Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

Then the plunge. I am swimming. Yes, I can swim as I could never walk barefoot. I am swimming in the direction of Africa, of nowhere. That, surely, is what I have chosen? It is just because I can swim with ease that finally I burst out laughing. Like an amateur, I swallow a gutful of water. And light. All the refractions of light around me — violet into blue blue. I swallow it and spout it out. I am the Amateur Suicide. I turn and snooze back through healing water. I am not ashamed, as I shall be later. For the present, snoozing and spouting. Rising, as Angelos must be rising out of those other, grey waves, to bare his teeth at the bathroom mirror, farting, regardless of whether I’m there or not. This is marriage, I would like to think, enduring marriage as authorised by our version of the Holy Ghost.

But I must escape, and not through suicide. I knew it as I dashed the (healing) water from my face and body on those damn rocks, to which I should have had no intention of returning. Was this why I wrote the letter to Joanie Golson? to enlist her sympathy, her help? Can you escape into the past? Perhaps you can begin again that way. If you can escape at all.

When I got back, Angelos said, ‘Where were you? I began to worry. What were you doing? Look, your feet are bleeding!’

‘Yes, they’re bleeding, I’ll put iodine on them. That will be hell — but your wife Anna would have approved. Actually, I only went for a swim — nothing less orthodox than that, darling .’

A. laughed. ‘I wondered where you were, and why you didn’t bring me my coffee.’

This is why you can’t help loving A. — in the absence of a Holy Ghost, his trust in one frailer than himself.

Mrs Golson had just returned from the English Tea-room and Library where she had succeeded in securing (there was no other word for it) that elusive novel by Mrs Wharton. If Mrs Golson was already intimidated by what she saw at a glance between its covers, she would be proud to sit with it in public places. In fact she had already more or less decided to venture into the rotunda and order tea instead of having it sent up to their suite, when she discovered that it was Madame Vatatzes, no less, standing at the reception desk.

Mrs Golson’s spirits soared, which did not protect her from simultaneous confusion.

‘Are you visiting somebody,’ she asked, ‘at our hotel?’

Madame Vatatzes also appeared confused. ‘I was passing,’ she replied awkwardly, ‘and thought I’d look in — to see whether you were still about.’

‘What good luck that I am!’ Mrs Golson hoped she sounded jaunty rather than rakish.

Madame Vatatzes seemed to find her manner acceptable. They both laughed.

But almost immediately the unfortunate Mrs Golson was faced with another dilemma: whether to take her attractive friend up to her private salon and keep her to herself, or to flaunt Madame Vatatzes, far more spectacular than Mrs Wharton’s novel, in a public room?

When suddenly she was tossed, with no effort on her part, on what seemed the dilemma’s only possible horn. ‘Shall we be devils and brave the music in the rotunda?’ It sounded most unlike herself.

‘Why not?’ said Madame Vatatzes. ‘We’ll have each other to fall back on.’ Immediately after, that white smile broke in the terracotta face.

Mrs Golson almost took her by the hand and led her towards the music. If she thought better of the hand-play, she continued to feel extraordinarily daring, as she marched ahead across the gloomy hall towards the more luminous rotunda, where the palms stood quivering in their jardinières under onslaught by piano and strings.

Mrs Golson paused to look about her in triumph and choose a table worthy of her guest. Not neglecting that other alliance with Mrs Wharton, she held the volume flat against her bosom. They made an imposing trio, Mrs Golson saw reflected in panels of amethyst and amber, her own lips sligntly parted, Mrs Wharton’s lettering at least displayed, Madame Vatatzes graver in expression, perhaps because censorious. It might well have appeared a worldly, and to a refined, reclusive young woman, a vulgar scene.

What if it were? Mrs Golson was thriving on it; she would not apologise any more.

‘Shall we take this table?’ she suggested. ‘Or shall we be deafened?’ Almost another apology; she laughed to make it less so.

‘More likely seduced by those sticky strings,’ Madame Vatatzes remarked.

Memories of their first conversation persuaded Mrs Golson she ought not to feel surprised. So she swam across the short space separating them from the desired table, moistening her lips, lowering her eyelids ever so slightly, conscious of the sounds her movements made, those of silk and feathers, and in regrettable undertone, the faint chuff chuff of caoutchouc.

Madame Vatatzes was following with a charming negligence reflected in the amethyst and amber. Today she was wearing grey, which made her look, Mrs Golson decided, almost a quaker — a tall one. She was so glad Curly wasn’t with them. Nor was he likely to nose into the rotunda; he had a passionate hatred of music, especially the violin.

For a moment as they seated themselves Mrs Golson wondered what on earth they would say to each other, but now there was the tea to order — and oh, yes, gâteaux ; she would insist that Madame Vatatzes eat several, which would give herself the opportunity of eating one, or perhaps two; and there were other eyes to outstare, of those who resented intruders, who despised newcomers, for Mrs Golson and her caller could not but fit, for the present anyway, into this unfortunate category.

‘ Thé pour deux personnes ,’ she offered in her most sculptured French to a waiter who looked quite contemptuous considering how the Golsons overtipped him for his contempt. ‘ Et des gâteaux — beaucoup de beaux gâteaux — pour mon jeune ami .’

Madame Vatatzes was looking so excessively grave that Mrs Golson, in her sincere delight and manhandling of gender, was reduced to appearing the younger of the two. She was conscious of it herself, not only from her friend’s face, but from the reflective panels of amethyst and amber. Mrs Golson hoped that Madame Vatatzes did not regret paying her call.

She would have loved to say something reassuring, as from an older to a younger woman. She would have loved to gaze at Madame Vatatzes’ disturbing eyes, which she remembered from the previous occasion. But this was a luxury Mrs Golson promised herself for later, after the weak straw-flavoured tea, and the slight but not unpleasant bilious sensation which came to her from indulging in Mont Blanc . By then, each of them, she hoped, would be lulled into the requisite state of intimacy.

In waiting, Mrs Golson tapped with her nails on the bland surface of the little table. The nails had been very conscientiously done by a young Scottish widow, a protégée of Miss Clitheroe’s. This afternoon, Mrs Golson felt, her half-moons were particularly fine. (The nails themselves were looking paler than they should have been; should she, perhaps, consult a doctor?)

Far more ominous those full moons the eyes of chattering female macaws and parakeets, their stare levelled at interlopers from beneath wrinkled mauve-to-azure lids. In contrast to the females their no less watchful, for the greater part elderly escorts, lids blackened by digestive ailments and insomnia; in more than one instance a single smoky pearl pinned into what must be a grizzled chest. Among the throng of French, a Russian bearing up under a mound of strawberry hair, who continued munching her language along with a baba au rhum , on one eyelid a pink wart flickering behind the net veil she had hoisted to the level of glaring nostrils.