Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

Would he ever succeed in making credible to others the new moleskins and elastic sides? At least people were more ready to accept material façade than glimpses of spiritual nakedness, cover this up with whatever you will, pomegranate shawl and spangled fan, or moleskins and elastic sides. Joan Golson had accepted a whole vacillating illusion, romantically clothed and in its wrong mind. But on entering the world of Don Prowse and the Lushingtons he suspected he would find the natives watching for lapses in behaviour. All the more necessary to cultivate his alliance with Mrs Tyrrell: women whose wombs have been kicked to pieces by a football team of sons, and who have married off daughters still in possession of their natural teeth should be more inclined to sympathise with the anomalies of life.

He forged farther along the river, stumbling over tussock, stimulated by rushing water, repelled by the patches of virulent green which recurred in this coldly feverish landscape, then turned in towards what he sensed to be forbidden ground, the land surrounding the Lushington homestead.

Far from betraying the lives of its owners to strangers, denuded trees and shrubs showed up the stranger in his trespass. Would Greg Lushington descend, or was he out with the manager and his ‘men’, super-managing his barren slopes? There was no sign that anyone inhabited the house; not that this is ever indication. You could hear in the distance a barking of dogs as they jerked at their chains and fretted the iron and woodwork of kennels.

At the foot of the wintry Lushington garden, where thorns of naked Chinese pear caught hold of the intruder’s sleeves and shoulders and sycamore seed was drizzled down the nape of his neck, there was a basalt wall surrounding three headstones. Eddie Twyborn was on the point of pushing open the elaborately designed, iron gate, a rich folly if ever there was one, to give more attention to the graves and their inscriptions, but became distracted by the sound of the loose planks of the ‘Bogong’ bridge shuffled together by the passage of a car.

It was a black, mud-spattered Packard, slowly driven, but with a possessive confidence, towards the house. The trespasser ducked behind the skeleton trees as though caught out in the spangles and embroidered pomegranates of the European drag he liked to think he had abandoned.

He walked back quickly the way he had come. The brown waters of the river reflected the thoughts of one who was unwise enough to unmask them on its bank. The river froze him. He could not imagine what he was doing at ‘Bogong’—or anywhere, for that matter.

Mrs Tyrrell was standing waiting, he was relieved to see, on the edge of the dry-rotted veranda.

‘Marcia come back,’ she told him. ‘She’ll ’uv brought me some-think. Marcia brings the loveliest gifts.’

‘She must be all right then?’ He tried it out in the manager’s voice.

Mrs Tyrrell sucked her gap before answering. ‘She’s right enough. Nobody’s ever all right. ’Aven’t you found that out, love?’ She ended up in a cackle, in which he joined, while avoiding contact with a callused hand.

The cottage was full of dusk, smoke, and a smell of roasting mutton.

‘Better take a squint at me shoulder,’ Mrs Tyrrell immediately announced.

Satisfied, she slammed the oven shut again.

‘Arr, dear, the winters,’ she sighed, ‘they make a person cry!’ then, more cheerfully inspired, ‘ ’Ere, you little bugger, why don’t-cher make yerself useful and light the bloody lamp? Prowse’ll be back any minute an’ say we’re not dermestercated.’

While he fumbled with and lit the lamp, she busied herself investigating a cabbage for slugs. ‘I’ll like ’avin’ you around,’ she told him; ‘you an’ me ’ull get on like one thing.’ She sighed again, disposing of a colony of slugs. ‘It’s the girls I miss out ’ere. Never the boys. Not that you isn’t a boy,’ she realised. ‘But different. A woman can speak out ’er thoughts.’

He should not have felt consoled, but was, to be thus accepted by Peggy Tyrrell. The flowering lamp he set between them on the oilcloth made a little island of conspiracy for the woman’s blazing face and the pale ghost of what people took to be Eddie Twyborn.

Presently they heard a truck, boots, a slammed fly-screen door. Eddie would have chosen to delay the manager’s presence, but it was soon with them in the dining-kitchen, not least the stench of his recent exertions.

Don Prowse was overpoweringly cheerful. ‘Quite domesticated, aren’t we?’ His hands sounded like sandpaper.

When he had gone to throw water at his torso and rid himself to some extent of the stench, Peggy Tyrrell winked at her ally.

‘Dermestercation! What did I tell yer? Can’t get over ’ow ’is wife walked out on ’im. You’ll ’ear all that when ’e’s warmed up.’

He returned, the hair above his forehead glittering in a watered, orange slick. He produced a bottle from the lower regions of a hobbledy dresser and poured himself a handsome tot.

‘Learned the lay of the land, have we?’ Always smiling, his teeth were his own, and good. ‘That’s the dunny, if the old woman didn’t tell yer,’ he pointed with his pipe through a smoked-up window. ‘It’s a two-seater — for company.’

Eddie Twyborn said, ‘I’ve never done it in company, and perhaps I couldn’t.’

The manager grunted. ‘Perhaps you could in a place like this. A judge’s son could get ground down like anybody else.’

Eddie Twyborn might have agreed.

Perhaps Don Prowse realised. ‘ ’Ere,’ he said, ‘you’d better have one for the first night. Everybody finds ’e depends on ’is grog in these parts. When you get yerself a bottle, you can write yer name on it, and I’ll write mine on mine.’

They drank their whiskey in company. Eddie was glad of this employment for his hands, and it made him feel more masculine.

‘Didn’t he say anything?’ he asked.

‘Who said what?’

‘Greg. Didn’t he ask to see me, perhaps? He’s my father’s friend.’

‘Greg’s a slow old bastard. Never know what ’e’s thinking. ’E’ll ask all in good time — whoever yer father is.’

They knocked back the whiskey, and the old woman produced a blackened shoulder out of the oven.

‘Greg’s off again — round the world,’ Prowse informed them while carving. ‘He likes the travel life. And why not? If you can afford it.’

Prowse must have been very well paid not to have sounded vindictive.

‘Is Marcia going too?’ asked Eddie.

‘How — Marcia? What do you know about Marce?’

‘Nothing. But she’s back. I saw her driving the Packard up the road.’

Prowse hacked the black mutton and Peggy Tyrrell relieved the cabbage of a boiled slug.

‘No,’ said Prowse, ‘Marcia’s not going with Greg. She sort of belongs more to “Bogong”—not that you’d think it at first sight.’ The carvers slithered into the gravy. ‘Marcia’s of the land — if you know what I mean. Greg only inherited it.’

They sat down and began their meal. Everyone, it seemed, even the newcomer, was involved in a primitive ritual, no grace, but plenty of tomato sauce.

Just as Eddie had sighted yet another slug, the telephone almost tore itself from the wall, and the manager leaped at it.

‘Yes, sir … Yes … Yes, Mr Lushington. Yes … In the morning … Eddie was asking whether … Yes …’

When he had returned to his creaking chair Don Prowse somewhat unnecessarily informed them, ‘That was the boss. ’E’ll see yer in the morning, Eddie. Wants to take a look at the wethers on Bald Hill.’

They made further play with their mutton.

‘I told you,’ said Prowse, spitting out some gristle, ‘Greg is slow, but wouldn’t forget — least of all ’is friend’s son.’ A second shred of gristle followed the first.