowering silence, almost, you thought you detected, a fearful stench blowing from the kitchen offices.

He forged on. The sound of his own feet covering a jarrah no-man's land between threadbare rugs should not have alarmed an ex-lieutenant (D.S.O.); nor should an ex-Empress (hetaira) of Nicaea, expert in matters of protocol and mayhem, have quailed before a situation involving a minor official even when the official was her
father; mere blood relationship never ruled out a bloodbath.

With Eadie in the kitchen, it was unavoidably the Judge smoking his solitary cigar in the quiet of the garden.

Lieutenant Twyborn went over the top, down the marble steps from which brocaded skirts swept dead leaves and caterpillars' droppings.

A shaft of light striking from the house laid bare the long judicial face as well as that of the defendant.

A dry, self-contained man, the Judge was at the culprit's mercy as never on any of his many circuits.

‘Why didn't she tell me?' He had to accuse somebody.

The air around them was tremulous.

‘I expect she thought it would be less upsetting to let you find out.'

As indeed it had been easier not to forewarn by writing, to leave it to a mingling of skin and veins, the texture of cloth, the tokens on a watch-chain, the spider-moustache which descended and withdrew as on the night when the shutters blew open, never before, never again till now. (Angelos hadn't worn a moustache.)

In the shaft of light the Judge's concern glistened like bone: that this son whom he loved—he did, didn't he? should have perverted justice by his disappearance. Judge Twyborn did not intend to pursue the reason why; it might have been too unreasonable for one who put his faith in reason despite repeated proof that it will not stand up to human behaviour.

To avoid a conclusion he might be forced to draw, this honourable man began asking, ‘Did they put soap for you, Eddie, and a towel?'

‘Haven't looked, but I expect so.'

‘Whatever else is neglected, your room has been taken care of.'

They were stumbling over the earthworks Thatcher's tended lawn had thrown up.

‘Are you cold, boy? Your hand is cold.'

‘Not unduly.' The hand you were chafing with yours, the molten rivers of veins, would not have allowed it; still, you heard yourself chattering as though with cold.

‘Sydney is splendid at night,' the Judge was informing a visitor. ‘There's a lot that's undesirable by day, but that can apply, I should think, in any city in the world.'

Fortunately as they reached the steps the techniques of living were taking over.

‘Madam says dinner is served, sir. She's afraid of the soufflé'

Lieutenant Twyborn dropped his host's hand.

Freshly powdered, Mildred stood simpering on the illuminated heights. She had exchanged her daytime starch for organdie frills, frivolous against a more austere background of black.

And Eadie had emerged to reinforce the announcement. ‘Yes,' she told them, ‘Etty's soufflé is standing up—splendidly. So don't dawdle, Edward, please.'

She smiled at their son. She may have wished to touch him, but something she could not have defined frightened her into resisting the impulse. Perhaps it was his good looks. Handsome men were inclined to intimidate Eadie Twyborn. It would not have dawned on her to credit with looks the man she had married, just as you take for granted some elegant hairbrush acquired long ago, its form less noticeable by the time you've worn the bristles down and realise you ought to do something about what has become a source of aggravation.

As they entered the dining room Judge Twyborn was holding himself so erect he must have been competing with a soldier son. In more normal circumstances, his profession would have assisted him, but the combination of an already mythical war and suddenly recovered fatherhood left him looking overtly respectful.

Eddie saw that the whole elaborate ritual was in store: the mahogany oval laid with worn silver, Waterford glass, in a central épergne white hibiscus preparing to close, while Mildred, straining at her calves against the sideboard, would be catapulted into the kitchen as soon as they were seated, to return with Etty's upstanding soufflé.

Oh God, he could have cried. Instead he bowed his head as for
grace, and remembered the fortnight after confirmation when he had expected miracles.

‘We don't know, darling, what your tastes are,' Eadie said, ‘I mean—in food.'

The Judge sat crumbling bread on the mahogany surface beyond the circumference of a Limerick doily which threatened to stick to his fingers, all doilies to all their fingers, leprous flesh barely distinguishable from webs of lace.

‘I mean,' said Eadie, ‘whether you're a
gourmet
, or like it plain.'

‘Don't you think food depends a lot on time and place?'

Eadie laughed; she would have laughed at anything, even what she hadn't listened to. But Edward Twyborn was looking grave. Eddie hated to feel he might appear a prig to those mournful eyes.

‘Do you remember—Father,' the whole scene was so unreal, nothing he might add to it could make it more incongruous, ‘you took me with you when a court was sitting at—Bathurst I think it was. We shared an enormous iron bed with a honeycomb coverlet on it.'

‘I don't remember,' the Judge said.

‘I do.' Or thought you did. Oh yes, you
did
! ‘I was so excited I lay awake all night listening to the noises in the pub yard. The moonlight, I remember, was as white as milk. It was hot. I pushed the bedspread off. It lay on the floor against the moonlight.'

‘Eddie, you're making it up!' Eadie was out in the cold.

‘No, I'm not,' he insisted as he messed up Etty's soufflé. ‘Remembering is a kind of disease I suffer from.'

‘Hardly a disease,' the Judge muttered through a mouthful. ‘Useful, I'd say, if you're to any degree selective.'

‘No, a disease,' Eddie Twyborn heard himself persisting. ‘I don't know, but suspect that those who can't recall, act more positively than those who are bogged down in memory.'

Eadie announced in a loud voice, ‘You can't deny it's a jolly good soufflé.'

‘Excellent,' the Judge agreed.

‘I remember, on the same trip we had a meal in one of those
railway refreshment rooms—so-called. We had corned beef, and watery carrots, and dumplings that bounded from under the knife …'

‘Oh darling, must we be morbid?'

‘… but it was delicious. Anyway, a delicious memory. Even the brown drone of blowflies, the brown linoleum. Somebody's dumpling shot across the floor.'

Judge Twyborn was staring at his plate, at the soufflé he had massacred.

‘I can't believe,' Eadie said. ‘Unless you keep a diary. Do you, Eddie?'

‘On and off.'

‘I've thought about it. But haven't had the courage.' She wiped her mouth, and looked at the mark on the napkin.

Eddie glanced at the father he had wanted to impress and comfort, who was looking as though he had a moron for a son, or worse, some kind of pervert: that honeycomb bedspread, the whole moonlit scene.

While his wife continued wrapped in a state of mind induced by the mark on the napkin.

The Judge leaned across. ‘Then I'm not wrong, my dear, in thinking you painted up a bit too vividly for the occasion.'

Eadie exclaimed, ‘Oh my God!' and got up to pour herself a whiskey chaser to her wine.

Mildred removed the dishes, and brought on the roast fowl, with bread sauce and sprouts, just as though it were the holidays.

‘Are we having the caramel custard with toffee on it?' he asked his mother.

‘You're unnatural, Eddie.'

Even before all three were crunching the caramel toffee (Judge Twyborn more circumspectly than the others because of an upper denture) he knew that he should not have come back; he should have kept his existence to himself, or only revealed it to strangers.

Eadie stood up at last. ‘This is where I leave the men to the port. I know that's how Edward would like it.' She poured another whiskey chaser to sustain her in her isolation.

She had got herself up in an ancient girlish frock, silver flounces over rose. A tear became visible under one armpit as she scratched her head defensively. She was wearing a Spanish comb in her hair as no Spaniard had ever worn one.

He stood up. He would have liked to say something to his mother, but hadn't learnt the language as do natural linguists and normal sons.

So she extricated herself from what she saw to be a male situation, and was soon cursing Etty, Mildred, Thatcher, between the silences in which she hoped to overhear what was going on in the dining room.

He had failed her. He was going to fail them both, as it is the habit, more often than not, of the children to fail the parents—and vice versa.

He had hardly sat down after Eadie's exit when the Judge began. ‘What do you think of doing, Eddie?'

You could hardly answer, Nothing; surely being is enough? looking, smelling, listening, touching.

Instead you said, ‘I'm thinking of going into the country. To work.'

In response to a serious aspiration, the Judge became more than ever earnest. ‘A practice in a country town—somewhere like Wagga, say—no, Bathurst. I don't approve of nepotism, but could probably persuade Birkett and Blair to take you in. A very reputable firm of solicitors. Blair I know personally. I can't see why you shouldn't aim higher eventually. But feel your way back into the profession you were intended for. I'd die so much happier for seeing you dedicated to the Law.'

The velvet of sentiment and the private bin Edward Twyborn kept in reserve for celebrations introduced a seductive solemnity into their tête-à-tête. Eddie wished he could take himself as seriously as his father required, or that the Judge might have understood the greater seriousness of coming to terms with a largely irrational nature.

‘I thought of taking a job, as a labourer more or less—hard
physical labour—on the land—and in that way perhaps, getting to know a country I've never belonged to.'

Judge Twyborn's eyes had never looked deeper, more troubled, as though some private obsession of his own were on the point of being discovered.

In fact his son barely noticed; he was too surprised at the improbable idea which had come to him the moment before. Its morality must have appeared admirable, if stark, to the one in whom he was confiding. His more innocent confidant would not have seen it as Eddie Twyborn escaping from himself into a landscape.

Oh yes, it was an idea he would more than consider; he could not wait to put it into action; he was already surrounded by the train smell, frosty air, his oilskin rolled, heavy boots grating on the gravel of a country siding. (Would those who came across him notice that the boots were recently bought and that his hands looked as ineffectual as they might prove to be?)

But the landscape would respond, the brown, scurfy ridges, fat valleys opening out of them to disclose a green upholstery, the ascetic forms of dead trees, messages decipherable at last on living trunks.

‘I'd never thought of anything like that—for you, Ed,' Judge Twyborn admitted glumly; the port no doubt made it sound the sadder. ‘That the son of a professional man like myself … Oh well, why not?' He laughed rather disconsolately. ‘The Law—or medicine, or any other profession, shouldn't be allowed to become a religion. Lots of reputable young men have made a go of it on the land. We can get someone to take you on—not as a labourer. When members of our class are involved,' the Judge approached it gingerly, ‘they call it
jackerooing
.'

An easier way? Eddie suspected it was, and not without a touch of nepotism, when he had aspired to be a ‘hand'.

‘I'll speak to Greg Lushington. I see him on and off at the Club.'