The Twyborn Affair

by Patrick White

  ‘They tell me Greg is expected back at any moment. That will be fine for you, Marcia.’

  She almost suppressed a frown. ‘Dear old Greg! Not everyone appreciates him, but I think, Eddie, you do—you and your father.’

  There was a silence in which the cane furniture showed signs of disintegrating.

  Marcia said, ‘I must go and make us some tea.’

  ‘Don’t bother.’

  ‘But it’s what we do at four o’clock. Don’t expect a lot of food, though. Mrs Quimby’s mumping over something or other, probably preparing to give notice.’

  The fact that he, too, was more than probably going to leave made him melancholy, sitting on the Lushingtons’ veranda with the river flat spread before him, the brown river meandering through bleached tussock, the sensuous forms of naked hills on either side: a landscape which had engaged his feelings in a brief and unlikely love affair he was about to end.

  If all love affairs are not, perhaps, unlikely. Only the meat of marriage convinces, if you are made for it, and open to conviction.

  A hornet was somewhere ceaselessly working on its citadel, and under the eaves hung a swallow’s nest temporarily abandoned by its tenant, in each case evidence of the continuity which convinces animals better than it does human beings, unless they are human vegetables.

  Marcia returned carrying a tray as though it were the sort of act she wasn’t used to performing. Her shoulders drooped, her bare arms looked defenceless, even pathetic. Perhaps she expected him, as a lover, or simply as a man, to jump up and help her with the tray.

  But he didn’t: he was too distant, and at the same time too absorbed in everything happening around him, the fidgeting sound of the hornet, on the faded plain the brown river, static now, swift in memory, over the veranda tiles Marcia’s shuffle in a pair of scuffed, once elegant, crocodile shoes.

  She arranged the tray on a table, yet another member of the weathered cane family

  A generous wedge was missing from the jam sandwich, its pink icing buttoned down and slightly stained by a wreath of crystallised violets. Though a cake for a country occasion, the recalcitrant Mrs Quimby had failed to pipe a message on it.

  Marcia let off a misplaced giggle. ‘There we are, darling!’ She would have liked to appear girlish, but suspected at once that he would not allow her.

  He sat, chin lowered, staring ahead. He saw himself, alas, as a farouche schoolboy refusing to let Mum have him on. Poor Marce didn’t know about it, while he had the unfair advantage, at any rate since last night, of knowing almost everything.

  She poured the tea, of a delicacy which must have been wasted on the district, and which they would have discussed afterwards: that hogwash of Marcia Lushington’s.

  Along with the barbarians, Eddie was not appreciative enough. The pink festive cake was stale. The cruel scene he had rehearsed would have to be enacted eventually.

  ‘There you are,’ she said very humbly as she tried a fragment of the cake, ‘I warned you.’

  ‘But did you?’ His cup slithered like stone on the saucer; his chair grated on the tiled veranda.

  While Marcia Lushington sat holding her teacup in both hands, to prevent a trembling from showing, and to let the steam take the blame for her watering eyes.

  She protested, ‘I don’t understand. I thought you loved me.’

  In his case, it was the crumbs of the stale cake which were trembling; he brushed them off with a disapproving, and as he saw it, suddenly old-maidish hand.

  ‘I was fond of you,’ he admitted; and then not too honestly, ‘because affection was what I thought you wanted;’ less honest still, ‘I couldn’t love you for respecting poor old Greg.’

  She sat up jerkily on the edge of the grating chaise.

  ‘There you’ve caught me out, Eddie. You’ve caught us both. Because,’ and now it was her turn to look out along the bleached plain, ‘I find I’m pregnant.’

  The hornet was worrying the silence worse than ever, a fiery copper wire piercing but never aborting a situation the enormity of which could only be human.

  Eddie began to laugh. It made Marcia look more becolded.

  ‘However cynical you may like to be thought, I’m glad the child will be yours. Greg is fond of you,’ she said, ‘and it may be the son he and I have failed to get.’

  ‘It might be another failure—like the one you had with Prowse.’

  He thought the silence would never end: a balloon swelling and swelling, but never bursting, in spite of the hornet’s efforts, in the late light of a summer afternoon.

  When Marcia said, ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘I was going by the names on the graves—as well as more positive evidence.’

  She leaned forward, her chin broader for being propped on the heel of a hand. ‘It could be Greg’s—just—from before he went away. But you were what I wanted.’

  ‘Or Prowse?’

  She ignored it. He got up soon after. She was still staring at the breached cake, its yellow more unnatural, its pink more lurid in the evening light.

  ‘I think you’re cruel by nature,’ she said.

  He didn’t answer: he was arranging his belt, because his manly shirt was coming out.

  ‘Now I believe you’re what I was told you are.’

  He didn’t bother to expose any of them worse than they were already exposed.

  The landscape which might have healed was withdrawing into dusk; it was the landscape he had loved, peopled with those the magic-lantern projects without their knowing, like Greg Lushington the Crypto-poet, Mr Justice Twyborn the Bumbling Father, Peggy Tyrrell of the Football Team. Even, perhaps, Don Prowse the Brute Male.

  Only Marcia was excluded, looking out through her becolded mask at Eadie’s son. No one but Eadie, another woman, could have dealt her this cruel blow. Eadie was the judge, and women have more of justice in them.

  Eddie blubbered to himself going down the hill, not for Marcia, but Angelos, legs sticking out straight and stiff on a maid’s bed in that pension before the frontier. Men are frailer than women. Don Prowse, for all his meaty male authority, was not much more than a ping-pong ball knocked back and forth in a sinewy female set. Most sinewy of all, an aggressive anima walled up inside her tower of flesh.

  Till accused by the child in Marcia’s womb, Eddie Twyborn cut short the ping-pong game, returning to his actual surroundings and candidacy for fatherhood.

  He awoke to hear the car manoeuvred under cover, the crackle of paper as parcels were undone in the kitchen, a man’s curse when a wing was grazed on a corner of corrugated iron, a woman’s sighs and invocations as the depths of her body, and even more, her spiritual tatters, caused her pain.

  The walls of his normally putty-coloured room were spattered with light from the manoeuvred car, translucent patches, with iridescent threads superimposed as he rubbed his eyeballs to rid them of an itch and hurry them into awareness of what was happening. He reached down to cover up his nakedness, but fell back upon the stretcher where he had been dozing: it was too hot, it was too hot. He couldn’t bother. The blanket too hairy. Since coming to ‘Bogong’ he had dispensed with sheets, out of masochism or delusions of masculinity.

  The petals of light flowering on the walls were suddenly wiped out by darkness.

  Silence was broken by the creaking of a fly-proof door, a renewed outburst of female sighs, male boots hurled against the wall of a fragile weatherboard house.

  Any frail male could only cower and try to assemble an acceptable identity, any female, because tougher, more fibrous, consolidate her position inside the cloak of darkness.

  Though Peggy did creep along the passage to hiss, ‘I oughter warn yer, love, ’e ’s ’ad a fair few. Don’t let yerself get drawn in. ’E’s cantankerous ternight.’

  After Prowse had martyrised the skirting-board with his boots, and let out a round fart or two, and the housekeeper had shut her door, silence again descended where the rats hadn’t taken over, the rabbits and t
he hawthorns—night in fact, but not yet dreams.

  ‘Eddie?’

  It was Don Prowse in the doorway: a heavy body bungling, stomping, chafing, a voice reaching out after what it hoped might be conciliation. If the thought hadn’t been so grotesque, Prowse was less cantankerous than what he probably considered seductive.

  ‘Ed.’ No query, it was pure statement in search of a solid presence.

  The body continued advancing, stubbing its toes here and there, groaning, gasping. A rite of sorts had started taking place in the shuddering dark of this dry-rotted room.

  ‘… you got me worried, boy. I never did anything like it before. Don’t know what came over me. I been thinkin’ about it—what you must think …’

  The penitent must have had a fair idea of his bearings, either from instinct or from a glimmer of light the hawthorns allowed through their locked branches, for he reached a point where he crashed on the stretcher alongside its occupant.

  Prowse was crying, expostulating, and apparently stark naked. Eddie’s own fastidious nakedness became aware of prickling hair, tingling with moisture like a rain forest, at the same time the smell exuded by sodden human fur. He was surrounded by, almost dunked in, these practically liquid exhalations.

  What was both alarming and gratifying, he knew that he was being won over, not by the orange brute so much as poor old Prowse of the snapshots with meticulous white-ink captions, the husband of Kath, and by the spirit of Angelos Vatatzes, whose cold eyelids and rigid feet still haunted memory.

  It was too much for Eddie Twyborn to endure. He was rocking this hairy body in his arms, to envelop suffering in some semblance of love, to resuscitate two human beings from drowning.

  Prowse managed to extricate himself. He rolled over.

  ‘Go on,’ he moaned, ‘Ed!’ and bit the pillow.

  Eddie Twyborn’s feminine compassion which had moved him to tenderness for a pitiable man was shocked into what was less lust than a desire for male revenge. He plunged deep into this passive yet quaking carcase offered up as a sacrifice. He bit into the damp nape of a taut neck. Hair sprouting from the shoulders, he twisted by merciless handfuls as he dragged his body back and forth, lacerated by his own vengeance.

  Prowse was crying, ‘Oh God! Oh Christ!’ before a final whimper which was also his ravisher’s sigh.

  They fell apart finally.

  Eddie said, ‘Go on, Don. That’s what it’s about, that’s what you wanted.’

  He couldn’t deny it, except, ‘I hope you won’t hold it against me, Eddie.’

  ‘Go on, get out!’

  Prowse heaved, protested, curled himself into the shape of a prawn against a form which, having vindicated itself, refused to respond. Prowse’s sighs of entreaty, his redundancies of love, were surprisingly like Marcia’s.

  ‘If that’s what you say—and feel.’

  ‘All I want to say is, I’ll catch the train tomorrow evening at Fossickers, and would like you to run me over, Don. Otherwise, if you’d rather, I’ll hire a car from town.’

  After a short whimpering silence, ‘If that’s what you’ve decided, I’ll run yer there.’

  A damp paw put out on a renewed voyage of exploration. Eddie Twyborn rejected it, in spite of the scabs on the obverse side, the dry cracks, and the freckles he remembered.

  ‘Go on, Don—get!’ It sounded unconvincingly male.

  The manager heaved, the stretcher creaked. Prowse was diving in the direction of the doorway. He must have bumped his head or some other part of his anatomy on something more solid than darkness.

  He cried out, ‘Oh Jesus! Oh fuck!’ before slewing round the corner into the passage, slithering several yards on the lino, and falling into his own room.

  Mrs Tyrrell was tearful. ‘I dunno wot’s took you, Eddie. I thought you was more dependable. Most men aren’t dependable. Rowley weren’t—though ’e was me husband, an’ dead since. The boys aren’t—they got their wives. Only the girls. Well, that’s ’ow it is. I thought you was different—like me daughters, but different.’

  Eddie was at first embarrassed, then moved to feel her weather-cured face, together with a smear of tears, ground against his cheek. At the same time he became enveloped in the bobbled shawl, in whiffs of kero, eaudy Cologne, and the overall stench of mutton fat.

  A brown-paper parcel was thrust at him. ‘A few bloody sandwiches fer the journey. There’s mustard in ’em ter make ’em more tasty.’

  In the corrugated shed the manager was revving up the Ford, the afternoon light as remorseless as the fossicking hens.

  Eddie Twyborn could only say, ‘We’ll write, Peggy,’ regretting that it sounded so upper class.

  ‘ ’Oo’ll write? You, if I’m lucky. But ’oo’s gunner read it to me? ’Oo that I can trust—at “Bogong”—or anywheres—fer that matter?’

  He got himself out, together with the greasy parcel, the suitcase and valise with which he had arrived, lighter for his boots and work clothes which he was leaving for Denny. The too ostentatious cabin trunk was already strapped to the rack.

  The manager drove doggedly, his heavy hands bumped by the wheel. Eddie dared not look at the hands, let alone the face, which smelled overpoweringly of shaving soap.

  In a paddock through which they were passing, sulphur-crested cockatoos were screeching as they tore down stooks of oats.

  ‘Bloody cockies! You can’t win,’ Prowse mumbled; he sounded fairly acceptant for the moment.

  ‘Greg’ll be back,’ he announced farther on, as though pleased to think his responsibility for marauding cockatoos, and anything else, might be ended by the owner’s return. ‘Nothing lasts for ever, eh?’

  He glanced sideways, no doubt hoping for his passenger to corroborate, or even suggest that past events are expungeable if you put your will to it.

  Eddie did not return the glance for fear of finding a mirror to his own thoughts. Instead, he glanced down and encountered the wrist-watch. A utilitarian affair, sitting rather high on the hairy wrist, the watch was attached to a sweat-eaten strap, narrow to the point of daintiness. He had barely noticed this watch before. Now it wrung him. Had he been a child instead of this pseudo-man-cum-crypto-woman, he might have put out a finger and touched it, to the consolation of both of them.

  In the light of shared desire, it was some consolation to himself to remember a moment in which he had embraced, not so much a lustful male, as a human being exposed in its frailty and tenderness.

  This, of course, was no consolation to Don Prowse. Who knew. Who knew. But only the half of it.

  They drove bumping through the paddocks, and as on arrival, so on departure, brumby horses wheeled and approached, eyeing them through wild forelocks, sheep milled and halted and stamped, wooden masks conveying that expression of disbelief for the same two intruders, who had got to know each other in the meantime, so much better, or so much worse.

  They drove, and arrived at Fossickers Flat.

  Prowse looked at the wristwatch and grumbled, ‘Don’t know why you got us here so early.’

  And Eddie replied, ‘I arrive everywhere too early, or too late. It’s my worst vice.’ He laughed, but Prowse’s expression could have been taken for thoughtful.

  After unloading the luggage they stood about together on the siding.

  ‘Look, Don, you don’t have to hang about.’

  But Don did: mouthing, swallowing words to which the thick lips failed to give birth.

  ‘Should ’uv rung to reserve a sleeper. But you caught me on the hop, Ed.’

  ‘Probably no sleepers left. Not at the last moment. Anyhow, I don’t expect I’ll sleep.’

  Was it too perilous an admission? They crunched up and down the siding, beneath the painted sign FOSSICKERS FLAT. A rudimentary shelter might have offered asylum to a parcel, never to escaping prisoners or queered lovers. In the scrub across the track, the zither notes of small birds seemed to be conveying bird facts which evaded expression in human terms.

  ‘We’ll all
miss you, Eddie.’

  ‘Oh, go on, Don! Don’t be a cunt—for God’s sake go!’

  GO!

  Legs apart, shoulders hunched, the bare hills behind him, the man looked every bit a puzzled, panting, red ox.

  But as time ticked away on the crude wristwatch, it was Eddie Twyborn awaiting the pole-axe.

  ‘All right, Ed. All right!’ Again the manager, Mr Prowse had matters in hand. ‘You got yer bags. You’ll get yer ticket on the train. I’ll shove off.’

  As he did.

  Eddie turned his back on the diminishing trail of dust, and the Mail arrived eventually, the guard descending to jolly the ascending passenger.

  ‘Not offn we get one at Fossickers, sir.’

  After the two had heaved up the baggage, he flagged the engine.

  Eddie Twyborn sat in the corner of his empty compartment and was rushed away, past the skeleton trees, the hill with its cairn of lichened rocks, faces hungry for events outside a shack at a level crossing. A bronzed, exhausted, country evening gave way to night, which had the smell of soot.

  The brown-paper parcel had fallen off the seat on to the floor. He ought to pick it up.

  He was too passive, it seemed. Jolted onward, through Bungendore and the rest, he closed his eyes. But did not sleep. Sleep might always be denied him, except in the form of dreams, or nightmares.

  Sydney

  5 October 1929

  Dear, dear Mrs Lushington,

  It was so kind of you to write to me and send the snap of your little boy. I do feel for you, deeply—a claim which no doubt you’ll interpret as hypocrisy, grief being such a personal matter we must bear our own; others can sympathise while only superficially understanding.

  I keep returning to the picture of this little boy so dear to you, and so cruelly taken when his life seemed assured. I believe he has the stamp of both of you, in equal parts. Not that I know either of you, reallty—Mr Lushington only on abysmal formal occasions when mere women are admitted to a gentleman’s club; you even less, in spite of an unacceptable encounter best forgotten, and the time you appeared for Sunday luncheon in the dining room of the Hotel Australia, and scanned the menu, and blew smoke at us from under monkey fur, and left, for some reason, contemptuously. I am not criticising, dear Mrs Lushington, what at that stage would have been my own attitude. I think I was only resentful of the behaviour of one I might have liked to know.