The Twyborn Affair (14 page)

All of which she had been receiving from the music until the Greek started turning against her.

He sprang up finally. ‘I must leave you,' he gasped at his guests.

He looked so livid, Mrs Golson cried out in what she hoped was a compassionate tone, ‘Oh dear—there's nothing
wrong?
You're not
ill
, are you?'

Good reliable Curly had risen to support the old fellow if necessary (she had always congratulated herself when Curly, a warden at St James's, carried out the fainted ladies and sat them on the porch during the summer services). Now, in their friends'
salon
, she could have patted his broad back.

But Monsieur Vatatzes assured them he was not in need of assistance or sympathy. ‘I am called by nature,' he explained, and walked rather stiffly out of the room.

Madame Vatatzes continued for a short while at the piano as the romantic composition for four hands trailed off into a series of solo improvisations.

Without turning her straight, and for Mrs Golson, still splendid, carnation back, she informed her visitors, ‘Angelos is the victim of his bladder. He's practically worn a track, poor darling, tramping to the bathroom in the night.'

She sounded a final treble note and closed the lid of the upright piano.

Curly was preparing to sympathise, but Joanie made sure to quash that. ‘I'm so sorry to have put you to all this inconvenience—and upset your husband by coming here.' Much as it pained her to twist the knife, she experienced a sensation of exquisite pleasure from the pain she might have inflicted on the unattainable Madame Vatatzes.

An expression of pain did in fact drift across the sublime face, but from no unkindness on her friend's part, Mrs Golson soon realised; Monsieur Vatatzes was shouting from somewhere deeper in the house, ‘Doxy, where are you? Do your visitors mean to spend the night?'

Madame Vatatzes detached herself in a desperately ungainly movement, floundering in her robe, almost but not quite tripping on the hem, as she thumped across the floor on bare feet, making towards her importunate husband.

The Golsons were stranded in a situation each hoped the other might handle.

While from farther out this distinguished boor continued shouting. ‘But what possessed you?'

Whatever had was drowned in the gushing of a cistern, the flushing of a lavatory bowl.

‘And not to tell me!' Monsieur Vatatzes stormed.

Never would his wife's more murmurous explanations reach the ears of their attentive guests. It was most aggravating.

‘You have no consideration
—poteh poteh—
for the feelings of others.'

‘Pott-ay pott-ay!' Curly sniggered.

‘All this intrigue behind my back! Will you leave me for …' the voice was breaking on a high note as it searched for a word sufficiently abrasive ‘… for these
Australians
of yours?'

His wife's reply was wrapped in silence.

‘What should we
do
, Curly? Slip away—leave a card perhaps—say nothing
—what
?'

Curly said, ‘You're the one who brought it on us, treasure.'

Curly never understood how much she depended on him. Curly, simply, did not understand. Much as she deplored the tedium of sexual intercourse, there were occasions when he might have ravished her, and she would have risen in a shower of grateful hairpins.

The Melton velour was growing so creased in the uncomfortable chair, Mrs Golson finally exploded. ‘What do you think they can be up to?'

Curly was hardly responsive. ‘Your guess is as good as mine.'

It was Madame Vatatzes who helped decide their line of action by returning to the room after several aeons of silence and waiting, during which Mrs Golson had examined the series of hideous ornaments on display in the rented villa, while ignoring the fact that her own husband was breaking wind. (She would have liked to discuss this habit with Curly, but in all their years of marriage she hadn't.)

Madame Vatatzes smiled. The bony face did have something sublime about it: an expression of fulfilment, in its best moments, and this was one of them Mrs Golson enviously observed.

Smoothing her somewhat dishevelled hair, Madame Vatatzes confided in them, ‘He's impossible of course. But there it is—that is Angelos.'

Also smiling, Mrs Golson extended a suede hand. ‘It was so charming—and the music.'

They had come out on the front terrace.

‘I shall always remember your garden,' Mrs Golson said as they sauntered down between the silver borders, their skirts drawing a perfume from them.

‘It was something that happened before we came,' Madame Vatatzes admitted quite humbly.

Mrs Golson turned to her. ‘You've added something by being here,' she told the young woman with a gallantry so undisguised Curly might not have been present; though a man would hardly have understood.

Was Madame Vatatzes embarrassed?

In case she was, Mrs Golson hastened to cover her gaffe by
dragging a leaf or two from a plant. ‘Delicious fragrance,' she pronounced as exquisitely as she could while sniffing at the leaves in her gloved hand. ‘What is it?'

‘Balm,' Madame Vatatzes replied. ‘They say it raises the spirits.'

Mrs Golson did not altogether believe; she suspected her friend had made it up on the spur of the moment, a conceit as delicate as the perfume released from the handful of crushed leaves.

It was an emblazoned evening in which they were standing at the ramshackle gate, Curly cap in hand, wearing the smile he usually adopted for foreigners (because you couldn't accept that the Greek's wife had anything Australian) Joanie adjusting the gossamer to secure her hat for the motor journey, while searching unsuccessfully for some extra-meaningful phrase with which to decorate her leave-taking.

Madame Vatatzes seemed on the verge of making some declaration or appeal as she stood with her hand on the gate, the line of her cheek touched by a last transcendental glow, lips fumbling with elusive words, eyes revealing the same extraordinary mosaic of colour as they had on the occasion of that first meeting, then as self-contained as jewels, now diffused—if not melting. No doubt only an effect produced by evening light. Nor did she find the words she needed to convey that deeper message—which she may never have intended to convey.

So Mrs Golson said, while tying the veil in a bow beneath her chin, ‘We shall see you, I hope.
Au revoir
!' and Madame Vatatzes replied, ‘Good-bye,' smiling, but at the same time perhaps regretful of what she had left unsaid.

 

Curly was allowing Teakle to drive them back to St Mayeul and had seated himself beside Joanie. He appeared exhausted by the unusual nature of what they had recently experienced.

But laughed and said, ‘You were laying it on a bit thick, weren't you?'

‘How?'

‘Her adding to the garden by being there!'

She really didn't know how to answer. She had taken it for granted she would be sitting alone on the back seat, refurbishing and adding to her impressions of the afternoon, when here was Curly lifting the veil on her most private sentiments.

She would have liked to let off a firework in his face, but as she did not have one at hand, she replied dully, ‘It was meant as a little compliment. One had to praise her, in some way, after the scene her husband made. If he
is
the husband …'

‘What makes you think he isn't?'

‘Nothing,' she snapped.

What made her additionally peevish was realisation that the husband's scene had caused her to forget the amethyst brooch she had intended offering Madame Vatatzes. Of course she would not have done so. She would not have found the courage. But might have.

 

Determined to make good her omission, she set out the following afternoon at the same time as they had driven off on their miscarried formal visit. She did not tell Curly, who was about the town with one of his hotel acquaintances. Nor did she call for Teakle, but hired a cab. Because the vehicle was horse-drawn she finally doubted they would reach the villa much before the hour when they had left it yesterday. She was so distracted she had hardly given thought to her appearance, but had thrown on a drab smocked garment she wore for dusty distances. That she was hatless only vaguely troubled her.

As they drove through the pine-grove, she sidled restlessly on the cracked leather with its smell of hay, and ahead of her the reek of a raw-boned horse, its scours competing with the stench from the salt-pans. At least she had her talisman, the amethyst brooch, clutched in her hand.

She halted the driver at the foot of the hill so that she might approach ‘Crimson Cottage' on foot, assemble her thoughts, and perhaps even decide to retreat from the prospect effacing that odious Greek.

She descended from the cab, unassisted of course by the boor she
had engaged, and started on her walk. Would the driver imagine, perhaps, that she meant to escape without paying? At one point she turned, and mumbled in her lamentable French, ‘
Je reviens …
' Whether he heard or not as he sat lolling on his seat, he smiled back at one who could only be classified as a
folle Anglaise
.

So she went on, through a quenched radiance, at this hour the sky slate-coloured above interwoven branches, the waves, a heavy periwinkle hemmed with white, dragging back and forth against the shore, her memories of Madame Vatatzes, the glow on a cheekbone, the smile breaking through terracotta, dimmed, if not extinguished.

At the villa the rickety gate stood ajar. A woman in black was stumping, hobbling, snatching at flowers or herbs, gathering for herself a gratuitous bunch. Her movements might have suggested a goat if it hadn't been for the tight bunch which the goat had not devoured

The goat-woman raised her head as Mrs Golson paused and asked, ‘
Où est Madame—et Monsieur Vatatzes?
'

The goat-woman arranged her tongue, of a pale mauve shiny with saliva. ‘
Partis! Partis!
GONE
!' she added for one who was beneath contempt, and to emphasise her feelings, swept the horizon with an arm.

‘Mais où?'

‘Sais pas. Sont partis—le soir? le matin? Personne ne sait—seulement qu'ils sont partis.'

The woman continued snatching at sprigs from the garden. Its martyrdom was Mrs Golson's own, a confusion of perfumes from crushed leaves and released sap intensifying her overwrought state. Added to an intolerable situation, the woman's spit was clearly visible, leaping from her mouth as she spoke; and one of her stockings had lapsed to halfway down the leg revealing a crude bandage through which a stain was seeping.

Mrs Golson could bear the tension no longer. Herself a rival goat, she charged at the gate, almost pushing it down, to arrive in what had been Eudoxia's garden.

The woman in black could not laugh enough, then clenched her teeth as she bound her tight bunch tighter still with some stalks of grass she had torn off.

‘
Que sont-ils—vos herbes?
' Now the intruder of all intruders, Mrs Golson heard herself stammer.

The smocked garment she had thrown on for the journey had fallen back, and she realised she was wearing the nightdress in which she had taken her restless afternoon nap.

As though awakened against her will, the woman frowned at her bunched herbs. ‘
Sont des barbottines. On les met sous les draps pour chasser les puces
.'

Mrs Golson would have to look up ‘
barbottines
' together with Eudoxia's ‘balm', but her French-English pocket dictionary was not the greatest help and the herb manual somewhere on a shelf in Sydney Australia.

Now, since her friend had left for wherever, there was really no purpose in her staying.

‘
Alors
,' she told this female, ‘
moi aussi, je partirai
.'

But the creature beckoned. ‘
Venez! Venez!
' The cackle which followed revealed a number of black gaps as well as a span of aggressive gold. ‘
Faut voir
,' she advised, leading the way to the shell of a house around which the sky was darkening.

Curiosity outdoing discretion and even fear, Mrs Golson followed.

The shutters were open, fastened to the outside of the walls, the windows closed, the interior stuffy. In spite of the furniture which she remembered from the day before, the rooms seemed to creak and reverberate like those in a dismantled house.

Her guide led her past mirrors from which Mrs Golson averted her face, and into the kitchen where a door open on the sea and village below, let in an unexpected burst of light, illuminating the Vatatzes' last hours of tenancy: the squalor of unwashed dishes, smeared glasses, coffee grounds, a great over-ripe tomato melting into the papered surface of a dresser shelf.

Mrs Golson would have liked to persuade herself that Madame Vatatzes had been saving up this tomato for its seed. But the thought
was bathetic in the guide's presence; the woman in black did not condone improbabilities. From the juice of the putrid tomato, Mrs Golson's glance was drawn to the woman's leg, the musketeer stocking, the stained bandage, on it not so much the signs of watery matter from a running sore, as, Mrs Golson was convinced—pus.

‘
Venez! Venez!
' The guide was leading one no longer her confederate but her victim always deeper into the lives of the departed.

The intruders had entered what passed for a bathroom. Choked by the sight of spilt powder, balls of hair, cotton-wool swabs, Mrs Golson put her handkerchief to her lips; she might be developing Daddy's asthma.

‘
Voyez! Ils out oublié ce true-là!
' the creature shrieked through her gaps, past the bastion of gold.

She poked at an object on a shelf, which as far as Mrs Golson could tell, was an enema of enormous proportions.