Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

An English church, a squat Gothic in grey stone. Fine avenues at intervals. Outside their version of Miss Clitheroe’s Tea-room and Lending Library a group of pelicans and brolgas discuss, not unexpectedly, war. War may be the solution.

Ate a delicious lunch alone on the terrace with my old darling, who had dressed, and persuaded the Sasso to let us enjoy this luxury. Madame S. is impressed by A. They always are till experiencing his rages, his not quite madness, which automatically they interpret as the real thing. First they are insulted, then frightened. May he continue to impress at ‘My Blue Home’ morally I am exhausted.

An old servant, Marguerite, arranged a table for us in the patchy shade from an almond tree. Angelos in sentimental mood as we got through our déjeuner : a thin, rather greasy soup from last night’s fish, beignets de poisson (pieces of skin, again from last night’s fish, done in batter) something indeterminate as meat. For some reason one did not care. The bay, a breeze shaking alternate light and shade out of the branches of the almond tree, exorcised my thoughts of recent weeks — even Angelos helped.

A. remembers our first meeting when he picked me up on the Canebière. Who picked whom? he her she him, perhaps it was he him …

A.: Don’t you remember?

E.: I could hardly forget. I can remember the dress I was wearing.

A.: I can’t.

E.: You can never remember dresses. To me they mean so much.

A.: [for him, infinitely kind] Your vice. [He was in a stroking mood this morning.] I remember it was raining and we went to that hotel.

E.: Because you were ashamed to take me back to yours. You weren’t quite sure what you’d got hold of.

A.: Don’t be unkind, E. You can never resist the opportunity to be unkind.

[Marguerite brings the fruit; she has the sly look of a dog who has just disposed of a couple of pounds of fillet beef.]

A.: Do you know, darling, I’m sure we forgot the enema. If we wrote for it they might send it on.

E.: If we wrote for it Madame Boieldieu might make you pay the rest of what we owe.

A.: But I shall miss that enema. It’s unlike anything they make today.

The damn enema notwithstanding, lunch on the terrace at ‘My Blue Home’ was an occasion I feel I shall remember. My old monster would not know it, but I could have eaten him between the courses. How is it the French can get away with pieces of fish skin done in batter? How can A., by looking at me from beneath those horny eyelids, convince me that we are wearing the purple, standing on the steps at Blachernae or Nicaea? more — that I am no longer a fiction but a real human being …

Madame Sasso and one of her boarders, a Mrs Corbould, were seated at an accommodating round table in a small salon between kitchen offices and public rooms, discussing over their second glass of poire William and before laying out the cards, the husbands they had buried, womb complications, and decreasing incomes; it was all too personal to include les Boches . As it was around 2 a.m., the other boarders had decamped to their beds with hot-water bottles, tins of imported Bath Olivers, and indigestion, while Marguerite had descended to the lower town with whatever she could scavenge from the evening meal.

Crimson plush and poire William were lighting the throats and cheeks of the confidential ladies when this young woman, this Madame Vatatzes burst upon them from the surrounding dark.

‘ Mon mari, je crois, est gravement malade ,’ she informed Madame Sasso, then remembering that her landlady was a linguist, ‘He is having a heart attack.’

Madame Sasso could not have been more shocked. The announcement brought to mind a suicide in Number 17, from which it had taken her reputation several months to recover.

‘You are sure, madame? You are not excited?’

Less involved, Mrs Corbould was fascinated by the openwork in the yoke of the nightdress this rather angular, flat-chested young woman had been wearing when her emotions carried her into their presence without additional covering.

‘Do not distract yourself, madame. We will see,’ Madame Sasso advised, herself trembling.

‘But I know!’ Madame Vatatzes insisted.

Madame Sasso also insisted, pushing past the young wife to reach the maid’s room which the couple were at present occupying. From being English and discreet, Mrs Corbould did not follow, but poured herself another glass, and sat awaiting developments.

Madame Sasso was quick to see. ‘ Oui, madame, il est bien malade .’

‘Send for a doctor then — can’t you?’

‘ Marguerite est partie . I dare not ask the cook. I have no other person.’ Madame Sasso parried necessity like an expert, then appeared to remember.

She marched out, her black forms falling into place behind the padded buttons. ‘Rouse Mr Genge,’ she commanded Mrs Corbould.

Those who knew about such things were aware that Mr Genge, a pensionnaire of some years’ standing, was in the habit of warming his blue shanks round Madame Sasso’s steamy thighs on cold nights when the propriétaire was either forgetful or charitable.

Abandoning her poire William , Mrs Corbould rose to the occasion.

Madame Sasso returned to the sickroom.

Monsieur Vatatzes was lying, chin raised, his nightshirt open on a wisp of scruffy hair which his wife was stroking with one hand while holding with the other a bundle of yellow bones, not unlike, Madame Sasso observed, the claw of an elderly black cock, the kind which can be served as several courses after careful stewing.

‘He is coming, darling,’ Madame Vatatzes assured her husband with a tenderness Madame Sasso had not experienced before.

‘Who is coming?’ he asked. ‘Who?’

‘The doctor.’

‘Oh,’ he groaned. ‘Only the doctor.’

To do something, Madame Sasso was pouring a glass of tepid water out of a carafe, when she definitely heard, ‘I have had from you, dear boy, the only happiness I’ve ever known.’

Madame Vatatzes turned at once to the landlady. ‘Leave us, please. I think it is over.’

Madame Sasso obeyed.

When she had returned to her confidante she could not prevent herself laughing. ‘Poor man, he is out of his wits! Last words can often be amusing, as you, madame, will no doubt have found.’

Mrs Corbould found the last words of Monsieur Vatatzes, if not amusing, provocative.

Madame Sasso was pouring yet another glass of poire William when the young woman appeared again.

‘He is dead,’ she said, in what sounded not only a broken, but at the same time, an awakening voice.

Still barefoot, she was wearing a long black cloak over the nightdress with the openwork yoke.

Before the two women could go to her, to initiate her into the formal grief it is usual for widows to indulge in, Madame Vatatzes escaped from them into the night, her gait as long, loping, ungainly, as provocative as Mrs Corbould had found the openwork in a flat nightdress and the elderly Greek’s last words.

As soon as she returned from that grotesque encounter with the woman of the suppurating bandage, she slipped off the smocked travelling garment she had been wearing over her nightdress, and after rummaging for a sheet of her best monogrammed letter parchment such as she had used weeks before in starting what became the aborted letter to Eadie Twyborn, sat down to write while her emotions, her dashed hopes, her suspicions and doubts were still seething in her. Yet hesitated before beginning, her glance directed beyond the upheaval of bosom, the delicately manicured finger-nails, the plump ineffectual hands, the rings arrayed against the grain of this expensive letter-paper. (Were the rings perhaps vulgar when compared with those of Lady Tewkes — and Eudoxia Vatatzes, despite the fact that one had caught sight of congealed egg lurking in the corner of an agate eye?)