Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

Mrs Tyrrell produced the spotted dick.

After their meal, as he smoked his pipe and drank another whiskey or three, the manager grumbled, ‘It’s the winters that get you down on the Monaro. If you could escape the worst of it — drive up north and thaw out on the coast for a coupler months — like the moneyed bastards do — or Europe.’ A tear of frustration, alcohol, or retrospect had appeared surprisingly in a corner of one of Prowse’s eyes. ‘The winters were what the wife couldn’t stand. She walked out on me — I’d better tell you before others do. It was the cold. Well, good luck to ’er! She was never much use to a man. It’s the kid I miss. Haven’t seen ’er since they went.’

Mrs Tyrrell had continued sitting in a corner, yawning, and holding her forearms. Old tales left her untouched. She might have been a gnarled, half-burnt tree stump.

If Prowse’s confidences touched Eddie, it could have been in the light of his own contemplated defections from Angelos Vatatzes. He could smell the night trains he had never caught towards a hypothetical freedom somewhere beyond the Côte Morte. In the front bedroom of this creaking house the departed Mrs Prowse, all pallor and resentment, might have been awaiting her orang-outang on the iron bedstead with the brass knobs.

If he had been a woman in body as well as psyche, Eddie might have put out a tentative hand and touched an orange paw.

On realising that it would have been for his own comfort rather than the sufferer’s, he shivered and suggested, ‘Think I ought to be turning in.’

‘You’ve got something there, Eddie.’ It was again hearty, banal, masculine; never more masculine than when they went outside together, backs at the oblique, pissing on the frost.

‘Christ!’ chattered Prowse. ‘Freeze the balls off yer, wouldn’t it?’

The newcomer had begun to feel that perhaps he was more inured to cold from life in the trenches, not to say exposure during a female existence.

Or he could have been numbed by exhaustion and the situation he found himself in. As he fell asleep under the army blankets and the threadbare bedside mat, Peggy Tyrrell could be heard through the wall mumbling a drowsy rosary. Then there was the slamming of the screen door as Prowse went outside again. It occurred to Eddie that the manager had only just relieved himself, but could be — who cared? moved to sit alone one side of the two-seater dunny, chattering with cold, black mutton, and retrospect.

‘Looks like you slept in.’

He roused himself to see Prowse standing in the doorway.

‘Didn’t wake yer the first morning. Lushington’s not an early riser. He’ll come down when ’e feels like it. So take yer time, Ed. Peggy’ll have yer breakfast ready if you let ’er know you’ve done yer fly up.’

The manager’s splendid teeth grinned before his manliness withdrew.

Thin white sunlight was glittering coldly on gritty boards. Eddie Twyborn revolved and wove himself deeper into the cocoon of army blanket. He was conscious of too supple arms, the tendrils of armpits, the manager’s image fading from the crude doorway.

He got up presently, and while forcing with trembling fingers metal buttons through holes a size too small for them, called out, ‘Hey — Mrs Tyrrell — what about breakfast?’ in a voice he hoped the manager might have approved.

‘… when you want ut …’ her toothless cavern reverberated through what sounded like a cascade of thick crockery.

Outside in the frost there was a shambling of hooves, champing of chaff-scented bits, and a more intense perfume from dung recently dropped on frozen ruts.

He looked out and saw the Men rolling cigarettes under the eaves of a thawing roof. They were waiting for the manager, or more formidable, the owner of the acres to which they were enslaved.

Eddy was finally presentable enough to face his ally Mrs Tyrrell. He wondered whether he should clean his teeth with paste from the ruptured tube, but didn’t. He went out smelling of sleep and the hairy blankets he had slept in.

No doubt taught by her football team of sons that this is a man’s world, Mrs Tyrrell didn’t turn a hair. She tossed several charred chops and a mountain of fried-up cabbage and potato on to the plate waiting for him.

‘Marcia didn’t bring me a gift.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Mr Edmonds come down with the meat and veggies.’

‘Perhaps she did, and he hasn’t found out.’

‘Everyone knows everythin’ at “Bogong”. Little enough happens — without Lushingtons come or go.’

With one hand, she sat stirring her pink tea, with the other slightly titivating the tiara of greasy little hair-rosettes which framed her forehead.

‘Well, that’s Marcia for yer,’ she munched, and added, ‘It’s ’umankind.’

‘I’d have brought you a present,’ said Eddie, somewhat hypocritical above his chops, ‘but didn’t know about you.’

‘Of course you didn’t, love!’ she giggled. ‘And anyways, you learn not to expect too much.’

‘I’ve never expected too much,’ he murmured, and knew it was a lie, his lips thick with mutton fat and what would probably remain unfulfilled longing.

He went outside presently, his hopes of fulfilment higher in that they were humbler. After stalking through clumps of horehound, he seated himself on one half of the two-seater dunny, among the faded smells of wood-ash, lime, hen-shit, and old yellowed newsprint. Lulled by suspension in time and surrender to natural functions, he felt comforted at last, chafed his goose-flesh thighs, wiped himself on a recipe for pumpkin scones, and prepared to receive the morning’s orders.

The stockmen comprised a father and son, Jim and Denny. They remained silent when faced with a new arrival, not to say jackeroo, but egged on by the manager, extended hard hands in a gesture of cold welcome. Jim the father was leaner, more ravaged, more taciturn by nature, perhaps more aware, though not all that older than Denny his son, who had obviously shot too early from his father’s loins probably as the result of an excruciating Monaro winter. Denny at least smiled, out of witlessness it seemed, as much as good will. His head was afflicted with the shakes. His eyes squinted from behind tin-rimmed spectacles, one wing mended with a length of greasy string. He was carrying a black stockwhip which, from moment to moment, he flicked, at a solitary blade of anaemic grass, or at one of his own cringing curs, as though proud of this symbol of his office in the ‘Bogong’ hierarchy.

Discouraged by their owners, Eddie squatted to convert the dogs, two narrow-headed mongrels distantly related to the deerhound, and a little faded kelpie bitch. One deerhound snapped, and each continued looking blank from behind lolling tongue and yellow fangs, but the little kelpie whined, and was on the way to prostrating herself, torn between convention and desire for affection. Tail between her legs, she compromised by daring to rest her paws on Jim the father’s knee, and was knocked back by the knee for her pains.

‘Gid down, yer bloody bitch!’

The corrected bitch slunk away, while Eddie was made to realise that it wasn’t done to touch dogs.

‘What’s her name?’ he asked with caution.

‘Dunno that she’s got a name. She’s just a dawg, ain’t she?’ her owner replied, and spat out a shred of tobacco.

Denny the son nearly laughed his head off. ‘My dawgs ’uv got names,’ he claimed. ‘This is Cis and that’s Captain.’

Jim the father turned away in disgust, but the dogs themselves seemed to join in Denny’s simple mirth, grinning, golloping, and snapping at the air.

Eddie might have felt unhappier if his attention hadn’t been diverted. Prowse re-appeared leading a horse of the same strain as those the stockmen had tethered to a rail, except that the mount which was to be his looked shaggier, wilder-eyed amongst his forelock, and from every angle worse put together. His colour might have been described as creamy, but smeared with Peggy Tyrrell’s frying pan.