The Twyborn Affair

by Patrick White

  They were both more than a little drunk, but fortunately not drunk enough. When she suggested he leave her, he obeyed without protest, so that their relationship remained intact, which was how she must keep it.

  She must have been awakened by protesting cries from other voices. It was the same room, except that all but the essentials of furniture had been removed. In this bare, clinical interior the light did not come from the bedside lamp, which she could remember switching on and off, nor was it related to normal daylight. As the room was windowless, she saw, the light falling around her could only have been shed from within, yet from no visible light fittings.

  Throughout this flesh-coloured, infra-natural light, she became aware of a fluttering of the bird-voices, moth-like hands, of a brood of children she did not attempt to count. They were too many and too unearthly, also too frightening, in particular the eyes and mouths, which were those of flesh-and-blood children, probing, accusing the room’s focal point, herself.

  She understood by degrees that the children wanted out; the safe, windowless room (its walls even upholstered, she noticed) was the cause of their distress and she the one they held responsible for their unreasonable imprisonment.

  ‘But my darlings,’ her voice sounded as odd as her use of a term she had always tended to avoid, ‘here you’ll be safe, don’t you see?’

  But the children continued battering with flat hands on the unresponsive walls, a drumming to which was added, she could hear, sounds of gathering confusion outside, as of wind rising, waves pounding, and worse, human voices screaming hatred and destruction as some monstrous act, explosive and decisive, was being prepared.

  She, too, had begun screaming as she tore free from the hospital sheets pinning her down. ‘Can’t I make you realise?’ She lunged among the milling children, trying to gather them into her arms as though they had been flowers. ‘Safe—as you’ll never be outside.’

  Almost all of them eluded her. Only one little crop-headed boy she succeeded in trapping. She was holding his pink head against her breast, when he tore the nightdress she was wearing, and it fell around her, exposing a chest, flat and hairy, a dangling penis and testicles. To express his disgust, the pink-stubbled boy bit into one of the blind nipples, then reeled back, pointing, as did all the children, laughing vindictively as their adult counterparts might have, at the blood flowing from the wound opened in the source of their deception, down over belly and thighs, gathering at the crotch in such quantities that it overflowed and hid the penis. The dripping and finally coagulating blood might have gushed from a torn womb.

  She awoke again, this time to the less hostile reality of Gravenor’s guest room, her comparatively smooth body slimy with sweat inside an intact nightdress. A steely light of false dawn entering by a crack between the black-out curtains had replaced the sterile timeless light of her windowless dream. She got up chafing her arms. She could hear what was either a thunderstorm or gunfire, but far out at sea. Along the coast the black coils of wire, the white dragons’ teeth, were beginning to materialise.

  After dressing she walked some way through the Anglo-Flemish landscape, at each step experiencing the same struggle to withdraw her by no means exaggerated heels from the grey sand and mangled pig’s-face.

  She must have walked for over an hour. A red sun was rising out of a northern sea. At points along the coast one of the dun-coloured figures would train binoculars on the seascape. Obsessed by the prospect of invasion, they showed no interest whatsoever in what might have been a rewarding suspect in their rear.

  When she got in she returned to her room to make up her face before going in search of Gravenor. Her natural lips tasted of salt; there were encrustations at the corners of her eyes, a mingling of sea salt, tears, the detritus which dreams leave.

  She found him in his room doing press-ups in his underpants: the long form of an almost transparent, pink grasshopper.

  ‘Why don’t you join me?’ he suggested. ‘The exercise would do you good’ as he went on pressing his chest against the carpet, and up.

  ‘I’ve taken my exercise. Along the coast. For quite two hours.’

  ‘What a glutton! You might have been arrested by a captain. Or raped by a sergeant.’

  ‘I think I’ve learnt enough to hold them off.’

  Gravenor carried on with his press-ups. Feathered like a bronze cockerel on the shoulders, the pronounced vertebrae so exposed, the calves and Achilles tendons so strained, the heels polished almost as white as the bone beneath the skin, she was overcome by a tenderness which made her avoid them. She went and looked out the window at a view which was becoming hateful to her, as hateful as the blind room in her dream.

  ‘I’m going to leave you today,’ she said. ‘It was foolish of me to come. And you to have asked me.’

  ‘If that’s how you feel, I’ll run you over to the station.’

  All the banalities of human intercourse were called into play in the kitchen as he served her with a coddled egg, Oxford marmalade, and burnt toast.

  He told her she had made herself look ‘extraordinarily attractive’ and she cackled back at him in self-defence, like an ageing whore who would not have given up doing the boat-trains if the boat-trains hadn’t been taken over.

  For all that, he didn’t seem discouraged.

  Although unpunctual at the station, they arrived at the moment the train came in sight.

  ‘I’ll write to you,’ he told her as they broke free from a hurried kiss.

  She couldn’t say she would reply because, from the little she had been able to gather, she wouldn’t know how to find him. By the same token, he might never reach her.

  She looked back out of the narrow window for a last glimpse of this sandy man, standing in his baggy, wind-blown clothes in a flat landscape.

  Tentacles from a frayed and grubby antimacassar were trying for a hold on her hair as she lay back against the upholstery and closed her eyes to the press-ups, the pronounced vertebrae, the tense buttocks trembling inside cotton drawers, images she didn’t succeed in shutting out; they were projected in even more vivid detail on the dark screen her eyelids had let down.

  In Beckwith Street the train of events provoked the house’s longstanding patrons to higher flights of lechery. Then there was a newer breed of client, his motives more obscure, often tortuous. If he was less dishonest than the regulars, it was because his unconscious reasons for disguising the truth were usually pure. These survivors of lost battles seemed intent on avoiding any accusation of heroism, let alone experience of transcendence, which some of them had evidently undergone. Those whose prayers had been answered no longer appeared to have faith, as though prayer were a drug which can outlive its virtue and fail to arrest future threats, more especially the constantly recurring disease of recollection. Now the survivors were falling back on brutishness; not only to absolve them of the sins of embarrassing heroism and shameful spirituality, but to dissolve memories of cowardice, authorised murder, dying friends, the faces of unknown families escaping with their bundles from the wreckage of their normal lives, the mummified death-throes of figures in a burnt-out tank, or a form shrouded in a parachute casually hanging from a tree.

  In certain circumstances lust can become an epiphany, as Eadith Trist recognised while talking to some of those survivors of Dunkirk who frequented her brothel.

  She was reminded of a man long forgotten, an Australian captain, who had met up with Eddie Twyborn during a lull in the First War. The captain was a Prowse before Prowse’s advent, if Eddie had realised. They were sitting together in a poor sort of estaminet some way behind the front, drinking the lees of their watered-down wine.

  When the captain suddenly confided, ‘There’s nothing like a good fuck, mate, when the shit’s been scared out of you.’

  He rinsed his mouth with the abysmal wine and squirted it out from between his teeth.

  Eddie agreed. ‘I expect you’re right.’ As he uncrossed his legs in a delicate situation, he thought
he heard the chafing of silk, and blushed behind his dirt and stubble.

  ‘I’ll tell you something,’ the captain said, ‘I’ve never told it to anyone before—somethun funny that happened to me. We was over there a few weeks ago,’ he pointed with his pipe in a vague direction, ‘enjoyin’ a breather on our way back for a bit of a spell. I started pokin’ around where we’d halted. I was too nervous to stay put—we’d had it pretty tough the last trip. I went over to a farm that was still of a piece under cover of the next ridge. Always take a squint at what they’re up to on the land. Got a place of me own at Bungendore. Well, I was pokin’ round this poor sort of farm. God, it stank! of pig shit, like most of these Frog farms do. When I saw a bloody woman’s face lookin’ out of the winder at me. She’d every right, I had to admit. So I went in to apologise. We stood there sizing each other up. Couldn’t say a bloody word of course. This big, white-skinned, fine figure of a Frog woman—and me. And we started takin’ off our bloody clothes. You couldn’t say which of us started. She took me by the hand and we got on a bed, not in another room, but on a sort of platform down the other end of the kitchen. You could hear the kids playin’ in the yard. Where ’er husband was I couldn’t ask. P’raps down the paddock diggin’ up turnips. Otherwise, I reckoned, she wouldn’t ’uv been so foolish. There was nothun foolish about ’er—it—US. Except that I was pretty feeble. I don’t mind saying I was tremblin’ all over from what we’d been through up the line. But I mounted, and she let me in. An’ then this funny thing happened. It was not like I was just fuckin’ a Frog woman with greased thighs. I reckon we were both carried, like, beyond the idea of orgasm. In my case, I was too fuckun tired. Just joggun along like it was early mornun, the worst of the frost just about over. As you doze in the saddle. The light as warm and soft and yeller as the wool on a sheep’s back …’

  The captain spat on the estaminet floor.

  ‘You’ll think me a funny sort of joker. But that’s how it was as I fucked this Frog. And more. Wait till I tell yer.’ If he could; he’d begun to look so uneasy. ‘It was like as if a pair of open wings was spreading round the pair of us. Ever seen those white cockies pullin’ down the stooked oats soon as yer bloody back’s turned? Then sitting on a bough screechin’ their heads off! Well, like the wings of a giant cocky, soft, and at times explosive. You heard feathers explode, didn’t yer?’

  By now the Australian captain had begun looking almost demented.

  ‘You’ll think I’m a shingle short! Don’t know what the woman thought or felt. There was this language difficulty, see? When suddenly she let out a yell. Me—I thought this is it—it’s ’er old man back from the turnips! So I jumped off, and started getting into me clothes—double quick, I don’t mind tellin’ yer. But she only lay there, poor cow, sort of smiling and crying—arm across ’er eyes. So it couldn’t ’uv been ’er old man she’d heard.’

  The captain was scratching in his pouch for a few last crumbs of dry tobacco.

  ‘P’raps the husband was bloody well dead.’

  He rammed the tobacco into the stinking crater of his pipe.

  ‘Or she could ’uv been yellin’ at the orgasm.’

  He rammed and rammed.

  ‘Don’t know why I’m tellun yer this. About giant cockies. You’ll think I’m a nut case.’

  Eddie Twyborn had to rejoin his detachment down the road.

  ‘An’ don’t think I’m religious!’ The captain had followed him as far as the door. ‘Because I believe in nothun!’ he shouted after one he regretted taking for a temporary mate. ‘NOTHUN!’ he screamed.

  The remembered scream rang in Eadith’s ears as she listened to the men who had returned from Dunkirk, and as she walked through the warren of what was officially her brothel. She could not envisage leaving her house, or handing over to anyone else, for this was the life she had chosen, or which had been chosen for her. Yet her girls, her clients, seemed less aware of her presence than before. Ada had emerged as a person of abounding influence; her professional attitudes commanded the respect of those who had dealings with her; the brisk sound of her brown habit, the rustle of her bunch of keys, if not her rosary, could be heard in the corridors, the public rooms, and as they issued out of the individual cells under her charitable control.

  That Ada might take over began to seem possible, at moments inevitable. The two principals accepted what their eyes and minds avoided, because theirs had always been a relationship of perfect trust. Now more than ever Mrs Trist relied on her deputy’s support.

  Eadith believed that sooner or later she must come across Eadie Twyborn again. She sensed that the conflict of individual destinies was as inescapable, and often as fatal, as the all-embracing undertow of war. As she waited, nervousness made her snip at the hairs in her nostrils; she even found herself picking her nose. Supposing the barbarians arrived before she and Eadie could be brought face to face? She went out and stood on the marble steps to repel the invader with what remained of her own strength, and the spirit-support of a father, husband, lovers, all of whom had been frail human beings, as frail in fact as Eddie/Eadith.

  There was an evening when Mrs Trist was forced to defect temporarily from her over- organised, airless house. After strolling, by a great effort of restraint, some distance along the Walk, she sat down on a bench placed almost exactly in front of the Old Church. It was before the peak hour of activity at her brothel: when the armed services poured in, the politicians, the civil servants, the Law, the Church, refugee royalty, and those who had survived trial by fire. As she sat in the pigeon-coloured light she knew she had begun to renounce what Ada was better able to cope with: a world of fragmentation and despair in which even the perversities of vice can offer regeneration of a kind.

  But perhaps she was what is called old-fashioned. Sitting on the bench on the Embankment, she saw herself as an Old Girl. Gulls flying up the estuary, wheeling above the incoming tide, were shitting on her dyed hair. She picked off a dob of white, while remembering that it was said to bring luck.

  Whether that was so, she did in fact look round soon after and saw Eadie Twyborn come out of the church. She was dressed in the same black she had been wearing on recent occasions, her face as drained of human passion, the prayer-book held in black-gloved hands. If Eadith Trist was an Old Girl, Eadie Twyborn could have been the original She-Ancient.

  To Eadith’s terror, this timeless figure seemed to be approaching the bench on which she was seated. Should she make her getaway before her courage dwindled, her will left her? Or should she remain and be exposed as never before? Nothing was decided for her. She continued sitting, more passive than she had known herself in the moments of her worst despair.

  The equally passive, outwardly unemotional figure of the elderly woman revealed no possible reason for her decision to sit on the already occupied bench. She didn’t speak; she was not the traditional Australian looking for a stranger on whom to inflict a life story. No doubt she was only preparing to enjoy the last of the sun and the light on the river turning by now from dove to violet.

  Eadith was so relieved, not to say disappointed, she could feel the tears coming into her eyes. She continued sitting, staring straight ahead, a stranger beside a stranger.

  More than anything the evening light began establishing a harmony between them.

  Eadith glanced sideways at the gloved hands, the skin showing white at the tip of one black forefinger pointed along the prayer-book’s shabby morocco.

  The hole in the glove, together with the scruffy leather, became more than Eadith Trist could bear. Perhaps it wasn’t her mother, and she could leave without a qualm. Even if it were Eadie Twyborn, one shouldn’t delude oneself into staying, out of sentimentality, compassion, or whatever.

  The aged woman began to speak in what was indisputably an aged, drained version of Eadie Twyborn’s voice. ‘I’d been promising myself one of Gribble’s brown-bread ices. I’ve only recently discovered them. But the light by the river is so delicious I’ve postpo
ned this other delight, till now, I suppose, it’s too late.’

  Eadith had decided not to think of this woman as her mother. At the same time she was unable to move.

  Mrs Twyborn turned to the stranger and asked, ‘Do you know their brown-bread ices?’

  Mrs Trist answered in her coldest English, ‘I find them slimy.’

  ‘Rich, perhaps. But a rich ice-cream or pudding is one of the few vices old age allows me to enjoy. Where I come from,’ she added (now you were for it), ‘they consider it a bit immoral to put too much cream in an ice.’

  Mrs Trist failed to ask the stranger’s inevitable question, but Mrs Twyborn didn’t seem put out. She apparently took for granted a cold temperament in her anonymous acquaintance.

  Presently she sighed. ‘Another thing I’ve missed doing this afternoon is mending this tear in my glove. Ah well, it’ll keep for this evening. I was never much good with my needle. I’ve always hated mending.’

  Mrs Trist agreed that mending was a bore.

  At this moment she was moved to look at Eadie Twyborn, even though she sensed the latter had turned and was looking at her.

  They were looking into each other’s eyes, Eadith’s of fragmented blue and gold blazing in their tension, their determination not to melt, Eadie’s of a dull topaz, the eyes of an old, troubled dog. The soft white-kid face, the pale lips, began to tremble so violently she had to turn away at last.

  The women continued sitting side by side, till Eadie found the strength to rummage in her bag, and when she had found the pencil she was looking for, to scribble on the prayer-book’s fly-leaf.

  Eadith was offered this tremulous scribble, and read, ‘Are you my son Eddie?’

  They were seated on this other bench inside the corrugated-iron shelter, sun blazing on black asphalt as the brown, bucking tram approached them.

  ‘I do wish, Eddie, you’d stop picking that scab on your knee. Sometimes I think you do things just to irritate me.’