Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

He got up as quickly as his lameness allowed, re-read the letter of invitation, looked in the glass at the reflection of his personally unappealing face. The rest of the afternoon he spent imitating Prowse’s preparations for the week-end orgy at Woolambi, except that he devoted all often minutes to filing and buffing his nails, an occupation in which Don would never have indulged. Or would he? The surprises other people can spring are all the more surprising for being unimaginable.

Don . Only rarely had he addressed Prowse by his first name, and it entered his thoughts just as rarely. It had the same brashness, brassiness of tone, as the man himself, not without appeal. Marcia on the other hand conveyed the opulent ripple of soft, creamy flesh, the penetrating scent of an exotic flower unrelated to the delicate accents of the greenish-white winterbound rose.

As the hour for their dinner approached he lit the hurrican lamp. He considered whether to take his stick, which by now he scarcely needed for physical support, then decided on it, more in the nature of a theatrical prop. He was wearing a suit made for him in London after he had been demobbed. Looking at the reflection in the glass he had begun to convince himself of an existence which most others seemed to take for granted.

He could not be sure whether Prowse did, just as he would probably never believe wholly in his own positive attributes — if what is masculine is also necessarily positive.

As often happens in the approach to an Australian country house, it was difficult to decide where to breach the Lushington homestead. There were verandas, porches, lights, snatches of piano music, whinging dogs, skittering cats, archways armed with rose-thorns, a drift of kitchen smells, but never any real indication of how to enter. Australian country architecture is in some sense a material extension of the contradictory beings who have evolved its elaborate informality, as well as a warning to those who do not belong inside the labyrinth.

After blundering around awhile he was finally admitted by the fresh-faced Mrs Edmonds, wife of the groom-cum-dairyman-cum-gardener. Herself who aired Mrs Lushington’s furs, and who had brought the invalid white rosebud down to the cottage.

She said, ‘They’re expecting you, sir, in the droring room.’ She was too shy or too untrained to go farther than indicate the direction in which the room lay.

He might have blundered some more if it hadn’t been for light visible in a doorway at the end of the passage and a few groping piano chords of musical comedy origin. The piano act, he suspected, was staged by Mrs Lushington to lure him in.

In fact it was her husband brooding over the piano.

‘Vamping a bit,’ old Lushington explained with a bashful smile. ‘It helps pass the time.’

Leaving the piano, he advanced and asked, ‘What’s your poison, Eddie?’ as though he might rely on alcohol to dissolve human restraints.

Lushington himself, still wearing leggings and cord breeches below a balding velvet smoking-jacket, was already comfortably oiled. ‘You’re well, are you?’ he asked. ‘You look well.’

Eddie was prevented answering either of his host’s questions by the entrance of a little yapping Maltese terrier with a delicious sliver of a pink tongue who proceeded to skip around, blinded by his own eyebrows, excited by his own frivolity.

The guest spilled a finger of what smelled like practically neat whiskey as the dog’s mistress appeared.

‘We haven’t met,’ Mrs Lushington said, ‘but I know you, of course, from the Hotel Australia.’

‘How the Australia?’ her husband asked in some surprise.

‘On an occasion when I decided not to lunch there,’ she answered. ‘It all looked too bloody— like some awful club, full of the people one spends one’s life avoiding. Too much flour in everything — and a smell of horse radish.’

Mr Lushington looked perplexed. ‘But we’ve always enjoyed the old Australia. You run into so many of your mates. And you, Marce, have never found anything wrong with the food.’

But Mrs Lushington was holding out. She raised her chin, and smiled. Like Peggy Tyrrell she enjoyed her mysteries, while being more than half prepared to share them with one who was not quite a stranger, but almost.

‘Stop it, Beppi!’ she advised the Maltese, who was chivvying the fur with which she was hemmed.

‘Darling,’ she asked her husband, ‘are you going to pour me a drink?’

As Greg Lushington was too deeply immersed in the mystery of his wife’s betrayal of the Hotel Australia, she advanced and did it for herself with a most professional squirt from a siphon covered with wire-netting.

Marcia was wearing a long coat of vivid oriental patchings over her discreet black, less discreetly sable-hemmed, skirt. It was in the upper regions that discretion ended completely, in an insertion of flesh-coloured, or to match Marcia, beige lace which strayed waist-wards in whorls and leaves. Her daring must have deserted her in dressing, for she had stuck an artificial flower in the cleavage of lace or flesh, a species of oriental poppy artistically crushed, its flesh-tones tinged with departing flame.

‘Do sit,’ she invited their guest, ‘if you can see somewhere comfortable. Other people’s furniture, like their coffee, is inclined to be unbearable.’

The Lushingtons’ drawing-room furniture was a mixed lot: armchairs and sofa in the chintzy English tradition, with a few pieces of what looked like authentic Chippendale, and rubbing shoulders with them, humbler colonial relations in cedar, crudely carved by some early settler, or more likely, his assigned slave.

There was also the grand piano at which Mr Lushington had been discovered vamping, on it a Spode tureen filled with an arrangement of dead hydrangeas, autumn leaves, and pussy willow, in front of it, framed importantly in gold, a portrait-photograph of a younger Marcia, one hand resting possessively on what must have been the same piano, draped at the time with a Spanish shawl.

Noticing their jackeroo’s interest in pianos, Mrs Lushington asked, ‘Do you play?’

‘I used to,’ he said, ‘badly, I was told, but my enthusiasm made me acceptable.’

‘Greg is the musical one,’ nor did Mrs Lushington resent it. ‘He’ll thump quite happily by the hour. I tried as a child, but my chilblains didn’t encourage me to practise. I think a piano’s necessary, though — as part of a room, to stand things on.’

Her husband, who had flopped down in a rickety cedar grandmother chair, continued bemused by her recent remark, or else it was his most recent whiskey. ‘I can’t think what makes you say that about the old Australia.’

‘Oh, darling, leave it! It’s only that one isn’t the same person every hour of the week.’

She was prepared to laugh for her own conceit, when her little dog, jumping from the sofa to her lap, darted his tongue between her opening lips, and incipient mirth was replaced by barely controlled annoyance.

‘I like to think I’ve been the same person,’ Mr Lushington said, ‘every hour of my life.’

After smacking her naughty dog, Mrs Lushington was again disposed for laughter.

‘I know you do,’ she said. ‘That’s what makes you adorable.’ Getting up, she went behind his chair and, bending over, kissed him on the crown of his bald head. ‘Don’t you think he’s rather sweet?’ she asked.

Eddie was relieved to gather that her question was rhetorical. His own affection for the old man was too delicate to bear exposure.

For all her affectation of lightness and mirth, Marcia Lushington revealed glimpses of a more sombre temperament. Where her black, rather coarse, glistening eyebrows almost met, there were flickering hints that black frowns were the order of her day. Unlike so many other women, she had not yet cut off her hair, which was arranged with some skill and tortoiseshell combs in a chignon above the nape of her neck. Though substantially built, height and flowing lines helped her to get away with it; full lips were only faintly painted the colour of scallop-coral, beneath a too heavy Caucasian moustache; overall, the raw-scallop tones would have made her flesh look unduly naked if it had not received the benefit of powder. Her regrettable feature would have been her teeth if they hadn’t looked so durable: they were strong, but too widely spaced, and in the moments of her assured mirth, bubbles would appear in the gaps.