The Twyborn Affair (22 page)

‘Sshhh!' It was the Judge.

‘How do you see it, Eddie darling?'

Eddie was, wrongly, seated between them. The Judge should have been the centre-piece.

Dragged out of focus, and scalding his palate, Eddie said, ‘I like to think, Mother, we're all of us timeless.'

She began whimpering at her untouched soup.

It could have become embarrassing if a lady had not borne down on them in a braided costume of another age, leaving after an early luncheon; she might have referred to it as ‘dinner'.

She said, ‘It's such a joy to see you, Mrs Twyborn—Judge,' smirking at the son of whom she had heard, ‘one of our most distinguished families, re-united.' Nodding her little postillion hat, she showed them her teeth, in one of which the nerve had died.

‘The War might have destroyed us, but didn't,' the lady told them.

‘So kind,' Eadie murmured, and bowed her head above the untouched soup.

Eddie asked, ‘Who is she?'

‘Red Cross or something like that, I think. I met her when we were knitting for you, darling.' The nerves had not died in Eadie's teeth, but nicotine had coated them; everybody had been through it.

The slaves removed the plates and produced others. There was the roast beef with its ruffle of yellow fat, and Yorkshire pudding baked in the shape of a tight bun.

‘Everything in order, Judge?' asked Mr Effans, who had not yet received recognition for his favours.

‘Everything. Why not?' the Judge demanded, laughing.

In deference to an old hand, the head waiter smiled and withdrew.

Eadie was again bent on disapproval. ‘Now that is a woman I can't take to.'

After advancing some way into the dining room, the object of her aversion had seated herself on the opposite side. If she was aware of the disapproval Mrs Judge Twyborn was aiming at her, she gave no indication of it.

The two women sat not exactly looking at each other.

‘Who?' asked the Judge, glancing out like some noble beast interrupted in his grazing.

‘Marcia Lushington,' Eadie hissed.

‘She didn't go back with Greg,' their son remarked, to take an interest in a world which was shortly to include himself.

Eadie said, ‘I think they suit themselves. But stay together for convenience. I suppose we shouldn't hold it against them.' She petered out in a racketty cough.

The Judge was slopping around in the shallows of gravied pumpkin and beans.

Mrs Lushington blew two streams of smoke down her nostrils, which must have irritated Mrs Twyborn almost beyond control, for she ground out her cigarette, not in the ashtray provided, but in her practically untouched beef.

The Judge laid his knife and fork together in the puddles of gravy, the sludge of greens, as humbly as he might have in any railway refreshment- or country tea-room while on circuit.

From admiring his father's velvet muzzle, Eddie fell to observing Mrs Lushington.

Her dress proclaimed her a rich dowdy, or fashionable slattern. If the monkey fur straggling down from a Venetian tricorne gave
her head the look of a hanging basket in a fernery, the suit she wore was buttoned and belted in a loosely regimental style, an effect contradicted in turn by several ropes of pearls which she slung about while studying the menu.

Marcia reminded Eddie somewhat of a raw scallop, or heap of them, the smudged, ivory flesh, the lips of a pale coral. Undaunted by her surroundings, her tongue suddenly flickered out and drew in a straggle of monkey fur, which she sucked for a second or two before rejecting. As she continued studying the menu, torturing the enormous pearls, glancing up from time to time at nobody and everybody, the faintly coral lips worked against her teeth, as though she had already eaten, and was trying to free them from fragments of something unpleasant.

Eadie couldn't bear her apple pie. ‘I don't know why you insisted, darling, when you know I don't care for sweets.'

The Judge, who enjoyed his pud, was masticating gently, and ignoring.

Eddie asked his mother, ‘What have you got against Mrs Lushington?' His schoolboy treat was making him feel magnanimous.

‘Nothing—actually—nothing,' Eadie admitted. ‘Except that she's a common piece—who came off a cow farm at Tilba—and caught old Greg Lushington—and led him by the nose ever since.'

‘Come on, Eadie, aren't you unfair?' the Judge intervened. ‘Greg may have wanted to be led.'

‘It's no less deplorable—from whichever side.' After making this virtuous pronouncement Eadie lowered her eyes.

Just then Mrs Lushington blew two fiercer blasts from her nostrils, and without ordering, rose from the mock-Chippendale, and began to leave the dining room, her slouch as contemptuous as it was fashionable.

‘Good on 'er!' Mrs Justice Twyborn remarked.

Her son was left with his own image in the glass on the opposite wall. He was surprised to find himself look as convincing as he did, and wondered whether this had been Marcia's impression too. Probably not. For the reflexion was already fluctuating, in the satin
shoals, the watery waves of the mottled glass, as well as in his own mind. He was faced, as always, with an impersonation of reality.

 

All night, it seemed to him, he heard the twitter of birds migrating. In the luminous dark and his half-sleep he saw their eyes outlined with white pencil, as Eudoxia had touched up hers with black.

As Marcia Lushington had, what's more.

Marcia was lying, buttocks upturned, an abandoned china doll.

Eddie could not bring himself to respond to the breakfast bell, but waited for his parents to disperse. Then he went into the kitchen where Etty and Mildred were scurrying in bleached-out blue and Thatcher was smoking a vile pipe.

The girls chittered, ‘Oh, Mr Eddie!' and Etty dished up strips of a leathery omelette.

The spittle seethed in the bowl of Thatcher's pipe. ‘It's yer last day, eh?'

‘What makes you say that?'

‘Well, isn't it?' the gardener persisted.

He could not have denied what his parents might have.

He continued sitting over this late and fragmentary breakfast, but realised he was embarrassing the servants: the cook and maid taken up with their work, the gardener too, after his fashion.

Later in the morning, on packing his shamefully new clothes, the few indispensable possessions, the tube of toothpaste he had ruptured with his heel, he went down to face his mother.

Eadie Twyborn was seated on the flight of marble steps leading from the drawing room into the garden. On her tweed lap she was holding a beatific subject, one of her matted terriers. She was combing round his genitals, obviously causing him anguish of a kind, but whoever it was grinned and submitted.

Eadie said without looking up, ‘That is one I lost—and have recaptured.'

Her son ventured, ‘Not a flea, surely?'

‘Why not? We're all swarming, aren't we?' Her occupation was making her drowsy. ‘If not with fleas, thoughts—desires … Sometimes I think your father's the only one who isn't afflicted.'

She grimaced at the shadowless Australian light, and back at the flea she was crushing between blencing nails.

‘That,' she said with some satisfaction, ‘is the creamiest flea I've ever squashed. I often wonder about their sex. Is the little agile one the male—the creamy monster his mate? Or perhaps age, not sex, is responsible for the physical difference.'

She must have helped herself to a snifter earlier than on most mornings.

When he let himself out of the house that evening he wondered whether Eadie realised. Probably not. He would have liked to run into the Judge on the pavement; he would have half-liked Edward to go with him to the station, but his father must have been about the town on some honourable business of his own.

As the train glided alongside the platform in that sickening stench of departure Eddie looked out the window, still hoping the one face might materialise, the drooping moustache, the loosely furled umbrella, and that his father would leap aboard as a more athletic youth might, or Eudoxia Vatatzes, cramming Angelos into a packed corridor.

But no one appeared at the end of the long damp perspective, and Eddie Twyborn withdrew his head. The guard would think him peculiar enough without the ‘concrete evidence' of watering eyes.

 

He had in his pocket a letter of instructions. In the course of the night he read it several times, while the supply of greenish drinking water jumped and shuddered in a bottle secured by a metal circlet and bracket at the same level as the upper berth, and the commercial gent snored on his back in the bunk below.

‘This is it!' the guard shouted. ‘Fossickers Flat.'

‘Is it? Oh. Yes. It is.'

The only passenger for the Flat, he had come bundling, tumbling out, fumbling with his case and valise, barking a knuckle on a door fitting. Then the run along the gritty platform to make some show of helping the guard drag his trunk down from the van.

‘Looks like you're 'ere for an extended visit!' The man was laying out a minimum of joviality on one whose Christian name he would not be staying long enough to learn and use.

Already he was flagging the train on its way.

Out of conscience, or some store of fundamental kindness, he thought to call, ‘So long, Jack!' to the poor bastard left behind on the siding as himself swung aboard.

So Eddie Twyborn was stranded in this landscape, the well-read letter of instructions and welcome cooling in his cold hand.

The landscape too, was cold, and huge, undulating in white waves
towards distant mountains of ink blue. Rocks, not strewn, but arranged in groups of formal sculpture suggesting prehistoric rites, prevented monotony taking over the bleached foothills. These were almost treeless. Distracted eyes in search of cover would have had to content themselves with one or two patches of dingy scrub, the most luxuriant of which straggled alongside the railway siding known as Fossickers Flat.

Eddie Twyborn found refuge at last, less in the trees themselves, than in the sounds of life in their branches: the
tsst tsst
of invisible small birds, wrens possibly, as he remembered them from his childhood, and here caught glimpses finally, not of the flashy cock, but the humbler, yet more elegant hen. The hen wren's industry drew him back, out of the abstractions propounded by the hillscape and glazed air, into the everyday embroidery of life, the minutiae to which Eudoxia Vatatzes had clung as insurance against the domes of Byzantine deception. (Did poor Eadie in her Sydney garden find the same satisfaction in combing for insect-life round her terriers' genitals?)

Consoled by the sound and movements of the wrens as they skirred among the scrubby branches, Eddie Twyborn was not at first aware that a car of sorts, trailing a heavy wake of dust, was lurching down a road as white as the hills from which it had been carved. It was the dust he noticed first, for distance and the concerted wrens obliterated sound. Only in the foreground did the Ford start chugging with any purpose, clattering towards its apparent goal.

Of dislocated joints and flapping hood, it ground to a standstill below the siding. A door was torn open and slammed shut before the driver came round and showed himself. He was of middle age, a reddish man in clothes which seemed to inconvenience him judging by the contortions to which he was subjecting his shoulders, while easing his crotch, and flinging evident cramps off a pair of well-developed calves. In spite of the rights he enjoyed as a native, he might have felt that the stranger stationed above him on the platform had him at a disadvantage. For he took up a stance, legs apart, hands on hips, as he stared upward. What may have been
intended as a smile of welcome was turned by his disadvantage and the position of the sun into a ginger-stubbled glare.

‘ 'Ow are we, eh?' he drooled in conventional tone. ‘You beat me to it!'

Insufficiently rehearsed, the amateur mumbled and smiled back.

‘Never know with the fuckun Woolambi Mail. It comes or it don't. Today it came.' The professional laughed, and exercised his musclebound shoulders more violently than ever to restore them to working order.

Nobody thought of starting an exchange of names, taking it for granted there could be no other than the manager and the jackeroo, Don Prowse and Eddie Twyborn.

Without delay the ginger one mounted the ramp and there began a ritual male tussle to possess the baggage. It was over too soon. As he hoisted the trunk on a shoulder it must have gratified Prowse to detect and dismiss decadence, while Eddie following with case and valise wondered where civilisation ended, and still more, where it began.

The manager kept up a muttering as he lashed the trunk to a rusted rack, his activities accompanied by the glaring smile directed nowhere in particular. The backs of the hands at work with such authority were scabbed in places and tufted with orange hair. Eddie felt ashamed of his own unblemished, unskilled hands, and planned to keep them a secret for as long as he could. He hid them in his trouser pockets, where they started jingling his key-ring, his change. (What to do with hands had always been a major problem.)