Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

It was his turn to expose himself, as she had every right to expect, standing twisting the small sapphire she was wearing on her engagement finger, the desert light flashing on her slightly buckled teeth.

But he could not oblige her.

So she went off into a recitative of gush, ‘It’s so so so … the DSO … we’re so so … Well, real courage is not for every mortal to achieve.’

By now quite desperate, he replied, ‘Courage is often despair running in the right direction.’ And stalked off.

The other one, her friend, who tackled him not much later, was the more serious proposition in that she represented extrovert Australia.

‘Aren’t you one of those Twyborns?’

‘Which?’

‘Well-Edward the Judge.’

‘He’s my father.’

‘And Eadie, Eadie’s a friend of Mummy’s. Not intimate, but a friend.’

She encouraged the son with a bland smile in a tan which had returned since her stint of nursing at Lady Ifield’s Sussex mansion.

‘How excited your parents must be to know you’re coming.’

‘They don’t know.’

‘Oh? But haven’t you written?’

‘Not in years.’

There was nothing she could say to that, only reflect her own parents’ opinion of Eddie Twyborn’s disappearance on the eve of his marriage to nice Marian Dibden, who had done much better for herself in the end with Ken Anstruther the chartered accountant (top of his year).

He saw to it that there was not another encounter until the two acquaintances Margs Gilchrist and Angie Parsons bailed him up by what looked like deliberate accident during the Aden-Colombo run. Planted in the glaring, holy-stoned deck they barred the way. He could feel the sweat trickling down his legs inside crumpled duck.

‘Won’t the ball be fun?’ gushed Miss Parsons. ‘What are you going as, Mr Twyborn? Or is it a secret?’

‘Going as myself.’

‘Oh, no! Oh, Eddie!’ Margs protested. ‘How elderly !’

He could only wince and hope to escape.

They couldn’t bear it, and when, as they afterwards agreed, he was looking his most divine.

‘I know!’ It was Angela’s brainwave. ‘What if we dress you up as one of ourselves? You’d be a riot!’

Margs could only shriek in agreement.

‘Might run you out of business.’ He did not mean it to sound as sour as he knew it did, although he could see they hadn’t heard it as more than a ‘scream’.

He got away soon afterwards.

After finishing his dinner of half a leaden kromesky and a few splinters of frozen pheasant, and detaching himself from the colonial aristocracy (the genuinely kind ladies who would have liked to nurse him back from some obscure sickness he was obviously suffering from, and their more suspicious home-made husbands, creaking and sweating in the dinner jackets enforced on them) he did look in on the ball for a little, and spotted his two friends, the one a hearty improvised sultana, her yashmak stuck to the buckled teeth, the other an athletic pierrette in a costume she must have brought along. The latter’s sinewy tanned arms were permanently tensed as though for a volley at tennis. The not inappropriately black pompoms revived the metaphor of an infernal game, which his memory loathed, yet mourned as the occasion of his downfall, the confession of his deficiencies.

He had almost succeded in putting revelry behind him when he heard sounds of pursuit and, on looking round, saw that Margs Gilchrist had torn free of her partner, a certain ginger colonel going as a baby in pale blue rompers.

‘I can’t arrive home,’ she panted, ‘without being able to boast that I danced with the famous Eddie Twyborn.’ ‘Infamous’ might have been the implication, as her nervous, though steely hand dragged him back into the maelstrom of a foxtrot, in which her abandoned ginger baby had continued whirling as solo jetsam.

‘Won’t you admit there’s fun in life?’ she hissed at him as they pumphandled through their steps.

‘Oh, it’s fun all right!’ Too hilariously awful funny.

‘We all know you’ve been through hell. But now it’s over.’

When it was beginning again, if indeed it had ever stopped.

Margs was determined to prove a point. She had thrust a campaigning vulva as deep as possible into his crotch; her rather flat little breasts were bumping and grinding against his chest; the heat of her wiry body smelled agreeably natural emerging from its mist of talc. He would have liked to feel more than kindly disposed, to have given her the opportunity to think she was making her contribution to post-war therapeutics.

She was grinning up. ‘Darling, you may be brave, but a girl’s feet aren’t the enemy. What about finding something else we could do together?’

He was saved by the ginger baby.

Brandishing its rattle at the end of a hairy arm, it screamed, ‘You’re hogging the lieutenant, Mummy! Poor Baby, must have a turn.’

The colonel’s crotch was almost as possessive as Margie Gilchrist’s, and certainly more developed than her breasts.

‘Eddie,’ the sultana called across the deck, ‘save me the waltz. A waltz is what I’m dying for.’ To illustrate, she swooned so elaborately that she brought her swaggie partner down.

At that moment the music stopped and Eddie Twyborn escaped from the muscular embrace of ginger arms.

While they were all laughing, stamping, shouting, clapping, he scuttled down the companionway into the smelly-clean bowels of a ship and the asylum of his cabin. When he had bolted his door, taken off his clothes, and shot La Rochefoucauld into a corner, he lay down — expecting what?

All night, it seemed, giggles and explosions, a traffic of clumsy, spongy feet filled the corridor. At intervals a handle was rattled, at others almost wrenched off.

Margie Gilchrist’s exploratory vulva, or alternately the colonel’s opulent crotch, was forced against his sleep.

Fremantle, 4 mars 1920

Said there would never be another diary, and here it is (like masturbation) in that old cahier I found amongst Angelos’s belongings — the stationer’s imprint A. Diamantis, 26 rue du Commerce, Smyrne (the French touch hovering over every Greek of a certain age and any pretensions).

But Fremantle, the first glimpse, the first whiff of a fate which can never be renounced, is enough to drive the pretensions out of any expatriate Australian.

A party organised for sight-seeing in Perth this morning. It ended up as Angie Parsons, Margs Gilchrist, Colonel ‘the Baby’ Wilbraham-Edwards, and a widow hurtling back into circulation, Mrs Merv ‘call me Dawn’ Pilbeam. I gave belly-wobbles as my excuse for not joining; might be a drag on their sport. The party accepted my reasons, while not wholly convinced. They tottered down the gangway on the first stage of their fun-finding, the ladies precarious on their heels, the colonel waving back. All soon quenched. No heat, or is it the glare? more quenching than that of Fremantle.

After letting the party make its getaway, I went down into the town. Rusted railway-lines are strips of red, solidified heat. Wharfies sweating round their hairy navels. I am the stranger of all time, for all such hairy bellies an object of contempt — a Pom, or worse, a suspected wonk. If only one had the courage to stick a finger in the outraged navel and await reactions. Nothing minces so daintily as an awakened male.

Dream streets: the tiny houses in maroon or shit-colour brick. Paint-blisters on brown woodwork. Festoons of iron doilies which suggest melting caramel. Blank, suetty faces of women framed in grubby lace or muslin curtains, as they peer out in search of something to whet their interest. A little pomeranian dog, white coat with patches of pink eczema. An ageing blonde stands holding the dog to her bosom, fat dissolving on her vast arms. A gold armlet eating into a fatty biceps, the neatly folded, obsessively laundered hankie held in place by this dented gold circlet.