Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

‘I’d have thought,’ she hastened to correct, ‘nobody could teach the Australians.’

‘What’s wrong with the Australians, darling? Except that that’s what we happen to be.’

She could not refute it, nor remind him that he would refer to the horrid porto as ‘rotgut’ at some less exotic, more rational hour.

Monsieur Vatatzes had sucked in his lips till his mouth resembled nothing so much as a wrinkle in a sooty lemon, through which was squeezed the sour assertion, ‘Other Australians have not come my way — excepting E.’

‘What?’ Mrs Golson was almost propelled out of her collapsing Provençal chair. ‘You’re not born Australian?’

Curly did not utter, but conveyed his slightly incredulous approval; the Golsons loomed at Madame Vatatzes as though all three had been Christians in a pagan world, that of Madame Vatatzes’ husband. He, by contrast, and Orthodoxy, repudiated those who could have been — well, Bogomils, Bulgars —Barbarians .

Naturally Eudoxia, torn between opposite camps, was terribly distracted.

At least Mr Golson, regardless of anybody else, poured himself another tot of the very indifferent porto . ‘To celebrate,’ he had the grace to apologise.

While Mrs Golson continued sitting forward on her creaking chair in a state of precarious enthusiasm. ‘Do tell!’ she coaxed. ‘Where are you from? Melbourne?’ before venturing breathlessly to hope, ‘Sydney perhaps?’

‘Oh,’ Madame Vatatzes sighed, still not raising her heavy eyelids, ‘it was so long ago I can’t feel I came from there. Or,’ she murmured, ‘belong anywhere, for that matter.’

Her husband had opened his eyes and was staring at her with an expression determined to accuse her of any step he might consider false, while she, in her passive stone-bound condition, seemed equally determined not to give him cause, not at the moment anyway. Although impressed by the sight of Monsieur Vatatzes’ commanding eyes, Mrs Golson regretted the withdrawal of those other jewelled ones which, now that she had this additional clue, might have enabled her to do her sums on past and present.

It was immensely irritating. She sank back at last, exhausted, exuding in her frustration and her tan velour, the luscious promise, the tantalising glitter of a baba au rhum .

Fortunately for her, Curly at least continued to find his wife luscious. Did Monsieur Vatatzes too, perhaps? For as she sank back into her chair and her brown confection, he rose in his black, his veined hands working like talons, which till now had only dangled limply from his arms and the arms of his chair.

The old cove was wearing round his neck on a broad black ribbon of watered silk, something Curly had already noticed, and dismissed out of loyalty to their sex: a gold emblem in the shape of a two-headed eagle. Could you beat it?

‘If it’s music they want,’ and the Imperial Eagle looked full at E. Boyd Golson rather than at the female of the species, ‘hadn’t we better give it to them — Doxy?’ His teeth seemed to implant ignominy in the one who bore what Mrs Golson presumed was a nickname, an unfortunate one.

Otherwise she was so delighted she drew from her chair all the sounds of threatening collapse. She clutched the handbag which contained the jewel she would almost surely offer eventually to Madame Vatatzes, metaphorically on bended knee.

It was Curly who now withdrew, into a male despair, as the young woman rose and dedicated herself to her husband’s wishes and their guests’ entertainment. She was delightful of form, moving, swaying, in this bleached-out robe which only a ‘bohemian’ would be seen dead in, but carrying it off with a style of her own, unlike Joanie (he would never criticise Joan’s taste in dress: it was too right and too expensive) but this young erect sheaf, he could see her falling to the reaper’s sickle, possibly his own — yes, his own.

He looked at Joanie. She was too entranced by the prospect of culture to cotton on to a man’s thoughts, so he eased his crotch, and resigned himself to the tedium he was in for.

Madame Vatatzes had seated herself at her end of the oblong piano-stool. She had arranged everything trailing which needed to be arranged, behind her, thus leaving room for the old boy.

At the same time Joanie Golson was arranging her chin in the hollow of her hand, her beatific smile preparing to be pollinated by the music scattered on it by Madame Vatatzes — less by that nasty old man her husband. Joanie had forgotten her former life, Australia, Eadie Twyborn, and in the present, threats of war. Her receptive soul was yearning to collaborate in giving birth to a promised music.

The silence, Madame Vatatzes, Mrs Golson, even the resistant Mr Golson, all were waiting; when the old Greek stalked towards the piano, in a slight susurration of pin-feathers, and clanking of the gold Imperial emblem.

‘Which is it to be, Angelos?’ his creature asked.

‘Shall we give them Jeux ?’ He laughed, and seated himself beside her on the unyielding stool. ‘Yes, Jeux d’enfants ,’ he decided, ‘is what I think they ought to get.’ You too, his voice seemed to be implying.

So they started out on this prim walk with the governesses, along the Prokymea, or in other cases, round Rushcutters Bay. The bow into which a sash was gathered bobbing against the waterline. Of splintering blue or submerged stocks. And not without its menace of lantana, through which Curly Golson blundered in search of something he could put his hand on. The future scarcely anyone had found. Not Joanie, her freckle-encrusted cleavage bursting with unwritten love letters. The exiled Greek extinguished by his crown, or its substitute the peasant hat, the aura of which he was still wearing, and not the least, the little-boyhood from which he had never disentangled himself.

So they played, they all played, whether actively or not, the Jeux , the games Madame Llewellyn-Boieldieu’s warped piano keys released. Curly’s fingers all thumbs and a blood-blister as he made some attempt at groping after the elusive music. Joanie clasping the amethyst in its several wrappings: of tissue paper, beaded silk, and flesh. More frenetically the two Vatatzes, shoulders bumping as they spun tops, or galloped towards a climax neither they nor Miss Wansborough-Walmsley, Fräulien Felser, or Mademoiselle Le Grand, of dappled necks and crimson nostrils, might ever achieve, rocking and rocking on their stationary rockers.

‘Eudoxia,’ Angelos Vatatzes shouted, ‘your bass is too pedestrian,’ and stopped.

Herself seemingly desolated, Eudoxia continued for a few bars in the bass which had offended her husband.

When at last Madame Vatatzes halted, brutal in turn in her abruptness, the governess in black might have brought her ruler down on Doxy’s knuckles, the sharp edge on cold morning.

It left the Golsons somewhat confused. For Curly it was simply a case of too much bloody music. Joanie on the other hand bled for her love.

Again they were all sitting at attention, while Teakle, the other side of the wall, somewhere under the olive-tree, was clearing his throat. Mrs Golson heard the subsequent gob hurtle and settle, or so she thought. She saw the amethyst lying at Madame Vatatzes’ large feet. Were the hackled toes rejecting her?

They sat until, disregarding all indignities, Eudoxia launched without her husband into deeper seas of music, thrashing out to escape from the weed of human relationships, and he, perhaps recognising the attempt, joined in with a wild disdain.

The Vatatzes were playing, like many marriages, together and apart, but where their Jeux d’enfants had been performed with an angular malice, now the musicians swirled in romantic carnation-tinted circles. Were they perhaps revolving in the waltzes Mrs Golson had heard on that other occasion when she returned to confirm her love? She was sure finally that these were the same waltzes, and breathed so deep she choked on the musty dust rising from bowls of stale pot-pourri and rented carpet, stifled by the moted air where all the poetry of which she had been cheated trembled and expired. Unavoidably, she started coughing behind a knuckle of the hand not engaged with the amethyst.