The Twyborn Affair

by Patrick White

  But Eadith longed to feel the texture of remembered skin.

  She despaired of ever catching sight of her mother, when here she was, ascending by escalator out of the depths of the underground, Eadith herself descending, on a day of rain. All the faces on the up and down conveyed some purpose. Excepting Eadie Twyborn.

  As on the first occasion, Mrs Twyborn was dressed in black, her clothes neat for Eadie, but in no way remarkable. Black gloves holding tight to the prayer-book. As she was carried higher, she was staring straight ahead, her abstracted face drained of any human expression.

  For a moment of panic Eadith would have liked to think it was not her mother, that Eadie’s weatherbeaten, blotched skin could never have existed under the mask of white powder, that her drunken, lipstuck mouth was in no way related to these meek, colourless lips, that the fire of a passionate disposition could not have been so thoroughly extinguished. And yet she knew that, under the ashes of resignation, the scars of retribution, the weight of grief, it had to be Eadie Twyborn.

  Again seized by panic Mrs Trist wondered what on earth she could do about the situation. The climax was approaching: ascending and descending they would soon draw level. Should she lean over and touch her mother? She imagined someone like Dennis Maufey exclaiming, ‘The hideous melodrama of it, my dear!’ Whether melodrama or truth, intense emotion might bring on a heart attack, in an elderly, overwrought woman. And the embarrassment if it were not Eadie: ‘I am sorry—so like somebody I used to know’ as they were carried apart, the relief, which finally was no relief. Alternately, the pain of, ‘Oh, my darling, where can I find you? Tell me, tell me …’ as they were carried upward and downward, out of reach.

  Mrs Trist did not lean over to touch. Once more her will had faltered, the moment had eluded her. She would never find out. The answers were not for her.

  She looked back at narrow shoulders in a damp black raincoat disappearing into the upper reaches.

  A person on Eadith’s present level, glancing sideways as they crossed on the down and up, was fascinated by the despair of a strong, but curiously violet chin, the mouth in a soggy face sucking after life it seemed.

  Anyhow, the moment of longed-for, but dreaded expiation had once more been evaded, and was followed by one of passionate regret.

  Mrs Trist was received into the lower depths and the desirable anonymity of all those who sojourn there.

  Gravenor rang her. He hadn’t made contact since the night of Philip Thring’s consummation at the brothel in Beckwith Street.

  He wanted her down for the week-end at a place he had in Norfolk (he used to refer to it as his ‘folly’).

  ‘It’s quite primitive,’ he warned her.

  ‘Comfortable-primitive, I’m sure.’

  They enjoyed sharing a slight laugh.

  ‘You never trust me, do you? or believe me, Eadith darling.’

  She ignored that. ‘But I’ve my “house”—my business.’

  ‘We know.’

  ‘And I’m no good at mucking in with the English in the country. They never get up in the morning.’

  ‘Don’t accuse us, Eadith. I don’t want to feel a foreigner. Anyway, where you are concerned.’

  There was a long pause on the telephone.

  Finally he said, ‘This call’s going to work out hellishly expensive. I can only say I want—you—to come.’

  She couldn’t give him an answer.

  ‘I’m going away,’ he told her from a greater distance than before.

  ‘To where?’

  ‘Out of England.’

  She still couldn’t bring herself to accept his invitation, but said she would think about it.

  When she hung up, the recording of his voice continued playing, just as Eadie Twyborn’s apparition never quite left off haunting. From the window she caught a glimpse of those passive, silver cows tethered high above the city. Around her in the house the girls who were less and less hers lay steaming on their beds, prepared to open their legs to anyone in need of their services. One day, she felt, she might walk into the modernised bathroom and take up the razor instead of the toothbrush. (The razor itself, already of antique design, had been a present from Judge Twyborn to his son Eddie.)

  She did, however, decide she must accept Gravenor’s invitation.

  He said, ‘I’ll drive up and fetch you, Eadith.’

  He had told her he was there ‘sorting out his thoughts’ till he went away.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’ll come by train.’

  ‘If you’d rather. I’ll meet you at the station, darling.’

  She tried to resent being called his darling like some whore-bride who had acquired the label along with an expensive diamond ring; yet she knew it was what she would have chosen.

  She wanted to crush her mouth on the chapped-looking lips under the clipped, pink moustache of this emaciated, freckled man. Gravenor in the flesh, and her desire for him, might not have convinced a rational mind any more than would that apparition, narrow-shouldered in its black rain coat, as it was carried upward by the escalator.

  Seated in the narrow slot in the train which was jolting her into the increasing flatness of East Anglia, she turned her face away from a landscape which seemed to be moaning at her. Where the latterday Eadie had been wearing gloves and carrying a prayer-book, Eadith’s hands were naked and the pressure of her locked fingers was making her rings eat into her.

  She hoped she would never arrive; but of course one does.

  Rod was waiting for her on the platform, hair sparser than she remembered, legs thinner for a wind blowing his trousers against them. They kissed, his lips cold, thin, yet affectionate, against those which must have felt swollen, grasping, in their otherwise unconfessed desire to be comforted.

  She followed up with a rather feeble attempt at rubbing her cheek against his, but he had already withdrawn and she was rubbing instead against a salt wind off the North Sea.

  She had not been wrong in thinking the landscape was moaning at her as the train jolted her dispassionately towards her destination. From the direction of the sea came a steady moan insinuating itself between a low sky and a flat landscape. The expectations of those walking through a pale light were duly flattened.

  Gravenor was holding her hand, chafing her rings with bony fingers. ‘I’m so glad, Eadith, you could give me some time before I go away.’

  ‘But where are you going?’

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  It increased the anonymity she had coveted intermittently. Yet Gravenor’s refusal added another ominous note to a life which was becoming an orchestration of foreboding. Seated beside him in the car she visualised letters some of her girls had shown her from those they imagined to be real lovers, the dates, place names, sometimes whole lines, even paragraphs excised. Eadith was reminded of games Eddie had played under Nanny’s supervision, snipping patterns out of folded paper, in a nursery sealed against draughts and asthma.

  Turning to Gravenor she said, ‘Anyway, Rod, I’m glad I came—that we’ll have this time together.’

  ‘If we do have it.’

  They were driving through the East Anglian flatlands, which rose very slightly to seaward, protecting them from the forces beyond. As additional protection a straggling crown of black thorns. In one place she noticed an armoured car, dun figures of the military, concrete dragon’s teeth and pillboxes, to remind that this low-keyed war was not entirely fantasy.

  A flat landscape and preoccupation with war would not allow her to defer answering him for ever.

  ‘Well, I’m here,’ she said. ‘Why shouldn’t we enjoy being together?’

  ‘That’s for you to decide. You always close down on me.’

  ‘I like to think we have something better than sexuality,’ she half-lied. ‘Isn’t a relationship richer for leaving its possibilities open?’

  She turned to see whether she was beating the English at their own game.

  He said, ‘Much as I enjoy your company, E
adith, I’d like to know you as a woman—because I love you—even if my temperament doesn’t help me convey it.’

  It was as difficult for him, she could see, as for herself. She would have liked to leave it at that, but couldn’t; she must take more of the blame on herself.

  ‘Day and night I’m surrounded by whores,’ she offered as part excuse. ‘Girls I’m exploiting, I should make clear. Even they like to think they have what they see as true lovers, sometimes only fellow prostitutes they can depend on for comfort and affection—above sexuality.’

  Because she sensed she was causing him pain she was racked by her personal dishonesty. If she had been true to her deepest feelings she would have stopped the car, dragged him behind a hedge—and demolished their relationship.

  At least what must be the house was beginning to take shape ahead.

  ‘That’s it,’ he nodded. ‘The camel couchant.’

  The folly forming in the bleached landscape was every bit of that: its tower-neck in nobler stone patched with mortar, the body of humbler grey flint. Bits added on contributed a ribbed effect, the buckling timber only waiting for time, weather, or invasion to send it flying apart.

  ‘I love it,’ Mrs Trist announced with the glib spontaneity of a guest at an Untermeyer party.

  No, she wasn’t quite so dishonest; she didn’t ‘adore’ it.

  What appealed to her were aspects of its homely ugliness, the local flints, like the knobs of Gravenor’s finger joints. She resisted taking up the hand nearest her, which might have led to more and worse.

  After the two of them had struggled inside with her bag, he resumed his apologies in an automatic silence-filling way, ‘… primitive as I warned you, darling.’

  There was a fire burning in one room, then in a second. There was more than a touch of luxury, but of a subdued kind, such as the crypto-rich and the aristocratic hope will put them right with democracy.

  In the same way the slaves who keep luxury in order may be discounted if they remain invisible.

  Rod said, ‘There’s an old body comes over from the village and cleans up. Leaves a stew—a rice pudding. Otherwise, I do for myself while I’m here.’

  ‘I look forward to seeing that.’ She meant it tenderly, but he might have taken it as censure.

  He left her after showing her her room, which looked out over the dyke, the crown of thorns, and the uncharitable light off a sea which, although invisible from where she was standing, must be lashing itself into frenzied action.

  After living through the approach of one, and the early stages of a second and more equivocal war, she was sensitive to hysteria in the elements as well, yet probably, however many wars she experienced, she would not believe in their reality. Any more than she could believe in her own by now middle-aged face, in which every wrinkle was quivering as she repaired her lips in a fogged glass, driving the lipstick in as though committing a rape.

  She glanced at her wrist, not so smooth as it should have been because Fatma had let her down that week. She found herself looking, she realised, for Eddie Twyborn’s wristwatch: checking the time when we go over the top. The stench of sweat-rotted leather, mud, blood, and was it semen? rose disconcertingly through the concentrated perfume of French Fern.

  She touched her hair and went down to find Gravenor, who called to her from the kitchen.

  It was a small, improvised, littered room. She saw at first glance that the expensive utensils were dented or chipped—genuinely used, unless he threw them at himself when alone. Or at someone else if he weren’t.

  ‘I don’t eat lunch,’ he apologised, ‘but we’ll have something.’

  They sat at a scarred table putting away lashings of indifferent cheese perilously perched on hunks of bread. She could see her violent lipstick coming off on the crust of a cottage loaf. They were both cramming in too hard the food which was, for Rod at least, another apology to common man; while Eadith’s apology was for herself and that phoenix inside her which in the nature of things would never experience re-birth.

  She put out a hand, and they were holding each other’s, in her case holding off, fingers buttery, smelling of chain-store Cheddar.

  He made coffee and they began listening—oh, no, she might have protested—to the Grosse Fuge on the gramophone. When they had descended—and it was no escalator, no apparition on the way up, only the dentist drilling at the ultimate in nerves—she got up out of the low-slung sofa, hoping he was not aware of what she heard as a strangulated fart.

  She said, ‘Rod, darling—I think I’ll go for a walk—by myself. It’s what I need.’

  She stood above him, like a soubrette swinging the organdy hat, about to launch into a number, whereas in her self of selves she might have been preparing to drown in Wagnerian waves of love and redemption.

  ‘You know what to avoid,’ he told her. ‘On the sea side, the Army. If they’re not on hand to prevent you clambering through the barbed wire, there are mines along the beach.’

  He had a coldsore breaking out. She could have fallen on it and sucked it dry. But contented herself with a few little half-coughs, half-sobs, which he probably interpreted as dispassion.

  All through the grey-green landscape, the colour of succulents, samphire, dirty sand, lichened stone, blown cloud, war was gathering, she could feel. She could smell blanco, Brasso, male armpits, sergeant-majors’ crotches, the phlegm in their screamed orders from away down beyond the uvula, as a prelude to the scream of shells.

  Her clothes were almost falling off her as she struggled through the soft sandy soil held together by stones and the sea plants which struggle to maintain themselves between salt air and sand. Her ankles were swelling, she thought. She must struggle back to the lover she had failed, and would continue failing, because of the importance his illusions held for both of them. As she went, her expensive version of the tart’s shoe was grinding the starved, dirty-pink pig’s face, leaving a trail of inevitable desolation.

  She avoided her host until having to face him at dinner. Looking out of her window, she was alerted by a smutch of bronze light glowering on this Anglo-Flemish landscape. Downstairs, Rod was working in the kitchen, wearing a waterproof apron edged with a fly-specked frill.

  In what was part-library part-dining room he had lit candles, illuminating the spines of collected works, encyclopaedias, reference books, none of them, from what she saw, complete, certainly none relevant to an insoluble personal relationship, and not much more helpful in a universal context now that the accumulation of human wisdom had been withdrawn from circulation, the voice of percipience silenced, during a re-shuffling of the cards.

  Rod came mumbling into the room. Rather than fiddle with black-out curtains, and to enjoy the lingering natural light, he pinched out the candle-flames with his fingers. The room was filled with dusk and a smell of dying candles.

  Regardless of his waterproof apron, Lord Gravenor sat graver than ever at the head of the table while they ate the meal he had cooked for her: none of the village body’s stew and rice pudding, but a soup so delicate she failed to identify its origins, chicken breasts in cream with slivered truffle, no sweet, but grapes which actually tasted of grape. Lord Gravenor’s wartime dinner would have encouraged cynicism if it hadn’t been for the air of last supper about it.

  When what must have been the last of her lipstick had come off on the napkin, she looked at him and said, ‘I’m touched that you should go to so much trouble for somebody so unresponsive,’ hastening to add something, anything, to disguise the wound she had inflicted on herself, ‘That’s the kind of remark I’d have made to my parents if I hadn’t been numbed by youth, cruelty—yes, a bit—and fear.’ But it didn’t help matters at all.

  Gravenor didn’t comment. He sat behind the shambles of their finished meal, hands clamped between his knees, a travesty in a moustache and a frilly waterproof apron. It was she who seemed invested with the authority and arrogance of manhood; till anger or regret forced her up. She gathered the dishes a
nd started slinging them about in the sink.

  Through the window a dollop of yellow moon had appeared in a slate-coloured sky above the black coils of protective wire. By moonlight the concrete defence measures were more than ever irregular teeth.

  She plunged, and again plunged, her talons into greasy water. Whatever she handed him he meekly dried, then began to organise the black-out curtains.

  The house became stifling.

  She escaped to her room, though it wasn’t by any means an escape, for she could not lock her door against this kindly man as she had locked it in his sister’s exclusive whore-house.

  He came to her of course. He lay beside her. The weight of his body tightening the bedclothes over hers, distressed her. She was moved to turn, but either way might have distressed Gravenor more. It seemed that his intention was not to possess her, but to give expression to what he saw as their relationship.

  ‘You’re what I always wanted, Eadith. Not that I can explain, exactly. Not that I’d want to. It might be embarrassing for both of us. Baby would be horrified.’

  Eadith found some comfort exploring a whorl in the nape of his neck, and buried under the sandy hair, the crater of a boil extinct since little-boyhood. ‘If you don’t want to, don’t tell me, then,’ she tried to reason with him.

  ‘Nanny might have understood. The jokes she had with Elsie were pretty borderline as I remember. Elsie did the dirty work of the nursery—brought the food from hatch to table—mopped up when we vomited those boiled brains. Nanny was in many ways an imitation of my mother, but touchable. She had a moustache. I used to put up my hand—and stroke this soft black—animal.’

  He was drowsing by now in Nanny’s bed. She held him to her.

  How the Bellasis children if left to themselves returned to the nursery, in refuge from the noble parents, sycophant guests, and the hierarchy of downstairs servants.

  She told him. ‘Your fingers still smell of candle-wick. That was a big show-off downstairs in the dining room. I’ve always been afraid of burning myself.’