The Twyborn Affair (32 page)

 

Whatever else fragmented and eluded, the themes of conscious life flowed into a common stream, of endlessness rather than infinity: the takeover of day from night, summer from winter, the diet of mutton, slug-riddled cabbage and grey potato, Peggy Tyrrell's
recitative of births, deaths, and lotteries, Prowse's morose narrative of Kath's defection. Eddie could have touched Kath, rounded out like a waxwork, her belongings crammed into a pair of Globeite cases, the kiddy trailing by its celluloid arm a doll in a tartan frock. Kath had barely left before she started leaving again, her sour-milk complexion emphasised against the sooty mesh of the fly-proof door. Don had half a mind to go out at night into the paddock and suck on the muzzle of a gun, like his dad, to put an end to it all.

Eddie pointed out, ‘You couldn't do it, with Greg away, and Marcia up there on her own.'

‘Marcia's not all that helpless.'

‘But depends on you.'

Don smiled a sceptical ginger smile. ‘Help me off with me boots, Ed.' He had finished the last of the current bottle, his name pencilled in copybook hand below the maker's. ‘Don't know what I'd do without yer.'

After the final assisted contortion out of singlet and pants into pyjamas, the manager subsided on his bed, at the summit of which the brass balls had been jingling an accompaniment.

It was correspondence which alleviated the prolonged phase between winter and summer at ‘Bogong', and those Saturday nights when, Don and Peggy away in town, Eddie climbed the hill and shared what Marcia described as ‘the scrumptious meal Mrs Quimby has prepared for you, darling—she'd have fobbed me off with a poached egg.'

Marcia would ask sharply, ‘What have you heard from my husband, Eddie?'

Eddie would tell of the highly coloured post-card he had just received, with its snatches of information on Roman churches, race meetings in England and Ireland, or the train journey from Bergen to Christiania.

‘But surely he's written to you?' he asked.

‘Naturally he's written to me. At some length.' She sighed. ‘He sent me a poem about a glacier.'

‘Then I can't think why you're anxious to know what he wrote on a post-card to an acquaintance.'

‘Aren't I at liberty to wonder what he writes to others?'

‘I'd like to read one of his poems.'

By then the table had been cleared, the servants gone to their quarters, and Marcia and he withdrawn to the warmth of her bed and their united bodies.

‘The one about the glacier,' he added, kissing her between breasts which had begun to heave and protest.

‘It's far too private,' she told him. ‘I mean,' she said, ‘you only show your poem to those you want to see it—unless, of course, you throw it wide open to the public.'

Round him she had wrapped importunate thighs.

‘Rather like a cunt,' he suggested as he strained to return the passion expected of him.

‘Oh,' she moaned, ‘I find this sort of thing—so hateful—in you—and know you'll—never—love me.'

After reaching their climax, and while still coupled, she tore her mouth apart from his, her head thrown sideways on the pillow.

‘Like somebody I got to hate.'

‘Like who?'

‘Somebody I was fool enough to sleep with. Somebody I thought might love me. Who turned out to be a man like any other.'

‘Not Greg, surely?'

‘Oh, leave Greg out of it! He's the husband I love and respect. I don't have to sleep with Greg to love him.'

She had switched on the lamp. She got up in some agitation, and after flying in several directions at once, all distraught buttocks and breasts, put on a gown, and sat herself at the dressing table, feeling her cheeks, her throat, as though for damage.

While Eddie continued lying in the bed, drowsily combing at his armpits. ‘Perhaps we shouldn't have started by fucking. Then we might have learnt to love each other.'

‘How I hate that degrading word!'

‘I was only using what they use.'

She had taken up a pot, and was creaming her face, slapping at it. ‘I don't mind whether I never see you again.' She went on slapping.

Soon after, he got up and began dressing. When he had finished, he kissed her on the side of the neck. ‘Poor Marcia! I hope you'll find the love you need.'

‘I don't
need
love,' she whimpered.

‘The fucking, then.'

‘Go!' she shouted. ‘And don't come near me. If Greg were here …' she tailed off. ‘I'll write to Greg and tell him he ought …' but again her voice and the impulse expired.

So he went. He might have packed his bag that night and asked Don to drive him to the train on Monday, but could not feel he was intended to break away from ‘Bogong' yet. Marcia's shoulders, as he took his leave, had only half-decided to shed him. He did not want it, nor, he liked to think, did others for whom he had discovered an affection. Peggy Tyrrell, for instance. If he had cuckolded Greg Lushington, his fondness and respect for that decent man were intact. As for Don Prowse, what would he do without somebody to pull his boots off?

While sifting flour for a batch of scones, Mrs Tyrrell announced, ‘They've fixed a date for Dot Norton's weddun.' Raised breast high, the sifter trailed a veil. ‘Arr, it 'ull be lovely!' She assumed the expression that some women wear for a bride. ‘Mrs Lushington 'ull see to it that Dot has a proper outfit—and everythink the baby 'ull need.'

‘But did they trace the man who came selling the separator parts?'

‘Nao!' Peggy hawked, and abandoned her dainty fingertip technique working the butter into the flour.

‘But if he was the father?'

‘The father ain't what matters. It's the ring. No girl wants the loaf in 'er oven to turn into a bastard on 'er ‘ands.' She slopped the milk; she kneaded her dough so passionately the basin almost flew off the oilcloth on to the lino.

‘Besides,' said Mrs Tyrrell when things were again under control, ‘it wasn't the separator man.'

‘How do you know?'

‘If yez been around long enough, you know.'

‘Then who's the official father?'

‘The who?'

‘The one that's gunner be registered,' he nagged.

‘Arr,' she paused. ‘Denny,' she said. ‘I told yer, didn't I?'

‘But he's a half-wit.'

‘No worse than a lot of others. There's padded rooms in a lot of the Woolambi homes.'

‘Won't he mind fathering another man's child?'

‘ 'E'll 'ave a woman ter bake for 'im, an' boil 'is mutton. That's what's practical, ain't ut?' Her gums showed him she was growing resentful as she marshalled her scones on the baking sheet.

‘Sounds extraordinary to me. Shocking.'

‘Anyways, it's what Mrs Lushington arranged.'

‘Knowing the father?'

‘Everybody knows the father. But I'm not sayun. If you wanter know more, better ask Marce.'

‘It's none of my business.'

‘When you've been on at me the last 'arf hour?' She shoved the baking sheet in the oven and slammed the door. ‘That's what's wrong with edgercated people—argue, argue—waste yer time in argument.'

She laughed rather bitterly, and flounced out, but returned soon after, the wrinkles in her cheeks veiled in what looked like the flour with which she had dusted her recent batch of scones.

‘I'll tell yer, Eddie,' she announced, ‘but confidential.' She started munching on her gums. ‘No! I'm not gunner!' she exploded. ‘Even though 'e's a rabbiter, Dickie Norton's a decent bloke—and I reckon a widower must feel the cold down there along the bloody flat.'

 

Spring did take over at last, if spasmodically, days of brilliant, slashing light alternating with a return to leaden rain squalls; the
nights still crackled as he stood shivering, pissing from the veranda's edge on to frosted grass.

By day a visible green had crept along the grey shoulders of the hills, but the tussock remained bleached and sterile throughout the flat. Birds seemed to soar higher, to sing more shrilly, solitary wagtails to swivel more expectantly on the strand between the barbs of a wire fence, peewits tumbled through the air in pairs, briar clumps greening over were filled with the twitter of small, serious bird-couples.

The river flowed through the spring scene, at times with a mineral glitter, at others with a supple, animal life, each aspect probably more apparent to stranger than to native. In fact it seemed to Eddie Twyborn that, with the exception of Marcia Lushington, who was actually ‘from down Tilba way', the native-born remained unaware of the landscape surrounding them, except as a source of economic returns and a fate they must accept, or in the case of Denny Allen, a river from which, by some stroke of imbecile genius, he could land a trout after one flick with a dry fly; he might even have succeeded with a naked hook.

Denny would stand amongst the tussocks flicking at the rippled water, itself as brown and speckled as a trout, despoiling the river time and again.

‘What are you going to do with so many?'

‘Take 'em 'ome to the missus.' He smiled his most imbecile smile from behind his steel-rimmed spectacles and grooved, greenish teeth.

‘Dot mightn't thank you for bringing such a lot. Gutting trout!'

‘Mrs Allen don't gut no trout. Guttun's my job,' he said proudly.

Scrawny, sawney, his woollen singlet buttoned up to where the hair broke out in a frill below his plucked-cockerel's throat, the greasy waistcoat never discarded whatever the temperature or time of day, Denny Allen was a happy man Eddie Twyborn often found himself envying.

On one of the more benign mornings of this reluctant Monaro spring Eddie and Denny were digging out a warren not far from the river bank.

‘How's the baby?' Eddie asked.

‘Got the colic.'

‘What do you do for it?'

‘Dunno.' Denny grunted, and dug deep into red earth. ‘Mrs Allen knows. She give it some kinda water.' He slashed deeper with the shovel, fetching up from a nest below tufts of fur and wads of withered grass. ‘She knows—the mother!' His exertions made him salivate, and the saliva was carried by the wind in a long, transparent loop.

Eddie dug. His hands no longer blistered. The skin had hardened. A man's hands. His whole life had been so preposterous, to think of it made him laugh.

Denny followed suit, for the joke he had not been asked to share. He never seemed resentful of a status forced on him by lack of wits. Perhaps his intuitions as stockman, fisherman, and rifle shot, raised him in his own estimation to a level which compensated.

They dug away.

Denny started slobbering. ‘ 'Ere she is—the bloody mother!' he shouted.

He flung out a shovelful of bleeding fur which his matted hounds slavered and gobbled.

‘An' 'ere's the kickers!' Denny shovelled out the litter, which followed the doe down the gullets of the ravenous dogs.

‘It's fun, ain't it? you gotter admit, Eddie!' Fulfilled, Denny sat panting, laughing, on the edge of the trench, rejoicing in his skills, waiting to return to the wife who had been made an honest woman and the child who was officially his.

On such an enamelled morning Eddie, whose own contentment was never more than transient, as capricious as a Monaro spring, felt less disgusted than envious of his simple friend. Happiness was perhaps the reward of those who cultivate illusion, or who, like Denny Allen, have it thrust upon them by some tutelary being, and then are granted sufficient innocent grace to sustain it.

As it was about the middle of the day and the warren by now destroyed, the pair of rabbit murderers prepared to take their lunch
break. Denny had got together one of his miraculous fires out of a handful of dead grass and another of twigs, and the two quart pots were already steaming and singing, when Eddie noticed a horseman descending the hill behind them.