Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

By day a visible green had crept along the grey shoulders of the hills, but the tussock remained bleached and sterile throughout the flat. Birds seemed to soar higher, to sing more shrilly, solitary wagtails to swivel more expectantly on the strand between the barbs of a wire fence, peewits tumbled through the air in pairs, briar clumps greening over were filled with the twitter of small, serious bird-couples.

The river flowed through the spring scene, at times with a mineral glitter, at others with a supple, animal life, each aspect probably more apparent to stranger than to native. In fact it seemed to Eddie Twyborn that, with the exception of Marcia Lushington, who was actually ‘from down Tilba way’, the native-born remained unaware of the landscape surrounding them, except as a source of economic returns and a fate they must accept, or in the case of Denny Allen, a river from which, by some stroke of imbecile genius, he could land a trout after one flick with a dry fly; he might even have succeeded with a naked hook.

Denny would stand amongst the tussocks flicking at the rippled water, itself as brown and speckled as a trout, despoiling the river time and again.

‘What are you going to do with so many?’

‘Take ’em ’ome to the missus.’ He smiled his most imbecile smile from behind his steel-rimmed spectacles and grooved, greenish teeth.

‘Dot mightn’t thank you for bringing such a lot. Gutting trout!’

‘Mrs Allen don’t gut no trout. Guttun’s my job,’ he said proudly.

Scrawny, sawney, his woollen singlet buttoned up to where the hair broke out in a frill below his plucked-cockerel’s throat, the greasy waistcoat never discarded whatever the temperature or time of day, Denny Allen was a happy man Eddie Twyborn often found himself envying.

On one of the more benign mornings of this reluctant Monaro spring Eddie and Denny were digging out a warren not far from the river bank.

‘How’s the baby?’ Eddie asked.

‘Got the colic.’

‘What do you do for it?’

‘Dunno.’ Denny grunted, and dug deep into red earth. ‘Mrs Allen knows. She give it some kinda water.’ He slashed deeper with the shovel, fetching up from a nest below tufts of fur and wads of withered grass. ‘She knows — the mother!’ His exertions made him salivate, and the saliva was carried by the wind in a long, transparent loop.

Eddie dug. His hands no longer blistered. The skin had hardened. A man’s hands. His whole life had been so preposterous, to think of it made him laugh.

Denny followed suit, for the joke he had not been asked to share. He never seemed resentful of a status forced on him by lack of wits. Perhaps his intuitions as stockman, fisherman, and rifle shot, raised him in his own estimation to a level which compensated.

They dug away.

Denny started slobbering. ‘ ’Ere she is — the bloody mother!’ he shouted.

He flung out a shovelful of bleeding fur which his matted hounds slavered and gobbled.

‘An’ ’ere’s the kickers!’ Denny shovelled out the litter, which followed the doe down the gullets of the ravenous dogs.

‘It’s fun, ain’t it? you gotter admit, Eddie!’ Fulfilled, Denny sat panting, laughing, on the edge of the trench, rejoicing in his skills, waiting to return to the wife who had been made an honest woman and the child who was officially his.

On such an enamelled morning Eddie, whose own contentment was never more than transient, as capricious as a Monaro spring, felt less disgusted than envious of his simple friend. Happiness was perhaps the reward of those who cultivate illusion, or who, like Denny Allen, have it thrust upon them by some tutelary being, and then are granted sufficient innocent grace to sustain it.

As it was about the middle of the day and the warren by now destroyed, the pair of rabbit murderers prepared to take their lunch break. Denny had got together one of his miraculous fires out of a handful of dead grass and another of twigs, and the two quart pots were already steaming and singing, when Eddie noticed a horseman descending the hill behind them.

‘Mind if I join you blokes?’ It was the manager returning from some unspecified employment, or simply from riding round exercising his self-importance.

He and Denny were soon monotonously intoning the exchange of comments on weather and wool, fluke and worms, lucerne and sorghum. Eddie wished he could join in, but did not think he would ever master the liturgy. A certain repugnance or perversity in the face of their ritual solemnity would always prevent him.

He remained seated inside the palisade of his own thoughts and the surrounding landscape. It may not have been sexual ambivalence after all which prevented him identifying himself with other men; his true self responded more deeply to those natural phenomena which were becoming his greatest source of solace.

Prowse and Denny were still at it, while knocking the ash off the ends of their loosely packed cigarettes, as he finished his cold chop and the last yellow crumb of Peggy Tyrrell’s cake. He got up and wandered contentedly enough a little way along the river, when suddenly the warmth, the light, the glistening flow of brown water, moved him to take off his clothes. He lay awhile, exposing his vertebrae to the sun, almost dozing, his genitals pricked by dead grass.

Roused by the approach of his companions’ voices, he was driven by confusion, if not shame, to plunge into the river below him. The effect was electrifying, the water so cold the breath was almost beaten out of his lungs, his only thought to survive in the suddenly malignant current when he was by no means an indifferent swimmer.

As he swam he glanced up, gasping, blinking from under a wet fringe, at Prowse and Denny seated on their horses, staring down, the horses snorting, Denny embarking on a frightened giggle, Prowse frowning, or glaring, lips drawn back in a smile which conveyed both scorn and unwilling admiration.

‘Better watch out, Ed. If you flash yer arse about like that, someone might jump in and bugger yer.’ The message was made to sound as brutal and contemptuous as possible. ‘What about you, Denny? Are yer game?’

Denny’s giggles were cut short. ‘Not on yer life! Not gunner bugger nobody. Might catch a chill.’ His hand went up to his already buttoned woollen singlet. ‘Missus ’ud rouse if I went ’ome crook. She’s got enough with a baby on ’er ’ands.’

Prowse withdrew his non-smile and the two horsemen sauntered on their way, leaving their companion to follow if he had any sense left in him.

Eddie climbed out by handfuls of tussock and footholds of rock. From feeling like a helpless drifting frog at the mercy of the current, he was again a naked stumbling man, the ribbons of a burning wind lashing and sawing at his shoulders. In his isolation he was free and whole, but only momentarily. He saw not so much the healing landscape as the images of Marcia and Prowse alternating in the dancing light. He tried to extinguish them by putting on his shirt, but they continued flickering, beige to burnt orange inside the dark tunnel of shirt.

When he was again decent, he rode after those who had contributed to his humiliation and who might think fit to remind him of it. Probably not Denny: he was too simple, and must himself have been humiliated in other forgettable circumstances. Prowse, in his position of authority and inviolable masculinity, might be less willing to let a victim off the hook.

As it happened they gave no sign of recognition when the delinquent caught up with them. The three rode together in a silence broken by horses’ wind and the jingling and chafing of harness. Denny yawned noisily, a horse’s yawn which exposed his broad green teeth. Very erect, Prowse simply glared back at the glare from under the brim of a stained felt hat, every bristle of his stubble tipped with gold.