Patrick White: The Twyborn Affair

‘Darling …?’ My lover turns towards me as though wanting something confirmed.

By the light beneath the cedars he has the teeth of an old Alsatian dog — well, why not, if he’s devoted to me — nuzzling at my calf, nosing at the hem of my skirt.

Normally Angelos’s teeth are a brilliant white, those of a demanding, sensual man.

‘Your serve, Rand …’ From behind the vines screening the pension tennis-court one can hear the felted balls flying back and forth, swish swish of starched skirts, the thump and shuffle of blancoed shoes, the straining, the panting of young men leaping at the net, ribs as taut as racquet strings. An unbearable high chirruping from les Américaines .

‘ Ti echeis, agapi mou? Yiati trecheis ? Why —run ?’

It isn’t possible to explain to those one loves the reason for arbitrary fears if shame is involved. Angelos should understand, but doesn’t. My flight from the screened tennis-court at ‘Beau Séjour’ on the coast road above Les Sailles can only seem ridiculous because it cannot be transposed. Beyond the screen nobody, as yet, has run from the court, while his partner stands, hemline stationary, racquet poised for the decisive shot, her enviably shallow blue eyes still only faintly suspicious of what may be a blow prepared for her. While he runs up into and through the house.

‘What on earth?’ She laughs as she slams the ball against the ivy screen frightening the sparrows nesting in it. ‘Impossible creature!’ Giggling out of her long, elegant, regurgitating throat; it’s de rigueur that an Australian girl of Marian’s upbringing and class should giggle even when the roof is carried away.

The misdirected ball lands bouncing where nobody will ever discover it.

Marian and the others, her born equals, walk off the court to pour themselves glasses of lemonade. Sinewy wrists, not a tremble amongst them, though Marian’s sapphire engagement ring may have caused embarrassment to all three. Down below, at Double Bay, the trams can be heard crossing from opposite directions. At dusk their extremities will flower with sprays of violet sparks.

It was ridiculous of me to give way to panic simply at the sound of tennis balls this evening on the road from the village. I pulled free of his supporting arm. I was hurrying towards the safety one always hopes to find ahead. When I hear the cry, and looking over my shoulder realise it was I who had been supporting Angelos. The terrifying despair in his face and the old man’s hand outspread against his chest are too explicit. I run back. It is weeks since the last attack. ‘Are you all right?’ ‘I am all right — a twinge or two …’ We are so clumsy in our concern, our gestures, our questions and our explanations. Our bodies bump, skins flutter. We have seldom been closer than when seated together on a large porous stone at the roadside: grains of sand have become as enormous as pebbles, fern fronds were never more intricate, a single tender cyclamen is clinging by a crimson thread to the cleft in a rock. These, more than inadequate words, are our comfort, the embodiment and expression of our love.

When he has rested we continue up the hill and the questions really begin.

A.: You will never leave me, will you, E.?

E.: Why should I leave?

A.: You’re young.

E.: I was born old.

A.: Your body’s young [he laughs] and that is what decides.

E.: My body’s what you make of it.

[Both laugh]

We walk on. He is stroking my arm, the tips of his fingers lingering on a scab near the elbow. The evening is falling practically in veils around us.

A.: Do you think we’ll find anything to eat?

E.: There’s the cold veal.

A.: It’s drying up.

E.: Yes, it’s drying up. I’ll make you some æufs brouillés .

A.: Dear Doxy, what would I do without you?

E.: Engage a housekeeper.

A.: So much more expensive.

Angelos is mean; it is one of the scabs on our relationship, on which I linger in our worse moments. Not a sore spot, but an aggravation, like an old man’s fart in the next room.

E.: A fart can’t blow us apart.

A.: Qu’est-ce que tu veux dire, ma chère Eudoxie?

E.: Neither of us could ever walk out on the other. We’ve explored each other’s scabs, experienced each other’s airs and graces. I like to think we understand as far as it is possible to understand.

At this point we reached the gate, which will fall off its hinges if nothing is done about it. Our beloved landlady Madame Llewellyn-Boieldieu will do damn-all beyond let her crumbling villa, her ‘Crimson Cottage’, to the next unwary tenants. So we submit to the indignities this demi-Anglaise subjects us to.

My masochistic lover rather enjoys the indignity of dilapidation. Of the screaming hinges at ‘Crimson Cottage’, he has said, ‘At least they will warn us when the Turk is at the gate.’ Not always they won’t — not this evening.

Anyway, we had reached ‘home’—the blistered paintwork, scurfy walls unchanged, the network of threads and suspended hand-mirror to scare away birds from budding branches, all that has shot or died since we left … The scents your skirt drags from the borders of a garden: the dragnet skirt is one of the advantages a man can never enjoy.

On the other hand there is not much that escapes those old dragnet eyes of his. Angelos is a specialist in dredging up the moral wreckage of others, while inclined to remain impervious to his own. His eyes will flicker past his worst faults.

I had barely finished kissing those nut-shell eyelids, and he thrusting himself against me, his laughter radiating through my whole body, when we heard a motor assaulting the hill, emerging from the pines, shaving the garden wall. And there is Mrs E. Boyd Golson staring out; one would say ‘glaring’ if one didn’t know her to be myopic and afraid of limiting her social successes by taking to spectacles.

At least her driver didn’t toot, but trust the Golsons to have a klaxon disguised as a brass serpent slithering down to rest on a mudguard.

Angelos couldn’t know what had descended on us, except that it was something distasteful, something not quite, but almost American.

I lead him away, along the path, into our refuge, where we are left to face the night.

Angelos says, ‘I would have liked to make music with you, E., if all inclination has not left me.’ His tenses go to pot in a crisis. I tell him I have no inclination either. I bring him the œufs brouillés , but he has no appetite. I make myself eat his helping as well as mine. As I gobble the eggs I can feel a trickle down my chin. I must look as thoroughly vulgar as the situation and Joanie Golson call for. Poor cow! She can’t help it any more than I can.

I know that before long the Emperor of All Byzantium (Nicaea thrown in for good measure — Mistra too) will begin to accuse the Colonies. Rain is battering the shutters. Madame Réboa will no doubt have started showing her ulcer to a fresh victim. For all his Byzantine pretensions A. might have sprung on Joséphine this evening if she hadn’t shed the apron along with the servitude she inherited in our house. Instead he sits rocking in the rented demi-fauteuil style provençal .

A. says, ‘I will never hold anything against you. Nor anybody. Not even that gangster Palaiologos. Where is Anna my wife?’

The rain is sawing at the shutters. He must know how I hate the name of Anna.

‘I expect Anna has taken her martyrdom to Heaven by special ladder.’

I don’t think he heard.

‘A good woman, but without the flair of the Empress Eudoxia.’ He arranges his tongue against his palate before going off into his usual tumbled Imperial catalogue. ‘She used to wait on the steps … along with the Panhypersevastos … the Grand Stratopedarchs … the Primikerios the Constable the Logothete …’