Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

That noon, while enjoying the luxury of a solitary Sunday frowst, after the minimum of cold mutton with mustard pickle, and the dwindling warmth of a brew of tea, he heard a sound of hooves and the metal of a horse’s bridle. He looked out and saw, not his mistress of last night, but Mrs Lushington his employer’s wife tethering her hack to the rail outside the feed room.

It was startling in these circumstances and at this hour of day. He heard himself muttering. He took up the pot to pour another cup of tea, by now tepid and repulsive, but found himself instead draining the pot to its dregs through the spout.

Fortified, if ashamed, he went out to the encounter with this stranger already knocking at the door.

‘I hope I’m not intruding,’ she began what sounded a prepared speech. ‘Usually on Sunday, after lunch, I go for a ride, otherwise Ham gets out of hand. As I was passing this way I thought I’d look in — see how they’re treating you — whether they’ve made you comfortable.’

She smiled out of unadorned lips, unnatural only in dealing with a rehearsed recitative.

He brought her in, or rather, she brought herself.

She said, ‘It’s a horrid little house if you look at it squarely.’

‘I’ve grown attached to it.’ He might begin resenting Marcia.

‘At least in your case it’s only temporary.’

Her conscience salved, she started stalking through the house as though she didn’t own it and hadn’t been there before; perhaps she hadn’t. For Sunday afternoon and the land which was hers, she was shabbily dressed, in the old dead-green velour and stretched cardigan in natural wool, with riding pants which, in spite of exclusive tailoring, did not show her at her best. As she went she peered into rooms, dilating and contracting her nostrils in the manager’s doorway while glancing with a frown at the photographs of Kath and Kim, murmuring on reaching the cook’s bedroom, ‘Poor Peggy Tyrrell — rough as bags, but such a dear,’ turning her back on Eddie Twyborn’s unmade bed.

When they reached the dining-kitchen she started rapping on the oilcloth, which made the crumbs on its surface tremble and her engagement finger flash.

‘I ought to apologise,’ she said, teeth champing on the words the other side of those bland lips, ‘for anything that happened. It was my fault. Oh, I know you’d think it was, Eddie, even if I didn’t admit it. Because you’re a man.’

She paused as though giving him a chance to exonerate her.

‘I shouldn’t have thought of blaming you,’ he said. ‘It was a moment of shared lust. It surprised me that I enjoyed it. But I did.’

Marcia looked most surprised. She suppressed a little gasp. Her eyes were glowing. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it isn’t the sort of thing a man usually says to his mistress. I knew I was right. You’re different, Eddie. You have a quality I’ve always hoped for — and never found — in a man.’

‘To me it’s only conscience — for having fucked the wife of a man I respect.’

‘Oh, darling,’ she breathed, all the masculinity gone out of the tailored riding breeches, the imperiousness out of her engagement finger, ‘don’t put it like that! I adore my husband. That’s something else.’

She was reduced to cajoling sighs, and whimpers she might have learnt from her Maltese terrier, and whiffs of the perfume she had been wearing the night before, which he now realised was predominantly hyacinth, and that hyacinth is haunted by the ghosts of wood-smoke and warm ash.

She might, they might both have wanted it again, wood-smoke and ash and all, on the army blankets of his unmade bed. She had brushed against him, the full breasts, the fleshy lips. He was about to respond when repugnance took over.

She said, ‘You’re right, darling,’ and re-settled the green velour.

Then they were walking back along the passage, from which rooms opened in accordance with the accepted pattern, from suburbia to the Dead Heart. Their feet went trott trott over the linoleum lozenges.

Her voice cut in. ‘Have you noticed how the exceptional person almost never turns up in the beginning?’

‘But Greg — the husband you love — the man I’m fond of?’

‘Yes,’ she moaned, ‘I love him.’

They had reached the fly-proof door. He must let her out before they established whose dishonesty was the greater.

‘What about this Sunday ride you were on about — to work the oats out of your horse?’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘yes. Do you want to come for a breath of air? You look pale — Eddie. Then we’ll go back to tea with Greg.’

She gave him a rather wan smile. The flesh seemed to have slipped from her cheekbones, the eyes more enormous and liquid than ever: she had assumed that invalid expression he had noticed in those who suffer from guilt, or who hope to effect a complete conversion.

Again he felt physically drawn to her. He could have fucked her on the fallen hawthorn leaves amongst the rabbit pellets.

She must have felt they were preparing a desecration, for she coughed and said, ‘Mrs Quimby makes the loveliest pikelets. We always have them for Sunday tea. Greg insists on them.’

While he went to saddle his horse, she was fiddling with hers, stroking his neck, adjusting the girth, generally seducing Hamlet her overfed bay.

‘Why,’ she called when he re-appeared, ‘the Blue Mule !’

He laughed back. ‘I’ve become attached to him too.’

‘Oh, but that’s typical! We must find you something — something more appropriate.’

‘How “typical”?’ he asked.

‘Of Prowse.’

‘But why?’

She had lapsed into a mystery of silence and the wood-smoke of stale hyacinth perfume, which a brash wind set about exorcising.

They were heading in the direction she had chosen, or which, perhaps, had been chosen for them. His dislocated nag had difficulty in keeping up with her splendidly paced bay gelding. Hamlet gave the impression of responding to his rider’s wishes without surrendering his independence. Ears pricked, neck arched, his eyes surveyed the landscape from under sculptured lids. From time to time he snorted through veined nostrils, either in surprise, or out of contempt.

The Blue Mule galumphed slightly to the rear or, if his rider succeeded in coaxing him level with their companions by dint of heel-kicks, bumped Hamlet’s flank. Occasionally there was a clash of stirrup-irons and grazing of boot against boot. Some of their progress was humiliating for Eddie Twyborn, some of it comforting: like keeping up with Mummy.

It made him laugh at one point, breaking in on Marcia’s thought-fulness. She had fallen silent as though brooding over the acres which, seemingly, she loved, or perhaps dissecting her questionable adultery of the night before.

‘What is it?’ She laughed back less in mirth than from sociability.

‘I believe you know my mother,’ he said.

She began by a series of little murmurs implying denial. ‘Yes and no,’ she admitted at last. ‘We’ve met. I’m acquainted with Eadie Twyborn, but you couldn’t say we know each other.’

‘Where,’ he asked, ‘does acquaintanceship end and knowing begin?’

Their horses carried them forward as Marcia considered in silence and frowns how she might answer that great social question.

‘Do we know each other?’ he asked.

She bit an unpainted lip. ‘You have a streak of cruelty!’ But had to laugh finally. ‘I hope we know each other — and shall deepen our friendship.’ She reached out and stroked the back of his hand. ‘I need you.’

But he persisted; it must have been the ‘cruel streak’, ‘You don’t answer my question: where acquaintanceship ends and friendship begins, and why my mother remained the wrong side of the barrier.’