Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

She dredged up the necessary words and said, ‘ Merci je m’en vais .’

But the woman put out a hand. ‘ Ne voulez pas voir lew chambre à coucher? Ils n’ont fait, vous comprenez, que jouer au piano et baiser … ’

‘ Non! Non! Non! ’ Mrs Golson skirted past the bedroom, through the door of which she caught a glimpse of shadowy, but turbulent sheets; she could not have borne further evidence of the games, perhaps even the stains, of love.

All the way down the hall, out upon the terrace, down the path smelling of tomcat, she was pursued by the woman’s diabolical voice as she ran from the flickering images of Angelos and Eudoxia Vatatzes, themselves as diabolical as her own never extinct desires — as she fled towards Curly, honesty, Australia .

‘ Ils paieront — vous verrez! ’ the woman hurled after her.

‘ Qui sait? ’ Mrs Golson gasped back as she pushed against the collapsing gate, which finally fell.

Who knows what? Herself, certainly, knew nothing, hurrying down the stony hill towards the waiting cab — if it had waited.

But it had. The man was sitting on the high driver’s-seat, looking out from inside the tunnel provided by the leather hood. As la folk Anglaise hurtled towards him.

For no explicable reason, the train was packed on that day. As it drew in at the station they stampeded along its steaming side as part of the lowing inconsolable herd lugging portmanteaux, baskets, parcels, bulging serviettes. Themselves, or rather, their hearts leaping like wild creatures inside the cages of their ribs. To arrive at the doors. To scrape their shins almost to the bone on the iron steps. To scramble panting, dragging, on, on, on board the contemptuous train.

They just succeeded. She forced him up, and after grasping a stanchion, protected him with her strong arm, while a guard, laughing, tried out her buttocks with a hand, pushed the last of the passengers higher, and slammed the door on the lot.

They stood breathing at each other, inhaling the perfumes from the toilettes . Even the round smell of shit.

‘Well, we are here, E.!’ he panted.

More practical, she answered, ‘We haven’t begun,’ and started weaving down the corridor, past the portmanteaux, the baskets, the bulging serviettes, somebody hanging out of a window, a handkerchief held against nausea.

They did squeeze in at last, into one of the wooden boxes, amidst the scowls, the luggage, the children of those already established. They seated themselves in a corner, more closely conjoined than at any moment of their life together, distributing the smiles of the false-humble, in which teeth return to being milk-teeth, cheeks illuminated not so much by the brief innocence as the prolonged guilt of childhood.

After staking their claim they might have looked out of the windows at the view, but on one side the blinds were lowered, admitting no more than a band of flesh-coloured light between hem and sill, on the other a human hedge planted in the corridor presented landscape as a flackering of vines and recurring gashes of red soil. There was also the occasional mountain crest like a heap of unquarried blue-metasl.

The old man said to his companion, ‘At least we can enjoy the thought of wine, but that won’t anaesthetise us.’

He laughed in his dry accusatory way. She regretted that, in the haste of departure, after a frenzied night of hallucination and barbed attack, she had forgotten wine and food of any kind, whereas everyone else in the wooden compartment seemed over-provisioned: the crusty bread, the purple bottles they held to their lips, hunks of salami to be sawn at, and rounds of cheese smelling of goat; in one instance, gobbets of truffled pâté de foie conveyed by fingers as refined as the bread on which the stufflay, the flesh dimpling with a diamond or two, the bosom on which the crumbs tumbled as black as the inlay of truffle itself.

The newcomers were lulled at last by motion, the alternate shuffling and hurtling of the train, and the sound of salami skins constantly stirred by the feet of children passing between the rows of knees.

At one point a young mother opened her blouse and offered an enormous breast to her two-year-old, who fastened on it, cheeks working as though he meant to get the whole thing down.

The old man took his companion’s hand. ‘That is how it was in the beginning, with Stavroula, at Mikhali. So it should be at the end too — in the after life — if we didn’t know there isn’t any.’

Sight of the suckling child seemed, mercifully, to nourish him.

‘Why should you say “at the end”?’

He sighed. ‘It can’t last for ever. Surely we must arrive soon?’

‘Another three-quarters of an hour,’ she told him with a simulated authority.

The young woman appeared to be staring at the hands of the peasant opposite, at the encrustations of dirt beneath the broken nails, as thick fingers broke off a corner of crust. She shivered, it could have been from hunger. The widow turned away so as to avoid noticing.

Just then the old fellow flung himself back in his corner, eyes closed, face as yellow as the varnished boards against which it was pinned. He was very frail. The young woman squeezed the handful of bones she was holding. His face was more than ever that of a Byzantine saint, used up in obeisance, less to God than to masochism and fatality.

Or onanism. The widow had taken a pederast en premières noces , and survived her experience.

Against her better judgment she was moved by the devotion of the old man’s companion, her putting up a hand and touching his forehead. A daughter, perhaps? A mistress would have withdrawn by now. Wives are more matter-of-fact.

Could he be ill? she inquired.

The young woman replied, ‘Not ill. He is tired. Sûrement il n’est que fatigué .

But must have found her diagnosis too glib, for immediately she produced a little bottle from her bag, and looked round for a means of administering what the widow knew to be drops, from having nursed and buried two husbands, and one who wasn’t.

The widow offered a couple of fingers of Evian. She derived visible consolation from her own charitable act.

After taking the draught, from a glass provided, again, by the widow (which she scoured out with a clean napkin and a generous splurge of the Evian on its being returned to her) the old fellow dozed a little, watched over by his tender companion. If it might not have seemed improper in the circumstances, the widow would have questioned her on their relationship, nationality, place of residence, income, in fact all those details which demonstrate whether an individual is sociably acceptable.

The film of a smile veiled the face of the young woman seated opposite. The peasants gazed while cleaning behind their lips with their tongues. Once or twice the sleeper scratched inside his shirt with gestures the widow condemned as lacking in refinement. The two-year-old wet himself. C’est écœurant , the widow considered, les enfants qui ne sont pas élevés au delà du niveau des bêtes … , while the old man and the strewn salami skin continued breathing.

The widow could not have restrained herself a moment longer from embarking on her questionnaire, if the old man, after tearing so restlessly at his chest that a button flew off the shirt above the waitscoat, had not opened his eyes and sprung out of his corner.

‘ Ma — soffoco! Soffoco! ’ he shouted.

The blind went flackering out of sight. And he tore the window down.

The other occupants of the compartment were too dazed to protest. They sat blinking at the inrush of light, gulping the currents of air which would surely lay them low in spite of flannel next the skin.