‘Is Prowse your friend?’ suddenly Mrs Lushington saw fit to ask the jackeroo.
‘We haven’t quarrelled,’ Eddie answered cautiously.
‘Why should they? Poor Don!’ Mr Lushington murmured.
‘A quick-tempered, a passionate man,’ retorted Mrs Lushington, fitting a little of everything on her fork.
They were being watched more intently than ever, Eddie realised, by Mrs Edmonds against the sideboard, and the rather more animal eyes through the hatch.
‘Poor Don—his wife left him,’ Mr Lushington continued.
Marcia replied, ‘We all know that—even Eddie, I imagine, by now. Her leaving was to everyone’s advantage, surely?’
Greg Lushington had spilt some gravy on his already spotted smoking-jacket. He sat rubbing at the place with a napkin.
‘They were wrong for each other,’ he murmured, as though nobody else ever had been. ‘She hated him.’
‘He hated her.’
‘I think he was hoping the little girl might bring them together.’ The litany unfurled, more, you felt, for the Lushingtons’ benefit than their guest’s.
After a while they fell silent, mashing at a shambles of potato and gravy. Mrs Edmonds replenished the glasses with Burgundy of an impeccable French vintage.
On the walls of the mock-Tudor dining room there were several photographs of Greg holding stud rams by the horns, vaguely smiling in the direction of the camera, and one of Marcia astride a show hack, his arched neck almost wholly swathed in ribbons. From beneath the brim of what might have been the dead-green velour at the beginning of its career, she was looking moody in spite of her success. (It surprised Eddie; for Australian women were usually photographed grinning from ear to ear.)
There was a baked pudding with strawberry jam and clotted cream. From his nursery days he seemed to remember it as Queen of Puddings.
‘Don’t you adore food?’ Marcia asked through a mouthful, and only just prevented a trickle of cream from escaping. (A woman of importance, she was allowed sloppy table manners.)
It was obvious that her husband loved, her servants admired her, Mrs Tyrrell enjoyed her patronage, and Prowse considered her a ‘good sort’. It was he, Eddie, who must be wrong in having doubts, while drawn to her as part of an exercise in self-vindication.
It was perhaps how her husband was drawn to undertake those journeys, in Patagonia, down the China Coast, through the foothills of the Himalayas, of which he told at length over coffee and liqueurs afterwards in the drawing room. His wife, who must have heard it many times, yawned an accompaniment to his narrative. The guest listened intermittently.
‘… in Russia they serve tea in glasses. They hold the sugar in their mouths, you know …’
Russian sugar, Swedish fishskin: these were the incidentals which intrigued dear Greg Lushington. While Eddie found himself fascinated by the Oriental poppy in crumpled silk, ever more insufficiently arranged in Marcia’s beige cleavage. She seemed to realise. She kept glancing down, giving the petals a tweak to spread them. The brilliant coat had slipped sideways off one shoulder. She shivered, and righted it. Greater nakedness might have come more naturally to her, but not in midwinter in the Monaro.
Greg Lushington was straying somewhere along the Nevsky Prospect; he closed down after draining his brandy.
Remembering one of his mother’s conventions, Eddie murmured, ‘Delicious coffee’ of the watery stuff they were drinking; then, louder, ‘Any fishskin, sir, to bring out the flavour?’
But Greg Lushington’s rosy jowls had subsided on his velvet lapels.
Marcia sighed. ‘That old Swedish fishskin!’
Seated beside the fire, irritably agitating an ankle beneath her broad sable hem, she bent and picked up her sleeping Maltese dog, to comfort one who was in no need of comforting.
She said, ‘You must find it all very boring.’
‘Why should it be?’ he asked.
It was her turn not to know the answer.
‘I could lend you books,’ she said, ‘if I knew your tastes.’
‘I haven’t felt any inclination to read since coming to “Bogong”.’
‘Then we’ve properly seduced you!’ Her wry smile was directed at the collapsing fire.
As the only conscious male present, perhaps he should put on another log, for Greg had let out the faint sizzle of a snore, followed by a short, querulous fart.
Marcia immediately raised her voice. ‘Don’t you think you ought to go to bed, darling? We know you’re tired. Eddie will forgive you.’
The old boy rose, tottering like an enormous cherubic baby, and said after sliding his hand down one of his protégé’s shoulderblades, ‘Anyway I think I’ll—take a little nap. See you later, everyone.’
After that there was an opening and closing of doors, a lavatory flushed, and a final closing.
Marcia said, ‘He’s taken a great fancy to you. Greg badly wanted a son. I failed him. But he doesn’t hold it against me. He’s a good man in all his instincts. That’s what makes it more dreadful.’
‘Why should it?’ His teeth were chattering.
‘If a man is truly good, he rises above hurt. We’re the ones who are hurt.’
She sat watching her own tossed ankle. ‘What do you think of Prowse?’ she asked.
‘I haven’t thought about him enough.’ He wondered whether she would know he was lying.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Prowse is a human animal. No more. But the poor brute has suffered.’
Marcia too, was shivering, hugging herself more closely inside her Oriental coat.
He bent down and began clumsily stacking logs on the fire.
‘Rather extravagant!’ she twittered.
The fresh logs spat and cracked.
Marcia was leaning forward in the direction of the renewed flames. ‘Do you know about the bogong moth?’
He did of course, but was not allowed to resist the reprise she was launching into, ‘… up into the mountains at a certain time of year, to eat this moth. It’s said to taste rich and nutty …’
Hunched above the crumpled poppy in her beige cleavage, she had parted her lips on the strong teeth, in the gaps between which the downy sacs of moths might have been disgorging their nutty cream.
Marcia herself at that moment was not unlike a great downy moth irrationally involved in an obscene but delicious cannibalistic rite; in which she must involve some other being for his initiation or destruction.
She said, in a very intimate voice, for they were both crouched over the fire, ‘No one has been able to explain to me why you came here. There’s something too fine about you for this kind of life.’
He was balanced again on the razor-edge of motives, between truth and lies. ‘I wanted to live simply for a while. To think things out. Yes, to think.’
She said sourly, ‘You’ve come to the very worst place! It numbs thought, or pinches it out. We’ve hardly one between us.’
‘There’s the country.’
‘Oh, yes, there’s the country!’ She threw back her thick, creamy throat, and closed her eyes, and smiled with the expression of fulfilment which explained what Prowse had said of her. ‘The country itself is what makes it possible—even at its worst, its bitterest. But one needs more than that, surely?’ She opened her eyes and looked at him. ‘Wouldn’t you agree, Eddie Twyborn?’
How false was Marcia Lushington of the grand piano for standing things on, the Spode tureen, the French Burgundy, and mock-Tudor dining room? He couldn’t very well decide for being something of a fake himself.
‘I think,’ she said, and now she was probably dead-level honest, ‘you may have something I’ve always wanted. That fineness I mentioned.’
‘What about your husband? A good man. Isn’t that something better than whatever this “fineness” may be?’
She bared her wide-spaced teeth in what was a mirthless smile, and he found himself responding to it, while repelled. ‘Oh yes, we know all that! The good—the virtuous�
��they’re what we admire—depend on to shore us up against our own shortcomings—with loving affection.’
She fell silent after that, and looked down along his wrist, his thigh.
‘The other,’ she said, ‘needn’t be lust, need it?’
Half burnt half chilled beside the leaping fire, he discovered himself, to his amazement and only transitory repugnance, lusting after Marcia’s female forms.
They stood up simultaneously. If they had hoped to escape by withdrawing from the heat of the fire, the diminishing circles of warmth inside the room brought them closer together.
Her body was a revelation of strength in softness.
‘What about Greg?’ It was his conscience letting out a last gasp.
‘He won’t wake this side of daylight.’ She sounded ominously certain.
She led him through a frozen house from which the servants had already dispersed, either to its fringes or its outhouses. They bumped against each other, slightly and at first silently, then in more vigorous, noisy collusion, the little Maltese terrier staggering sleepily behind them, trailing the plume of his tail.
When the sky had started greening she switched on the lamp to verify the time. They were by then a shambles of sheet and flesh, the Maltese dog exposing in his sleep a pink belly and tufted pizzle.
Switching back to green darkness she said, ‘I was right, Eddie.’
‘About what?’ Considering his own respect for the old man her husband, he was not too willing to allow Marcia Lushington the benefit of knowing her own mind.
‘The fineness.’
‘Oh, stuff!’
He started extricating himself from what he had begun to see as a trap, a sticky one at that.
‘Perhaps I’m wrong after all,’ she murmured and heaved. ‘Perhaps all men are the same. The same crudeness. Blaming you for what they’ve had.’
‘It isn’t that,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t understand. Or would be too shocked if I tried to explain.’
She was hesitating in the dark.
‘Why? We didn’t do anything perverse, did we? I can’t bear perversion of any kind.’
Bumping and shivering, he started putting on his clothes. Once the Maltese terrier whimpered.
‘Eddie?’ Again she switched on the light. ‘Men can be so brutal. And you are not. That’s why I’m attracted to you. I don’t believe you’d ever hurt me by refusing what I have to offer.’
Heaped amongst the blankets, the crisscrossed sheets, and punch-drunk pillows, her mound of quaking female flesh appeared on the verge of sculpturing itself into the classic monument to woman’s betrayal by callous man. What he looked like, half-dressed in underpants, shirt-tails, and socks with holes in the heels, it gave him goose-flesh to imagine.
‘Even if you haven’t quite the delicacy I’d hoped for, perhaps we could comfort each other,’ she blurted through naked lips, ‘in lots of undemanding ways.’
He buckled his belt, which to some extent increased his masculine assurance, but it was not to his masculine self that Marcia was making her appeal. He was won over by a voice wooing him back into childhood, the pervasive warmth of a no longer sexual, but protective body, cajoling him into morning embraces in a bed disarrayed by a male, reviving memories of toast, chilblains, rising bread, scented plums, cats curled on sheets of mountain violets, hibiscus trumpets furling into sticky phalluses in Sydney gardens, his mother whom he should have loved but didn’t, the girl Marian he should have married but from whom he had escaped, from the ivied prison of a tennis court, leaving her to bear the children who were her right and fate, the seed of some socially acceptable, decent, boring man.
He was drawn back to Marcia by the bright colours of retrospect, the more sombre tones of remorse. He lowered his face into the tumult of her breasts.
‘There,’ she murmured, comforting, ‘I knew! My darling! My darling!’
She was ready to accept him back into her body; she would have liked to imprison him in her womb, and he might have been prepared to go along with it if they hadn’t heard the rushing of a cistern in the distance.
‘I better go,’ he mumbled.
‘Oh, no! It’s only his bladder. I know his form. Poor old darling! You don’t live with someone half a lifetime without getting wise to every movement of the clockwork.’
The little dog whinged, and dug a deeper nest in the blankets in which to finish his normal sleep.
‘Eddie?’
He resisted her warmth reaching out through the dark to repossess him. He withdrew into the outer cold, not through any access of virtue, rather from disgust for his use of Lushington’s wife in an attempt to establish his own masculine identity. Marcia apart, or even Marcia considered, women were probably honester than men, unless the latter were sustained by an innocent strength such as Greg Lushington and Judge Twyborn enjoyed.
As Eddie let himself out into the night the images of Eadie his mother and Joan Golson joined forces with that of Marcia Lushington, who had, incredibly, become his mistress! The trio of women might have been shot sky high on the trampoline of feminine deceit if it hadn’t been for the emergence of Eudoxia Vatatzes at Eddie Twyborn’s side.
Eddie went stumbling down the hill through the increasing green of the false dawn, the light from an outhouse window, and the scented breath of ruminating cows. In his own experience, in whichever sexual role he had been playing, self-searching had never led more than briefly to self-acceptance. He suspected that salvation most likely lay in the natural phenomena surrounding those unable to rise to the spiritual heights of a religious faith: in his present situation the shabby hills, their contours practically breathing as the light embraced them, stars fulfilled by their logical dowsing, the river never so supple as at daybreak, as dappled as the trout it camouflaged, the whole ambience finally united by the harsh but healing epiphany of cockcrow.
Scattering a convocation of rabbits, he went in through the hedge of winter-blasted hawthorns, into the mean cottage in which physical exhaustion persuaded him it was his good fortune to be living. He lay down smiling, and slept, under the dusty army blankets, in the grey room.
That noon, while enjoying the luxury of a solitary Sunday frowst, after the minimum of cold mutton with mustard pickle, and the dwindling warmth of a brew of tea, he heard a sound of hooves and the metal of a horse’s bridle. He looked out and saw, not his mistress of last night, but Mrs Lushington his employer’s wife tethering her hack to the rail outside the feed room.
It was startling in these circumstances and at this hour of day. He heard himself muttering. He took up the pot to pour another cup of tea, by now tepid and repulsive, but found himself instead draining the pot to its dregs through the spout.
Fortified, if ashamed, he went out to the encounter with this stranger already knocking at the door.
‘I hope I’m not intruding,’ she began what sounded a prepared speech. ‘Usually on Sunday, after lunch, I go for a ride, otherwise Ham gets out of hand. As I was passing this way I thought I’d look in—see how they’re treating you—whether they’ve made you comfortable.’
She smiled out of unadorned lips, unnatural only in dealing with a rehearsed recitative.
He brought her in, or rather, she brought herself.
She said, ‘It’s a horrid little house if you look at it squarely.’
‘I’ve grown attached to it.’ He might begin resenting Marcia.
‘At least in your case it’s only temporary.’
Her conscience salved, she started stalking through the house as though she didn’t own it and hadn’t been there before; perhaps she hadn’t. For Sunday afternoon and the land which was hers, she was shabbily dressed, in the old dead-green velour and stretched cardigan in natural wool, with riding pants which, in spite of exclusive tailoring, did not show her at her best. As she went she peered into rooms, dilating and contracting her nostrils in the manager’s doorway while glancing with a frown at the photographs of Kath and Kim, murmuring on reaching the cook’
s bedroom, ‘Poor Peggy Tyrrell—rough as bags, but such a dear,’ turning her back on Eddie Twyborn’s unmade bed.
When they reached the dining-kitchen she started rapping on the oilcloth, which made the crumbs on its surface tremble and her engagement finger flash.
‘I ought to apologise,’ she said, teeth champing on the words the other side of those bland lips, ‘for anything that happened. It was my fault. Oh, I know you’d think it was, Eddie, even if I didn’t admit it. Because you’re a man.’
She paused as though giving him a chance to exonerate her.
‘I shouldn’t have thought of blaming you,’ he said. ‘It was a moment of shared lust. It surprised me that I enjoyed it. But I did.’
Marcia looked most surprised. She suppressed a little gasp. Her eyes were glowing. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it isn’t the sort of thing a man usually says to his mistress. I knew I was right. You’re different, Eddie. You have a quality I’ve always hoped for—and never found—in a man.’
‘To me it’s only conscience—for having fucked the wife of a man I respect.’
‘Oh, darling,’ she breathed, all the masculinity gone out of the tailored riding breeches, the imperiousness out of her engagement finger, ‘don’t put it like that! I adore my husband. That’s something else.’
She was reduced to cajoling sighs, and whimpers she might have learnt from her Maltese terrier, and whiffs of the perfume she had been wearing the night before, which he now realised was predominantly hyacinth, and that hyacinth is haunted by the ghosts of wood-smoke and warm ash.
She might, they might both have wanted it again, wood-smoke and ash and all, on the army blankets of his unmade bed. She had brushed against him, the full breasts, the fleshy lips. He was about to respond when repugnance took over.
She said, ‘You’re right, darling,’ and re-settled the green velour.
Then they were walking back along the passage, from which rooms opened in accordance with the accepted pattern, from suburbia to the Dead Heart. Their feet went trott trott over the linoleum lozenges.
Her voice cut in. ‘Have you noticed how the exceptional person almost never turns up in the beginning?’
The Twyborn Affair Page 23