Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

‘Joanie?’

‘Golson — Sewell that was.’

‘Hardly remember. Suppose I do — just; I was quite small.’

‘But later, surely. You can’t have been away all the time at boarding school. She remembers you and is dying to meet you.’

He gave no indication of accepting or refusing.

‘She’ll be coming to afternoon tea tomorrow. I do hope you’ll make the effort, darling.’

After that she took her dogs into the garden and gave them a good flea-powdering in preparation for Mrs Golson’s visit.

The day of the visit turned out heavy: morning yawned through a green-gold late autumn haze; hibiscus pollen clung to the shoulder blundering against those brooding trumpets; the air you breathed felt coated with fur; and under the rose bushes which Mrs Golson must skirt that afternoon, a crop of giant, speckled toadstools had shot from the compost overnight.

At breakfast (Eadie presiding over a battery of shapely but dented Georgian silver, in a steam of strong Darjeeling) the Judge informed them, ‘I ran into Lushington, lunching yesterday at the Club.’ Before revealing the outcome of their meeting, he paused to convey a liberal forkful of kedgeree past the spidery moustache. ‘He says,’ said the Judge while masticating conscientiously, ‘he’ll take you on at a — nominal — wage. Like many of the rich,’ here the Judge defended himself by hunching his shoulders and clamping down on the kedgeree, ‘Greg Lushington is stingy. Oh, he doesn’t mean to be. He understands it as thrift — which is how he came by what he’s got. Thrift is something we poor professional coots are unable to indulge in. We can only aim at retiring early, to cosset investments.’ He let out an enormous sigh, and continued munching, stray grains of rice trembling on the tips of the more detached hairs in his moustache.

‘Sometimes I wonder, darling, whether you are emulating Gladstone.’

‘How?’

‘All this — mastication.’

He ignored it, while continuing to munch.

‘Lushington would see you, Eddie. But returned last night to his property.’

‘Most of the time half-sloshed,’ said Eadie.

‘How do you know?’

‘I can tell,’ she said, ‘by instinct.’

Silence fell on a debris of haddock bones and rejected rice. Eadie was entering the desert which lies between the breakfast cuppa and the first snifter.

‘Lushington says that, as a jackeroo, you’ll share a cottage with the manager — which, I take it, is meant as compensation for the nominal wage you’ll be receiving.’

‘Fair enough,’ Eddie Twyborn heard himself; morning apathy had dulled the glint in his brave idea.

All three Twyborns sank their chins and sipped their strong Darjeeling.

Eddie felt the sweat trickling down his temples.

When he had done all there is to do at that hour he went out and roamed. He took a tram to the city and bought some pencils for which he had no immediate use. Later in the morning he caught sight of the Judge sniffing at cigars in a tobacconist’s; later still, his mother buying a card of buttons in a store. So that all three, for the time being, were employed.

He might have evaporated completely towards the time for afternoon tea, if what Eadie would have called his ‘morbid streak’ had allowed him to resist a glimpse of Joanie Golson. So he hung around the periphery.

The doorbell rang and Mildred in her frills ran to answer.

A breeze had broken out in the garden, stirring the perfumes, the pollens. The harbour had become a sheet of corrugated zinc. Mildred was using a hankie.

‘Well, Mildred, how nice to see you. Are you keeping well?’

A grateful sogginess issuing out of the hankie.

‘Are they all well?’

The felted distances were the more intriguing for remaining invisible; he, the would-be voyeur, preferred to train his mind’s eye on the person formed by Mrs Golson’s voice.

Eadie, entering from the garden, slipped where marble verged on jarrah.

Joanie must have caught her.

‘Thank you, darling. Such a stand-by. You’re my rock !’

‘I’d have thought Edward …’

‘Edward is my judgment.’

A high breathiness in Joanie. ‘But rocks suggest bulk, don’t they? When I’ve been at such pains to reduce.’

‘Oh, you have, of course you have! You’re looking positively flimsy, Joanie — in your blue — that panama so light it’s ready to fly out the window.’

‘One never knows how to take you, Eadie.’ Mrs Golson sounded peeved.

‘Take me? No one has attempted that in years.’ Eadie Twyborn too, was breathy, but in the bass, subsiding, it seemed into the sofa’s non-existent springs.

Mrs Golson must have subsided shortly after, her impact more audible. ‘Anyway, he is here. Cheer up, Eadie! Am I going to have a glimpse of him?’

‘Who can tell?’

Mildred bearing tea-things was competing with a gardenful of birds.

‘It remains to be seen,’ Eadie continued cryptically, to keep it from the servants.

‘Nowhere else,’ Mrs Golson vouchsafed, ‘does one find such delicious bread-and-butter rolls.’

‘Etty learned them from the nuns.’

As Mildred had withdrawn, the two ladies went into a giggle.

‘Oh yes,’ Mrs Golson gasped, ‘we can learn a lot from the nuns, I’m sure.’

After that they must have fallen to counting the crumbs or searching their thoughts, until Eadie embarked on the pedigree of somebody who had married someone.

‘Did you know,’ Joanie interrupted, ‘that Marian is expecting another?’

‘Yes, Marian’s expecting another.’

‘Does she know that Eddie is back?’

‘Who can say? I’m too discreet to ask. But the world is full of indiscretion.’

A southerly had risen to trouble the garden; it was bashing the helpless hibiscus trumpets. From where he was stationed, round the corner in the study, he could look out and see flesh already bruised, shredded. Soon he must declare himself, face other damage at the tea-table, for all anybody knew, perhaps even create worse.

So he held back.

‘You know, Eadie, when we were away that time in France, before the War, there were several occasions when I was about to write you a letter.’

‘That was when you were neglecting me.’

‘It would be difficult to say, Eadie, who was neglecting who.’

Half a French door was slammed shut by the mounting gale. Nobody rose to attend to it.

‘Was there something specific you had to write about? Or only that you still loved me — and were too cruel to re-assure.’

‘Of course I still loved — I do still love you! Of all people, I think I’m the one who understands you.’

‘To understand a person can make her most unlovable.’

‘Oh, darling, you do know how to stick the knife in!’

‘Then why did you want to write, and didn’t?’

‘I didn’t because I had no concrete evidence.’

‘Of what, Joan? Only Edward can be as tiresome.’

‘Well, you see, I met this very beautiful, very charming young woman — a Madame Vatatzes — married to an elderly, mad Greek.’

‘Ah, now we’re coming to it! You had an affair with this very charming, beautiful young woman. You comforted her in her husband’s madness.’

‘You’re the one who’s mad! I’ve never been unfaithful to you, darling.’

‘Will you give me your hand on it?’

‘It’s far too buttery — and far too hot — but if you must.’

Round the corner in the study Eddie Twyborn was enveloped in this same buttery silence of schoolgirl pacts and womanly frustration. Could he escape the dénouement of then and now?

‘If you didn’t have the affair, what else was there to confess, in this letter you didn’t write?’