The car did not make for the homestead, but for a cottage closer to the river and surrounded by the expected complement of sheds, yards, iron water-tanks, and what must be the dunny. Hawthorns were crowding in upon another deep veranda, providing a break-wind, if also probably a break-light for the rooms inside.
Don Prowse turned on a sourly beatific smile for one who might have been the bride of a shotgun marriage instead of an unwanted offsider wished on to him by his employer. ‘Snugger than it looks, and at the week-end you can bugger off to Woolambi if it suits.’
Eddie Twyborn felt the complete misfit in Don Prowse’s aggressively masculine world; whereas a relationship was waiting to develop between himself, the huggermugger buildings, even a bitter landscape. If the river appeared at first sight hostile, it was through the transience of its coursing waters to one who longed for the reality of permanence.
He was made clumsy and unreal by the manager’s continued remarks, by his attempts at friendliness, by the man’s insistence on shouldering the cabin-trunk again, on grabbing hold of all the baggage if he could get possession of it—in doing the man’s work in fact. It was humiliating.
It might have become worse, creating a puppet tittuping helplessly through slush and puddles, if a woman hadn’t appeared, neither young, nor all that old, at any rate her hair still black, her cheeks as tanned and ravaged by the climate as those of the ‘Red Indian’ stockmen loping on their lean horses.
‘Mrs Tyrrell,’ Prowse grunted by way of introduction under the stress of shouldering the trunk and carrying the suitcase.
Mrs Tyrrell mumbled through a smile, licking her thin, natural lips. She revealed two brown, upper fangs with nothing but her tongue to fill the gap. She was dressed all in black, whether from grief or for practical reasons, it was not possible to tell. She simpered a lot, and hugged a bobbled crochet shawl round narrow shoulders. In the lower regions, what had once been a laundered apron had failed to protect her practical black from a storm of flour.
Anyway, Eddie Twyborn had hopes of this Mrs Tyrrell, her bright black eyes already alight with confidences and an offer of sleazy kindliness.
‘Bet you’re hungry, mister,’ she said. ‘Fix yer some breakfast. Bet Mr Prowse won’t say no to a second breakfast. ’E’s a good doer.’
At the same time she started a struggle for the valise with which the young man had been left. He clung on desperately, as though possession of it were his only means of self-assertion.
‘Independent, are we?’ Mrs Tyrrell cackled through her gap, a detachment of mongrel hens joining in as they shot across the slush from under her feet.
‘Never thought about it—frankly,’ he gasped.
Such strangeness strangely expressed must have dried up her repartee, for she fell silent, one hand on the disputed valise. He could feel Mrs Tyrrell’s skin slithering against his own, hard and greasy at the same time, the broad golden wedding-band turned by age to the colour of brass.
So they staggered on, and into the house, allies, it could have been, against the manager’s overtly masculine back.
‘This do?’ the latter asked.
He released the trunk, which crumped on the boards and shook the whole structure of the room.
‘Yes, it’s fine!’ said Eddie Twyborn out of a deathly sinking.
He stood with his hands on his hips as he had seen men do, and smiled, while the others read his thoughts, no doubt correctly: Don Prowse grinning through the ginger stubble, Mrs Tyrrell bird-eyed beneath a row of little jet black hair-rosettes.
If they would only withdraw, the room might become his, just as the imagination can clothe a skeleton with flesh, even kindle a spirit in it. They did leave him to it finally: the stretcher with the army blankets, shelves curtained by a straight length of faded cretonne, a frayed mat on the dusty boards, on the chest an enamel candle-stick, its broken candle aslant over gobbets of stale wax, on the wall a deal-framed glass to mirror his jaunty disarray.
He was alone at least—‘independent’ as Mrs Tyrrell might have described it.
He could hear her in the kitchen. He could smell the mutton chops she was charring, the cabbage-and-potato she was ‘frying up’.
‘A good-lookun young cove, Peggy,’ he heard Don Prowse’s voice.
Then her cackle, tailing off into a sigh, and something about ‘a mother’, and ‘women is only pack ’orses’, through the stench, the spitting of fat.
Should he go out to them?
After their delayed breakfast, his second in the manager’s case, of chops and veg followed by wedges of yellow sponge and dobs of enormous floury scone, Don advised, ‘Better settle in, Ed. We’ll talk things over later.’ He showed his teeth in an educated smile, while Mrs Tyrrell stood watching from beneath her hair-rosettes, lips parted to reveal the cavern behind her gap.
‘Gotter unpack,’ she murmured.
While the jackeroo did just that the cook came in and draped herself over a deckchair as faded as the cretonne curtain masking the shelves in the room which was becoming Eddie Twyborn’s.
Mrs Tyrrell said, sighing, scratching an armpit under the black, bobbled shawl, ‘You gotter take what comes, I’ve always said. Man or woman. Prowse wouldn’t understand that. You would,’ she added.
‘Why would I?’
‘Because you’re yer mother’s son,’ she said, peering at him and licking her lips.
‘How do you know?’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m the mother of seventeen Tyrrells—a football team of boys—but the girls is what counts.’
‘I’m a boy,’ said Eddie Twyborn.
‘We know you are,’ Mrs Tyrrell agreed, munching on her mauve gums. ‘The boys!’ she munched. ‘Bet yer mum would’ve been glad of a girl.’
‘I don’t think so. She would have preferred to be barren, I think.’
‘Go on! There’s no mother wouldn’t ’uv chose ter be a mother. Not even our poor Else, with that bloody Kevun pokin’ the hell out of ’er. Gets what ’e wants, then ’e beats ’er up. We ’ave ’im put in, but the damage is done. The kiddies are worth it, Else says. Arr, the women!’
Peggy Tyrrell sucked her gap passionately.
‘Marcia—Mrs Lushington—give a beautiful quilted dressin’-gown after Kev put the fifth in Elsie’s oven. Arr, Mrs Lushington’s good—a lovely woman.’
Mrs Tyrrell was writhing in the faded chair, which must have done the P. & O. run under Lushington auspices. ‘Both my girls,’ she said, eyeing the tube of toothpaste he had ruptured with his heel in Edgecliff, ‘both was married with their own teeth still in place. Only lost ’em afterwards. Thing about teeth,’ she said, ‘you don’t ’ave to clean ’em if you ’aven’t got ’em.’
‘You don’t,’ he agreed.
She had begun eyeing the underpants he was bringing out.
‘Wouldn’tcher like somethun to eat? Prowse is gone with the men ’n won’t be back to lunch.’
‘Which men?’
‘Well—Matt ’n Denny—the men!’
Presumably the ‘Red Indians’.
He didn’t hanker after lunch; he only wanted Peggy Tyrrell to leave him alone. Which presently she did, sighing and burping. Glancing round, he caught sight of her through the doorway, moving plates of sponge and plates of scones around the kitchen table as though playing a game of draughts with herself.
She was what is called a ‘trick’, and he knew that he would be glad of her.
After arranging his possessions, all of them objects which might remain dispensable, he left the house to which he had been consigned, and walked along the river bank. He half-expected Peggy Tyrrell to follow. When she didn’t he looked back, and sure enough, there she was, hesitating on the edge of the dry-rotted veranda, in a gap between hawthorns, tightening the bobbled shawl around her shoulders. He turned away and hurried on, persuading himself he was not guilty of betraying a relationship so recently formed.
But he felt guilty, and gashed a glaringly new boot in tripping ove
r a rock.
Would he ever succeed in making credible to others the new moleskins and elastic sides? At least people were more ready to accept material façade than glimpses of spiritual nakedness, cover this up with whatever you will, pomegranate shawl and spangled fan, or moleskins and elastic sides. Joan Golson had accepted a whole vacillating illusion, romantically clothed and in its wrong mind. But on entering the world of Don Prowse and the Lushingtons he suspected he would find the natives watching for lapses in behaviour. All the more necessary to cultivate his alliance with Mrs Tyrrell: women whose wombs have been kicked to pieces by a football team of sons, and who have married off daughters still in possession of their natural teeth should be more inclined to sympathise with the anomalies of life.
He forged farther along the river, stumbling over tussock, stimulated by rushing water, repelled by the patches of virulent green which recurred in this coldly feverish landscape, then turned in towards what he sensed to be forbidden ground, the land surrounding the Lushington homestead.
Far from betraying the lives of its owners to strangers, denuded trees and shrubs showed up the stranger in his trespass. Would Greg Lushington descend, or was he out with the manager and his ‘men’, super-managing his barren slopes? There was no sign that anyone inhabited the house; not that this is ever indication. You could hear in the distance a barking of dogs as they jerked at their chains and fretted the iron and woodwork of kennels.
At the foot of the wintry Lushington garden, where thorns of naked Chinese pear caught hold of the intruder’s sleeves and shoulders and sycamore seed was drizzled down the nape of his neck, there was a basalt wall surrounding three headstones. Eddie Twyborn was on the point of pushing open the elaborately designed, iron gate, a rich folly if ever there was one, to give more attention to the graves and their inscriptions, but became distracted by the sound of the loose planks of the ‘Bogong’ bridge shuffled together by the passage of a car.
It was a black, mud-spattered Packard, slowly driven, but with a possessive confidence, towards the house. The trespasser ducked behind the skeleton trees as though caught out in the spangles and embroidered pomegranates of the European drag he liked to think he had abandoned.
He walked back quickly the way he had come. The brown waters of the river reflected the thoughts of one who was unwise enough to unmask them on its bank. The river froze him. He could not imagine what he was doing at ‘Bogong’—or anywhere, for that matter.
Mrs Tyrrell was standing waiting, he was relieved to see, on the edge of the dry-rotted veranda.
‘Marcia come back,’ she told him. ‘She’ll ’uv brought me some-think. Marcia brings the loveliest gifts.’
‘She must be all right then?’ He tried it out in the manager’s voice.
Mrs Tyrrell sucked her gap before answering. ‘She’s right enough. Nobody’s ever all right. ’Aven’t you found that out, love?’ She ended up in a cackle, in which he joined, while avoiding contact with a callused hand.
The cottage was full of dusk, smoke, and a smell of roasting mutton.
‘Better take a squint at me shoulder,’ Mrs Tyrrell immediately announced.
Satisfied, she slammed the oven shut again.
‘Arr, dear, the winters,’ she sighed, ‘they make a person cry!’ then, more cheerfully inspired, ‘ ’Ere, you little bugger, why don’t-cher make yerself useful and light the bloody lamp? Prowse’ll be back any minute an’ say we’re not dermestercated.’
While he fumbled with and lit the lamp, she busied herself investigating a cabbage for slugs. ‘I’ll like ’avin’ you around,’ she told him; ‘you an’ me ’ull get on like one thing.’ She sighed again, disposing of a colony of slugs. ‘It’s the girls I miss out ’ere. Never the boys. Not that you isn’t a boy,’ she realised. ‘But different. A woman can speak out ’er thoughts.’
He should not have felt consoled, but was, to be thus accepted by Peggy Tyrrell. The flowering lamp he set between them on the oilcloth made a little island of conspiracy for the woman’s blazing face and the pale ghost of what people took to be Eddie Twyborn.
Presently they heard a truck, boots, a slammed fly-screen door. Eddie would have chosen to delay the manager’s presence, but it was soon with them in the dining-kitchen, not least the stench of his recent exertions.
Don Prowse was overpoweringly cheerful. ‘Quite domesticated, aren’t we?’ His hands sounded like sandpaper.
When he had gone to throw water at his torso and rid himself to some extent of the stench, Peggy Tyrrell winked at her ally.
‘Dermestercation! What did I tell yer? Can’t get over ’ow ’is wife walked out on ’im. You’ll ’ear all that when ’e’s warmed up.’
He returned, the hair above his forehead glittering in a watered, orange slick. He produced a bottle from the lower regions of a hobbledy dresser and poured himself a handsome tot.
‘Learned the lay of the land, have we?’ Always smiling, his teeth were his own, and good. ‘That’s the dunny, if the old woman didn’t tell yer,’ he pointed with his pipe through a smoked-up window. ‘It’s a two-seater—for company.’
Eddie Twyborn said, ‘I’ve never done it in company, and perhaps I couldn’t.’
The manager grunted. ‘Perhaps you could in a place like this. A judge’s son could get ground down like anybody else.’
Eddie Twyborn might have agreed.
Perhaps Don Prowse realised. ‘ ’Ere,’ he said, ‘you’d better have one for the first night. Everybody finds ’e depends on ’is grog in these parts. When you get yerself a bottle, you can write yer name on it, and I’ll write mine on mine.’
They drank their whiskey in company. Eddie was glad of this employment for his hands, and it made him feel more masculine.
‘Didn’t he say anything?’ he asked.
‘Who said what?’
‘Greg. Didn’t he ask to see me, perhaps? He’s my father’s friend.’
‘Greg’s a slow old bastard. Never know what ’e’s thinking. ’E’ll ask all in good time—whoever yer father is.’
They knocked back the whiskey, and the old woman produced a blackened shoulder out of the oven.
‘Greg’s off again—round the world,’ Prowse informed them while carving. ‘He likes the travel life. And why not? If you can afford it.’
Prowse must have been very well paid not to have sounded vindictive.
‘Is Marcia going too?’ asked Eddie.
‘How—Marcia? What do you know about Marce?’
‘Nothing. But she’s back. I saw her driving the Packard up the road.’
Prowse hacked the black mutton and Peggy Tyrrell relieved the cabbage of a boiled slug.
‘No,’ said Prowse, ‘Marcia’s not going with Greg. She sort of belongs more to “Bogong”—not that you’d think it at first sight.’ The carvers slithered into the gravy. ‘Marcia’s of the land—if you know what I mean. Greg only inherited it.’
They sat down and began their meal. Everyone, it seemed, even the newcomer, was involved in a primitive ritual, no grace, but plenty of tomato sauce.
Just as Eddie had sighted yet another slug, the telephone almost tore itself from the wall, and the manager leaped at it.
‘Yes, sir … Yes … Yes, Mr Lushington. Yes … In the morning … Eddie was asking whether … Yes …’
When he had returned to his creaking chair Don Prowse somewhat unnecessarily informed them, ‘That was the boss. ’E’ll see yer in the morning, Eddie. Wants to take a look at the wethers on Bald Hill.’
They made further play with their mutton.
‘I told you,’ said Prowse, spitting out some gristle, ‘Greg is slow, but wouldn’t forget—least of all ’is friend’s son.’ A second shred of gristle followed the first.
Mrs Tyrrell produced the spotted dick.
After their meal, as he smoked his pipe and drank another whiskey or three, the manager grumbled, ‘It’s the winters that get you down on the Monaro. If you could escape the worst of it—drive up nort
h and thaw out on the coast for a coupler months—like the moneyed bastards do—or Europe.’ A tear of frustration, alcohol, or retrospect had appeared surprisingly in a corner of one of Prowse’s eyes. ‘The winters were what the wife couldn’t stand. She walked out on me—I’d better tell you before others do. It was the cold. Well, good luck to ’er! She was never much use to a man. It’s the kid I miss. Haven’t seen ’er since they went.’
Mrs Tyrrell had continued sitting in a corner, yawning, and holding her forearms. Old tales left her untouched. She might have been a gnarled, half-burnt tree stump.
If Prowse’s confidences touched Eddie, it could have been in the light of his own contemplated defections from Angelos Vatatzes. He could smell the night trains he had never caught towards a hypothetical freedom somewhere beyond the Côte Morte. In the front bedroom of this creaking house the departed Mrs Prowse, all pallor and resentment, might have been awaiting her orang-outang on the iron bedstead with the brass knobs.
If he had been a woman in body as well as psyche, Eddie might have put out a tentative hand and touched an orange paw.
On realising that it would have been for his own comfort rather than the sufferer’s, he shivered and suggested, ‘Think I ought to be turning in.’
‘You’ve got something there, Eddie.’ It was again hearty, banal, masculine; never more masculine than when they went outside together, backs at the oblique, pissing on the frost.
‘Christ!’ chattered Prowse. ‘Freeze the balls off yer, wouldn’t it?’
The newcomer had begun to feel that perhaps he was more inured to cold from life in the trenches, not to say exposure during a female existence.
Or he could have been numbed by exhaustion and the situation he found himself in. As he fell asleep under the army blankets and the threadbare bedside mat, Peggy Tyrrell could be heard through the wall mumbling a drowsy rosary. Then there was the slamming of the screen door as Prowse went outside again. It occurred to Eddie that the manager had only just relieved himself, but could be—who cared? moved to sit alone one side of the two-seater dunny, chattering with cold, black mutton, and retrospect.
The Twyborn Affair Page 19