Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

He progressed slowly to the far side of what was referred to as the ‘drawing room’, with its crumpled chintz, sunken springs (‘natural comfort’, Eadie called it) Town Cries, figurines, paperweights, the inherited Dutch chest shedding its marquetry scales, the unnatural photographs of relations, friends, associates, assembled over an indiscriminate lifetime (himself in a white tunic, lace-up boots, simpering from beneath a fringe while holding a sword). Now defenceless (supposedly an adult) standing on the ridge between the French doors, from which he must descend by way of the discoloured marble steps, the corroded, unstable handrail, into Eadie’s ‘beloved’ garden (as her women friends, the Joanie Golsons, referred to it) this morning a chaos of suffocating scents and emotions. He had to face it. Now or never. Must. And did.

And there was Eadie, crouched on her knees with a trowel in her hand, her beam broader in one of those skirts she had invariably worn, a miracle of Scottish weave and an intermingling of dogs’ hair clotted with compost or manure. Oblivious as far as you could tell. As were the six or seven little red dogs, scratching, swivelling on their rumps, sniffing, one of them lifting a leg behind Eadie’s back on a border of sweet alyssum.

To an outburst of barely synchronised clocks in the house behind, and the little terriers giving tongue, she turned on her haunches, and squinted through the smoke from a wilting cigarette at the intruder in her garden.

Making an uglier face she asked, ‘Who are you? Didn’t Mildred answer the bell? Who …?’ then went off into a long whimpering moan, wrinkling up, coughing, gasping.

‘Oh!’ she cried. ‘What you’ve done to us, Eddie! Whyyy?’

She hung her head, and if the cigarette hadn’t slipped from her lips down inside her front, the situation might have grown intolerable, but in the circumstances she had to slap and grab at her blouse, shouting, ‘God … damn … ’ before retrieving the source of her wrath and flinging it into a patch of snail-fretted acanthus.

She clambered to her feet, tottering on legs seized by cramp, dropping the trowel from stiff fingers, again threatened with a landslide of emotion, while the terriers pounced, one of them worrying at a trouser-cuff, sniffing to decide the category to which this unidentified person, possibly no stranger, belonged.

‘Shouldn’t we embrace?’ The gruff warning in her voice at once established her as his mother; and as they advanced upon each other, still the victims of their diffidence, he saw that it was she who was beginning to take the initiative, while he, the passive object of her intentions, was drawn into the labyrinth of wrinkles, cigarette fumes, and more noticeable, a gust of early whiskey.

Wasn’t this what he had come for? He closed his eyes and let it happen.

He must have continued standing with them closed, for when it was over she demanded, out of a greed which had not been sated, ‘Come on, let me look at your eyes. Your eyes are what I’ve missed most.’

So he had to open up to the present, to her pair of brown ferrets, and must have repelled them, for she gasped and asked, ‘Are you hungry, darling? Arriving so early — and the Customs — the Customs always make one hungry. What about your luggage? Did Mildred take it up to your room? She looks frail, but she’s surprisingly tough — only idle.’

‘I haven’t got it. It’s at the hotel.’

‘I hope you’re not going to make us pay too dearly, Eddie, for being your parents.’

When more than likely Eadie intended he should be the one to pay for a relationship, the mysteries of which might never be solved.

‘You don’t always know,’ he mumbled, ‘whether it’s as difficult for people to have strangers staying, as it is — well, to stay with strangers.’

They were stranded looking at each other on the spot where drawing room became hall. Anywhere else it might have been unbearable to realise that the son with whom she had wrestled, perhaps even tried to throttle in the agony he had caused while forcing his way out of a womb where he was not wanted in the first place, had become the mirror-figure of herself. At least the doorway from drawing room to hall allowed her to shoot off into the dining room beyond, and avoid further exposure.

Then, with her back to him, she complained, ‘My nerves are on end,’ and poured herself a resounding whiskey.

Back still turned, she decided, ‘Thatcher will fetch your stuff from the hotel. Thatcher’s the gardener — no earthly use, except to take the dogs walking. I doubt anyone else would have him if we turned him loose. So Thatcher has become our fate.’

Once more mistress of herself, Thatcher, and most others, she returned from the dining room into the hall, thrust out her hand, and announced through that voracious smile, ‘Come and I’ll show you your room.’

As though he didn’t know it.

‘Is the mattress as hard as it used to be?’

But she did not seem to hear as they clumped thumping upstairs, shoulder bumping off shoulder, hands locked in sisterhood.

Delicacy must have overtaken Eadie, for she left him alone in what had been, and evidently still was, his room. Nothing appeared to have been disturbed, neither objects such as books, trophies, a sea urchin on a window sill, nor the nightmares and unrealisable romances with which the narrow bed was still alive. He prodded it, and felt the same hair mattress on which he had done youthful penance. She had unlatched the shutters, but the glare of sunlight prevented him re-acquainting himself to any extent with the precipice outside, its fuzz of lantana scrub, nasturtiums, and a few precarious pittosporums. Considering that the geography was so little altered, the furniture disposed to receive him back, there was no reason why he should not resume both his rational and unconscious lives, if the unreason with which he was cursed, and worse than that, a rebellious body, would allow him to.

In the meantime he prowled inside the fortress of his room, stepping as softly as he could in case his mother might be listening for his movements, to interpret them. Eadie="Eddie." It was true, but in spite of the war years and the aftermath of peace, he had not yet learnt to accept that he was Eddie Twyborn, the son of Mr Justice Twyborn — the incalculable factor. He dreaded Edward more than Eadie, who was himself in disguise.

He continued prowling, softer than before, running his finger down the spines, the titles of dustless books: the rejected Profession —Private Equity, Real Property, The Law of Contract, The Law of Torts; The Prisoner of Zenda and Robinson Crusoe ; the Kipling birthday presents (‘he’s such a splendid writer, darling, as you’ll appreciate later on’); Swinburne’s reeking perfumes, secret orgasms; The Man in the Iron Mask— the Bible.

He opened the last, and in it found, in a handwriting gone green with age, the characters cramped by sincerity and doubts:

For Eddie

on the occasion of his 13th birthday

from his father

Edward Twyborn

He might have protested oh horror horror my own poor father if there hadn’t been a knocking at the door.

It was Mildred and the gardener Thatcher either end of his cabin-trunk.

Mildred panted, ‘Where shall we put it, Mr Eddie?’

‘On the sofa?’

‘Oh, no! Mrs Twyborn would never approve of that. The springs!’

‘But there aren’t any, and I shan’t have to stoop.’

‘Shall we leave it here? under the window?’ was Mildred’s breathless suggestion.

‘The rain will come in.’ He identified his mother’s disapproving voice.

But Mildred and Thatcher were ready to dump the trunk, and did, under the window. The parlourmaid was smelling rather pleasantly of the powder which had given in to her exertions; while Thatcher who took the dogs for walks, and who had adopted silence, probably as an armature against his mistress, stank of what is known as ‘honest sweat’, or more accurately, dirty socks.