Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

He welcomed the Lushingtons’ acquisition by putting an arm round his shoulders and exposing equally uneasy teeth in a ferocious china smile. ‘Heard about you, Eddie. What can we get you to drink?’ Like Greg Lushington, Harold Winterbotham seemed to think that by rushing a stranger behind the veil of alcohol his own uncertainty would glare less in the stranger’s eyes.

The greatest diffident of all, Eddie Twyborn saw through their play too clearly. If he could have shown them the defenceless grub inside what they took to be flawless armour, they might have established some kind of bumbling relationship. But he could not. Instead, he and Harold fell back on alcohol and the momentous question of what Eddie should have to drink.

One look, and Bid Winterbotham swept Marcia Lushington behind the scenes, into the undressing room of confidences, but Marcia almost immediately brought herself back. She stood patting her hair, glancing in and out of the Winterbotham mirrors and between the bars of the hired music. It seemed as though she knew it all, and Bid offering the savoury boats to Eddie Twyborn in preference to the ‘Belair’ regulars.

Marcia patted her hair the harder for the regulars: Mrs Temperley who was Somebody’s Cousin, the doctor and his wife (only the profession held them together), the junior partner of Crewe and Caulfield, the Dicks of ‘Pevensey’, the Braddons of ‘Saltash’, Robbie Boyle a Papal count. Standing centre on the Winterbotham Aubusson, Marcia might have been holding a post-mortem on a doubtful prawn from her savoury boat.

She looked to Don Prowse for relief, but occupied in helping himself at the buffet, he did not give it. She looked to the Winterbothams’ so-called Romney Conversation Piece , but again received no support. She turned her back, always humming, always patting her heavy chignon.

Geoff Scott, who had tried several times, but never succeeded in making her, approached as though preparing to try again. She gave him her banana-split smile. Always patting her back hair. Always keeping an eye on this jackeroo of theirs.

As hostess, Bid Winterbotham had led her guest somewhat apart from the others, ostensibly to mother him and make him feel at home. They were seated on the Queen Anne settee, its high back to the room, its front to the Conversation Piece , for which the Winterbothams let it be known they had paid a fortune.

(Later in the evening, between dances, Marcia was at pains to make good an omission on her part. ‘I should have told you, darling — Bid is what they call nervy. She can’t sit with a man on a sofa without starting to toy with his fly. Everybody knows about it. They forgive her because she’s such a good sort.’)

Indeed, the regulars had watched with sympathetic interest as Bid and the popular jackeroo sat on the straight-backed settee making conversation in front of the Conversation Piece . They knew by her hunched shoulders and his blenching cheeks that the operation must have begun.

‘I adore everything old,’ Bid was telling the young man, her long, nervy fingers flying in time with her monologue, ‘antiques — paintings — you’ve probably heard about our Romney.’ She did not wait to hear he hadn’t. ‘The Art Gallery wants to steal it from us — before Harold gives it to them.’ She looked perfunctorily at their work of art while explaining, ‘It’s the Lady Etterick of Etterick with her family. We’re somehow descended — on my side, that is — but go farther back than the Ettericks — to Mary Queen of Scots, and away beyond.’

She had a long thin tongue, which curved at the tip as though preparing to dart from her ancestral past into present possibilities.

‘I adore lace —old lace,’ she confessed, and her flickering eyelids flung a whole web of it in her victim’s face. ‘One of my great-aunts was famous for her tatting, in Maitland where I was born.’ Bid Winterbotham’s long nervy fingers flew like her great-aunt’s tatting shuttle, in and out the air, between tweaking at a fly-button.

Eddie might have stirred more uneasily if Marcia hadn’t leant over the back of the settee and asked, ‘How are we going, Bid?’

Bid answered, ‘Famously,’ and raised her throat like a shag caught swallowing another’s fish.

The two women agreed to share their mirth at least, Eddie the fish glancing up into Marcia’s laughing, powdered cleavage.

The Winterbotham party, the Winterbotham friends, in particular the Papal count of roving eye, made him love his patroness. He loved old Don, who had brought him another glass of champagne, or what was left of it after its frothing over on the way.

‘You’re all right, Eddie. You know I like yer.’

The object of the manager’s approval looked sideways at the orange paw planted on his shoulder. How he should deal with the paw, he had no idea. He had never made a positive decision, unless to escape from the tennis-court and marriage with Marian Dibden, and his dash across no-man’s-land to assault the enemy lines, though in each instance, it could be argued, the decision had been made for him by some incalculable power, just as on a lower plane, his fucking Mrs Lushington had been initiated not by himself but by Marcia.

After the second encore for ‘Marquita’ Marcia and he were sitting it out, forking up some supper from the Winterbotham Sèvres.

‘I keep on forgetting to tell you,’ Marcia was munching her way through the last of her Russian salad, ‘I’ve got some friends coming who’d adore to meet you.’

‘Too much adoration,’ Eddie protested, ‘in the Monaro,’ and disposed of his plate on an ormolu console.

‘Can’t you allow for a manner of speaking?’ Marcia took his hand and laid it amongst a detritus of beetroot which had settled in her charmeuse lap.

He said, ‘I could allow for anything,’ and nibbled with genuine appetite at his mistress’s neck.

She glanced round before continuing, but nobody had seen, except perhaps the Papal count, and at the far end of the room, a girl so awkward and unobtrusive as to be of little consequence in Mrs Lushington’s estimation.

‘These friends,’ Marcia returned to the topic his indiscretion had interrupted, ‘they haven’t exactly met you — or may have long ago — it isn’t clear. They know your parents. Joanie Golson, who I love — Curly the husband’s a bore, it can’t be helped — but Joanie’s an old friend of your mother’s.’

He could have been wrong, but Marcia had grown quizzical, he felt. She had never looked so much a raw scallop — with guile concealed in its fleshiness.

‘Why do you shy away, darling?’

He was relieved of the necessity of answering by the girl he had noticed at the far end of the room. She was weaving her way through the guests, and if Marcia and he were not her goal, she was headed vaguely in their direction. She made an unprepossessing impression, in a drab frock carelessly worn, thick black hair uncombed, if not positively matted.

‘That’s Helen — the daughter,’ Marcia casually answered his enquiry. ‘Poor thing, she’s most unhappy,’ though Mrs Lushington, it sounded, was not prepared, or did not know how, to deal with such unhappiness.

The girl cast a shadow in otherwise shadowless surroundings under a Venetian chandelier.

Marcia sighed, and swept the beetroot off her lap. ‘At least she has her weaving. I expect that does something for her.’

‘I hope to God it does, because if it doesn’t, nothing else will.’

At once he regretted his boozy non-sympathy. Across the short distance which was all that now separated them, the girl was staring at him. She had a harelip, he began to realise, so badly sewn the teeth behind it were sneering at him, and yet it was not a sneer: it was suppressing a cry as she climbed upward, out of the pit of her own monstrosity, to convey some message, or perhaps only asking for help — even offering it to one in whom she recognised signs of monstrosity or hopelessness.