The Twyborn Affair (29 page)

‘The other,' she said, ‘needn't be lust, need it?'

Half burnt half chilled beside the leaping fire, he discovered him
self, to his amazement and only transitory repugnance, lusting after Marcia's female forms.

They stood up simultaneously. If they had hoped to escape by withdrawing from the heat of the fire, the diminishing circles of warmth inside the room brought them closer together.

Her body was a revelation of strength in softness.

‘What about Greg?' It was his conscience letting out a last gasp.

‘He won't wake this side of daylight.' She sounded ominously certain.

She led him through a frozen house from which the servants had already dispersed, either to its fringes or its outhouses. They bumped against each other, slightly and at first silently, then in more vigorous, noisy collusion, the little Maltese terrier staggering sleepily behind them, trailing the plume of his tail.

 

When the sky had started greening she switched on the lamp to verify the time. They were by then a shambles of sheet and flesh, the Maltese dog exposing in his sleep a pink belly and tufted pizzle.

Switching back to green darkness she said, ‘I was right, Eddie.'

‘About what?' Considering his own respect for the old man her husband, he was not too willing to allow Marcia Lushington the benefit of knowing her own mind.

‘The fineness.'

‘Oh,
stuff
!'

He started extricating himself from what he had begun to see as a trap, a sticky one at that.

‘Perhaps I'm wrong after all,' she murmured and heaved. ‘Perhaps all men are the same. The same crudeness. Blaming you for what they've had.'

‘It isn't that,' he said. ‘You wouldn't understand. Or would be too shocked if I tried to explain.'

She was hesitating in the dark.

‘Why? We didn't do anything perverse, did we? I can't bear perversion of any kind.'

Bumping and shivering, he started putting on his clothes. Once the Maltese terrier whimpered.

‘Eddie?' Again she switched on the light. ‘Men can be so brutal. And you are not. That's why I'm attracted to you. I don't believe you'd ever hurt me by refusing what I have to offer.'

Heaped amongst the blankets, the crisscrossed sheets, and punch-drunk pillows, her mound of quaking female flesh appeared on the verge of sculpturing itself into the classic monument to woman's betrayal by callous man. What he looked like, half-dressed in underpants, shirt-tails, and socks with holes in the heels, it gave him goose-flesh to imagine.

‘Even if you haven't quite the delicacy I'd hoped for, perhaps we could comfort each other,' she blurted through naked lips, ‘in lots of undemanding ways.'

He buckled his belt, which to some extent increased his masculine assurance, but it was not to his masculine self that Marcia was making her appeal. He was won over by a voice wooing him back into childhood, the pervasive warmth of a no longer sexual, but protective body, cajoling him into morning embraces in a bed disarrayed by a male, reviving memories of toast, chilblains, rising bread, scented plums, cats curled on sheets of mountain violets, hibiscus trumpets furling into sticky phalluses in Sydney gardens, his mother whom he should have loved but didn't, the girl Marian he should have married but from whom he had escaped, from the ivied prison of a tennis court, leaving her to bear the children who were her right and fate, the seed of some socially acceptable, decent, boring man.

He was drawn back to Marcia by the bright colours of retrospect, the more sombre tones of remorse. He lowered his face into the tumult of her breasts.

‘There,' she murmured, comforting, ‘I knew! My darling! My darling!'

She was ready to accept him back into her body; she would have liked to imprison him in her womb, and he might have been prepared to go along with it if they hadn't heard the rushing of a cistern in the distance.

‘I better go,' he mumbled.

‘Oh, no! It's only his bladder. I know his form. Poor old darling! You don't live with someone half a lifetime without getting wise to every movement of the clockwork.'

The little dog whinged, and dug a deeper nest in the blankets in which to finish his normal sleep.

‘Eddie?'

He resisted her warmth reaching out through the dark to repossess him. He withdrew into the outer cold, not through any access of virtue, rather from disgust for his use of Lushington's wife in an attempt to establish his own masculine identity. Marcia apart, or even Marcia considered, women were probably honester than men, unless the latter were sustained by an innocent strength such as Greg Lushington and Judge Twyborn enjoyed.

As Eddie let himself out into the night the images of Eadie his mother and Joan Golson joined forces with that of Marcia Lushington, who had, incredibly, become his
mistress
! The trio of women might have been shot sky high on the trampoline of feminine deceit if it hadn't been for the emergence of Eudoxia Vatatzes at Eddie Twyborn's side.

Eddie went stumbling down the hill through the increasing green of the false dawn, the light from an outhouse window, and the scented breath of ruminating cows. In his own experience, in whichever sexual role he had been playing, self-searching had never led more than briefly to self-acceptance. He suspected that salvation most likely lay in the natural phenomena surrounding those unable to rise to the spiritual heights of a religious faith: in his present situation the shabby hills, their contours practically breathing as the light embraced them, stars fulfilled by their logical dowsing, the river never so supple as at daybreak, as dappled as the trout it camouflaged, the whole ambience finally united by the harsh but healing epiphany of cockcrow.

Scattering a convocation of rabbits, he went in through the hedge of winter-blasted hawthorns, into the mean cottage in which physical exhaustion persuaded him it was his good fortune to be living. He
lay down smiling, and slept, under the dusty army blankets, in the grey room.

 

That noon, while enjoying the luxury of a solitary Sunday frowst, after the minimum of cold mutton with mustard pickle, and the dwindling warmth of a brew of tea, he heard a sound of hooves and the metal of a horse's bridle. He looked out and saw, not his mistress of last night, but Mrs Lushington his employer's wife tethering her hack to the rail outside the feed room.

It was startling in these circumstances and at this hour of day. He heard himself muttering. He took up the pot to pour another cup of tea, by now tepid and repulsive, but found himself instead draining the pot to its dregs through the spout.

Fortified, if ashamed, he went out to the encounter with this stranger already knocking at the door.

‘I hope I'm not intruding,' she began what sounded a prepared speech. ‘Usually on Sunday, after lunch, I go for a ride, otherwise Ham gets out of hand. As I was passing this way I thought I'd look in—see how they're treating you—whether they've made you comfortable.'

She smiled out of unadorned lips, unnatural only in dealing with a rehearsed recitative.

He brought her in, or rather, she brought herself.

She said, ‘It's a horrid little house if you look at it squarely.'

‘I've grown attached to it.' He might begin resenting Marcia.

‘At least in your case it's only temporary.'

Her conscience salved, she started stalking through the house as though she didn't own it and hadn't been there before; perhaps she hadn't. For Sunday afternoon and the land which was hers, she was shabbily dressed, in the old dead-green velour and stretched cardigan in natural wool, with riding pants which, in spite of exclusive tailoring, did not show her at her best. As she went she peered into rooms, dilating and contracting her nostrils in the manager's doorway while glancing with a frown at the photographs of Kath and Kim, murmuring on reaching the cook's bedroom, ‘Poor Peggy
Tyrrell—rough as bags, but such a dear,' turning her back on Eddie Twyborn's unmade bed.

When they reached the dining-kitchen she started rapping on the oilcloth, which made the crumbs on its surface tremble and her engagement finger flash.

‘I ought to apologise,' she said, teeth champing on the words the other side of those bland lips, ‘for anything that happened. It was my fault. Oh, I know you'd think it was, Eddie, even if I didn't admit it. Because you're a man.'

She paused as though giving him a chance to exonerate her.

‘I shouldn't have thought of blaming you,' he said. ‘It was a moment of shared lust. It surprised me that I enjoyed it. But I did.'

Marcia looked most surprised. She suppressed a little gasp. Her eyes were glowing. ‘Well,' she said, ‘it isn't the sort of thing a man usually says to his mistress. I knew I was right. You're different, Eddie. You have a quality I've always hoped for—and never found—in a man.'

‘To me it's only conscience—for having fucked the wife of a man I respect.'

‘Oh, darling,' she breathed, all the masculinity gone out of the tailored riding breeches, the imperiousness out of her engagement finger, ‘don't put it like that! I adore my husband. That's something else.'

She was reduced to cajoling sighs, and whimpers she might have learnt from her Maltese terrier, and whiffs of the perfume she had been wearing the night before, which he now realised was predominantly hyacinth, and that hyacinth is haunted by the ghosts of wood-smoke and warm ash.

She might, they might both have wanted it again, wood-smoke and ash and all, on the army blankets of his unmade bed. She had brushed against him, the full breasts, the fleshy lips. He was about to respond when repugnance took over.

She said, ‘You're right, darling,' and re-settled the green velour.

Then they were walking back along the passage, from which rooms opened in accordance with the accepted pattern, from sub
urbia to the Dead Heart. Their feet went
trott trott
over the linoleum lozenges.

Her voice cut in. ‘Have you noticed how the exceptional person almost never turns up in the beginning?'

‘But Greg—the husband you love—the man I'm fond of?'

‘Yes,' she moaned, ‘I love him.'

They had reached the fly-proof door. He must let her out before they established whose dishonesty was the greater.

‘What about this Sunday ride you were on about—to work the oats out of your horse?'

‘Well,' she said, ‘yes. Do you want to come for a breath of air? You look pale—Eddie. Then we'll go back to tea with Greg.'

She gave him a rather wan smile. The flesh seemed to have slipped from her cheekbones, the eyes more enormous and liquid than ever: she had assumed that invalid expression he had noticed in those who suffer from guilt, or who hope to effect a complete conversion.

Again he felt physically drawn to her. He could have fucked her on the fallen hawthorn leaves amongst the rabbit pellets.

She must have felt they were preparing a desecration, for she coughed and said, ‘Mrs Quimby makes the loveliest pikelets. We always have them for Sunday tea. Greg insists on them.'

While he went to saddle his horse, she was fiddling with hers, stroking his neck, adjusting the girth, generally seducing Hamlet her overfed bay.

‘Why,' she called when he re-appeared, ‘the
Blue Mule
!'

He laughed back. ‘I've become attached to him too.'

‘Oh, but that's typical! We must find you something—something more appropriate.'

‘How “typical”?' he asked.

‘Of Prowse.'

‘But why?'

She had lapsed into a mystery of silence and the wood-smoke of stale hyacinth perfume, which a brash wind set about exorcising.

They were heading in the direction she had chosen, or which, perhaps, had been chosen for them. His dislocated nag had difficulty
in keeping up with her splendidly paced bay gelding. Hamlet gave the impression of responding to his rider's wishes without surrendering his independence. Ears pricked, neck arched, his eyes surveyed the landscape from under sculptured lids. From time to time he snorted through veined nostrils, either in surprise, or out of contempt.

The Blue Mule galumphed slightly to the rear or, if his rider succeeded in coaxing him level with their companions by dint of heel-kicks, bumped Hamlet's flank. Occasionally there was a clash of stirrup-irons and grazing of boot against boot. Some of their progress was humiliating for Eddie Twyborn, some of it comforting: like keeping up with Mummy.

It made him laugh at one point, breaking in on Marcia's thought-fulness. She had fallen silent as though brooding over the acres which, seemingly, she loved, or perhaps dissecting her questionable adultery of the night before.

‘What is it?' She laughed back less in mirth than from sociability.

‘I believe you know my mother,' he said.

She began by a series of little murmurs implying denial. ‘Yes and no,' she admitted at last. ‘We've met. I'm
acquainted
with Eadie Twyborn, but you couldn't say we
know
each other.'

‘Where,' he asked, ‘does acquaintanceship end and knowing begin?'

Their horses carried them forward as Marcia considered in silence and frowns how she might answer that great social question.

‘Do we know each other?' he asked.

She bit an unpainted lip. ‘You have a streak of cruelty!' But had to laugh finally. ‘I hope we know each other—and shall deepen our friendship.' She reached out and stroked the back of his hand. ‘I need you.'

But he persisted; it must have been the ‘cruel streak', ‘You don't answer my question: where acquaintanceship ends and friendship begins, and why my mother remained the wrong side of the barrier.'

Marcia frowned one of those frowns which blackened the skin between her eyebrows. She must have dug her spurs into Hamlet, for he started cavorting and she had to rein him back. Only when
she had brought him round on a curve, almost nose to nose with that abnormality the Blue Mule, was she prepared or forced to answer.