The Twyborn Affair

by Patrick White

  The enemy firing on them from the rising ground beyond the trees the slaver of dogs pouring down into the hollow.

  You aren’t hit are you Eddie?

  He could barely answer such a tender question.

  Yes I suppose I am he managed.

  It was pouring out.

  Wounded in spite of the shield this freckled other body provided.

  He tried staunching the wound with his hand as the blood continued pouring out into the hollow in what was no longer a beech copse but an ever darkening pine forest.

  He looked down at his fingers and saw that the blood wasn’t red but white.

  Eadith awoke to find herself in one of the guest beds at ‘Wardrobes’. Although disturbing, her mortal dream had also consoled as it ebbed from her. Drawing the nightdress round her naked shoulders, nursing a stickiness between her thighs, she turned her back finally, and after first nibbling, then devouring a Bath Oliver from the japanned tin on the bedside table, slept dreamless into a perversely sunny Wiltshire morning, to which she was introduced by a housemaid, anonymous and milky (she might have taken part in the dream), encouraging her to drink mouthfuls of tea (Ceylon for morning) in between consuming token slices of bread-and-butter.

  War, death, and sex were the missing elements in this protected room.

  Ursula, Roderick, and Eadith avoided one another till past eleven, when Ursula’s friends, risen by supreme effort from their London beds, started arriving, trickling down the paths, clotting on the lawns, recoiling from smells, possibly those of mortality rising out of the beech copse below. Most of the guests looked out of place but seemed to enjoy the irony of it: Diana her melting mascara; returned from her exile at Saffron Walden, Cecily in flounces of crumbling-meringue organdy; an old bag of a Bellasis distant relation whose alter ego of a matted coat-and-skirt might have stood up without support like a similar garment worn by Eddie/Eadith’s Eadie. The assortment of males was less vocal, but more important, the Mileses and Gileses who populate the P.O. and other Ministries more mysterious. Herself a whole entanglement of mysteries, Eadith did not intend to investigate anyone else’s too deeply.

  When those who had been inspecting their rooms (were they better or worse than last time?) had come downstairs, and those who had confidences to exchange had returned by trickles and driblets through the maze of garden, the guests were brought together, according to the law of quicksilver, on Ursula’s paved terrace, laughing over their shoulders at the one who, technically their friend, was far more desirably their hostess. Those who had been opening tins of beans in an amusing mews, and dropping the alarm clock together with their gin into the pan in which they were boiling the spaghetti, looked forward to the vast saddles of lamb and bleeding barons of beef they hoped she would provide to feed the starving poor-rich.

  On all sides were heard murmurs of ‘Ursula darling …’ if mostly followed by a snort.

  Everybody was doing something: writing, painting, marrying a title, divorcing one, destroying a soul. Exposing their teeth, their long fingers clamped to their glasses, every one of them avid for the ultimate experience. If this were a war, their eyelids rejected it. Their glances lingered in rebuttal on the figure brought for their entertainment, speculating whether Mrs Trist, the accredited brothel-keeper, were not in fact a guardsman, a nun, a German, a Colonial, or the tail end of a dream nobody ever succeeds in arresting.

  Mrs Trist could not have denied being their equal in crime and frustration, and was only less inquisitive because she might have had more to hide.

  Most of Ursula’s friends were born with that respect for the theory of discretion common to members of their class. Not so this young man approaching. He had the moist eye, the wreathed lips, the apologetic chin of one who intends to tell and be told all in the shortest possible time. In the name of friendship, naturally. Any confidences to be dished out in due course to the rest; isn’t friendship a shared thing?

  Dennis Maufey had written a play—indeed several, but this was the one which would be heard about. If all went well he had found backers, who were in fact expected at ‘Wardrobes’—some Australians, he lowered his voice to apologise to Ursula’s incongruous friend, who was none the less desirable because for the moment fashionable.

  He looked at Mrs Trist, either to see how he stood in her estimation, or more likely, whether she should sink in his. He was wearing a rag hat (the Ursula set favoured hats in the garden: rag, raffia, rattan—anything provided it was old and tatty). Only Eadith and the elderly Honourable Bellasis lady in the smelly coat-and-skirt were going hatless.

  Maufey congratulated Eadith on her success. ‘Not that I’ve visited your house,’ he said. ‘I’ve only heard about it—and wouldn’t go there unless you consented to take me on professionally.’

  He did not leave off looking at her from under his rag brim, as though deciding how worldly she was.

  She smiled back. ‘There are too many applicants. One can’t take on everybody,’ she answered in her coolest English.

  He giggled slightly, and looked at her closer than ever. ‘I believe you’ve got something against us. I can tell by your tone of voice. I mean—you’re not one of us, are you? The Dominions, possibly?’ Always looking at her; he would have so liked to share a secret. ‘Wait till you meet my Australians. That’ll serve you right, darling. Frantic bores, but they adore the English.’

  While Dennis Maufey and Eadith Trist stood about in increasingly disjointed attitudes, slopping the gin poured for them as the prelude to a country lunch, Maufey must have admitted his failure to have the creature confess to the shadow on which he had obviously trodden, for he began to concentrate instead on that other stone façade behind them.

  ‘Ursula’s house—houses,’ he corrected himself, ‘are the most ordered I’ve ever come across. Open any of the cupboards and I’m sure you’ll find even the skeletons are catalogued.’

  He was so pleased with his epigram, his snigger developed into an outright laugh, then subsided into thought. ‘You must meet my Australians—well, you will, you can’t avoid it,’ looking at her always from under the frayed brim of his hat, ‘because they’re coming. Oh yes, they’ll come. Titles and antiques are truffles to Reg and Nora Quirk. If they’re sometimes taken in by puff-balls, they get a lot of pleasure out of the deception.’

  ‘When will they be here?’ She might have been making plans to leave.

  ‘Possibly tomorrow. There was talk of polo with a prince today—or was it cricket with some grisly duke? Anyhow, they’ll come. They’ve bought a left-over Turner.’ He almost dislocated himself with his worst giggle yet. ‘Nora’s going to be presented if a war doesn’t prevent her wearing her feathers to the circus. Poor darlings, I love them—such a vigorous country—I’ve great hopes … We’ll always need plays, shan’t we? particularly when the bombs are falling.’

  After the hopeful playwright had cast her off, Mrs Trist was appropriated by the Honourable Mrs Spencer-Parfitt, who stood clutching to the grubby beige blouse worn inside her tailor-made a glass of the buttermilk Ursula provided specially for Muff.

  ‘I can’t think why I turn up at Baby’s house parties. I’m not wanted. And I don’t want.’ She looked sternly at the woman of whom she had heard tell. ‘Are you? And do you?’ she asked.

  ‘I shouldn’t have come if I hadn’t been invited. Your second question is harder to answer,’ Mrs Trist replied.

  ‘You’re as bad as any of ’em,’ muttered Muff, whose christened names were Constance Grace Aurelia. ‘People on the whole stink, I think—as the dreadful Americans say.’ Then turning on what might have been intended as encouragement, ‘Some of ’em stink sweeter than others.’

  Muff by now was stinking of the buttermilk past and present she had spilt on her beige blouse, and the cats she slept with in Kensington. Increasing whiffs of Eadie Twyborn began to trouble Eadith Trist.

  ‘I’ve heard all about you,’ warned the honourable lady, slopping some more of the buttermilk, ‘but only
believe half of what I hear. Nothing is wholly believable today. Nothing is true. Except Dinky my old seal-pointed Siamese, and Dinky—but I shan’t talk about that.’

  Mrs Spencer-Parfitt started dabbing at herself with a grey, snotted-up Irish hanky.

  ‘Purity …’ she snuffled. ‘That daisy at any rate is pure.’ She pointed with the toe of an abraded brogue at a clump of pink-to-white daisy which had shot up since the lawn-mower razed Ursula’s lawn to perfection. ‘I’d like to think you were,’ she turned abruptly to the bawd. ‘In spite of what I hear, my instincts as a cat-lover tell me you may be. Too pure even for your own good.’

  Eadith was aghast. ‘I’ve never aspired to virtue. As for purity—truth—I’ve still to make up my mind what they amount to. But hope I may. Eventually.’

  ‘Good for you!’

  Somewhere an invisible servant was beating a gong, summoning people to a late lunch; a cold one considering the unreliability of the idle. It was no less sumptuous for being cold, and everybody tucked in, remembering what they would return to in their service flats, the eternal tins they would open in the mews, and the cockroach in the Charlotte Street ragù bolognese.

  After lunch, and resumption of their hats, most of the guests returned to the garden and arranged themselves in deck chairs, to snooze, or continue their destruction of literature, art, and political careers, the dissection of adulteries they suspected or knew their friends to be conducting, and speculation on Hitler’s next possible move in developing the Grave Threat to England.

  With nothing to contribute beyond her incongruity Mrs Trist remained unnoticed. She was able to escape to her room. She could have been suffering from indigestion, or going to the lavatory.

  Except for a sound of cutlery from the kitchen quarters, the house was heavy with silence, which did not prevent slabs of the past moving round in it. They pursued her as she fled upstairs past Courbet’s peasant of the livery jowl. A cloying tortoiseshell light clung as insidiously as the misty future in her dream of the night before.

  She stood bathing her face in front of the bathroom glass.

  He burped back at her, out of the past or the future.

  She felt the better for it, however.

  Evening was as uneventful and discursive. The promised Australians, somewhat to Maufey’s relief, hadn’t arrived. The only incident to affect the displaced bawd was when Madame Siderous beckoned and drew her aside amongst the flower borders at dusk.

  ‘Darling,’ Diana began, and her perfume, her breath, overpowered the evening scents of the garden, ‘do you realise how you fail to keep your promises?’

  Mrs Trist could not imagine for what she was about to stand accused.

  ‘You’ve never given me the Arab woman’s number. The one who knows the wax-and-honey method for removing superfluous hair.’

  Madame Siderous was looking at her intently as though expecting the coded reply to a coded question.

  ‘She isn’t on the telephone. We’ll come to an arrangement next time I see her.’

  It couldn’t have been the correct answer, for Diana frowned, while seeming to offer a second chance. ‘You’re surely not one of those tiresome people who, when they discover something special, feel they’ve got to keep it to themselves.’ A mole between her right nostril and the arch of a smoothly painted lip threatened reprisal.

  ‘Yes and no,’ Eadith replied; whatever the outcome in friendship or war, she would not be lured into surrendering her closer secrets to the likes of Madame Siderous.

  Diana’s exasperation returned them both to reality. ‘These boring English house-parties!’ She reached out and beheaded a delphinium with a quick flick of her brown fingers. ‘All these F.O. pin-stripes and sculptured M.I. jaws! Not to mention the pansy artists! And noble crypto-Lesbians! Some of the women here would be more use than most of the men.’ Suddenly Diana Siderous seized Eadith Trist by the nose with fingers smelling of nicotine, and sap from the slaughtered delphinium. ‘Odd we never thought of doing it together …’

  Almost at once she must have decided to reduce her gesture and remark to the level of the ridiculous.

  ‘Don’t worry, darling,’ she screeched, ‘I’m sure we’ll never feel as bored as that. And disillusion poor old Ursula.’

  She took her friend by the arm and was leading her back into what could pass for focus. ‘Seriously,’ and Madame Siderous did apparently consider herself capable of seriousness, ‘I believe you’re Ursula’s big disappointment. As a collector, I mean. When you should have been her grand coup—the whore-mistress of Beckwith Street, exposing her nipples, gnashing her teeth at the men—and here you are, as sombre as a nun.’

  The bronze tunic Eadith was wearing, the skirt susurrating as it scuffed the ground, the long, fluted sleeves, did suggest a nun, or priestess, while the Siderous plastered to her ribs forced on her a stride more stilted than was normal.

  When she answered her accuser, the gravity of her expression and movements seemed to have rubbed off on her voice, ‘I like to think I’m sometimes capable of more than is expected of me.’

  They continued towards the house and the nets of light which had by now been spread for them. The light caught their disappointments and illusions, and for a brief moment portrayed the wooden attitudes, the formal eyes, of a pair of worm-eaten Coptic saints.

  Then Madame Siderous announced, ‘I’m going to get myself a stiff gin—what else hardly matters—I can face the evening.’

  But Eadith remained set in her sobriety.

  During dinner she looked for Gravenor but did not find him. Without being asked, Ursula explained casually from down table that he had been called away; she expected him back later that night. Maufey’s awaited Australians still had not arrived, which was cause for thankfulness as far as Mrs Trist was concerned.

  She spilled some gravy on her bronze tunic and fell to rubbing surreptitiously. All the stains in her life were concentrated in this greasy emblem as she rubbed and rubbed with the spotless napkin. She reduced it at last enough to satisfy her conscience. More startling was the bloody mark left on the napkin by nervous lips; he hid it with such vehemence he might have been sitting with Prowse amongst the mutton fat in Peggy Tyrrell’s kitchen.

  Nobody could have noticed. They were all hanging on a story told to one of them by ‘Ribb’s closest friend’. Their eyes seemed to be probing the rather innocuous anecdote for a clue to their whole future.

  Back in her cell, Eadith was afraid she might re-enter her dream of the night before. She heard what could have been the ten-year-old Bentley swirling over gravel, then rolling more evenly on the paving-stones laid as an approach to what were the stables in the days when life at ‘Wardrobes’ was sedate and indestructible.

  During the night she heard laughter in the passages and on the landing, doors opening, closing, and opening. Her own door was tried several times, but she had thought to lock it. Whoever it was retreated after threatening to wring off the knob.

  She fell into a sleep as blank as a paving-stone.

  The warm, muzzy days might have been created expressly for the professional guests at country house-parties. At the same time they were too bland, too languid to refuse admittance to an outsider. She was free to disintegrate in the overall pointilliste haze of woods and fields, in particular the marigolden water meadows. The more demanding nights, the dinner table, the dressing, the door-knobs, the dreams were what made her apprehensive.

  The following evening, those who showed interest enough were told that the Australians Reg and Nora Quirk had arrived.

  On the terrace before dinner Eadith recognised the Decent Bloke and the Good Sort; she quailed for antipodal innocence exposed to hereditary expertise.

  Introducing the new arrivals, Ursula was exercising what she understood as infallible charm.

  As she called the roll, her friends were looking exceptionally grave. ‘Diana—Cecily—Muff—Hugo—Waldo—Miles—Giles … Dennis you know, of course,’ when what they knew was the lea
st part of him.

  On finishing the introductions, Ursula opened her cornflower eyes to their fullest, to beg a favour. ‘I hope you’ll let me call you Nora and Reg,’ she appealed in a sustained whisper which revealed the transparent tips of her teeth.

  The Quirks could only smile and mumble back to convey their humble gratitude, till Reg got up the courage to suggest, ‘Names make it more homely, don’t they?’ and Nora, though hardly a girl, let off a corroborative, girl’s giggle.

  Like a ventriloquist not sure of his skill, Dennis Maufey stood mouthing his way too obviously through his dolls’ performance. The Quirks could only be vastly rich to subject him to such agony.

  In her unhappiness, Eadith Trist had remained on the edge of darkness. She was dressed even more sombrely tonight, in black, and for this reason perhaps, Ursula had failed to notice, till it could have been a glint from the cocks’ feathers with which her long sleeves were edged, drew attention to her presence.

  ‘And Eadith Trist—one of the friends I value most.’ Her eyelids batted, not so much for an exaggeration, as to project her charm more shamelessly.

  ‘How lucky I’d consider myself to be one of the friends Lady Ursula values most.’ A small spry woman with a practical denture, Nora Quirk might not have been so innocent after all; the female of the species often isn’t, Eadith remembered from her antipodal past.

  While drinks were brought, the Quirks and Mrs Trist remained entangled on the outskirts, as though it had arranged itself thus, outsiders drawn to the arch-outsider.

  Reg Quirk implanted his confidences more firmly by driving a shoulder into the person he was addressing (she was more or less his equal in height). ‘I’m not apologising for we Australians, but you’ve got the edge on us when it comes to culture—tradition. All this,’ he nudged her and looked around. ‘Democracy’s right enough. The stuff’s there for anyone to take if you grab quick. Then you sort of hole up. Out with us, the Lady Ursulas aren’t gunner let you horn in without you have an English accent. They’re the jealousest mob on earth.’ He followed up his semi-indictment with a metallic laugh.