The Twyborn Affair (21 page)

What had been a solemn occasion became the more solemn for an excess of port and an excessive unreality.

When the door was flung open. ‘I can't bear it any longer. The girls have pissed. Aren't you men ready for your coffee?'

She had stuck the Spanish comb at an even more improbable angle. She had started blinking and expostulating.

‘I'm worried about Biffy's cyst. All my little dogs die of cancer. Soon I shall be left alone—without the strength for rearing puppies.'

Cheeks pale by now, her mouth gaped open like a target in a fair.

Surprisingly, Judge Twyborn aimed. ‘You'll never be left alone, my dear. There'll be a host of surviving fleas—and probably a paralysed husband.'

 

On and off the parents had hopes of displaying their son to those they considered their friends: Edward's fellow judges, barristers, doctors, architects, sometimes a leavening of graziers. (‘You'll find country people speak a different language,' Eadie told him, ‘but they're warm-hearted, well-meaning' adding in the course of her introductory remarks, which were intended as persuasion, ‘Some have greater pretensions. Ethel Tucker, for example, is reading Proust, if you can believe, down in the Riverina.')

She would start sighing, almost mewing, before announcing, ‘We're having a few close friends to a little
drinks
party. We'd so love it if you'd look in.'

He staved it off. ‘I don't feel I'm ready. The languages alone.'

She sat looking at him incredulously.

‘Though Ethel and I might become mates if we don't rush it.'

‘Oh, Ethel's no great shakes. Take it from me. We were at school together. Ethel was practically illiterate. I had to write her love-letters for her.'

‘Was the marriage a success?'

‘Marriage doesn't necessarily come of the love-letters,' she mused.

She looked at him. ‘You're not ashamed of us, are you, Eddie?'

Unable to explain the reason for his diffidence, he could only murmur, ‘Two such honourable characters … Why should I be?'

She blushed. ‘I'm not all that honourable. And you sound as legal as your father while pretending not to be.'

Exposure in its most painful form was for some reason delayed till later than he had expected. ‘If you don't want to meet anybody else, I must bring you together with my old friend Joanie.'

‘Joanie?'

‘Golson—Sewell that was.'

‘Hardly remember. Suppose I do—just; I was quite small.'

‘But later, surely. You can't have been away all the time at boarding school. She remembers you and is dying to meet you.'

He gave no indication of accepting or refusing.

‘She'll be coming to afternoon tea tomorrow. I do hope you'll make the effort, darling.'

After that she took her dogs into the garden and gave them a good flea-powdering in preparation for Mrs Golson's visit.

 

The day of the visit turned out heavy: morning yawned through a green-gold late autumn haze; hibiscus pollen clung to the shoulder blundering against those brooding trumpets; the air you breathed felt coated with fur; and under the rose bushes which Mrs Golson must skirt that afternoon, a crop of giant, speckled toadstools had shot from the compost overnight.

At breakfast (Eadie presiding over a battery of shapely but dented Georgian silver, in a steam of strong Darjeeling) the Judge informed them, ‘I ran into Lushington, lunching yesterday at the Club.' Before revealing the outcome of their meeting, he paused to convey a liberal forkful of kedgeree past the spidery moustache. ‘He says,' said the Judge while masticating conscientiously, ‘he'll take you on at a—nominal—wage. Like many of the rich,' here the Judge defended himself by hunching his shoulders and clamping down on the kedgeree, ‘Greg Lushington is stingy. Oh, he doesn't
mean
to be. He understands it as thrift—which is how he came by what he's got. Thrift is something we poor professional coots are unable to indulge in. We can only aim at retiring early, to cosset investments.' He let out an enormous sigh, and continued munching, stray grains of rice trembling on the tips of the more detached hairs in his moustache.

‘Sometimes I wonder, darling, whether you are emulating Gladstone.'

‘How?'

‘All this—mastication.'

He ignored it, while continuing to munch.

‘Lushington would see you, Eddie. But returned last night to his property.'

‘Most of the time half-sloshed,' said Eadie.

‘How do you know?'

‘I can tell,' she said, ‘by instinct.'

Silence fell on a debris of haddock bones and rejected rice. Eadie was entering the desert which lies between the breakfast cuppa and the first snifter.

‘Lushington says that, as a jackeroo, you'll share a cottage with the manager—which, I take it, is meant as compensation for the nominal wage you'll be receiving.'

‘Fair enough,' Eddie Twyborn heard himself; morning apathy had dulled the glint in his brave idea.

All three Twyborns sank their chins and sipped their strong Darjeeling.

Eddie felt the sweat trickling down his temples.

When he had done all there is to do at that hour he went out and roamed. He took a tram to the city and bought some pencils for which he had no immediate use. Later in the morning he caught sight of the Judge sniffing at cigars in a tobacconist's; later still, his mother buying a card of buttons in a store. So that all three, for the time being, were employed.

He might have evaporated completely towards the time for afternoon tea, if what Eadie would have called his ‘morbid streak' had allowed him to resist a glimpse of Joanie Golson. So he hung around the periphery.

The doorbell rang and Mildred in her frills ran to answer.

A breeze had broken out in the garden, stirring the perfumes, the pollens. The harbour had become a sheet of corrugated zinc. Mildred was using a hankie.

‘Well, Mildred, how nice to see you. Are you keeping well?'

A grateful sogginess issuing out of the hankie.

‘Are
they
all well?'

The felted distances were the more intriguing for remaining invisible; he, the would-be voyeur, preferred to train his mind's eye on the person formed by Mrs Golson's voice.

Eadie, entering from the garden, slipped where marble verged on jarrah.

Joanie must have caught her.

‘Thank you, darling. Such a stand-by. You're my
rock
!'

‘I'd have thought Edward …'

‘Edward is my judgment.'

A high breathiness in Joanie. ‘But rocks suggest bulk, don't they? When I've been at such pains to reduce.'

‘Oh, you have, of course you have! You're looking positively flimsy, Joanie—in your blue—that panama so light it's ready to fly out the window.'

‘One never knows how to take you, Eadie.' Mrs Golson sounded peeved.

‘Take me? No one has attempted that in years.' Eadie Twyborn too, was breathy, but in the bass, subsiding, it seemed into the sofa's non-existent springs.

Mrs Golson must have subsided shortly after, her impact more audible. ‘Anyway,
he
is here. Cheer up, Eadie! Am I going to have a glimpse of him?'

‘Who can tell?'

Mildred bearing tea-things was competing with a gardenful of birds.

‘It remains to be seen,' Eadie continued cryptically, to keep it from the servants.

‘Nowhere else,' Mrs Golson vouchsafed, ‘does one find such delicious bread-and-butter rolls.'

‘Etty learned them from the nuns.'

As Mildred had withdrawn, the two ladies went into a giggle.

‘Oh yes,' Mrs Golson gasped, ‘we can learn a lot from the nuns, I'm sure.'

After that they must have fallen to counting the crumbs or searching their thoughts, until Eadie embarked on the pedigree of somebody who had married someone.

‘Did you know,' Joanie interrupted, ‘that Marian is expecting another?'

‘Yes, Marian's expecting another.'

‘Does she know that Eddie is back?'

‘Who can say? I'm too discreet to ask. But the world is full of indiscretion.'

A southerly had risen to trouble the garden; it was bashing the helpless hibiscus trumpets. From where he was stationed, round the corner in the study, he could look out and see flesh already bruised, shredded. Soon he must declare himself, face other damage at the tea-table, for all anybody knew, perhaps even create worse.

So he held back.

‘You know, Eadie, when we were away that time in France, before the War, there were several occasions when I was about to write you a letter.'

‘That was when you were neglecting me.'

‘It would be difficult to say, Eadie, who was neglecting who.'

Half a French door was slammed shut by the mounting gale. Nobody rose to attend to it.

‘Was there something specific you had to write about? Or only that you still loved me—and were too cruel to re-assure.'

‘Of course I still loved—I do still love you! Of all people, I think I'm the one who understands you.'

‘To understand a person can make her most unlovable.'

‘Oh, darling, you do know how to stick the knife in!'

‘Then why did you want to write, and didn't?'

‘I didn't because I had no concrete evidence.'

‘Of what, Joan? Only Edward can be as tiresome.'

‘Well, you see, I met this very beautiful, very charming young woman—a Madame Vatatzes—married to an elderly, mad Greek.'

‘Ah, now we're coming to it! You had an affair with this very charming, beautiful young woman. You comforted her in her husband's madness.'

‘You're the one who's mad! I've never been unfaithful to you, darling.'

‘Will you give me your hand on it?'

‘It's far too buttery—and far too hot—but if you must.'

Round the corner in the study Eddie Twyborn was enveloped in this same buttery silence of schoolgirl pacts and womanly frustration. Could he escape the dénouement of then and now?

‘If you didn't have the affair, what else was there to confess, in this letter you didn't write?'

‘It would sound too silly. I couldn't tell! There's nothing to back it up. Only that she had such extraordinary eyes.'

‘She won you over. She seduced you, Joanie.'

‘Nothing of the sort.'

‘In your thoughts at least.'

The silence was palpitating.

‘I don't think you're being honest with me, Joan.'

‘I am, I tell you. You're unfair. Well, nobody's completely honest in every corner of her mind. Are you, Eadie?'

Eadie did not answer.

Joanie said, ‘I don't believe Eddie's going to appear.'

‘You could be right.'

‘You frightened him off.'

‘How?'

‘By wanting to possess him.'

‘Isn't he my child?'

The storm broke in the drawing room as against the gale outside in the garden.

‘You do, you know!' Joanie Golson was riding both inner storm and outer gale. ‘Everybody!' she seemed to exult.

‘Oh, people are cruel! One only asks for trust—certainty …' There was a terrible glug-glugging, an infernal bath water escaping. ‘That's why one keeps dogs, I suppose.'

‘Oh, darling, don't! Nobody else knows how to hurt.'

‘Only Eddie. Eddie's an expert.'

‘You can depend on me, Eadie darling. Didn't you say I was your rock?'

Shattered by now, he must slip away, regardless of the consequences. The shadow in other people's lives oppressed him as much as the shadow in his own—the unpossessed.

He glanced back from the hall and there in the depths of the drawing-room mirror was this inchoate mass of flesh gobbling desperately at flesh. Was he the cause of their Laocoon's breaking up? Nobody could have told, because at this point Eadie kicked the tea-table, the remains of the nuns' bread-and-butter rolls, the uncut jam sandwich, the Georgian family silver lovingly acquired at auction—all crashing.

‘Oh God, Joanie, they'll hear! Do help me pick it up. They'll see. Mildred's so sharp—I'd give her the sack—if I thought I'd get anybody else.'

He stole away—the word for thieves and ghosts. The bottoms erected between himself and the shambles neither observed nor accused, as hands scrabbled to repair a situation for which he, perhaps, was totally responsible.

 

As the waitresses, plump or sinewy, wove and interwove in their uniform black with white flashes, the head waiter, that giant currawong, a sheaf of menus tucked into a wing, swirling and descending, in nobody's pay yet open to persuasion, and woe to the heads he might crunch off as a reward for unworldliness (Mr Effans, no other), those seated at Sunday luncheon in this most reputable Sydney hotel should have felt assured, and for the most part were, the napkins so thick and nappy, the excessive cutlery so solid and elaborately incised; you could play a chord or two if you chose on either side of your brown Windsor soup.

In fact Eddie Twyborn did. But the Chabrier did not swirl to the same extent as the head waiter, whose gyrations were constantly bouncing the tips of his tails off the convexity of his splendid calves.

Eadie grumbled. ‘I don't know why you brought us, Edward. We could have lunched much more happily at home. Instead the servants—Etty and Thatcher anyway; it's Mildred's afternoon off—will be eating their heads off at your expense and blaming me for being their mistress.'

‘I brought us, my dear,' said the Judge, trying out the surface of his brown Windsor, ‘for the sake of old times, and to give our son a little treat.' Here Judge Twyborn might have been blowing on his soup or laughing up his sleeve.

‘Old times …' Eadie mumbled; then, as though stung by memories, she cried, ‘I think I was born before my time!' and hit the rim of her plate with her spoon.