The Twyborn Affair

by Patrick White

  Starting in frustration and anger, he was cajoled, pricked, and finally seduced by the empty garments, the soft and slithery, the harsh and grainy, the almost live-animal, which he held in his arms. He fumbled with his own crude moleskins, the bargain shirt from the Chinaman’s store. The laces of his wrinkled boots, stinking of rancid mutton fat, lashed at him as he got them off. He stood shivering in what now passed for his actual body, muscular instead of sinuous, hairier than formerly, less subtle but more experienced.

  He needed no guidance in entering the labyrinth of gold thread and sable, the sombre, yet glowing, brocaded tribute to one of Marcia’s less neutral selves. And still was not satisfied by the image Marcia’s glass presented.

  He stormed at the dressing-table, roughing up his hair, dabbling with the beige puff in armpits from which the heavy brocaded sleeves fell back, outstaring himself feverishly, then working on the mouth till it glistened like the pale, coral trap of some great tremulous sea anemone.

  He fell back on Marcia’s bed.

  And the footsteps began advancing with a male assurance which had been his own till recently. Eudoxia Vatatzes lay palpitating, if contradictorily erect, awaiting the ravishment of male thighs.

  The movement of her heart had taken over from all other manifestations as the door was pushed farther ajar, and the head intruded. It was Greg Lushington, sightless behind his spectacles. Neither the glare from Norweigan glaciers, nor the heady air of Himalayas or Andes could have blinded him, for he was still rooted in his own country of pale, nut-flavoured moths.

  ‘I just wanted to tell you, Marce, that the word was wrong—in the poem, I mean. What I thought of as “placebo”, you remember? ought to have been “purulence”.’

  Then he smiled, and immediately withdrew, not wanting to disturb his wife’s rest.

  And Eudoxia Vatatzes threw off her borrowed clothes, as Eddie Twyborn broke up the scene he was re-living in the gathering shadows, returning from the boundary paddock after a day’s crutching.

  He untethered his mare from her own fetlock and returned to the settlement known as ‘Bogong’, where Peggy Tyrrell, inside the illuminated kitchen, was engaged in the evening ritual of maltreating food into the semblance of a meal. Tonight there was a smell of onions—and was it beef on the boil instead of mutton? Some days earlier Jim Allen had destroyed a cow, her leg broken by a fall down a gully.

  This luxury of cooking smells united with the stench of his own body, greasy wool, and tar from the anointing of sheeps’ wounds and fly-blown wrinkles, while inside the shed, as he mixed his horse a feed, the sweet scents of chaff and oats mingled with the no less intoxicating, if baser stenches he had brought with him.

  In the darkness beyond the feed-room proper, in the depths of the shed where a soft mountain of chaff was stored, a landslide had been started by a cat pursuing a rat. There was a deathly squeal as the cat pounced and worried its prey, growling at the human intruder.

  From her stall the mare was whinnying at him impatiently. She glared and snorted, stamping on the brickwork with small, elegant, shod hooves. Her greed as he poured the oats and chaff whetted his own appetite for sodden onions and stringy cow passing as beef. (He would have liked to believe his own disguises more convincing. Well, it had been proved that they were.)

  Leaving his ravenous horse to her feed he heard the iron door pushed farther open on grudging hinges. Against a sky paling into darkness it could only have been Prowse’s bulk advancing unsteadily into the sweet must of the shed’s enveloping gloom.

  ‘What is it, Don? What’ve I done wrong this time?’

  The form came shambling on. ‘Wrong?’ A familiar blast of whiskied breath was introduced into the gentler scents of the stable and the dusty draught from chaff set in motion by the huntress cat.

  ‘Yes. I’d like to know. I never seem to do the right thing by you.’ It wasn’t quite honest.

  ‘Nothing wrong, I suppose—Eddie—in being true to yerself.’

  Prowse’s bulk had reached the point where they were bumping against each other in the darkness.

  Eddie realised that, up against this laborious drunk, he was simulating drunkenness.

  ‘And what’s myself?’ he dared.

  There was a pause, and the sounds of overheated, crackling iron and slithering chaff.

  Till Prowse was prepared to come out with it. ‘I reckon I recognised you, Eddie, the day you jumped in—into the river—and started flashing yer tail at us. I reckon I recognised a fuckun queen.’

  All the while Don Prowse was pushing his bulk up against Eddie Twyborn’s more slender offering.

  ‘See?’

  ‘If that’s what you saw …’ Eddie knew that his voice, like his body, was trembling.

  Prowse suddenly grew enraged. He, too, had started trembling in a massive way, smelling of sodden red hair almost stronger than the whiskey breath, shouting, pushing his opponent around and about with chest and thighs, spinning him face down in the chaff.

  ‘A queen! A queen! A fuckun queen!’ Sobbing as though it was his wife Kath walking out on him.

  Prowse was tearing at all that had ever offended him in life, at the same time exposing all that he had never confessed, unless in the snapshot album.

  His victim’s face was buried always deeper, breathless, in the loose chaff as Don Prowse entered the past through the present.

  Eddie Twyborn was breathing chaff, sobbing back, not for the indignity to which he was being subjected, but finally for his acceptance of it.

  When Prowse had had his way they lay coupled, breathing in some kind of harmony.

  Till the male animal withdrew, muttering what could have been, ‘You asked for it—you fuckun asked …’

  And got himself out of the shed.

  The victim lay awhile, wholly exhausted by the switch to this other role. Then stood up, chaff trickling down skin wherever it did not stick inside rucked-up shirt and torn pants—the disguise which didn’t disguise.

  Complete darkness had fallen outside, except where Peggy Tyrrell’s sibyl, in the illuminated window across the yard, was rising through the steam from a suet pudding she was easing out of its cloth. She glanced up once into the outer darkness, her sibyl’s eyes contracting, before resuming the ritual of her suet pud.

  In the days which followed, they went about doing what had to be done. They used only the words required. They depended on the objects surrounding them, grateful for the furniture of daily life.

  The manager announced with the solemnity of an alderman, ‘We can expect Mr Lushington back in the near future.’ Reduced by several tones, his voice sounded furred up.

  After giving morning orders to Jim, Denny, and the jackeroo, he added importantly, ‘Get on with it then. I’ve got to go up to the house to do some accounting in Mr Lushington’s office.’

  Mr Prowse shaved regularly now. The texture of the burnished skin fascinated Eddie Twyborn.

  Don would lower his eyes on finding himself scrutinised.

  His clothes were more formal. He was, in fact, the manager, who almost never mucked in as he had on the day when the men were crutching.

  The jackeroo became more formal too, asking at tea for information on cross-breeding, wool sales, and crops.

  Mrs Tyrrell gravely served the pudding, and sat afterwards, hands folded in her apron, like Our Lady of Stains.

  Marcia alone had no part in the play which was being enacted. Though he looked for her from a distance, Eddie failed to catch sight of the black Packard, the bay gelding or the solitary figure hitting a golf ball on the mini course below the house.

  One night after the manager had gone up to do some more accounting, he thought he heard her voice, not that which issued from the thick, thyroidal throat of the sensual woman who had dragged him into her bed, but of the tentative girl who had ridden with him the day they had met by accident in a far paddock.

  He went out preparing to investigate.

  For no good reason beyond infallible instinc
t Mrs Tyrrell called, ‘Mrs Lushington, Mrs Edmonds says, is suffering from a heavy cold.’

  And he called back, ‘I hope Mrs Edmonds hasn’t brought it down with her. It wouldn’t be fair if you were laid up so soon after your ma’s visit.’

  Herself fairly mature, Peggy had an ancient mother, Ma Corkill, who had been out to ‘Bogong’ recently to investigate her daughter’s situation.

  Mrs Corkill, the she-ancient of she-ancients, did not aspire to hats as did her daughter, but wore her hair in the semblance of a hat, a creation such as insects weave out of leaves and twigs, and dead grass, its structure containing a suppressed hum, which erupts in a sizzle of red-hot needles if anyone is unwise enough to poke it. (Neither mother nor daughter approved of hair-washing: ‘it don’t do nothun for yer health, dear;’ and in fact, as Peggy Tyrrell confessed, neither had ever washed hers.)

  Unlike her daughter, who was still in possession of the fangs to which she hitched her Sunday teeth, the old lady was completely toothless. Her vocabulary was sparse but serviceable, particularly after she had taken a dose from a medicine bottle she carried in an apron pocket, or seated with Peggy on the double dunny, or holding a post-mortem in the daughter’s bed after the lamp had been blown out. As the smell of extinguished wick ascended, the women’s voices would entwine in a duet embellished by roulades and trills worthy of a more rococo age.

  Ma Corkill’s visit to ‘Bogong’ had its climax in her flinging a kettle of boiling water at her daughter halfway through the third day. She was collected by a Tyrrell grandson, almost as mature as his mother it seemed, as he sat in his convulsive Ford, under the brim of a green-grey Sewell felt, the neckband of his shirt gathered together by a glass ruby in a brass claw.

  ‘What can yer do,’ Mrs Tyrrell asked, ‘if it’s yer own mother?’

  Nobody had the answer to that; least of all Eddie Twyborn, who had never found the answer to himself.

  Least of all on his way up the hill to face Marcia’s displeasure for his neglect and his avoidance of her friends the Golsons, or perhaps on overcoming that displeasure, to prove to himself that she was still his mistress. It was most important that he should decide how much of his life was serious and how much farce.

  Though late enough, there were signs of life, sounds of conversation. No car parked in the drive. Marcia might have persuaded a servant to stay behind and receive her confidences, or perhaps, he began to fear, Prowse had come up for some of that office work by which he boosted his self-importance.

  Eddie passed the office window. In a deserted room a single light bulb under a white porcelain shade was engaged in a battering match with walls enamelled an electric blue.

  The voices were coming from that vast and hideous mock-Tudor library. The windows and glass doors had been thrown open to summer. He halted in the darkness on reaching the narrow carpet of light laid across the tiles from doorway to garden.

  ‘You’re all very well when you need a bloke,’ Prowse was grumbling.

  Marcia laughed what was recognisably a bored laugh. ‘We might as well admit there’s a practical side to every human relationship.’

  ‘But no one’s ever used me as you have.’

  ‘I’d have thought I was useful to you—at a certain stage—when your wife couldn’t stand any more.’

  ‘Yes, but I thought you had some feeling for me.’

  ‘Yes, I did have. But feeling doesn’t always last. Like tastes. When I was a little girl I couldn’t eat too much Yorkshire pudding. Then, suddenly, I couldn’t touch another mouthful.’

  ‘But you called one of the kids after Prowse.’

  ‘Oh yes, I know. That was Greg. He was sorry for you. He wanted to do you a kindness, Don.’

  ‘And what did you do for Greg? The kid was ours, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Who knows? Oh God, don’t let’s start going over it again!’

  She had begun walking about. There was the sound of struck matches, then the smell of the Abdulla cigarette which Marcia smoked.

  ‘Lost yer taste for Yorkshire pud, but you might develop it again. Like you’ve started coming at the other.’

  There was half a sigh, half a snort from Marcia. ‘If you must put it that way …’

  ‘You were the one that put it.’

  Marcia appeared in the doorway, the necklaces of Venus eating into her heavy throat, the smoke blown from her nostrils indicative of extreme irritation.

  Eddie saw that he hated Marcia.

  ‘Don’t let’s argue!’ she insisted from beside the drooping, gold-tipped cigarette.

  ‘Then let’s have it out the other way. That’s what you’d call practical, isn’t it?’

  ‘How?’ She raised her head imperiously.

  ‘You know I do it good.’

  She stood looking out into the dark. ‘You make it sound so gross.’

  He had come up behind; the thick orange forearms appeared round her waist. ‘That’s what you’re all about, Marcia. What you want. And what we do so well together.’

  ‘Oh,’ she whimpered, ‘there’s more than that!’

  ‘Funny you only recently found out.’

  ‘Lives change.’

  ‘Funny it happened after Twyborn came. You’re not on with Eddie, are you, Marce?’

  ‘What a thing to imagine!’ She had broken free and turned back into the enormous room. ‘We have a fine relationship—Eddie and I. His friendship is something I value immensely. He gives me so much more than any of the other boring clods in the district.’

  ‘Me included.’

  ‘Oh, darling, I didn’t mean to be rude! You’re someone I value differently. You’re part of our lives. Greg and I do appreciate you, Don.’

  ‘Useful—practical—profitable. Like a ram or a stud bull.’

  At this point there took place a considerable trampling of the moth-eaten Afghan carpet as she tried to sidestep his accusations and her stud followed her round the room.

  ‘This Eddie Twyborn you have the fine relationship with—you don’t know what you’ve got on yer hands. Well, I’ll tell yer. He’s nothun more than a bloody queen.’

  There was rather a long pause. ‘I haven’t any evidence of it,’ Marcia Lushington replied at last. ‘Have you?’

  ‘I can put two and two together.’ He must still have been pounding about; the windows were rattling. ‘If there’s anything I can’t stand it’s a queen.’

  ‘Because he’s sensitive,’ she said, ‘you draw wrong conclusions.’

  ‘So sensitive he let you down. And now you want the bull again.’

  Silence was spreading in widening circles through the mock-Tudor library. The listener visualised numbers of the Bystander and Tatler in disarray on occasional tables, and the goose-fleshed covers of Marcia’s subscribed novels from Dymocks’ and Angus and Robertson. He saw the great fireplace with logs awaiting next winter, and in an ash-tray the butt of a gold-tipped Abdulla, its thread of incense uniting with the languor of summer.

  Then someone or other was groaning, churning up the heavy silence, a mouth rejecting a mouth from its depths, a body dragging itself away from another equally elastic.

  She said, ‘You’re right—up to a point,’ and laughed one of her thicker laughs.

  Which must have been devoured instantly.

  When she came up for breath she said, ‘All right, Don—we do understand each other. But you’ll never understand Eddie Twyborn.’

  If Prowse didn’t reply, it was because she was leading him out of the room, into a distance she and Eddie had explored together on freezing Monaro nights, now this steamier, more bestial version of what the novice had tried to see as a pilgrimage.

  Eddie hated Marcia Lushington more than he hated Don Prowse. He might have progressed along the wall through outer darkness to overhear more, if his humiliation hadn’t already developed to its utmost: the humiliation of jealousy, more of Marcia than Don.

  He returned to a dark cottage where Peggy Tyrrell seemed to be dreaming a sibyl’s dream
s.

  After taking off his clothes, he lay down on his narrow stretcher and began automatically masturbating.

  The following day was a Saturday, and Prowse had driven into town, to pubs and other less salubrious pastures, taking with him Mrs Tyrrell, who was looking forward to a scene with her mother and a funeral scheduled for the afternoon.

  Towards four o’clock, after shaving and bathing, Eddie went up the hill to the house. He found Marcia alone on the veranda, reclining on an old bleached cane chaise. On her outstretched thighs, one of her library books, which more than likely she hadn’t been reading, was lying spine upward. She was dressed in a worn grey flannel skirt and a blouse unbuttoned to the opulent cleavage, sleeves turned back to expose the elbows and the blue veins on the reverse side. Her arms were hanging listlessly for the brief but intense Monaro heat. Her face expressed a disenchantment, whether real or cultivated, radiating from a nose made thicker, soggier, by the heavy cold Mrs Tyrrell had reported.

  ‘Can I be dreaming?’ she said at last, cutting into the remark with a grudging smile, and coughing thickly to enlist her cold.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I think we’re real enough,’ and laughed.

  He sat down on an upright chair, another member of the suite in dilapidated, bleached cane.

  Whereas he had planned to be cruel, biting, dramatic, he felt sympathetic towards her: it must have been those red, swollen eyelids, or else his bath had cooled him off. His clothes sat so lightly on him, he might in other circumstances have felt the urge to take them off, to stretch alongside her, no longer a lover, but some lean and ingratiating breed of hairless dog, licking her wrists, expecting an exchange of caresses.

  ‘Why did you treat me like that? And as far as I can see, all because of the poor Golsons. Now, why?’ she hectored mildly.

  ‘I’m not prepared to go into that.’ He sounded tense; his light mood was leaving him.

  ‘You’ve made me very unhappy,’ she told him, ‘Eddie, dearest—for no good reason that I can imagine. When I most need your—company—your confidence, you treat me as though I’m in some way diseased.’