Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

His wife hurried the party as quickly as she could towards a room referred to as the Library, where she knew the deliquescent pikelets would be found, and which housed the encyclopaedia, the dictionary, and her ration of novels from a lending library in Sydney. Anything else in the way of books, anything suggestive of Greg’s vice, must have been hidden from neighbourhood eyes in some unfrequented attic.

The Lushingtons brightened at the prospect of pikelets and tea, and Beppi joined them from the kitchen regions where he must have scoured a pan already.

They distributed themselves in what was another neo-Tudor room: dark panels, stone fireplace, with a suite of leather furniture straining at its buttons where it wasn’t sagging on its springs.

Marcia poured tea into Staffordshire cups skating uneasily in their saucers. Some of the service had been riveted. She heaped their plates with pikelets. Little embroidered napkins had been provided, which was just as well, for the Lushingtons were soon in a somewhat buttery condition.

He too, in their company, was transported back to nurseryland. to Mummy and ‘your father’, which was what the Lushingtons wanted, except that for a moment Marcia’s pikelet must have turned to flesh, and Greg’s mouthful to a difficult word in one of the disgraceful poems.

Greg wiped his fingers on one of the embroidered napkins; as fingers they were rather too delicate, and in their efforts to demonstrate their practical worth, one of them had gone missing; a thumb wore its purple nail like a medal; yet the palms, showing pink, were those of a rich and idle man, who mumbled through the last of his mouthful of pikelet, ‘The word should have been “placebo”’ before dabbing at a trickle of butter.

‘Oh God,’ Marcia complained, ‘I wonder what you’ll come out with next.’

Wiping his fingers and turning to Eddie, Greg Lushington began telling, ‘… when I was a boy foxes used to kill the turkeys. We never heard a sound. But sometimes a terrier — we always kept a pack of them — would bring in a dead fox. All done most silently. Once, I remember, an old dog — Patch — almost blind wtih cataract — brought in a turkey gobbler’s head instead. I had a governess, Miss Delbridge, who fancied herself at the piano. She was playing a Chopin mazurka at the time. As she was pedalling her soul away, Patch laid the turkey’s head at her feet. A kind of love offering — or that’s how I saw it.’

‘A love offering!’ Marcia exclaimed. ‘How could a little boy have known?’

‘By instinct of course — like dogs. I bet Eddie would have known.’ Mr Lushington paused, thoughtfully exploring the comers of his mouth. ‘Old men know more perhaps, but never grow as wise as they hope.’

The fire leaped in the stone hearth, then relapsed into a drowsier tempo; it should have been a comfort to those seated round it.

‘Oh dear, all this is horrid — morbid. I wasn’t expecting anything like it — with my pikelets — after our ride.’

Beppi must have interpreted her disapproval as an invitation. He started barking, and from lying on the sofa, jumped upon his mistress’s lap, put his front paws on her bosom and started licking her glossy lips.

Mrs Lushington laughed. ‘Disgusting little dog!’ she shrieked, and pushed him down, but immediately snatched him back, and gave him a kiss on his wet blackberry of a nose.

‘Hydatids, Marcia …’ her husband warned.

Which she ignored. ‘I adore you,’ she told her dog, ‘as you ought to know.’

Greg started groaning up out of his chair, not without a faint fart or two. ‘I’m going to leave you,’ he announced. ‘There’s something, I realise, I ought to alter in the last line.’

He was obviously obsessed by words, when Eddie had thought his obsessions lay almost anywhere else: sheep, worms, the sons he hadn’t got.

He reproached Marcia for not having told him about the poems.

‘Why should I have told?’ She pouted. ‘If you tell too much in the beginning there’s nothing left for later on. That’s why so many marriages break up.’

‘Why are you against poetry?’ he asked.

‘I’m not. Everyone else is. So I don’t make a point of flaunting it in their faces. It might put them off us. Actually, I always leave a book of verse on the stool in the visitors’ lav. Nothing too long. Narrative poems,’ she turned appealing eyes on him, ‘are no go in a cold climate.’

Contrary to reason, his mistress was warming him again. He went and propped a knee on the sofa beside her, where a whiff of last night’s perfume and a smell of cleanly dog rose up around him. At the moment he was perhaps drawn to Greg’s unexpected dedication to poetry as much as to his wife’s voluptuous charms. He was even disturbed by a ripple of grudging affection for his own mother. For it occurred to him that the unexpected in Eadie Twyborn was similar to that which linked the Lushingtons. He would have liked to share his discovery of their common trait, but remembering Marcia’s antipathy, he confined himself to fingering her cleavage where a blob of butter, fallen from a pikelet, had hardened into what could have passed for one of Eadie’s antique brooches.

‘Darling,’ Marcia sighed, looking up, ‘not on Sunday, and while Greg is tidying a poem.’

So he realised that he was dismissed, and had better lump it, together with the Mule, down to the cottage. What surprised him more than anything was his desire to possess Marcia again, and in spite of the dangers inherent in the act.

With this thought, he pressed a kiss into her mouth, and was received into some buttery depths before firm rejection.

No less firmly he stormed inside the deserted cottage, his masculine self flinching neither at chill nor dark. He lit a lamp, and as the flame steadied, his ‘love’ for Marcia became more credible; his affection for the human creatures with whom he shared this hovel grew. How Eudoxia might have reacted, whether she would have approved of, improved on, or cynically dismissed his sentiments, he did not stop to consider, but flung out to the yard, and after assembling logs and kindling, stoked the kitchen stove, and lit fires in the cook’s room and the manager’s. Peggy Tyrrell’s looked more desolate for the empty tumbler on the window-sill, its water swaying as he moved around. As he knelt at the manager’s hearth he shrank slightly, from sensing the stare of Don Prowse’s thin wife aimed between his shoulderblades.

After he had got the fire going, he turned round, determined to outstare Kath. Not succeeding, he decided to go one better: he threw himself on the loosely articulated iron bedstead with the brass knobs. It heaved and expostulated obscenely. Through some collaboration between glass and firelight, Kath appeared to blink and withdraw — and were those two elongated tears? That is how icons behave, as he knew from Angelos Vatatzes, and how miracles are recorded. If Kath was scarcely Don’s miracle, her photograph was his nearest approach to iconography.

At what precise moment the party returned from town, Eddie Twyborn could not be sure. It was after dark and the fire was failing. He must have fallen asleep on Don’s bed under Kath’s ousted stare. Fingers dug into the honeycomb spread at the Woolpack (or was it the Wheatsheaf?) he had been watching the wooden partners gyrate to Miss Delbridge’s mazurka: Edward and Eadie, Marcia and Greg. He was powerless to choose; Eddie, it seemed, had always been chosen, whirled out into the figures of the dance, whether by Marian, Angelos, Marcia, Mrs E. Boyd Joanie Golson; even his afflicted parents had attempted an unconscious twirl or two. Would he never dare assert himself? He was becoming aware of Don’s torso at the bedside: nipples surrounded by whorls of rosy fuzz opening out into flat expanses of ginger bristle. Don smiling; closely associated fox’s teeth in contrast to Marcia’s blunt, open-spaced portcullis poised to crush unwary bogong moths.