The Twyborn Affair (30 page)

‘Well,' she said, ‘as you've asked for it, I'll tell you what I think of Eadie Twyborn. She's a frowzy old drunken Lesbian—who once made a pass at me,' she said.

‘Shouldn't you feel flattered? Any pass is better than none.'

‘Ugh!' she regurgitated. ‘Not between women. And that nice man—the Judge.'

She rode ahead aloof and virtuous, until the Blue Mule chugged abreast again.

‘Of course there are some women,' she said. ‘Take Joan Golson—Eadie's friend—everybody knows about that. You couldn't hold it against Joan—not altogether—because she's in most ways—so—so
normal
. You must have met the Boyd Golsons although you were away so many years.'

Eddie muttered that he was acquainted, but did not know them. Marcia may not have heard; she had fallen into a trance, from which she issued in the tone of voice they adopt for money and pedigrees.

‘… frightfully rich in all directions … Joan was Joanie Sewell of Sewell's Felt. Ghastly if you come to think, but substantial. And Curly—Golson's Emporium. Curly's the bore of bores, but another substantial investment. So there you are.'

‘A normal conjunction.'

‘But darling,' she screamed against the wind while seizing his wrist, ‘leaving Joan Golson aside—and Eadie—it was you who brought your mother up—I just don't care to associate with abnormality.' After a little pause she continued, ‘Some women are
inveterate
.' He wondered where she had learnt it. ‘They adore to have queer men around. They find it amusing. A sort of court fool. I couldn't bear to touch one.'

‘You must have touched a few,' he suggested, ‘a few of your women friends' fools—if only in shaking hands.'

She said, ‘Oh well—as a social formality one has to—don't you understand? Fortunately,' she added, ‘most of them go away to Europe. They're too ashamed.'

The riders rode.

The winter sun was forcibly withdrawn behind a sliver of nacreous cloud. The hills undulated in time with the horses' gait, or at least with Hamlet's. Eddie's disastrous mount only created a tumult, as though they were stumbling over molehills or excavated rabbit warrens.

Marcia remarked, ‘Nobody understands or loves this part of the world as I do. Not even Greg who was born here. None of them.'

He saw no reason for questioning the sincerity of what she had said.

‘I believe Don understands how you feel,' he told her.

‘
Don
!' She bared her wide-spaced teeth as she had at the moment when telling about the bogong moths and he had visualised her devouring them. ‘What has Prowse been saying? That crude and repulsive man.'

‘Only that you love the country.'

‘Oh.'

She subsided after that.

They had completed a circuit, he realised, and were returning towards the homestead and the clutter of cottages and sheds which comprised the heart of the Lushington property of ‘Bogong'. The paddocks were a grey-green like Marcia Lushington's old velour. They rode past eruptions of wiry briar, graced by notes of tingling scarlet and a flickering of wings or incipient leaves. Invisible birds were calling through the cold air along the river, the wraiths of curlew or plover; he could not have told; Marcia would have.

Suddenly she began chanting, at no one so much as the landscape spread out before them, ‘A foreigner came here once—one of those complacent Hunter Valley squatters—and said—behind my back of course—that “Bogong” is sterile country. Would you dismiss it as that having lived here?'

‘Hardly barren. You'd be out of business if you were,' he tried to console.

‘Oh,' she coughed, or spat, ‘you're talking like a man now!
Business—
super-phosphate
—cross
breeding!'

She turned in her saddle and wrenched his hand from the pommel where it was resting.

She said, ‘Darling, you know what I mean.'

He did, but he couldn't do anything for her.

They rode on hand in hand till they reached the outskirts of the Lushington garden and the walled graveyard he had found on the occasion of a walk.

They drew in their horses outside the elaborate gate, or perhaps Hamlet knew where to halt.

‘Did somebody—did
Prowse
,' Marcia asked, ‘tell you about this too?'

‘He told me only that Greg had wanted a son.'

‘All men do, I expect,' she said, ‘to vindicate themselves.'

‘I think I'd prefer a daughter.'

‘But you're more sensitive, Eddie,' she blurted, ‘whatever you may do or say to destroy my opinion of you.'

Briskets pressed to the wall, the resting horses forced him to read the inscriptions on the headstones inside:

 

GREGORY LUSHINGTON
born 28 May 1912
died 5 August 1912

 

GREGORY LUSHINGTON
born 5 May 1914
died 6 January 1915

 

GREGORY DONALD PROWSE LUSHINGTON
born 17 May 1917
died 19 November 1918

 

The riders did not linger.

‘Why “Donald Prowse” if you despise him?' he asked as they rode away.

‘Oh—it was after Kath walked out. Greg wanted to do something for him. I did too, for that matter. We thought it might help to
make him our child's godfather. The child died,' she ended. ‘He died.'

They rode on, the horses bowing their heads, so it seemed, though of course they were returning to home, fodder, and idleness.

After unsaddling their horses at the stables, they walked towards the house, where they saw Mr Lushington had come out and was waiting for them, the lenses of his spectacles discs of gold.

Adopting a tone of jovial annoyance, he told them, ‘I'd begun to worry.'

‘Why? That I'd fallen off?' asked his wife chidingly.

‘No. That the pikelets would go soggy, and Mrs Quimby give notice.'

‘We'll eat them soggy or not,' Mrs Lushington declared. ‘As far as I'm concerned, pikelets are a means of conveying melted butter to the mouth.'

She gave her companion a melting smile at the same time as her husband brushed up against his son
manqué
.

‘Did you have a good ride?' Mr Lushington asked Eddie.

‘Yes,' she answered for him. ‘And talk. So much better than stewing in the house over old stud books and agricultural pamphlets.'

‘Oh,' said Mr Lushington, ‘what did you talk about?'

‘Things,' Mrs Lushington replied. ‘Life, I suppose. But not in any intellectual way. So you needn't worry.'

He hiccuped once or twice and stumbled on the steps they were mounting.

‘If you'd like to know, I didn't stew over old stud books or agricultural stuff.'

‘What did you do then?' his wife asked with an aloofness which suggested she was listening intently as she took off her stretchy cardigan and faded velour.

‘I wrote a poem,' Mr Lushington confessed.

‘Those!' she sighed, tizzing up her hair, and when they had emerged into stronger light, ‘You've got it over?'

He said he had—‘more or less.'

They were all three staggering slightly.

‘What was it about?' Mrs Lushington asked, now that it was out in front of one who was, in most essentials, a stranger.

Thus cornered, Greg Lushington bleated, not unlike one of his own stud rams, ‘I expect it's about love—that's where everything seems to lead—in some form or other. Unfulfilled love.'

His wife hurried the party as quickly as she could towards a room referred to as the Library, where she knew the deliquescent pikelets would be found, and which housed the encyclopaedia, the dictionary, and her ration of novels from a lending library in Sydney. Anything else in the way of books, anything suggestive of Greg's vice, must have been hidden from neighbourhood eyes in some unfrequented attic.

The Lushingtons brightened at the prospect of pikelets and tea, and Beppi joined them from the kitchen regions where he must have scoured a pan already.

They distributed themselves in what was another neo-Tudor room: dark panels, stone fireplace, with a suite of leather furniture straining at its buttons where it wasn't sagging on its springs.

Marcia poured tea into Staffordshire cups skating uneasily in their saucers. Some of the service had been riveted. She heaped their plates with pikelets. Little embroidered napkins had been provided, which was just as well, for the Lushingtons were soon in a somewhat buttery condition.

He too, in their company, was transported back to nurseryland. to Mummy and ‘your father', which was what the Lushingtons wanted, except that for a moment Marcia's pikelet must have turned to flesh, and Greg's mouthful to a difficult word in one of the disgraceful poems.

Greg wiped his fingers on one of the embroidered napkins; as fingers they were rather too delicate, and in their efforts to demonstrate their practical worth, one of them had gone missing; a thumb wore its purple nail like a medal; yet the palms, showing pink, were those of a rich and idle man, who mumbled through the last of his mouthful of pikelet, ‘The word should have been “placebo”' before dabbing at a trickle of butter.

‘Oh God,' Marcia complained, ‘I wonder what you'll come out with next.'

Wiping his fingers and turning to Eddie, Greg Lushington began telling, ‘… when I was a boy foxes used to kill the turkeys. We never heard a sound. But sometimes a terrier—we always kept a pack of them—would bring in a dead fox. All done most silently. Once, I remember, an old dog—Patch—almost blind wtih cataract—brought in a turkey gobbler's head instead. I had a governess, Miss Delbridge, who fancied herself at the piano. She was playing a Chopin mazurka at the time. As she was pedalling her soul away, Patch laid the turkey's head at her feet. A kind of love offering—or that's how I saw it.'

‘A love offering!' Marcia exclaimed. ‘How could a little boy have known?'

‘By instinct of course—like dogs. I bet Eddie would have known.' Mr Lushington paused, thoughtfully exploring the comers of his mouth. ‘Old men know more perhaps, but never grow as wise as they hope.'

The fire leaped in the stone hearth, then relapsed into a drowsier tempo; it should have been a comfort to those seated round it.

‘Oh dear, all this is horrid—morbid. I wasn't expecting anything like it—with my pikelets—after our ride.'

Beppi must have interpreted her disapproval as an invitation. He started barking, and from lying on the sofa, jumped upon his mistress's lap, put his front paws on her bosom and started licking her glossy lips.

Mrs Lushington laughed. ‘Disgusting little dog!' she shrieked, and pushed him down, but immediately snatched him back, and gave him a kiss on his wet blackberry of a nose.

‘Hydatids, Marcia …' her husband warned.

Which she ignored. ‘I adore you,' she told her dog, ‘as you ought to know.'

Greg started groaning up out of his chair, not without a faint fart or two. ‘I'm going to leave you,' he announced. ‘There's something, I realise, I ought to alter in the last line.'

He was obviously obsessed by words, when Eddie had thought his obsessions lay almost anywhere else: sheep, worms, the sons he hadn't got.

He reproached Marcia for not having told him about the poems.

‘Why should I have told?' She pouted. ‘If you tell too much in the beginning there's nothing left for later on. That's why so many marriages break up.'

‘Why are you against poetry?' he asked.

‘I'm not. Everyone else is. So I don't make a point of flaunting it in their faces. It might put them off us. Actually, I always leave a book of verse on the stool in the visitors' lav. Nothing too long. Narrative poems,' she turned appealing eyes on him, ‘are no go in a cold climate.'

Contrary to reason, his mistress was warming him again. He went and propped a knee on the sofa beside her, where a whiff of last night's perfume and a smell of cleanly dog rose up around him. At the moment he was perhaps drawn to Greg's unexpected dedication to poetry as much as to his wife's voluptuous charms. He was even disturbed by a ripple of grudging affection for his own mother. For it occurred to him that the unexpected in Eadie Twyborn was similar to that which linked the Lushingtons. He would have liked to share his discovery of their common trait, but remembering Marcia's antipathy, he confined himself to fingering her cleavage where a blob of butter, fallen from a pikelet, had hardened into what could have passed for one of Eadie's antique brooches.

‘Darling,' Marcia sighed, looking up, ‘not on Sunday, and while Greg is tidying a poem.'

So he realised that he was dismissed, and had better lump it, together with the Mule, down to the cottage. What surprised him more than anything was his desire to possess Marcia again, and in spite of the dangers inherent in the act.

With this thought, he pressed a kiss into her mouth, and was received into some buttery depths before firm rejection.

 

No less firmly he stormed inside the deserted cottage, his masculine self flinching neither at chill nor dark. He lit a lamp, and as the flame steadied, his ‘love' for Marcia became more credible; his affection for the human creatures with whom he shared this hovel grew. How Eudoxia might have reacted, whether she would have approved of, improved on, or cynically dismissed his sentiments, he did not stop to consider, but flung out to the yard, and after assembling logs and kindling, stoked the kitchen stove, and lit fires in the cook's room and the manager's. Peggy Tyrrell's looked more desolate for the empty tumbler on the window-sill, its water swaying as he moved around. As he knelt at the manager's hearth he shrank slightly, from sensing the stare of Don Prowse's thin wife aimed between his shoulderblades.

After he had got the fire going, he turned round, determined to outstare Kath. Not succeeding, he decided to go one better: he threw himself on the loosely articulated iron bedstead with the brass knobs. It heaved and expostulated obscenely. Through some collaboration between glass and firelight, Kath appeared to blink and withdraw—and were those two elongated tears? That is how icons behave, as he knew from Angelos Vatatzes, and how miracles are recorded. If Kath was scarcely Don's miracle, her photograph was his nearest approach to iconography.