Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

Madame Vatatzes gave every impression of being sincere. There were the implications, however. ‘I have learnt to cultivate my garden!’ That exclamation mark. And wasn’t Curly dragged in without good reason? Or so Mrs Golson liked to think. Was this young woman begging for a rescue from the far from ‘invalid husband’, or merely inviting a literary correspondence with sentimental undertones?

Joanie Golson was to no great extent literary. Gruff notes from her closest friend Eadie Twyborn had not exactly encouraged the literary convention.

Come at 8. The Judge dining at the club with fifteen other males. The child atrocious all afternoon. Threw tantrum after tantrum. Nanny useless. Don’t know why intuition didn’t warn me against conceiving. My darlings are suffering from a plague of fleas. Bathed them in sheep-dip. Hoping.

E.

P.S. Child will be under control — asleep.

Mrs Golson was racked. What should she do? What could she expect? Probably nothing. She slipped deeper in the bergère , her sporty zouave by now rucked in sculptural folds.

And as always, Curly came in.

‘How are we, treasure?’

‘I have a throat …’ She did, indeed, sound hoarse; had he been sufficiently aware, he might have found her proud of it.

But Curly, as the bearer of tidings, was momentarily self-impressed. ‘The Russians are the ones we’ve got to watch.’

‘Watch for what?’ Mrs Golson asked languidly.

‘Been talking to a cove back from St Petersburg. The Russkies will decide whether we’re to have a war.’

‘I doubt it,’ Mrs Golson replied. ‘The French are convinced the Boches are the danger. Miss Clitheroe heard from a well-informed source that the Kaiser is planning to widen the Kiel Canal.’

‘In any case, I did the right thing — booking our passages in the Simla .’

‘That remains to be seen,’ she said. ‘The French,’ she asserted shamelessly, ‘are the worst of all warmongers.’ She seemed to gargle with it, and her throat became so far restored that she consented to go down to dinner with her husband, after freshening up and changing into a pretty frock.

Between the consommé à l’ambassadrice and the blanchaille en corbeilles de pommes pailles she opened her beaded evening bag and, on clearing her disaffected throat, announced with appropriate nonchalance, ‘I’ve had the most charming note of thanks from the little Vatatzes.’ Without awaiting comment, she allowed the letter to flutter down beside the mess Curly was making of his roll.

‘The little Vatatzes? I wouldn’t care to fall foul of such a strapping young female.’

‘I was only speaking figuratively.’ She wondered where she had learnt it; perhaps from Judge Twyborn, Eadie’s necessary adjunct, as Curly was, less creditably, hers.

‘What are we expected to do about them?’ he asked when he had read the letter.

‘Nothing,’ his wife assured him, though it made her bleed (figuratively) to do so. ‘We can’t go barging in on what is obviously a delicate sensibility.’ Mrs Golson was pleased with her own.

Since the whitebait had offered itself for attack, E. Boyd Golson only grunted. He brought down his knife across the heaped fish and the potato basket containing them. It distressed his wife never to have learnt whether one is meant to eat the basket; she would dearly have loved to devour the lot, but restrained herself beyond nibbling at a straw or two, a finger crooked under the weight of a pink sapphire, her defiant frown and arched eyebrows challenging her fellow diners’ censure.

Protected by their pink shades the candle-flames stood erect on the island-tables of the Grand Hôtel Splendide des Ligures as the clientele munched, gobbled, sucked up their soup (from the pointed end of the spoon, Mrs Golson felt superior to notice) while any larger-than-life passions, and the mythic war promised by the newspaper prophets and reinforced by Miss Clitheroe’s well-informed sources, were dismissed to a safe distance from this illuminated stucco folly inside its perimeter of slatternly palms, box borders, and regimented marigolds.

If war had begun to creep closer to Mrs Golson personally, it was only this evening, and because she had failed to halt her own very private passion. It surged around their island-table causing the candle-flames to flicker, and her vision of this charming girl and a frail old man to submerge in what was becoming a general void.

‘There is nothing we can do,’ she repeated.

‘Do about what?’

‘The Vatatzes.’

Having demolished the last of his potato basket, Curly would have felt replete if the main courses weren’t still to come. ‘What are the Vatats to us?’ he exploded through the crumbs of fried potato.

Mrs Golson giggled. ‘I thought you were rather gone on her!’ She was at once ashamed, not of her husband, as was usually the case, but of herself, for she added quickly and with an earnestness which made her eyes protrude, ‘Did you gather from her letter, perhaps, that she might have been holding out her hand asking for help?’

Who wasn’t? Mrs Golson’s voice implied as it cut out on a note of high interrogation.

‘Don’t see why we … ’ Curly grumbled.

‘No,’ she agreed. ‘There’s no reason.’

Reason is the most unstable raft, as Mrs Golson was learning. She suspected that she, and any other refugee from life lashed to its frail structure, was threatened with extinction by the seas of black unreason on which it floated, sluiced and slewing.

The storm the night before, the worst in a succession of storms inflicted on the Coast that spring, had driven Monsieur Pelletier, not unwillingly, out of the conjugal bed and down to his kiosk at an early hour. To exchange the smells of tortured sheets and sleeping bodies, a full pot de chamber and the dregs of a tisane , for those of damp newspapers, mildewed cigarettes, and coffee brewing on a spirit lamp, gave him a raison d’être he had never achieved in marriage, parenthood, vice, or any form of civic responsibility. When he had taken down the iron shutters from the leeside of his constricted stall he began to breathe again, dragging on the air still churning out of the Atlantic, on past Gibraltar, to wane somewhere east of Marseille.

It was natural enough at this hour of morning that Monsieur Pelletier should see himself and his iron kiosk of salt-eroded shutters as the focal point of all existence. As he strode up and down outside the kiosk, thumping his ribs with blue flippers, easing the arthritis from his limb, coaxing his circulation back, working his tortoise-neck so that the rusty chain concealed in it began to grate less audibly, the storm seemed to expire in a series of turbulent gasps in his formerly tubercular lungs.

Once or twice, encouraged by the scent of coffee over methylated spirit, he laughed. There was also the smell of seaweed, the great tresses heaved up amongst the rocks and stranded on the narrow strip of grit referred to in Les Sailles as plage .

There was no real reason why Monsieur Pelletier should exist. At times, at dawn in particular, outside his kiosk, this was what he suspected, while never exactly giving in to his suspicion (any more than Mrs Golson gave way to hers, churning on her bed in the Grand Hôtel Splendide at St Mayeul amongst the scum and knotted tresses of dreams.) Monsieur Pelletier and Mrs Golson had not met at any point; they would not want to meet: they did not credit each other with existence.

It was only in the figure now clambering down over rocks, that the two might have agreed to converge.

At a distance the stranger’s figure was still unremarkable enough, sombre in its long cape, either black, or of a very deep green. Not yet recovered from the storm of the night before, the whole landscape had remained withdrawn in its sombre self, the sea still streaked with oily black, except when throwing itself against the promontory of rock or the strip of gritty plage , it flashed a frill of underskirt which would have shown up white if it had not been dirtied, toning with grey concrete, black asphalt, the straggle of palms, saw-toothed blades parrying the last of the wind, a line of tamarisks, their cobweb-and-dustladen branches a dead green at the best of times, now harried to a kind of life, overall the coastal spine covered with a scurf of dead grass and network of black vines.