The Twyborn Affair (24 page)

He forged farther along the river, stumbling over tussock,
stimulated by rushing water, repelled by the patches of virulent green which recurred in this coldly feverish landscape, then turned in towards what he sensed to be forbidden ground, the land surrounding the Lushington homestead.

Far from betraying the lives of its owners to strangers, denuded trees and shrubs showed up the stranger in his trespass. Would Greg Lushington descend, or was he out with the manager and his ‘men', super-managing his barren slopes? There was no sign that anyone inhabited the house; not that this is ever indication. You could hear in the distance a barking of dogs as they jerked at their chains and fretted the iron and woodwork of kennels.

At the foot of the wintry Lushington garden, where thorns of naked Chinese pear caught hold of the intruder's sleeves and shoulders and sycamore seed was drizzled down the nape of his neck, there was a basalt wall surrounding three headstones. Eddie Twyborn was on the point of pushing open the elaborately designed, iron gate, a rich folly if ever there was one, to give more attention to the graves and their inscriptions, but became distracted by the sound of the loose planks of the ‘Bogong' bridge shuffled together by the passage of a car.

It was a black, mud-spattered Packard, slowly driven, but with a possessive confidence, towards the house. The trespasser ducked behind the skeleton trees as though caught out in the spangles and embroidered pomegranates of the European drag he liked to think he had abandoned.

He walked back quickly the way he had come. The brown waters of the river reflected the thoughts of one who was unwise enough to unmask them on its bank. The river froze him. He could not imagine what he was doing at ‘Bogong'—or anywhere, for that matter.

Mrs Tyrrell was standing waiting, he was relieved to see, on the edge of the dry-rotted veranda.

‘Marcia come back,' she told him. ‘She'll 'uv brought me some-think. Marcia brings the loveliest gifts.'

‘She must be all right then?' He tried it out in the manager's voice.

Mrs Tyrrell sucked her gap before answering. ‘She's right enough. Nobody's ever
all
right. 'Aven't you found that out, love?' She ended up in a cackle, in which he joined, while avoiding contact with a callused hand.

The cottage was full of dusk, smoke, and a smell of roasting mutton.

‘Better take a squint at me shoulder,' Mrs Tyrrell immediately announced.

Satisfied, she slammed the oven shut again.

‘Arr, dear, the winters,' she sighed, ‘they make a person cry!' then, more cheerfully inspired, ‘ 'Ere, you little bugger, why don't-cher make yerself useful and light the bloody lamp? Prowse'll be back any minute an' say we're not dermestercated.'

While he fumbled with and lit the lamp, she busied herself investigating a cabbage for slugs. ‘I'll like 'avin' you around,' she told him; ‘you an' me 'ull get on like one thing.' She sighed again, disposing of a colony of slugs. ‘It's the girls I miss out 'ere. Never the boys. Not that you isn't a boy,' she realised. ‘But different. A woman can speak out 'er thoughts.'

He should not have felt consoled, but was, to be thus accepted by Peggy Tyrrell. The flowering lamp he set between them on the oilcloth made a little island of conspiracy for the woman's blazing face and the pale ghost of what people took to be Eddie Twyborn.

Presently they heard a truck, boots, a slammed fly-screen door. Eddie would have chosen to delay the manager's presence, but it was soon with them in the dining-kitchen, not least the stench of his recent exertions.

Don Prowse was overpoweringly cheerful. ‘Quite domesticated, aren't we?' His hands sounded like sandpaper.

When he had gone to throw water at his torso and rid himself to some extent of the stench, Peggy Tyrrell winked at her ally.

‘Dermestercation! What did I tell yer? Can't get over 'ow 'is wife walked out on 'im. You'll 'ear all that when 'e's warmed up.'

He returned, the hair above his forehead glittering in a watered,
orange slick. He produced a bottle from the lower regions of a hobbledy dresser and poured himself a handsome tot.

‘Learned the lay of the land, have we?' Always smiling, his teeth were his own, and good. ‘That's the dunny, if the old woman didn't tell yer,' he pointed with his pipe through a smoked-up window. ‘It's a two-seater—for company.'

Eddie Twyborn said, ‘I've never done it in company, and perhaps I couldn't.'

The manager grunted. ‘Perhaps you could in a place like this. A judge's son could get ground down like anybody else.'

Eddie Twyborn might have agreed.

Perhaps Don Prowse realised. ‘ 'Ere,' he said, ‘you'd better have one for the first night. Everybody finds 'e depends on 'is grog in these parts. When you get yerself a bottle, you can write yer name on it, and I'll write mine on mine.'

They drank their whiskey in company. Eddie was glad of this employment for his hands, and it made him feel more masculine.

‘Didn't he say anything?' he asked.

‘Who said what?'

‘Greg. Didn't he ask to see me, perhaps? He's my father's friend.'

‘Greg's a slow old bastard. Never know what 'e's thinking. 'E'll ask all in good time—whoever yer father is.'

They knocked back the whiskey, and the old woman produced a blackened shoulder out of the oven.

‘Greg's off again—round the world,' Prowse informed them while carving. ‘He likes the travel life. And why not? If you can afford it.'

Prowse must have been very well paid not to have sounded vindictive.

‘Is Marcia going too?' asked Eddie.

‘How—Marcia? What do you know about Marce?'

‘Nothing. But she's back. I saw her driving the Packard up the road.'

Prowse hacked the black mutton and Peggy Tyrrell relieved the cabbage of a boiled slug.

‘No,' said Prowse, ‘Marcia's not going with Greg. She sort of belongs more to “Bogong”—not that you'd think it at first sight.' The carvers slithered into the gravy. ‘Marcia's of the land—if you know what I mean. Greg only inherited it.'

They sat down and began their meal. Everyone, it seemed, even the newcomer, was involved in a primitive ritual, no grace, but plenty of tomato sauce.

Just as Eddie had sighted yet another slug, the telephone almost tore itself from the wall, and the manager leaped at it.

‘Yes, sir … Yes … Yes, Mr Lushington. Yes … In the morning … Eddie was asking whether … Yes …'

When he had returned to his creaking chair Don Prowse somewhat unnecessarily informed them, ‘That was the boss. 'E'll see yer in the morning, Eddie. Wants to take a look at the wethers on Bald Hill.'

They made further play with their mutton.

‘I told you,' said Prowse, spitting out some gristle, ‘Greg is slow, but wouldn't forget—least of all 'is friend's son.' A second shred of gristle followed the first.

Mrs Tyrrell produced the spotted dick.

After their meal, as he smoked his pipe and drank another whiskey or three, the manager grumbled, ‘It's the winters that get you down on the Monaro. If you could escape the worst of it—drive up north and thaw out on the coast for a coupler months—like the moneyed bastards do—or Europe.' A tear of frustration, alcohol, or retrospect had appeared surprisingly in a corner of one of Prowse's eyes. ‘The winters were what the wife couldn't stand. She walked out on me—I'd better tell you before others do. It was the cold. Well, good luck to 'er! She was never much use to a man. It's the kid I miss. Haven't seen 'er since they went.'

Mrs Tyrrell had continued sitting in a corner, yawning, and holding her forearms. Old tales left her untouched. She might have been a gnarled, half-burnt tree stump.

If Prowse's confidences touched Eddie, it could have been in the light of his own contemplated defections from Angelos Vatatzes.
He could smell the night trains he had never caught towards a hypothetical freedom somewhere beyond the Côte Morte. In the front bedroom of this creaking house the departed Mrs Prowse, all pallor and resentment, might have been awaiting her orang-outang on the iron bedstead with the brass knobs.

If he had been a woman in body as well as psyche, Eddie might have put out a tentative hand and touched an orange paw.

On realising that it would have been for his own comfort rather than the sufferer's, he shivered and suggested, ‘Think I ought to be turning in.'

‘You've got something there, Eddie.' It was again hearty, banal, masculine; never more masculine than when they went outside together, backs at the oblique, pissing on the frost.

‘Christ!' chattered Prowse. ‘Freeze the balls off yer, wouldn't it?'

The newcomer had begun to feel that perhaps he was more inured to cold from life in the trenches, not to say exposure during a female existence.

Or he could have been numbed by exhaustion and the situation he found himself in. As he fell asleep under the army blankets and the threadbare bedside mat, Peggy Tyrrell could be heard through the wall mumbling a drowsy rosary. Then there was the slamming of the screen door as Prowse went outside again. It occurred to Eddie that the manager had only just relieved himself, but could be—who cared? moved to sit alone one side of the two-seater dunny, chattering with cold, black mutton, and retrospect.

 

‘Looks like you slept in.'

He roused himself to see Prowse standing in the doorway.

‘Didn't wake yer the first morning. Lushington's not an early riser. He'll come down when 'e feels like it. So take yer time, Ed. Peggy'll have yer breakfast ready if you let 'er know you've done yer fly up.'

The manager's splendid teeth grinned before his manliness withdrew.

Thin white sunlight was glittering coldly on gritty boards. Eddie
Twyborn revolved and wove himself deeper into the cocoon of army blanket. He was conscious of too supple arms, the tendrils of armpits, the manager's image fading from the crude doorway.

He got up presently, and while forcing with trembling fingers metal buttons through holes a size too small for them, called out, ‘Hey—Mrs Tyrrell—what about breakfast?' in a voice he hoped the manager might have approved.

‘… when you want ut …' her toothless cavern reverberated through what sounded like a cascade of thick crockery.

Outside in the frost there was a shambling of hooves, champing of chaff-scented bits, and a more intense perfume from dung recently dropped on frozen ruts.

He looked out and saw the Men rolling cigarettes under the eaves of a thawing roof. They were waiting for the manager, or more formidable, the owner of the acres to which they were enslaved.

Eddy was finally presentable enough to face his ally Mrs Tyrrell. He wondered whether he should clean his teeth with paste from the ruptured tube, but didn't. He went out smelling of sleep and the hairy blankets he had slept in.

No doubt taught by her football team of sons that this is a man's world, Mrs Tyrrell didn't turn a hair. She tossed several charred chops and a mountain of fried-up cabbage and potato on to the plate waiting for him.

‘Marcia didn't bring me a gift.'

‘How do you know?'

‘Mr Edmonds come down with the meat and veggies.'

‘Perhaps she did, and he hasn't found out.'

‘Everyone knows everythin' at “Bogong”. Little enough happens—without Lushingtons come or go.'

With one hand, she sat stirring her pink tea, with the other slightly titivating the tiara of greasy little hair-rosettes which framed her forehead.

‘Well, that's Marcia for yer,' she munched, and added, ‘It's 'umankind.'

‘I'd have brought you a present,' said Eddie, somewhat hypocritical above his chops, ‘but didn't know about you.'

‘Of course you didn't, love!' she giggled. ‘And anyways, you learn not to expect too much.'

‘I've never expected too much,' he murmured, and knew it was a lie, his lips thick with mutton fat and what would probably remain unfulfilled longing.

He went outside presently, his hopes of fulfilment higher in that they were humbler. After stalking through clumps of horehound, he seated himself on one half of the two-seater dunny, among the faded smells of wood-ash, lime, hen-shit, and old yellowed newsprint. Lulled by suspension in time and surrender to natural functions, he felt comforted at last, chafed his goose-flesh thighs, wiped himself on a recipe for pumpkin scones, and prepared to receive the morning's orders.

The stockmen comprised a father and son, Jim and Denny. They remained silent when faced with a new arrival, not to say jackeroo, but egged on by the manager, extended hard hands in a gesture of cold welcome. Jim the father was leaner, more ravaged, more taciturn by nature, perhaps more aware, though not all that older than Denny his son, who had obviously shot too early from his father's loins probably as the result of an excruciating Monaro winter. Denny at least smiled, out of witlessness it seemed, as much as good will. His head was afflicted with the shakes. His eyes squinted from behind tin-rimmed spectacles, one wing mended with a length of greasy string. He was carrying a black stockwhip which, from moment to moment, he flicked, at a solitary blade of anaemic grass, or at one of his own cringing curs, as though proud of this symbol of his office in the ‘Bogong' hierarchy.

Discouraged by their owners, Eddie squatted to convert the dogs, two narrow-headed mongrels distantly related to the deerhound, and a little faded kelpie bitch. One deerhound snapped, and each continued looking blank from behind lolling tongue and yellow fangs, but the little kelpie whined, and was on the way to prostrating herself, torn between convention and desire for affection. Tail
between her legs, she compromised by daring to rest her paws on Jim the father's knee, and was knocked back by the knee for her pains.