The Twyborn Affair

by Patrick White

  What if it were? Mrs Golson was thriving on it; she would not apologise any more.

  ‘Shall we take this table?’ she suggested. ‘Or shall we be deafened?’ Almost another apology; she laughed to make it less so.

  ‘More likely seduced by those sticky strings,’ Madame Vatatzes remarked.

  Memories of their first conversation persuaded Mrs Golson she ought not to feel surprised. So she swam across the short space separating them from the desired table, moistening her lips, lowering her eyelids ever so slightly, conscious of the sounds her movements made, those of silk and feathers, and in regrettable undertone, the faint chuff chuff of caoutchouc.

  Madame Vatatzes was following with a charming negligence reflected in the amethyst and amber. Today she was wearing grey, which made her look, Mrs Golson decided, almost a quaker—a tall one. She was so glad Curly wasn’t with them. Nor was he likely to nose into the rotunda; he had a passionate hatred of music, especially the violin.

  For a moment as they seated themselves Mrs Golson wondered what on earth they would say to each other, but now there was the tea to order—and oh, yes, gâteaux; she would insist that Madame Vatatzes eat several, which would give herself the opportunity of eating one, or perhaps two; and there were other eyes to outstare, of those who resented intruders, who despised newcomers, for Mrs Golson and her caller could not but fit, for the present anyway, into this unfortunate category.

  ‘Thé pour deux personnes,’ she offered in her most sculptured French to a waiter who looked quite contemptuous considering how the Golsons overtipped him for his contempt. ‘Et des gâteaux—beaucoup de beaux gâteaux—pour mon jeune ami.’

  Madame Vatatzes was looking so excessively grave that Mrs Golson, in her sincere delight and manhandling of gender, was reduced to appearing the younger of the two. She was conscious of it herself, not only from her friend’s face, but from the reflective panels of amethyst and amber. Mrs Golson hoped that Madame Vatatzes did not regret paying her call.

  She would have loved to say something reassuring, as from an older to a younger woman. She would have loved to gaze at Madame Vatatzes’ disturbing eyes, which she remembered from the previous occasion. But this was a luxury Mrs Golson promised herself for later, after the weak straw-flavoured tea, and the slight but not unpleasant bilious sensation which came to her from indulging in Mont Blanc. By then, each of them, she hoped, would be lulled into the requisite state of intimacy.

  In waiting, Mrs Golson tapped with her nails on the bland surface of the little table. The nails had been very conscientiously done by a young Scottish widow, a protégée of Miss Clitheroe’s. This afternoon, Mrs Golson felt, her half-moons were particularly fine. (The nails themselves were looking paler than they should have been; should she, perhaps, consult a doctor?)

  Far more ominous those full moons the eyes of chattering female macaws and parakeets, their stare levelled at interlopers from beneath wrinkled mauve-to-azure lids. In contrast to the females their no less watchful, for the greater part elderly escorts, lids blackened by digestive ailments and insomnia; in more than one instance a single smoky pearl pinned into what must be a grizzled chest. Among the throng of French, a Russian bearing up under a mound of strawberry hair, who continued munching her language along with a baba au rhum, on one eyelid a pink wart flickering behind the net veil she had hoisted to the level of glaring nostrils.

  There were the hats.

  There were the jewelled hatpins.

  There were the jewels.

  And cigarette smoke, a blue-grey, interweaving yarn; to Mrs Golson, the perfume was intoxicating.

  But the eyes: if only they had been less daunting; and the ferocious mouths. All the veils had been raised to allow the parrot-ladies to fall upon le goûter, the black, the white, the beige gloves unbuttoned, folded back like superfluous skins for the ivory-skeletal or white-upholstered claws to fork unencumbered at confectioner’s custard, whipped cream, chocolate pyramids, and chestnut worm-casts.

  Each wearing, in addition to the routine rosette, the aura of an ex-president,-prefect, or minor Bonapartist nobleman, the males were more austere. Their movements groaned as they plied their cigarettes, the more indulgent among them sipping a porto. There were signs of congestion, a whiff of saltpetre, and from one quarter—was it the creaking of a truss?

  Mrs Golson had begun to regret her daring; herself so middle-aged Australian, Madame Vatatzes so young, so healthy, so untarnished.

  ‘Oh dear, I shouldn’t have brought you here!’

  ‘Why ever not?’ The younger woman spoke with a huskiness which might have masked the sulks.

  ‘Into this mausoleum!’ Unfortunate choice of a word, Mrs Golson sensed at once: that elderly husband, who might be asthmatic, and even wear a truss.

  ‘It’s what I’m used to,’ said Madame Vatatzes.

  She had chosen a Mont Blanc, they both had, and were forking them up in what Mrs Golson hoped would become an extended orgy. (She had grown as reckless as Curly on the drive back to Les Sailles.)

  When the Russian lady, her eyelid with its pink wart flickering behind the net pelmet, distinctly lowed, if she did not practically bellow through her museau de bœuf, the two friends got the giggles. Transformed into two schoolgirls in a tea-room, they sank back to enjoy the waves of their heaving mirth. Joanie Golson saw that her friend had broken out in delicious speckles of perspiration just where a moustache would have been. Gulping. Biting on the already deformed hotel fork as she dealt with the cream and the chestnut worm-casts. Which according to the tea-room code should have been a lettuce and ham sandwich, its thin green strips smelling of vinegar and knife, with even thinner slivers of ham, the whole lolling loosely round expiring lips before the mouth sucked it in.

  The girls humped their backs and giggled.

  Finally Madame Vatatzes sat up. ‘Shouldn’t we control ourselves?’ she suggested.

  But they were off again.

  It was Mrs Golson who took control. ‘When we were in Paris,’ she told, ‘and I went to the Louvre, of course I had to find the Mona Lisa. Nobody could help. Nobody. Curly—my husband—was furious—he’d only come because—well, he’s my husband. Then I discovered that what we were looking for is known as La Gioconde!’

  Ultimately rescued at the Louvre, here Mrs Golson remained lost, long-winded, irrelevant: looking at Madame Vatatzes she realised that she and her close, giggly, schoolgirl friend with the lettuce ribbons hanging out of their mouths were of different worlds.

  It is always like this, Joan Golson supposed.

  On the dais across the room, the violinist was snatching, half brave, half desperate, at a tangle of hairs hanging from his bow.

  The Russian began looking down her front to see why she should have become a focus of attention.

  Overhead, the immense nacreous shade shed its light more dreamily, that of convolvulus and sea-pinks. It seemed to revolve, though it must have been the effect of the music, for the shade was in fact stationary.

  Madame Vatatzes finished her Mont Blanc. She wiped her mouth in determined fashion with the paper napkin, and rummaged in her bag, not much more than a shabby old black velvet reticule such as she might have picked up secondhand, capacious, and probably a comfort to its owner. Mrs Golson herself, fearful of disease and insects, hated anything secondhand.

  ‘What a charming bag! So practical …’ she murmured.

  ‘Tat,’ Madame Vatatzes replied, and even went so far as to confess, ‘I got it secondhand at Marseille.’

  Mrs Golson loved her; she would have put up with disease and insects.

  Madame Vatatzes had found what she was looking for, which turned out to be a little box lacquered in crimson, black, and gold.

  ‘Do you smoke?’ she asked her hostess.

  ‘Very rarely. And only in private. I’ll sometimes smoke a cigarette to keep my husband company—but seldom finish it.’

  Madame Vatatzes offered her box, and Mrs Golson accepted, giggling.

&
nbsp; Madame Vatatzes lit their cigarettes after breaking a match or two.

  ‘We smoke constantly,’ she said, and her voice had hunger in it. ‘Smoking is Angelos’s worst vice—and one of mine.’

  The cigarettes, Mrs Golson realised at once, were of the cheapest French variety. It made her feel more daring, more foreign. The Golsons liked to feel foreign abroad, while tending to deplore foreignness at home, unless, in Curly’s case, it promoted business, or in Joan’s, if it impressed those who thought themselves socially superior. But in the rotunda at the Grand Hôtel Splendide des Ligures she was more than anything the wicked schoolgirl. As she drew on her cheap cigarette, some of the nostrils closer to them became aware of an infringement on their code of behaviour.

  Mrs Golson crossed her ankles, and said in rather a fruity voice, ‘I’d be intrigued to hear, Madame Vatatz—es, what you know of Australia. Were you ever there? Or is it only from acquaintanceship with other Australians?’

  Madame Vatatzes sank her chin. ‘Oh, I was there! But briefly. Long ago.’ Her sigh was outlined in blue smoke.

  Joan Golson caught something of the blur of blue leaves, blue bay, a motor-boat panting in the distance, reflexions distorted by the motions of disturbed water.

  Mrs Golson said, ‘I’m so grateful, my dear, that you should have offered me your friendship.’ But immediately started wondering whether it had indeed been offered.

  For Madame Vatatzes seemed to have forgotten her hostess. Her chin still sunken and moody, she sat smoking with a defiance which suggested rage rather than pleasure.

  Disgusted by the filthy cigarette, and made bilious by the Mont Blanc as she had feared she might be, Mrs Golson was billowing helplessly, and in her billows envisaged herself being drawn out of her rubber corset. Would Madame Vatatzes hear the sound of suction? She so slim and uncorseted, so long and lean of thigh when divested of her quaker grey, her nipples a tender beige on the slight cushions of her breasts.

  Both crushing and crushed, Mrs Golson roused herself, but spoke from behind lowered eyelids. ‘Australia is not for everyone,’ she admitted. ‘For some it is their fate, however.’

  Madame Vatatzes grunted, or so it sounded. ‘I’ve not made up my mind about fate.’

  Oh dear, is it ever possible to make it up for anybody else when one almost never succeeds in deciding for oneself? Mrs Golson resolved to try.

  It was her turn to rummage in her bag (Curly’s anniversary present) to take out the shagreen engagement book, extract the slim gilt pencil, scribble on a page, and call the waiter.

  Madame Vatatzes seemed hardly aware until the music broke in on her; then she roused herself. ‘This awful thing! Why did you do it?’

  ‘I did it because the day you hurt your ankle it was what they were playing, when I led you in from the street.’

  ‘But so horribly sticky!’ Madame Vatatzes was visibly suffering.

  While Joanie Golson had crimped her face, clenched her hand, not so much the wicked schoolgirl as the naughty child clutching her forbidden jujube.

  ‘Won’t you let me enjoy it?’ she implored this stern older girl.

  ‘I can’t think why anyone should want to.’

  Immediately after, Madame Vatatzes gathered up her smoking tackle and shoved it in the velvet reticule.

  ‘Why I came here this afternoon,’ her head was still bent above her operations, ‘was because Angelos suggested it. He would like to meet you—Mr Golson too, of course. Thursday—would it be possible? To a glass of something—say five-thirty. At “Crimson Cottage”.’ She pronounced it as Miss Clitheroe had, and as Madame Llewellyn-Boieldieu would have.

  Poor Joanie was thoroughly flabbergasted: the letter, the formal call, the invitation, all as she had dreamed, and rejected as too symmetrical to expect. Today she suspected that fate is symmetrical.

  ‘Oh,’ she gasped, ‘I’ll have to ask Mr Golson—my husband—Curly … Did you say Thursday? I’m almost sure we have nothing on Thursday.’ Knowing there wasn’t, she did not even bother to look in her book; in any case her hands would have been too helpless.

  ‘I’ve never gathered,’ she gasped, no, her corset wheezed, ‘your husband’s profession—that is,’ she said, ‘if he had one before he retired.’

  ‘Spices,’ Madame Vatatzes seemed to gnash her strong white teeth; it could have been provoked by the Meditation from Thais. ‘He exported spices, from Smyrna, from Alexandria. Not all that successfully,’ she added. ‘As heir to the Imperial throne he considered himself above commerce. A Byzantine by birth, he’s a Byzantinologist by vocation, and an authority on Orthodox theology, which he admits he doesn’t yet understand.’ She rose, tall and cool, reeking of her cheap French cigarette. ‘His true hobby, I sometimes think, is entomology.’

  Still cowering on her gilt chair, Mrs Golson quailed before these biographical details she had been rash enough to encourage. Until her friend’s smile and extended hand dissolved the terror in her bones, and she sprang up, or that is how it might have been, had her forms been less globular. Now she wobbled on reaching the erect position, but did not fall, thanks to Madame Vatatzes’ firm hand, and even more, the protracted smile.

  What could one give in return? In her room Mrs Golson had an unopened box of Turkish delight. Too far up, and besides, she was always fobbing people off with presents instead of confronting them.

  In the glass panels she saw her own face perspiring mercilessly through its powder and the ritual dash of rouge, while Madame Vatatzes walked, cool, erect, timeless, through the barrage of music, the cigarette smoke, and interrogation by veiled eyes.

  When they had reached the dusty hall, calm except for the action of a furtive heart, Mrs Golson asked, ‘That evening when I passed by your villa and heard you playing—the two of you—what was it, I wonder?’ Mrs Golson did not even pause to wonder at her own courage; on Madame Vatatzes’ arm, her question seemed natural, logical, as gilt-edged as a love she had always hoped for.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know—it could have been—yes, I think it probably was—we had all three, after coalescing, begun to emerge—to surge. Yes, on that evening I think it was probably Chabrier.’

  Mrs Golson, who had never heard of the fellow, was relieved her friend had not seemed to find her presumptuous. She was so grateful for everything that she lunged forward to set the revolving door in motion for the departing guest.

  Ejected by it after a brief but delirious twirl, Mrs Golson leaned forward on her cramped toes, peering at a halcyon sky as though expecting at least a cyclone. ‘My dear, I quite forgot,’ she remembered, ‘couldn’t I have our man run you home?’

  Madame Vatatzes lashed out with her head, perhaps not yet recovered from the revolving door and already part of Mrs Golson’s non-existent cyclone. ‘I shall walk,’ she said, ‘so good for one—and be back in no time.’

  What would have become of him all these weeks without the personal objects surrounding him, the appurtenances of a stable life? Whether in London, Inverness (most of all perhaps Inverness; you can feel most foreign where you think you understand the language and don’t) or Paris, or here at this damn St Mayeul where they were stuck for one of Joanie’s less explicable whims, he derived significant support from his hairbrushes alone, the concave ivory with gold monograms (time the bristles were renewed, time they were washed if Joanie would get down to it, you tried picking out the fluff yourself with a pin) less from the clothes-brush and softer-bristled narrow one for hats, the stud-box, and bottle for hair tonic, a slit in the leather casing to show you the level of the stuff inside. All these things: Curly Golson sometimes wondered how they had acquired him. Joanie perhaps: ‘Oh, but darling, you ought to have one …’ So they became necessary, his various appurtenances, like the yacht at Rose Bay, the horses in training at Kensington, the bottle-green Austin with brass fittings, even Joanie Sewell, comfortable in her own right. Whether he had acquired Joanie or she him, he had never decided. She was a good investment and luscious piece of flesh (no one would h
ave dragged it out of him.)

  Dressing this afternoon she had finished before him for the first time in history. She was in the other room doing God knew what, not putting in time, she never put in time, but whipped it up to what she hoped was the level of her expectations. Which she never reached, while achieving all else, all the solid things in life. Himself for instance: Golsons’ Emporium, on top of Sewell’s Sweat-free Felt.

  Along the coast it was an evening of sun after a day of brooding. Clear blue, but brisk. Curly Golson was standing at the bedroom window of his suite at the Grand Hôtel Splendide. In the gardens below and down the Avenue Félix Faure the palms rose slashed and bashed without appearing more tattered than was natural to them. A scent of unidentifiable flowers (he accepted, but did not care for flowers) and horse manure, and France, drifted up as far as his nostrils.

  Duty returned him to the dressing-table and he made a pass or two with the brushes at what remained of his hair, reviving it with a slight dash of bay rum and cantharides from the leather-cased travelling-bottle. He got himself into that rather natty sage waistcoat he had picked up in the Burlington Arcade, over it the Harris jacket (it was cold enough for that.) The glass told him he was a fine figure of an antipodean gentleman.

  Yet on returning to the open window he found his self-assurance sinking. He could not have accounted for it, or not immediately. The same anonymous bourgeois figures were advancing towards and retreating from him between the formal avenue’s tattered palms, when suddenly he was overwhelmed by his own anonymity, which did not protect him from a suspicion that the world of menace held him in its sights. He tried creeping out of range, away from the open window at least. Must be this war, which you could otherwise avoid by not understanding the French papers and resisting your inclination to go in search of The Times.