The Twyborn Affair

by Patrick White

  Sliding off the willingly passive Blue Mule, it was Eddie Twyborn who felt old, stiff, and formal.

  Mr Lushington dismounted with considerable professional dignity. On his feet he looked more than ever pear-shaped, even toadlike, without losing his aura of authority and wealth.

  The stockmen flung into automatic action and in the Twentieth Century did the sort of thing that has always been expected of serfs: snapping twigs, kindling fire, filling quart-pots, setting these to boil. The democratic spirit of Australia prevailed only after congealed chops were produced from saddle-pouches and the quarts had boiled: men and boss sank their teeth into fatty chops, trying to outdo one another in a display of ugliness and appetite.

  Mrs Tyrrell had supplied Eddie with chops, but he could not have joined in the tea ceremony if Greg Lushington had not eased his own blackened quart in the direction of his friend’s son.

  Blinded by smoke and steam, scalded by the tea in which he sank his mouth, Eddie lowered his eyelids to convey his appreciation of a ritual.

  Judging by his smile and the expression refracted by the spectacles, Mr Lushington was delighted, but Don Prowse swallowed what could have been a lump of gristle. He began to cough, and frown his orange frown.

  ‘Get you a quart, Ed—first trip to Woolambi.’

  Towards the end of the meal he offered Eddie a sip from his. The tea was by then cooler, if not less bitter. He was able to take several gulps. The manager sat nursing his knees, looking along the river as though to dissociate himself from his own gesture.

  ‘Moth! Bloody moth!’ Denny the son of Jim began shouting, golloping, beating ineffectually with a torn-off gum-switch at a creature which had fluttered out from the lee of their rock shelter. ‘Make good bait if you can catch the bitches.’

  ‘Set down, Denny,’ his father advised.

  Denny obeyed, though Captain and Cis continued snapping awhile at the air which had contained the departed moth.

  Mr Lushington said, ‘That’s one of the bogong moths. There’s a season of the year when they gather in the mountains—a regular moth corroboree. The blacks used to go up, and feast on them, and grow fat.’

  Their lips and cheeks glistening, the whites looked replete and drowsy, if not with moths, with mutton chops. Only Eddie Twyborn felt nauseated. To stave off his queasiness he almost broke silence disgracefully by returning to the subject of Marcia, but swallowed the impulse along with his sensation of nausea.

  The party staggered up. They packed their tackle. Except for tooth-picking, the work day seemed over. Well, the evenings set in early at ‘Bogong’. The inky shadows were already gathering along the river flat and in the mountain clefts.

  The party rode off in the direction of evening fires.

  Rounding the shoulder of a hill where briars had taken over, Mr Lushington said, ‘Root out the briars, Prowse. That’s somethun else for the winter months. Get this boy to help yer. That’s what ’e’s here for. Experience.’

  The boss left them the other side of the loose-jointed bridge, followed by his terrier pack.

  ‘See you, Eddie,’ he called back; then with a somewhat diffident daring, ‘You’ll have to come up and meet my wife—who knows your mum.’

  Eddie felt too tired as they rode towards their own quarters, but must draw Prowse on Marcia, unless Peggy Tyrrell made that unnecessary.

  ‘How’re you doin’, Ed?’ Their knees bumped; it might have been deliberately and with a forced heartiness on the manager’s part. ‘You look fucked out!’ He laughed, but not unkindly, or it may have been cajoled out of him by his mare’s fondling the bit with her tongue in anticipation of a feed of oats.

  Any evening Eddie Twyborn looked and felt fucked out. It was what he was there for, wasn’t it? He did, however, wonder, picking at the raw blisters on his hands. He derived a morbid pleasure from letting the water out of the blisters, farting after boiled cabbage, or mashed swede with the lumps still in it, listening to Prowse tell how Kath walked out taking Kim with her.

  ‘Kim’s the kid, is she? Why did you call her Kim, Don?’

  ‘Why not? It’s a name, isn’t it?’

  There was nothing to reply to that.

  ‘Any’ow,’ Prowse said, ‘I think it was Kath’s choice.’ He seemed satisfied that Eddie had given him the opportunity to blame his wife for something else.

  ‘What about Marcia? What’s she like?’

  ‘Another woman.’ He poured himself another whiskey; he had grown surly.

  Mrs Tyrrell was more forthcoming, if only slightly so, on an evening when Prowse said he had to go up to the homestead to a conference with Lushington and the accountant who was down from Sydney.

  ‘Marcia?’ Mrs Tyrrell hid a yawn behind her hand. ‘She was from Tilba way. That makes ’er foreign to some, but I was allus broadminded where foreigners is concerned. Anyways, she did well for ’erself catching Lushington. Cupboards full of lovely gowns. An’ furs put away in calico bags. Mrs Edmonds, ’oo ’elps, showed me the furs when she ’ad ’em out to air. Couldn’t let Marce go to the ball smellun of mothballs.’

  ‘Are we ever going to set eyes on Marce?’

  ‘Sure thing,’ Mrs Tyrrell munched. ‘She offen rides round the paddocks with Greg and Prowse. Or Prowse alone—it don’t worry. You can’t say she’s not a good sort, though some run ’er down—say she’s a stuck-up nobody from Tilba. They say—well, I’m not gunner repeat. Those are the ones she don’t wanter know. You can’t know everybody, can yer? Even I know that.’ She sighed and re-settled herself.

  ‘Yes, you’ll see Marce. When you’re wealthy you’ve got time to put in. Arr, it’s hard on the women—the wealthy ones along with the others. You can’t expect ’em to spend all their time readin’ the libr’y books or shakun the mothballs out of their furs.’ Peggy Tyrrell’s eyes were at their brightest, their blackest. ‘Lushington wanted a son. I reckon they must’uv give up after the third go. They’re all there,’ she said, ‘in the graveyard down below the house. Arr, dear,’ she sighed, ‘it’s the funerals I miss out ’ere. Never missed a funeral in town. Knew everybody like me own ’and. They allus invited me ter do the layun out.’

  She went to bed after that. The following day would be Sunday, and though reared a Catholic, she was looking forward to the Protestant service. Every third Sunday the Reverend Hannaford came out from Woolambi. On Sundays Peggy Tyrrell wore four extra teeth between her fangs. The teeth spent the week greening in a tumbler of water on her bedroom sill.

  He was coming to terms with his body. He had begun to live in accordance with appearances. His hands no longer broke out in blisters; his arms, if not muscular, were at least lithe and sinewy. Sometimes on a calm day, by snatches of winter sunlight, while straining fences, digging out rabbits, or following Prowse’s tractor to loop a chain round a clump of briars, he might take off his shirt, and the men would watch, not respectfully, but without showing too much disapproval: Prowse in his smelly overalls, Jim and Denny in their khaki shirts buttoned up to the throat, their frayed serge jackets discarded only at the height of summer; or old Lushington might ride by, apparently for the sole purpose of sharing with his friend the Judge’s son some joke which wasn’t. At first irritated by the old man’s partiality for an ignorant novice, the men finished by accepting a relationship based on education or class.

  Prowse possibly didn’t. It was difficult to fit the manager into any social category. He was as liable to lapse into educated speech as Greg Lushington would talk uneducated to his men.

  Prowse said, ‘I used to read before I married Kath. Ever read any Peacock, Eddie? Or Meredith? There’s a writer for you!’

  ‘No. My education was neglected. My father intended me for the Law.’ It wounded him to wound the Judge, and not so unintentionally.

  ‘Well, you missed something if you never read Headlong Hall or The Ordeal of Richard Feverell. Though it’s all gingerbread of course. I gave it up when I married and life became serious. Kath thought reading novels a waste
of time—they weren’t real. She was for magazines. She kidded herself she knew the people she’d seen once or twice on the social pages. She could talk about their homes, their clothes—their divorces, by the hour. It was her religion like.’

  Prowse poured himself another drink. ‘My old man warned me against getting bogged down in any sort of myth. Dad was an Anglican parson who lost his faith, then went broke on a place where Mexican thistle had taken over.’

  The parson father and the bookworm son were such unlikely apparitions that Eddie wished he had the courage to conjure up Eudoxia in the same weatherboard room.

  Prowse swallowed an ugly mouthful. ‘Went out into the paddock one night and shot ’imself through the mouth—amongst the bloody thistle.’

  Eddie began to feel an affection for poor bloody Prowse, which didn’t accord with his own intentions, and which probably would have earned him one on the jaw from that scabby fist.

  ‘You men!’ Peggy Tyrrell had come in from some outer darkness. ‘Yarn yer ’eads off if yez gets ’alf a chance—and accuse we women at the same time!’

  Eddie Twyborn was cantering home. It was a tranquil evening beneath a pale green sky soon to darken. Curlews could be heard calling in the tussock with an abstract melancholy which was curiously comforting. In bays scalloped from the river bank, cushions of white scum had collected, bobbing against the vigorous flow of brown water. A trout rose, and plopped back.

  He was content, with evening, with the scent of frost, his own smell, the stench of leather on a sweat-sodden horse.

  He had even developed a kind of affection for this gelded monstrosity the Blue Mule, dipping, swivelling, dislocating, then re-uniting in its various components beneath his thighs. When the animal snorted and shied. The tangled mane was cutting into the rider’s fingers. Before he started falling. A sawdust puppet dragged. Trampled amongst sparks from the road. Under this feverish green sky, curlew calls, cushions of bobbing grey-white scum, the gobbets of a horse’s vegetable dung, flow of blood, of water, of blood. Of the burst puppet. Fading into the green white. Drowned in crimson …

  The brakes were applied so violently, the chassis shuddered, the headlamps danced.

  ‘Hi! Ed, boy? Ed?’ It was Prowse’s voice, boots approaching stiffly over frosted ruts.

  The figure lying on the edge of the road began stirring. Eddie Twyborn, realising that he was still himself, grew conscious of the pains shooting through his ribs, legs, head. He must have been concussed by the fall. None of him was manageable, anyway by his own efforts but oh God, he was still here, if he wanted to be; he was not yet sure. He would have liked to eat an ice, a sorbet delicately flavoured with cantaloup, morello, or pistachio.

  Don Prowse was mumbling grunting panting as he encouraged dragged finally lifted. ‘Lucky I was out in the yard when the bloody horse got back.’

  ‘Poor old Mule. Nobody’s fault.’

  Their passage to the little runabout Prowse drove about the place, to work, was excruciating to say the least. Accomplished in the end, Eudoxia, deposed empress or current hetaira, would have liked to thank, or in some way reward, the sweaty brute who had carried her halfway across the Bithynian plain. She might even have allowed him to ravish her in one long painful orgasm. Instead, after being lumped on the tray of the vibrating Ford runabout, beside a coil of fencing wire, several spanners, a jack, and a spare can of petrol, Eddie Twyborn fainted.

  They discussed whether to transfer the patient to the Woolambi cottage hospital.

  ‘No, no,’ he protested, already belonging to a dun-coloured, draughty, weatherboard room, which light entered only when wind agitated the hawthorns outside; he had begun to associate light with the motion of his head against the pillow and hawthorn spikes scratching at glass.

  ‘No!’ he repeated.

  ‘Not if anythink ain’t broke. Not if the poor bugger don’t want it,’ Mrs Tyrrell insisted. ‘I’ve taken on worse ’n this. Nursed a family of seventeen, and a ’usband in the last stages of cancer.’

  He had a sudden vision of a withered dug flexed for action.

  Dr Yip agreed.

  Prowse had explained before the doctor’s arrival, ‘Doc’s got a touch of the Chow, Eddie, but a good bloke for all that.’

  The patient responded to an exotic eye, to the wind-burnt hands with under-cushions in crumpled pink. The doctor decided there was, in fact, nothing broken, perhaps out of deference to the sick man’s passionate wish not to be moved.

  They all took turns at mauling him, particularly his forehead: it had become their dearest possession, a talisman against thwarted love. He closed his eyes and let them get on with it.

  He overheard Peggy Tyrrell and Prowse, whose strength had been enlisted in lifting the body, quarrelling over a hard stool in a bedpan sent down from the homestead.

  ‘You can’t tell me …’ Peggy hissed.

  ‘I’m not trying to!’ Don’s voice was trembling with rage.

  You awoke on another occasion, and again it was a hand polishing the talisman of a forehead.

  It was the hand of old Lushington himself.

  Seated on a slat chair beside the iron stretcher he was got up in his usual pigskin leggings, the same cord riding breeches, and the straight-set cap in heather-mixture tweed which he had not thought of removing for his visit to a sickbed. From the angle at which he was sitting, the spectacles looked blank, like the headlamps of a car gone out for day.

  ‘Only came down to have a look,’ he remarked on whipping his hand away from the forehead. ‘You don’t want to exert yourself. Don’t feel you have to talk, Eddie. Half of what we say isn’t worthwhile, anyway.’ He heaved against the fragile, slatted chair. ‘That’s what I tell the wife, and she won’t agree. Most women are terrible mags.’

  Eddie closed his eyes. ‘I thought you were leaving—sir—for Europe.’

  ‘Yes—but not yet—but later.’

  Gregory Lushington had brought as offerings two irregular oranges, a wizened apple, and a brown banana. ‘It’s the best we can do locally.’

  He also fished out a couple of letters. ‘The mail. I’ll leave you to peruse it. And hope to see you about soon. Marcia—my wife—joins me.’

  When the visitor had gone Eddie continued holding the letters between the bones of his unconvincing fingers, breathing gently, eyes still closed. He must read his letters, but not just then.

  The next morning he was strong enough to make the effort. His fingers trembled, however. The first envelope when broached fell clattering amongst the egg-shells and the crusts of bread.

  Dearest Eddie,

  They rang to tell us. Needless to say I was horrified—but relieved to hear you had survived this alarming accident. Ethel Tucker’s husband George was killed outright, only recently, by landing on his head.

  To get you back and then almost to have lost you! I don’t know why I deserve such retribution, though no doubt your law-trained father could find a reason for it. Perhaps it is because I should never have been a wife or mother. Who knows? I am surely not as bad as some who get away with worse.

  I would come to ‘Bogong’, but you—and Mrs Lushington—might not approve. I think I know my place at last.

  Bless you, my darling boy!

  Your

  Mum

  P.S. Biffy is ailing—very miserable—a heavy infestation of tapeworm—and, I suspect, a cancerous growth—I shall be devastated if I lose her—nobody can understand, but there it is.

  Eadie T.

  The letter joined the eggshells as he opened the second envelope, addressed in his father’s formal hand.

  My dear boy,

  This is bad news, though not as bad as it might have been. At least you are in good hands. Greg Lushington will see to it that all which ought to be done is done.

  I thought of taking the train down. Then it occurred to me it might embarrass you. I know how you value your independence and dislike any display of emotion.

  With best wishes for a speedy recovery
,

  Your affect.

  Father

  He drowsed a little after finishing the letter, pondering over the impressions one makes on others, in this case so perversely contradictory he suspected the Judge to be shielding himself from experiences he did not wish to undergo. For a moment he and Eddie were again adrift in a moonlit sea, on a honeycomb bedspread, the yard sounds of a country pub rising through an open window. The dreamer would not have regretted drowning in love with Judge Twyborn.

  Instead he was returning closer to life every day, to the clash of metal and men’s voices, horses’ hooves and dogs barking, the shambling and squelching of cows filing down a hillside towards their milking.

  The bails stood between the homestead and the cottage. Mr Edmonds was in charge of the dairy, and several other provinces: he curry-combed the Lushington hacks; he polished their car with a secret unguent; he coaxed forked carrots and staggy cabbage out of the frozen ‘Bogong’ earth; and twice a week cut a sheep’s throat after a desperate wrestling match. He was a small, mild, buttoned-up man, like a wood carving painted predominantly red and black. His wife helped about the homestead and was Mrs Tyrrell’s chief informant on what was going on ‘up there’. There was a cook too (Mrs Quimby and Mrs Tyrrell had long since broken off relations) and Dot Norton the rabbiter’s daughter whose duties were unspecified.

  ‘Dot’s what you’d expect from a rabbiter,’ Mrs Tyrrell considered.

  ‘What’s wrong with a rabbiter?’

  ‘A rabbiter—from them I’ve knowed—could never ever associate with nothun better than bally rabbuts.’

  Dick Norton the rabbiter was certainly a runtish rabbit of a man, never seen but mounted on one of the strain of ‘Bogong’ nags, an outsize army trenchcoat trailing almost on the ground, and a pack of incestuous mongrels running at his horse’s heels.

  ‘But his daughter—what’s wrong with the rabbiter’s daughter?’