Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

Mrs Tyrrell informed him, ‘Now that you’ve got yer strength back, love, I’m takin’ the opportunity of drivin’ inter town this week-end. Prowse is off to see some girl and ’as offered me a lift. Which I’ve accepted. I don’t doubt you can do for yerself. You’re not one of the helpless males — I can see by the way you use a needle. Anyways, I’ll bake cake enough ter see yer through, an’ all you’ll ’ave ter do is shove the blessed shoulder in the h’oven.’

He was almost too anxious to see them go. Morning and evening, using a stick, he was able by now to hobble along the river bank. More than ever his surroundings yielded quiet subtleties: a combing of cloud, a hare starting up from its nest in the tussock, a flotilla of geese rounding a bend in the river. The silly sheep, recovering from initial shock, resumed their grazing, perhaps recognising a kindred spirit.

He hobbled and clumped and hobbled, or sat when his leg gave out.

On one occasion in the days preceding Mrs Tyrrell’s week-end he came across a miserable stunted female, of lashless, red-rimmed eyes, and nostrils pinched so close together the gristle could barely have allowed the passage of air. Seated on a rock beside the river she averted her face from his approach, holding her head at a discouraging angle.

He knew at once, but had to ask, ‘And who are you?’

‘I’m Dot,’ she replied unwillingly. ‘Dot Norton. I help at the house. You’re Mr Twyborn,’ she said. ‘They was talkin’ about you.’

‘What were they saying?’

‘Oh, I dunno — yer leg,’ she gulped and sniffed, ‘yer dad. They’re talkin’ about askin’ you up.’

‘People don’t always do what they talk about doing.’

‘That’s somethun you don’t need to tell me!’ said Dot Norton.

She started re-arranging her dress over the early months of a pregnancy. She was the kind of runt whose last phase would be huge. He decided he’d better not look at her.

‘Look at these geese,’ he said. ‘Have they gone wild, or are they still domesticated?’

‘Eh?’

‘Do they belong at the homestead?’

‘Not as you’d say,’ said Dot Norton. ‘They’re not exactly wild neether. They’re old,’ she said. ‘They lay soft eggs and nothun ever comes out.’

She turned on him a look which expressed envy of the luck of elderly geese.

‘I wish I was barren,’ she said very earnestly.

‘If you were, you mightn’t.’

He did sincerely believe it for that instant: to be rent between birth and death was the luxury of normal women.

It was obvious they had discussed life too deeply, for Dot grew prim.

‘I better be goin’. Scrape the bloody parsnips,’ she said, ‘or Mrs Quimby ’ull rouse on me.’

She stood up, pulling down a crumpled woollen dress over her increasing baby.

‘Don’t worry, Eddie,’ she told him. ‘Mrs Lushington means to invite yer — and soon.’

He hobbled back to the cottage.

‘Where’ve you been, you little bastard?’ Mrs Tyrrell asked.

‘Along the river.’

‘It’s too late for invalids along the river. An’ Mrs Edmonds come lookun for yer with this.’

She produced one of the coarse tumblers with which the cottage was provided, and in one of which her Sunday teeth spent the rest of the week. But aslant this particular glass reclined a single, white, wintry rose, possibly the last rose ever, its invalid complexion infused with a delicate transcendent green.

Against the tumbler Mrs Tyrrell rather coyly propped an oblong parchment envelope which in no way went with her own blackened hand and the huggermugger little dining-kitchen in which they were standing.

As he tore through the envelope, he saw she was watching, but overtaken by recklessness he could not care, nor for what she might read on his face as he read.

Dear Eddie,

You may wonder why I haven’t been in touch before. It could be from laziness — or diffidence — I’m really quite a shy person. But now that we’re over whatever it was, Greg and I would love you to come to a meal this Saturday night, when we understand you will be on your own. About 7, shall we say?

Sincerely,

Marcia Lushington

This last of our roses is a token of I don’t know what. There is nothing else I can offer. Do, please, forgive my earlier omissions.

He left the kitchen without offering to share the contents of his letter, and Peggy Tyrrell must have felt she ought to respect his decision.

No doubt it was his silence which provoked her superiority as the time approached for her departure to town. Long before the driver showed up, she jumped into the passenger’s seat, clutching an irregular brown-paper parcel, sucking her green, week-end teeth, lolled in the high-standing Ford and looked out with an expression which suggested ‘if you have your mysteries, I can have mine’ from under a great black hat, constructed rather than made, out of stiff, dusty ribbon. Except for the battered brick-red face she was a vision of total black. It was her normal going-out dress, though on this occasion she was looking forward to a funeral of some importance. If the late mayor happened to have been both a Protestant and a swindler, Peggy Tyrrell was never known to let moral scruples stand between herself and her favourite form of entertainment. ‘Besides’, as she was fond of saying, ‘if you’re born with morals yerself, it’s up ter you to forgive the poor bugger ’oo wasn’t’—a precept she didn’t always obey.

Now while Mrs Tyrrell sat waiting, serenely, if mysteriously, in the car, Eddie, lying on his bed beneath the vantage window, could hear the manager endlessly buffing his town boots. The preparations for this expedition were unusually elaborate. In the intervals between the roaring, the pounding, the explosions of the chip-heater, which shook the unstable cottage’s whole structure, there was the sound of a razor painfully dragged through a three-day stubble. Then the thrashing and splashing of water, the thumping and grazing of large limbs coming to terms with a narrow metal tub.

Prowse showed up unexpectedly before putting on his shirt.

‘If you ever feel like it, Ed,’ he announced from the doorway, ‘there’s plenty of hot little sorts in town. Let me know and I’ll fix up something for yer.’

Eddie thanked his would-be procurer, who had advanced some way into the room.

Prowse was at his most ostentatiously virile, in faded moleskins and heavy, conspicuously polished boots, a generous golden fell wreathed round the nipples of the male breasts. He stood looking down at the passive figure before him on the bed. The thick arms looked strangely powerless, and the smile which accompanied his invitation to lust, directionless, and finally evasive.

Eddie let Prowse withdraw without helping him by remark or glance. In fact, he turned his face, and was staring at the side wall from under half-lowered lids. He felt as powerless and evasive as Prowse had looked. If he had spoken he might not have been able to control his breathing.

‘See you tomorrow night then,’ the manager called as he slammed the fly-proof door and thundered over the veranda.

The car was heard driving off.

Alone in the house, Eddie was possessed by a sensation of freedom from the need to control his more obsessive desires. Contingency was no longer a threat. On his visit to the Lushingtons, one of whom he hardly knew, the other not at all, he would have every opportunity for impressing strangers with the self which, he felt sure, was in process of being born, and which was the reason he had chosen a manner of life on the whole distasteful to him.

Till the image of Dot Norton was inserted into his mind to start his conviction wobbling. The tearful undersized girl nursing her pregnancy by the river, unhappy in her possession — but possessed. Her figure fading into the vision of brute arms, nipples wreathed in a fuzz of gold. Into Marcia Lushington’s nostrils breathing cigarette smoke from under a fringe of monkey fur.