The Twyborn Affair (37 page)

‘What about a tot of bi-carb if I bring it?'

‘Thanks, Ed, it can't be indigestion. Didn't eat me tea. Didn't feel up to stuffed
flaps
.' Again a groan, and a jingling of the bed. ‘I never talk about it, but Dad's old man died of cancer, Eddie.'

Eddie said, ‘See you in the morning, Don.'

‘Don't think I'm fishing for sympathy,' the manager called after him. ‘But I can't say we weren't worrying about yer.'

As he undressed he could hear a listening. He could almost hear sandy eyelashes thrashing the silences, then after he had put out his lamp, Prowse rising through a jingle before going out to pee off the veranda. He could hear him listening, barefoot on the brown lino, after returning.

When sleep fell on Eddie Twyborn, a penful of wethers milling
round him, Marcia was possibly there. Yes. Though in what capacity he could not remember when he awoke to a pale sky and dwindling stars the morning of the crutching.

In the next room the manager must have been lying on his back, while in the kitchen Mother Tyrrell was raking the stove and calling on Our Lady to rid her of her aches.

 

It was a long day at the shed. At noon Jim the Father brought in a mob of ewes when yesterday's wethers were barely accounted for.

‘ 'Ow's yer back doin', Ed?' Denny Allen called to his mate.

The manager came and went, more often absent than present, though when there, he would muck in with the men in short ostentatious bursts, impressively muscular in a singlet. ‘Better to get it over—even if it buggers us,' he advised his team.

Prowse chose the cleaner sheep, Eddie noticed, himself drawn, it appeared, to the daggier ones. It was an aspect of his own condition he had always known about, but it amused him to recognise it afresh while snipping at the dags of shit, laying bare the urine-sodden wrinkles with their spoil of seething maggots, round a sheep's arse.

At one stage he found he had picked a ewe who must have detached herself from her own mob and joined the wethers. Before becoming fully aware of the difference in sex of the sheep he was handling, he had cut off the tip of the vulva. Nobody noticed his clumsiness or distress. As the day lengthened and the men grew tired, the blood flowed copiously from under the most professional hand. Lacerated beasts were sometimes dismissed with kicks and curses.

At least the sound of snipping soothed, and the smell of tar rising from wounded, blown crotches. Some of the sheep raised their muzzles, baring their teeth in ecstasy or agony at the treatment they were receiving.

From squirming on the greasy slats, they regained a precarious balance as Eddie Twyborn straightened a fastidious masochist's back.
He must have been grinning like a skull. His blisters had burst and become raw patches from manipulating the hand-shears.

Denny laughed. ‘ 'Ow you doin', Ed feller?'

During one of his appearances Prowse laid a hot, appraising hand on the novice's back. ‘Eddie 'ud make a professional shearer if he only knew it.'

Towards mid-afternoon the manager decided he did not want the wethers returned to Bald Hill. He told off Eddie to drive them to a rested paddock at some distance, while Jim and Denny, and he in theory, finished crutching the ewes.

‘Can't write home and say I'm a slave-driver,' he told the jackeroo, who was by then too dazed to think of an answer.

It was some relief to be off on his own, his back broken, his blistered hands listless on the reins. Released from their recent ordeal, the wethers trotted meekly enough, their heads working as though by strings concealed in their papier mâché armour. In her automatic movements, the mare too, seemed relieved, jingling the metal on her bridle, lowering her head to snort at the dust, prodding stragglers with her muzzle.

An animal acquiescence had descended on all those involved in the migration through the coppery glare of late afternoon, in which, on the other hand, trees were shedding a less passive drizzle of silver light.

They reached the distant paddock, its fence in such poor repair he saw himself returning in a few days to that other back-breaking operation of digging post-holes, tamping down the stones round renewed posts, and straining vindictive wire. In his present exhaustion he accepted the state of affairs with a degree of cynical resignation, slammed and chained the netted gate, and headed for home.

His horse had carried him perhaps a mile when he was overcome by drowsiness. He dismounted, and after tethering the mare to one of her front fetlocks, lay down beneath a tree, on the pricking grass, amongst the lengthening shadows. He did not sleep, but fell into that state between waking and sleeping in which he usually came closest to being his actual self.

This evening he started remembering or re-living an occasion, it was a Sunday afternoon, when he had felt the urge to see his fortuitous mistress. Never in his life had he felt so aggressive, so masculine, or so impelled by the desire to fuck this coarsely feminine woman. He deliberately thought of it as
fucking
, and spoke the word on his way up the hill between the cottage and the homestead. As he walked he was looking down at his coarse, labourer's boots which he was in the habit of treating with rendered-down mutton fat. The boots matched his intention, just as no other word would have fitted the acts he performed with Marcia, nothing of love, in spite of her protestations. Except on another, more accidental occasion when they had ridden together through the paddocks, sidestepping the imperfect expressions of perfection.

Each incident had taken place so long ago, if not in time, in experience, Eddie Twyborn could only watch them in detachment as he lay dozing or re-living beneath his tree, the face of Greg Lushington, that amiable absentee, re-forming amongst the branches. However intangible, Greg's presence made his own behaviour the coarser, the more shocking.

The house when he reached it on this Sunday afternoon had about it an air of desertion. A cat raised its head from where it was lying in a patch of winter sunlight. A wiry strand of climbing rose was rubbing deeper the scar it had worn on a corner of painted brickwork.

As he wandered round, considering his plan of attack, chains rattled against kennels, mingling with abortive barks and faint moans of affection for one who had ceased to be a total stranger. He entered by the kitchen door. The servants were gone, either to town or their own quarters. The only life in the living rooms was a stirring of almost extinct coals (on tables, copies of the London
Tatler
and library books from Sydney which amounted to Marcia's intellectual life.)

He looked inside her bedroom more cautiously, for fear of disturbing a migraine or a monthly.

Silence and the absence of its owner played on the frustration growing in him.

He flung himself on the bed, of the same oyster- or scallop-tones as those of Marcia his mistress (incredible word). There was Marcia's familiar scent, not so much a synthetic perfume as that of her body. He lay punching at the down pillows, prising out of crumpled satin handfuls of opulent flesh, until present impotence and an undertow of memory forced him off the bed to rummage through the clothes hanging in the wardrobes.

Starting in frustration and anger, he was cajoled, pricked, and finally seduced by the empty garments, the soft and slithery, the harsh and grainy, the almost live-animal, which he held in his arms. He fumbled with his own crude moleskins, the bargain shirt from the Chinaman's store. The laces of his wrinkled boots, stinking of rancid mutton fat, lashed at him as he got them off. He stood shivering in what now passed for his actual body, muscular instead of sinuous, hairier than formerly, less subtle but more experienced.

He needed no guidance in entering the labyrinth of gold thread and sable, the sombre, yet glowing, brocaded tribute to one of Marcia's less neutral selves. And still was not satisfied by the image Marcia's glass presented.

He stormed at the dressing-table, roughing up his hair, dabbling with the beige puff in armpits from which the heavy brocaded sleeves fell back, outstaring himself feverishly, then working on the mouth till it glistened like the pale, coral trap of some great tremulous sea anemone.

He fell back on Marcia's bed.

And the footsteps began advancing with a male assurance which had been his own till recently. Eudoxia Vatatzes lay palpitating, if contradictorily erect, awaiting the ravishment of male thighs.

The movement of her heart had taken over from all other manifestations as the door was pushed farther ajar, and the head intruded. It was Greg Lushington, sightless behind his spectacles. Neither the glare from Norweigan glaciers, nor the heady air of Himalayas or Andes could have blinded him, for he was still rooted in his own country of pale, nut-flavoured moths.

‘I just wanted to tell you, Marce, that the word was wrong—in
the poem, I mean. What I thought of as “placebo”, you remember? ought to have been “purulence”.'

Then he smiled, and immediately withdrew, not wanting to disturb his wife's rest.

And Eudoxia Vatatzes threw off her borrowed clothes, as Eddie Twyborn broke up the scene he was re-living in the gathering shadows, returning from the boundary paddock after a day's crutching.

He untethered his mare from her own fetlock and returned to the settlement known as ‘Bogong', where Peggy Tyrrell, inside the illuminated kitchen, was engaged in the evening ritual of maltreating food into the semblance of a meal. Tonight there was a smell of onions—and was it beef on the boil instead of mutton? Some days earlier Jim Allen had destroyed a cow, her leg broken by a fall down a gully.

This luxury of cooking smells united with the stench of his own body, greasy wool, and tar from the anointing of sheeps' wounds and fly-blown wrinkles, while inside the shed, as he mixed his horse a feed, the sweet scents of chaff and oats mingled with the no less intoxicating, if baser stenches he had brought with him.

In the darkness beyond the feed-room proper, in the depths of the shed where a soft mountain of chaff was stored, a landslide had been started by a cat pursuing a rat. There was a deathly squeal as the cat pounced and worried its prey, growling at the human intruder.

From her stall the mare was whinnying at him impatiently. She glared and snorted, stamping on the brickwork with small, elegant, shod hooves. Her greed as he poured the oats and chaff whetted his own appetite for sodden onions and stringy cow passing as beef. (He would have liked to believe his own disguises more convincing. Well, it had been proved that they were.)

Leaving his ravenous horse to her feed he heard the iron door pushed farther open on grudging hinges. Against a sky paling into darkness it could only have been Prowse's bulk advancing unsteadily into the sweet must of the shed's enveloping gloom.

‘What is it, Don? What've I done wrong this time?'

The form came shambling on. ‘Wrong?' A familiar blast of whiskied breath was introduced into the gentler scents of the stable and the dusty draught from chaff set in motion by the huntress cat.

‘Yes. I'd like to know. I never seem to do the right thing by you.' It wasn't quite honest.

‘Nothing wrong, I suppose—Eddie—in being true to yerself.'

Prowse's bulk had reached the point where they were bumping against each other in the darkness.

Eddie realised that, up against this laborious drunk, he was simulating drunkenness.

‘And what's myself?' he dared.

There was a pause, and the sounds of overheated, crackling iron and slithering chaff.

Till Prowse was prepared to come out with it. ‘I reckon I recognised you, Eddie, the day you jumped in—into the river—and started flashing yer tail at us. I reckon I recognised a fuckun queen.'

All the while Don Prowse was pushing his bulk up against Eddie Twyborn's more slender offering.

‘See?'

‘If that's what you saw …' Eddie knew that his voice, like his body, was trembling.

Prowse suddenly grew enraged. He, too, had started trembling in a massive way, smelling of sodden red hair almost stronger than the whiskey breath, shouting, pushing his opponent around and about with chest and thighs, spinning him face down in the chaff.

‘A queen! A queen! A fuckun queen!' Sobbing as though it was his wife Kath walking out on him.

Prowse was tearing at all that had ever offended him in life, at the same time exposing all that he had never confessed, unless in the snapshot album.

His victim's face was buried always deeper, breathless, in the loose chaff as Don Prowse entered the past through the present.

Eddie Twyborn was breathing chaff, sobbing back, not for the indignity to which he was being subjected, but finally for his acceptance of it.

When Prowse had had his way they lay coupled, breathing in some kind of harmony.

Till the male animal withdrew, muttering what could have been, ‘You asked for it—you fuckun asked …'

And got himself out of the shed.

The victim lay awhile, wholly exhausted by the switch to this other role. Then stood up, chaff trickling down skin wherever it did not stick inside rucked-up shirt and torn pants—the disguise which didn't disguise.

Complete darkness had fallen outside, except where Peggy Tyrrell's sibyl, in the illuminated window across the yard, was rising through the steam from a suet pudding she was easing out of its cloth. She glanced up once into the outer darkness, her sibyl's eyes contracting, before resuming the ritual of her suet pud.

 

In the days which followed, they went about doing what had to be done. They used only the words required. They depended on the objects surrounding them, grateful for the furniture of daily life.

The manager announced with the solemnity of an alderman, ‘We can expect Mr Lushington back in the near future.' Reduced by several tones, his voice sounded furred up.

After giving morning orders to Jim, Denny, and the jackeroo, he added importantly, ‘Get on with it then. I've got to go up to the house to do some accounting in Mr Lushington's office.'