Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

This luxury of cooking smells united with the stench of his own body, greasy wool, and tar from the anointing of sheeps’ wounds and fly-blown wrinkles, while inside the shed, as he mixed his horse a feed, the sweet scents of chaff and oats mingled with the no less intoxicating, if baser stenches he had brought with him.

In the darkness beyond the feed-room proper, in the depths of the shed where a soft mountain of chaff was stored, a landslide had been started by a cat pursuing a rat. There was a deathly squeal as the cat pounced and worried its prey, growling at the human intruder.

From her stall the mare was whinnying at him impatiently. She glared and snorted, stamping on the brickwork with small, elegant, shod hooves. Her greed as he poured the oats and chaff whetted his own appetite for sodden onions and stringy cow passing as beef. (He would have liked to believe his own disguises more convincing. Well, it had been proved that they were.)

Leaving his ravenous horse to her feed he heard the iron door pushed farther open on grudging hinges. Against a sky paling into darkness it could only have been Prowse’s bulk advancing unsteadily into the sweet must of the shed’s enveloping gloom.

‘What is it, Don? What’ve I done wrong this time?’

The form came shambling on. ‘Wrong?’ A familiar blast of whiskied breath was introduced into the gentler scents of the stable and the dusty draught from chaff set in motion by the huntress cat.

‘Yes. I’d like to know. I never seem to do the right thing by you.’ It wasn’t quite honest.

‘Nothing wrong, I suppose — Eddie — in being true to yerself.’

Prowse’s bulk had reached the point where they were bumping against each other in the darkness.

Eddie realised that, up against this laborious drunk, he was simulating drunkenness.

‘And what’s myself?’ he dared.

There was a pause, and the sounds of overheated, crackling iron and slithering chaff.

Till Prowse was prepared to come out with it. ‘I reckon I recognised you, Eddie, the day you jumped in — into the river — and started flashing yer tail at us. I reckon I recognised a fuckun queen.’

All the while Don Prowse was pushing his bulk up against Eddie Twyborn’s more slender offering.

‘See?’

‘If that’s what you saw …’ Eddie knew that his voice, like his body, was trembling.

Prowse suddenly grew enraged. He, too, had started trembling in a massive way, smelling of sodden red hair almost stronger than the whiskey breath, shouting, pushing his opponent around and about with chest and thighs, spinning him face down in the chaff.

‘A queen! A queen! A fuckun queen!’ Sobbing as though it was his wife Kath walking out on him.

Prowse was tearing at all that had ever offended him in life, at the same time exposing all that he had never confessed, unless in the snapshot album.

His victim’s face was buried always deeper, breathless, in the loose chaff as Don Prowse entered the past through the present.

Eddie Twyborn was breathing chaff, sobbing back, not for the indignity to which he was being subjected, but finally for his acceptance of it.

When Prowse had had his way they lay coupled, breathing in some kind of harmony.

Till the male animal withdrew, muttering what could have been, ‘You asked for it — you fuckun asked …’

And got himself out of the shed.

The victim lay awhile, wholly exhausted by the switch to this other role. Then stood up, chaff trickling down skin wherever it did not stick inside rucked-up shirt and torn pants — the disguise which didn’t disguise.

Complete darkness had fallen outside, except where Peggy Tyrrell’s sibyl, in the illuminated window across the yard, was rising through the steam from a suet pudding she was easing out of its cloth. She glanced up once into the outer darkness, her sibyl’s eyes contracting, before resuming the ritual of her suet pud.

In the days which followed, they went about doing what had to be done. They used only the words required. They depended on the objects surrounding them, grateful for the furniture of daily life.

The manager announced with the solemnity of an alderman, ‘We can expect Mr Lushington back in the near future.’ Reduced by several tones, his voice sounded furred up.

After giving morning orders to Jim, Denny, and the jackeroo, he added importantly, ‘Get on with it then. I’ve got to go up to the house to do some accounting in Mr Lushington’s office.’

Mr Prowse shaved regularly now. The texture of the burnished skin fascinated Eddie Twyborn.

Don would lower his eyes on finding himself scrutinised.

His clothes were more formal. He was, in fact, the manager, who almost never mucked in as he had on the day when the men were crutching.

The jackeroo became more formal too, asking at tea for information on cross-breeding, wool sales, and crops.

Mrs Tyrrell gravely served the pudding, and sat afterwards, hands folded in her apron, like Our Lady of Stains.

Marcia alone had no part in the play which was being enacted. Though he looked for her from a distance, Eddie failed to catch sight of the black Packard, the bay gelding or the solitary figure hitting a golf ball on the mini course below the house.

One night after the manager had gone up to do some more accounting, he thought he heard her voice, not that which issued from the thick, thyroidal throat of the sensual woman who had dragged him into her bed, but of the tentative girl who had ridden with him the day they had met by accident in a far paddock.

He went out preparing to investigate.

For no good reason beyond infallible instinct Mrs Tyrrell called, ‘Mrs Lushington, Mrs Edmonds says, is suffering from a heavy cold.’

And he called back, ‘I hope Mrs Edmonds hasn’t brought it down with her. It wouldn’t be fair if you were laid up so soon after your ma’s visit.’

Herself fairly mature, Peggy had an ancient mother, Ma Corkill, who had been out to ‘Bogong’ recently to investigate her daughter’s situation.

Mrs Corkill, the she-ancient of she-ancients, did not aspire to hats as did her daughter, but wore her hair in the semblance of a hat, a creation such as insects weave out of leaves and twigs, and dead grass, its structure containing a suppressed hum, which erupts in a sizzle of red-hot needles if anyone is unwise enough to poke it. (Neither mother nor daughter approved of hair-washing: ‘it don’t do nothun for yer health, dear;’ and in fact, as Peggy Tyrrell confessed, neither had ever washed hers.)

Unlike her daughter, who was still in possession of the fangs to which she hitched her Sunday teeth, the old lady was completely toothless. Her vocabulary was sparse but serviceable, particularly after she had taken a dose from a medicine bottle she carried in an apron pocket, or seated with Peggy on the double dunny, or holding a post-mortem in the daughter’s bed after the lamp had been blown out. As the smell of extinguished wick ascended, the women’s voices would entwine in a duet embellished by roulades and trills worthy of a more rococo age.

Ma Corkill’s visit to ‘Bogong’ had its climax in her flinging a kettle of boiling water at her daughter halfway through the third day. She was collected by a Tyrrell grandson, almost as mature as his mother it seemed, as he sat in his convulsive Ford, under the brim of a green-grey Sewell felt, the neckband of his shirt gathered together by a glass ruby in a brass claw.

‘What can yer do,’ Mrs Tyrrell asked, ‘if it’s yer own mother?’

Nobody had the answer to that; least of all Eddie Twyborn, who had never found the answer to himself.

Least of all on his way up the hill to face Marcia’s displeasure for his neglect and his avoidance of her friends the Golsons, or perhaps on overcoming that displeasure, to prove to himself that she was still his mistress. It was most important that he should decide how much of his life was serious and how much farce.