Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

Eddie asked his mother, ‘What have you got against Mrs Lushington?’ His schoolboy treat was making him feel magnanimous.

‘Nothing — actually — nothing,’ Eadie admitted. ‘Except that she’s a common piece — who came off a cow farm at Tilba — and caught old Greg Lushington — and led him by the nose ever since.’

‘Come on, Eadie, aren’t you unfair?’ the Judge intervened. ‘Greg may have wanted to be led.’

‘It’s no less deplorable — from whichever side.’ After making this virtuous pronouncement Eadie lowered her eyes.

Just then Mrs Lushington blew two fiercer blasts from her nostrils, and without ordering, rose from the mock-Chippendale, and began to leave the dining room, her slouch as contemptuous as it was fashionable.

‘Good on ’er!’ Mrs Justice Twyborn remarked.

Her son was left with his own image in the glass on the opposite wall. He was surprised to find himself look as convincing as he did, and wondered whether this had been Marcia’s impression too. Probably not. For the reflexion was already fluctuating, in the satin shoals, the watery waves of the mottled glass, as well as in his own mind. He was faced, as always, with an impersonation of reality.

All night, it seemed to him, he heard the twitter of birds migrating. In the luminous dark and his half-sleep he saw their eyes outlined with white pencil, as Eudoxia had touched up hers with black.

As Marcia Lushington had, what’s more.

Marcia was lying, buttocks upturned, an abandoned china doll.

Eddie could not bring himself to respond to the breakfast bell, but waited for his parents to disperse. Then he went into the kitchen where Etty and Mildred were scurrying in bleached-out blue and Thatcher was smoking a vile pipe.

The girls chittered, ‘Oh, Mr Eddie!’ and Etty dished up strips of a leathery omelette.

The spittle seethed in the bowl of Thatcher’s pipe. ‘It’s yer last day, eh?’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘Well, isn’t it?’ the gardener persisted.

He could not have denied what his parents might have.

He continued sitting over this late and fragmentary breakfast, but realised he was embarrassing the servants: the cook and maid taken up with their work, the gardener too, after his fashion.

Later in the morning, on packing his shamefully new clothes, the few indispensable possessions, the tube of toothpaste he had ruptured with his heel, he went down to face his mother.

Eadie Twyborn was seated on the flight of marble steps leading from the drawing room into the garden. On her tweed lap she was holding a beatific subject, one of her matted terriers. She was combing round his genitals, obviously causing him anguish of a kind, but whoever it was grinned and submitted.

Eadie said without looking up, ‘That is one I lost — and have recaptured.’

Her son ventured, ‘Not a flea, surely?’

‘Why not? We’re all swarming, aren’t we?’ Her occupation was making her drowsy. ‘If not with fleas, thoughts — desires … Sometimes I think your father’s the only one who isn’t afflicted.’

She grimaced at the shadowless Australian light, and back at the flea she was crushing between blencing nails.

‘That,’ she said with some satisfaction, ‘is the creamiest flea I’ve ever squashed. I often wonder about their sex. Is the little agile one the male — the creamy monster his mate? Or perhaps age, not sex, is responsible for the physical difference.’

She must have helped herself to a snifter earlier than on most mornings.

When he let himself out of the house that evening he wondered whether Eadie realised. Probably not. He would have liked to run into the Judge on the pavement; he would have half-liked Edward to go with him to the station, but his father must have been about the town on some honourable business of his own.

As the train glided alongside the platform in that sickening stench of departure Eddie looked out the window, still hoping the one face might materialise, the drooping moustache, the loosely furled umbrella, and that his father would leap aboard as a more athletic youth might, or Eudoxia Vatatzes, cramming Angelos into a packed corridor.

But no one appeared at the end of the long damp perspective, and Eddie Twyborn withdrew his head. The guard would think him peculiar enough without the ‘concrete evidence’ of watering eyes.

He had in his pocket a letter of instructions. In the course of the night he read it several times, while the supply of greenish drinking water jumped and shuddered in a bottle secured by a metal circlet and bracket at the same level as the upper berth, and the commercial gent snored on his back in the bunk below.

‘Bogong’,

New South Wales,

25th April 1920

Dear Eddie,

Thank you for yours of the 19th inst. referring to your journey south on the suggested date.

Ask the guard to stop the train the following morning and put you down at Fossickers Flat, where my manager Don Prowse will meet you with a vehicle, and convey you and your traps to ‘Bogong’.

I must warn you that life on the land is not all violets (and these days far from profitable) but your dad tells me you are set on giving it a go. I for my part look forward to making the acquaintance of my good friend Edwd. Twyborn’s son. I know that my wife, if she was here, would join me in bidding you welcome, but she is at present paying a little visit to shops and friends in Sydney.

Yrs cordially,

Gregory K. Lushington

‘This is it!’ the guard shouted. ‘Fossickers Flat.’

‘Is it? Oh. Yes. It is.’

The only passenger for the Flat, he had come bundling, tumbling out, fumbling with his case and valise, barking a knuckle on a door fitting. Then the run along the gritty platform to make some show of helping the guard drag his trunk down from the van.

‘Looks like you’re ’ere for an extended visit!’ The man was laying out a minimum of joviality on one whose Christian name he would not be staying long enough to learn and use.

Already he was flagging the train on its way.

Out of conscience, or some store of fundamental kindness, he thought to call, ‘So long, Jack!’ to the poor bastard left behind on the siding as himself swung aboard.

So Eddie Twyborn was stranded in this landscape, the well-read letter of instructions and welcome cooling in his cold hand.

The landscape too, was cold, and huge, undulating in white waves towards distant mountains of ink blue. Rocks, not strewn, but arranged in groups of formal sculpture suggesting prehistoric rites, prevented monotony taking over the bleached foothills. These were almost treeless. Distracted eyes in search of cover would have had to content themselves with one or two patches of dingy scrub, the most luxuriant of which straggled alongside the railway siding known as Fossickers Flat.

Eddie Twyborn found refuge at last, less in the trees themselves, than in the sounds of life in their branches: the tsst tsst of invisible small birds, wrens possibly, as he remembered them from his childhood, and here caught glimpses finally, not of the flashy cock, but the humbler, yet more elegant hen. The hen wren’s industry drew him back, out of the abstractions propounded by the hillscape and glazed air, into the everyday embroidery of life, the minutiae to which Eudoxia Vatatzes had clung as insurance against the domes of Byzantine deception. (Did poor Eadie in her Sydney garden find the same satisfaction in combing for insect-life round her terriers’ genitals?)

Consoled by the sound and movements of the wrens as they skirred among the scrubby branches, Eddie Twyborn was not at first aware that a car of sorts, trailing a heavy wake of dust, was lurching down a road as white as the hills from which it had been carved. It was the dust he noticed first, for distance and the concerted wrens obliterated sound. Only in the foreground did the Ford start chugging with any purpose, clattering towards its apparent goal.