Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

‘Oh?’ the county one returned. ‘Well, I’m Angela Parsons. But answer to Angie.’ She too threw in a giggle.

So the relationship was established, as much as anything through confidence in each other’s high-lit teeth, of which Angie’s were only very slightly buckled.

‘I’m so glad we’ve met,’ she said. ‘So far it’s been a tremendous bore — so under-populated — any way with men.’

Margs glanced at the small sapphire on the hand grasping the varnished rail. ‘What does your fiancé do?’

Angie grew serious. ‘He farms,’ she said. ‘I believe he has,’ she manipulated her buckled teeth, ‘what is called a sheep station.’

‘Oh yes, that’s what it’s called!’ Margs giggled approvingly. ‘You’re all right there.’ But paused. ‘Daddy’s a doctor — a specialist in diseases of the heart.’

They both looked appropriately grave, steadying themselves on the rail and rocking with the motion of the ship.

Margs told how she had been nursing a bit at the home of her aunt Lady Ifield, in Sussex. (‘Not really? I believe Mummy knows her!’) Angie had been driving an ambulance, which was how she had met Doug when he was returned wounded from the trenches.

The girls agreed the War had been simply ghastly, though not without its rewarding moments.

‘Weren’t you ever engaged?’ asked Angie.

‘Not actually, but almost,’ Margs confessed.

‘Did you sleep with him?’

‘You have to, haven’t you? when there’s a war on.’

‘Exactly! That’s what I felt about Doug.’

It was fascinating for the two friends to be thus engrossed in moral issues.

Angela looked round at a husband helping a queasy wife erect a reluctant deck chair. ‘Have you ever seen such a collection of pot-bellied men?’

‘Every one of them hairy, I’d say.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘By what’s missing on top.’

The two young women shrieked at the waves.

‘But hair can be rather fascinating,’ Angela said when she had subsided.

Margs looked round. ‘There’s a smooth one, though — have you come across him? Eddie Twyborn.’

‘Oh yes. Lieutenant Twyborn.’

‘Is he a lieutenant?’

‘Was, I’m told. Decorated too.’

Margs looked ready to gobble up, not only the smoothness, but the decoration.

Furtive in their confidences, they both looked round to see the object of them approaching.

He passed by.

He was walking stiffly, his bearing tentative for a man, holding with Gothic hand against his chest the book he had been, or intended, reading. He was certainly not ‘pot-bellied’, and his well-covered skull, the hair of a cut to suggest an army officer, should have exempted him from accusations of hairiness by those who supported Margs’s theory.

It was the face, however, which fascinated, not to say awed, the two observers. It had about it a detachment which could have passed for purity, which each of the girls must have sensed, for Angie said, after he was out of earshot, ‘Do you think a man can be naturally pure? I don’t mean monks and priests and things — and even those;’ to which Margs, struggling with the proposition, replied, ‘I’d never thought — but I see what you mean. Oh, yes!’

They looked at each other.

‘Did you ever notice his eyes?’

‘Of course! His eyes!’

They looked away.

At that moment the sun rent the slate-coloured awning stretched between world and sky, and at once the waves were decked with an evening panoply of gold and hyacinth.

Margs asked, ‘Would you sleep with a man now that you’re engaged to another?’

‘If I did, I’d keep something back for marriage. Marriage is another matter,’ Angie nobly replied.

‘How right you are! Exactly how I feel!’

Soon afterwards the girls relinquished the rail and went down to dress for dinner.

After taking his clothes off, he lay down on sheets slatted with light, which surrendered their cool all too soon to a sweating body. A couple of days out of Colombo the bunk was as stable as a bed on this motionless sea, its monotony broken only by a random shark’s fin; the flying-fish, growing languid, elected to stay below. His own languor did not prevent him forcing himself at his discipline of interrogating La Rochefoucauld, the words tasting musty to a furred tongue, the thought rising like baroque remains in a tropic jungle.

Nos vertus ne sont le plus souvent que des vices déguisés … ; when according to his own experience the reverse was true.

His book tumbling floorwards, he dozed off, and was soon spanned by the protective wings of this great eagle, who should have been vicious, but wasn’t. He could have cried out for the delight they were sharing if he hadn’t become otherwise caught up in the stratagems of men, floundering in mud, failing to disentangle himself from the slime and blood of human bowels.

He awoke whimpering, twitching, yelping like a limp puppy.

The steward, a decent little bloke with the scar of an ancient boil visible on a cropped nape, was picking up the fallen book.

‘French, eh?’ It might have been his batman Pritchett. ‘Not dressing up for the fancy ball?’

‘Tired of dressing up …’ Not only in the carnation robe, the pomegranate shawl, but the webbing, the mud leggings, and starting out through the carnival of gunfire and Verey lights.

‘Go in the altogether, sir,’ the pseudo-Pritchett suggested. ‘Give ’em an eyeful.’

He laughed down his nose. ‘Tired of undressing too.’

‘Pritchett’ joined in with a snigger. ‘Suffering from the old accidie, are we?’

He opened his eyes. ‘Could be. What do you know about accidie?’

‘Only what a priest told me.’ As though released by an invitation the pseudo-Pritchett sat down on the edge of the bunk.

‘The priest was suffering from it?’

‘Not on yer life! ’E was working it out of ’is bloody system — take it from me — only too successfully.’ The steward could not resist slapping the passenger on the thigh.

Oh God, not another! (You didn’t mean it exactly like that, when you could have kissed the crater of the extinct boil. Poor bloody Pritchett!)

Recovering himself, the steward had risen and started on a dithering voyage of tidying. ‘Only want to encourage you — Lieutenant Twyborn — to join in whatever’s offerin’. We’re ’ere, aren’t we? so why not?’

‘Cut out the Lieutenant.’

‘But we want to honour yer — in some way.’ The poor bastard almost in a state of bubbling tears.

‘Thank you.’ It sounded so dry, pompous, poopish — insincere, from one who was sincerely grateful. (A situation for La Rochefoucauld.)

‘Well, good-night, sir. Thank you.’ There was not quite a click of heels as the batman-steward withdrew.

Turning a cheek against the hot pillow, Eudoxia Twyborn wept inwardly, for the past as well as a formless future.

The Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean had been slowly cajoling the worst out of shipboard relationships; life was lived in a fever which only Fremantle would reduce. Until then, ex-colonels were ready to engage dangers less explicit than those they had survived; the more adventurous among their no longer seasick wives embarked on recces through the steerage and even into the engine-room. Girls grew breathless from expectation. Youths in sandshoes hovered, trousers hoist above hand-knitted ankles. All of them wanted to express something , but didn’t. With the result that he in particular never mastered the part they expected him to play.

It was the girl with the creamed sunburn who dared blurt at the one they needed as protagonist for their legend. ‘We all know you’re Lieutenant Twyborn, so why shouldn’t I introduce myself? I’m Angela Parsons of Salisbury, Wilts. Does it sound too American put like that?’ Here she giggled and clasped her hands together on the rail. ‘I’m going out to my fiancé—Doug Yeomans — who’s farming near Brewarrinna.’