Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

‘Oh darling, must we be morbid?’

‘… but it was delicious. Anyway, a delicious memory. Even the brown drone of blowflies, the brown linoleum. Somebody’s dumpling shot across the floor.’

Judge Twyborn was staring at his plate, at the soufflé he had massacred.

‘I can’t believe,’ Eadie said. ‘Unless you keep a diary. Do you, Eddie?’

‘On and off.’

‘I’ve thought about it. But haven’t had the courage.’ She wiped her mouth, and looked at the mark on the napkin.

Eddie glanced at the father he had wanted to impress and comfort, who was looking as though he had a moron for a son, or worse, some kind of pervert: that honeycomb bedspread, the whole moonlit scene.

While his wife continued wrapped in a state of mind induced by the mark on the napkin.

The Judge leaned across. ‘Then I’m not wrong, my dear, in thinking you painted up a bit too vividly for the occasion.’

Eadie exclaimed, ‘Oh my God!’ and got up to pour herself a whiskey chaser to her wine.

Mildred removed the dishes, and brought on the roast fowl, with bread sauce and sprouts, just as though it were the holidays.

‘Are we having the caramel custard with toffee on it?’ he asked his mother.

‘You’re unnatural, Eddie.’

Even before all three were crunching the caramel toffee (Judge Twyborn more circumspectly than the others because of an upper denture) he knew that he should not have come back; he should have kept his existence to himself, or only revealed it to strangers.

Eadie stood up at last. ‘This is where I leave the men to the port. I know that’s how Edward would like it.’ She poured another whiskey chaser to sustain her in her isolation.

She had got herself up in an ancient girlish frock, silver flounces over rose. A tear became visible under one armpit as she scratched her head defensively. She was wearing a Spanish comb in her hair as no Spaniard had ever worn one.

He stood up. He would have liked to say something to his mother, but hadn’t learnt the language as do natural linguists and normal sons.

So she extricated herself from what she saw to be a male situation, and was soon cursing Etty, Mildred, Thatcher, between the silences in which she hoped to overhear what was going on in the dining room.

He had failed her. He was going to fail them both, as it is the habit, more often than not, of the children to fail the parents — and vice versa.

He had hardly sat down after Eadie’s exit when the Judge began. ‘What do you think of doing, Eddie?’

You could hardly answer, Nothing; surely being is enough? looking, smelling, listening, touching.

Instead you said, ‘I’m thinking of going into the country. To work.’

In response to a serious aspiration, the Judge became more than ever earnest. ‘A practice in a country town — somewhere like Wagga, say — no, Bathurst. I don’t approve of nepotism, but could probably persuade Birkett and Blair to take you in. A very reputable firm of solicitors. Blair I know personally. I can’t see why you shouldn’t aim higher eventually. But feel your way back into the profession you were intended for. I’d die so much happier for seeing you dedicated to the Law.’

The velvet of sentiment and the private bin Edward Twyborn kept in reserve for celebrations introduced a seductive solemnity into their tête-à-tête. Eddie wished he could take himself as seriously as his father required, or that the Judge might have understood the greater seriousness of coming to terms with a largely irrational nature.

‘I thought of taking a job, as a labourer more or less — hard physical labour — on the land — and in that way perhaps, getting to know a country I’ve never belonged to.’

Judge Twyborn’s eyes had never looked deeper, more troubled, as though some private obsession of his own were on the point of being discovered.

In fact his son barely noticed; he was too surprised at the improbable idea which had come to him the moment before. Its morality must have appeared admirable, if stark, to the one in whom he was confiding. His more innocent confidant would not have seen it as Eddie Twyborn escaping from himself into a landscape.

Oh yes, it was an idea he would more than consider; he could not wait to put it into action; he was already surrounded by the train smell, frosty air, his oilskin rolled, heavy boots grating on the gravel of a country siding. (Would those who came across him notice that the boots were recently bought and that his hands looked as ineffectual as they might prove to be?)

But the landscape would respond, the brown, scurfy ridges, fat valleys opening out of them to disclose a green upholstery, the ascetic forms of dead trees, messages decipherable at last on living trunks.

‘I’d never thought of anything like that — for you, Ed,’ Judge Twyborn admitted glumly; the port no doubt made it sound the sadder. ‘That the son of a professional man like myself … Oh well, why not?’ He laughed rather disconsolately. ‘The Law — or medicine, or any other profession, shouldn’t be allowed to become a religion. Lots of reputable young men have made a go of it on the land. We can get someone to take you on — not as a labourer. When members of our class are involved,’ the Judge approached it gingerly, ‘they call it jackerooing .’

An easier way? Eddie suspected it was, and not without a touch of nepotism, when he had aspired to be a ‘hand’.

‘I’ll speak to Greg Lushington. I see him on and off at the Club.’

What had been a solemn occasion became the more solemn for an excess of port and an excessive unreality.

When the door was flung open. ‘I can’t bear it any longer. The girls have pissed. Aren’t you men ready for your coffee?’

She had stuck the Spanish comb at an even more improbable angle. She had started blinking and expostulating.

‘I’m worried about Biffy’s cyst. All my little dogs die of cancer. Soon I shall be left alone — without the strength for rearing puppies.’

Cheeks pale by now, her mouth gaped open like a target in a fair.

Surprisingly, Judge Twyborn aimed. ‘You’ll never be left alone, my dear. There’ll be a host of surviving fleas — and probably a paralysed husband.’

On and off the parents had hopes of displaying their son to those they considered their friends: Edward’s fellow judges, barristers, doctors, architects, sometimes a leavening of graziers. (‘You’ll find country people speak a different language,’ Eadie told him, ‘but they’re warm-hearted, well-meaning’ adding in the course of her introductory remarks, which were intended as persuasion, ‘Some have greater pretensions. Ethel Tucker, for example, is reading Proust, if you can believe, down in the Riverina.’)

She would start sighing, almost mewing, before announcing, ‘We’re having a few close friends to a little drinks party. We’d so love it if you’d look in.’

He staved it off. ‘I don’t feel I’m ready. The languages alone.’

She sat looking at him incredulously.

‘Though Ethel and I might become mates if we don’t rush it.’

‘Oh, Ethel’s no great shakes. Take it from me. We were at school together. Ethel was practically illiterate. I had to write her love-letters for her.’

‘Was the marriage a success?’

‘Marriage doesn’t necessarily come of the love-letters,’ she mused.

She looked at him. ‘You’re not ashamed of us, are you, Eddie?’

Unable to explain the reason for his diffidence, he could only murmur, ‘Two such honourable characters … Why should I be?’

She blushed. ‘I’m not all that honourable. And you sound as legal as your father while pretending not to be.’

Exposure in its most painful form was for some reason delayed till later than he had expected. ‘If you don’t want to meet anybody else, I must bring you together with my old friend Joanie.’