Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

‘It would sound too silly. I couldn’t tell! There’s nothing to back it up. Only that she had such extraordinary eyes.’

‘She won you over. She seduced you, Joanie.’

‘Nothing of the sort.’

‘In your thoughts at least.’

The silence was palpitating.

‘I don’t think you’re being honest with me, Joan.’

‘I am, I tell you. You’re unfair. Well, nobody’s completely honest in every corner of her mind. Are you, Eadie?’

Eadie did not answer.

Joanie said, ‘I don’t believe Eddie’s going to appear.’

‘You could be right.’

‘You frightened him off.’

‘How?’

‘By wanting to possess him.’

‘Isn’t he my child?’

The storm broke in the drawing room as against the gale outside in the garden.

‘You do, you know!’ Joanie Golson was riding both inner storm and outer gale. ‘Everybody!’ she seemed to exult.

‘Oh, people are cruel! One only asks for trust — certainty …’ There was a terrible glug-glugging, an infernal bath water escaping. ‘That’s why one keeps dogs, I suppose.’

‘Oh, darling, don’t! Nobody else knows how to hurt.’

‘Only Eddie. Eddie’s an expert.’

‘You can depend on me, Eadie darling. Didn’t you say I was your rock?’

Shattered by now, he must slip away, regardless of the consequences. The shadow in other people’s lives oppressed him as much as the shadow in his own — the unpossessed.

He glanced back from the hall and there in the depths of the drawing-room mirror was this inchoate mass of flesh gobbling desperately at flesh. Was he the cause of their Laocoon’s breaking up? Nobody could have told, because at this point Eadie kicked the tea-table, the remains of the nuns’ bread-and-butter rolls, the uncut jam sandwich, the Georgian family silver lovingly acquired at auction — all crashing.

‘Oh God, Joanie, they’ll hear! Do help me pick it up. They’ll see. Mildred’s so sharp — I’d give her the sack — if I thought I’d get anybody else.’

He stole away — the word for thieves and ghosts. The bottoms erected between himself and the shambles neither observed nor accused, as hands scrabbled to repair a situation for which he, perhaps, was totally responsible.

As the waitresses, plump or sinewy, wove and interwove in their uniform black with white flashes, the head waiter, that giant currawong, a sheaf of menus tucked into a wing, swirling and descending, in nobody’s pay yet open to persuasion, and woe to the heads he might crunch off as a reward for unworldliness (Mr Effans, no other), those seated at Sunday luncheon in this most reputable Sydney hotel should have felt assured, and for the most part were, the napkins so thick and nappy, the excessive cutlery so solid and elaborately incised; you could play a chord or two if you chose on either side of your brown Windsor soup.

In fact Eddie Twyborn did. But the Chabrier did not swirl to the same extent as the head waiter, whose gyrations were constantly bouncing the tips of his tails off the convexity of his splendid calves.

Eadie grumbled. ‘I don’t know why you brought us, Edward. We could have lunched much more happily at home. Instead the servants — Etty and Thatcher anyway; it’s Mildred’s afternoon off — will be eating their heads off at your expense and blaming me for being their mistress.’

‘I brought us, my dear,’ said the Judge, trying out the surface of his brown Windsor, ‘for the sake of old times, and to give our son a little treat.’ Here Judge Twyborn might have been blowing on his soup or laughing up his sleeve.

‘Old times …’ Eadie mumbled; then, as though stung by memories, she cried, ‘I think I was born before my time!’ and hit the rim of her plate with her spoon.

‘Sshhh!’ It was the Judge.

‘How do you see it, Eddie darling?’

Eddie was, wrongly, seated between them. The Judge should have been the centre-piece.

Dragged out of focus, and scalding his palate, Eddie said, ‘I like to think, Mother, we’re all of us timeless.’

She began whimpering at her untouched soup.

It could have become embarrassing if a lady had not borne down on them in a braided costume of another age, leaving after an early luncheon; she might have referred to it as ‘dinner’.

She said, ‘It’s such a joy to see you, Mrs Twyborn — Judge,’ smirking at the son of whom she had heard, ‘one of our most distinguished families, re-united.’ Nodding her little postillion hat, she showed them her teeth, in one of which the nerve had died.

‘The War might have destroyed us, but didn’t,’ the lady told them.

‘So kind,’ Eadie murmured, and bowed her head above the untouched soup.

Eddie asked, ‘Who is she?’

‘Red Cross or something like that, I think. I met her when we were knitting for you, darling.’ The nerves had not died in Eadie’s teeth, but nicotine had coated them; everybody had been through it.

The slaves removed the plates and produced others. There was the roast beef with its ruffle of yellow fat, and Yorkshire pudding baked in the shape of a tight bun.

‘Everything in order, Judge?’ asked Mr Effans, who had not yet received recognition for his favours.

‘Everything. Why not?’ the Judge demanded, laughing.

In deference to an old hand, the head waiter smiled and withdrew.

Eadie was again bent on disapproval. ‘Now that is a woman I can’t take to.’

After advancing some way into the dining room, the object of her aversion had seated herself on the opposite side. If she was aware of the disapproval Mrs Judge Twyborn was aiming at her, she gave no indication of it.

The two women sat not exactly looking at each other.

‘Who?’ asked the Judge, glancing out like some noble beast interrupted in his grazing.

‘Marcia Lushington,’ Eadie hissed.

‘She didn’t go back with Greg,’ their son remarked, to take an interest in a world which was shortly to include himself.

Eadie said, ‘I think they suit themselves. But stay together for convenience. I suppose we shouldn’t hold it against them.’ She petered out in a racketty cough.

The Judge was slopping around in the shallows of gravied pumpkin and beans.

Mrs Lushington blew two streams of smoke down her nostrils, which must have irritated Mrs Twyborn almost beyond control, for she ground out her cigarette, not in the ashtray provided, but in her practically untouched beef.

The Judge laid his knife and fork together in the puddles of gravy, the sludge of greens, as humbly as he might have in any railway refreshment- or country tea-room while on circuit.

From admiring his father’s velvet muzzle, Eddie fell to observing Mrs Lushington.

Her dress proclaimed her a rich dowdy, or fashionable slattern. If the monkey fur straggling down from a Venetian tricorne gave her head the look of a hanging basket in a fernery, the suit she wore was buttoned and belted in a loosely regimental style, an effect contradicted in turn by several ropes of pearls which she slung about while studying the menu.

Marcia reminded Eddie somewhat of a raw scallop, or heap of them, the smudged, ivory flesh, the lips of a pale coral. Undaunted by her surroundings, her tongue suddenly flickered out and drew in a straggle of monkey fur, which she sucked for a second or two before rejecting. As she continued studying the menu, torturing the enormous pearls, glancing up from time to time at nobody and everybody, the faintly coral lips worked against her teeth, as though she had already eaten, and was trying to free them from fragments of something unpleasant.

Eadie couldn’t bear her apple pie. ‘I don’t know why you insisted, darling, when you know I don’t care for sweets.’

The Judge, who enjoyed his pud, was masticating gently, and ignoring.