Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

‘Thanks, Ed — you’re the good oil …’ he thought he heard as the heavy arms slithered briefly over his ribs.

Then the head lolled back on the pillow, the smile withdrawing from fox’s teeth into a glare of bronze stubble.

Prowse slept, and Eddie turned down the lamp, till the familiar smell of untrimmed wick filled the darkened room.

At night the dark grew suffocating in the felted rooms of the creaking cottage. The cries of the sleepers tormented him: Peggy Tyrrell for her rheumatics and her daughters, Don Prowse for God knew what — the war he hadn’t enlisted for, his dead brother, the failure of his marriage, Valda in her hat offering the good oil through the net.

On a certain night Eddie could no longer endure the manager’s mutterings, his farts, the metallic jingling of a bed the other side of a thin wall. He got up, thinking to spend the rest of the night by the cool of the river, but had hardly got the screen-door open when the voice intercepted him.

‘Where yer goin’, Ed?’

‘Down to the river. I’ll stretch out there on a blanket. It’s too bloody hot inside.’

Prowse laughed. ‘I’d join yer,’ he said, ‘if the mozzies wouldn’t get us.’

Eddie persisted, but found the mozzies did get him.

‘What did I tell yer?’ Prowse murmured.

Prowse would go outside to have a pee and, braving mosquitoes, stay there longer than making water warranted, perhaps in company with his glowering mum, Kath gnashing on the terms of separation, the brother’s Light Horse plumes blowing in the false dawn. Eddie heard the bugle. He heard the screen-door mosquitoing as Don returned. A heavy, orange bungling. Stained poplin hitched to contain the load which women despise, and desire.

On one occasion Eddie was dreaming of the thin, green-skinned child. I’m Kim who are you? I’m nobody. You must be someone every- body’s somebody. You’re right there Kim I’m my father and mother’s son and daughter … She looked as distrustful as the snap with its white-ink caption let into the khaki page of the album. Her lip so disapproving. The two of them a couple of prigs: a chlorotic child and a governess with aspirations to lust. Then she said Ed I love you in her father’s voice. She put out a pale claw. They were grappling each other in a common desire related to childhood and despair. Before her mother broke in through the disapproving rustle of a screen-door.

He woke after that. It was the actual dawn after the false. He could hear the sound of Don’s belt, the buckle hitting the bedstead. Mrs Tyrrell was raking the ashes in the stove. She sighed and burped. There was a smell of burning newspaper and sticks. A cock crowed, pitting his fire against the cool of dawn.

‘What do you say if I drive us there?’ Prowse had become this eager child, rocking on the balls of his feet beside the shining black Packard Mr Edmonds had been working over earlier in the afternoon.

‘There, but not back,’ Mrs Lushington stipulated in the kind of voice Mum Prowse might have used on her frocked and ringletted boy. ‘I’ll drive back.’ She was very firm in her decision, her frown hidden by a flesh bandeau powdered with small metallic beads which collaborated with the evening light to flash what could have been messages in code.

Although her edict was strong enough to have sprung from a dogmatic male, Marcia Lushington had never looked more feminine to Eddie Twyborn, her rather too large, powdered breasts barely controlled by flesh charmeuse. Almost always neutral, this evening she emitted flashes of green from swathes of that same tone as the seas of young barley grass which stormed through ‘Bogong’ in the spring.

She was obviously flattered by his looking at her, and as she thought, quite rightly, appreciating her appearance. She touched his hand as they entered the black Packard, where the manager, in a suit which had grown too tight for him, had already seated himself like an attendant husband.

Marcia muttered, ‘I’d better sit beside old Don — restrain him if he’s had a couple for the road.’

Don most likely hadn’t heard; he was too engrossed in examining the controls awaiting his touch, delighted by the prospect of driving the Lushington Packard on even an inconsiderable journey.

Eddie got behind. Marcia looked round and smiled from below the flesh bandeau, its metal beads sifting a radiance, of the theatre rather than the spirit, out of the hard, natural light.

Don pronounced very gravely, ‘This is something like it,’ juggling with gears as they finished with the slope below the house and straightened out across the stony stretch before the bridge. ‘Oh God,’ he mumbled, and again, ‘Jesus Christ — it’s good to be driving a real car!’

Marcia was sitting straight-backed. Eddie suspected she had been brought up on religion: a Methodist from Tilba. Greg could only have been C of E, Marcia Methodist — or Baptist? though she’d picked up a wrinkle or two from the Romans.

He was still undecided on the denomination from which Marcia Lushington had lapsed, when he glanced out, and there was Mrs Tyrrell beside the loosely articulated bridge, her gums parted, her sticks of arms raised from out of the bobbled shawl.

‘Good on yez!’ Peggy called in a burst of Saturday evening despair, perhaps remembering the funerals she had missed, the corpses she hadn’t been invited to lay out, since accepting to finish her pensioned life working for the Lushingtons of ‘Bogong’.

They waved back, trailing the perfumes of brilliantine and bath salts, they waved at that crucified cow, poor Peggy, beside the bucking bridge. They could afford to be magnanimous as they drove off to the party to which they had been invited.

Marcia had walked down to tell Eddie. ‘It’s the Winterbothams.’ She stood looking at the toes of her shoes; how the stones had scuffed them. ‘Next Saturday evening. Everybody’s dying to meet you.’

‘Why — what do they know?’

Marcia snorted, and continued looking at her martyred shoes. ‘Well, you’re here, aren’t you? With us. And you’re your father’s son.’

‘And what about my mother?’

‘Oh, yes, yes! Of course your mother. We know about mothers !’ She crimped her brows.

Then she added, ‘They probably also want to decide whether you’re my lover.’

So now they were driving to the Winterbothams’ party.

In yet another footnote Marcia had thought to explain, ‘We’ll have to take poor old Don along, otherwise he might turn against us — or commit suicide, or something.’

So here was old Don driving them to the Winterbothams. Of ‘Belair’.

It was a house of greater pretensions than the Lushingtons’ discreetly ramshackle affair, more of an Edwardian city mansion, in ox-blood brick with tan ironwork, all illuminated for the party, if self-advertisement weren’t perhaps the rule. Music was already bursting out, or anyway saxophones and drums were tuning up. The arriving guests were made aware that ‘Last Night on the Back Porch’ and ‘Marquita’ were in the band’s repertoire.

Don Prowse swirled his passengers round the oval rose-bed, and brought the black Packard to a standstill. His marriage may have failed, but he was a perfectionist in his handling of a car.

‘Well,’ sighed Marcia, ‘this is it.’ She might have regretted their coming.

Later in the evening, as the French champagne frothed over, and at least one of the guests had dropped his Pavlova on the parquet, Don explained to Eddie, ‘Old Greg could write a cheque and buy out Winterbothams any time they asked for it.’

There was no asking for it tonight. Winterbothams appeared on top of the wave, Harold a tall, cadaverous man whose scabby hands had earned all that they had got hold of, from cedar panelling and Sèvres urns, to his wife’s Paquin model and his own uneasy dinner jacket.