The Twyborn Affair

by Patrick White

  At what precise moment the party returned from town, Eddie Twyborn could not be sure. It was after dark and the fire was failing. He must have fallen asleep on Don’s bed under Kath’s ousted stare. Fingers dug into the honeycomb spread at the Woolpack (or was it the Wheatsheaf?) he had been watching the wooden partners gyrate to Miss Delbridge’s mazurka: Edward and Eadie, Marcia and Greg. He was powerless to choose; Eddie, it seemed, had always been chosen, whirled out into the figures of the dance, whether by Marian, Angelos, Marcia, Mrs E. Boyd Joanie Golson; even his afflicted parents had attempted an unconscious twirl or two. Would he never dare assert himself? He was becoming aware of Don’s torso at the bedside: nipples surrounded by whorls of rosy fuzz opening out into flat expanses of ginger bristle. Don smiling; closely associated fox’s teeth in contrast to Marcia’s blunt, open-spaced portcullis poised to crush unwary bogong moths.

  He jumped up. He could hear Prowse backing the Ford into the corrugated shell referred to as ‘shed’ rather than ‘garage’. He could hear Mrs Tyrrell scuttling across early-frozen puddles to reach her kitchen.

  Under Kath’s timeless stare he began hastily straightening and tautening the honeycomb bedspread. Threw a knot of wood on the fire. Went out to face whatever dreary post-mortem.

  ‘Arr, dear, it was a lovely funeral,’ Mrs Tyrrell announced from amongst the glimmers, the flickers of the kitchen. ‘Before I come out ’ere,’ she said, ‘to earn a crust, they relied on me to lay out the dead, but Mayor Craxton was such a bugger, I wouldn’ uv wanted ter stop up any ’ole in ’is body. I’m tellun yer—’e was real crook.’ She was peeling off her black kid gloves, and had brought back a brown-paper parcel, smaller, if as irregular, as the one she had gone away with. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but I gotter admit, it was the loveliest funeral I was ever at.’

  After professionally raking the stove, and leaving for her room to remove her week-end teeth, she returned hatless and in her apron. ‘Thank yer, love. I would ’uv thought as only a woman would ’uv lit fires for another. I knew you was different, Eddie dear.’

  Prowse would be a different matter again, who now came stamping into the house, the fly-screen falling back into place, door slamming. The cottage shuddered. So did Eddie, who had faced worse and been decorated for it. He went out into the passage and stood too erect in the manager’s doorway.

  ‘How was it?’ he asked.

  ‘It was all right—and it wasn’t—as you’d expect where women’s concerned.’ Prowse was bending over the bed smoothing the honeycomb spread.

  Had he noticed signs of disturbance? the imprint of a body? Or was it an automatic gesture? Impossible to tell,

  ‘I admire your good sense, Ed, not to let yerself imagine you’re in need of a bloody woman. If it wasn’t one thing, then it was the other. She was wearing the rags, or another had to get ’erself up for the mayor’s fuckun funeral. There was one expected ’er old man to be out that night at the Lodge, but you never know with the Masons, sometimes they finish early. Les did. Must ’uv been out of bloody spite.’

  Only then, the manager faced the jackeroo. The lines in his face were deeper than before he went away, his shoulders slumped. He was pretty surly, and already far gone in grog.

  ‘Fetch me the bottle, Ed,’ he ordered, after plumping down on the honeycomb bedspread. ‘It’s in there—or oughter be—beside the po—with me name on it.’

  Eddie fetched out the whiskey, the level of which did not encourage hospitality.

  ‘I’ll treat you to one,’ Don offered.

  Eddie accepted, and fetched a tooth-glass, suspecting that his host would prefer the bottle.

  ‘So I settled for the town bike,’ he told, ‘and more than likely brought back the clap.’

  He turned on a clanking, tin-can laughter, but subsided soon after, and sat looking up at his sober familiar. He could have been asking forgiveness, his expression an early-morning one, tingling with a day’s growth. How deep his sudden innocence went you might only have found out by touch, a temptation Eddie Twyborn resisted.

  Prowse twitched, and shrugged off what a subordinate could have interpreted as weakness. ‘What about you, Ed? How did you go about the week-end?’

  ‘I didn’t go about it. Can’t say there’s much to report. Had a meal with the Lushingtons,’ he admitted.

  ‘Well, that was that,’ said Don, shuffling his feet on the bedside mat. ‘We know about supper with the Lushingtons. Old Greg’s a decent cove.’ Don continued sitting, and between swigs from the almost empty bottle, resumed stroking the honeycomb bedspread.

  Suddenly he looked up and spat. ‘Christ, that shit—that—Kath!’ and keeled over on the bed.

  The last of the whiskey would have trickled from the bottle if Eddie hadn’t seized and returned it to the po cupboard. He eased the legs on to the bed. The highlights of yesterday’s polishing had quite gone out of the manager’s boots. The tweed jacket might have been exposed to rain, its sleeves wrinkled well above the wrists, and straining at the armpits and biceps. As it would have involved a major operation, or love rite, to do any more for Don Prowse, Eddie extinguished the lamp and left him.

  Mrs Tyrrell was slicing cold mutton; she warmed it up in floury gravy, with a handful of capers to pander to the tastes of any possible gourmet.

  ‘You had supper last night,’ she said, ‘with Marce and Greg. That was nice,’ How ‘nice’ he wondered on hearing how well informed she was on various other matters. ‘Greg’s leavin’ for England Toosdee.’ Eddie experienced a twinge for his own undeserved ignorance: not to have been informed by his patrons after so much loving patronage; to be kept in the dark by his mistress, his employer’s wife, was less galling than the deceitful behaviour of his adoptive father the crypto-poet.

  Wounds were no deterrent to Mrs Tyrrell, who must have been slashed to shreds in her time, what with the climate and a family of seventeen. ‘They say,’ she said, ‘as Dot’s gunner marry Denny Allen. Mrs Lushington ’erself arranged it. The poor bloody imbecile Denny—but Dot couldn’ expeck better. Mrs Lushington done right, I reckon, for all concerned. Otherwise Dot ’ull pup along the river bank, for all ’er father ’ull do about it—or ’erself catch the bagman ’oo come sellun the separator parts—’oo she says is the father—’oo isn’t, as everybody knows.’

  ‘How do they know?’ Eddie insisted.

  ‘They know,’ she said. ‘Because.’

  She brought out a plate on which were arranged some wedges of cake of an unnatural yellow.

  ‘You ain’t been ’ere long enough,’ she said. ‘But everybody knows. Mrs Lushington was right. An’ Denny ’ull be as pleased as punch when they put a baby in ’is arms. ’E won’t notice ’e got it without any of the effort.’

  As they sat consuming stale cake and considering life’s cross purposes, Eddie felt at last that he belonged.

  ‘I’ll go to bed, Peggy,’ he announced. ‘I’m tired.’ Indeed, his eyelids were behaving like iron shutters over which the owner, apparently himself, was losing control.

  ‘You could be,’ said Mrs Tyrrell, observing him too intently.

  ‘I’m surprised Greg left without a word,’ he told his employer’s wife.

  ‘That’s Greg,’ Marcia said. ‘Without his unexpectedness he might have become unbearable. And you, Eddie, shouldn’t be upset by his absence.’

  They were seated on the leather sofa in the neo-Tudor library. She laid a hand between his thighs. But her availability did her a disservice: today his mistress left him cold.

  ‘I’m not upset,’ he insisted. ‘Only he’s someone you grow fond of. And I thought he might have mentioned his going away.’

  Marcia laughed. She got up. It was again Saturday, and Prowse and Mrs Tyrrell had driven into town.

  ‘Greg,’ she said, ‘is one of those kind, simple men, who insinuate themselves, and leave you flat without realising what they’ve done. Which is why women take lovers—the not so kind, not so simple—like you, Eddie—who know how to hurt delici
ously.’

  ‘How?’ He was astonished that he could have hurt anybody as practised as Marcia Lushington. He considered himself far more hurt by Greg Lushington’s silent defection.

  ‘I thought you were my lover,’ she told him, ‘and that on occasions like this, we could lose ourselves in each other.’

  From ramping up and down against the lozenges of neo-Tudor glass, she came and sat down again beside him and started nibbling his nearside lobe.

  ‘Darling?’ she breathed into the ear, to encourage him and satisfy her hopes.

  ‘But I never set out to lose myself. Finding myself is more to the point.’

  Marcia laughed bitterly. ‘I hadn’t thought of myself as a test-tube!’

  Contemplating her own reflection in a glass framed in the fumed-oak overmantel, she told him a while later, ‘You destroy me, Eddie. But how agreeably!’

  Mrs Edmonds came in, ever so discreet. ‘Mrs Quimby is wondering, madam, if Mr Twyborn will be staying to supper.’

  ‘I expect so,’ Mrs Lushington answered. ‘Yes, of course. He’s on his own.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’d better not. I’ve letters to answer. If I don’t get down to it, I never will. And I ought to write to my mother.’

  Mrs Edmonds at least appeared convinced by a situation Mrs Lushington could only accept with decent resignation. She looked down her front and re-arranged it.

  ‘You’re right, Eddie,’ she agreed. ‘You shouldn’t neglect your mother.’

  After eating a ration of cold mutton alone in the cottage, he began regretting his decision not to let himself enjoy Marcia’s cooked meal, her down pillows, the warmth of her body. Was he a masochist as a man? He didn’t think so. He would have been had he loved her; he wanted to love, and might still, somewhere in the geography of flesh, come across the wherewithal for kindling its spirit. Up till now he was only enjoying the perks of love and the re-discovered womb.

  He did, however, get out his writing-pad to justify his decision. Was the pad another masochistic touch? It was one he had bought from a Syrian hawker who came round from time to time. Marcia not unnaturally would have despised the ruled paper from his cheap pad. Even the slatternly recipient of his duty letter had a taste for expensive writing-paper, with watermarks and monograms; if Eadie had forsworn her grandfather’s coat of arms it was due to an inherent bashfulness.

  So it seemed to him, as he sat poised above his ostentatiously modest pad, by the light of the kerosene lamp, that he was the only dishonest one.

  ‘Bogong’,

  Sunday.

  In his state of drift, at the mercy of ‘Bogong’, the Lushingtons, the climate, and other influences, some of them inadmissible except to himself, the date eluded him.

  He wrote

  Dear Mother,

  too bleak, too upright, and waited for what comes shooting out, finally, like milk, or sperm …

  … should have written an age ago, and you’ll wonder why I haven’t. Physical exhaustion no doubt, Monaro cold, spasmodic depression. But don’t jump to the conclusion that I regret having come here. If nothing else, my body is hardening. I’m learning much that is practical in its own context, otherwise irrelevant. I can hear you laughing, and to some degree I share your amusement. I wish I had inherited more of my father’s legal blood and rational approach to the seriousness of life. But there we are—Eadie!

  What I’d like to correct, Mother, is your impression of Marcia Lushington. She’s not what I’d call a bad woman, or not much worse than most of us, if our components could be seen squirming under the microscope. The bacilli of my own nature might appear related. Aren’t you perhaps blaming her for showing up your own faults? That is how most blame is doled out. I shouldn’t be accusing you of this if I didn’t know how alike we are. It should have brought us closer together, but never has. If I’m more lenient to Marcia it may be because I have none of her blood in my veins, while given to the same sensuality, lust, deceits. If these traits seem more evident in Marcia, it’s because she’s had greater cause to develop them. In a graveyard beside the house three short-lived children are buried. Greg wanted them there. He wanted a son. At least one of the dead children is not his, I suspect for no good reason beyond that of knowing my own capacity for deceit to be the equal of Marcia’s. Since I have never conceived or begotten a child, there is less concrete evidence in my case, only the shadows of deceit which flicker through the undergrowth of a life which has not been without its shady patches.

  Marcia is respected by her servants, the neighbourhood, and obviously loves the land she owns. She is loved and respected (I believe) by her husband, an amiable, virtuous character, whose simplicity disguises intuitions of which he seems only half-aware. He has just gone off to Europe, for what purpose I haven’t been told. If Marcia knows, she doesn’t show. She is prepared to indulge his motives, perhaps because they suit her purposes. From my own experience, I’m inclined to think that Greg’s frequent disappearances are part of a desire to lose—or find himself, which perhaps one never succeeds in doing.

  I shall leave you here, dear Mother, hoping I haven’t written anything too distasteful.

  Love,

  Ed.

  When he had finished, he sat looking at the word which promises so much, yet never illuminates to the extent that one hopes it will. He was tempted to climb back up the hill and creep into Marcia’s great warm womb of a bed. When more than likely she would not have had him since his rejection of her earlier that evening.

  Instead he got between the army blankets, on his own narrow stretcher, and dreamed an astonishing dream in which Marcia played no part. He awoke in the Sunday dawn and burrowed deeper into the blankets, trying to mend his broken dream. Of course he did not succeed, and was left with the gritty resentment of those who are dispossessed by waking.

  Whatever else fragmented and eluded, the themes of conscious life flowed into a common stream, of endlessness rather than infinity: the takeover of day from night, summer from winter, the diet of mutton, slug-riddled cabbage and grey potato, Peggy Tyrrell’s recitative of births, deaths, and lotteries, Prowse’s morose narrative of Kath’s defection. Eddie could have touched Kath, rounded out like a waxwork, her belongings crammed into a pair of Globeite cases, the kiddy trailing by its celluloid arm a doll in a tartan frock. Kath had barely left before she started leaving again, her sour-milk complexion emphasised against the sooty mesh of the fly-proof door. Don had half a mind to go out at night into the paddock and suck on the muzzle of a gun, like his dad, to put an end to it all.

  Eddie pointed out, ‘You couldn’t do it, with Greg away, and Marcia up there on her own.’

  ‘Marcia’s not all that helpless.’

  ‘But depends on you.’

  Don smiled a sceptical ginger smile. ‘Help me off with me boots, Ed.’ He had finished the last of the current bottle, his name pencilled in copybook hand below the maker’s. ‘Don’t know what I’d do without yer.’

  After the final assisted contortion out of singlet and pants into pyjamas, the manager subsided on his bed, at the summit of which the brass balls had been jingling an accompaniment.

  It was correspondence which alleviated the prolonged phase between winter and summer at ‘Bogong’, and those Saturday nights when, Don and Peggy away in town, Eddie climbed the hill and shared what Marcia described as ‘the scrumptious meal Mrs Quimby has prepared for you, darling—she’d have fobbed me off with a poached egg.’

  Marcia would ask sharply, ‘What have you heard from my husband, Eddie?’

  Eddie would tell of the highly coloured post-card he had just received, with its snatches of information on Roman churches, race meetings in England and Ireland, or the train journey from Bergen to Christiania.

  ‘But surely he’s written to you?’ he asked.

  ‘Naturally he’s written to me. At some length.’ She sighed. ‘He sent me a poem about a glacier.’

  ‘Then I can’t think why you’re anxious to know what he wrote on a
post-card to an acquaintance.’

  ‘Aren’t I at liberty to wonder what he writes to others?’

  ‘I’d like to read one of his poems.’

  By then the table had been cleared, the servants gone to their quarters, and Marcia and he withdrawn to the warmth of her bed and their united bodies.

  ‘The one about the glacier,’ he added, kissing her between breasts which had begun to heave and protest.

  ‘It’s far too private,’ she told him. ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘you only show your poem to those you want to see it—unless, of course, you throw it wide open to the public.’

  Round him she had wrapped importunate thighs.

  ‘Rather like a cunt,’ he suggested as he strained to return the passion expected of him.

  ‘Oh,’ she moaned, ‘I find this sort of thing—so hateful—in you—and know you’ll—never—love me.’

  After reaching their climax, and while still coupled, she tore her mouth apart from his, her head thrown sideways on the pillow.

  ‘Like somebody I got to hate.’

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘Somebody I was fool enough to sleep with. Somebody I thought might love me. Who turned out to be a man like any other.’

  ‘Not Greg, surely?’

  ‘Oh, leave Greg out of it! He’s the husband I love and respect. I don’t have to sleep with Greg to love him.’

  She had switched on the lamp. She got up in some agitation, and after flying in several directions at once, all distraught buttocks and breasts, put on a gown, and sat herself at the dressing table, feeling her cheeks, her throat, as though for damage.

  While Eddie continued lying in the bed, drowsily combing at his armpits. ‘Perhaps we shouldn’t have started by fucking. Then we might have learnt to love each other.’

  ‘How I hate that degrading word!’

  ‘I was only using what they use.’