The Twyborn Affair

by Patrick White

  His wife’s reply was wrapped in silence.

  ‘What should we do, Curly? Slip away—leave a card perhaps—say nothing—what?’

  Curly said, ‘You’re the one who brought it on us, treasure.’

  Curly never understood how much she depended on him. Curly, simply, did not understand. Much as she deplored the tedium of sexual intercourse, there were occasions when he might have ravished her, and she would have risen in a shower of grateful hairpins.

  The Melton velour was growing so creased in the uncomfortable chair, Mrs Golson finally exploded. ‘What do you think they can be up to?’

  Curly was hardly responsive. ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

  It was Madame Vatatzes who helped decide their line of action by returning to the room after several aeons of silence and waiting, during which Mrs Golson had examined the series of hideous ornaments on display in the rented villa, while ignoring the fact that her own husband was breaking wind. (She would have liked to discuss this habit with Curly, but in all their years of marriage she hadn’t.)

  Madame Vatatzes smiled. The bony face did have something sublime about it: an expression of fulfilment, in its best moments, and this was one of them Mrs Golson enviously observed.

  Smoothing her somewhat dishevelled hair, Madame Vatatzes confided in them, ‘He’s impossible of course. But there it is—that is Angelos.’

  Also smiling, Mrs Golson extended a suede hand. ‘It was so charming—and the music.’

  They had come out on the front terrace.

  ‘I shall always remember your garden,’ Mrs Golson said as they sauntered down between the silver borders, their skirts drawing a perfume from them.

  ‘It was something that happened before we came,’ Madame Vatatzes admitted quite humbly.

  Mrs Golson turned to her. ‘You’ve added something by being here,’ she told the young woman with a gallantry so undisguised Curly might not have been present; though a man would hardly have understood.

  Was Madame Vatatzes embarrassed?

  In case she was, Mrs Golson hastened to cover her gaffe by dragging a leaf or two from a plant. ‘Delicious fragrance,’ she pronounced as exquisitely as she could while sniffing at the leaves in her gloved hand. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Balm,’ Madame Vatatzes replied. ‘They say it raises the spirits.’

  Mrs Golson did not altogether believe; she suspected her friend had made it up on the spur of the moment, a conceit as delicate as the perfume released from the handful of crushed leaves.

  It was an emblazoned evening in which they were standing at the ramshackle gate, Curly cap in hand, wearing the smile he usually adopted for foreigners (because you couldn’t accept that the Greek’s wife had anything Australian) Joanie adjusting the gossamer to secure her hat for the motor journey, while searching unsuccessfully for some extra-meaningful phrase with which to decorate her leave-taking.

  Madame Vatatzes seemed on the verge of making some declaration or appeal as she stood with her hand on the gate, the line of her cheek touched by a last transcendental glow, lips fumbling with elusive words, eyes revealing the same extraordinary mosaic of colour as they had on the occasion of that first meeting, then as self-contained as jewels, now diffused—if not melting. No doubt only an effect produced by evening light. Nor did she find the words she needed to convey that deeper message—which she may never have intended to convey.

  So Mrs Golson said, while tying the veil in a bow beneath her chin, ‘We shall see you, I hope. Au revoir!’ and Madame Vatatzes replied, ‘Good-bye,’ smiling, but at the same time perhaps regretful of what she had left unsaid.

  Curly was allowing Teakle to drive them back to St Mayeul and had seated himself beside Joanie. He appeared exhausted by the unusual nature of what they had recently experienced.

  But laughed and said, ‘You were laying it on a bit thick, weren’t you?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Her adding to the garden by being there!’

  She really didn’t know how to answer. She had taken it for granted she would be sitting alone on the back seat, refurbishing and adding to her impressions of the afternoon, when here was Curly lifting the veil on her most private sentiments.

  She would have liked to let off a firework in his face, but as she did not have one at hand, she replied dully, ‘It was meant as a little compliment. One had to praise her, in some way, after the scene her husband made. If he is the husband …’

  ‘What makes you think he isn’t?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she snapped.

  What made her additionally peevish was realisation that the husband’s scene had caused her to forget the amethyst brooch she had intended offering Madame Vatatzes. Of course she would not have done so. She would not have found the courage. But might have.

  Determined to make good her omission, she set out the following afternoon at the same time as they had driven off on their miscarried formal visit. She did not tell Curly, who was about the town with one of his hotel acquaintances. Nor did she call for Teakle, but hired a cab. Because the vehicle was horse-drawn she finally doubted they would reach the villa much before the hour when they had left it yesterday. She was so distracted she had hardly given thought to her appearance, but had thrown on a drab smocked garment she wore for dusty distances. That she was hatless only vaguely troubled her.

  As they drove through the pine-grove, she sidled restlessly on the cracked leather with its smell of hay, and ahead of her the reek of a raw-boned horse, its scours competing with the stench from the salt-pans. At least she had her talisman, the amethyst brooch, clutched in her hand.

  She halted the driver at the foot of the hill so that she might approach ‘Crimson Cottage’ on foot, assemble her thoughts, and perhaps even decide to retreat from the prospect effacing that odious Greek.

  She descended from the cab, unassisted of course by the boor she had engaged, and started on her walk. Would the driver imagine, perhaps, that she meant to escape without paying? At one point she turned, and mumbled in her lamentable French, ‘Je reviens …’ Whether he heard or not as he sat lolling on his seat, he smiled back at one who could only be classified as a folle Anglaise.

  So she went on, through a quenched radiance, at this hour the sky slate-coloured above interwoven branches, the waves, a heavy periwinkle hemmed with white, dragging back and forth against the shore, her memories of Madame Vatatzes, the glow on a cheekbone, the smile breaking through terracotta, dimmed, if not extinguished.

  At the villa the rickety gate stood ajar. A woman in black was stumping, hobbling, snatching at flowers or herbs, gathering for herself a gratuitous bunch. Her movements might have suggested a goat if it hadn’t been for the tight bunch which the goat had not devoured

  The goat-woman raised her head as Mrs Golson paused and asked, ‘Où est Madame—et Monsieur Vatatzes?’

  The goat-woman arranged her tongue, of a pale mauve shiny with saliva. ‘Partis! Partis! GONE!’ she added for one who was beneath contempt, and to emphasise her feelings, swept the horizon with an arm.

  ‘Mais où?’

  ‘Sais pas. Sont partis—le soir? le matin? Personne ne sait—seulement qu’ils sont partis.’

  The woman continued snatching at sprigs from the garden. Its martyrdom was Mrs Golson’s own, a confusion of perfumes from crushed leaves and released sap intensifying her overwrought state. Added to an intolerable situation, the woman’s spit was clearly visible, leaping from her mouth as she spoke; and one of her stockings had lapsed to halfway down the leg revealing a crude bandage through which a stain was seeping.

  Mrs Golson could bear the tension no longer. Herself a rival goat, she charged at the gate, almost pushing it down, to arrive in what had been Eudoxia’s garden.

  The woman in black could not laugh enough, then clenched her teeth as she bound her tight bunch tighter still with some stalks of grass she had torn off.

  ‘Que sont-ils—vos herbes?’ Now the intruder of all intruders, Mrs Golson heard hersel
f stammer.

  The smocked garment she had thrown on for the journey had fallen back, and she realised she was wearing the nightdress in which she had taken her restless afternoon nap.

  As though awakened against her will, the woman frowned at her bunched herbs. ‘Sont des barbottines. On les met sous les draps pour chasser les puces.’

  Mrs Golson would have to look up ‘barbottines’ together with Eudoxia’s ‘balm’, but her French-English pocket dictionary was not the greatest help and the herb manual somewhere on a shelf in Sydney Australia.

  Now, since her friend had left for wherever, there was really no purpose in her staying.

  ‘Alors,’ she told this female, ‘moi aussi, je partirai.’

  But the creature beckoned. ‘Venez! Venez!’ The cackle which followed revealed a number of black gaps as well as a span of aggressive gold. ‘Faut voir,’ she advised, leading the way to the shell of a house around which the sky was darkening.

  Curiosity outdoing discretion and even fear, Mrs Golson followed.

  The shutters were open, fastened to the outside of the walls, the windows closed, the interior stuffy. In spite of the furniture which she remembered from the day before, the rooms seemed to creak and reverberate like those in a dismantled house.

  Her guide led her past mirrors from which Mrs Golson averted her face, and into the kitchen where a door open on the sea and village below, let in an unexpected burst of light, illuminating the Vatatzes’ last hours of tenancy: the squalor of unwashed dishes, smeared glasses, coffee grounds, a great over-ripe tomato melting into the papered surface of a dresser shelf.

  Mrs Golson would have liked to persuade herself that Madame Vatatzes had been saving up this tomato for its seed. But the thought was bathetic in the guide’s presence; the woman in black did not condone improbabilities. From the juice of the putrid tomato, Mrs Golson’s glance was drawn to the woman’s leg, the musketeer stocking, the stained bandage, on it not so much the signs of watery matter from a running sore, as, Mrs Golson was convinced—pus.

  ‘Venez! Venez!’ The guide was leading one no longer her confederate but her victim always deeper into the lives of the departed.

  The intruders had entered what passed for a bathroom. Choked by the sight of spilt powder, balls of hair, cotton-wool swabs, Mrs Golson put her handkerchief to her lips; she might be developing Daddy’s asthma.

  ‘Voyez! Ils out oublié ce true-là!’ the creature shrieked through her gaps, past the bastion of gold.

  She poked at an object on a shelf, which as far as Mrs Golson could tell, was an enema of enormous proportions.

  The shrieks indulged, the wrath began to pour. ‘C’est un vieux salaud—une jeune salope! Ils paieront. Beaucoup! Madame Boieldieu m’a dit.’

  Mrs Golson had retreated into the comparative dusk of the passage.

  She dredged up the necessary words and said, ‘Merci je m’en vais.’

  But the woman put out a hand. ‘Ne voulez pas voir lew chambre à coucher? Ils n’ont fait, vous comprenez, que jouer au piano et baiser …’

  ‘Non! Non! Non!’ Mrs Golson skirted past the bedroom, through the door of which she caught a glimpse of shadowy, but turbulent sheets; she could not have borne further evidence of the games, perhaps even the stains, of love.

  All the way down the hall, out upon the terrace, down the path smelling of tomcat, she was pursued by the woman’s diabolical voice as she ran from the flickering images of Angelos and Eudoxia Vatatzes, themselves as diabolical as her own never extinct desires—as she fled towards Curly, honesty, Australia.

  ‘Ils paieront—vous verrez!’ the woman hurled after her.

  ‘Qui sait?’ Mrs Golson gasped back as she pushed against the collapsing gate, which finally fell.

  Who knows what? Herself, certainly, knew nothing, hurrying down the stony hill towards the waiting cab—if it had waited.

  But it had. The man was sitting on the high driver’s-seat, looking out from inside the tunnel provided by the leather hood. As la folk Anglaise hurtled towards him.

  For no explicable reason, the train was packed on that day. As it drew in at the station they stampeded along its steaming side as part of the lowing inconsolable herd lugging portmanteaux, baskets, parcels, bulging serviettes. Themselves, or rather, their hearts leaping like wild creatures inside the cages of their ribs. To arrive at the doors. To scrape their shins almost to the bone on the iron steps. To scramble panting, dragging, on, on, on board the contemptuous train.

  They just succeeded. She forced him up, and after grasping a stanchion, protected him with her strong arm, while a guard, laughing, tried out her buttocks with a hand, pushed the last of the passengers higher, and slammed the door on the lot.

  They stood breathing at each other, inhaling the perfumes from the toilettes. Even the round smell of shit.

  ‘Well, we are here, E.!’ he panted.

  More practical, she answered, ‘We haven’t begun,’ and started weaving down the corridor, past the portmanteaux, the baskets, the bulging serviettes, somebody hanging out of a window, a handkerchief held against nausea.

  They did squeeze in at last, into one of the wooden boxes, amidst the scowls, the luggage, the children of those already established. They seated themselves in a corner, more closely conjoined than at any moment of their life together, distributing the smiles of the false-humble, in which teeth return to being milk-teeth, cheeks illuminated not so much by the brief innocence as the prolonged guilt of childhood.

  After staking their claim they might have looked out of the windows at the view, but on one side the blinds were lowered, admitting no more than a band of flesh-coloured light between hem and sill, on the other a human hedge planted in the corridor presented landscape as a flackering of vines and recurring gashes of red soil. There was also the occasional mountain crest like a heap of unquarried blue-metasl.

  The old man said to his companion, ‘At least we can enjoy the thought of wine, but that won’t anaesthetise us.’

  He laughed in his dry accusatory way. She regretted that, in the haste of departure, after a frenzied night of hallucination and barbed attack, she had forgotten wine and food of any kind, whereas everyone else in the wooden compartment seemed over-provisioned: the crusty bread, the purple bottles they held to their lips, hunks of salami to be sawn at, and rounds of cheese smelling of goat; in one instance, gobbets of truffled pâté de foie conveyed by fingers as refined as the bread on which the stufflay, the flesh dimpling with a diamond or two, the bosom on which the crumbs tumbled as black as the inlay of truffle itself.

  The newcomers were lulled at last by motion, the alternate shuffling and hurtling of the train, and the sound of salami skins constantly stirred by the feet of children passing between the rows of knees.

  At one point a young mother opened her blouse and offered an enormous breast to her two-year-old, who fastened on it, cheeks working as though he meant to get the whole thing down.

  The old man took his companion’s hand. ‘That is how it was in the beginning, with Stavroula, at Mikhali. So it should be at the end too—in the after life—if we didn’t know there isn’t any.’

  Sight of the suckling child seemed, mercifully, to nourish him.

  ‘Why should you say “at the end”?’

  He sighed. ‘It can’t last for ever. Surely we must arrive soon?’

  ‘Another three-quarters of an hour,’ she told him with a simulated authority.

  The young woman appeared to be staring at the hands of the peasant opposite, at the encrustations of dirt beneath the broken nails, as thick fingers broke off a corner of crust. She shivered, it could have been from hunger. The widow turned away so as to avoid noticing.

  Just then the old fellow flung himself back in his corner, eyes closed, face as yellow as the varnished boards against which it was pinned. He was very frail. The young woman squeezed the handful of bones she was holding. His face was more than ever that of a Byzantine saint, used up in obeisance, less to God
than to masochism and fatality.

  Or onanism. The widow had taken a pederast en premières noces, and survived her experience.

  Against her better judgment she was moved by the devotion of the old man’s companion, her putting up a hand and touching his forehead. A daughter, perhaps? A mistress would have withdrawn by now. Wives are more matter-of-fact.

  Could he be ill? she inquired.

  The young woman replied, ‘Not ill. He is tired. Sûrement il n’est que fatigué.

  But must have found her diagnosis too glib, for immediately she produced a little bottle from her bag, and looked round for a means of administering what the widow knew to be drops, from having nursed and buried two husbands, and one who wasn’t.

  The widow offered a couple of fingers of Evian. She derived visible consolation from her own charitable act.

  After taking the draught, from a glass provided, again, by the widow (which she scoured out with a clean napkin and a generous splurge of the Evian on its being returned to her) the old fellow dozed a little, watched over by his tender companion. If it might not have seemed improper in the circumstances, the widow would have questioned her on their relationship, nationality, place of residence, income, in fact all those details which demonstrate whether an individual is sociably acceptable.

  The film of a smile veiled the face of the young woman seated opposite. The peasants gazed while cleaning behind their lips with their tongues. Once or twice the sleeper scratched inside his shirt with gestures the widow condemned as lacking in refinement. The two-year-old wet himself. C’est écœurant, the widow considered, les enfants qui ne sont pas élevés au delà du niveau des bêtes …, while the old man and the strewn salami skin continued breathing.

  The widow could not have restrained herself a moment longer from embarking on her questionnaire, if the old man, after tearing so restlessly at his chest that a button flew off the shirt above the waitscoat, had not opened his eyes and sprung out of his corner.