Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

So Mrs Golson said, while tying the veil in a bow beneath her chin, ‘We shall see you, I hope. Au revoir !’ and Madame Vatatzes replied, ‘Good-bye,’ smiling, but at the same time perhaps regretful of what she had left unsaid.

Curly was allowing Teakle to drive them back to St Mayeul and had seated himself beside Joanie. He appeared exhausted by the unusual nature of what they had recently experienced.

But laughed and said, ‘You were laying it on a bit thick, weren’t you?’

‘How?’

‘Her adding to the garden by being there!’

She really didn’t know how to answer. She had taken it for granted she would be sitting alone on the back seat, refurbishing and adding to her impressions of the afternoon, when here was Curly lifting the veil on her most private sentiments.

She would have liked to let off a firework in his face, but as she did not have one at hand, she replied dully, ‘It was meant as a little compliment. One had to praise her, in some way, after the scene her husband made. If he is the husband …’

‘What makes you think he isn’t?’

‘Nothing,’ she snapped.

What made her additionally peevish was realisation that the husband’s scene had caused her to forget the amethyst brooch she had intended offering Madame Vatatzes. Of course she would not have done so. She would not have found the courage. But might have.

Determined to make good her omission, she set out the following afternoon at the same time as they had driven off on their miscarried formal visit. She did not tell Curly, who was about the town with one of his hotel acquaintances. Nor did she call for Teakle, but hired a cab. Because the vehicle was horse-drawn she finally doubted they would reach the villa much before the hour when they had left it yesterday. She was so distracted she had hardly given thought to her appearance, but had thrown on a drab smocked garment she wore for dusty distances. That she was hatless only vaguely troubled her.

As they drove through the pine-grove, she sidled restlessly on the cracked leather with its smell of hay, and ahead of her the reek of a raw-boned horse, its scours competing with the stench from the salt-pans. At least she had her talisman, the amethyst brooch, clutched in her hand.

She halted the driver at the foot of the hill so that she might approach ‘Crimson Cottage’ on foot, assemble her thoughts, and perhaps even decide to retreat from the prospect effacing that odious Greek.

She descended from the cab, unassisted of course by the boor she had engaged, and started on her walk. Would the driver imagine, perhaps, that she meant to escape without paying? At one point she turned, and mumbled in her lamentable French, ‘ Je reviens … ’ Whether he heard or not as he sat lolling on his seat, he smiled back at one who could only be classified as a folle Anglaise .

So she went on, through a quenched radiance, at this hour the sky slate-coloured above interwoven branches, the waves, a heavy periwinkle hemmed with white, dragging back and forth against the shore, her memories of Madame Vatatzes, the glow on a cheekbone, the smile breaking through terracotta, dimmed, if not extinguished.

At the villa the rickety gate stood ajar. A woman in black was stumping, hobbling, snatching at flowers or herbs, gathering for herself a gratuitous bunch. Her movements might have suggested a goat if it hadn’t been for the tight bunch which the goat had not devoured

The goat-woman raised her head as Mrs Golson paused and asked, ‘ Où est Madame — et Monsieur Vatatzes? ’

The goat-woman arranged her tongue, of a pale mauve shiny with saliva. ‘ Partis! Partis! GONE!’ she added for one who was beneath contempt, and to emphasise her feelings, swept the horizon with an arm.

‘Mais où?’

‘Sais pas. Sont partis — le soir? le matin? Personne ne sait — seulement qu’ils sont partis.’

The woman continued snatching at sprigs from the garden. Its martyrdom was Mrs Golson’s own, a confusion of perfumes from crushed leaves and released sap intensifying her overwrought state. Added to an intolerable situation, the woman’s spit was clearly visible, leaping from her mouth as she spoke; and one of her stockings had lapsed to halfway down the leg revealing a crude bandage through which a stain was seeping.

Mrs Golson could bear the tension no longer. Herself a rival goat, she charged at the gate, almost pushing it down, to arrive in what had been Eudoxia’s garden.

The woman in black could not laugh enough, then clenched her teeth as she bound her tight bunch tighter still with some stalks of grass she had torn off.

‘ Que sont-ils — vos herbes? ’ Now the intruder of all intruders, Mrs Golson heard herself stammer.

The smocked garment she had thrown on for the journey had fallen back, and she realised she was wearing the nightdress in which she had taken her restless afternoon nap.

As though awakened against her will, the woman frowned at her bunched herbs. ‘ Sont des barbottines. On les met sous les draps pour chasser les puces .’

Mrs Golson would have to look up ‘ barbottines ’ together with Eudoxia’s ‘balm’, but her French-English pocket dictionary was not the greatest help and the herb manual somewhere on a shelf in Sydney Australia.

Now, since her friend had left for wherever, there was really no purpose in her staying.

‘ Alors ,’ she told this female, ‘ moi aussi, je partirai .’

But the creature beckoned. ‘ Venez! Venez! ’ The cackle which followed revealed a number of black gaps as well as a span of aggressive gold. ‘ Faut voir ,’ she advised, leading the way to the shell of a house around which the sky was darkening.

Curiosity outdoing discretion and even fear, Mrs Golson followed.

The shutters were open, fastened to the outside of the walls, the windows closed, the interior stuffy. In spite of the furniture which she remembered from the day before, the rooms seemed to creak and reverberate like those in a dismantled house.

Her guide led her past mirrors from which Mrs Golson averted her face, and into the kitchen where a door open on the sea and village below, let in an unexpected burst of light, illuminating the Vatatzes’ last hours of tenancy: the squalor of unwashed dishes, smeared glasses, coffee grounds, a great over-ripe tomato melting into the papered surface of a dresser shelf.

Mrs Golson would have liked to persuade herself that Madame Vatatzes had been saving up this tomato for its seed. But the thought was bathetic in the guide’s presence; the woman in black did not condone improbabilities. From the juice of the putrid tomato, Mrs Golson’s glance was drawn to the woman’s leg, the musketeer stocking, the stained bandage, on it not so much the signs of watery matter from a running sore, as, Mrs Golson was convinced — pus.

‘ Venez! Venez! ’ The guide was leading one no longer her confederate but her victim always deeper into the lives of the departed.

The intruders had entered what passed for a bathroom. Choked by the sight of spilt powder, balls of hair, cotton-wool swabs, Mrs Golson put her handkerchief to her lips; she might be developing Daddy’s asthma.

‘ Voyez! Ils out oublié ce true-là! ’ the creature shrieked through her gaps, past the bastion of gold.

She poked at an object on a shelf, which as far as Mrs Golson could tell, was an enema of enormous proportions.

The shrieks indulged, the wrath began to pour. ‘ C’est un vieux salaud — une jeune salope! Ils paieront. Beaucoup! Madame Boieldieu m’a dit .’

Mrs Golson had retreated into the comparative dusk of the passage.