Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

Don Prowse turned on a sourly beatific smile for one who might have been the bride of a shotgun marriage instead of an unwanted offsider wished on to him by his employer. ‘Snugger than it looks, and at the week-end you can bugger off to Woolambi if it suits.’

Eddie Twyborn felt the complete misfit in Don Prowse’s aggressively masculine world; whereas a relationship was waiting to develop between himself, the huggermugger buildings, even a bitter landscape. If the river appeared at first sight hostile, it was through the transience of its coursing waters to one who longed for the reality of permanence.

He was made clumsy and unreal by the manager’s continued remarks, by his attempts at friendliness, by the man’s insistence on shouldering the cabin-trunk again, on grabbing hold of all the baggage if he could get possession of it — in doing the man’s work in fact. It was humiliating.

It might have become worse, creating a puppet tittuping helplessly through slush and puddles, if a woman hadn’t appeared, neither young, nor all that old, at any rate her hair still black, her cheeks as tanned and ravaged by the climate as those of the ‘Red Indian’ stockmen loping on their lean horses.

‘Mrs Tyrrell,’ Prowse grunted by way of introduction under the stress of shouldering the trunk and carrying the suitcase.

Mrs Tyrrell mumbled through a smile, licking her thin, natural lips. She revealed two brown, upper fangs with nothing but her tongue to fill the gap. She was dressed all in black, whether from grief or for practical reasons, it was not possible to tell. She simpered a lot, and hugged a bobbled crochet shawl round narrow shoulders. In the lower regions, what had once been a laundered apron had failed to protect her practical black from a storm of flour.

Anyway, Eddie Twyborn had hopes of this Mrs Tyrrell, her bright black eyes already alight with confidences and an offer of sleazy kindliness.

‘Bet you’re hungry, mister,’ she said. ‘Fix yer some breakfast. Bet Mr Prowse won’t say no to a second breakfast. ’E’s a good doer.’

At the same time she started a struggle for the valise with which the young man had been left. He clung on desperately, as though possession of it were his only means of self-assertion.

‘Independent, are we?’ Mrs Tyrrell cackled through her gap, a detachment of mongrel hens joining in as they shot across the slush from under her feet.

‘Never thought about it — frankly,’ he gasped.

Such strangeness strangely expressed must have dried up her repartee, for she fell silent, one hand on the disputed valise. He could feel Mrs Tyrrell’s skin slithering against his own, hard and greasy at the same time, the broad golden wedding-band turned by age to the colour of brass.

So they staggered on, and into the house, allies, it could have been, against the manager’s overtly masculine back.

‘This do?’ the latter asked.

He released the trunk, which crumped on the boards and shook the whole structure of the room.

‘Yes, it’s fine!’ said Eddie Twyborn out of a deathly sinking.

He stood with his hands on his hips as he had seen men do, and smiled, while the others read his thoughts, no doubt correctly: Don Prowse grinning through the ginger stubble, Mrs Tyrrell bird-eyed beneath a row of little jet black hair-rosettes.

If they would only withdraw, the room might become his, just as the imagination can clothe a skeleton with flesh, even kindle a spirit in it. They did leave him to it finally: the stretcher with the army blankets, shelves curtained by a straight length of faded cretonne, a frayed mat on the dusty boards, on the chest an enamel candle-stick, its broken candle aslant over gobbets of stale wax, on the wall a deal-framed glass to mirror his jaunty disarray.

He was alone at least—‘independent’ as Mrs Tyrrell might have described it.

He could hear her in the kitchen. He could smell the mutton chops she was charring, the cabbage-and-potato she was ‘frying up’.

‘A good-lookun young cove, Peggy,’ he heard Don Prowse’s voice.

Then her cackle, tailing off into a sigh, and something about ‘a mother’, and ‘women is only pack ’orses’, through the stench, the spitting of fat.

Should he go out to them?

After their delayed breakfast, his second in the manager’s case, of chops and veg followed by wedges of yellow sponge and dobs of enormous floury scone, Don advised, ‘Better settle in, Ed. We’ll talk things over later.’ He showed his teeth in an educated smile, while Mrs Tyrrell stood watching from beneath her hair-rosettes, lips parted to reveal the cavern behind her gap.

‘Gotter unpack,’ she murmured.

While the jackeroo did just that the cook came in and draped herself over a deckchair as faded as the cretonne curtain masking the shelves in the room which was becoming Eddie Twyborn’s.

Mrs Tyrrell said, sighing, scratching an armpit under the black, bobbled shawl, ‘You gotter take what comes, I’ve always said. Man or woman. Prowse wouldn’t understand that. You would,’ she added.

‘Why would I ?’

‘Because you’re yer mother’s son,’ she said, peering at him and licking her lips.

‘How do you know?’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m the mother of seventeen Tyrrells — a football team of boys — but the girls is what counts.’

‘I’m a boy,’ said Eddie Twyborn.

‘We know you are,’ Mrs Tyrrell agreed, munching on her mauve gums. ‘The boys!’ she munched. ‘Bet yer mum would’ve been glad of a girl.’

‘I don’t think so. She would have preferred to be barren, I think.’

‘Go on! There’s no mother wouldn’t ’uv chose ter be a mother. Not even our poor Else, with that bloody Kevun pokin’ the hell out of ’er. Gets what ’e wants, then ’e beats ’er up. We ’ave ’im put in, but the damage is done. The kiddies are worth it, Else says. Arr, the women!’

Peggy Tyrrell sucked her gap passionately.

‘Marcia — Mrs Lushington — give a beautiful quilted dressin’-gown after Kev put the fifth in Elsie’s oven. Arr, Mrs Lushington’s good — a lovely woman.’

Mrs Tyrrell was writhing in the faded chair, which must have done the P. & O. run under Lushington auspices. ‘Both my girls,’ she said, eyeing the tube of toothpaste he had ruptured with his heel in Edgecliff, ‘both was married with their own teeth still in place. Only lost ’em afterwards. Thing about teeth,’ she said, ‘you don’t ’ave to clean ’em if you ’aven’t got ’em.’

‘You don’t,’ he agreed.

She had begun eyeing the underpants he was bringing out.

‘Wouldn’tcher like somethun to eat? Prowse is gone with the men ’n won’t be back to lunch.’

‘Which men?’

‘Well — Matt ’n Denny — the men!’

Presumably the ‘Red Indians’.

He didn’t hanker after lunch; he only wanted Peggy Tyrrell to leave him alone. Which presently she did, sighing and burping. Glancing round, he caught sight of her through the doorway, moving plates of sponge and plates of scones around the kitchen table as though playing a game of draughts with herself.

She was what is called a ‘trick’, and he knew that he would be glad of her.

After arranging his possessions, all of them objects which might remain dispensable, he left the house to which he had been consigned, and walked along the river bank. He half-expected Peggy Tyrrell to follow. When she didn’t he looked back, and sure enough, there she was, hesitating on the edge of the dry-rotted veranda, in a gap between hawthorns, tightening the bobbled shawl around her shoulders. He turned away and hurried on, persuading himself he was not guilty of betraying a relationship so recently formed.

But he felt guilty, and gashed a glaringly new boot in tripping over a rock.