Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

Don Prowse was mumbling grunting panting as he encouraged dragged finally lifted. ‘Lucky I was out in the yard when the bloody horse got back.’

‘Poor old Mule. Nobody’s fault.’

Their passage to the little runabout Prowse drove about the place, to work, was excruciating to say the least. Accomplished in the end, Eudoxia, deposed empress or current hetaira, would have liked to thank, or in some way reward, the sweaty brute who had carried her halfway across the Bithynian plain. She might even have allowed him to ravish her in one long painful orgasm. Instead, after being lumped on the tray of the vibrating Ford runabout, beside a coil of fencing wire, several spanners, a jack, and a spare can of petrol, Eddie Twyborn fainted.

They discussed whether to transfer the patient to the Woolambi cottage hospital.

‘No, no,’ he protested, already belonging to a dun-coloured, draughty, weatherboard room, which light entered only when wind agitated the hawthorns outside; he had begun to associate light with the motion of his head against the pillow and hawthorn spikes scratching at glass.

‘ No !’ he repeated.

‘Not if anythink ain’t broke. Not if the poor bugger don’t want it,’ Mrs Tyrrell insisted. ‘I’ve taken on worse ’n this. Nursed a family of seventeen, and a ’usband in the last stages of cancer.’

He had a sudden vision of a withered dug flexed for action.

Dr Yip agreed.

Prowse had explained before the doctor’s arrival, ‘Doc’s got a touch of the Chow, Eddie, but a good bloke for all that.’

The patient responded to an exotic eye, to the wind-burnt hands with under-cushions in crumpled pink. The doctor decided there was, in fact, nothing broken, perhaps out of deference to the sick man’s passionate wish not to be moved.

They all took turns at mauling him, particularly his forehead: it had become their dearest possession, a talisman against thwarted love. He closed his eyes and let them get on with it.

He overheard Peggy Tyrrell and Prowse, whose strength had been enlisted in lifting the body, quarrelling over a hard stool in a bedpan sent down from the homestead.

‘You can’t tell me … ’ Peggy hissed.

‘I’m not trying to!’ Don’s voice was trembling with rage.

You awoke on another occasion, and again it was a hand polishing the talisman of a forehead.

It was the hand of old Lushington himself.

Seated on a slat chair beside the iron stretcher he was got up in his usual pigskin leggings, the same cord riding breeches, and the straight-set cap in heather-mixture tweed which he had not thought of removing for his visit to a sickbed. From the angle at which he was sitting, the spectacles looked blank, like the headlamps of a car gone out for day.

‘Only came down to have a look,’ he remarked on whipping his hand away from the forehead. ‘You don’t want to exert yourself. Don’t feel you have to talk, Eddie. Half of what we say isn’t worthwhile, anyway.’ He heaved against the fragile, slatted chair. ‘That’s what I tell the wife, and she won’t agree. Most women are terrible mags.’

Eddie closed his eyes. ‘I thought you were leaving — sir — for Europe.’

‘Yes — but not yet — but later.’

Gregory Lushington had brought as offerings two irregular oranges, a wizened apple, and a brown banana. ‘It’s the best we can do locally.’

He also fished out a couple of letters. ‘The mail. I’ll leave you to peruse it. And hope to see you about soon. Marcia — my wife — joins me.’

When the visitor had gone Eddie continued holding the letters between the bones of his unconvincing fingers, breathing gently, eyes still closed. He must read his letters, but not just then.

The next morning he was strong enough to make the effort. His fingers trembled, however. The first envelope when broached fell clattering amongst the egg-shells and the crusts of bread.

Dearest Eddie,

They rang to tell us. Needless to say I was horrified— but relieved to hear you had survived this alarming accident. Ethel Tucker’s husband George was killed outright, only recently, by landing on his head.

To get you back and then almost to have lost you! I don’t know why I deserve such retribution, though no doubt your law-trained father could find a reason for it. Perhaps it is because I should never have been a wife or mother. Who knows? I am surely not as bad as some who get away with worse.

I would come to ‘Bogong’, but you — and Mrs Lushington — might not approve. I think I know my place at last.

Bless you, my darling boy!

Your

Mum

P.S. Biffy is ailing — very miserable — a heavy infestation of tapeworm — and, I suspect, a cancerous growth — I shall be devastated if I lose her — nobody can understand, but there it is.

Eadie T.

The letter joined the eggshells as he opened the second envelope, addressed in his father’s formal hand.

My dear boy,

This is bad news, though not as bad as it might have been. At least you are in good hands. Greg Lushington will see to it that all which ought to be done is done.

I thought of taking the train down. Then it occurred to me it might embarrass you. I know how you value your independence and dislike any display of emotion.

With best wishes for a speedy recovery,

Your affect.

Father

He drowsed a little after finishing the letter, pondering over the impressions one makes on others, in this case so perversely contradictory he suspected the Judge to be shielding himself from experiences he did not wish to undergo. For a moment he and Eddie were again adrift in a moonlit sea, on a honeycomb bedspread, the yard sounds of a country pub rising through an open window. The dreamer would not have regretted drowning in love with Judge Twyborn.

Instead he was returning closer to life every day, to the clash of metal and men’s voices, horses’ hooves and dogs barking, the shambling and squelching of cows filing down a hillside towards their milking.

The bails stood between the homestead and the cottage. Mr Edmonds was in charge of the dairy, and several other provinces: he curry-combed the Lushington hacks; he polished their car with a secret unguent; he coaxed forked carrots and staggy cabbage out of the frozen ‘Bogong’ earth; and twice a week cut a sheep’s throat after a desperate wrestling match. He was a small, mild, buttoned-up man, like a wood carving painted predominantly red and black. His wife helped about the homestead and was Mrs Tyrrell’s chief informant on what was going on ‘up there’. There was a cook too (Mrs Quimby and Mrs Tyrrell had long since broken off relations) and Dot Norton the rabbiter’s daughter whose duties were unspecified.

‘Dot’s what you’d expect from a rabbiter,’ Mrs Tyrrell considered.

‘What’s wrong with a rabbiter?’

‘A rabbiter — from them I’ve knowed — could never ever associate with nothun better than bally rabbuts.’

Dick Norton the rabbiter was certainly a runtish rabbit of a man, never seen but mounted on one of the strain of ‘Bogong’ nags, an outsize army trenchcoat trailing almost on the ground, and a pack of incestuous mongrels running at his horse’s heels.

‘But his daughter — what’s wrong with the rabbiter’s daughter?’

‘I’ve got nothun against Dot,’ Mrs Tyrrell protested; then in virtuous volte-face, ‘I’m not accusin’ ’er of nothun, poor cow. It’s not ’er fault. I’ll take ’er side in any showdown. Mrs Lushington ’ull think of somethun. Marcia’s on Dot’s side.’

Marcia as dea ex machina . His strength returning, he hankered less for acquaintanceship with one who was too much a legend for his present life to accommodate. She had remained inhumanly remote while his flesh-and-blood friends and allies had quarrelled over the contents of his bedpan and the techniques of lifting him on and off. Though hadn’t Marcia at least contributed the pan? Or so he had been told.