Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

A figure, he realised, had come down the steps from the drawing room and was hovering amongst the more amorphous masses of shrubs. Impossible to tell whether it were Edward or Eadie. Cigar smoke was no indication of sex. If Edward, would Eadie have warned him of what to expect? Or had she decided to submit him to the same shock as she had undergone, only intensified by darkness, night perfumes, and fragmentation of distant lights? Perhaps you had done wrong to plan the meeting in the dark garden. Face to face in the dim lighting favoured in this house might have been less unnerving, underwater shapes drifting harmlessly around as they took each other’s measure. Too bad if a predator appeared. But Eadie had probably been frightened off. She would keep away till the worst was over.

Anyway, he had to go down.

Crossing the drawing room he overheard a voice bullying servants. ‘Can we be sure of the soufflé, Etty? You know what a flop the last one was — when Mrs Golson came to lunch …’ A clattering of crockery. ‘By all means take her on your lap, Thatcher. But you did nothing, absolutely nothing, about the cyst between her toes. My poor dear! My darling Biffy! Sentimentality is all very well, but practical attention, Thatcher, is what little dogs respond to.’ A cowering silence, almost, you thought you detected, a fearful stench blowing from the kitchen offices.

He forged on. The sound of his own feet covering a jarrah no-man’s land between threadbare rugs should not have alarmed an ex-lieutenant (D.S.O.); nor should an ex-Empress (hetaira) of Nicaea, expert in matters of protocol and mayhem, have quailed before a situation involving a minor official even when the official was her father; mere blood relationship never ruled out a bloodbath.

With Eadie in the kitchen, it was unavoidably the Judge smoking his solitary cigar in the quiet of the garden.

Lieutenant Twyborn went over the top, down the marble steps from which brocaded skirts swept dead leaves and caterpillars’ droppings.

A shaft of light striking from the house laid bare the long judicial face as well as that of the defendant.

A dry, self-contained man, the Judge was at the culprit’s mercy as never on any of his many circuits.

‘Why didn’t she tell me?’ He had to accuse somebody.

The air around them was tremulous.

‘I expect she thought it would be less upsetting to let you find out.’

As indeed it had been easier not to forewarn by writing, to leave it to a mingling of skin and veins, the texture of cloth, the tokens on a watch-chain, the spider-moustache which descended and withdrew as on the night when the shutters blew open, never before, never again till now. (Angelos hadn’t worn a moustache.)

In the shaft of light the Judge’s concern glistened like bone: that this son whom he loved — he did, didn’t he? should have perverted justice by his disappearance. Judge Twyborn did not intend to pursue the reason why; it might have been too unreasonable for one who put his faith in reason despite repeated proof that it will not stand up to human behaviour.

To avoid a conclusion he might be forced to draw, this honourable man began asking, ‘Did they put soap for you, Eddie, and a towel?’

‘Haven’t looked, but I expect so.’

‘Whatever else is neglected, your room has been taken care of.’

They were stumbling over the earthworks Thatcher’s tended lawn had thrown up.

‘Are you cold, boy? Your hand is cold.’

‘Not unduly.’ The hand you were chafing with yours, the molten rivers of veins, would not have allowed it; still, you heard yourself chattering as though with cold.

‘Sydney is splendid at night,’ the Judge was informing a visitor. ‘There’s a lot that’s undesirable by day, but that can apply, I should think, in any city in the world.’

Fortunately as they reached the steps the techniques of living were taking over.

‘Madam says dinner is served, sir. She’s afraid of the soufflé’

Lieutenant Twyborn dropped his host’s hand.

Freshly powdered, Mildred stood simpering on the illuminated heights. She had exchanged her daytime starch for organdie frills, frivolous against a more austere background of black.

And Eadie had emerged to reinforce the announcement. ‘Yes,’ she told them, ‘Etty’s soufflé is standing up — splendidly. So don’t dawdle, Edward, please.’

She smiled at their son. She may have wished to touch him, but something she could not have defined frightened her into resisting the impulse. Perhaps it was his good looks. Handsome men were inclined to intimidate Eadie Twyborn. It would not have dawned on her to credit with looks the man she had married, just as you take for granted some elegant hairbrush acquired long ago, its form less noticeable by the time you’ve worn the bristles down and realise you ought to do something about what has become a source of aggravation.

As they entered the dining room Judge Twyborn was holding himself so erect he must have been competing with a soldier son. In more normal circumstances, his profession would have assisted him, but the combination of an already mythical war and suddenly recovered fatherhood left him looking overtly respectful.

Eddie saw that the whole elaborate ritual was in store: the mahogany oval laid with worn silver, Waterford glass, in a central épergne white hibiscus preparing to close, while Mildred, straining at her calves against the sideboard, would be catapulted into the kitchen as soon as they were seated, to return with Etty’s upstanding soufflé.

Oh God, he could have cried. Instead he bowed his head as for grace, and remembered the fortnight after confirmation when he had expected miracles.

‘We don’t know, darling, what your tastes are,’ Eadie said, ‘I mean — in food.’

The Judge sat crumbling bread on the mahogany surface beyond the circumference of a Limerick doily which threatened to stick to his fingers, all doilies to all their fingers, leprous flesh barely distinguishable from webs of lace.

‘I mean,’ said Eadie, ‘whether you’re a gourmet , or like it plain.’

‘Don’t you think food depends a lot on time and place?’

Eadie laughed; she would have laughed at anything, even what she hadn’t listened to. But Edward Twyborn was looking grave. Eddie hated to feel he might appear a prig to those mournful eyes.

‘Do you remember — Father,’ the whole scene was so unreal, nothing he might add to it could make it more incongruous, ‘you took me with you when a court was sitting at — Bathurst I think it was. We shared an enormous iron bed with a honeycomb coverlet on it.’

‘I don’t remember,’ the Judge said.

‘I do.’ Or thought you did. Oh yes, you did ! ‘I was so excited I lay awake all night listening to the noises in the pub yard. The moonlight, I remember, was as white as milk. It was hot. I pushed the bedspread off. It lay on the floor against the moonlight.’

‘Eddie, you’re making it up!’ Eadie was out in the cold.

‘No, I’m not,’ he insisted as he messed up Etty’s soufflé. ‘Remembering is a kind of disease I suffer from.’

‘Hardly a disease,’ the Judge muttered through a mouthful. ‘Useful, I’d say, if you’re to any degree selective.’

‘No, a disease,’ Eddie Twyborn heard himself persisting. ‘I don’t know, but suspect that those who can’t recall, act more positively than those who are bogged down in memory.’

Eadie announced in a loud voice, ‘You can’t deny it’s a jolly good soufflé.’

‘Excellent,’ the Judge agreed.

‘I remember, on the same trip we had a meal in one of those railway refreshment rooms — so-called. We had corned beef, and watery carrots, and dumplings that bounded from under the knife …’