The Twyborn Affair (28 page)

Mr Lushington looked perplexed. ‘But we've always enjoyed the old Australia. You run into so many of your mates. And you, Marce, have never found anything wrong with the food.'

But Mrs Lushington was holding out. She raised her chin, and smiled. Like Peggy Tyrrell she enjoyed her mysteries, while being more than half prepared to share them with one who was not quite a stranger, but almost.

‘Stop it, Beppi!' she advised the Maltese, who was chivvying the fur with which she was hemmed.

‘Darling,' she asked her husband, ‘are you going to pour me a drink?'

As Greg Lushington was too deeply immersed in the mystery of his wife's betrayal of the Hotel Australia, she advanced and did it for herself with a most professional squirt from a siphon covered with wire-netting.

Marcia was wearing a long coat of vivid oriental patchings over her discreet black, less discreetly sable-hemmed, skirt. It was in the upper regions that discretion ended completely, in an insertion of flesh-coloured, or to match Marcia, beige lace which strayed waist-wards in whorls and leaves. Her daring must have deserted her in dressing, for she had stuck an artificial flower in the cleavage of lace or flesh, a species of oriental poppy artistically crushed, its flesh-tones tinged with departing flame.

‘Do sit,' she invited their guest, ‘if you can see somewhere comfortable. Other people's furniture, like their coffee, is inclined to be unbearable.'

The Lushingtons' drawing-room furniture was a mixed lot: armchairs and sofa in the chintzy English tradition, with a few pieces of what looked like authentic Chippendale, and rubbing shoulders with them, humbler colonial relations in cedar, crudely carved by some early settler, or more likely, his assigned slave.

There was also the grand piano at which Mr Lushington had been discovered vamping, on it a Spode tureen filled with an arrangement of dead hydrangeas, autumn leaves, and pussy willow, in front of it, framed importantly in gold, a portrait-photograph of a younger Marcia, one hand resting possessively on what must have been the same piano, draped at the time with a Spanish shawl.

Noticing their jackeroo's interest in pianos, Mrs Lushington asked, ‘Do you play?'

‘I used to,' he said, ‘badly, I was told, but my enthusiasm made me acceptable.'

‘Greg is the musical one,' nor did Mrs Lushington resent it. ‘He'll thump quite happily by the hour. I tried as a child, but my chilblains didn't encourage me to practise. I think a piano's necessary, though—as part of a room, to stand things on.'

Her husband, who had flopped down in a rickety cedar grandmother chair, continued bemused by her recent remark, or else it was his most recent whiskey. ‘I can't think what makes you say that about the old Australia.'

‘Oh, darling, leave it! It's only that one isn't the same person every hour of the week.'

She was prepared to laugh for her own conceit, when her little dog, jumping from the sofa to her lap, darted his tongue between her opening lips, and incipient mirth was replaced by barely controlled annoyance.

‘I like to think I've been the same person,' Mr Lushington said, ‘every hour of my life.'

After smacking her naughty dog, Mrs Lushington was again disposed for laughter.

‘I know you do,' she said. ‘That's what makes you adorable.' Getting up, she went behind his chair and, bending over, kissed him on the crown of his bald head. ‘Don't you think he's rather sweet?' she asked.

Eddie was relieved to gather that her question was rhetorical. His own affection for the old man was too delicate to bear exposure.

For all her affectation of lightness and mirth, Marcia Lushington revealed glimpses of a more sombre temperament. Where her black, rather coarse, glistening eyebrows almost met, there were flickering hints that black frowns were the order of her day. Unlike so many other women, she had not yet cut off her hair, which was arranged with some skill and tortoiseshell combs in a chignon above the nape of her neck. Though substantially built, height and flowing lines helped her to get away with it; full lips were only faintly painted the colour of scallop-coral, beneath a too heavy Caucasian moustache; overall, the raw-scallop tones would have made her flesh look unduly naked if it had not received the benefit of powder. Her regrettable feature would have been her teeth if they hadn't looked so durable: they were strong, but too widely spaced, and in the moments of her assured mirth, bubbles would appear in the gaps.

Her eyes were fine and dark—none of your blistering Anglo-Saxon blue.

During the evening Eddie remembered what Prowse had said about Marcia's being ‘more of the land'. He might not have agreed had he not experienced the vast undulating Monaro, and if, on the way to dinner, he had not brushed against an old natural-wool cardigan hanging from a hook under a hat in stained, dead-green velour. These very personal belongings had the smell of tussock and greasy fleece, which gusts from Marcia's Chanel temporarily overpowered.

In the mock-Tudor dining room, mint sauce took over from Chanel. Greg Lushington stood at the sideboard carving the leg like a surgeon under hypnosis.

There was no nonsense about the Lushingtons' feeding habits.

‘Do you approve, darling?' he asked. ‘The gravy isn't too floured, is it?'

‘Shut up, Greg!' she returned. ‘It was a mood, that's all.'

Mrs Edmonds who was waiting on them smiled for what she did not understand, while through a hatch there was the suggestion of a suetty face (Mrs Quimby? relations with whom Peggy Tyrrell had severed) and the pinched, rabbity features of Dot Norton the rabbiter's daughter above a wet floral apron.

The Lushingtons started eating their way through the slices of mutton, the roasted potatoes, the baked pumpkin, the wads of bicarbonated cabbage. They obviously enjoyed the feudal glory in which they lived.

‘Is Prowse your friend?' suddenly Mrs Lushington saw fit to ask the jackeroo.

‘We haven't quarrelled,' Eddie answered cautiously.

‘Why should they? Poor Don!' Mr Lushington murmured.

‘A quick-tempered, a passionate man,' retorted Mrs Lushington, fitting a little of everything on her fork.

They were being watched more intently than ever, Eddie realised, by Mrs Edmonds against the sideboard, and the rather more animal eyes through the hatch.

‘Poor Don—his wife left him,' Mr Lushington continued.

Marcia replied, ‘We all know that—even Eddie, I imagine, by now. Her leaving was to everyone's advantage, surely?'

Greg Lushington had spilt some gravy on his already spotted smoking-jacket. He sat rubbing at the place with a napkin.

‘They were wrong for each other,' he murmured, as though nobody else ever had been. ‘She hated him.'

‘He hated her.'

‘I think he was hoping the little girl might bring them together.' The litany unfurled, more, you felt, for the Lushingtons' benefit than their guest's.

After a while they fell silent, mashing at a shambles of potato and gravy. Mrs Edmonds replenished the glasses with Burgundy of an impeccable French vintage.

On the walls of the mock-Tudor dining room there were several photographs of Greg holding stud rams by the horns, vaguely smiling in the direction of the camera, and one of Marcia astride a show hack, his arched neck almost wholly swathed in ribbons. From beneath the brim of what might have been the dead-green velour at the beginning of its career, she was looking moody in spite of her success. (It surprised Eddie; for Australian women were usually photographed grinning from ear to ear.)

There was a baked pudding with strawberry jam and clotted cream. From his nursery days he seemed to remember it as Queen of Puddings.

‘Don't you adore food?' Marcia asked through a mouthful, and only just prevented a trickle of cream from escaping. (A woman of importance, she was allowed sloppy table manners.)

It was obvious that her husband loved, her servants admired her, Mrs Tyrrell enjoyed her patronage, and Prowse considered her a ‘good sort'. It was he, Eddie, who must be wrong in having doubts, while drawn to her as part of an exercise in self-vindication.

It was perhaps how her husband was drawn to undertake those journeys, in Patagonia, down the China Coast, through the foothills of the Himalayas, of which he told at length over coffee and
liqueurs afterwards in the drawing room. His wife, who must have heard it many times, yawned an accompaniment to his narrative. The guest listened intermittently.

‘… in Russia they serve tea in glasses. They hold the sugar in their mouths, you know …'

Russian sugar, Swedish fishskin: these were the incidentals which intrigued dear Greg Lushington. While Eddie found himself fascinated by the Oriental poppy in crumpled silk, ever more insufficiently arranged in Marcia's beige cleavage. She seemed to realise. She kept glancing down, giving the petals a tweak to spread them. The brilliant coat had slipped sideways off one shoulder. She shivered, and righted it. Greater nakedness might have come more naturally to her, but not in midwinter in the Monaro.

Greg Lushington was straying somewhere along the Nevsky Prospect; he closed down after draining his brandy.

Remembering one of his mother's conventions, Eddie murmured, ‘Delicious coffee' of the watery stuff they were drinking; then, louder, ‘Any fishskin, sir, to bring out the flavour?'

But Greg Lushington's rosy jowls had subsided on his velvet lapels.

Marcia sighed. ‘That old Swedish fishskin!'

Seated beside the fire, irritably agitating an ankle beneath her broad sable hem, she bent and picked up her sleeping Maltese dog, to comfort one who was in no need of comforting.

She said, ‘You must find it all very boring.'

‘Why should it be?' he asked.

It was her turn not to know the answer.

‘I could lend you books,' she said, ‘if I knew your tastes.'

‘I haven't felt any inclination to read since coming to “Bogong”.'

‘Then we've properly seduced you!' Her wry smile was directed at the collapsing fire.

As the only conscious male present, perhaps he should put on another log, for Greg had let out the faint sizzle of a snore, followed by a short, querulous fart.

Marcia immediately raised her voice. ‘Don't you think you ought
to go to bed, darling? We know you're tired. Eddie will forgive you.'

The old boy rose, tottering like an enormous cherubic baby, and said after sliding his hand down one of his protégé's shoulderblades, ‘Anyway I think I'll—take a little nap. See you later, everyone.'

After that there was an opening and closing of doors, a lavatory flushed, and a final closing.

Marcia said, ‘He's taken a great fancy to you. Greg badly wanted a son. I failed him. But he doesn't hold it against me. He's a good man in all his instincts. That's what makes it more dreadful.'

‘Why should it?' His teeth were chattering.

‘If a man is truly good, he rises above hurt. We're the ones who are hurt.'

She sat watching her own tossed ankle. ‘What do you think of Prowse?' she asked.

‘I haven't thought about him enough.' He wondered whether she would know he was lying.

‘No,' she said. ‘Prowse is a human animal. No more. But the poor brute has suffered.'

Marcia too, was shivering, hugging herself more closely inside her Oriental coat.

He bent down and began clumsily stacking logs on the fire.

‘Rather extravagant!' she twittered.

The fresh logs spat and cracked.

Marcia was leaning forward in the direction of the renewed flames. ‘Do you know about the bogong moth?'

He did of course, but was not allowed to resist the reprise she was launching into, ‘… up into the mountains at a certain time of year, to eat this moth. It's said to taste rich and nutty …'

Hunched above the crumpled poppy in her beige cleavage, she had parted her lips on the strong teeth, in the gaps between which the downy sacs of moths might have been disgorging their nutty cream.

Marcia herself at that moment was not unlike a great downy moth irrationally involved in an obscene but delicious cannibalistic rite;
in which she must involve some other being for his initiation or destruction.

She said, in a very intimate voice, for they were both crouched over the fire, ‘No one has been able to explain to me why you came here. There's something too fine about you for this kind of life.'

He was balanced again on the razor-edge of motives, between truth and lies. ‘I wanted to live simply for a while. To think things out. Yes, to think.'

She said sourly, ‘You've come to the very worst place! It numbs thought, or pinches it out. We've hardly one between us.'

‘There's the country.'

‘Oh, yes, there's the country!' She threw back her thick, creamy throat, and closed her eyes, and smiled with the expression of fulfilment which explained what Prowse had said of her. ‘The country itself is what makes it possible—even at its worst, its bitterest. But one needs more than that, surely?' She opened her eyes and looked at him. ‘Wouldn't you agree, Eddie Twyborn?'

How false was Marcia Lushington of the grand piano for standing things on, the Spode tureen, the French Burgundy, and mock-Tudor dining room? He couldn't very well decide for being something of a fake himself.

‘I think,' she said, and now she was probably dead-level honest, ‘you may have something I've always wanted. That fineness I mentioned.'

‘What about your husband? A good man. Isn't that something better than whatever this “fineness” may be?'

She bared her wide-spaced teeth in what was a mirthless smile, and he found himself responding to it, while repelled. ‘Oh yes, we know all that! The good—the virtuous—they're what we admire—depend on to shore us up against our own shortcomings—with loving affection.'

She fell silent after that, and looked down along his wrist, his thigh.