Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

Of dislocated joints and flapping hood, it ground to a standstill below the siding. A door was torn open and slammed shut before the driver came round and showed himself. He was of middle age, a reddish man in clothes which seemed to inconvenience him judging by the contortions to which he was subjecting his shoulders, while easing his crotch, and flinging evident cramps off a pair of well-developed calves. In spite of the rights he enjoyed as a native, he might have felt that the stranger stationed above him on the platform had him at a disadvantage. For he took up a stance, legs apart, hands on hips, as he stared upward. What may have been intended as a smile of welcome was turned by his disadvantage and the position of the sun into a ginger-stubbled glare.

‘ ’Ow are we, eh?’ he drooled in conventional tone. ‘You beat me to it!’

Insufficiently rehearsed, the amateur mumbled and smiled back.

‘Never know with the fuckun Woolambi Mail. It comes or it don’t. Today it came.’ The professional laughed, and exercised his musclebound shoulders more violently than ever to restore them to working order.

Nobody thought of starting an exchange of names, taking it for granted there could be no other than the manager and the jackeroo, Don Prowse and Eddie Twyborn.

Without delay the ginger one mounted the ramp and there began a ritual male tussle to possess the baggage. It was over too soon. As he hoisted the trunk on a shoulder it must have gratified Prowse to detect and dismiss decadence, while Eddie following with case and valise wondered where civilisation ended, and still more, where it began.

The manager kept up a muttering as he lashed the trunk to a rusted rack, his activities accompanied by the glaring smile directed nowhere in particular. The backs of the hands at work with such authority were scabbed in places and tufted with orange hair. Eddie felt ashamed of his own unblemished, unskilled hands, and planned to keep them a secret for as long as he could. He hid them in his trouser pockets, where they started jingling his key-ring, his change. (What to do with hands had always been a major problem.)

‘All set.’ Not quite a statement, nor wholly an interjection, Prowse jerked it out from behind his Adam’s apple.

The intimidated Eddie Twyborn climbed in on the passenger’s side. Prowse began doing things to the car with immense and impressive dexterity, which did not prevent it bucking and sidling, threatening to throw them out before they left the starting post.

‘What’s he like?’ Eddie asked in an untimely effort to establish himself.

‘What’s — who?’

‘Old Lushington.’

‘Greg’s all right,’ the manager shouted through a thrashing of gears.

They were cavorting by now, over the stones, towards a cleft in the bleached hills.

‘Soft old sod, but all right,’ Gregory Lushington’s manager intoned. ‘Not here all that much. Bugger’s always globe trotting. Been to bloody Patagonia . Done the China coast. Climbed the Himalayas — well, some of the easy bits.’ Prowse snorted slightly. ‘Wanted to see the rhodradendrons.’

It lulled the passenger to hear about his boss’s travels. It removed him to some extent from the driver’s side and what he suspected the latter’s judgment to be. He did not feel he could count on Prowse’s liking him; yet there was a tingling attraction on his own side, generated, if he would admit, by those hands lying heavy on the wheel.

Suddenly the manager turned to him and said, ‘In the War, weren’t yer, Eddie?’ It sounded almost an accusation.

‘I was — yes. I was.’ He couldn’t apologise enough on sensing it was what Prowse would have wanted.

‘Well, I wasn’t. I was doing what they considered a necessary job. I would ’uv, of course. I talked it over with old Greg. Greg’s had it easy all his life. Hasn’t come in for anything — war or otherwise. Full of money like a tick with blood. Marcia thought I oughter go. That’s ’is wife. She’s away in Sydney. Back any day now. It’s easy for a woman, isn’t it? to decide what a man oughter do in a war. Some women need a man dead before they can appreciate ’im.’

His glance hectic (he had a lip sore breaking out) Prowse was looking to his passenger for corroboration.

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Eddie replied, reconstructing the beige Marcia framed in straggles of monkey fur.

The manager calmed down. They were climbing, dipping, swerving, skidding in a sticky hollow; they were facing the direction from which they had come.

‘Fuck that!’ said Don Prowse, and laughed his throatiest from behind the Adam’s apple.

Eddie Twyborn smiled a lulled smile. His fate was in someone else’s hands.

They reached a signpost pointing along a main road. They even ran a short distance over the road’s luxurious surface before turning off again into the country of rudiments and stones.

While still on the metal Prowse explained, ‘This is the way to Woolambi. Where the good times are — six pubs, four stores, the picture-show. Get a screw too, if you’re interested in that.’

They continued driving.

‘There’s a root or two closer home if you get to know. I always say there’s roots for the lookin’—anywhere.’

Again the driver glanced at his passenger for approbation.

‘That’s so,’ Eddie answered, and wondered to what extent his companion was convinced.

‘This is it,’ the manager announced.

Even if his guide hadn’t told, everything signalled arrival. The act of getting down to open gates, even the rustiest, the more resistant, the most perversely chained, gave the stranger a sense of belonging somewhere. A mob of sheep scampering in initial fright was persuaded to turn, halt, and observe those who were possibly not the intruders of its first impression. The phalanx of sheep stood firm, some stamping, coughing, every one of them archaic inside a carapace of what could have passed for stone wool, down to a tinge of parasite moss suffusing its general dinginess. Winter was well on the way at ‘Bogong’. It showed in the staring, wind-ruffled coats of half a dozen horses in the next paddock. Wheeling and pig-rooting, the near brumbies halted only when almost on top of the car, their bright expressions from under wispy forelocks prepared to enjoy such entertainment as human beings had to offer. Here too there was a glint of moss in quizzical muzzles and, possibly by reflection, in fetlocks rising out of a short-pile carpet of a virulent green.

Presently a string of sheds, together with a huddle of cottages, their paintwork faded to a pale ochre, showed up amongst the white tussock on a river bank.

Two stockmen were riding at a distance, slouching, bumping with accomplished ease one behind the other on razor-backed nags whose slatternly tails almost swept the ground. Weather had cured the riders to a colour where they could have passed for Red Indians. They ignored the manager, as he them, more from convention, you felt, than from actual animosity.

Soon there was a bridge of loosely bolted planks buckling beneath the leaping car. Never had river waters looked glassier, more detached in their activity. Eddie Twyborn shivered and breathed deep for the encounter. Then they were across, above them in the middle distance a long low homestead, its windows dark and unrevealing behind a low-slung veranda, beneath a fairly low-pitched, red-painted roof, in corrugated iron. The homestead had a somewhat prim air, that of a retiring spinster of no pretensions beyond her breeding.

The car did not make for the homestead, but for a cottage closer to the river and surrounded by the expected complement of sheds, yards, iron water-tanks, and what must be the dunny. Hawthorns were crowding in upon another deep veranda, providing a break-wind, if also probably a break-light for the rooms inside.