The Twyborn Affair (15 page)

The shrieks indulged, the wrath began to pour. ‘
C'est un vieux salaud—une jeune salope! Ils paieront. Beaucoup! Madame Boieldieu m'a dit
.'

Mrs Golson had retreated into the comparative dusk of the passage.

She dredged up the necessary words and said, ‘
Merci je m'en vais
.'

But the woman put out a hand. ‘
Ne voulez pas voir lew chambre à coucher? Ils n'ont fait, vous comprenez, que jouer au piano et baiser …
'

‘
Non! Non! Non!
' Mrs Golson skirted past the bedroom, through the door of which she caught a glimpse of shadowy, but turbulent sheets; she could not have borne further evidence of the games, perhaps even the stains, of love.

All the way down the hall, out upon the terrace, down the path smelling of tomcat, she was pursued by the woman's diabolical voice as she ran from the flickering images of Angelos and Eudoxia Vatatzes, themselves as diabolical as her own never extinct desires—as she fled towards Curly, honesty,
Australia
.

‘
Ils paieront—vous verrez!
' the woman hurled after her.

‘
Qui sait?
' Mrs Golson gasped back as she pushed against the collapsing gate, which finally fell.

Who knows what? Herself, certainly, knew nothing, hurrying down the stony hill towards the waiting cab—if it had waited.

But it had. The man was sitting on the high driver's-seat, looking out from inside the tunnel provided by the leather hood. As
la folk Anglaise
hurtled towards him.

 

For no explicable reason, the train was packed on that day. As it drew in at the station they stampeded along its steaming side as part of the lowing inconsolable herd lugging portmanteaux, baskets, parcels, bulging serviettes. Themselves, or rather, their hearts leaping like wild creatures inside the cages of their ribs. To arrive at the doors. To scrape their shins almost to the bone on the iron steps. To scramble panting, dragging, on, on, on board the contemptuous train.

They just succeeded. She forced him up, and after grasping a stanchion, protected him with her strong arm, while a guard, laughing, tried out her buttocks with a hand, pushed the last of the passengers higher, and slammed the door on the lot.

They stood breathing at each other, inhaling the perfumes from the
toilettes
. Even the round smell of shit.

‘Well, we are here, E.!' he panted.

More practical, she answered, ‘We haven't begun,' and started weaving down the corridor, past the portmanteaux, the baskets, the bulging serviettes, somebody hanging out of a window, a handkerchief held against nausea.

They did squeeze in at last, into one of the wooden boxes, amidst the scowls, the luggage, the children of those already established. They seated themselves in a corner, more closely conjoined than at any moment of their life together, distributing the smiles of the false-humble, in which teeth return to being milk-teeth, cheeks illuminated not so much by the brief innocence as the prolonged guilt of childhood.

After staking their claim they might have looked out of the windows at the view, but on one side the blinds were lowered, admitting no more than a band of flesh-coloured light between hem and sill,
on the other a human hedge planted in the corridor presented landscape as a flackering of vines and recurring gashes of red soil. There was also the occasional mountain crest like a heap of unquarried blue-metasl.

The old man said to his companion, ‘At least we can enjoy the
thought
of wine, but that won't anaesthetise us.'

He laughed in his dry accusatory way. She regretted that, in the haste of departure, after a frenzied night of hallucination and barbed attack, she had forgotten wine and food of any kind, whereas everyone else in the wooden compartment seemed over-provisioned: the crusty bread, the purple bottles they held to their lips, hunks of salami to be sawn at, and rounds of cheese smelling of goat; in one instance, gobbets of truffled
pâté de foie
conveyed by fingers as refined as the bread on which the stufflay, the flesh dimpling with a diamond or two, the bosom on which the crumbs tumbled as black as the inlay of truffle itself.

The newcomers were lulled at last by motion, the alternate shuffling and hurtling of the train, and the sound of salami skins constantly stirred by the feet of children passing between the rows of knees.

At one point a young mother opened her blouse and offered an enormous breast to her two-year-old, who fastened on it, cheeks working as though he meant to get the whole thing down.

The old man took his companion's hand. ‘That is how it was in the beginning, with Stavroula, at Mikhali. So it should be at the end too—in the after life—if we didn't know there isn't any.'

Sight of the suckling child seemed, mercifully, to nourish him.

‘Why should you say “at the end”?'

He sighed. ‘It can't last for ever. Surely we must arrive soon?'

‘Another three-quarters of an hour,' she told him with a simulated authority.

The young woman appeared to be staring at the hands of the peasant opposite, at the encrustations of dirt beneath the broken nails, as thick fingers broke off a corner of crust. She shivered, it
could have been from hunger. The widow turned away so as to avoid noticing.

Just then the old fellow flung himself back in his corner, eyes closed, face as yellow as the varnished boards against which it was pinned. He was very frail. The young woman squeezed the handful of bones she was holding. His face was more than ever that of a Byzantine saint, used up in obeisance, less to God than to masochism and fatality.

Or onanism. The widow had taken a pederast
en premières noces
, and survived her experience.

Against her better judgment she was moved by the devotion of the old man's companion, her putting up a hand and touching his forehead. A daughter, perhaps? A mistress would have withdrawn by now. Wives are more matter-of-fact.

Could he be ill? she inquired.

The young woman replied, ‘Not ill. He is tired.
Sûrement il n'est que fatigué
.

But must have found her diagnosis too glib, for immediately she produced a little bottle from her bag, and looked round for a means of administering what the widow knew to be drops, from having nursed and buried two husbands, and one who wasn't.

The widow offered a couple of fingers of Evian. She derived visible consolation from her own charitable act.

After taking the draught, from a glass provided, again, by the widow (which she scoured out with a clean napkin and a generous splurge of the Evian on its being returned to her) the old fellow dozed a little, watched over by his tender companion. If it might not have seemed improper in the circumstances, the widow would have questioned her on their relationship, nationality, place of residence, income, in fact all those details which demonstrate whether an individual is sociably acceptable.

The film of a smile veiled the face of the young woman seated opposite. The peasants gazed while cleaning behind their lips with their tongues. Once or twice the sleeper scratched inside his shirt with gestures the widow condemned as lacking in refinement. The
two-year-old wet himself.
C'est écœurant
, the widow considered,
les enfants qui ne sont pas élevés au delà du niveau des bêtes …
, while the old man and the strewn salami skin continued breathing.

The widow could not have restrained herself a moment longer from embarking on her questionnaire, if the old man, after tearing so restlessly at his chest that a button flew off the shirt above the waitscoat, had not opened his eyes and sprung out of his corner.

‘
Ma—soffoco! Soffoco!
' he shouted.

The blind went flackering out of sight. And he tore the window down.

The other occupants of the compartment were too dazed to protest. They sat blinking at the inrush of light, gulping the currents of air which would surely lay them low in spite of flannel next the skin.

The interloping couple now sat knee to knee, on the edge of the bench, facing each other, beatified by the afternoon light, the draughts of too lusty air pouring through the open window. Or were they reaching into some inner pocket of a relationship where nobody else would have known how to follow? Certainly the peasants, whether French or Gallo-Italian, were only equipped to stare. Nor did the widow's sane mind allow her a clue. She knew only that the foreign couple (spies possibly?) were presenting some kind of sham which she could not fathom. The old man, wearing the ridiculous gilt eagle on a moiré ribbon (something to tell Monique) was no more ill than she—less so, probably, for she had begun to regurgitate the truffled
pâté defoie
.

The train gradually emptied, except for a few Italians trailing towards the frontier. The widow left them for Monaco with formal protestations of goodwill.

They arrived at sunset in a town heavy with dust and a scent of carnations after a day unusually warm for the time of year. Almost as though by arrangement they found a cab. The obstructions and frustrations of the journey were at once erased. Though he did not answer, the driver must have heard of the
pension
the young woman mentioned, for he slashed at his horse and started off in a direction his fare accepted as the only one.

‘It does exist then,' the old man agreed. ‘I would not have believed it—“My Blue Home”!'

‘Any more than “Crimson Cottage”?'

Thrown about on the back seat as the cab climbed a hill out of the embalmed town, they grew hilarious, then settled down. They must not question the nomenclature that panders to the gentility and mysterious origins of those who inhabit the Coast; to dismiss the credibility of ‘My Blue Home' and ‘Crimson Cottage' might have been to deny the existence of the Nicaean dynasty, the whole structure of Byzantium, including its lynch-pin the Australian hetaira.

‘My Blue Home' when it appeared, was a thin edifice overlaid with pinkish stucco and fitted upon a narrow ledge carved out of the mountainside. The woodwork at least was a blistered blue, and the vista a solid azure beneath a powdering of silver cloud. In the circumstances one ignored the criss-cross of lath showing here and there in irregular patches through the stucco, and a show of grey undergarments pegged haphazardly to a clothes-line above the weeds in what had once been a garden. On the other hand, to impress those who might become depressed at signs of squalor, there was a meticulous fresco in the Greek style, of terracotta urns alternating with satyrs and their prey stencilled round the walls between the eaves and lintels of the upper windows.

Leading her charge, the traveller bowed her head and entered.

Like the cab at the station, the proprietress must have been waiting for them. The young woman explained that through unforeseen events she and her husband were arriving
à l'improviste
. There had not been time to telegraph, but she mentioned the name of a lady who had been Madame Sasso's guest and who was a subscriber at Miss Clitheroe's library at St Mayeul. Madame Sasso could not recall her former guest, but knew of course by repute Mademoiselle Clitheroe of the English Tea-room and Library.

Madame Sasso smiled, and explained, ‘I spick Eenglish,' to encourage another of the foreigners through whom she made a respectable living.

She was composed of rounded and cylindrical forms, with a vertical arrangement of plump black buttons from the cleavage to the hem of her black dress. After giving the matter thought, she admitted to having a room vacant, which she hoped her guests might occupy until she was in a position to offer something more
—convenable
.

It was a room as narrow as one would have expected in such a narrow house. It was the kind of room from which a maid might have fled without giving notice. To encourage its prospective tenants, Madame Sasso prodded the bed, which gave out somewhat discouraging sounds. The bed matched the room in narrowness, but there was an ample chair covered in a thick green material reminiscent of governesses and schoolrooms.

‘Oh yes,' the young woman declared, ‘we must have it. We must sleep
somewhere
. My husband has been ill.'

‘Not seriously?' Madame Sasso hoped; and would they pay a deposit?

‘If we are already here?' the husband pointed out.

‘In advance then—if you would prefer it …' Madame Sasso smiled.

She tried to make a joke of it, but the wife was of a serious disposition; she opened her bag and brought out two or three notes as token payment.

So they were installed:
Monsieur et Madame Vatatzes—un nom grec
. Madame Sasso was impressed by the old gentleman's distinguished appearance and the beauty of his young—wife.

Left to themselves in their narrow room the travellers spoke in whispers at first. They touched each other often and gently, as though each suspected the other might break, or even vanish.

24th March

Soon after our arrival at this not very savoury
pension
Angelos took to his bed. The awfulness of yesterday's journey was too much for him. A. is prepared to accept this place as an asylum, in which
case I do too. I realise by now we can never be separated, not by human intervention (no Golsons!) only of my own free will. There I come up against the big snag. Shall my will ever grow strong and free enough for me to face up to myself? If I wanted that. To leave my one and only lover. I don't. I don't.

He snored the night away in this maid's bed. Myself comfortable enough in the chair until he asked me to come to him. We comforted each other narrowly and fell asleep towards dawn.

Will they hear us? The bed such a musical one, and the house, I'm sure, full of attentive ears.

Dined alone last night as he had no appetite: little separate tables, each with its complement of bottles—pills, spa water, wine eked out from previous meals to be consumed by sour mouthfuls at those to come. Dirty napkins put away in paper envelopes. Overall a smell of thrift and cheap oil.