The Twyborn Affair

by Patrick White

  It was reckless and at the same time controlled (by the man, Mrs Golson might not have cared to admit) it was joyous, with undertones of melancholy, it was a delirious collusion between two who were, the more she looked, united in their incongruity: the lithe young woman and the stiff, elderly man—the lovers; there was by now no doubt in Mrs Golson’s mind.

  As she stood by the wall watching the scene through the open window, the tears were streaming down her cheeks, for joy, from the music she was hearing, and out of frustration from the life she had led and, it seemed, would always lead, except for the brief unsatisfactory sorties she made into that other life with Eadie Twyborn; probably never again, since Eadie had been aged by her tragedy.

  Then, suddenly, the music was brought to its triumphant close in an upward flurry of unashamedly brazen notes. As they flung them from their fingers the two players teetered on their shared stool, shoulders hunched, torsos inclined backward from the hips, before they turned, facing, laughing at each other, the ivory-skinned, beaky, elderly man, and the lovely lean tanned features of the considerably younger woman.

  Joan Golson was inching along to identify herself more closely with every detail of the scene, when the couple embraced. Or at least, the young woman leaned towards the cadaverous man, seeming to rise above him, plunging her mouth into his, dashing her lips back and forth, while his skeletal, veined hands took possession of the sinuous arms, which the grey trailers of sleeve surrendered, the skin deepened by restrained lighting almost to the tone of terracotta. So they sat and clung in what was prevented from becoming perfect union.

  The young woman appeared to remember, or realise, or know by instinct. She rejected her elderly lover, left the stool, and practically striding, one would have said, reached the window, where she stood looking out, it might have been in anger, though the watcher doubted she was visible through the dusk. Yet the young woman leaned out, gathered in the shutters, and slammed them shut. Only a crack of light was left to commemorate all that had been desirable.

  By the time Mrs Golson reached her car darkness almost prevailed beneath the pines. Teakle must have long since finished changing the wheel. He was sitting in the driver’s seat. Unusual for him, he was sulking, or so it appeared. He allowed her to climb up unassisted.

  Now it was her turn to sulk. ‘I walked farther than I expected. Mr Golson will be wondering.’ Whether she had put things right or not she would leave it at that; while Teakle silently changed gears and remained as anonymous as possible.

  Unlike yesterday, Curly Golson had shaken off his luncheon, and was standing looking anxious beneath the stucco archway which framed the entrance to the hotel.

  ‘Anything happen, sweetheart?’ he asked somewhat angrily.

  His wife sounded equally peeved. ‘We had a—puncture.’

  ‘What’s the cove been up to? Doesn’t take all that time to change a wheel.’

  ‘It was something technical—some difficulty over tools.’

  Foolish of her not to have been less precise, but she could not care as she led the way to the little gilt cage in which the hunchback liftman hoisted them by a greasy rope to the second floor.

  When she had got herself out of her frock, Curly became affectionate: he would have liked to stroke, to kiss her shoulders, till she took refuge in a négligée.

  ‘Aren’t we changing for dinner?’ he asked with a sudden show of gloom.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I have a headache. I’ll get them to bring me something on a tray. Perhaps write a letter or two. Ought to write to Eadie Twyborn.’ For the second time this evening Mrs Golson felt she had been unnecessarily precise.

  Curly’s eyes bulged when he was thwarted. ‘Long time since you mentioned Eadie.’

  ‘Yes. I’ve been neglecting her. For that matter, she’s neglected me. Eadie’s aged since their tragedy.’

  Curly Golson’s eyes resumed their milder china glaze as opposed to their accusing blaze of blue. He had resigned himself.

  ‘I’ll go down alone then,’ he said.

  It would be no hardship for him, she knew, and presently he did, to eat his way from caviare to peaches in champagne.

  When she had finished her œufs sur le plat, she took out her writing-case and rummaged for one of the larger sheets of her own monogrammed letter-paper, then wondered whether she could fill it. She felt too languid, even in a strange sense, fulfilled. She sat lumped in what she believed was called a bergère, in the same style as the rest of their Louis Whichever suite (the Golsons never did things by halves) at the Grand Hôtel Splendide des Ligures. However sincere her intention of writing, for the moment she preferred thinking about her dearest friend Eadie Twyborn: Eadie down on her knees pulling the tops off onion-grass in her Edgecliff garden, Eadie in that grubby old coat and skirt which was lasting for ever, soil clinging to her fingers, her rings, her father’s signet, while the little red Australian terriers sat or lay around, blinking, sniffing, licking their privates, barking when they had cause, or more often when they hadn’t. In his study Edward, home from circuit, sat looking through a fresh batch of legal papers. Edward smelled of stale cigar. Eadie, too, smelled of cigar, the cheroots she smoked with Edward up in the tower-room, alone. Nobody and everybody knew about Eadie Twyborn’s cigars. She and the Judge had what was considered the perfect marriage, that is, until their disaster, which in no way damaged their relationship, only them.

  Eadie was drunk when she said, ‘You, Joan, are the one I depend on—for some reason. I can scratch my navel and you won’t bawl me out. I can blub if I feel like it, and you’ll—oh, I don’t know.’ She did, though; you and Eadie both did.

  ‘Of course my stupid darling judge comes first.’ Eadie poured some more into her own brandy balloon; she was quite maudlin—disgusting really. ‘It’s brought Edward and me closer.’

  Joan re-arranged her letter-paper. She wrote in her large, bulbous hand—tonight it looked enormous:

  Dearest Eadie,

  There she stopped as though daunted by that exceptionally stylish comma; and might get no farther.

  She was practically snoozing: it was the bland, buttery eggs and the half-bottle of champagne Curly had insisted on ordering; it was Curly’s cure for everything. She loved him, she supposed, his generosity, even his baldness: she would lie holding his head against her breast as though brooding on a giant egg.

  But as she sat snoozing, or allowing her mind to flicker amongst the tufts and wands of plants, the scents of evening, the silken swaths of colour with which the bay was strewn, the owners came out from the house, in which lights were burning, making its walls, which should have looked less substantial in their dissolution by dusk, if anything more solid, like a hollowed pumpkin with a candle in it. She heaved sniggering in the Louis Whichever bergère, but only for a moment; her actual surroundings were too ephemeral, banal, too downright vulgar. Back in the garden the others had reached her side and were supporting her, the cold bloodless fingers of the more controlled elderly pianist, and the terracotta, votive hands of his mistress-wife. They were leading her along the paths of the garden, then through the rooms of their enchanted house, past the upright, ‘fun’ piano (no, they couldn’t be the owners; they were the tenants of the pseudo-villa) the lamp with its porcelain shade lighting them in their solemn progress.

  Somewhere in a narrow hall, in the region of a console, above it a mirror, they parted from the man in black. He would stay behind, no doubt reading; yes, he looked a bookworm. She might have turned to thank him had she known in which language to communicate with her friends. So far, she realised, language had not mattered: they relied on touch, glances, and the smiles which united the three of them, as the two on the music-stool had been united earlier that evening by music and a sensual embrace. (Though she had not taken part in it, Joan Golson could feel the warm saliva in her mouth.)

  And now, though she should have thanked him for his kindness, she did not turn towards this man standing hesitating in the hall, but allowed the
young woman to lead her on, bumping their way, burrowing down passages the villa or cottage had failed to suggest to a common voyeuse. Until settling into a room of apparent importance and their evident goal, the woman or girl was helping her out of clothes which clung like refractory cobwebs, and into the bed which she had warmed with a copper warmer conveniently standing amongst a hearthful of glowing pine-knots.

  Joan was acutely conscious of the embossed pattern of fruit and flowers on the copper warmer which was first slid between the sheets waiting to receive her. Language was what she could not sort out: perhaps it was the language of silence as the young woman turned her noble head towards her, the invited guest holding in her whiter, plumper fingers a stronger terracotta hand, but from which, in spite of its warmth, she experienced no response, little enough illumination from the white smile in a terracotta face.

  Mrs Golson roused herself from a smell of singed or sun-bleached sheets.

  On the sheet which she had before her on the table she saw that she had written: Dearest Eadie—comma.

  She giggled slightly, remembering how on one occasion Eadie had given herself a moustache, dashed off with burnt cork, and they had dressed up—or Eadie had—and ordered drinks in a hotel winter garden, and joined in with the guests at a formal dinner dance, Eadie in the Judge’s check trousers, Joan in her pale blue charmeuse, everybody staring at them.

  Oh dear, write to poor old Eadie Twyborn, tell her about the couple at the villa—if that would ever be possible …

  7 feb. 1914

  A day which should have been idyllic grew increasingly black, ending in storms, after a real Visitation. Could not believe as this sporty motor surged up our hill that it was Eadie’s pal J.G. sitting in the back seat. But crikey, it was! Angelos tells me not to worry. I don’t, of course. But why should I be persecuted? Eadie has sent her. A. says no, Eadie couldn’t have, it’s nothing but coincidence. Angelos is always right. Or not always. Only when he isn’t wrong.

  But just when I’d begun to order my life, perhaps even make it into something believable, this emissary comes to smash it to pieces. Nothing so brutal as a soft, silly woman.

  Everything, I now see, has been leading up to this act of aggression. Gentle perfection is never allowed to last for long. The more laboriously it has been built up, the more painfully it is brought down.

  Text for every day to come: I must not dwell on Joan Golson’s arrival on the scene.

  Had hardly blundered back to consciousness this morning when A. reminded me that it is my birthday. I hadn’t forgotten, but it’s pleasant to be reminded. He brought out presents: the fan (spangled gauze—slats in mother o’ pearl) and a shawl embroidered with pomegranates. Both extremely pretty. But what I loved best was his less material present, which we shared as never before. Why am I besotted on this elderly, dotty, in many ways tiresome Greek? I can only think it’s because we have been made for each other, that our minds as well as our bodies fit, every bump to every cranny, and quirk to quirk. If I hate him at times it’s because I hate myself. If I love him more deeply than I love E. it’s because I know this other creature too well, and cannot rely entirely on him or her.

  It was one of the hyacinth mornings, a sea breeze blowing not only its own salt but all the early perfumes of the garden in at the window. When Angelos had left me and started sponging himself I sat by the window in my pomegranate shawl fanning myself with the spangled fan. Delicious fluctuations on bare skin. Looked at myself in the glass and decided I would pass. As I do! Or at any rate, on the days when I don’t hate—when I can forgive myself for being me. So that I’m not purely the narcissist I’m sometimes accused of being—by Angelos on his worst days—and as I am, undoubtedly, on mine.

  He comes back into the room rejuvenated by friction, bald head shining, the still black fringes of hair standing out like the spines of a sea-urchin as he rubs himself with his towel. For a man in his sixties his legs are remarkable: muscular, firmly planted on the ground, the old man’s usual ganglion of veins scarcely visible in A.’s case.

  He said, ‘I was wrong to give you these things. You have dressed yourself up like a whore, sitting at the open window by morning light.’ We both laughed. His teeth are still brilliant. Mine will crumble before I’m even half his age. I shall hope to crumble, not teeth alone, but entirely. God spare me a gummy old age!

  Angelos holding his head on one side as he continues drying the back of his neck, eyeing me with bright, predatory eye, light playing on the polished curve of the ivory beak, a smile coming and going in response to the voluptuous pleasure of friction … We might have begun again, devastating, perhaps even destroying each other in the course of one, silken morning if we hadn’t heard Joséphine arriving.

  When I am clothed and more or less in my right mind I go out to say the right thing. She has brought me the prettiest bunch of flowers—n’y a que celles qu’on trouve aux champs. There are wild candytuft, marigold, anemones, a kind of wilting celandine—all tightly bound together by stalks of grass, and warm from the hand of Joséphine: this solid, russet girl, glowing from her walk up the hill from the village on one of the more benign mornings of early spring on this favoured coast. Joséphine looks good, smells good (that smell of innocent soap, unconscious virtue, and honest exertion) enfin Joséphine is unmistakably GOOD. How unforced and enviable! This morning she wishes me health and many years of life. Her smiles are genuinely for my future. Yet Joséphine has been sad lately: at times all sighs and sniffs—her sister who is marrying away—the widowed mother who may move back to her native Toulon. Is Joséphine about to leave us? All the symptoms would suggest that. But not today. Joséphine won’t dare give notice on a birthday.

  Angelos said she will. He says a Greek lives by his heart, a Frenchman—and how much more a Frenchwoman—according to reason. ‘Joséphine has given you this charming bouquet to soften the blow it is reasonable for her to deal us. You do not want to believe this because Anglo-Saxons are by nature—most of you—Christian Science. You cultivate your Science to its utmost—all of you, all—the moment a slave threatens to defect.’

  I wouldn’t admit that he’s right, but he is. Joséphine will defect this evening.

  The ruddy skin of this clumsy but touching girl is peppered with little moles which suggest that somebody once let off a shotgun at her. She even smells of gunpowder after the walk up from the village.

  When she first came to us I told A., and because he didn’t think of it himself he said, nonsense, she only needed a bath. I told him, ‘If I found myself alone in the house with Joséphine I might feel inclined to rape her.’ He said I was trying to make myself sound experienced, but that he was pretty sure I had never slept with a woman. ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘I know you haven’t, my dear Eudoxia, because if you had you wouldn’t be blushing now—like an embarrassed schoolboy who hasn’t been near the brothel he claims to have visited.’

  I expect I had asked for it. I was relieved when he left me alone.

  Angelos considers that men are to women as apples to figs, the clean and the messy among fruits. I am not prepared to argue. He disgusts me at times—this sensual Greek whose every hair rouses me.

  He says that he never considered himself a sensualist, just a normal man, till I appeared. Whether to take this as a compliment I can’t decide. After Anna died he had avoided intimacy with other human beings. His Smyrna family had a puritanical streak: his aunts, some of his uncles, not his mother, most of all his wife Anna, who seems to have set herself up as a professional saint. It was only after a branch of the family business took him to Alexandria that the rot set in, preparing him for his relationship with me after the fatal encounter at Marseille!

  I am told this on his worse days. I become the flower of his decadence, the seeds of which were already sown in Nile silt. It is usually a day of rain, of retribution, of family history, when he airs his theories. (As for Greek family history, outsiders cannot hope to penetrate what they are expected to accept.) I shouldn’
t complain. I wouldn’t care to have Angelos burrow too deeply into my past, not that there is much fear of his unearthing shame, only pain.

  Anna according to the photograph: plushy figure on a steel framework, pallid skin rather doughy in texture, vague hair, the Greek eyes—a smouldering of masochistic coals. I bet Anna staged a Greek tragedy or two. And he loved her for it. That is what they understand best: masochism on a stony mountain, a white chapel perched on its summit to commemorate a hypothetical saint. So he canonised his Anna.

  I expect we are all jealous of the women in their past, but how much less exciting if the women had not kept the bed warm.

  I’m not ungrateful, only resentful of certain aspects of life which must remain withheld from me, though I try to persuade myself I can experience all by efforts of will or imagination. Here I am, 25 today, but fruitless as the moment I was born. How green and vulnerable nobody can suspect, not even my darling Angelos. If I hadn’t found Angelos Vatatzes I would have sunk—or might have swum?

  I blame Joan Golson for the morbid rubbish I’m writing tonight. I’d be tempted to conjure up my own collection of family snapshots, submit to that sly look which hindsight reveals on innocent faces, like the unconscious cynicism surfacing from childish letters lovingly bundled by a mother with expectations of posterity. I might have enjoyed a painful wallow (talk about masochistic Greeks!) if I hadn’t destroyed most of what would incriminate …

  After lunch we settled down to a siesta, longer than usual and more languid from the pleasures of early morning.

  I awoke to hear dishes being slung about in the kitchen—a sound which creates a void in a house at the best of times. Angelos continued lying on his back. Made sure he was still breathing. The eyelids of old, sleeping men can be terrifying.