The Twyborn Affair (34 page)

On an occasion when Mrs Tyrrell's monologue had driven each of them early to his room, the manager called through the thin wall, ‘Why don't you come in, Ed, and have a yarn? Not very sociable, are yer?' The voice was still accusing when his offsider appeared in the doorway.

‘You couldn't call either of us sociable, walking out on poor old Peggy.'

‘Arr, Christ! Peggy's all right. But women finish by givin' yer the gripes.'

‘The girls in town?'

They were seated opposite each other, pyjamas limp, rank with summer.

‘Girls!' Prowse grunted. ‘There's a time and place for anything.' His need for sociability forced the manager to pour his guest a drink. ‘That one—Valda—that I told you about—I might even marry if the wife 'ud give me a divorce. But Kath's the sour type that hangs on to what she considers 'er rights after she's bloody shown she doesn't want 'em.'

He knocked back his drink, scratching at his chest through the gap in his pyjama coat.

He brought out an album. ‘These 'ull make yer laugh!' he promised, while appearing far from mirthful himself. ‘Old photos.'

He began turning the khaki pages on yellowed to greyer, more recent snapshots, in most cases meticulously mounted, with captions in white ink.

A few loose snaps slid out in the beginning. He gathered them up, but not before Eddie had identified the thin woman from the enlargement on the wall.

‘That's Kath,' Prowse muttered unnecessarily before leafing on through the album.

‘Here's Valda,' he indicated more enthusiastically with a blue
thumbnail Eddie could remember receiving a hit from a hammer.

A plump smiling girl in a hat, Valda was shown holding a racquet as she stood pressed against the tennis net.

‘Take it from me, Valda's the good oil!' Prowse bumped his guest's pyjamaed knee with his.

They forged on. There were the blank spaces from which Kath must have been dismounted, only in half-hearted revenge for the enlarged Kath still ruled his room.

‘That's poor little Kim,' said Prowse.

She looked a disapproving child, with more of her mother in her than her father. The moment after she had been snapped, her upper teeth would more than likely have clamped on her lower lip as she wondered whether she had done right in exposing herself to a camera.

Prowse turned and turned.

‘That's me brother.' He sighed. ‘He was killed in action.'

‘Me brother' was a Light Horseman, too bronzed, too lithe, too beplumed, too much of a good thing, with death already in his light eyes.

Prowse turned the page too quickly.

After the brother, the group was something of a relief: of average, clumsy, lumpy blokes.

‘Those were some mates of mine—who enlisted. It was taken just before they embarked.

Eddie was examining the mates, when Don nicked the page.

‘Don't think, Eddie, I wouldn't 'uv enlisted. I know you were in the War. They told me about yer decoration. I would 'uv. But Greg pointed out I was doing a necessary job. And Marce;' as Eddie had heard several times before.

The coarse fingers were torturing the pasteboard edges of the khaki snapshot album.

Eddie Twyborn felt like blubbing as he hadn't since he came across his first corpse.

‘So you see?' The host poured them another drink.

Prowse turned the pages of the album.

‘Who's this?' Although you knew.

‘That's Mum.'

She had an aggressive jaw and was wearing an A.I.F. brooch pinned across the V of a print frock.

‘She never got over Bert's death. Well, you can understand.' Don sounded as though he were making excuses for his own earlier excesses.

‘And this?'

‘Mum when she was younger.'

Mum was holding a frocked moppet with abundant curls. Rather a pugnacious, scowling child. A miniature of herself in fact. Mum's scowls were girlish then.

‘But the kid?'

Don's thumb rasped against the edge of the page. ‘That's bloody me! That's how she kept me! That's what they do to yer when you're helpless,' he bellowed. ‘The women!'

His knees were bumping against his guest's, through the thin sweaty poplin of summer pyjamas.

Eddie said, ‘I've got to get some sleep, Don, or I shan't be up in the morning.'

‘Anyway,' the manager said, ‘we had a yarn. And that's something I didn't think yer capable of.'

‘How?'

Without answering, Prowse bowed his head; he was pretty far gone by now. Several snaps of Kath fell out of the album.

Eddie wondered whether he should pick them up, but didn't.

He stood for a moment looking down on the bowed head, at a balding patch on top of it, that of an orange, tonsured monk.

He wondered how the man would have reacted had he bent and touched the patch of skin. He was tempted to do it. Drained of his masculine strength and native brutality, Prowse was reduced to a harmless, rather pathetic ape. Eddie's heart was thumping, but he managed to restrain his inclination. It was too incredible, to himself, and might have shocked one who was perhaps not drunk enough.

Instead he put his arms under the armpits and began easing Prowse on to the bed as he had done many times before.

‘Thanks, Ed—you're the good oil …' he thought he heard as the heavy arms slithered briefly over his ribs.

Then the head lolled back on the pillow, the smile withdrawing from fox's teeth into a glare of bronze stubble.

Prowse slept, and Eddie turned down the lamp, till the familiar smell of untrimmed wick filled the darkened room.

At night the dark grew suffocating in the felted rooms of the creaking cottage. The cries of the sleepers tormented him: Peggy Tyrrell for her rheumatics and her daughters, Don Prowse for God knew what—the war he hadn't enlisted for, his dead brother, the failure of his marriage, Valda in her hat offering the good oil through the net.

On a certain night Eddie could no longer endure the manager's mutterings, his farts, the metallic jingling of a bed the other side of a thin wall. He got up, thinking to spend the rest of the night by the cool of the river, but had hardly got the screen-door open when the voice intercepted him.

‘Where yer goin', Ed?'

‘Down to the river. I'll stretch out there on a blanket. It's too bloody hot inside.'

Prowse laughed. ‘I'd join yer,' he said, ‘if the mozzies wouldn't get us.'

Eddie persisted, but found the mozzies did get him.

‘What did I tell yer?' Prowse murmured.

Prowse would go outside to have a pee and, braving mosquitoes, stay there longer than making water warranted, perhaps in company with his glowering mum, Kath gnashing on the terms of separation, the brother's Light Horse plumes blowing in the false dawn. Eddie heard the bugle. He heard the screen-door mosquitoing as Don returned. A heavy, orange bungling. Stained poplin hitched to contain the load which women despise, and desire.

On one occasion Eddie was dreaming of the thin, green-skinned child.
I'm Kim who are you? I'm nobody. You must be someone every-
body's somebody. You're right there Kim I'm my father and mother's son and daughter …
She looked as distrustful as the snap with its white-ink caption let into the khaki page of the album. Her lip so disapproving. The two of them a couple of prigs: a chlorotic child and a governess with aspirations to lust. Then she said
Ed I love you
in her father's voice. She put out a pale claw. They were grappling each other in a common desire related to childhood and despair. Before her mother broke in through the disapproving rustle of a screen-door.

He woke after that. It was the actual dawn after the false. He could hear the sound of Don's belt, the buckle hitting the bedstead. Mrs Tyrrell was raking the ashes in the stove. She sighed and burped. There was a smell of burning newspaper and sticks. A cock crowed, pitting his fire against the cool of dawn.

 

‘What do you say if I drive us there?' Prowse had become this eager child, rocking on the balls of his feet beside the shining black Packard Mr Edmonds had been working over earlier in the afternoon.

‘There, but not back,' Mrs Lushington stipulated in the kind of voice Mum Prowse might have used on her frocked and ringletted boy. ‘I'll drive back.' She was very firm in her decision, her frown hidden by a flesh bandeau powdered with small metallic beads which collaborated with the evening light to flash what could have been messages in code.

Although her edict was strong enough to have sprung from a dogmatic male, Marcia Lushington had never looked more feminine to Eddie Twyborn, her rather too large, powdered breasts barely controlled by flesh charmeuse. Almost always neutral, this evening she emitted flashes of green from swathes of that same tone as the seas of young barley grass which stormed through ‘Bogong' in the spring.

She was obviously flattered by his looking at her, and as she thought, quite rightly, appreciating her appearance. She touched his hand as they entered the black Packard, where the manager, in
a suit which had grown too tight for him, had already seated himself like an attendant husband.

Marcia muttered, ‘I'd better sit beside old Don—restrain him if he's had a couple for the road.'

Don most likely hadn't heard; he was too engrossed in examining the controls awaiting his touch, delighted by the prospect of driving the Lushington Packard on even an inconsiderable journey.

Eddie got behind. Marcia looked round and smiled from below the flesh bandeau, its metal beads sifting a radiance, of the theatre rather than the spirit, out of the hard, natural light.

Don pronounced very gravely, ‘This is something like it,' juggling with gears as they finished with the slope below the house and straightened out across the stony stretch before the bridge. ‘Oh God,' he mumbled, and again, ‘Jesus Christ—it's good to be driving a real car!'

Marcia was sitting straight-backed. Eddie suspected she had been brought up on religion: a Methodist from Tilba. Greg could only have been C of E, Marcia Methodist—or Baptist? though she'd picked up a wrinkle or two from the Romans.

He was still undecided on the denomination from which Marcia Lushington had lapsed, when he glanced out, and there was Mrs Tyrrell beside the loosely articulated bridge, her gums parted, her sticks of arms raised from out of the bobbled shawl.

‘Good on yez!' Peggy called in a burst of Saturday evening despair, perhaps remembering the funerals she had missed, the corpses she hadn't been invited to lay out, since accepting to finish her pensioned life working for the Lushingtons of ‘Bogong'.

They waved back, trailing the perfumes of brilliantine and bath salts, they waved at that crucified cow, poor Peggy, beside the bucking bridge. They could afford to be magnanimous as they drove off to the party to which they had been invited.

Marcia had walked down to tell Eddie. ‘It's the Winterbothams.' She stood looking at the toes of her shoes; how the stones had scuffed them. ‘Next Saturday evening. Everybody's dying to meet you.'

‘Why—what do they know?'

Marcia snorted, and continued looking at her martyred shoes. ‘Well, you're here, aren't you? With us. And you're your father's son.'

‘And what about my mother?'

‘Oh, yes, yes! Of course your mother. We know about
mothers
!' She crimped her brows.

Then she added, ‘They probably also want to decide whether you're my lover.'

So now they were driving to the Winterbothams' party.

In yet another footnote Marcia had thought to explain, ‘We'll have to take poor old Don along, otherwise he might turn against us—or commit suicide, or something.'

So here was old Don driving them to the Winterbothams. Of ‘Belair'.

It was a house of greater pretensions than the Lushingtons' discreetly ramshackle affair, more of an Edwardian city mansion, in ox-blood brick with tan ironwork, all illuminated for the party, if self-advertisement weren't perhaps the rule. Music was already bursting out, or anyway saxophones and drums were tuning up. The arriving guests were made aware that ‘Last Night on the Back Porch' and ‘Marquita' were in the band's repertoire.

Don Prowse swirled his passengers round the oval rose-bed, and brought the black Packard to a standstill. His marriage may have failed, but he was a perfectionist in his handling of a car.

‘Well,' sighed Marcia, ‘this is it.' She might have regretted their coming.

Later in the evening, as the French champagne frothed over, and at least one of the guests had dropped his Pavlova on the parquet, Don explained to Eddie, ‘Old Greg could write a cheque and buy out Winterbothams any time they asked for it.'

There was no asking for it tonight. Winterbothams appeared on top of the wave, Harold a tall, cadaverous man whose scabby hands had earned all that they had got hold of, from cedar panelling and Sèvres urns, to his wife's Paquin model and his own uneasy dinner jacket.

He welcomed the Lushingtons' acquisition by putting an arm round his shoulders and exposing equally uneasy teeth in a ferocious china smile. ‘Heard about you, Eddie. What can we get you to drink?' Like Greg Lushington, Harold Winterbotham seemed to think that by rushing a stranger behind the veil of alcohol his own uncertainty would glare less in the stranger's eyes.

The greatest diffident of all, Eddie Twyborn saw through their play too clearly. If he could have shown them the defenceless grub inside what they took to be flawless armour, they might have established some kind of bumbling relationship. But he could not. Instead, he and Harold fell back on alcohol and the momentous question of what Eddie should have to drink.

One look, and Bid Winterbotham swept Marcia Lushington behind the scenes, into the undressing room of confidences, but Marcia almost immediately brought herself back. She stood patting her hair, glancing in and out of the Winterbotham mirrors and between the bars of the hired music. It seemed as though she knew it all, and Bid offering the savoury boats to Eddie Twyborn in preference to the ‘Belair' regulars.