Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

They came and went, bringing in the smaller pieces. Eddie Twyborn, so-called, felt guilty, and prowled worse, with less concern for what might be overheard by Eadie.

As the servants were leaving she did in fact appear, having changed into some sort of haphazard frock, exposing freckled arms and a droughty chasm leading to the breasts which had suckled her child. It was not so much this painful revelation as the face she had tried to disguise by smearing it with crimson and white which made him avert his own.

‘Now,’ she said, her gaping wound smiling at him from amongst those lesser ones which had healed, ‘you must come down and have a drink — and tell me all about everything,’ trying to sound like the girl she might never have been.

Did she know he knew? She bowed her head going downstairs in front of the son she might never have had.

When they were seated in the drawing room, each holding as a protective weapon a glass of whiskey as strong as Eadie knew how to pour, and she had lit one of the cheroots he remembered her smoking in the past, only in the tower room alone with the Judge, he asked straight out, ‘What became of Ruffles — Mum?’

As though beaten at her own game by the one who should have been ‘telling all’, she looked at the carpet, and answered, ‘Ruffles died.’ It left her with a little tic in one cheek.

While like some old mangy, cancerous dog, Angelos Vatatzes was dragging his body out of a corner of the drawing room to lay his head on Eudoxia’s knee, asking forgiveness for his devotion.

The apparition drove Eddie Twyborn to concentrate on something which might convey actuality: the waves painted on the Gulf of Smyrna; lizards on burning marble at Nicaea; arabesques swirling out of the Chabrier waltzes at nightfall above Les Sailles.

‘Anyway, Ruffles apart,’ he said to his mother, ‘nothing has changed — here — since I went away. Only the springs have given up.’

Eadie hunched her shoulders and, after plunging her hands into the bowels of her chair as though groping for evidence which might justify his accusation, came out with a high, smoky giggle. ‘You’re not cruel, darling, I hope. We’re not as well off as we were — on a judge’s salary.’

‘Nobody — that is, none of us is ever as well off as we were. It’s one of the laws of nature and history.’

He heard her teeth make contact with her glass as she tried to work it out. ‘Darling, stop scratching !’ She smacked one of her little dogs.

Yes, he was being cruel, but only as he was to himself.

Her eyes were appealing to him, asking for some revelation, not quite that perhaps (wasn’t she Judge Twyborn’s pragmatic wife?) but a factual account of what he had been doing all these years. Had he been taking part in a war, like all young men of decent upbringing?

In case he was going to deny her this simple luxury, she leaned forward, elbow wobbling slightly on a knee, so that whiskey slopped over the lip of her glass. ‘Delia died too. Now we’ve Etty. Her devilled drumsticks are scrumptious. But she bosses me. I can’t stand it.’

‘She’ll probably leave, like Joséphine Réboa.’

‘God forbid! I couldn’t bear it.’ She bit on her cheroot. ‘Who was Josephine Whatsername?’

‘Somebody who left.’

After that they were at sea.

He thought he felt something crawling somewhere between his crotch and his navel.

Deciding, it seemed, not to let him escape, she leaned farther forward and asked, ‘Darling, were you in the War?’

‘Yes — as it happens — I was.’

‘I’m so glad. We would have hoped you were.’

‘Who?’

‘Well, Daddy …’

He would have liked to think that ‘Daddy’, of all people, would not have condemned him.

‘… and our friends.’

She was looking at him.

‘Who? your friends?’

‘Well, darling — everybody.’

She was looking at him more intently still. ‘You remember Joanie? Joanie Golson. The Boyd Golsons.’

‘Vaguely.’

‘And Marian Dibden?’

She was sitting forward to take stock. Eadie’s therapeutic touch was that of a sledge-hammer.

‘When shall I see my father?’ he asked.

‘Oh,’ she withdrew into her chair, ‘I was going to ring him, then I didn’t because I thought he’d be too upset. I thought when he comes home tonight I’d bring you out into the garden.’

‘No.’

‘What, then?’

‘I’ll come out — and just meet him — like that.’

‘If it’s what you want.’ The little dogs skirling at her ankles, she went to pour herself another drink, forgetting his.

Mildred announced. ‘Etty says luncheon is ready, madam.’

Eadie Twyborn ducked her head. ‘Oh, well, if it’s what Etty says … I hope it’s something delicious for Mr Eddie’s return to the fold.’

Mildred snickered, and looked down her powdered front.

There was nothing for it but that mother and son should go into the dining room and continue to ‘tell about everything’. Would Eadie of the corked-on moustache flinch if he casually produced the spangled fan and pomegranate shawl, flung them into the conversation? Wait perhaps, till the Judge was wearing his high heels and black silk stockings.

Eadie said, ‘I can imagine, Eddie, what you must have suffered — from what one heard of life in the trenches.’

In the lull before the guns opened up again there was only the sound of a dog scratching.

‘Did you win any medals?’ she asked.

‘Only one.’

‘I’d adore to see it.’

‘I dropped it down a grating in London after I was demobbed.’

‘I expect you could get another,’ she said, ‘if you paid them for it.’

From his window he had watched darkness gathering, a milky sky purpling over, a recent flowering of lights dancing in a thicket as branches were stirred by an evening breeze, all that was left of a ferry now like a child’s illuminated pencil-box slid across a smooth black surface in a gap between trees. (‘You wanted a pencil-box, didn’t you, Ed?’ ‘Yes, but I thought it’d be a double-decker.’ ‘Sorry — next time — when you’re older.’ Later: ‘Your father gave it so much thought — such a busy man — you should have sounded more grateful.’ Silence. He was not ungrateful. He took the disappointing pencil-box to bed. He hid it under his pillow. He would have defended it from loving hands doing things only for his good, removing angular, uncomfortable, ultimately ridiculous pencil-boxes. He would have been prepared to wound the loving hand as he had when it was laid upon him as a comfort, while he was inhaling the ether. ‘They’re only going to snip the nasty tonsils, which might otherwise poison your whole system; you won’t feel it I promise you, darling.’ ‘ Nhhao! ’ the shriek it became in the lint funnel as you were sucked down it, down down, through a scent of pale green fur …)

In this evening’s silence, nobody, at least for the time being, was suggesting anything for his good. His isolation was not the target for the sounds breaking around it: the chitter of crickets, the twitter from a formation of small migrating birds, a gibber of possums, more human for the demands they were making on one another, the crash of a tram as it rounded a corner in a sputtering of violet sparks.

Shouldn’t he do something instead of becoming a fixture in this room which had received him back? What rituals were performed before dinner in the house to which he belonged? Did they bathe? Change their clothes? To be on the safe side, he decided not to prepare in any way. Stick to the day’s patina of grime and sweat, an additional layer of himself as protection against the moment when he must beard the Judge in the garden.