The Twyborn Affair

by Patrick White

  It was Mildred and the gardener Thatcher either end of his cabin-trunk.

  Mildred panted, ‘Where shall we put it, Mr Eddie?’

  ‘On the sofa?’

  ‘Oh, no! Mrs Twyborn would never approve of that. The springs!’

  ‘But there aren’t any, and I shan’t have to stoop.’

  ‘Shall we leave it here? under the window?’ was Mildred’s breathless suggestion.

  ‘The rain will come in.’ He identified his mother’s disapproving voice.

  But Mildred and Thatcher were ready to dump the trunk, and did, under the window. The parlourmaid was smelling rather pleasantly of the powder which had given in to her exertions; while Thatcher who took the dogs for walks, and who had adopted silence, probably as an armature against his mistress, stank of what is known as ‘honest sweat’, or more accurately, dirty socks.

  They came and went, bringing in the smaller pieces. Eddie Twyborn, so-called, felt guilty, and prowled worse, with less concern for what might be overheard by Eadie.

  As the servants were leaving she did in fact appear, having changed into some sort of haphazard frock, exposing freckled arms and a droughty chasm leading to the breasts which had suckled her child. It was not so much this painful revelation as the face she had tried to disguise by smearing it with crimson and white which made him avert his own.

  ‘Now,’ she said, her gaping wound smiling at him from amongst those lesser ones which had healed, ‘you must come down and have a drink—and tell me all about everything,’ trying to sound like the girl she might never have been.

  Did she know he knew? She bowed her head going downstairs in front of the son she might never have had.

  When they were seated in the drawing room, each holding as a protective weapon a glass of whiskey as strong as Eadie knew how to pour, and she had lit one of the cheroots he remembered her smoking in the past, only in the tower room alone with the Judge, he asked straight out, ‘What became of Ruffles—Mum?’

  As though beaten at her own game by the one who should have been ‘telling all’, she looked at the carpet, and answered, ‘Ruffles died.’ It left her with a little tic in one cheek.

  While like some old mangy, cancerous dog, Angelos Vatatzes was dragging his body out of a corner of the drawing room to lay his head on Eudoxia’s knee, asking forgiveness for his devotion.

  The apparition drove Eddie Twyborn to concentrate on something which might convey actuality: the waves painted on the Gulf of Smyrna; lizards on burning marble at Nicaea; arabesques swirling out of the Chabrier waltzes at nightfall above Les Sailles.

  ‘Anyway, Ruffles apart,’ he said to his mother, ‘nothing has changed—here—since I went away. Only the springs have given up.’

  Eadie hunched her shoulders and, after plunging her hands into the bowels of her chair as though groping for evidence which might justify his accusation, came out with a high, smoky giggle. ‘You’re not cruel, darling, I hope. We’re not as well off as we were—on a judge’s salary.’

  ‘Nobody—that is, none of us is ever as well off as we were. It’s one of the laws of nature and history.’

  He heard her teeth make contact with her glass as she tried to work it out. ‘Darling, stop scratching!’ She smacked one of her little dogs.

  Yes, he was being cruel, but only as he was to himself.

  Her eyes were appealing to him, asking for some revelation, not quite that perhaps (wasn’t she Judge Twyborn’s pragmatic wife?) but a factual account of what he had been doing all these years. Had he been taking part in a war, like all young men of decent upbringing?

  In case he was going to deny her this simple luxury, she leaned forward, elbow wobbling slightly on a knee, so that whiskey slopped over the lip of her glass. ‘Delia died too. Now we’ve Etty. Her devilled drumsticks are scrumptious. But she bosses me. I can’t stand it.’

  ‘She’ll probably leave, like Joséphine Réboa.’

  ‘God forbid! I couldn’t bear it.’ She bit on her cheroot. ‘Who was Josephine Whatsername?’

  ‘Somebody who left.’

  After that they were at sea.

  He thought he felt something crawling somewhere between his crotch and his navel.

  Deciding, it seemed, not to let him escape, she leaned farther forward and asked, ‘Darling, were you in the War?’

  ‘Yes—as it happens—I was.’

  ‘I’m so glad. We would have hoped you were.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Well, Daddy …’

  He would have liked to think that ‘Daddy’, of all people, would not have condemned him.

  ‘… and our friends.’

  She was looking at him.

  ‘Who? your friends?’

  ‘Well, darling—everybody.’

  She was looking at him more intently still. ‘You remember Joanie? Joanie Golson. The Boyd Golsons.’

  ‘Vaguely.’

  ‘And Marian Dibden?’

  She was sitting forward to take stock. Eadie’s therapeutic touch was that of a sledge-hammer.

  ‘When shall I see my father?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh,’ she withdrew into her chair, ‘I was going to ring him, then I didn’t because I thought he’d be too upset. I thought when he comes home tonight I’d bring you out into the garden.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘I’ll come out—and just meet him—like that.’

  ‘If it’s what you want.’ The little dogs skirling at her ankles, she went to pour herself another drink, forgetting his.

  Mildred announced. ‘Etty says luncheon is ready, madam.’

  Eadie Twyborn ducked her head. ‘Oh, well, if it’s what Etty says … I hope it’s something delicious for Mr Eddie’s return to the fold.’

  Mildred snickered, and looked down her powdered front.

  There was nothing for it but that mother and son should go into the dining room and continue to ‘tell about everything’. Would Eadie of the corked-on moustache flinch if he casually produced the spangled fan and pomegranate shawl, flung them into the conversation? Wait perhaps, till the Judge was wearing his high heels and black silk stockings.

  Eadie said, ‘I can imagine, Eddie, what you must have suffered—from what one heard of life in the trenches.’

  In the lull before the guns opened up again there was only the sound of a dog scratching.

  ‘Did you win any medals?’ she asked.

  ‘Only one.’

  ‘I’d adore to see it.’

  ‘I dropped it down a grating in London after I was demobbed.’

  ‘I expect you could get another,’ she said, ‘if you paid them for it.’

  From his window he had watched darkness gathering, a milky sky purpling over, a recent flowering of lights dancing in a thicket as branches were stirred by an evening breeze, all that was left of a ferry now like a child’s illuminated pencil-box slid across a smooth black surface in a gap between trees. (‘You wanted a pencil-box, didn’t you, Ed?’ ‘Yes, but I thought it’d be a double-decker.’ ‘Sorry—next time—when you’re older.’ Later: ‘Your father gave it so much thought—such a busy man—you should have sounded more grateful.’ Silence. He was not ungrateful. He took the disappointing pencil-box to bed. He hid it under his pillow. He would have defended it from loving hands doing things only for his good, removing angular, uncomfortable, ultimately ridiculous pencil-boxes. He would have been prepared to wound the loving hand as he had when it was laid upon him as a comfort, while he was inhaling the ether. ‘They’re only going to snip the nasty tonsils, which might otherwise poison your whole system; you won’t feel it I promise you, darling.’ ‘Nhhao!’ the shriek it became in the lint funnel as you were sucked down it, down down, through a scent of pale green fur …)

  In this evening’s silence, nobody, at least for the time being, was suggesting anything for his good. His isolation was not the target for the sounds breaking around it: the chitter of crickets, the twitter from a formation of
small migrating birds, a gibber of possums, more human for the demands they were making on one another, the crash of a tram as it rounded a corner in a sputtering of violet sparks.

  Shouldn’t he do something instead of becoming a fixture in this room which had received him back? What rituals were performed before dinner in the house to which he belonged? Did they bathe? Change their clothes? To be on the safe side, he decided not to prepare in any way. Stick to the day’s patina of grime and sweat, an additional layer of himself as protection against the moment when he must beard the Judge in the garden.

  A figure, he realised, had come down the steps from the drawing room and was hovering amongst the more amorphous masses of shrubs. Impossible to tell whether it were Edward or Eadie. Cigar smoke was no indication of sex. If Edward, would Eadie have warned him of what to expect? Or had she decided to submit him to the same shock as she had undergone, only intensified by darkness, night perfumes, and fragmentation of distant lights? Perhaps you had done wrong to plan the meeting in the dark garden. Face to face in the dim lighting favoured in this house might have been less unnerving, underwater shapes drifting harmlessly around as they took each other’s measure. Too bad if a predator appeared. But Eadie had probably been frightened off. She would keep away till the worst was over.

  Anyway, he had to go down.

  Crossing the drawing room he overheard a voice bullying servants. ‘Can we be sure of the soufflé, Etty? You know what a flop the last one was—when Mrs Golson came to lunch …’ A clattering of crockery. ‘By all means take her on your lap, Thatcher. But you did nothing, absolutely nothing, about the cyst between her toes. My poor dear! My darling Biffy! Sentimentality is all very well, but practical attention, Thatcher, is what little dogs respond to.’ A cowering silence, almost, you thought you detected, a fearful stench blowing from the kitchen offices.

  He forged on. The sound of his own feet covering a jarrah no-man’s land between threadbare rugs should not have alarmed an ex-lieutenant (D.S.O.); nor should an ex-Empress (hetaira) of Nicaea, expert in matters of protocol and mayhem, have quailed before a situation involving a minor official even when the official was her father; mere blood relationship never ruled out a bloodbath.

  With Eadie in the kitchen, it was unavoidably the Judge smoking his solitary cigar in the quiet of the garden.

  Lieutenant Twyborn went over the top, down the marble steps from which brocaded skirts swept dead leaves and caterpillars’ droppings.

  A shaft of light striking from the house laid bare the long judicial face as well as that of the defendant.

  A dry, self-contained man, the Judge was at the culprit’s mercy as never on any of his many circuits.

  ‘Why didn’t she tell me?’ He had to accuse somebody.

  The air around them was tremulous.

  ‘I expect she thought it would be less upsetting to let you find out.’

  As indeed it had been easier not to forewarn by writing, to leave it to a mingling of skin and veins, the texture of cloth, the tokens on a watch-chain, the spider-moustache which descended and withdrew as on the night when the shutters blew open, never before, never again till now. (Angelos hadn’t worn a moustache.)

  In the shaft of light the Judge’s concern glistened like bone: that this son whom he loved—he did, didn’t he? should have perverted justice by his disappearance. Judge Twyborn did not intend to pursue the reason why; it might have been too unreasonable for one who put his faith in reason despite repeated proof that it will not stand up to human behaviour.

  To avoid a conclusion he might be forced to draw, this honourable man began asking, ‘Did they put soap for you, Eddie, and a towel?’

  ‘Haven’t looked, but I expect so.’

  ‘Whatever else is neglected, your room has been taken care of.’

  They were stumbling over the earthworks Thatcher’s tended lawn had thrown up.

  ‘Are you cold, boy? Your hand is cold.’

  ‘Not unduly.’ The hand you were chafing with yours, the molten rivers of veins, would not have allowed it; still, you heard yourself chattering as though with cold.

  ‘Sydney is splendid at night,’ the Judge was informing a visitor. ‘There’s a lot that’s undesirable by day, but that can apply, I should think, in any city in the world.’

  Fortunately as they reached the steps the techniques of living were taking over.

  ‘Madam says dinner is served, sir. She’s afraid of the soufflé’

  Lieutenant Twyborn dropped his host’s hand.

  Freshly powdered, Mildred stood simpering on the illuminated heights. She had exchanged her daytime starch for organdie frills, frivolous against a more austere background of black.

  And Eadie had emerged to reinforce the announcement. ‘Yes,’ she told them, ‘Etty’s soufflé is standing up—splendidly. So don’t dawdle, Edward, please.’

  She smiled at their son. She may have wished to touch him, but something she could not have defined frightened her into resisting the impulse. Perhaps it was his good looks. Handsome men were inclined to intimidate Eadie Twyborn. It would not have dawned on her to credit with looks the man she had married, just as you take for granted some elegant hairbrush acquired long ago, its form less noticeable by the time you’ve worn the bristles down and realise you ought to do something about what has become a source of aggravation.

  As they entered the dining room Judge Twyborn was holding himself so erect he must have been competing with a soldier son. In more normal circumstances, his profession would have assisted him, but the combination of an already mythical war and suddenly recovered fatherhood left him looking overtly respectful.

  Eddie saw that the whole elaborate ritual was in store: the mahogany oval laid with worn silver, Waterford glass, in a central épergne white hibiscus preparing to close, while Mildred, straining at her calves against the sideboard, would be catapulted into the kitchen as soon as they were seated, to return with Etty’s upstanding soufflé.

  Oh God, he could have cried. Instead he bowed his head as for grace, and remembered the fortnight after confirmation when he had expected miracles.

  ‘We don’t know, darling, what your tastes are,’ Eadie said, ‘I mean—in food.’

  The Judge sat crumbling bread on the mahogany surface beyond the circumference of a Limerick doily which threatened to stick to his fingers, all doilies to all their fingers, leprous flesh barely distinguishable from webs of lace.

  ‘I mean,’ said Eadie, ‘whether you’re a gourmet, or like it plain.’

  ‘Don’t you think food depends a lot on time and place?’

  Eadie laughed; she would have laughed at anything, even what she hadn’t listened to. But Edward Twyborn was looking grave. Eddie hated to feel he might appear a prig to those mournful eyes.

  ‘Do you remember—Father,’ the whole scene was so unreal, nothing he might add to it could make it more incongruous, ‘you took me with you when a court was sitting at—Bathurst I think it was. We shared an enormous iron bed with a honeycomb coverlet on it.’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ the Judge said.

  ‘I do.’ Or thought you did. Oh yes, you did! ‘I was so excited I lay awake all night listening to the noises in the pub yard. The moonlight, I remember, was as white as milk. It was hot. I pushed the bedspread off. It lay on the floor against the moonlight.’

  ‘Eddie, you’re making it up!’ Eadie was out in the cold.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ he insisted as he messed up Etty’s soufflé. ‘Remembering is a kind of disease I suffer from.’

  ‘Hardly a disease,’ the Judge muttered through a mouthful. ‘Useful, I’d say, if you’re to any degree selective.’

  ‘No, a disease,’ Eddie Twyborn heard himself persisting. ‘I don’t know, but suspect that those who can’t recall, act more positively than those who are bogged down in memory.’

  Eadie announced in a loud voice, ‘You can’t deny it’s a jolly good soufflé.’

  ‘Excellent,’ the Judge agreed.
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  ‘I remember, on the same trip we had a meal in one of those railway refreshment rooms—so-called. We had corned beef, and watery carrots, and dumplings that bounded from under the knife …’

  ‘Oh darling, must we be morbid?’

  ‘… but it was delicious. Anyway, a delicious memory. Even the brown drone of blowflies, the brown linoleum. Somebody’s dumpling shot across the floor.’

  Judge Twyborn was staring at his plate, at the soufflé he had massacred.

  ‘I can’t believe,’ Eadie said. ‘Unless you keep a diary. Do you, Eddie?’

  ‘On and off.’

  ‘I’ve thought about it. But haven’t had the courage.’ She wiped her mouth, and looked at the mark on the napkin.

  Eddie glanced at the father he had wanted to impress and comfort, who was looking as though he had a moron for a son, or worse, some kind of pervert: that honeycomb bedspread, the whole moonlit scene.

  While his wife continued wrapped in a state of mind induced by the mark on the napkin.

  The Judge leaned across. ‘Then I’m not wrong, my dear, in thinking you painted up a bit too vividly for the occasion.’

  Eadie exclaimed, ‘Oh my God!’ and got up to pour herself a whiskey chaser to her wine.

  Mildred removed the dishes, and brought on the roast fowl, with bread sauce and sprouts, just as though it were the holidays.

  ‘Are we having the caramel custard with toffee on it?’ he asked his mother.

  ‘You’re unnatural, Eddie.’

  Even before all three were crunching the caramel toffee (Judge Twyborn more circumspectly than the others because of an upper denture) he knew that he should not have come back; he should have kept his existence to himself, or only revealed it to strangers.

  Eadie stood up at last. ‘This is where I leave the men to the port. I know that’s how Edward would like it.’ She poured another whiskey chaser to sustain her in her isolation.

  She had got herself up in an ancient girlish frock, silver flounces over rose. A tear became visible under one armpit as she scratched her head defensively. She was wearing a Spanish comb in her hair as no Spaniard had ever worn one.

  He stood up. He would have liked to say something to his mother, but hadn’t learnt the language as do natural linguists and normal sons.