There was no asking for it tonight. Winterbothams appeared on top of the wave, Harold a tall, cadaverous man whose scabby hands had earned all that they had got hold of, from cedar panelling and Sèvres urns, to his wife’s Paquin model and his own uneasy dinner jacket.
He welcomed the Lushingtons’ acquisition by putting an arm round his shoulders and exposing equally uneasy teeth in a ferocious china smile. ‘Heard about you, Eddie. What can we get you to drink?’ Like Greg Lushington, Harold Winterbotham seemed to think that by rushing a stranger behind the veil of alcohol his own uncertainty would glare less in the stranger’s eyes.
The greatest diffident of all, Eddie Twyborn saw through their play too clearly. If he could have shown them the defenceless grub inside what they took to be flawless armour, they might have established some kind of bumbling relationship. But he could not. Instead, he and Harold fell back on alcohol and the momentous question of what Eddie should have to drink.
One look, and Bid Winterbotham swept Marcia Lushington behind the scenes, into the undressing room of confidences, but Marcia almost immediately brought herself back. She stood patting her hair, glancing in and out of the Winterbotham mirrors and between the bars of the hired music. It seemed as though she knew it all, and Bid offering the savoury boats to Eddie Twyborn in preference to the ‘Belair’ regulars.
Marcia patted her hair the harder for the regulars: Mrs Temperley who was Somebody’s Cousin, the doctor and his wife (only the profession held them together), the junior partner of Crewe and Caulfield, the Dicks of ‘Pevensey’, the Braddons of ‘Saltash’, Robbie Boyle a Papal count. Standing centre on the Winterbotham Aubusson, Marcia might have been holding a post-mortem on a doubtful prawn from her savoury boat.
She looked to Don Prowse for relief, but occupied in helping himself at the buffet, he did not give it. She looked to the Winterbothams’ so-called Romney Conversation Piece, but again received no support. She turned her back, always humming, always patting her heavy chignon.
Geoff Scott, who had tried several times, but never succeeded in making her, approached as though preparing to try again. She gave him her banana-split smile. Always patting her back hair. Always keeping an eye on this jackeroo of theirs.
As hostess, Bid Winterbotham had led her guest somewhat apart from the others, ostensibly to mother him and make him feel at home. They were seated on the Queen Anne settee, its high back to the room, its front to the Conversation Piece, for which the Winterbothams let it be known they had paid a fortune.
(Later in the evening, between dances, Marcia was at pains to make good an omission on her part. ‘I should have told you, darling—Bid is what they call nervy. She can’t sit with a man on a sofa without starting to toy with his fly. Everybody knows about it. They forgive her because she’s such a good sort.’)
Indeed, the regulars had watched with sympathetic interest as Bid and the popular jackeroo sat on the straight-backed settee making conversation in front of the Conversation Piece. They knew by her hunched shoulders and his blenching cheeks that the operation must have begun.
‘I adore everything old,’ Bid was telling the young man, her long, nervy fingers flying in time with her monologue, ‘antiques—paintings—you’ve probably heard about our Romney.’ She did not wait to hear he hadn’t. ‘The Art Gallery wants to steal it from us—before Harold gives it to them.’ She looked perfunctorily at their work of art while explaining, ‘It’s the Lady Etterick of Etterick with her family. We’re somehow descended—on my side, that is—but go farther back than the Ettericks—to Mary Queen of Scots, and away beyond.’
She had a long thin tongue, which curved at the tip as though preparing to dart from her ancestral past into present possibilities.
‘I adore lace—old lace,’ she confessed, and her flickering eyelids flung a whole web of it in her victim’s face. ‘One of my great-aunts was famous for her tatting, in Maitland where I was born.’ Bid Winterbotham’s long nervy fingers flew like her great-aunt’s tatting shuttle, in and out the air, between tweaking at a fly-button.
Eddie might have stirred more uneasily if Marcia hadn’t leant over the back of the settee and asked, ‘How are we going, Bid?’
Bid answered, ‘Famously,’ and raised her throat like a shag caught swallowing another’s fish.
The two women agreed to share their mirth at least, Eddie the fish glancing up into Marcia’s laughing, powdered cleavage.
The Winterbotham party, the Winterbotham friends, in particular the Papal count of roving eye, made him love his patroness. He loved old Don, who had brought him another glass of champagne, or what was left of it after its frothing over on the way.
‘You’re all right, Eddie. You know I like yer.’
The object of the manager’s approval looked sideways at the orange paw planted on his shoulder. How he should deal with the paw, he had no idea. He had never made a positive decision, unless to escape from the tennis-court and marriage with Marian Dibden, and his dash across no-man’s-land to assault the enemy lines, though in each instance, it could be argued, the decision had been made for him by some incalculable power, just as on a lower plane, his fucking Mrs Lushington had been initiated not by himself but by Marcia.
After the second encore for ‘Marquita’ Marcia and he were sitting it out, forking up some supper from the Winterbotham Sèvres.
‘I keep on forgetting to tell you,’ Marcia was munching her way through the last of her Russian salad, ‘I’ve got some friends coming who’d adore to meet you.’
‘Too much adoration,’ Eddie protested, ‘in the Monaro,’ and disposed of his plate on an ormolu console.
‘Can’t you allow for a manner of speaking?’ Marcia took his hand and laid it amongst a detritus of beetroot which had settled in her charmeuse lap.
He said, ‘I could allow for anything,’ and nibbled with genuine appetite at his mistress’s neck.
She glanced round before continuing, but nobody had seen, except perhaps the Papal count, and at the far end of the room, a girl so awkward and unobtrusive as to be of little consequence in Mrs Lushington’s estimation.
‘These friends,’ Marcia returned to the topic his indiscretion had interrupted, ‘they haven’t exactly met you—or may have long ago—it isn’t clear. They know your parents. Joanie Golson, who I love—Curly the husband’s a bore, it can’t be helped—but Joanie’s an old friend of your mother’s.’
He could have been wrong, but Marcia had grown quizzical, he felt. She had never looked so much a raw scallop—with guile concealed in its fleshiness.
‘Why do you shy away, darling?’
He was relieved of the necessity of answering by the girl he had noticed at the far end of the room. She was weaving her way through the guests, and if Marcia and he were not her goal, she was headed vaguely in their direction. She made an unprepossessing impression, in a drab frock carelessly worn, thick black hair uncombed, if not positively matted.
‘That’s Helen—the daughter,’ Marcia casually answered his enquiry. ‘Poor thing, she’s most unhappy,’ though Mrs Lushington, it sounded, was not prepared, or did not know how, to deal with such unhappiness.
The girl cast a shadow in otherwise shadowless surroundings under a Venetian chandelier.
Marcia sighed, and swept the beetroot off her lap. ‘At least she has her weaving. I expect that does something for her.’
‘I hope to God it does, because if it doesn’t, nothing else will.’
At once he regretted his boozy non-sympathy. Across the short distance which was all that now separated them, the girl was staring at him. She had a harelip, he began to realise, so badly sewn the teeth behind it were sneering at him, and yet it was not a sneer: it was suppressing a cry as she climbed upward, out of the pit of her own monstrosity, to convey some message, or perhaps only asking for help—even offering it to one in whom she recognised signs of monstrosity or hopelessness.
But he was neither helpless nor hopeless, was he? He looked to Marc
ia for confirmation, but she was gathering up her party luggage, and glancing round to locate her manager before leaving.
At the same moment the Winterbotham parents erupted on them, almost as though to shield this desirable young man from the daughter they could not begin to explain. Bid’s mouth had lost its symmetry, her fingers any calculated direction, their sticks threshing at the air like the spokes of a skinned umbrella, while Harold’s more knobbly, human fingers tried to control them.
‘But he’s gorgeous, Marce—gorgeous—and all this time you’ve been hiding him!’
Marcia announced, cold and flat, ‘It’s time I drove my contingent home, if we can manage the manager.’
At this point the Papal count was engaging Don.
Harold told Eddie, ‘Better come back some morning. We’re better in the mornings. I’ll show you the stud beef.’
The guest looked back once through the gush of eternal affection avowed by the Winterbotham parents and friends, himself and Marcia lugging Don more or less by his armpits, and there was Helen, standing as though in the spiral of a willy-nilly. Another moment and their breath might have united, her teeth clashing with his through the wounded lip.
As it was, she stood grinning through her affliction at what he saw she recognised as his.
The band was lurching into yet another reprise of ‘Marquita’ as Mrs Lushington revved up the black Packard. ‘My men,’ he heard Marcia shout at the hosts of ‘Belair’, but the reference was lost in the general hubbub.
Then they were driving down the moonlit clefts, between the stereoscopic buttocks of hills, amongst the lacy tatting of antique trees. If the trees looked less substantial, once or twice his cheek, his closed eyelids, were stung as though by strands of wire. He opened his eyes to see a fox, its red eyes glaring at him from the bed of a dry creek, before it turned and skittered away on spindly legs into the scrub.
In the same way the Winterbotham rout skittered from his mind. His head bumping, as they drove between the white, recurring hills.
Waking from a doze, he asked, ‘What became of the shawl? The Spanish shawl in the photograph. On the piano.’
Marcia snorted her disbelief. ‘Fancy noticing that shawl! And remembering it tonight.’
What he remembered more vividly was Helen Winterbotham’s non-smile, as sculptural as the natural details through which they were driving. The Spanish shawl no more than flickered like the tail end of the Winterbotham rout, the Winterbotham friends, Bid’s nervy fingers.
‘Actually,’ Marcia said, ‘the shawl flew out of the car somewhere on the way back from a Winterbotham party. Greg was ropeable,’ she giggled. ‘He’d paid quite a lot of money for it. In Seville.’
She guided the Packard round a curve.
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘he couldn’t complain as much as he might have. Because he had been with us to the party. It was fancy dress,’ she confessed, and with a naked shoulder warded off any disapproval on her lover’s part.
‘What did you go as?’
‘Carmen.’ It fell like a stone into the river bend they were crossing.
‘For a time,’ she explained on recovering herself, ‘Bid and Harold were all for fancy dress. They had the most extravagant costumes made for them by The Buttonhole.’ Marcia’s voice had assumed the humble tones of the disguised rich. ‘Bid as Queen Elizabeth—the Primrose Pompadour—God knows what. Harold I forget—but something to match.’
‘Did you find anyone to match your Carmen?’
Half-turned towards the back seat, she entered on a suppressed shriek. ‘Don was my Don José’
Don must have been sleeping.
‘And Greg—if he was of the party?’
‘Greg insisted on going as himself.’
Marcia drove more painstakingly.
‘Of course you won’t approve, Eddie. The young are too wise.’
‘I can’t feel I’m young. I’ve got an old man hiding inside me. Always been there.’
Marcia did not at once comment, but finally came out with it. ‘I wonder whether you’ll find a young man in the old man you’re going to become. It would give your life balance, and be a kind of justice, wouldn’t it?’
He might have enjoyed that more if he hadn’t felt moved to ask, ‘What did Helen Winterbotham go as?’
‘Nothing. She shut herself in her room. She wouldn’t come out.
‘Too wise again.’
‘Or too brutal!’ Marcia gave her most brutal laugh. ‘The young love to hurt.’
They were driving over the loose bridge at ‘Bogong’. They were arriving. Don Prowse was deposited.
‘Shall I come with you, Marce?’ asked Eddie.
‘No, darling.’ She flung off his dutiful kiss. ‘You don’t want to, and I can’t bear sozzled men.’
She looked back, however, after re-starting the car. ‘Don’t forget the Golsons. They’ll adore to see you.’
Mrs Tyrrell had an announcement to make; her voice refined to what she probably considered gentility, it reproduced the tone of a provincial newspaper’s gossip column which, in her own state of illiteracy, she could never have read, but with which her daughters and her cronies must surely have made her familiar. ‘Madam is expecting ’er friends Mr and Mrs E. Boyd Golson, arrivin’ Thursdee on a short visit. Wealthier, I’m told, than Lushingtons themselves. Mrs Edmonds says there’ll be a big shivoo Saturdee night, after the guests ’uv rested from their drive. Mrs Edmonds couldn’t say for sure, but would take a bet that Mr Twyborn and Mr Prowse has received an invite to the homestead.’ After which, Mrs Tyrrell lapsed. ‘That Mrs Quimby don’t know whether she’s comin’ or goin’. She’s lost the nozzles to ’er pipin’ outfit. All I can say is, good luck to ’er.’
On the Thursday evening, while unsaddling the black filly and mixing her feed, Eddie watched a car approaching across the flat. The Golsons were driving a maroon Minerva. As the planks of the ‘Bogong’ bridge alternately rattled and thundered, he saw a thicker, balder Curly at the wheel, and Joanie wearing lipstick, jowls, and dark glasses. She had bound her head for the journey, and perhaps country abandonment, in a chiffon scarf. Curly had congealed; he was looking straight ahead; Joan glanced about nervously with the dry bemused expression of one who has been reading a road map with only intermittent accuracy for the last few hours.
He felt for them, for all those who had survived the game, and Angelos, no longer there, whom he had truly loved, though to be honest, had often only just restrained himself from axing, just as Angelos had not been able to resist drawing the knife. Now more than any of them perhaps, he pitied the E. Boyd Golsons entering Lushington territory with the air of those who have lost their way on dusty roads and road maps held upside down.
He divorced himself from his sweaty mare and went inside.
‘Don,’ he called with an aggressiveness unnatural to him, ‘aren’t I due for some leave? What about letting me off for the next few days? I’ve been thinking of riding across the mountains, down to the Murray.’
Don came out from his room grinning his ginger grin. ‘It’s all right by me. Eddie. But what ’ull Marcia have to say?’
‘Why Marcia? You’re the manager, aren’t you?’
‘She’s pretty possessive if she takes a fancy.’ Don couldn’t turn off the grin in the stubble which would have to wait till Saturday. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I expect it’s up to you in the long run—if you want to take the leave that’s due. And what odds any bloody Golsons?’ His teeth snapped shut on his conclusion.
Eddie and Don stood looking at each other from opposite ends of the brown passage.
‘See, Eddie? I won’t hold anything against yer.’
There was a whispering of dry-rotten woodwork, a dull protest from warped lino, the scratching, almost like spirit-writing, of hawthorn spines on glass. Prowse didn’t approach any closer, but steamed outward, it seemed.
Eddie presumed he could take his leave at any moment and that Don was prepared to face Marcia’s wrath. Eddie a
nd Don understood each other in the brown, dry-rotted passage, while Peggy Tyrrell seared the mutton in a cavern beyond concern.
He set off the following day as Marcia, Joan, and Curly were hitting golf balls on the mini-course below the house. They were wearing the clothes, their limbs assuming the attitudes, of the Philistine upper class. Behind a hearty façade, they appeared somewhat lethargic as they put in time till lunch. (The Golsons would not have admitted to boredom because country life is virtuous.)
At that distance no one’s attention was drawn to the insignificant figure of a horseman, and he was soon well along the road which stretched through the white tussock, skirted the emerald upholstery of a lucerne pasture, and wound finally into the hills.
He had taken with him in his saddle-bags enough salt tucker to tide him over if night caught him between townships. He did on several occasions camp out, more by choice than through necessity, the heat of day giving place to agreeable tremors of mountain cool as he lay in his blanket on the rough grass, head propped against his saddle’s sweaty padding. He could not remember ever having felt happier. At the same time he wondered whether he could really exist without the sources of unhappiness. Half-dozing, half-waking to the tune of his horse’s regular cropping, and in his half-sleep what sounded like a pricking of early frost or needling by stars, he knew that his body and his mind craved the everlasting torments.
He found himself dreaming, or thinking, of Don Prowse seated in sweaty pyjamas, the snapshot album open on his lap, revealing snaps of Eddie Twyborn as he had most surely never looked in innocence or wantonness, and one of Eudoxia Vatatzes in pomegranate shawl, the spangled fan outspread to screen her breasts. Looks a regular cock-tease, eh? Don again, standing at the end of the brown lino passage, the light from the doorway behind him opening like a giant camera-lens. Eddie Twyborn put up a hand to ward off the photographer. Who, more purposeful, was standing at the bedside, red nipples as unblinking as foxes’ eyes in the surrounding fuzz of orange fur.
The Twyborn Affair Page 28