The Twyborn Affair (23 page)

‘All set.' Not quite a statement, nor wholly an interjection, Prowse jerked it out from behind his Adam's apple.

The intimidated Eddie Twyborn climbed in on the passenger's side. Prowse began doing things to the car with immense and impressive dexterity, which did not prevent it bucking and sidling, threatening to throw them out before they left the starting post.

‘What's he like?' Eddie asked in an untimely effort to establish himself.

‘What's—who?'

‘Old Lushington.'

‘Greg's all right,' the manager shouted through a thrashing of gears.

They were cavorting by now, over the stones, towards a cleft in the bleached hills.

‘Soft old sod, but all right,' Gregory Lushington's manager intoned. ‘Not here all that much. Bugger's always
globe
trotting. Been to bloody
Patagonia
. Done the China coast. Climbed the Himalayas—well, some of the easy bits.' Prowse snorted slightly. ‘Wanted to see the rhodradendrons.'

It lulled the passenger to hear about his boss's travels. It removed him to some extent from the driver's side and what he suspected the latter's judgment to be. He did not feel he could count on Prowse's liking him; yet there was a tingling attraction on his own side, generated, if he would admit, by those hands lying heavy on the wheel.

Suddenly the manager turned to him and said, ‘In the War, weren't yer, Eddie?' It sounded almost an accusation.

‘I was—yes. I was.' He couldn't apologise enough on sensing it was what Prowse would have wanted.

‘Well, I wasn't. I was doing what they considered a necessary job. I would 'uv, of course. I talked it over with old Greg. Greg's had it easy all his life. Hasn't come in for anything—war or otherwise. Full of money like a tick with blood. Marcia thought I oughter go. That's 'is wife. She's away in Sydney. Back any day now. It's easy for a woman, isn't it? to decide what a man oughter do in a war. Some women need a man dead before they can appreciate 'im.'

His glance hectic (he had a lip sore breaking out) Prowse was looking to his passenger for corroboration.

‘Perhaps you're right,' Eddie replied, reconstructing the beige Marcia framed in straggles of monkey fur.

The manager calmed down. They were climbing, dipping, swerving, skidding in a sticky hollow; they were facing the direction from which they had come.

‘Fuck that!' said Don Prowse, and laughed his throatiest from behind the Adam's apple.

Eddie Twyborn smiled a lulled smile. His fate was in someone else's hands.

They reached a signpost pointing along a main road. They even ran a short distance over the road's luxurious surface before turning off again into the country of rudiments and stones.

While still on the metal Prowse explained, ‘This is the way to Woolambi. Where the good times are—six pubs, four stores, the picture-show. Get a screw too, if you're interested in that.'

They continued driving.

‘There's a root or two closer home if you get to know. I always say there's roots for the lookin'—anywhere.'

Again the driver glanced at his passenger for approbation.

‘That's so,' Eddie answered, and wondered to what extent his companion was convinced.

‘This is it,' the manager announced.

Even if his guide hadn't told, everything signalled arrival. The act of getting down to open gates, even the rustiest, the more resistant, the most perversely chained, gave the stranger a sense of belonging somewhere. A mob of sheep scampering in initial fright was persuaded to turn, halt, and observe those who were possibly not the intruders of its first impression. The phalanx of sheep stood firm, some stamping, coughing, every one of them archaic inside a carapace of what could have passed for stone wool, down to a tinge of parasite moss suffusing its general dinginess. Winter was well on the way at ‘Bogong'. It showed in the staring, wind-ruffled coats of half a dozen horses in the next paddock. Wheeling and pig-rooting, the near brumbies halted only when almost on top of the car, their bright expressions from under wispy forelocks prepared to enjoy such entertainment as human beings had to offer. Here too there was a glint of moss in quizzical muzzles and, possibly by reflection, in fetlocks rising out of a short-pile carpet of a virulent green.

Presently a string of sheds, together with a huddle of cottages,
their paintwork faded to a pale ochre, showed up amongst the white tussock on a river bank.

Two stockmen were riding at a distance, slouching, bumping with accomplished ease one behind the other on razor-backed nags whose slatternly tails almost swept the ground. Weather had cured the riders to a colour where they could have passed for Red Indians. They ignored the manager, as he them, more from convention, you felt, than from actual animosity.

Soon there was a bridge of loosely bolted planks buckling beneath the leaping car. Never had river waters looked glassier, more detached in their activity. Eddie Twyborn shivered and breathed deep for the encounter. Then they were across, above them in the middle distance a long low homestead, its windows dark and unrevealing behind a low-slung veranda, beneath a fairly low-pitched, red-painted roof, in corrugated iron. The homestead had a somewhat prim air, that of a retiring spinster of no pretensions beyond her breeding.

The car did not make for the homestead, but for a cottage closer to the river and surrounded by the expected complement of sheds, yards, iron water-tanks, and what must be the dunny. Hawthorns were crowding in upon another deep veranda, providing a break-wind, if also probably a break-light for the rooms inside.

Don Prowse turned on a sourly beatific smile for one who might have been the bride of a shotgun marriage instead of an unwanted offsider wished on to him by his employer. ‘Snugger than it looks, and at the week-end you can bugger off to Woolambi if it suits.'

Eddie Twyborn felt the complete misfit in Don Prowse's aggressively masculine world; whereas a relationship was waiting to develop between himself, the huggermugger buildings, even a bitter landscape. If the river appeared at first sight hostile, it was through the transience of its coursing waters to one who longed for the reality of permanence.

He was made clumsy and unreal by the manager's continued remarks, by his attempts at friendliness, by the man's insistence on shouldering the cabin-trunk again, on grabbing hold of all the
baggage if he could get possession of it—in doing the man's work in fact. It was humiliating.

It might have become worse, creating a puppet tittuping helplessly through slush and puddles, if a woman hadn't appeared, neither young, nor all that old, at any rate her hair still black, her cheeks as tanned and ravaged by the climate as those of the ‘Red Indian' stockmen loping on their lean horses.

‘Mrs Tyrrell,' Prowse grunted by way of introduction under the stress of shouldering the trunk and carrying the suitcase.

Mrs Tyrrell mumbled through a smile, licking her thin, natural lips. She revealed two brown, upper fangs with nothing but her tongue to fill the gap. She was dressed all in black, whether from grief or for practical reasons, it was not possible to tell. She simpered a lot, and hugged a bobbled crochet shawl round narrow shoulders. In the lower regions, what had once been a laundered apron had failed to protect her practical black from a storm of flour.

Anyway, Eddie Twyborn had hopes of this Mrs Tyrrell, her bright black eyes already alight with confidences and an offer of sleazy kindliness.

‘Bet you're hungry, mister,' she said. ‘Fix yer some breakfast. Bet Mr Prowse won't say no to a second breakfast. 'E's a good doer.'

At the same time she started a struggle for the valise with which the young man had been left. He clung on desperately, as though possession of it were his only means of self-assertion.

‘Independent, are we?' Mrs Tyrrell cackled through her gap, a detachment of mongrel hens joining in as they shot across the slush from under her feet.

‘Never thought about it—frankly,' he gasped.

Such strangeness strangely expressed must have dried up her repartee, for she fell silent, one hand on the disputed valise. He could feel Mrs Tyrrell's skin slithering against his own, hard and greasy at the same time, the broad golden wedding-band turned by age to the colour of brass.

So they staggered on, and into the house, allies, it could have been, against the manager's overtly masculine back.

‘This do?' the latter asked.

He released the trunk, which crumped on the boards and shook the whole structure of the room.

‘Yes, it's fine!' said Eddie Twyborn out of a deathly sinking.

He stood with his hands on his hips as he had seen men do, and smiled, while the others read his thoughts, no doubt correctly: Don Prowse grinning through the ginger stubble, Mrs Tyrrell bird-eyed beneath a row of little jet black hair-rosettes.

If they would only withdraw, the room might become his, just as the imagination can clothe a skeleton with flesh, even kindle a spirit in it. They did leave him to it finally: the stretcher with the army blankets, shelves curtained by a straight length of faded cretonne, a frayed mat on the dusty boards, on the chest an enamel candle-stick, its broken candle aslant over gobbets of stale wax, on the wall a deal-framed glass to mirror his jaunty disarray.

He was alone at least—‘independent' as Mrs Tyrrell might have described it.

He could hear her in the kitchen. He could smell the mutton chops she was charring, the cabbage-and-potato she was ‘frying up'.

‘A good-lookun young cove, Peggy,' he heard Don Prowse's voice.

Then her cackle, tailing off into a sigh, and something about ‘a mother', and ‘women is only pack 'orses', through the stench, the spitting of fat.

Should he go out to them?

 

After their delayed breakfast, his second in the manager's case, of chops and veg followed by wedges of yellow sponge and dobs of enormous floury scone, Don advised, ‘Better settle in, Ed. We'll talk things over later.' He showed his teeth in an educated smile, while Mrs Tyrrell stood watching from beneath her hair-rosettes, lips parted to reveal the cavern behind her gap.

‘Gotter unpack,' she murmured.

While the jackeroo did just that the cook came in and draped herself over a deckchair as faded as the cretonne curtain masking
the shelves in the room which was becoming Eddie Twyborn's.

Mrs Tyrrell said, sighing, scratching an armpit under the black, bobbled shawl, ‘You gotter take what comes, I've always said. Man or woman. Prowse wouldn't understand that. You would,' she added.

‘Why would
I
?'

‘Because you're yer mother's son,' she said, peering at him and licking her lips.

‘How do you know?'

‘Well,' she said, ‘I'm the mother of seventeen Tyrrells—a football team of boys—but the girls is what counts.'

‘I'm a boy,' said Eddie Twyborn.

‘We know you are,' Mrs Tyrrell agreed, munching on her mauve gums. ‘The boys!' she munched. ‘Bet yer mum would've been glad of a girl.'

‘I don't think so. She would have preferred to be barren, I think.'

‘Go on! There's no mother wouldn't 'uv chose ter be a mother. Not even our poor Else, with that bloody Kevun pokin' the hell out of 'er. Gets what 'e wants, then 'e beats 'er up. We 'ave 'im put in, but the damage is done. The kiddies are worth it, Else says. Arr, the women!'

Peggy Tyrrell sucked her gap passionately.

‘Marcia—Mrs Lushington—give a beautiful quilted dressin'-gown after Kev put the fifth in Elsie's oven. Arr, Mrs Lushington's good—a lovely woman.'

Mrs Tyrrell was writhing in the faded chair, which must have done the P. & O. run under Lushington auspices. ‘Both my girls,' she said, eyeing the tube of toothpaste he had ruptured with his heel in Edgecliff, ‘both was married with their own teeth still in place. Only lost 'em afterwards. Thing about teeth,' she said, ‘you don't 'ave to clean 'em if you 'aven't got 'em.'

‘You don't,' he agreed.

She had begun eyeing the underpants he was bringing out.

‘Wouldn'tcher like somethun to eat? Prowse is gone with the men 'n won't be back to lunch.'

‘Which men?'

‘Well—Matt 'n Denny—the men!'

Presumably the ‘Red Indians'.

He didn't hanker after lunch; he only wanted Peggy Tyrrell to leave him alone. Which presently she did, sighing and burping. Glancing round, he caught sight of her through the doorway, moving plates of sponge and plates of scones around the kitchen table as though playing a game of draughts with herself.

She was what is called a ‘trick', and he knew that he would be glad of her.

After arranging his possessions, all of them objects which might remain dispensable, he left the house to which he had been consigned, and walked along the river bank. He half-expected Peggy Tyrrell to follow. When she didn't he looked back, and sure enough, there she was, hesitating on the edge of the dry-rotted veranda, in a gap between hawthorns, tightening the bobbled shawl around her shoulders. He turned away and hurried on, persuading himself he was not guilty of betraying a relationship so recently formed.

But he felt guilty, and gashed a glaringly new boot in tripping over a rock.

Would he ever succeed in making credible to others the new moleskins and elastic sides? At least people were more ready to accept material façade than glimpses of spiritual nakedness, cover this up with whatever you will, pomegranate shawl and spangled fan, or moleskins and elastic sides. Joan Golson had accepted a whole vacillating illusion, romantically clothed and in its wrong mind. But on entering the world of Don Prowse and the Lushingtons he suspected he would find the natives watching for lapses in behaviour. All the more necessary to cultivate his alliance with Mrs Tyrrell: women whose wombs have been kicked to pieces by a football team of sons, and who have married off daughters still in possession of their natural teeth should be more inclined to sympathise with the anomalies of life.