Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

The old woman had dismissed bombs and their consequences; she sat contemplating the image of the hopping woman.

In her exasperation, the maid was hurting Eadie Twyborn. ‘Please come — I can’t wait for ever. Two men were killed at the corner.’

‘It’s too late — too late to die. I’ll stay and watch. Besides, I’m expecting my daughter.’

‘She’ll not be so foolish to start out on a night like this. Or if she did, she’ll have got in somewhere.’

Mrs Twyborn murmured, ‘I’ll wait. I’ll watch. Eadith will come.’

Frustrated by this stubborn old thing, the maid stormed off in pursuit of her own safety.

Overhead, the silver plane appeared to have been halted at an intersection of searchlights, its lovely abstraction far above human clangour and despair.

Now that night had fallen, all London could have been burning. But again, in abstraction.

What was real was the garden in which she was sitting. She had come out to dry her hair, and was sitting on the discoloured steps amongst the lizards and bulbuls and hibiscus trumpets, waiting for Eadith.

The towel she had brought with her was an old one, practically as old as her marriage, still serviceable, if thin. Things from then last for ever.

That drizzling tap. Nobody to mend it. Will Eadith, perhaps? Her man’s hands. Eddie Eadith her interchangeable failure.

She had lost sight of the beautiful aluminium insect and would never know whether it had evaded those sticky feelers of light, or plunged into the destruction it had caused below.

You could never be certain, either sitting in the garden, or on the bench beside the river, or waiting for the tram in the blaze of Sydney.

Eadie said I must not fail Eadith now that I have found her Eadith Eddie no matter which this fragment of my self which I lost is now returned where it belongs.

Sitting in the garden drying our hair together amongst the bulbuls and drizzle of taps we shall experience harmony at last.

She loved the birds. As she dried her hair and waited, a bulbul was perched on the rim of the stone bird-bath, dipping his beak. Ruffling his feathers, he cocked his head at her, shook his little velvet jester’s cap, and raised his beak towards the sun.