The Twyborn Affair

by Patrick White

  There remained the rumours. These were what the open window framed, embodied in the anonymous faces of the French figures dressed in black, traipsing for no revealed purpose up and down the Avenue Félix Faure. Curly Golson hadn’t had it so bad since Inverness, though that was different, like contributing a detail to some old, time-darkened painting, harmless enough in theme, but lethal as dreams can be, with their load of buried personal threats; whereas the threat lurking beyond the window at St Mayeul was of a more general nature, at the same time one from which the sleeper’s will might not succeed in waking him. He had not experienced anything like this before. He might have discussed it with Joanie to ease his spirit, if he had been able to express himself, but hadn’t been born what they call ‘clever’.

  Joanie called from the salon next door, ‘What are you doing, darling? I’ve been wondering whether we ought to take a present.’

  ‘Hadn’t thought about it. Could take along a case of champagne.’

  ‘Heavens, no!’ She was shocked to visualise Teakle lugging the case in their wake, through the overgrown garden, towards the dilapidated villa.

  Curly had come out from the bedroom, and in spite of his tastelessness she was glad to see him, in his Harris tweed, exuding the scent of bay rum, so far removed from what Madame Vatatzes had referred to as ‘the smell of a man’. Mrs Golson sat smiling up at him from the Louis bergère, almost worshipful had he noticed.

  But today Curly seemed moody and preoccupied. ‘What about pushing off?’ he asked, as though she had kept him waiting, and not the other way round.

  Dear Curly, so reliable! When not submitted to the heavy demands of sexuality, in the context of what she understood as marriage, part duty, part economic, Joan Golson loved her husband.

  ‘That’s a stunner of a waistcoat, darling!’

  But he did not seem to hear her remark. She ought to seduce him more often with little soothing compliments. Titillated by a thought, not quite innocent, and not quite reprehensible, she got up meekly enough and followed his broad tweedy back. Her mood of the moment was what she recognised as fragile. She might brush against him on entering the lift and they would enjoy a delicious reunion of loyalties under the hunchback’s malicious gaze.

  It didn’t work out quite like that. Curly’s blenching finger pressed on the button repeatedly. ‘… out of order … antiquated …’ The voice made husky by alcohol and smoke vibrated in her.

  ‘Oh, darling, but how maddening!’ she protested. ‘It’s that man—the hunchback. He goes across and talks to the porter. I’ve caught him at it.’

  It occurred to neither of them to take the stairs. Hadn’t they paid for the lift?

  So Curly’s finger went on blenching as he pressed the button. Why was she so impressed by it? Far back, as a little girl, she remembered somebody showing her a witchety grub. But that was soft. As was she. Even so, she had squashed the grub. And had a bad dream about it. Oh dear, the liftman was to blame—Ange, no other—when they were expected at the Vatatzes’.

  Suddenly the door of the cage opened to receive the Golsons. Ange was too detached to appear in any way censorious as he hung on the rope by which he functioned. The Golsons were standing at attention, at what might have been the prescribed distance from a liftman. Curly’s calves looked as substantial as one would have expected in a male figure of the better class, but Joan’s Papillon by Worth faintly shimmered and fluttered in the draught which entered from the lift-well.

  They reached the rez-de-chaussée with such a bump that her hands grew hot inside her gloves and she clutched her bag as though she half expected a thief to snatch it. Inside the bag was the present she had hesitated to declare after squashing Curly’s suggestion of champagne. It was an antique amethyst brooch, framed, not in diamonds, but a garland of inoffensive brilliants: a charming little piece of jewellery, not made less so by the fact that Mrs Golson did not want it.

  Then that bump. The hunchback’s hump. Ange!

  But hadn’t they arrived safely? The door of the gilt cage opened. Curly Golson was getting out.

  When Joanie told him, ‘Darling—I’m going up—back—only for a second. Wait for me in the lounge, won’t you?’

  Halfway there, he could hardly have done otherwise.

  Not only did Ange despise, he must have loathed her while hauling her back to the second floor. He could not understand that so much, almost her continued existence, depended on it.

  ‘Merci,’ she said. ‘Vous êtes très gentil.’

  What she could not have understood was that Ange despised her more for addressing him as no guest ever had at the Grand Hôtel Splendide des Ligures.

  When Mrs Golson reappeared in the lounge she was wearing her tan Melton suit in place of the Worth Papillon. ‘Now,’ she enquired cajolingly, ‘are we ready?’

  They went out to where Teakle was waiting to open the Austin’s doors.

  She realised at once that she must look heavy, dull (perhaps she was) in her tan Melton. The hat sat too close to her heavy brows. She glanced about her nervously, licking her lips, adjusting the veil which bound the straight-brimmed hat to her head and made the whole effect more uncompromising.

  Curly was in the driver’s seat.

  ‘Oh, do be careful, darling, won’t you?’

  Did Teakle’s steadfast neck despise her as deeply as Ange the hunchback’s eyes?

  Curly did not answer, and they started off. She rather enjoyed being terrified in their own motor, her husband at the wheel. Lulled by her terrors, she sank back into an upholstered corner, clutching her bag with the amethyst brooch which she might, she hoped, find the courage to offer Madame Vatatzes; it would suit her style perfectly.

  As they swept through the grove of under-nourished pines, the stench from the salt-pans prevented Mrs Golson’s hopes aspiring much beyond the hatching of sooty needles, through which were revealed those other glimpses of enamelled gold and halcyon.

  Very purposeful, he had come out on the front terrace and was calling, ‘Eudoxia! Where are you, E.?’ wearing the sun hat with the frayed brim, the spokes radiating from the crown, which made him look like an old woman. (E. said it didn’t; it suited him.)

  Frustrated in his purpose, he returned through the house. Its structure seemed unstable this evening, rattling, groaning, trembling as he passed from front to back: the hovel which only an avaricious demi-Anglaise like Madame Llewellyn-Boieldieu would offer tenants poor enough to accept. Poor but not grateful, thank God! He had never been grateful for small mercies in any of his incarnations, not even on becoming what seemed like the last and withering twig of a family tree.

  Passing a wall-mirror in the hall he saw reflected in the fluctuating glass, amongst the scales and blotches, this figure in the plaited hat. E. was wrong: it was the face of an old woman and a peasant. Not that the aged don’t tend to pass from one sex to the other in some aspects of their appearance. He didn’t feel that he had undergone a change. E. appeared to appreciate him as much as ever—to love? he sometimes wondered. (If only he could lay hands on that diary. No! There are wounds enough without the diaries; the wax effigies of lovers are stuck with countless pins.)

  Angelos Vatatzes steadied himself on a rented console, worm-ridden to the extent that it threatened to crumble. (She would send them a French bill, by God!) This aged revenant in the peasant-woman’s hat, stuck with pins down the ages, from Blachernae to Nicaea, and down the map in travelogue to Smyrna and Alexandria. Athens? peugh! that haven of classicists and German nouveaux riches.

  He remembered in his mother’s work-basket a little heart in crimson velvet bristling with pins. She was not all that good with her needle; she was not all that good. But he had loved to draw his finger through the labyrinth of pins, exploring the textures of the stabbed velvet. He would cower over the crimson heart, anything to postpone the walks along the Prokymea with Miss Walmsley, or Fräulein Felser, or Mademoiselle Le Grand—the governesses who had ruled his life in turn.

  The wom
en.

  Of all those who had attempted to rule him, empresses, hetairai, his sister Theodora, Eudoxia his colonial ‘bride’, aunts, governesses, Anna his sainted wife, not so saintly in spite of the candles lit and the raw carrots nibbled at, only one had relieved him of the burden men carry, and that very briefly, long ago.

  She was his wet-nurse—a peasant. That perhaps was why he could accept himself as a peasant-woman in a reed hat, and because there is less distance between peasant and emperor than between the Imperial Highness and those who compose the hierarchy.

  His memory still showed him Stavroula (the Little Cross) a small woman of blanched cheeks, and enormous globes designed for devouring by the hungry offspring of the rich. (He had loved his milk-brother, however, and had rewarded him later, one Easter while sharing the same bed, by uniting with him in a sea of sperm.)

  Stavroula had recurred throughout his youth, offering, always offering: purple figs on a bed of leaves, glasses of cold well-water, food, food, endless food, her face growing smaller, yeast-coloured, welted, in the black kerchief surrounding it, beside the Gulf, and down the coast at Mikhali, its green valleys descending out of Asia powdered with a reddish dust.

  He could remember her kissing his hand. Himself always the acceptor, in a peasant hat worthy of an emperor.

  Tears gushed out as he crossed the kitchen of the villa they were renting from Madame Llewellyn-Boieldieu, and half an eggshell jumped off the table, the surface of which was grooved by use as Stavroula’s face had been welted by age and hardship. The shell bounced on the floor which E. had not swept since Joséphine Réboa disturbed them by defecting.

  Had E. defected?

  Stavroula never would have. That is why he wept for the dead and the past.

  He wept for the saints, even the pseudo-ones, the hateful Bogomil—a Bulgar.

  And reached the back terrace, and shouted, ‘Eudoxia! Where to God have you got to?’ He hesitated before shrieking, ‘Gamo ton olakeron kosmo! Fuck!’ His voice, dying, mumbled, blubbered in a whisper, ‘Doxy—for Christ’s sake …’

  In the absence of the one who had abandoned him he ground his head against the terrace table, its marble permanently stained by the early coffee they were in the habit of taking there. He dragged his forehead back and forth, the disenchanted Emperor of Byzantium, Nicaea, Mistra, and all those lands threatened by the Slav, the Turk, the western hordes of schismatic, so-called Christendom—the Barbarians of past and present.

  E. did not come. The spirit of Stavroula was not moved to appear. Mamma was at cards in another part of the town, Anna the Soul was no doubt copying aphorisms into a leather-bound notebook, or kissing an archimandrite’s clammy white hand. She maintained that the hands of high-ranking monks and priests smelled delicious—of rose-water. It was the only streak of sensuality in Anna. He could not believe in the rose-water; he was sure an archimandrite smelled like any other monk or priest: of flannel vests and frustration, or the throbbing overflow of a dammed-up concupiscence.

  Where was E.?

  Only today he realised the connection between Anna and E., two scribblers: Anna the copyist; with E., he suspected, it was self-expression or-vindication. No, he did not want to investigate the fruits (too frightening) he was only curious about them. Anna had been religious; he suspected E. was too, but differently. Anna was as Orthodox as a burning candle, E. some kind of life-mystic, poor devil—a potential suicide in other words.

  Who was not? unless the vegetables.

  He lifted his head from the terrace table. He had promised himself a serene close to the day, one of those perfect evenings on the Coast, with music, conversation, perhaps an omelette aux fines herbes, a glass or two of Armagnac, then bed. Instead, blood could be threatening.

  ‘Doxy, where are you? Damn all saints, mystics, literary pretenders …’

  The only true saint and woman was Stavroula, and for that reason he had kept it more or less secret, from Mamma, Anna, E. Mamma would have laughed at the idea, Anna would not have believed, E. might have, and for that reason, would have been more jealous than any.

  His crypto-saint on her knees in her cell-cottage at Mikhali. She tended it, but it wasn’t her own, any more than Yanni her giant husband (another slave) his strength dwindling till he ended, a paralysed flitch of bones wrapped in spotless rags, or Babbis the rosy boy who became a congested, resentful clerk.

  You kissed Stavroula once on one of the white welts of her old puddingy cheeks and it smelled of the cleanliness which you recognised as earthly evidence of sanctity. (All nonsense of course if all is nothing as it has been decided.)

  Again you recognised the smell of sanctity in the purple soil they opened in the graveyard above Mikhali to lower her into. Babbis glaring blubbering the other side of the grave. Resentful of the love you bore his mother? the milk you had deprived him of? more likely the sea of sperm to which you had both contributed while sharing a bed that Easter night. Anyway, he glared and blubbered, this grown boy and portly clerk, while you could not raise a tear for the Dormition of Stavroula and the great abstraction of death. (‘Angelos is cold.’)

  Angelos now crying, his head on a stained table, perhaps crying for himself because close to death. (In those days graveyards, cypresses always on the alert against marauding Turks, belonged by tradition to those who were lowered into their redemptive soil; today all dust, the bones scattered; relatives squabbled over whether they should buy an additional plot—or two—or six—of Attic or even foreign soil in which to lay their mortal remains and those of their descendants.)

  Somebody knocking, was it? The bell had eroded long ago. Neighbours came round to the back with their offerings of eggs, fruit, a strangled cockerel. Peasants don’t knock.

  ‘E.? E.?’ He barked his shins against the iron cradle of this hateful marble table.

  Above him the French sky held firm, when that above Mikhali, Smyrna, or any of the Imperial staging posts would have split open at his command.

  Not far below the terrace where the Imperial Highness was creating such a rumpus, ‘Eudoxia Vatatzes’ was seated on a rock, bare feet enjoying the texture of stone (and childhood) long arms emerging from these faded, but still lovely, carnation sleeves, to embrace bony knees.

  E. had not written up the diary, but here it was, all in the head, in the waning light above the pine-crests, between sea and sky: ‘E. Vatatzes’ stroking it out of terracotta arms.

  ‘… now that I’ve done the deed, now that I’ve invited them, shall I be brave enough to tell? To commit myself to the Golsons even in a moment of crisis: to Curly’s alcoholic breath, cracking seams, Joanie’s steamy bosom, her gasps and blunders, the smell of caoutchouc—to dismiss all the mistakes of the past culminating in Marian s driving the tennis ball against the ivy screen in which sparrows are nesting.

  Whatever is in store, I must go up. My Angelos is screaming as only a Byzantine emperor can scream.

  No, I can never leave him. He is too dependent. Only I am more so. We are welded together, until war, or death, tears us apart.’

  He opened the door. ‘Qui est là?’

  ‘Nous sommes les Golsons.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Joan and—Curly—Golson.’

  He stood looking at them from under that incredible woman’s hat, his lower lip protruding and trembling.

  Joan Golson, too, was trembling. ‘You met my husband. You are Monsieur Vatatzes, aren’t you?’

  ‘He is not at home.’

  She could hear Curly murmuring behind her, dragging the soles of his stationary boots on the stone paving. In a moment she would be accused.

  ‘But how tiresome of us! Have we come on the wrong day? I’m sure your wife said Thursday.’

  ‘Anna died.’

  Joan Golson thought she might burst into tears, when Madame Vatatzes appeared at the end of what must have been a poky hall, but which in the circumstances had taken on the endlessness, the proportions, of a dream perspective, down which this vision was advan
cing, burnt arms outstretched towards them from long, floating, carnation sleeves.

  ‘My dear Mrs Golson, I’m so glad you were able to come.’

  The voice seemed to weave, as though through water. Bubbles almost issued from Madame Vatatzes’ underwater voice as she delivered the opening line of a role she must have been trying to master up till the last moment, not in a play, more of a two-dimensional masque.

  Old Vatatzes flung his vast hat on a worm-eaten console. ‘Gamo olous!’

  ‘He forgets,’ she explained.

  He sprayed them with laughter. ‘On the contrary, I remember too much.’ But seemed to be settling for the inevitable.

  Madame Vatatzes resumed her flat, under-rehearsed role of hostess, suggesting, ‘Shall we go in here?’ Her tone implied there was infinite choice.

  Then they were standing in the room where Mrs Golson had seen the Vatatzes on the occasion when she had spied on them. From inside, it looked as poky as the hall, irregular in shape, its floor raked. Or had her own uncertainty brought it about? She wondered as she stood smiling, clutching her bag (it belonged, she realised, not to the Melton velour she was wearing, but the Papillon of her first and perhaps more suitable choice) the bag in which was the little brooch she must decide whether to offer or not. At the moment, in the presence of mad Monsieur Vatatzes, the amethyst brooch seemed too much an exposure of her own secret sentiments, on which his eye would most surely focus with a glittering malevolence. So she grappled the bag to her entrails while tottering on her Pinet heels.

  And smiled her most social smile. ‘So charming!’ Mrs Golson murmured, looking about her at the grubby walls, the battered Provençal furniture, and one or two bibelots of no value in a rented villa. Only the piano had any connection with an experience she might repeat, if those who could gratify her wishes were willing to collaborate by drawing from the warped keys the same skeins of passionate colours and swirl of romantic sentiment.