Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

The boss left them the other side of the loose-jointed bridge, followed by his terrier pack.

‘See you, Eddie,’ he called back; then with a somewhat diffident daring, ‘You’ll have to come up and meet my wife — who knows your mum.’

Eddie felt too tired as they rode towards their own quarters, but must draw Prowse on Marcia, unless Peggy Tyrrell made that unnecessary.

‘How’re you doin’, Ed?’ Their knees bumped; it might have been deliberately and with a forced heartiness on the manager’s part. ‘You look fucked out!’ He laughed, but not unkindly, or it may have been cajoled out of him by his mare’s fondling the bit with her tongue in anticipation of a feed of oats.

Any evening Eddie Twyborn looked and felt fucked out. It was what he was there for, wasn’t it? He did, however, wonder, picking at the raw blisters on his hands. He derived a morbid pleasure from letting the water out of the blisters, farting after boiled cabbage, or mashed swede with the lumps still in it, listening to Prowse tell how Kath walked out taking Kim with her.

‘Kim’s the kid, is she? Why did you call her Kim, Don?’

‘Why not? It’s a name, isn’t it?’

There was nothing to reply to that.

‘Any’ow,’ Prowse said, ‘I think it was Kath’s choice.’ He seemed satisfied that Eddie had given him the opportunity to blame his wife for something else.

‘What about Marcia? What’s she like?’

‘Another woman.’ He poured himself another whiskey; he had grown surly.

Mrs Tyrrell was more forthcoming, if only slightly so, on an evening when Prowse said he had to go up to the homestead to a conference with Lushington and the accountant who was down from Sydney.

‘Marcia?’ Mrs Tyrrell hid a yawn behind her hand. ‘She was from Tilba way. That makes ’er foreign to some, but I was allus broadminded where foreigners is concerned. Anyways, she did well for ’erself catching Lushington. Cupboards full of lovely gowns. An’ furs put away in calico bags. Mrs Edmonds, ’oo ’elps, showed me the furs when she ’ad ’em out to air. Couldn’t let Marce go to the ball smellun of mothballs.’

‘Are we ever going to set eyes on Marce?’

‘Sure thing,’ Mrs Tyrrell munched. ‘She offen rides round the paddocks with Greg and Prowse. Or Prowse alone — it don’t worry. You can’t say she’s not a good sort, though some run ’er down — say she’s a stuck-up nobody from Tilba. They say — well, I’m not gunner repeat. Those are the ones she don’t wanter know. You can’t know everybody, can yer? Even I know that.’ She sighed and re-settled herself.

‘Yes, you’ll see Marce. When you’re wealthy you’ve got time to put in. Arr, it’s hard on the women — the wealthy ones along with the others. You can’t expect ’em to spend all their time readin’ the libr’y books or shakun the mothballs out of their furs.’ Peggy Tyrrell’s eyes were at their brightest, their blackest. ‘Lushington wanted a son. I reckon they must’uv give up after the third go. They’re all there,’ she said, ‘in the graveyard down below the house. Arr, dear,’ she sighed, ‘it’s the funerals I miss out ’ere. Never missed a funeral in town. Knew everybody like me own ’and. They allus invited me ter do the layun out.’

She went to bed after that. The following day would be Sunday, and though reared a Catholic, she was looking forward to the Protestant service. Every third Sunday the Reverend Hannaford came out from Woolambi. On Sundays Peggy Tyrrell wore four extra teeth between her fangs. The teeth spent the week greening in a tumbler of water on her bedroom sill.

He was coming to terms with his body. He had begun to live in accordance with appearances. His hands no longer broke out in blisters; his arms, if not muscular, were at least lithe and sinewy. Sometimes on a calm day, by snatches of winter sunlight, while straining fences, digging out rabbits, or following Prowse’s tractor to loop a chain round a clump of briars, he might take off his shirt, and the men would watch, not respectfully, but without showing too much disapproval: Prowse in his smelly overalls, Jim and Denny in their khaki shirts buttoned up to the throat, their frayed serge jackets discarded only at the height of summer; or old Lushington might ride by, apparently for the sole purpose of sharing with his friend the Judge’s son some joke which wasn’t. At first irritated by the old man’s partiality for an ignorant novice, the men finished by accepting a relationship based on education or class.

Prowse possibly didn’t. It was difficult to fit the manager into any social category. He was as liable to lapse into educated speech as Greg Lushington would talk uneducated to his men.

Prowse said, ‘I used to read before I married Kath. Ever read any Peacock, Eddie? Or Meredith? There’s a writer for you!’

‘No. My education was neglected. My father intended me for the Law.’ It wounded him to wound the Judge, and not so unintentionally.

‘Well, you missed something if you never read Headlong Hall or The Ordeal of Richard Feverell . Though it’s all gingerbread of course. I gave it up when I married and life became serious. Kath thought reading novels a waste of time — they weren’t real. She was for magazines. She kidded herself she knew the people she’d seen once or twice on the social pages. She could talk about their homes, their clothes — their divorces, by the hour. It was her religion like.’

Prowse poured himself another drink. ‘My old man warned me against getting bogged down in any sort of myth. Dad was an Anglican parson who lost his faith, then went broke on a place where Mexican thistle had taken over.’

The parson father and the bookworm son were such unlikely apparitions that Eddie wished he had the courage to conjure up Eudoxia in the same weatherboard room.

Prowse swallowed an ugly mouthful. ‘Went out into the paddock one night and shot ’imself through the mouth — amongst the bloody thistle.’

Eddie began to feel an affection for poor bloody Prowse, which didn’t accord with his own intentions, and which probably would have earned him one on the jaw from that scabby fist.

‘You men !’ Peggy Tyrrell had come in from some outer darkness. ‘Yarn yer ’eads off if yez gets ’alf a chance — and accuse we women at the same time!’

Eddie Twyborn was cantering home. It was a tranquil evening beneath a pale green sky soon to darken. Curlews could be heard calling in the tussock with an abstract melancholy which was curiously comforting. In bays scalloped from the river bank, cushions of white scum had collected, bobbing against the vigorous flow of brown water. A trout rose, and plopped back.

He was content, with evening, with the scent of frost, his own smell, the stench of leather on a sweat-sodden horse.

He had even developed a kind of affection for this gelded monstrosity the Blue Mule, dipping, swivelling, dislocating, then re-uniting in its various components beneath his thighs. When the animal snorted and shied. The tangled mane was cutting into the rider’s fingers. Before he started falling. A sawdust puppet dragged. Trampled amongst sparks from the road. Under this feverish green sky, curlew calls, cushions of bobbing grey-white scum, the gobbets of a horse’s vegetable dung, flow of blood, of water, of blood. Of the burst puppet. Fading into the green white. Drowned in crimson …

The brakes were applied so violently, the chassis shuddered, the headlamps danced.

‘Hi! Ed, boy? Ed?’ It was Prowse’s voice, boots approaching stiffly over frosted ruts.

The figure lying on the edge of the road began stirring. Eddie Twyborn, realising that he was still himself, grew conscious of the pains shooting through his ribs, legs, head. He must have been concussed by the fall. None of him was manageable, anyway by his own efforts but oh God, he was still here, if he wanted to be; he was not yet sure. He would have liked to eat an ice, a sorbet delicately flavoured with cantaloup, morello, or pistachio.