Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

‘Won’t you let me enjoy it?’ she implored this stern older girl.

‘I can’t think why anyone should want to.’

Immediately after, Madame Vatatzes gathered up her smoking tackle and shoved it in the velvet reticule.

‘Why I came here this afternoon,’ her head was still bent above her operations, ‘was because Angelos suggested it. He would like to meet you — Mr Golson too, of course. Thursday — would it be possible? To a glass of something — say five-thirty. At “Crimson Cottage”.’ She pronounced it as Miss Clitheroe had, and as Madame Llewellyn-Boieldieu would have.

Poor Joanie was thoroughly flabbergasted: the letter, the formal call, the invitation, all as she had dreamed, and rejected as too symmetrical to expect. Today she suspected that fate is symmetrical.

‘Oh,’ she gasped, ‘I’ll have to ask Mr Golson — my husband —Curly … Did you say Thursday? I’m almost sure we have nothing on Thursday.’ Knowing there wasn’t, she did not even bother to look in her book; in any case her hands would have been too helpless.

‘I’ve never gathered,’ she gasped, no, her corset wheezed, ‘your husband’s profession — that is,’ she said, ‘if he had one before he retired.’

‘Spices,’ Madame Vatatzes seemed to gnash her strong white teeth; it could have been provoked by the Meditation from Thais . ‘He exported spices, from Smyrna, from Alexandria. Not all that successfully,’ she added. ‘As heir to the Imperial throne he considered himself above commerce. A Byzantine by birth, he’s a Byzantinologist by vocation, and an authority on Orthodox theology, which he admits he doesn’t yet understand.’ She rose, tall and cool, reeking of her cheap French cigarette. ‘His true hobby, I sometimes think, is entomology.’

Still cowering on her gilt chair, Mrs Golson quailed before these biographical details she had been rash enough to encourage. Until her friend’s smile and extended hand dissolved the terror in her bones, and she sprang up, or that is how it might have been, had her forms been less globular. Now she wobbled on reaching the erect position, but did not fall, thanks to Madame Vatatzes’ firm hand, and even more, the protracted smile.

What could one give in return? In her room Mrs Golson had an unopened box of Turkish delight. Too far up, and besides, she was always fobbing people off with presents instead of confronting them.

In the glass panels she saw her own face perspiring mercilessly through its powder and the ritual dash of rouge, while Madame Vatatzes walked, cool, erect, timeless, through the barrage of music, the cigarette smoke, and interrogation by veiled eyes.

When they had reached the dusty hall, calm except for the action of a furtive heart, Mrs Golson asked, ‘That evening when I passed by your villa and heard you playing — the two of you — what was it, I wonder?’ Mrs Golson did not even pause to wonder at her own courage; on Madame Vatatzes’ arm, her question seemed natural, logical, as gilt-edged as a love she had always hoped for.

‘Oh, I don’t know — it could have been — yes, I think it probably was — we had all three, after coalescing, begun to emerge — to surge . Yes, on that evening I think it was probably Chabrier.’

Mrs Golson, who had never heard of the fellow, was relieved her friend had not seemed to find her presumptuous. She was so grateful for everything that she lunged forward to set the revolving door in motion for the departing guest.

Ejected by it after a brief but delirious twirl, Mrs Golson leaned forward on her cramped toes, peering at a halcyon sky as though expecting at least a cyclone. ‘My dear, I quite forgot,’ she remembered, ‘couldn’t I have our man run you home?’

Madame Vatatzes lashed out with her head, perhaps not yet recovered from the revolving door and already part of Mrs Golson’s non-existent cyclone. ‘I shall walk,’ she said, ‘so good for one — and be back in no time.’

What would have become of him all these weeks without the personal objects surrounding him, the appurtenances of a stable life? Whether in London, Inverness (most of all perhaps Inverness; you can feel most foreign where you think you understand the language and don’t) or Paris, or here at this damn St Mayeul where they were stuck for one of Joanie’s less explicable whims, he derived significant support from his hairbrushes alone, the concave ivory with gold monograms (time the bristles were renewed, time they were washed if Joanie would get down to it, you tried picking out the fluff yourself with a pin) less from the clothes-brush and softer-bristled narrow one for hats, the stud-box, and bottle for hair tonic, a slit in the leather casing to show you the level of the stuff inside. All these things : Curly Golson sometimes wondered how they had acquired him. Joanie perhaps: ‘Oh, but darling, you ought to have one …’ So they became necessary, his various appurtenances, like the yacht at Rose Bay, the horses in training at Kensington, the bottle-green Austin with brass fittings, even Joanie Sewell, comfortable in her own right. Whether he had acquired Joanie or she him, he had never decided. She was a good investment and luscious piece of flesh (no one would have dragged it out of him.)

Dressing this afternoon she had finished before him for the first time in history. She was in the other room doing God knew what, not putting in time, she never put in time, but whipped it up to what she hoped was the level of her expectations. Which she never reached, while achieving all else, all the solid things in life. Himself for instance: Golsons’ Emporium, on top of Sewell’s Sweat-free Felt.

Along the coast it was an evening of sun after a day of brooding. Clear blue, but brisk. Curly Golson was standing at the bedroom window of his suite at the Grand Hôtel Splendide. In the gardens below and down the Avenue Félix Faure the palms rose slashed and bashed without appearing more tattered than was natural to them. A scent of unidentifiable flowers (he accepted, but did not care for flowers) and horse manure, and France, drifted up as far as his nostrils.

Duty returned him to the dressing-table and he made a pass or two with the brushes at what remained of his hair, reviving it with a slight dash of bay rum and cantharides from the leather-cased travelling-bottle. He got himself into that rather natty sage waistcoat he had picked up in the Burlington Arcade, over it the Harris jacket (it was cold enough for that.) The glass told him he was a fine figure of an antipodean gentleman.

Yet on returning to the open window he found his self-assurance sinking. He could not have accounted for it, or not immediately. The same anonymous bourgeois figures were advancing towards and retreating from him between the formal avenue’s tattered palms, when suddenly he was overwhelmed by his own anonymity, which did not protect him from a suspicion that the world of menace held him in its sights. He tried creeping out of range, away from the open window at least. Must be this war, which you could otherwise avoid by not understanding the French papers and resisting your inclination to go in search of The Times .

There remained the rumours. These were what the open window framed, embodied in the anonymous faces of the French figures dressed in black, traipsing for no revealed purpose up and down the Avenue Félix Faure. Curly Golson hadn’t had it so bad since Inverness, though that was different, like contributing a detail to some old, time-darkened painting, harmless enough in theme, but lethal as dreams can be, with their load of buried personal threats; whereas the threat lurking beyond the window at St Mayeul was of a more general nature, at the same time one from which the sleeper’s will might not succeed in waking him. He had not experienced anything like this before. He might have discussed it with Joanie to ease his spirit, if he had been able to express himself, but hadn’t been born what they call ‘clever’.