The Twyborn Affair (38 page)

Mr Prowse shaved regularly now. The texture of the burnished skin fascinated Eddie Twyborn.

Don would lower his eyes on finding himself scrutinised.

His clothes were more formal. He was, in fact, the manager, who almost never mucked in as he had on the day when the men were crutching.

The jackeroo became more formal too, asking at tea for information on cross-breeding, wool sales, and crops.

Mrs Tyrrell gravely served the pudding, and sat afterwards, hands folded in her apron, like Our Lady of Stains.

Marcia alone had no part in the play which was being enacted.
Though he looked for her from a distance, Eddie failed to catch sight of the black Packard, the bay gelding or the solitary figure hitting a golf ball on the mini course below the house.

One night after the manager had gone up to do some more accounting, he thought he heard her voice, not that which issued from the thick, thyroidal throat of the sensual woman who had dragged him into her bed, but of the tentative girl who had ridden with him the day they had met by accident in a far paddock.

He went out preparing to investigate.

For no good reason beyond infallible instinct Mrs Tyrrell called, ‘Mrs Lushington, Mrs Edmonds says, is suffering from a heavy cold.'

And he called back, ‘I hope Mrs Edmonds hasn't brought it down with her. It wouldn't be fair if you were laid up so soon after your ma's visit.'

Herself fairly mature, Peggy had an ancient mother, Ma Corkill, who had been out to ‘Bogong' recently to investigate her daughter's situation.

Mrs Corkill, the she-ancient of she-ancients, did not aspire to hats as did her daughter, but wore her hair in the semblance of a hat, a creation such as insects weave out of leaves and twigs, and dead grass, its structure containing a suppressed hum, which erupts in a sizzle of red-hot needles if anyone is unwise enough to poke it. (Neither mother nor daughter approved of hair-washing: ‘it don't do nothun for yer health, dear;' and in fact, as Peggy Tyrrell confessed, neither had ever washed hers.)

Unlike her daughter, who was still in possession of the fangs to which she hitched her Sunday teeth, the old lady was completely toothless. Her vocabulary was sparse but serviceable, particularly after she had taken a dose from a medicine bottle she carried in an apron pocket, or seated with Peggy on the double dunny, or holding a post-mortem in the daughter's bed after the lamp had been blown out. As the smell of extinguished wick ascended, the women's voices would entwine in a duet embellished by roulades and trills worthy of a more rococo age.

Ma Corkill's visit to ‘Bogong' had its climax in her flinging a kettle of boiling water at her daughter halfway through the third day. She was collected by a Tyrrell grandson, almost as mature as his mother it seemed, as he sat in his convulsive Ford, under the brim of a green-grey Sewell felt, the neckband of his shirt gathered together by a glass ruby in a brass claw.

‘What can yer do,' Mrs Tyrrell asked, ‘if it's yer own mother?'

Nobody had the answer to that; least of all Eddie Twyborn, who had never found the answer to himself.

Least of all on his way up the hill to face Marcia's displeasure for his neglect and his avoidance of her friends the Golsons, or perhaps on overcoming that displeasure, to prove to himself that she was still his mistress. It was most important that he should decide how much of his life was serious and how much farce.

Though late enough, there were signs of life, sounds of conversation. No car parked in the drive. Marcia might have persuaded a servant to stay behind and receive her confidences, or perhaps, he began to fear, Prowse had come up for some of that office work by which he boosted his self-importance.

Eddie passed the office window. In a deserted room a single light bulb under a white porcelain shade was engaged in a battering match with walls enamelled an electric blue.

The voices were coming from that vast and hideous mock-Tudor library. The windows and glass doors had been thrown open to summer. He halted in the darkness on reaching the narrow carpet of light laid across the tiles from doorway to garden.

‘You're all very well when you need a bloke,' Prowse was grumbling.

Marcia laughed what was recognisably a bored laugh. ‘We might as well admit there's a practical side to every human relationship.'

‘But no one's ever used me as you have.'

‘I'd have thought I was useful to you—at a certain stage—when your wife couldn't stand any more.'

‘Yes, but I thought you had some feeling for me.'

‘Yes, I did have. But feeling doesn't always last. Like tastes.
When I was a little girl I couldn't eat too much Yorkshire pudding. Then, suddenly, I couldn't touch another mouthful.'

‘But you called one of the kids after Prowse.'

‘Oh yes, I know. That was Greg. He was sorry for you. He wanted to do you a kindness, Don.'

‘And what did you do for Greg? The kid was ours, wasn't he?'

‘Who knows? Oh God, don't let's start going over it again!'

She had begun walking about. There was the sound of struck matches, then the smell of the Abdulla cigarette which Marcia smoked.

‘Lost yer taste for Yorkshire pud, but you might develop it again. Like you've started coming at the other.'

There was half a sigh, half a snort from Marcia. ‘If you must put it that way …'

‘You were the one that put it.'

Marcia appeared in the doorway, the necklaces of Venus eating into her heavy throat, the smoke blown from her nostrils indicative of extreme irritation.

Eddie saw that he hated Marcia.

‘Don't let's argue!' she insisted from beside the drooping, gold-tipped cigarette.

‘Then let's have it out the other way. That's what you'd call practical, isn't it?'

‘How?' She raised her head imperiously.

‘You know I do it good.'

She stood looking out into the dark. ‘You make it sound so gross.'

He had come up behind; the thick orange forearms appeared round her waist. ‘That's what you're all about, Marcia. What you want. And what we do so well together.'

‘Oh,' she whimpered, ‘there's more than that!'

‘Funny you only recently found out.'

‘Lives change.'

‘Funny it happened after Twyborn came. You're not on with Eddie, are you, Marce?'

‘What a thing to imagine!' She had broken free and turned back
into the enormous room. ‘We have a fine relationship—Eddie and I. His friendship is something I value immensely. He gives me so much more than any of the other boring clods in the district.'

‘Me included.'

‘Oh,
darling
, I didn't mean to be rude! You're someone I value differently. You're part of our lives. Greg and I do appreciate you, Don.'

‘Useful—practical—profitable. Like a ram or a stud bull.'

At this point there took place a considerable trampling of the moth-eaten Afghan carpet as she tried to sidestep his accusations and her stud followed her round the room.

‘This Eddie Twyborn you have the fine relationship with—you don't know what you've got on yer hands. Well, I'll tell yer. He's nothun more than a bloody queen.'

There was rather a long pause. ‘I haven't any evidence of it,' Marcia Lushington replied at last. ‘Have you?'

‘I can put two and two together.' He must still have been pounding about; the windows were rattling. ‘If there's anything I can't stand it's a queen.'

‘Because he's sensitive,' she said, ‘you draw wrong conclusions.'

‘So sensitive he let you down. And now you want the bull again.'

Silence was spreading in widening circles through the mock-Tudor library. The listener visualised numbers of the
Bystander
and
Tatler
in disarray on occasional tables, and the goose-fleshed covers of Marcia's subscribed novels from Dymocks' and Angus and Robertson. He saw the great fireplace with logs awaiting next winter, and in an ash-tray the butt of a gold-tipped Abdulla, its thread of incense uniting with the languor of summer.

Then someone or other was groaning, churning up the heavy silence, a mouth rejecting a mouth from its depths, a body dragging itself away from another equally elastic.

She said, ‘You're right—up to a point,' and laughed one of her thicker laughs.

Which must have been devoured instantly.

When she came up for breath she said, ‘All right, Don—we do
understand each other. But you'll never understand Eddie Twyborn.'

If Prowse didn't reply, it was because she was leading him out of the room, into a distance she and Eddie had explored together on freezing Monaro nights, now this steamier, more bestial version of what the novice had tried to see as a pilgrimage.

Eddie hated Marcia Lushington more than he hated Don Prowse. He might have progressed along the wall through outer darkness to overhear more, if his humiliation hadn't already developed to its utmost: the humiliation of jealousy, more of Marcia than Don.

He returned to a dark cottage where Peggy Tyrrell seemed to be dreaming a sibyl's dreams.

After taking off his clothes, he lay down on his narrow stretcher and began automatically masturbating.

 

The following day was a Saturday, and Prowse had driven into town, to pubs and other less salubrious pastures, taking with him Mrs Tyrrell, who was looking forward to a scene with her mother and a funeral scheduled for the afternoon.

Towards four o'clock, after shaving and bathing, Eddie went up the hill to the house. He found Marcia alone on the veranda, reclining on an old bleached cane chaise. On her outstretched thighs, one of her library books, which more than likely she hadn't been reading, was lying spine upward. She was dressed in a worn grey flannel skirt and a blouse unbuttoned to the opulent cleavage, sleeves turned back to expose the elbows and the blue veins on the reverse side. Her arms were hanging listlessly for the brief but intense Monaro heat. Her face expressed a disenchantment, whether real or cultivated, radiating from a nose made thicker, soggier, by the heavy cold Mrs Tyrrell had reported.

‘Can I be dreaming?' she said at last, cutting into the remark with a grudging smile, and coughing thickly to enlist her cold.

‘No,' he said, ‘I think we're real enough,' and laughed.

He sat down on an upright chair, another member of the suite in dilapidated, bleached cane.

Whereas he had planned to be cruel, biting, dramatic, he felt
sympathetic towards her: it must have been those red, swollen eyelids, or else his bath had cooled him off. His clothes sat so lightly on him, he might in other circumstances have felt the urge to take them off, to stretch alongside her, no longer a lover, but some lean and ingratiating breed of hairless dog, licking her wrists, expecting an exchange of caresses.

‘Why did you treat me like that? And as far as I can see, all because of the poor Golsons. Now, why?' she hectored mildly.

‘I'm not prepared to go into that.' He sounded tense; his light mood was leaving him.

‘You've made me very unhappy,' she told him, ‘Eddie, dearest—for no good reason that I can imagine. When I most need your—company—your confidence, you treat me as though I'm in some way diseased.'

‘They tell me Greg is expected back at any moment. That will be fine for you, Marcia.'

She almost suppressed a frown. ‘Dear old Greg! Not everyone appreciates him, but I think, Eddie, you do—you and your father.'

There was a silence in which the cane furniture showed signs of disintegrating.

Marcia said, ‘I must go and make us some tea.'

‘Don't bother.'

‘But it's what we do at four o'clock. Don't expect a lot of food, though. Mrs Quimby's mumping over something or other, probably preparing to give notice.'

The fact that he, too, was more than probably going to leave made him melancholy, sitting on the Lushingtons' veranda with the river flat spread before him, the brown river meandering through bleached tussock, the sensuous forms of naked hills on either side: a landscape which had engaged his feelings in a brief and unlikely love affair he was about to end.

If all love affairs are not, perhaps, unlikely. Only the meat of marriage convinces, if you are made for it, and open to conviction.

A hornet was somewhere ceaselessly working on its citadel, and under the eaves hung a swallow's nest temporarily abandoned by its
tenant, in each case evidence of the continuity which convinces animals better than it does human beings, unless they are human vegetables.

Marcia returned carrying a tray as though it were the sort of act she wasn't used to performing. Her shoulders drooped, her bare arms looked defenceless, even pathetic. Perhaps she expected him, as a lover, or simply as a man, to jump up and help her with the tray.

But he didn't: he was too distant, and at the same time too absorbed in everything happening around him, the fidgeting sound of the hornet, on the faded plain the brown river, static now, swift in memory, over the veranda tiles Marcia's shuffle in a pair of scuffed, once elegant, crocodile shoes.

She arranged the tray on a table, yet another member of the weathered cane family

A generous wedge was missing from the jam sandwich, its pink icing buttoned down and slightly stained by a wreath of crystallised violets. Though a cake for a country occasion, the recalcitrant Mrs Quimby had failed to pipe a message on it.

Marcia let off a misplaced giggle. ‘There we are, darling!' She would have liked to appear girlish, but suspected at once that he would not allow her.

He sat, chin lowered, staring ahead. He saw himself, alas, as a farouche schoolboy refusing to let Mum have him on. Poor Marce didn't know about it, while he had the unfair advantage, at any rate since last night, of knowing almost everything.

She poured the tea, of a delicacy which must have been wasted on the district, and which they would have discussed afterwards: that hogwash of Marcia Lushington's.