The Twyborn Affair

by Patrick White

  ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘he’s in Canada—on his way home—if he isn’t sidetracked to Ecuador.’

  ‘But thought of me, none the less.’

  She did not answer immediately, but as they descended the steep incline, swaying in the saddles as their horses propped and felt for a foothold amongst the rocks, Marcia suggested, ‘It might have been Don’s idea. I believe the grouchy old monster has your welfare at heart.’ Then she uttered a short flat laugh. ‘In fact, I’d say he’s quite fond of you.’

  Marcia sounded, or was trying to sound, as indifferent as when she had shown him that his naked torso was of no interest to her.

  Eddie said, ‘I don’t think I understand Prowse,’ and pricked up his ears for Marcia’s reactions.

  She did not react. Perhaps they were not deceiving each other; it was becoming boring.

  They emerged from the scrub into a pocket of pasture at the foot of the hill where ewes were lambing. Some of the mothers hurried their offspring away, others continued ruminating, unwilling to disturb the wriggly lamb bunting at an udder. One ewe stood transfixed, but only for a moment, torn between the instincts for self-preservation and motherhood, then resumed licking at the gelatinous envelope containing a lamb recently dropped. The parcel on the grass responded to her continued rasping: the lamb began breathing, rising, tottering into the first stages of its life.

  ‘There!’ Marcia herself breathed, and led them at a tangent to avoid disturbing the lambing ewes.

  This woman of a certain age, in her velour of a dedicated dowdiness, and stretched, even ravelled old cardigan, looked curiously innocent. She had little connection with Marcia Lushington his mistress of thrashing thighs and voracious mouth. While the body remained heavy enough, the spirit which possessed it seemed to have regained a purity of youth.

  Whether he sensed the transformation, the opulent gelding on which she was mounted was carrying his rider with a prim, spinsterly respect. And the new black filly had thrown off any vestige of unbroken folly and was stepping out, thrusting her neck into the wind with a show of conscientious, almost ostentatious, maidenly sobriety.

  Marcia broke the silence. ‘What are you going to call her?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m told her name is “Coalie”.’

  ‘Oh God, that! Nobody belongs to their given name. Or some of us don’t, I like to think.’

  She fell to giggling, and he joined in. They were soon bumping against each other, uncontrollably, unreasonably, like schoolgirls who have shed the boys during an interval at a dance.

  Till they came upon a second mob of lambing ewes; when Marcia sobered up. ‘Let’s go this way,’ she breathed, ‘so as not to frighten the poor wretches.’

  She took him by the wrist to guide him. Again she was a mature woman, but one in whom purity had never been disturbed by lust. She was the mother who had buried three children in the graveyard at ‘Bogong’, and who could not have conceived the third in the circumstances her pseudo-lover Eddie Twyborn had suspected.

  Consequently Eddie loved her for the moment with a pure, unadulterated joy. He lowered his eyelids against the glare, and finally closed them. He could have nuzzled the breasts he visualized inside the old ravelled cardigan.

  Marcia must have led him purposely on the opposite side from the Lushington graveyard. On reaching a stand of aged pear trees below the house, she turned to him and said, ‘You know, Eddie, how I appreciate you, don’t you? What I’m trying to tell you,’ she said, ‘is how much we—all of us—love you—whether you realise it or not.’

  The suppleness had gone out of her voice, the flesh fallen from her cheekbones, the chalky ridges of which had something of the agelessness of the hills surrounding them.

  He might have continued staring at this other Mrs Lushington if their horses had not begun to sidle.

  Whereupon Marcia rustled up a handful of reins from the pommel of her saddle. ‘I’m so glad I came across you where I did. Wasn’t it a lovely ride back?’ She lowered her eyes, and there was nothing dishonest in her modesty. ‘I don’t think Prowse could hold it against me for taking you away from your work.’

  If they hadn’t been within view of the house, he would have kissed Marcia Lushington for a tremor in her right cheek.

  Anyway, she had turned her horse. Jaunty with the knowledge that a feed of oats waited for him, Hamlet was bearing his rider off, this middle-aged woman practised in adulterous rites.

  Summer was upon them, a sun the fiercer for being so long watered down, waves curling white on hectic seas of barley grass. After hanging his blankets on the line to air he found them crawling with the minute threads of yellow maggots.

  ‘Arr!’ Peggy Tyrrell laughed. ‘It’s only the blowies. If it wasn’t for the good old blowie you wouldn’t know for sure that summer was with us. Give yer blankets ’ere, love, and I’ll fix ’em for yer.’

  She carried them off, and returned them decontaminated, if reeking of kerosene.

  He found himself slouching stupefied in the saddle as he rode round the paddocks, squinting through his lashes to keep out the flies, his skin cured to the tone and texture of any of the local stockmen. To a stranger he might have passed by now for a local. Often his companions forgot he was not one of them and asked his opinion, which they seemed to accept. But he did not believe he would ever learn to fool himself, as apparently he could deceive others, and as so many others deceived themselves.

  Prowse, for one.

  On an occasion when Mrs Tyrrell’s monologue had driven each of them early to his room, the manager called through the thin wall, ‘Why don’t you come in, Ed, and have a yarn? Not very sociable, are yer?’ The voice was still accusing when his offsider appeared in the doorway.

  ‘You couldn’t call either of us sociable, walking out on poor old Peggy.’

  ‘Arr, Christ! Peggy’s all right. But women finish by givin’ yer the gripes.’

  ‘The girls in town?’

  They were seated opposite each other, pyjamas limp, rank with summer.

  ‘Girls!’ Prowse grunted. ‘There’s a time and place for anything.’ His need for sociability forced the manager to pour his guest a drink. ‘That one—Valda—that I told you about—I might even marry if the wife ’ud give me a divorce. But Kath’s the sour type that hangs on to what she considers ’er rights after she’s bloody shown she doesn’t want ’em.’

  He knocked back his drink, scratching at his chest through the gap in his pyjama coat.

  He brought out an album. ‘These ’ull make yer laugh!’ he promised, while appearing far from mirthful himself. ‘Old photos.’

  He began turning the khaki pages on yellowed to greyer, more recent snapshots, in most cases meticulously mounted, with captions in white ink.

  A few loose snaps slid out in the beginning. He gathered them up, but not before Eddie had identified the thin woman from the enlargement on the wall.

  ‘That’s Kath,’ Prowse muttered unnecessarily before leafing on through the album.

  ‘Here’s Valda,’ he indicated more enthusiastically with a blue thumbnail Eddie could remember receiving a hit from a hammer.

  A plump smiling girl in a hat, Valda was shown holding a racquet as she stood pressed against the tennis net.

  ‘Take it from me, Valda’s the good oil!’ Prowse bumped his guest’s pyjamaed knee with his.

  They forged on. There were the blank spaces from which Kath must have been dismounted, only in half-hearted revenge for the enlarged Kath still ruled his room.

  ‘That’s poor little Kim,’ said Prowse.

  She looked a disapproving child, with more of her mother in her than her father. The moment after she had been snapped, her upper teeth would more than likely have clamped on her lower lip as she wondered whether she had done right in exposing herself to a camera.

  Prowse turned and turned.

  ‘That’s me brother.’ He sighed. ‘He was killed in action.’

  ‘Me brother’ was a Light Horseman, too bronz
ed, too lithe, too beplumed, too much of a good thing, with death already in his light eyes.

  Prowse turned the page too quickly.

  After the brother, the group was something of a relief: of average, clumsy, lumpy blokes.

  ‘Those were some mates of mine—who enlisted. It was taken just before they embarked.

  Eddie was examining the mates, when Don nicked the page.

  ‘Don’t think, Eddie, I wouldn’t ’uv enlisted. I know you were in the War. They told me about yer decoration. I would ’uv. But Greg pointed out I was doing a necessary job. And Marce;’ as Eddie had heard several times before.

  The coarse fingers were torturing the pasteboard edges of the khaki snapshot album.

  Eddie Twyborn felt like blubbing as he hadn’t since he came across his first corpse.

  ‘So you see?’ The host poured them another drink.

  Prowse turned the pages of the album.

  ‘Who’s this?’ Although you knew.

  ‘That’s Mum.’

  She had an aggressive jaw and was wearing an A.I.F. brooch pinned across the V of a print frock.

  ‘She never got over Bert’s death. Well, you can understand.’ Don sounded as though he were making excuses for his own earlier excesses.

  ‘And this?’

  ‘Mum when she was younger.’

  Mum was holding a frocked moppet with abundant curls. Rather a pugnacious, scowling child. A miniature of herself in fact. Mum’s scowls were girlish then.

  ‘But the kid?’

  Don’s thumb rasped against the edge of the page. ‘That’s bloody me! That’s how she kept me! That’s what they do to yer when you’re helpless,’ he bellowed. ‘The women!’

  His knees were bumping against his guest’s, through the thin sweaty poplin of summer pyjamas.

  Eddie said, ‘I’ve got to get some sleep, Don, or I shan’t be up in the morning.’

  ‘Anyway,’ the manager said, ‘we had a yarn. And that’s something I didn’t think yer capable of.’

  ‘How?’

  Without answering, Prowse bowed his head; he was pretty far gone by now. Several snaps of Kath fell out of the album.

  Eddie wondered whether he should pick them up, but didn’t.

  He stood for a moment looking down on the bowed head, at a balding patch on top of it, that of an orange, tonsured monk.

  He wondered how the man would have reacted had he bent and touched the patch of skin. He was tempted to do it. Drained of his masculine strength and native brutality, Prowse was reduced to a harmless, rather pathetic ape. Eddie’s heart was thumping, but he managed to restrain his inclination. It was too incredible, to himself, and might have shocked one who was perhaps not drunk enough.

  Instead he put his arms under the armpits and began easing Prowse on to the bed as he had done many times before.

  ‘Thanks, Ed—you’re the good oil …’ he thought he heard as the heavy arms slithered briefly over his ribs.

  Then the head lolled back on the pillow, the smile withdrawing from fox’s teeth into a glare of bronze stubble.

  Prowse slept, and Eddie turned down the lamp, till the familiar smell of untrimmed wick filled the darkened room.

  At night the dark grew suffocating in the felted rooms of the creaking cottage. The cries of the sleepers tormented him: Peggy Tyrrell for her rheumatics and her daughters, Don Prowse for God knew what—the war he hadn’t enlisted for, his dead brother, the failure of his marriage, Valda in her hat offering the good oil through the net.

  On a certain night Eddie could no longer endure the manager’s mutterings, his farts, the metallic jingling of a bed the other side of a thin wall. He got up, thinking to spend the rest of the night by the cool of the river, but had hardly got the screen-door open when the voice intercepted him.

  ‘Where yer goin’, Ed?’

  ‘Down to the river. I’ll stretch out there on a blanket. It’s too bloody hot inside.’

  Prowse laughed. ‘I’d join yer,’ he said, ‘if the mozzies wouldn’t get us.’

  Eddie persisted, but found the mozzies did get him.

  ‘What did I tell yer?’ Prowse murmured.

  Prowse would go outside to have a pee and, braving mosquitoes, stay there longer than making water warranted, perhaps in company with his glowering mum, Kath gnashing on the terms of separation, the brother’s Light Horse plumes blowing in the false dawn. Eddie heard the bugle. He heard the screen-door mosquitoing as Don returned. A heavy, orange bungling. Stained poplin hitched to contain the load which women despise, and desire.

  On one occasion Eddie was dreaming of the thin, green-skinned child. I’m Kim who are you? I’m nobody. You must be someone every- body’s somebody. You’re right there Kim I’m my father and mother’s son and daughter … She looked as distrustful as the snap with its white-ink caption let into the khaki page of the album. Her lip so disapproving. The two of them a couple of prigs: a chlorotic child and a governess with aspirations to lust. Then she said Ed I love you in her father’s voice. She put out a pale claw. They were grappling each other in a common desire related to childhood and despair. Before her mother broke in through the disapproving rustle of a screen-door.

  He woke after that. It was the actual dawn after the false. He could hear the sound of Don’s belt, the buckle hitting the bedstead. Mrs Tyrrell was raking the ashes in the stove. She sighed and burped. There was a smell of burning newspaper and sticks. A cock crowed, pitting his fire against the cool of dawn.

  ‘What do you say if I drive us there?’ Prowse had become this eager child, rocking on the balls of his feet beside the shining black Packard Mr Edmonds had been working over earlier in the afternoon.

  ‘There, but not back,’ Mrs Lushington stipulated in the kind of voice Mum Prowse might have used on her frocked and ringletted boy. ‘I’ll drive back.’ She was very firm in her decision, her frown hidden by a flesh bandeau powdered with small metallic beads which collaborated with the evening light to flash what could have been messages in code.

  Although her edict was strong enough to have sprung from a dogmatic male, Marcia Lushington had never looked more feminine to Eddie Twyborn, her rather too large, powdered breasts barely controlled by flesh charmeuse. Almost always neutral, this evening she emitted flashes of green from swathes of that same tone as the seas of young barley grass which stormed through ‘Bogong’ in the spring.

  She was obviously flattered by his looking at her, and as she thought, quite rightly, appreciating her appearance. She touched his hand as they entered the black Packard, where the manager, in a suit which had grown too tight for him, had already seated himself like an attendant husband.

  Marcia muttered, ‘I’d better sit beside old Don—restrain him if he’s had a couple for the road.’

  Don most likely hadn’t heard; he was too engrossed in examining the controls awaiting his touch, delighted by the prospect of driving the Lushington Packard on even an inconsiderable journey.

  Eddie got behind. Marcia looked round and smiled from below the flesh bandeau, its metal beads sifting a radiance, of the theatre rather than the spirit, out of the hard, natural light.

  Don pronounced very gravely, ‘This is something like it,’ juggling with gears as they finished with the slope below the house and straightened out across the stony stretch before the bridge. ‘Oh God,’ he mumbled, and again, ‘Jesus Christ—it’s good to be driving a real car!’

  Marcia was sitting straight-backed. Eddie suspected she had been brought up on religion: a Methodist from Tilba. Greg could only have been C of E, Marcia Methodist—or Baptist? though she’d picked up a wrinkle or two from the Romans.

  He was still undecided on the denomination from which Marcia Lushington had lapsed, when he glanced out, and there was Mrs Tyrrell beside the loosely articulated bridge, her gums parted, her sticks of arms raised from out of the bobbled shawl.

  ‘Good on yez!’ Peggy called in a burst of Saturday evening despair, perhaps remembering the funerals she ha
d missed, the corpses she hadn’t been invited to lay out, since accepting to finish her pensioned life working for the Lushingtons of ‘Bogong’.

  They waved back, trailing the perfumes of brilliantine and bath salts, they waved at that crucified cow, poor Peggy, beside the bucking bridge. They could afford to be magnanimous as they drove off to the party to which they had been invited.

  Marcia had walked down to tell Eddie. ‘It’s the Winterbothams.’ She stood looking at the toes of her shoes; how the stones had scuffed them. ‘Next Saturday evening. Everybody’s dying to meet you.’

  ‘Why—what do they know?’

  Marcia snorted, and continued looking at her martyred shoes. ‘Well, you’re here, aren’t you? With us. And you’re your father’s son.’

  ‘And what about my mother?’

  ‘Oh, yes, yes! Of course your mother. We know about mothers!’ She crimped her brows.

  Then she added, ‘They probably also want to decide whether you’re my lover.’

  So now they were driving to the Winterbothams’ party.

  In yet another footnote Marcia had thought to explain, ‘We’ll have to take poor old Don along, otherwise he might turn against us—or commit suicide, or something.’

  So here was old Don driving them to the Winterbothams. Of ‘Belair’.

  It was a house of greater pretensions than the Lushingtons’ discreetly ramshackle affair, more of an Edwardian city mansion, in ox-blood brick with tan ironwork, all illuminated for the party, if self-advertisement weren’t perhaps the rule. Music was already bursting out, or anyway saxophones and drums were tuning up. The arriving guests were made aware that ‘Last Night on the Back Porch’ and ‘Marquita’ were in the band’s repertoire.

  Don Prowse swirled his passengers round the oval rose-bed, and brought the black Packard to a standstill. His marriage may have failed, but he was a perfectionist in his handling of a car.

  ‘Well,’ sighed Marcia, ‘this is it.’ She might have regretted their coming.

  Later in the evening, as the French champagne frothed over, and at least one of the guests had dropped his Pavlova on the parquet, Don explained to Eddie, ‘Old Greg could write a cheque and buy out Winterbothams any time they asked for it.’