The Twyborn Affair

by Patrick White

  While I was left to hobble, and enjoy the scents of the evening garden, so much subtler if less exciting than the male stench.

  (I would like to think myself morally justified in being true to what I am—if I knew what that is. I must discover.)

  They calmed down eventually, the two, and suspicion began to set in between the Emperor of Byzantium and the raw Colonial Boy.

  A. began clutching me as though the crutch he thought he had lost might still be snatched away from him.

  A.: Thank you, sir, for returning me my … wife. I really don’t know how to thank …

  C.: Not at all, not at all, Mr—Tatzy. A very special occasion—to make the acquaintance of this charming young lady—your wife.

  (Australian wives with aspirations are so constantly ‘charmed’, I have noticed that it rubs off on some of the husbands, especially when overseas.)

  Curly began saying good-bye, Angelos looking gloomier, not for being separated from this new acquaintance, whom he had accepted wholly, too readily, and then regretted doing so. Boyd Golson was not a man one would have to reward materially (not like Joséphine Réboa) but my dearest husband, when faced with the less tangible demands, is apt to grow morally poverty-stricken. I could feel his arm clutching me, not only from relief, but also in a sense asking for forgiveness, in that he was not prepared to give to one who possibly deserved some token of recognition.

  I must tidy it up later if I can—and in spite of my own unwillingness (most of us are French underneath.)

  Curly: (jerking at his tweed cap.) Good-bye, good-bye. Perhaps we’ll run into each other, Mr—Madame Tatzy … again.

  Angelos: Oh yes, we must see one another. Oh, we shall—sans doute …

  Angelos displays a long-toothed smile. E. Boyd Golson is laughing. His open pores. His clear-blue eyes, the lights in them heightened by the Australian climate and alcohol. Poor Curly, his boyishness racks me, his manhood disturbs …

  Finally he is driving off in the bottle-green Austin, and nothing definite has been arranged. All will depend on me and/or Joan: the women.

  It astounds me that anybody should depend on me, that anyone, even Joanie Golson should expect; and here is this subtle old Greek lizard, my husband, dragging me towards the claustrophobic evening prepared for us, yet from which he hopes to extract a sense of security, faith (apart from his agnostic/Orthodox one) hope—Eternal Hope.

  Animals are more dependable: Eadie’s frowzy, till-death-us-do-part Australian terriers. Plants are less detached than they seem, more responsive than many human beings, their insinuating scents, their reasoning habits. I am only I—a plant too, but one the wind spins on its mooring.

  All evening we recapitulate the Macedonian and Thracian campaigns. ‘The Bulgars, E., are without necks, or not altogether, they have the necks of pigs. They squeal and bleed like pigs when stuck with a Hellene’s javelin.’

  Oh yes, those Bulgars! Madame Llewellyn-Boieldieu’s mobilier provençal is threatened by the press of cavalry returning from the wars, the salon filled with the clash of metal, a stench of leather and hairy, black, bloodshot men swaying in their saddles.

  I await him on the steps, along with the palace officials in strict order of hierarchy, we too, sweating in our robes, collecting the dust blowing out of Asia.

  This small, unlikely figure dismounts. ‘Where is Her Imperial Highness?’

  Nobody dares answer a question so mad.

  I break off my novelette to smoke one of his cigarettes. I’m growing as mad as Angelos, who hasn’t stopped smoking all night, while slaughtering Bulgars in Thrace and Macedonia.

  When we had gone to bed he asked, ‘Will your new friends take you away from me?’

  ‘Why should they?’

  ‘Eudoxia was given as a bribe to Grimaldi. They hoped he would help them recapture the City. But it didn’t work that way. He shut her up in that tower at Castellar.’

  Always these towers! I am the one shut in a tower more fatal than those experienced by his other fictions—his Eudoxias and Annas. I bet even Anna the wife is a fiction.

  At least the towers usually materialise as a prelude to tenderness. We fell asleep locked together.

  However much I need him I must somehow escape.

  Waking in the night, he said, ‘I could see it in his eye.’

  ‘In whose? And what?’

  ‘The Golson man—that he’ll take you away.’

  ‘We aren’t living in the Middle Ages. You almost make me wish we were.’

  When he had turned his back on me he said, ‘He’ll take you to Nice.’

  ‘We might all go there together. In the green Austin. Wouldn’t it be fun?’

  ‘Nice is the most vulgar place on earth.’

  ‘There are some you haven’t seen, darling.’

  In any case we must return their kindness. Perish the thought! Those who are kind don’t, surely, expect their kindness duplicated? Or perhaps they do, a carbon copy, a kind of receipt. I’ll write Joanie a letter of thanks, a civil note, the exquisite sentiments of which will fan her passion from a safe distance, Curly’s too.

  Must stop being a cock-tease.

  Mrs Golson was growing ashamed of herself. ‘Vous n’avez pas quelques lettres pour moi?’ she heard herself bleat at the porter’s desk, not only on returning from an outing, but sometimes less excusably after taking the lift down from her Louis Whichever suite for the express purpose of making her futile enquiry.

  ‘Non, madame. Pas de courrier. Rien.’

  At times the porter scarcely bothered to turn his head and glance in the direction of the pigeon-hole. She could see that he, even more than the hunchback liftman, was becoming suspicious, connecting her with the rumours of war; when she was less responsible for its threats and stratagems than anybody on the European scene.

  She must restrain herself. But didn’t.

  ‘Toujours rien pour moi?’

  ‘Si, madame, il y a une petite lettre.’

  Mrs Golson experienced the greatest difficulty in receiving her letter with an indifference to match the porter’s own. She knew her skin was glowing, her hands were trembling, and that idiocy had crept into the smile the porter would in any case not have expected from this foreigner he only just deigned to serve.

  ‘Merci,’ she barely whispered, and even then it sounded to her ears regrettably Australian.

  Grasping her unopened letter, she took the lift. All the way up, while hauling on the greasy rope, the silent hunchback stared at her clenched hand, she was convinced, out of the corner of one suspicious eye. Along the corridor Joséphine stood leaning on a millet broom, smiling, but watchful. They, the servants, were the spies.

  Mrs Golson felt downright faint by the time she had unlocked her door and was free to tear at her blessed letter.

  18th March 1914

  Quite laughable! She had waited three days, not a lifetime. She did in fact laugh now that she could afford to.

  My dear Mrs Golson,

  The letters one writes to thank for a genuine, spontaneous kindness usually seem forced, their words, and the sentiments the words fail to express, inadequate. That is why I have hesitated these few days to try to convey my appreciation of your help—Mr Golson’s too, it goes without saying.

  I think it is in part the reclusive life I lead which gives rise to these difficulties—not that I would choose to live otherwise, for I have to consider the needs of an elderly, invalid husband. You must not imagine I am making further inroads on the kindness you have already shown. I have learnt to cultivate my garden! Even the persistent rumours of war have failed to destroy our peaceful existence. (Don’t you think the French the worst of all warmongers?)

  Again—I hope without appearing effusive—I would like to thank you—and Mr Golson. My husband joins me in my gratitude.

  Sincerely

  E. Vatatzes

  On reading her letter, Mrs Golson fell back exhausted in her gold bergère. Deserted by any pretence at deportment, she half
-sat, half-lay, her legs stretched straight ahead, her ankles and feet sticking out from underneath her skirt, her heels planted in the balding pseudo-Aubusson. She felt dehydrated by an excess of emotion both concentrated and suppressed.

  But what could she believe? ‘My dear Mrs Golson …’ She herself was in the habit of writing ‘Dearest …’ to a mere acquaintance, when it didn’t mean a thing. By comparison ‘My dear …’ sounded personal; it had about it an air of warm envelopment (or so Mrs Golson would have liked to think) of unaffected affection. It made her heave in her gold bergère, thoughtlessly rumpling her beige zouave.

  Madame Vatatzes gave every impression of being sincere. There were the implications, however. ‘I have learnt to cultivate my garden!’ That exclamation mark. And wasn’t Curly dragged in without good reason? Or so Mrs Golson liked to think. Was this young woman begging for a rescue from the far from ‘invalid husband’, or merely inviting a literary correspondence with sentimental undertones?

  Joanie Golson was to no great extent literary. Gruff notes from her closest friend Eadie Twyborn had not exactly encouraged the literary convention.

  Come at 8. The Judge dining at the club with fifteen other males. The child atrocious all afternoon. Threw tantrum after tantrum. Nanny useless. Don’t know why intuition didn’t warn me against conceiving. My darlings are suffering from a plague of fleas. Bathed them in sheep-dip. Hoping.

  E.

  P.S. Child will be under control—asleep.

  Mrs Golson was racked. What should she do? What could she expect? Probably nothing. She slipped deeper in the bergère, her sporty zouave by now rucked in sculptural folds.

  And as always, Curly came in.

  ‘How are we, treasure?’

  ‘I have a throat …’ She did, indeed, sound hoarse; had he been sufficiently aware, he might have found her proud of it.

  But Curly, as the bearer of tidings, was momentarily self-impressed. ‘The Russians are the ones we’ve got to watch.’

  ‘Watch for what?’ Mrs Golson asked languidly.

  ‘Been talking to a cove back from St Petersburg. The Russkies will decide whether we’re to have a war.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Mrs Golson replied. ‘The French are convinced the Boches are the danger. Miss Clitheroe heard from a well-informed source that the Kaiser is planning to widen the Kiel Canal.’

  ‘In any case, I did the right thing—booking our passages in the Simla.’

  ‘That remains to be seen,’ she said. ‘The French,’ she asserted shamelessly, ‘are the worst of all warmongers.’ She seemed to gargle with it, and her throat became so far restored that she consented to go down to dinner with her husband, after freshening up and changing into a pretty frock.

  Between the consommé à l’ambassadrice and the blanchaille en corbeilles de pommes pailles she opened her beaded evening bag and, on clearing her disaffected throat, announced with appropriate nonchalance, ‘I’ve had the most charming note of thanks from the little Vatatzes.’ Without awaiting comment, she allowed the letter to flutter down beside the mess Curly was making of his roll.

  ‘The little Vatatzes? I wouldn’t care to fall foul of such a strapping young female.’

  ‘I was only speaking figuratively.’ She wondered where she had learnt it; perhaps from Judge Twyborn, Eadie’s necessary adjunct, as Curly was, less creditably, hers.

  ‘What are we expected to do about them?’ he asked when he had read the letter.

  ‘Nothing,’ his wife assured him, though it made her bleed (figuratively) to do so. ‘We can’t go barging in on what is obviously a delicate sensibility.’ Mrs Golson was pleased with her own.

  Since the whitebait had offered itself for attack, E. Boyd Golson only grunted. He brought down his knife across the heaped fish and the potato basket containing them. It distressed his wife never to have learnt whether one is meant to eat the basket; she would dearly have loved to devour the lot, but restrained herself beyond nibbling at a straw or two, a finger crooked under the weight of a pink sapphire, her defiant frown and arched eyebrows challenging her fellow diners’ censure.

  Protected by their pink shades the candle-flames stood erect on the island-tables of the Grand Hôtel Splendide des Ligures as the clientele munched, gobbled, sucked up their soup (from the pointed end of the spoon, Mrs Golson felt superior to notice) while any larger-than-life passions, and the mythic war promised by the newspaper prophets and reinforced by Miss Clitheroe’s well-informed sources, were dismissed to a safe distance from this illuminated stucco folly inside its perimeter of slatternly palms, box borders, and regimented marigolds.

  If war had begun to creep closer to Mrs Golson personally, it was only this evening, and because she had failed to halt her own very private passion. It surged around their island-table causing the candle-flames to flicker, and her vision of this charming girl and a frail old man to submerge in what was becoming a general void.

  ‘There is nothing we can do,’ she repeated.

  ‘Do about what?’

  ‘The Vatatzes.’

  Having demolished the last of his potato basket, Curly would have felt replete if the main courses weren’t still to come. ‘What are the Vatats to us?’ he exploded through the crumbs of fried potato.

  Mrs Golson giggled. ‘I thought you were rather gone on her!’ She was at once ashamed, not of her husband, as was usually the case, but of herself, for she added quickly and with an earnestness which made her eyes protrude, ‘Did you gather from her letter, perhaps, that she might have been holding out her hand asking for help?’

  Who wasn’t? Mrs Golson’s voice implied as it cut out on a note of high interrogation.

  ‘Don’t see why we …’ Curly grumbled.

  ‘No,’ she agreed. ‘There’s no reason.’

  Reason is the most unstable raft, as Mrs Golson was learning. She suspected that she, and any other refugee from life lashed to its frail structure, was threatened with extinction by the seas of black unreason on which it floated, sluiced and slewing.

  The storm the night before, the worst in a succession of storms inflicted on the Coast that spring, had driven Monsieur Pelletier, not unwillingly, out of the conjugal bed and down to his kiosk at an early hour. To exchange the smells of tortured sheets and sleeping bodies, a full pot de chamber and the dregs of a tisane, for those of damp newspapers, mildewed cigarettes, and coffee brewing on a spirit lamp, gave him a raison d’être he had never achieved in marriage, parenthood, vice, or any form of civic responsibility. When he had taken down the iron shutters from the leeside of his constricted stall he began to breathe again, dragging on the air still churning out of the Atlantic, on past Gibraltar, to wane somewhere east of Marseille.

  It was natural enough at this hour of morning that Monsieur Pelletier should see himself and his iron kiosk of salt-eroded shutters as the focal point of all existence. As he strode up and down outside the kiosk, thumping his ribs with blue flippers, easing the arthritis from his limb, coaxing his circulation back, working his tortoise-neck so that the rusty chain concealed in it began to grate less audibly, the storm seemed to expire in a series of turbulent gasps in his formerly tubercular lungs.

  Once or twice, encouraged by the scent of coffee over methylated spirit, he laughed. There was also the smell of seaweed, the great tresses heaved up amongst the rocks and stranded on the narrow strip of grit referred to in Les Sailles as plage.

  There was no real reason why Monsieur Pelletier should exist. At times, at dawn in particular, outside his kiosk, this was what he suspected, while never exactly giving in to his suspicion (any more than Mrs Golson gave way to hers, churning on her bed in the Grand Hôtel Splendide at St Mayeul amongst the scum and knotted tresses of dreams.) Monsieur Pelletier and Mrs Golson had not met at any point; they would not want to meet: they did not credit each other with existence.

  It was only in the figure now clambering down over rocks, that the two might have agreed to converge.

  At a distance the stranger�
��s figure was still unremarkable enough, sombre in its long cape, either black, or of a very deep green. Not yet recovered from the storm of the night before, the whole landscape had remained withdrawn in its sombre self, the sea still streaked with oily black, except when throwing itself against the promontory of rock or the strip of gritty plage, it flashed a frill of underskirt which would have shown up white if it had not been dirtied, toning with grey concrete, black asphalt, the straggle of palms, saw-toothed blades parrying the last of the wind, a line of tamarisks, their cobweb-and-dustladen branches a dead green at the best of times, now harried to a kind of life, overall the coastal spine covered with a scurf of dead grass and network of black vines.

  The figure in the distance climbing down amongst the rocks, their normal, living red dimmed by the neutrality of early morning was very much a part of the storm-exhausted landscape. Himself from Lille, Monsieur Pelletier had come to appreciate the Coast partly because it had returned him to life by driving out the ailment from which he had suffered as a younger man amongst the damp cobbles of his birthplace, but also because he found in the landscape a spiritual refuge from his wife and family, from the intrigues of this village which the more ambitious inhabitants liked to call a ‘town’, as well as from his own thoughts, doubts, fears, especially those incurred by references in the newspapers he had for sale, which he didn’t so much read as flicker through, not wishing his mind to become entangled with their contents, and thus perhaps encourage a return of his malady.

  Despite his original interest in the unidentifiable figure climbing down the rocks towards the sea, Monsieur Pelletier now began to shiver, as though one of his less desirable, unidentifiable thoughts was forming in his private landscape. Arrived on the edge of the sea, the unknown person threw off the cape. Whether the stranger, a naked one at that, was a man or a woman, Monsieur Pelletier could not be sure: there were enough folles Anglaises along the Coast to make it a woman; there were plenty of romantic Englishmen and pederast-poets to provide a possible alternative. The equivocal nature of the scene made Monsieur Pelletier shiver worse than ever. Had it not been so early he might have run and borrowed Admiral Gandon’s telescope or the ex-Préfet Delprat’s binoculars, although in those circumstances he would without doubt have had to share the scene with the owner of either instrument, in the one case a lecher, in the other a dry cynic; whereas the newspaper vendor, poetic at heart (he could recite whole yards of Victor Hugo and Chateaubriand) would have wished to keep his incident a wordless poem.