The Twyborn Affair

by Patrick White

  ‘Charming!—arid so typical!’

  ‘Typical of what?’ Monsieur Vatatzes cracked down on her; his nose looked alarming.

  ‘Of those who live here.’ Mrs Golson gasped.

  If only Curly would back her up, but like most Australian husbands, he never did if one ventured into country considered in any way ‘artistic’ or ‘intellectual’.

  Monsieur Vatatzes almost screamed, his spit flying in the faces of his guests. ‘We only exist in this filthy hovel! If we live, it is in our minds—the past;’ here he turned on Madame Vatatzes, ‘though E. rejects the past. Don’t you?’

  Madame Vatatzes composed her lips into what looked like two narrow strips of pale rubber. ‘Would you care for a glass of porto?’ she asked the alarmed Golsons.

  Her teeth appeared smaller than they normally were, Mrs Golson thought; on the other hand, the feet, she noticed for the first time, were bare, and looking enormous planted in Madame Llewellyn-Boieldieu’s shabby carpet.

  The Golsons silently agreed, with idiotic smiles and nods, that porto would be on the one hand ‘delightful’, on the other ‘the real oil’.

  Poor Curly! so far out of his depth, visibly clinging to his clothes as a form of reality in the situation in which they found themselves. Had they been left alone by their hosts just for a moment, she would have nibbled one of his ear-lobes; to Joan Golson there was something delectable about a lobe, like a single oyster on a roundel of bread as opposed to the gross gourmandise of overt sensuality.

  But they were not alone. Madame Vatatzes had gone, only too willingly, to fetch the porto, and they were left with the old man.

  He told them, ‘Having company so seldom—and, I must admit, not needing it—one wonders what would amuse the guests.’ He looked at them so intently he might at any moment splinter in all directions.

  Hands deep in his Harris pockets, Curly found the courage to suggest, ‘If you didn’t want us, why did you invite us?’

  ‘That, you must ask E.,’ Monsieur Vatatzes replied, ‘who may now be going for a swim instead of fetching the porto. E. is inclined to attempt suicide at all those moments one doesn’t care to face.’

  ‘But will probably never succeed if she hasn’t brought it off by now,’ Mrs Golson contributed, and added, ‘I am the least successful suicide.’

  Her husband was amazed. ‘Aren’t we being morbid?’

  ‘After the Italians, “morbid” is a condition of cheeses,’ said Monsieur Vatatzes. ‘Human beings are human—hélas.’ He stood mopping his high forehead on which sweat was glistening.

  As she hadn’t been invited to sit, Mrs Golson now did so, and her husband followed suit. They might not have been the human beings old Vatatzes insisted did exist, more likely inflated rubber dolls invoked for their hosts to puncture.

  Just then Madame Vatatzes returned with a tray, a bottle of porto, and four glass thimbles. (Curly used to say, ‘Foreigners see to it you don’t get drunk at their expense.’) On entering the room, one bare foot stubbed itself on the edge of the carpet, and the bottle might have crashed to the floor if Curly hadn’t sprung and caught it. (Joanie Golson was so proud of her cricketer husband.)

  Madame Vatatzes accepted it all as a matter of course. Indeed, she might not have been present; stooped above the tray, re-arranging the bottle and the glass thimbles, she was as unaware as her bare feet.

  Mrs Golson was able to study her afresh, the tendrils escaping from the nape of her neck, the little, almost imperceptible hackles rising from the ridges of her great toes. The finger-joints could have been arthritic, and must have prevented her ever dragging off those antique rings, had she wanted to, but probably she didn’t want. The rings of women such as Madame Vatatzes (like Eadie Twyborn) were ingrained and ingrown.

  Joan Golson had a sudden brief vision of an enslaved dog or cat rubbing against, licking the beringed hand casually offered for adulation.

  She looked at her husband to see whether he had caught her at it.

  He hadn’t. Curly was more likely preparing for the stroke he had started expecting in recent years. There was a vein in his temple which reminded his wife of that other, horrid one.

  She looked away.

  ‘Shouldn’t we have something to eat?’ Monsieur Vatatzes remembered. ‘In for a penny, in for a pound—or is it the pig is in for a poke?’

  ‘Angelos had an English governess,’ his wife informed herself as much as those who could not know. ‘Wansborough, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Walmsley!’ He might never forgive her the mistake.

  Somewhat to Madame Vatatzes’ relief, the Golsons declined food, with incredulous chins and murmurs of ‘figures’ and ‘livers’.

  ‘But,’ said Mrs Golson, glancing at her husband, ‘we were hoping you might treat us to some music.’

  ‘They may not be in the mood, treasure. Nobody is always in the mood.’

  That Curly might have developed a sensibility perhaps superior to her own, astonished and annoyed Joanie; it was not to be expected in a man.

  ‘Of course if they don’t feel like it. I know one has to feel like it …’ Then she blushed, looking to the Vatatzes for some manner of corroboration or forgiveness.

  Neither of them showed a sign. They had sunk into chairs. Their eyelids looked as solid as stone.

  Of them all, only Curly appeared to be enjoying himself, his resentful wife could tell. He had drained his tot of rather nasty wine, and sat revolving the glass thimble between a finger and thumb gigantic by comparison. His calves tensed, he was beating time with the balls of his feet. She hoped he was not about to take the floor.

  ‘Where you’ve got it over we Australians,’ she heard with horror, ‘you know how to start early.’ He clucked with his tongue in the direction of his empty glass.

  ‘I’d have thought,’ she hastened to correct, ‘nobody could teach the Australians.’

  ‘What’s wrong with the Australians, darling? Except that that’s what we happen to be.’

  She could not refute it, nor remind him that he would refer to the horrid porto as ‘rotgut’ at some less exotic, more rational hour.

  Monsieur Vatatzes had sucked in his lips till his mouth resembled nothing so much as a wrinkle in a sooty lemon, through which was squeezed the sour assertion, ‘Other Australians have not come my way—excepting E.’

  ‘What?’ Mrs Golson was almost propelled out of her collapsing Provençal chair. ‘You’re not born Australian?’

  Curly did not utter, but conveyed his slightly incredulous approval; the Golsons loomed at Madame Vatatzes as though all three had been Christians in a pagan world, that of Madame Vatatzes’ husband. He, by contrast, and Orthodoxy, repudiated those who could have been—well, Bogomils, Bulgars—Barbarians.

  Naturally Eudoxia, torn between opposite camps, was terribly distracted.

  At least Mr Golson, regardless of anybody else, poured himself another tot of the very indifferent porto. ‘To celebrate,’ he had the grace to apologise.

  While Mrs Golson continued sitting forward on her creaking chair in a state of precarious enthusiasm. ‘Do tell!’ she coaxed. ‘Where are you from? Melbourne?’ before venturing breathlessly to hope, ‘Sydney perhaps?’

  ‘Oh,’ Madame Vatatzes sighed, still not raising her heavy eyelids, ‘it was so long ago I can’t feel I came from there. Or,’ she murmured, ‘belong anywhere, for that matter.’

  Her husband had opened his eyes and was staring at her with an expression determined to accuse her of any step he might consider false, while she, in her passive stone-bound condition, seemed equally determined not to give him cause, not at the moment anyway. Although impressed by the sight of Monsieur Vatatzes’ commanding eyes, Mrs Golson regretted the withdrawal of those other jewelled ones which, now that she had this additional clue, might have enabled her to do her sums on past and present.

  It was immensely irritating. She sank back at last, exhausted, exuding in her frustration and her tan velour, the luscious promise, the tanta
lising glitter of a baba au rhum.

  Fortunately for her, Curly at least continued to find his wife luscious. Did Monsieur Vatatzes too, perhaps? For as she sank back into her chair and her brown confection, he rose in his black, his veined hands working like talons, which till now had only dangled limply from his arms and the arms of his chair.

  The old cove was wearing round his neck on a broad black ribbon of watered silk, something Curly had already noticed, and dismissed out of loyalty to their sex: a gold emblem in the shape of a two-headed eagle. Could you beat it?

  ‘If it’s music they want,’ and the Imperial Eagle looked full at E. Boyd Golson rather than at the female of the species, ‘hadn’t we better give it to them—Doxy?’ His teeth seemed to implant ignominy in the one who bore what Mrs Golson presumed was a nickname, an unfortunate one.

  Otherwise she was so delighted she drew from her chair all the sounds of threatening collapse. She clutched the handbag which contained the jewel she would almost surely offer eventually to Madame Vatatzes, metaphorically on bended knee.

  It was Curly who now withdrew, into a male despair, as the young woman rose and dedicated herself to her husband’s wishes and their guests’ entertainment. She was delightful of form, moving, swaying, in this bleached-out robe which only a ‘bohemian’ would be seen dead in, but carrying it off with a style of her own, unlike Joanie (he would never criticise Joan’s taste in dress: it was too right and too expensive) but this young erect sheaf, he could see her falling to the reaper’s sickle, possibly his own—yes, his own.

  He looked at Joanie. She was too entranced by the prospect of culture to cotton on to a man’s thoughts, so he eased his crotch, and resigned himself to the tedium he was in for.

  Madame Vatatzes had seated herself at her end of the oblong piano-stool. She had arranged everything trailing which needed to be arranged, behind her, thus leaving room for the old boy.

  At the same time Joanie Golson was arranging her chin in the hollow of her hand, her beatific smile preparing to be pollinated by the music scattered on it by Madame Vatatzes—less by that nasty old man her husband. Joanie had forgotten her former life, Australia, Eadie Twyborn, and in the present, threats of war. Her receptive soul was yearning to collaborate in giving birth to a promised music.

  The silence, Madame Vatatzes, Mrs Golson, even the resistant Mr Golson, all were waiting; when the old Greek stalked towards the piano, in a slight susurration of pin-feathers, and clanking of the gold Imperial emblem.

  ‘Which is it to be, Angelos?’ his creature asked.

  ‘Shall we give them Jeux?’ He laughed, and seated himself beside her on the unyielding stool. ‘Yes, Jeux d’enfants,’ he decided, ‘is what I think they ought to get.’ You too, his voice seemed to be implying.

  So they started out on this prim walk with the governesses, along the Prokymea, or in other cases, round Rushcutters Bay. The bow into which a sash was gathered bobbing against the waterline. Of splintering blue or submerged stocks. And not without its menace of lantana, through which Curly Golson blundered in search of something he could put his hand on. The future scarcely anyone had found. Not Joanie, her freckle-encrusted cleavage bursting with unwritten love letters. The exiled Greek extinguished by his crown, or its substitute the peasant hat, the aura of which he was still wearing, and not the least, the little-boyhood from which he had never disentangled himself.

  So they played, they all played, whether actively or not, the Jeux, the games Madame Llewellyn-Boieldieu’s warped piano keys released. Curly’s fingers all thumbs and a blood-blister as he made some attempt at groping after the elusive music. Joanie clasping the amethyst in its several wrappings: of tissue paper, beaded silk, and flesh. More frenetically the two Vatatzes, shoulders bumping as they spun tops, or galloped towards a climax neither they nor Miss Wansborough-Walmsley, Fräulien Felser, or Mademoiselle Le Grand, of dappled necks and crimson nostrils, might ever achieve, rocking and rocking on their stationary rockers.

  ‘Eudoxia,’ Angelos Vatatzes shouted, ‘your bass is too pedestrian,’ and stopped.

  Herself seemingly desolated, Eudoxia continued for a few bars in the bass which had offended her husband.

  When at last Madame Vatatzes halted, brutal in turn in her abruptness, the governess in black might have brought her ruler down on Doxy’s knuckles, the sharp edge on cold morning.

  It left the Golsons somewhat confused. For Curly it was simply a case of too much bloody music. Joanie on the other hand bled for her love.

  Again they were all sitting at attention, while Teakle, the other side of the wall, somewhere under the olive-tree, was clearing his throat. Mrs Golson heard the subsequent gob hurtle and settle, or so she thought. She saw the amethyst lying at Madame Vatatzes’ large feet. Were the hackled toes rejecting her?

  They sat until, disregarding all indignities, Eudoxia launched without her husband into deeper seas of music, thrashing out to escape from the weed of human relationships, and he, perhaps recognising the attempt, joined in with a wild disdain.

  The Vatatzes were playing, like many marriages, together and apart, but where their Jeux d’enfants had been performed with an angular malice, now the musicians swirled in romantic carnation-tinted circles. Were they perhaps revolving in the waltzes Mrs Golson had heard on that other occasion when she returned to confirm her love? She was sure finally that these were the same waltzes, and breathed so deep she choked on the musty dust rising from bowls of stale pot-pourri and rented carpet, stifled by the moted air where all the poetry of which she had been cheated trembled and expired. Unavoidably, she started coughing behind a knuckle of the hand not engaged with the amethyst.

  Mrs Golson was racked by her cough; and not a lozenge in her bag. If only she could have sucked the uncut amethyst, a pebble in her desert of despair, as her wretched cough humped her against recurring themes: her youthful caper with Eadie Twyborn when they crashed that supper dance at the Australia, the circular motion of Daddy’s chapped, tremulous hand stroking her cheek, Curly cavorting at the net, all bravura in white flannels, all male, and yes, the smell of a man, which had shocked when first introduced by Doxy Vatatzes, but which now rose naturally enough out of memory and the swell of music.

  Whoever the Vatatzes were wooing it was not each other. As their tempo grew more reckless, the piece they were playing was falling apart. She had become the leader in spite of every indication of his musical displeasure. In his narrowed shoulders, shuddering elbows, Mrs Golson sensed a moral disapproval, worse still, a physical crisis. She was reminded of the seizure which had carried off Daddy, and Daddy’s only unkind words: If what they tell me is true, Joanie … and what strangers tell is usually true … dancing at the Australia with a woman … in a corked-on moustache … then I’ve failed to … After which, poor Daddy turned blue. It was one of the many incidents she had never been able to forgive herself.

  And this horrid old Greek, what did he know? He had grown so brittle he promised to break on the piano-stool. Would he accuse her from the carpet as Daddy had from amongst the feather pillows which more than likely caused his asthma and cardiac seizure? Joanie could not have borne to be accused again: two murders were too much in the lifetime of an innocent woman whose only vice was a need for tenderness, romantic sunsets, and emotional conceits of a feminine nature.

  All of which she had been receiving from the music until the Greek started turning against her.

  He sprang up finally. ‘I must leave you,’ he gasped at his guests.

  He looked so livid, Mrs Golson cried out in what she hoped was a compassionate tone, ‘Oh dear—there’s nothing wrong? You’re not ill, are you?’

  Good reliable Curly had risen to support the old fellow if necessary (she had always congratulated herself when Curly, a warden at St James’s, carried out the fainted ladies and sat them on the porch during the summer services). Now, in their friends’ salon, she could have patted his broad back.

  But Monsieur Vatatzes assured them he was not i
n need of assistance or sympathy. ‘I am called by nature,’ he explained, and walked rather stiffly out of the room.

  Madame Vatatzes continued for a short while at the piano as the romantic composition for four hands trailed off into a series of solo improvisations.

  Without turning her straight, and for Mrs Golson, still splendid, carnation back, she informed her visitors, ‘Angelos is the victim of his bladder. He’s practically worn a track, poor darling, tramping to the bathroom in the night.’

  She sounded a final treble note and closed the lid of the upright piano.

  Curly was preparing to sympathise, but Joanie made sure to quash that. ‘I’m so sorry to have put you to all this inconvenience—and upset your husband by coming here.’ Much as it pained her to twist the knife, she experienced a sensation of exquisite pleasure from the pain she might have inflicted on the unattainable Madame Vatatzes.

  An expression of pain did in fact drift across the sublime face, but from no unkindness on her friend’s part, Mrs Golson soon realised; Monsieur Vatatzes was shouting from somewhere deeper in the house, ‘Doxy, where are you? Do your visitors mean to spend the night?’

  Madame Vatatzes detached herself in a desperately ungainly movement, floundering in her robe, almost but not quite tripping on the hem, as she thumped across the floor on bare feet, making towards her importunate husband.

  The Golsons were stranded in a situation each hoped the other might handle.

  While from farther out this distinguished boor continued shouting. ‘But what possessed you?’

  Whatever had was drowned in the gushing of a cistern, the flushing of a lavatory bowl.

  ‘And not to tell me!’ Monsieur Vatatzes stormed.

  Never would his wife’s more murmurous explanations reach the ears of their attentive guests. It was most aggravating.

  ‘You have no consideration—poteh poteh—for the feelings of others.’

  ‘Pott-ay pott-ay!’ Curly sniggered.

  ‘All this intrigue behind my back! Will you leave me for …’ the voice was breaking on a high note as it searched for a word sufficiently abrasive ‘… for these Australians of yours?’