Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

He jumped up. He could hear Prowse backing the Ford into the corrugated shell referred to as ‘shed’ rather than ‘garage’. He could hear Mrs Tyrrell scuttling across early-frozen puddles to reach her kitchen.

Under Kath’s timeless stare he began hastily straightening and tautening the honeycomb bedspread. Threw a knot of wood on the fire. Went out to face whatever dreary post-mortem.

‘Arr, dear, it was a lovely funeral,’ Mrs Tyrrell announced from amongst the glimmers, the flickers of the kitchen. ‘Before I come out ’ere,’ she said, ‘to earn a crust, they relied on me to lay out the dead, but Mayor Craxton was such a bugger, I wouldn’ uv wanted ter stop up any ’ole in ’is body. I’m tellun yer—’e was real crook.’ She was peeling off her black kid gloves, and had brought back a brown-paper parcel, smaller, if as irregular, as the one she had gone away with. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but I gotter admit, it was the loveliest funeral I was ever at.’

After professionally raking the stove, and leaving for her room to remove her week-end teeth, she returned hatless and in her apron. ‘Thank yer, love. I would ’uv thought as only a woman would ’uv lit fires for another. I knew you was different, Eddie dear.’

Prowse would be a different matter again, who now came stamping into the house, the fly-screen falling back into place, door slamming. The cottage shuddered. So did Eddie, who had faced worse and been decorated for it. He went out into the passage and stood too erect in the manager’s doorway.

‘How was it?’ he asked.

‘It was all right — and it wasn’t — as you’d expect where women’s concerned.’ Prowse was bending over the bed smoothing the honeycomb spread.

Had he noticed signs of disturbance? the imprint of a body? Or was it an automatic gesture? Impossible to tell,

‘I admire your good sense, Ed, not to let yerself imagine you’re in need of a bloody woman. If it wasn’t one thing, then it was the other. She was wearing the rags, or another had to get ’erself up for the mayor’s fuckun funeral. There was one expected ’er old man to be out that night at the Lodge, but you never know with the Masons, sometimes they finish early. Les did. Must ’uv been out of bloody spite.’

Only then, the manager faced the jackeroo. The lines in his face were deeper than before he went away, his shoulders slumped. He was pretty surly, and already far gone in grog.

‘Fetch me the bottle, Ed,’ he ordered, after plumping down on the honeycomb bedspread. ‘It’s in there — or oughter be — beside the po — with me name on it.’

Eddie fetched out the whiskey, the level of which did not encourage hospitality.

‘I’ll treat you to one,’ Don offered.

Eddie accepted, and fetched a tooth-glass, suspecting that his host would prefer the bottle.

‘So I settled for the town bike,’ he told, ‘and more than likely brought back the clap.’

He turned on a clanking, tin-can laughter, but subsided soon after, and sat looking up at his sober familiar. He could have been asking forgiveness, his expression an early-morning one, tingling with a day’s growth. How deep his sudden innocence went you might only have found out by touch, a temptation Eddie Twyborn resisted.

Prowse twitched, and shrugged off what a subordinate could have interpreted as weakness. ‘What about you, Ed? How did you go about the week-end?’

‘I didn’t go about it. Can’t say there’s much to report. Had a meal with the Lushingtons,’ he admitted.

‘Well, that was that,’ said Don, shuffling his feet on the bedside mat. ‘We know about supper with the Lushingtons. Old Greg’s a decent cove.’ Don continued sitting, and between swigs from the almost empty bottle, resumed stroking the honeycomb bedspread.

Suddenly he looked up and spat. ‘Christ, that shit — that — Kath!’ and keeled over on the bed.

The last of the whiskey would have trickled from the bottle if Eddie hadn’t seized and returned it to the po cupboard. He eased the legs on to the bed. The highlights of yesterday’s polishing had quite gone out of the manager’s boots. The tweed jacket might have been exposed to rain, its sleeves wrinkled well above the wrists, and straining at the armpits and biceps. As it would have involved a major operation, or love rite, to do any more for Don Prowse, Eddie extinguished the lamp and left him.

Mrs Tyrrell was slicing cold mutton; she warmed it up in floury gravy, with a handful of capers to pander to the tastes of any possible gourmet.

‘You had supper last night,’ she said, ‘with Marce and Greg. That was nice,’ How ‘nice’ he wondered on hearing how well informed she was on various other matters. ‘Greg’s leavin’ for England Toosdee.’ Eddie experienced a twinge for his own undeserved ignorance: not to have been informed by his patrons after so much loving patronage; to be kept in the dark by his mistress, his employer’s wife, was less galling than the deceitful behaviour of his adoptive father the crypto-poet.

Wounds were no deterrent to Mrs Tyrrell, who must have been slashed to shreds in her time, what with the climate and a family of seventeen. ‘They say,’ she said, ‘as Dot’s gunner marry Denny Allen. Mrs Lushington ’erself arranged it. The poor bloody imbecile Denny — but Dot couldn’ expeck better. Mrs Lushington done right, I reckon, for all concerned. Otherwise Dot ’ull pup along the river bank, for all ’er father ’ull do about it — or ’erself catch the bagman ’oo come sellun the separator parts—’oo she says is the father—’oo isn’t, as everybody knows.’

‘How do they know?’ Eddie insisted.

‘They know,’ she said. ‘Because.’

She brought out a plate on which were arranged some wedges of cake of an unnatural yellow.

‘You ain’t been ’ere long enough,’ she said. ‘But everybody knows. Mrs Lushington was right. An’ Denny ’ull be as pleased as punch when they put a baby in ’is arms. ’E won’t notice ’e got it without any of the effort.’

As they sat consuming stale cake and considering life’s cross purposes, Eddie felt at last that he belonged.

‘I’ll go to bed, Peggy,’ he announced. ‘I’m tired.’ Indeed, his eyelids were behaving like iron shutters over which the owner, apparently himself, was losing control.

‘You could be,’ said Mrs Tyrrell, observing him too intently.

‘I’m surprised Greg left without a word,’ he told his employer’s wife.

‘That’s Greg,’ Marcia said. ‘Without his unexpectedness he might have become unbearable. And you, Eddie, shouldn’t be upset by his absence.’

They were seated on the leather sofa in the neo-Tudor library. She laid a hand between his thighs. But her availability did her a disservice: today his mistress left him cold.

‘I’m not upset ,’ he insisted. ‘Only he’s someone you grow fond of. And I thought he might have mentioned his going away.’

Marcia laughed. She got up. It was again Saturday, and Prowse and Mrs Tyrrell had driven into town.

‘Greg,’ she said, ‘is one of those kind, simple men, who insinuate themselves, and leave you flat without realising what they’ve done. Which is why women take lovers — the not so kind, not so simple — like you, Eddie — who know how to hurt deliciously.’

‘How?’ He was astonished that he could have hurt anybody as practised as Marcia Lushington. He considered himself far more hurt by Greg Lushington’s silent defection.

‘I thought you were my lover,’ she told him, ‘and that on occasions like this, we could lose ourselves in each other.’

From ramping up and down against the lozenges of neo-Tudor glass, she came and sat down again beside him and started nibbling his nearside lobe.