Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

There were the hats.

There were the jewelled hatpins.

There were the jewels.

And cigarette smoke, a blue-grey, interweaving yarn; to Mrs Golson, the perfume was intoxicating.

But the eyes: if only they had been less daunting; and the ferocious mouths. All the veils had been raised to allow the parrot-ladies to fall upon le goûter , the black, the white, the beige gloves unbuttoned, folded back like superfluous skins for the ivory-skeletal or white-upholstered claws to fork unencumbered at confectioner’s custard, whipped cream, chocolate pyramids, and chestnut worm-casts.

Each wearing, in addition to the routine rosette, the aura of an ex-president, — prefect, or minor Bonapartist nobleman, the males were more austere. Their movements groaned as they plied their cigarettes, the more indulgent among them sipping a porto . There were signs of congestion, a whiff of saltpetre, and from one quarter — was it the creaking of a truss?

Mrs Golson had begun to regret her daring; herself so middle-aged Australian, Madame Vatatzes so young, so healthy, so untarnished.

‘Oh dear, I shouldn’t have brought you here!’

‘Why ever not?’ The younger woman spoke with a huskiness which might have masked the sulks.

‘Into this mausoleum!’ Unfortunate choice of a word, Mrs Golson sensed at once: that elderly husband, who might be asthmatic, and even wear a truss.

‘It’s what I’m used to,’ said Madame Vatatzes.

She had chosen a Mont Blanc , they both had, and were forking them up in what Mrs Golson hoped would become an extended orgy. (She had grown as reckless as Curly on the drive back to Les Sailles.)

When the Russian lady, her eyelid with its pink wart flickering behind the net pelmet, distinctly lowed, if she did not practically bellow through her museau de bœuf , the two friends got the giggles. Transformed into two schoolgirls in a tea-room, they sank back to enjoy the waves of their heaving mirth. Joanie Golson saw that her friend had broken out in delicious speckles of perspiration just where a moustache would have been. Gulping. Biting on the already deformed hotel fork as she dealt with the cream and the chestnut worm-casts. Which according to the tea-room code should have been a lettuce and ham sandwich, its thin green strips smelling of vinegar and knife, with even thinner slivers of ham, the whole lolling loosely round expiring lips before the mouth sucked it in.

The girls humped their backs and giggled.

Finally Madame Vatatzes sat up. ‘Shouldn’t we control ourselves?’ she suggested.

But they were off again.

It was Mrs Golson who took control. ‘When we were in Paris,’ she told, ‘and I went to the Louvre, of course I had to find the Mona Lisa. Nobody could help. Nobody . Curly — my husband — was furious— he’d only come because — well, he’s my husband. Then I discovered that what we were looking for is known as La Gioconde !’

Ultimately rescued at the Louvre, here Mrs Golson remained lost, long-winded, irrelevant: looking at Madame Vatatzes she realised that she and her close, giggly, schoolgirl friend with the lettuce ribbons hanging out of their mouths were of different worlds.

It is always like this, Joan Golson supposed.

On the dais across the room, the violinist was snatching, half brave, half desperate, at a tangle of hairs hanging from his bow.

The Russian began looking down her front to see why she should have become a focus of attention.

Overhead, the immense nacreous shade shed its light more dreamily, that of convolvulus and sea-pinks. It seemed to revolve, though it must have been the effect of the music, for the shade was in fact stationary.

Madame Vatatzes finished her Mont Blanc . She wiped her mouth in determined fashion with the paper napkin, and rummaged in her bag, not much more than a shabby old black velvet reticule such as she might have picked up secondhand, capacious, and probably a comfort to its owner. Mrs Golson herself, fearful of disease and insects, hated anything secondhand.

‘What a charming bag! So practical …’ she murmured.

‘Tat,’ Madame Vatatzes replied, and even went so far as to confess, ‘I got it secondhand at Marseille.’

Mrs Golson loved her; she would have put up with disease and insects.

Madame Vatatzes had found what she was looking for, which turned out to be a little box lacquered in crimson, black, and gold.

‘Do you smoke?’ she asked her hostess.

‘Very rarely. And only in private. I’ll sometimes smoke a cigarette to keep my husband company — but seldom finish it.’

Madame Vatatzes offered her box, and Mrs Golson accepted, giggling.

Madame Vatatzes lit their cigarettes after breaking a match or two.

‘We smoke constantly,’ she said, and her voice had hunger in it. ‘Smoking is Angelos’s worst vice — and one of mine.’

The cigarettes, Mrs Golson realised at once, were of the cheapest French variety. It made her feel more daring, more foreign. The Golsons liked to feel foreign abroad, while tending to deplore foreignness at home, unless, in Curly’s case, it promoted business, or in Joan’s, if it impressed those who thought themselves socially superior. But in the rotunda at the Grand Hôtel Splendide des Ligures she was more than anything the wicked schoolgirl. As she drew on her cheap cigarette, some of the nostrils closer to them became aware of an infringement on their code of behaviour.

Mrs Golson crossed her ankles, and said in rather a fruity voice, ‘I’d be intrigued to hear, Madame Vatatz —es , what you know of Australia. Were you ever there? Or is it only from acquaintanceship with other Australians?’

Madame Vatatzes sank her chin. ‘Oh, I was there! But briefly. Long ago.’ Her sigh was outlined in blue smoke.

Joan Golson caught something of the blur of blue leaves, blue bay, a motor-boat panting in the distance, reflexions distorted by the motions of disturbed water.

Mrs Golson said, ‘I’m so grateful, my dear, that you should have offered me your friendship.’ But immediately started wondering whether it had indeed been offered.

For Madame Vatatzes seemed to have forgotten her hostess. Her chin still sunken and moody, she sat smoking with a defiance which suggested rage rather than pleasure.

Disgusted by the filthy cigarette, and made bilious by the Mont Blanc as she had feared she might be, Mrs Golson was billowing helplessly, and in her billows envisaged herself being drawn out of her rubber corset. Would Madame Vatatzes hear the sound of suction? She so slim and uncorseted, so long and lean of thigh when divested of her quaker grey, her nipples a tender beige on the slight cushions of her breasts.

Both crushing and crushed, Mrs Golson roused herself, but spoke from behind lowered eyelids. ‘Australia is not for everyone,’ she admitted. ‘For some it is their fate, however.’

Madame Vatatzes grunted, or so it sounded. ‘I’ve not made up my mind about fate.’

Oh dear, is it ever possible to make it up for anybody else when one almost never succeeds in deciding for oneself? Mrs Golson resolved to try.

It was her turn to rummage in her bag (Curly’s anniversary present) to take out the shagreen engagement book, extract the slim gilt pencil, scribble on a page, and call the waiter.

Madame Vatatzes seemed hardly aware until the music broke in on her; then she roused herself. ‘This awful thing! Why did you do it?’

‘I did it because the day you hurt your ankle it was what they were playing, when I led you in from the street.’

‘But so horribly sticky!’ Madame Vatatzes was visibly suffering.

While Joanie Golson had crimped her face, clenched her hand, not so much the wicked schoolgirl as the naughty child clutching her forbidden jujube.