Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

‘They tell me Greg is expected back at any moment. That will be fine for you, Marcia.’

She almost suppressed a frown. ‘Dear old Greg! Not everyone appreciates him, but I think, Eddie, you do — you and your father.’

There was a silence in which the cane furniture showed signs of disintegrating.

Marcia said, ‘I must go and make us some tea.’

‘Don’t bother.’

‘But it’s what we do at four o’clock. Don’t expect a lot of food, though. Mrs Quimby’s mumping over something or other, probably preparing to give notice.’

The fact that he, too, was more than probably going to leave made him melancholy, sitting on the Lushingtons’ veranda with the river flat spread before him, the brown river meandering through bleached tussock, the sensuous forms of naked hills on either side: a landscape which had engaged his feelings in a brief and unlikely love affair he was about to end.

If all love affairs are not, perhaps, unlikely. Only the meat of marriage convinces, if you are made for it, and open to conviction.

A hornet was somewhere ceaselessly working on its citadel, and under the eaves hung a swallow’s nest temporarily abandoned by its tenant, in each case evidence of the continuity which convinces animals better than it does human beings, unless they are human vegetables.

Marcia returned carrying a tray as though it were the sort of act she wasn’t used to performing. Her shoulders drooped, her bare arms looked defenceless, even pathetic. Perhaps she expected him, as a lover, or simply as a man, to jump up and help her with the tray.

But he didn’t: he was too distant, and at the same time too absorbed in everything happening around him, the fidgeting sound of the hornet, on the faded plain the brown river, static now, swift in memory, over the veranda tiles Marcia’s shuffle in a pair of scuffed, once elegant, crocodile shoes.

She arranged the tray on a table, yet another member of the weathered cane family

A generous wedge was missing from the jam sandwich, its pink icing buttoned down and slightly stained by a wreath of crystallised violets. Though a cake for a country occasion, the recalcitrant Mrs Quimby had failed to pipe a message on it.

Marcia let off a misplaced giggle. ‘There we are, darling!’ She would have liked to appear girlish, but suspected at once that he would not allow her.

He sat, chin lowered, staring ahead. He saw himself, alas, as a farouche schoolboy refusing to let Mum have him on. Poor Marce didn’t know about it, while he had the unfair advantage, at any rate since last night, of knowing almost everything.

She poured the tea, of a delicacy which must have been wasted on the district, and which they would have discussed afterwards: that hogwash of Marcia Lushington’s.

Along with the barbarians, Eddie was not appreciative enough. The pink festive cake was stale. The cruel scene he had rehearsed would have to be enacted eventually.

‘There you are,’ she said very humbly as she tried a fragment of the cake, ‘I warned you.’

‘But did you?’ His cup slithered like stone on the saucer; his chair grated on the tiled veranda.

While Marcia Lushington sat holding her teacup in both hands, to prevent a trembling from showing, and to let the steam take the blame for her watering eyes.

She protested, ‘I don’t understand. I thought you loved me.’

In his case, it was the crumbs of the stale cake which were trembling; he brushed them off with a disapproving, and as he saw it, suddenly old-maidish hand.

‘I was fond of you,’ he admitted; and then not too honestly, ‘because affection was what I thought you wanted;’ less honest still, ‘I couldn’t love you for respecting poor old Greg.’

She sat up jerkily on the edge of the grating chaise.

‘There you’ve caught me out, Eddie. You’ve caught us both. Because,’ and now it was her turn to look out along the bleached plain, ‘I find I’m pregnant.’

The hornet was worrying the silence worse than ever, a fiery copper wire piercing but never aborting a situation the enormity of which could only be human.

Eddie began to laugh. It made Marcia look more becolded.

‘However cynical you may like to be thought, I’m glad the child will be yours. Greg is fond of you,’ she said, ‘and it may be the son he and I have failed to get.’

‘It might be another failure — like the one you had with Prowse.’

He thought the silence would never end: a balloon swelling and swelling, but never bursting, in spite of the hornet’s efforts, in the late light of a summer afternoon.

When Marcia said, ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I was going by the names on the graves — as well as more positive evidence.’

She leaned forward, her chin broader for being propped on the heel of a hand. ‘It could be Greg’s — just — from before he went away. But you were what I wanted.’

‘Or Prowse?’

She ignored it. He got up soon after. She was still staring at the breached cake, its yellow more unnatural, its pink more lurid in the evening light.

‘I think you’re cruel by nature,’ she said.

He didn’t answer: he was arranging his belt, because his manly shirt was coming out.

‘Now I believe you’re what I was told you are.’

He didn’t bother to expose any of them worse than they were already exposed.

The landscape which might have healed was withdrawing into dusk; it was the landscape he had loved, peopled with those the magic-lantern projects without their knowing, like Greg Lushington the Crypto-poet, Mr Justice Twyborn the Bumbling Father, Peggy Tyrrell of the Football Team. Even, perhaps, Don Prowse the Brute Male.

Only Marcia was excluded, looking out through her becolded mask at Eadie’s son. No one but Eadie, another woman, could have dealt her this cruel blow. Eadie was the judge, and women have more of justice in them.

Eddie blubbered to himself going down the hill, not for Marcia, but Angelos, legs sticking out straight and stiff on a maid’s bed in that pension before the frontier. Men are frailer than women. Don Prowse, for all his meaty male authority, was not much more than a ping-pong ball knocked back and forth in a sinewy female set. Most sinewy of all, an aggressive anima walled up inside her tower of flesh.

Till accused by the child in Marcia’s womb, Eddie Twyborn cut short the ping-pong game, returning to his actual surroundings and candidacy for fatherhood.

He awoke to hear the car manoeuvred under cover, the crackle of paper as parcels were undone in the kitchen, a man’s curse when a wing was grazed on a corner of corrugated iron, a woman’s sighs and invocations as the depths of her body, and even more, her spiritual tatters, caused her pain.

The walls of his normally putty-coloured room were spattered with light from the manoeuvred car, translucent patches, with iridescent threads superimposed as he rubbed his eyeballs to rid them of an itch and hurry them into awareness of what was happening. He reached down to cover up his nakedness, but fell back upon the stretcher where he had been dozing: it was too hot, it was too hot. He couldn’t bother. The blanket too hairy. Since coming to ‘Bogong’ he had dispensed with sheets, out of masochism or delusions of masculinity.

The petals of light flowering on the walls were suddenly wiped out by darkness.

Silence was broken by the creaking of a fly-proof door, a renewed outburst of female sighs, male boots hurled against the wall of a fragile weatherboard house.

Any frail male could only cower and try to assemble an acceptable identity, any female, because tougher, more fibrous, consolidate her position inside the cloak of darkness.

Though Peggy did creep along the passage to hiss, ‘I oughter warn yer, love, ’e ’s ’ad a fair few. Don’t let yerself get drawn in. ’E’s cantankerous ternight.’