The Twyborn Affair

by Patrick White

  While dressing I prepared myself for hearing that Joséphine will move to Toulon with that dreadful mother of the weeping ulcer. It is on the left leg, and Madame Réboa loves to roll the stocking farther down, to explain to her victim of the moment comme je souffre vous n’avez aucune idée et la plaie n’est plus belle avec le pus qui coule tout le temps. Madame Réboa’s ulcer is by no means pretty, but most of us have one, while concealing it. It is Fernande her eldest who is marrying (a carpenter) and will live at Arles. Céleste the youngest (ma plus belle fille) has a matelot in gaol at Marseille for some offence which is never mentioned.

  When I have finished dressing and go out to Joséphine, it is just as we have suspected. She is standing moist-eyed amongst the glistening dishes. The words she uses, like bonté, cæur, aimable, are not her own. One wonders who has lent them. Not Madame Réboa, who never for a moment verges on the abstract. I say that it is very sad, that I have valued her friendship as much as her services. (True, but the truth is not always enough to prevent one feeling a hypocrite.) Has she a friend, perhaps, who will come to us? In fact she has not, but will consider. (I like to think I am acquitting myself with aplomb, as my mother would. I do indeed detect echoes of her in my voice—a distasteful discovery if Mother weren’t so professional.)

  I tell Joséphine that, as her decision was unexpected, she will have to return for the wages we owe her, and a little present (money of course) which I want to give her. (My mother would have carried off this part of the performance with greater style.)

  But at last it is done, and I leave Joséphine arranging, thoughtfully and for the last time, the washed dishes, the scoured pans, in our cupboards, before taking off her apron, preparing to rejoin her mother who is, sans doute, behind it all. The good Joséphine of russet cheeks and shot-speckled neck will provide another snapshot to add to my collection of reprehensible innocents.

  Angelos looking every inch a spry Greek half his age suggested we walk to the village, to purge ourselves of the effects of Joséphine’s ‘surprise’. Angelos who can smile his way through any of the less subjective situations was accordingly purged. I was not. Aware of Madame Réboa’s plan, the whole of Les Sailles watched us with the complacent expressions of initiates: the postmistress, the baker’s wife, Monsieur Pelletier in his newspaper kiosk, even the fishermen mending their nets. Am I absurd? Perhaps I am. I must accept it when people stare at me. Angelos says, ‘They are planning what they will do with you, Eudoxia, after dark, when they can enjoy the freedom of their thoughts.’

  The freedom of one’s thoughts … My thoughts were never a joy—only my body made articulate by this persuasive Greek. Then I do appear consecutive, complete, and can enjoy my reflection in the glass, which he has created, what passes for the real one, with devices like the spangled fan and the pomegranate shawl.

  (Is it so very different from Joanie Golson? Isn’t that what one is aiming at? Ugh!)

  When we had bought some stamps, and Le Figaro, which A. feels duty-bound to read while never doing so, we return by the coast road. (This was where the fishermen aimed their smiles. Toe-nails in yellow horn … Scabby, swollen hands, but each man as finical in mending his net as a broderer poised above her frame of petit point. The dainty fishermen! My coarse mouth lingering over their ignorance of life.)

  We walk. It was A. who wanted the coast road. My instincts were against it, but I could not have explained if he had asked me to. Had I known what was in store for us en route and on arrival at the villa, I might at least have made a womanly scene. To introduce Angelos to more than the bare details of my past is something I have always failed to do, just as he feels he cannot convey the essence of his, or nothing beyond stationary figures with traditional features: the photograph of the Smyrna family, the icons of St Anna and the three Emperors of Byzantium-Nicaea. He tries endlessly, God knows, substituting himself for each Imperial Highness in turn, but another person’s past can become a joke, then a bore. If I’ve given up rubbing Angelos’s nose in mine, it’s not because I might appear a joke or a bore, but because I’m afraid of what I might find.

  My Angelos grasps me by an arm as we climb the road through the tunnel of cedars above Les Sailles. ‘Beau Séjour’ has been taken over by Americans, one hears. A.’s arm and wrist have grown frail, those of an aged man, when he isn’t. We climb towards the peak of our evening, which has not yet been hinted at, unless as a vague unease. Twigs snapping under foot, the smell of something—fungus? excrement? a dead animal of some kind? At ‘Beau Séjour’ tables at which the guests will sit when the places have been set, the candles lit and slewing in the wind. A livery-faced waiter in his yellowed woollen undervest, buttons sewn to a strip of tape, is laying desultory knives and forks.

  ‘Darling …?’ My lover turns towards me as though wanting something confirmed.

  By the light beneath the cedars he has the teeth of an old Alsatian dog—well, why not, if he’s devoted to me—nuzzling at my calf, nosing at the hem of my skirt.

  Normally Angelos’s teeth are a brilliant white, those of a demanding, sensual man.

  ‘Your serve, Rand …’ From behind the vines screening the pension tennis-court one can hear the felted balls flying back and forth, swish swish of starched skirts, the thump and shuffle of blancoed shoes, the straining, the panting of young men leaping at the net, ribs as taut as racquet strings. An unbearable high chirruping from les Américaines.

  ‘Ti echeis, agapi mou? Yiati trecheis? Why—run?’

  It isn’t possible to explain to those one loves the reason for arbitrary fears if shame is involved. Angelos should understand, but doesn’t. My flight from the screened tennis-court at ‘Beau Séjour’ on the coast road above Les Sailles can only seem ridiculous because it cannot be transposed. Beyond the screen nobody, as yet, has run from the court, while his partner stands, hemline stationary, racquet poised for the decisive shot, her enviably shallow blue eyes still only faintly suspicious of what may be a blow prepared for her. While he runs up into and through the house.

  ‘What on earth?’ She laughs as she slams the ball against the ivy screen frightening the sparrows nesting in it. ‘Impossible creature!’ Giggling out of her long, elegant, regurgitating throat; it’s de rigueur that an Australian girl of Marian’s upbringing and class should giggle even when the roof is carried away.

  The misdirected ball lands bouncing where nobody will ever discover it.

  Marian and the others, her born equals, walk off the court to pour themselves glasses of lemonade. Sinewy wrists, not a tremble amongst them, though Marian’s sapphire engagement ring may have caused embarrassment to all three. Down below, at Double Bay, the trams can be heard crossing from opposite directions. At dusk their extremities will flower with sprays of violet sparks.

  It was ridiculous of me to give way to panic simply at the sound of tennis balls this evening on the road from the village. I pulled free of his supporting arm. I was hurrying towards the safety one always hopes to find ahead. When I hear the cry, and looking over my shoulder realise it was I who had been supporting Angelos. The terrifying despair in his face and the old man’s hand outspread against his chest are too explicit. I run back. It is weeks since the last attack. ‘Are you all right?’ ‘I am all right—a twinge or two …’ We are so clumsy in our concern, our gestures, our questions and our explanations. Our bodies bump, skins flutter. We have seldom been closer than when seated together on a large porous stone at the roadside: grains of sand have become as enormous as pebbles, fern fronds were never more intricate, a single tender cyclamen is clinging by a crimson thread to the cleft in a rock. These, more than inadequate words, are our comfort, the embodiment and expression of our love.

  When he has rested we continue up the hill and the questions really begin.

  A.: You will never leave me, will you, E.?

  E.: Why should I leave?

  A.: You’re young.

  E.: I was born old.

  A.: Your body’s young [he laughs] and tha
t is what decides.

  E.: My body’s what you make of it.

  [Both laugh]

  We walk on. He is stroking my arm, the tips of his fingers lingering on a scab near the elbow. The evening is falling practically in veils around us.

  A.: Do you think we’ll find anything to eat?

  E.: There’s the cold veal.

  A.: It’s drying up.

  E.: Yes, it’s drying up. I’ll make you some æufs brouillés.

  A.: Dear Doxy, what would I do without you?

  E.: Engage a housekeeper.

  A.: So much more expensive.

  Angelos is mean; it is one of the scabs on our relationship, on which I linger in our worse moments. Not a sore spot, but an aggravation, like an old man’s fart in the next room.

  E.: A fart can’t blow us apart.

  A.: Qu’est-ce que tu veux dire, ma chère Eudoxie?

  E.: Neither of us could ever walk out on the other. We’ve explored each other’s scabs, experienced each other’s airs and graces. I like to think we understand as far as it is possible to understand.

  At this point we reached the gate, which will fall off its hinges if nothing is done about it. Our beloved landlady Madame Llewellyn-Boieldieu will do damn-all beyond let her crumbling villa, her ‘Crimson Cottage’, to the next unwary tenants. So we submit to the indignities this demi-Anglaise subjects us to.

  My masochistic lover rather enjoys the indignity of dilapidation. Of the screaming hinges at ‘Crimson Cottage’, he has said, ‘At least they will warn us when the Turk is at the gate.’ Not always they won’t—not this evening.

  Anyway, we had reached ‘home’—the blistered paintwork, scurfy walls unchanged, the network of threads and suspended hand-mirror to scare away birds from budding branches, all that has shot or died since we left … The scents your skirt drags from the borders of a garden: the dragnet skirt is one of the advantages a man can never enjoy.

  On the other hand there is not much that escapes those old dragnet eyes of his. Angelos is a specialist in dredging up the moral wreckage of others, while inclined to remain impervious to his own. His eyes will flicker past his worst faults.

  I had barely finished kissing those nut-shell eyelids, and he thrusting himself against me, his laughter radiating through my whole body, when we heard a motor assaulting the hill, emerging from the pines, shaving the garden wall. And there is Mrs E. Boyd Golson staring out; one would say ‘glaring’ if one didn’t know her to be myopic and afraid of limiting her social successes by taking to spectacles.

  At least her driver didn’t toot, but trust the Golsons to have a klaxon disguised as a brass serpent slithering down to rest on a mudguard.

  Angelos couldn’t know what had descended on us, except that it was something distasteful, something not quite, but almost American.

  I lead him away, along the path, into our refuge, where we are left to face the night.

  Angelos says, ‘I would have liked to make music with you, E., if all inclination has not left me.’ His tenses go to pot in a crisis. I tell him I have no inclination either. I bring him the œufs brouillés, but he has no appetite. I make myself eat his helping as well as mine. As I gobble the eggs I can feel a trickle down my chin. I must look as thoroughly vulgar as the situation and Joanie Golson call for. Poor cow! She can’t help it any more than I can.

  I know that before long the Emperor of All Byzantium (Nicaea thrown in for good measure—Mistra too) will begin to accuse the Colonies. Rain is battering the shutters. Madame Réboa will no doubt have started showing her ulcer to a fresh victim. For all his Byzantine pretensions A. might have sprung on Joséphine this evening if she hadn’t shed the apron along with the servitude she inherited in our house. Instead he sits rocking in the rented demi-fauteuil style provençal.

  A. says, ‘I will never hold anything against you. Nor anybody. Not even that gangster Palaiologos. Where is Anna my wife?’

  The rain is sawing at the shutters. He must know how I hate the name of Anna.

  ‘I expect Anna has taken her martyrdom to Heaven by special ladder.’

  I don’t think he heard.

  ‘A good woman, but without the flair of the Empress Eudoxia.’ He arranges his tongue against his palate before going off into his usual tumbled Imperial catalogue. ‘She used to wait on the steps … along with the Panhypersevastos … the Grand Stratopedarchs … the Primikerios the Constable the Logothete …’

  During the recitation he slips lower on his throne. I pour my Emperor another brandy.

  He asks, ‘Did Anna die at Blachcrnae? Or was it after we moved to Nicaea?’

  Or Smyrna? Or Alexandria? Or even Athens? The Stations of the Greek Cross.

  I help him upstairs, by now so sloshed he is only for undressing. Old cold feet, like skate on the fishmonger’s slab, the feet of my 68-year-old child, the snoring funnel of the aged mouth …

  The shutter tears free of the latch, and the room is incorporated into the churning night, the garden threatened with uprooting, its only stable feature the immense olive, in the branches of which the moon appears caught for a second or two, and at intervals the scud of cloud.

  How enviable this olive tree encased in its cork armour, hardly a tremor in its gnarled arms, its downthrust roots firmly holding. To have such stability—or is oneself the strongest stanchion one can hope for? To realise this is perhaps to achieve stability.

  Writing about oneself at night is release of a kind, but no more than of a kind—like masturbation.

  8 feb.

  Slept v. little as result of the storm and the Visitation. If I had known there was to be a Second Coming I might have abandoned my old child, made for the railway station at St Mayeul, and spent the rest of the night waiting for the first train—whether to Genoa, Nice, Marseille or Perpignan would not have worried the fugitive.

  But this morning was again one of those with which we are blessed in these parts and which exorcise the recurring nightmares.

  That very real one: the shutter has flown open, the whole cliffside a churning mass of pittosporum and lantana scrub pressing in upon, threatening all man-made shoddiness. The giant emu’s head and neck tormented by the wind. As its plumage is ruffled and tossed, its beak descends repeatedly, almost past the useless shutter, almost into the room where I am lying in my narrow bed, fright raised in goose-pimples, when not dissolving into urine.

  Last night, to make this dream more disturbing, my father came in: this tall man with droopy moustache and swollen knuckles—not forgetting the eyes. My father’s eyes are the most expressive part of him: a liquid, apologetic, near-black, terrifying when faced with any kind of dishonesty, terrified in turn by the grief of others, poverty, children. I never dared call my father ‘Dad’—Mother might become, grudgingly, ‘Mum’, a sulky ‘you’ more often than not—but my father could never have been less than ‘Father’.

  I speak of him as though he were dead, when last night he was standing beside me, after the shutter had burst open and the beak of the giant emu was threatening to descend into the room, to tear me open as I cowered on my narrow, sodden mattress (hair, they had decided, on account of the asthma).

  Mastering fear of his own child, my father was standing over me, offering a cold, knobbly hand. Which I took in desperation and love. He was trembling. I could smell his fear. It was that of a man, intensified, and overlaid by those other smells of cigar smoke and port-wine. I guessed that my father must be the only person in the house, otherwise he would not have come in, he would have left me to Nanny, or Mummy, even to Emma or Dora. But here he stood in person by the bed, his waistcoat with one of the points crumpled, the watch-chain with its gold symbols, and the miniature greenstone tiki which somebody had brought back from a holiday at Rotorua, and which I would have loved to fondle had I dared.

  And now his hand. I did not dare.

  ‘Is anything wrong?’ he asked, ‘darling?’

  He had never ventured on a ‘darling’ before, and this confirme
d my belief that Father was the only person in the house.

  ‘Is there?’

  ‘No.’

  When everything was. I was swimming in it.

  Then he said, ‘Aren’t we a bit smelly? Shall I change you?’

  ‘No.’

  I was brimming with love for this man I was privileged to call ‘Father’, while going through life avoiding calling him anything unless it was dragged out of me.

  So I repeated, ‘No’.

  I could see how relieved he was—this tall, stately, scruffy man. Both my parents were given to food-spots, too argumentative, always in too great a hurry to pay much attention to what they were eating. My mother could look the slut of sluts, and did, except when she set out to kill. But the food-spots seemed to dignify my father, like the asterisks in books too technical to read. My father was essentially technical: a closed book if it hadn’t been for his troubled eyes.

  Not like those of my more than troubled, my dotty 68-year-old child. Again eyes which are as near as anything black, but ready to splinter into hilarity and rages. Vatatzes is protected by malice, madness, the Byzantine armour inherited from his ancestors, and the infallible weapon with which he overcomes his chief adversary’s last resistance.

  I have often wondered what sexual solace my parents were able to offer each other. This matter of tense when speaking of parents: as far as I know mine aren’t dead, yet almost always I speak of them as though they were. They seemed indestructible; it was their child who died, one of the premature suicides.

  When I said he need not change me, Father re-latched the shutter, and managed a smile. The night-light made the smile dip and shudder on his long face. Then, incredibly, he bent and, whether by accident, kissed me on the mouth. It seemed to me I was drawn up into the drooping moustache, as though inside some great brooding loving spider without being the spider’s prey; if anything, I was the spinner of threads trying to entangle him more irrevocably than his tentative sortie into loving could ever bind me.