She was grinning up. ‘Darling, you may be brave, but a girl’s feet aren’t the enemy. What about finding something else we could do together?’
He was saved by the ginger baby.
Brandishing its rattle at the end of a hairy arm, it screamed, ‘You’re hogging the lieutenant, Mummy! Poor Baby, must have a turn.’
The colonel’s crotch was almost as possessive as Margie Gilchrist’s, and certainly more developed than her breasts.
‘Eddie,’ the sultana called across the deck, ‘save me the waltz. A waltz is what I’m dying for.’ To illustrate, she swooned so elaborately that she brought her swaggie partner down.
At that moment the music stopped and Eddie Twyborn escaped from the muscular embrace of ginger arms.
While they were all laughing, stamping, shouting, clapping, he scuttled down the companionway into the smelly-clean bowels of a ship and the asylum of his cabin. When he had bolted his door, taken off his clothes, and shot La Rochefoucauld into a corner, he lay down—expecting what?
All night, it seemed, giggles and explosions, a traffic of clumsy, spongy feet filled the corridor. At intervals a handle was rattled, at others almost wrenched off.
Margie Gilchrist’s exploratory vulva, or alternately the colonel’s opulent crotch, was forced against his sleep.
Fremantle, 4 mars 1920
Said there would never be another diary, and here it is (like masturbation) in that old cahier I found amongst Angelos’s belongings—the stationer’s imprint A. Diamantis, 26 rue du Commerce, Smyrne (the French touch hovering over every Greek of a certain age and any pretensions).
But Fremantle, the first glimpse, the first whiff of a fate which can never be renounced, is enough to drive the pretensions out of any expatriate Australian.
A party organised for sight-seeing in Perth this morning. It ended up as Angie Parsons, Margs Gilchrist, Colonel ‘the Baby’ Wilbraham-Edwards, and a widow hurtling back into circulation, Mrs Merv ‘call me Dawn’ Pilbeam. I gave belly-wobbles as my excuse for not joining; might be a drag on their sport. The party accepted my reasons, while not wholly convinced. They tottered down the gangway on the first stage of their fun-finding, the ladies precarious on their heels, the colonel waving back. All soon quenched. No heat, or is it the glare? more quenching than that of Fremantle.
After letting the party make its getaway, I went down into the town. Rusted railway-lines are strips of red, solidified heat. Wharfies sweating round their hairy navels. I am the stranger of all time, for all such hairy bellies an object of contempt—a Pom, or worse, a suspected wonk. If only one had the courage to stick a finger in the outraged navel and await reactions. Nothing minces so daintily as an awakened male.
Dream streets: the tiny houses in maroon or shit-colour brick. Paint-blisters on brown woodwork. Festoons of iron doilies which suggest melting caramel. Blank, suetty faces of women framed in grubby lace or muslin curtains, as they peer out in search of something to whet their interest. A little pomeranian dog, white coat with patches of pink eczema. An ageing blonde stands holding the dog to her bosom, fat dissolving on her vast arms. A gold armlet eating into a fatty biceps, the neatly folded, obsessively laundered hankie held in place by this dented gold circlet.
Oh, God, but I feel for them, because I know exactly—they are what I am, and I am they—interchangeable.
Perhaps I should have gone with the Hoorah Party, fun-finding in Perth. Fremantle is something to be passed over because so painfully personal. No doubt that’s why I chose it—the expatriate masochist and crypto-queen.
Drank a schooner in a tiled bar. The acid smell, not quite urine, of draught beer. The ‘head’ forming as a red hand pulls on the joystick. The barmaid’s rattling cough accompanied by a blast of morning gin.
One old professional blue-nosed soak, a finger crooked above the slops in his glass, tries to engage the interloper.
O.S.: Owdyer findut, eh? in Fremantle.
ME: All right, I suppose. Yes, all right. [Hopeful laughter]
O.S.: Not all the Poms do. An’ I can’t see why. [His turtle’s neck at work as he swallows the last of the slops.]
ME: I’m not a Pom.
O.S.: Go on! You’re not? [He stands looking in need of a reassurance he does not expect to get.] What are yer, then?
ME: [because it’s useless to explain.] I’m a kind of mistake trying to correct itself.
Too much for Fremantle. The silence hits me in the small of the back, like the sheet of frosted glass with BAR engraved on a lyre of ferns.
I am in the street. I am the Resurrection and the Dead, or more simply, the eternal deserter in search of asylum. I did not leave Angelos, but might have done so. I did not desert from the army because it would have been too difficult. In such situations you’re sucked in deeper, while remaining a deserter at heart.
At a draper’s I buy for five shillings a cardigan in grey string. Stagger out again into the glare not knowing why I’ve made my purchase, except that it might encourage a humility I’ve never been able to achieve. And there, oh God, is the Greek shop I’ve been expecting while dreading.
SNACKS DINNERS SODAS SUNDAES
ALL HOURS
PROP: CON ASPERGIS
Will Con the Prop recognise the con?
At the Greek’s there is a soft, sticky gloom, the Greek concession to Fremantle’s version of Australian brown: an atmosphere made up of frying fat (oil, dripping, or a mixture of both) synthetic ‘flavours’ mingled with freezing gusts, light filtered through stained glass on to bas reliefs of dusty, brown-gold nymphs. The usual assortment of clotted sauce bottles, cruets and fly-specked ‘mee-news’.
I sit and wait at a stained table. For a moment I am tempted to smear my throat and wrists with tomato sauce, snuffle it up through my nostrils, and fall across the table, some kind of Greek sacrifice crossed with an Australian fate—lie there for poor Con to find and misinterpret.
He comes out through the bead curtain, a thickset, short-arsed man, thin on top, but with wisps of damp black hair sprouting from various parts of his body. Thick arms hanging alongside the stained apron. The inevitable wedding ring conspicuously gold on a finger swollen by kitchen rites. For the customer, Con is wearing a golden smile, while Greek eyes wonder whether the Turk has arrived.
E.: What’uv we got for dinner, Con? [The Greek can’t know about this hearty self evolved solely for his benefit.]
CON.: Good fress fiss. Tsips. Stike ’n’ onions. Stike ’n’ eggs. All very spessul.
E.: Then echeis kephtehthes?
CON.: No kephtehthes. [Tongue held against the palate produces that clicking noise which is the sound of Greek negation.] You spick Grick, eh? [The Greek eyes again suspicious.]
E.: How I speak Greek!
CON.: You not Grick. Where you learn?
E.: In another life. In Byzantium.
[The Greek roars for this mad joke before steering into safer waters.]
CON.: What you teck for dinner?
E.: Knowing the Greek, whatever he decides I must teck.
CON.: [relieved by this lesser madness.] You teck fiss. Fiss is good. [He calls the order through the bead curtain.]
Two boys have come out, one of a superior teen age, and a small inquisitive roly-poly. If the youth is inquisitive too, he has learnt to disguise it. The father, muttering in the background, tells them he has on his hands some kind of foreign, Greek-speaking madman.
CON.: [returning to the foreground.] You titch my boys Grick, sir. Ross and Phil don’t wanter learn their own language. [The older boy prowls in an agony of disgust against the far wall of the café. He would like to dissociate himself from this communicative father.]
CON.: Ross make big progress at ’ighschool. ’E’ll study Law.
E.: Poor bugger!
CON.: Eh?
E.: Good on ’im!
[Ross can’t take any more. He stalks between the tables and out the shop door, a disdainful Greek imitation of the emu. The father is occupied p
rofessionally, but the roly-poly PHIL is fascinated by what is new.]
P.: [very softly, as he examines a heap of spilt salt on the surface of the table.] Where you from?
E.: From here.
[The roly-poly’s lip, his downcast eyes, are disbelieving.]
P.: You been away for long?
E.: Yes, ages—at the War.
P.: [acquisitively] Got any souvenirs on yer?
E.: Don’t go in for souvenirs. There’s reminders enough, if you want them, in your mind.
P.: No helmuts? Byernets? Didn’t you ever kill someone?
E.: I expect I did.
P.: Got any medals?
E.: I lost it.
[The questions are becoming intolerable, and only beginning. The customer gets up and is preparing to leave.]
P.: Hey, yer order, mister!
[For CON is at this moment returning with it, mummified in yellow batter, beside the mound of glistening chips.]
CON.: You no want yer good fiss dinner? [The incredulous wedding ring on the Greek’s stumpy, tufted finger; all the best men are ringed.]
E.: Oh, I want all right—yes! But somehow always miss the bus …
[Puts down some money and escapes into the outer glare, which blinds at least temporarily.]
‘But who will I say?’
‘You needn’t say anybody, need you? If she’s in the garden I’ll just go out.’
It was too much for the young parlourmaid. She had reddened all the way up her neck. The points of her cap were quivering for what she had been taught was an offence against accepted behaviour.
‘Mrs Twyborn won’t like that.’ The girl had begun to prickle with tears of anger.
‘She was never all that orthodox herself.’
The situation was something the maid’s starch was unable to protect her against, so she turned and blundered out in the direction of the servants’ quarters.
He was left with this house in which the owners had gone on living without his assistance. He wondered what part he had played in their lives during his absence, perhaps no more than they in his own unwilling memory: a series of painful, washed-out flickers. Unless those who lead what are considered real lives see the past as an achieved composite of fragments, like a jig-saw from which only some of the details are missing, or cannot be fitted.
Since encouraging his parents’ maid to surrender her responsibility here he was, surrounded by all the details of the classic jig-saw waiting for him to put them together, more alarmingly, to fit himself, the missing piece, into a semblance of real life. He could hear a tap dripping (there had always been a tap dripping in the cloakroom). Hanging from a peg there was the rag hat the Judge used to wear when he went fishing with his mates Judge Kirwan and Mr Mulcahy K.C. Opulence still showed through the texture of scuffed rugs; and on the Romanian mat, the place where Ruffles had pissed was only slightly darkened by time. He hesitated, dazed by the perspective of other rooms, opening through light and memory into a blur of acacia fronds and hibiscus trumpets.
He progressed slowly to the far side of what was referred to as the ‘drawing room’, with its crumpled chintz, sunken springs (‘natural comfort’, Eadie called it) Town Cries, figurines, paperweights, the inherited Dutch chest shedding its marquetry scales, the unnatural photographs of relations, friends, associates, assembled over an indiscriminate lifetime (himself in a white tunic, lace-up boots, simpering from beneath a fringe while holding a sword). Now defenceless (supposedly an adult) standing on the ridge between the French doors, from which he must descend by way of the discoloured marble steps, the corroded, unstable handrail, into Eadie’s ‘beloved’ garden (as her women friends, the Joanie Golsons, referred to it) this morning a chaos of suffocating scents and emotions. He had to face it. Now or never. Must. And did.
And there was Eadie, crouched on her knees with a trowel in her hand, her beam broader in one of those skirts she had invariably worn, a miracle of Scottish weave and an intermingling of dogs’ hair clotted with compost or manure. Oblivious as far as you could tell. As were the six or seven little red dogs, scratching, swivelling on their rumps, sniffing, one of them lifting a leg behind Eadie’s back on a border of sweet alyssum.
To an outburst of barely synchronised clocks in the house behind, and the little terriers giving tongue, she turned on her haunches, and squinted through the smoke from a wilting cigarette at the intruder in her garden.
Making an uglier face she asked, ‘Who are you? Didn’t Mildred answer the bell? Who …?’ then went off into a long whimpering moan, wrinkling up, coughing, gasping.
‘Oh!’ she cried. ‘What you’ve done to us, Eddie! Whyyy?’
She hung her head, and if the cigarette hadn’t slipped from her lips down inside her front, the situation might have grown intolerable, but in the circumstances she had to slap and grab at her blouse, shouting, ‘God … damn …’ before retrieving the source of her wrath and flinging it into a patch of snail-fretted acanthus.
She clambered to her feet, tottering on legs seized by cramp, dropping the trowel from stiff fingers, again threatened with a landslide of emotion, while the terriers pounced, one of them worrying at a trouser-cuff, sniffing to decide the category to which this unidentified person, possibly no stranger, belonged.
‘Shouldn’t we embrace?’ The gruff warning in her voice at once established her as his mother; and as they advanced upon each other, still the victims of their diffidence, he saw that it was she who was beginning to take the initiative, while he, the passive object of her intentions, was drawn into the labyrinth of wrinkles, cigarette fumes, and more noticeable, a gust of early whiskey.
Wasn’t this what he had come for? He closed his eyes and let it happen.
He must have continued standing with them closed, for when it was over she demanded, out of a greed which had not been sated, ‘Come on, let me look at your eyes. Your eyes are what I’ve missed most.’
So he had to open up to the present, to her pair of brown ferrets, and must have repelled them, for she gasped and asked, ‘Are you hungry, darling? Arriving so early—and the Customs—the Customs always make one hungry. What about your luggage? Did Mildred take it up to your room? She looks frail, but she’s surprisingly tough—only idle.’
‘I haven’t got it. It’s at the hotel.’
‘I hope you’re not going to make us pay too dearly, Eddie, for being your parents.’
When more than likely Eadie intended he should be the one to pay for a relationship, the mysteries of which might never be solved.
‘You don’t always know,’ he mumbled, ‘whether it’s as difficult for people to have strangers staying, as it is—well, to stay with strangers.’
They were stranded looking at each other on the spot where drawing room became hall. Anywhere else it might have been unbearable to realise that the son with whom she had wrestled, perhaps even tried to throttle in the agony he had caused while forcing his way out of a womb where he was not wanted in the first place, had become the mirror-figure of herself. At least the doorway from drawing room to hall allowed her to shoot off into the dining room beyond, and avoid further exposure.
Then, with her back to him, she complained, ‘My nerves are on end,’ and poured herself a resounding whiskey.
Back still turned, she decided, ‘Thatcher will fetch your stuff from the hotel. Thatcher’s the gardener—no earthly use, except to take the dogs walking. I doubt anyone else would have him if we turned him loose. So Thatcher has become our fate.’
Once more mistress of herself, Thatcher, and most others, she returned from the dining room into the hall, thrust out her hand, and announced through that voracious smile, ‘Come and I’ll show you your room.’
As though he didn’t know it.
‘Is the mattress as hard as it used to be?’
But she did not seem to hear as they clumped thumping upstairs, shoulder bumping off shoulder, hands locked in sisterhood.
Delicacy must have overtaken Eadie, for she
left him alone in what had been, and evidently still was, his room. Nothing appeared to have been disturbed, neither objects such as books, trophies, a sea urchin on a window sill, nor the nightmares and unrealisable romances with which the narrow bed was still alive. He prodded it, and felt the same hair mattress on which he had done youthful penance. She had unlatched the shutters, but the glare of sunlight prevented him re-acquainting himself to any extent with the precipice outside, its fuzz of lantana scrub, nasturtiums, and a few precarious pittosporums. Considering that the geography was so little altered, the furniture disposed to receive him back, there was no reason why he should not resume both his rational and unconscious lives, if the unreason with which he was cursed, and worse than that, a rebellious body, would allow him to.
In the meantime he prowled inside the fortress of his room, stepping as softly as he could in case his mother might be listening for his movements, to interpret them. Eadie="Eddie." It was true, but in spite of the war years and the aftermath of peace, he had not yet learnt to accept that he was Eddie Twyborn, the son of Mr Justice Twyborn—the incalculable factor. He dreaded Edward more than Eadie, who was himself in disguise.
He continued prowling, softer than before, running his finger down the spines, the titles of dustless books: the rejected Profession—Private Equity, Real Property, The Law of Contract, The Law of Torts; The Prisoner of Zenda and Robinson Crusoe; the Kipling birthday presents (‘he’s such a splendid writer, darling, as you’ll appreciate later on’); Swinburne’s reeking perfumes, secret orgasms; The Man in the Iron Mask—the Bible.
He opened the last, and in it found, in a handwriting gone green with age, the characters cramped by sincerity and doubts:
For Eddie
on the occasion of his 13th birthday
from his father
Edward Twyborn
He might have protested oh horror horror my own poor father if there hadn’t been a knocking at the door.
The Twyborn Affair Page 15