The Twyborn Affair (16 page)

Most of the guests are English (the Anglaise predominating) escaping from bronchitis, rheumatism, taxation, one or two perhaps from scandals. A few faces of mixed race—Levantines? A. would have known, too vocally to be comfortable, if he had been present. Trust A. to spot the
Frangolevantini
.

He ate a splinter of fish, mostly skin, which I took to our room, then he fell asleep again …

 

This morning was an improvement in every respect, though morning usually is. Looking back, my whole childhood is composed of mornings, yet I wasn't happy by any means. The future threatens very early. This growing threat which I'll always associate with unruly masses of purple lantana, and cats lying on hot asphalt as they died from eating too many lizards … Or was that a parent's disgnosis?

• MOTHER:
  Don't look, darling. Patches is sick from eating lizards. They somehow poison cats. We'll take her to the vet and he'll make her better.
  

The vet didn't. I think Eadie hated cats. We were a house of dogs. Father was a cat man, but seldom there—away on circuit, or at the
club. Father never wanted his child hanging round, or was in some way afraid. Eadie wanted one constantly.

• EADIE:
  Don't you love me, darling? … Then why are you avoiding me?
  

Eadie's desire to devour—when you could have devoured the stuffy Judge—his man's smell! (This I think more than half explains my relationship with Angelos.)

Washed smalls, then walked down into the town. A scent of jonquils, roses—flowers. A yucca flaunting last year's brolly reminded me of home. Always these pointers. In the town the Golsons were out in force—a less showy variety because less affluent than those at St Mayeul. The ladies several years behind in their style, or else in enforced collusion with the past—putting on a brave show however, shaking their plumes, disentangling lorgnettes from lace. Elderly gentlemen in seedy retirement: tweeds in brown or grey, all tending to turn green. With luck their tweeds will see them out. The network of veins in flushed elderly male cheeks …

An English church, a squat Gothic in grey stone. Fine avenues at intervals. Outside their version of Miss Clitheroe's Tea-room and Lending Library a group of pelicans and brolgas discuss, not unexpectedly, war. War may be the solution.

Ate a delicious lunch alone on the terrace with my old darling, who had dressed, and persuaded the Sasso to let us enjoy this luxury. Madame S. is impressed by A. They always are till experiencing his rages, his not quite madness, which automatically they interpret as the real thing. First they are insulted, then frightened. May he continue to impress at ‘My Blue Home' morally I am exhausted.

An old servant, Marguerite, arranged a table for us in the patchy shade from an almond tree. Angelos in sentimental mood as we got through our
déjeuner
: a thin, rather greasy soup from last night's fish,
beignets de poisson
(pieces of skin, again from last night's fish, done in batter) something indeterminate as meat. For some reason one did not care. The bay, a breeze shaking alternate light and shade out of the branches of the almond tree, exorcised my thoughts of recent weeks—even Angelos helped.

A. remembers our first meeting when he picked me up on the Canebière. Who picked whom? he her she him, perhaps it was he him …

• A.: Don't you remember?
  
• E.: I could hardly forget. I can remember the dress I was wearing.
  
• A.: I can't.
  
• E.: You can never remember dresses. To me they mean so much.
  
• A.: [for him, infinitely kind] Your vice. [He was in a stroking mood this morning.] I remember it was raining and we went to that hotel.
  
• E.: Because you were ashamed to take me back to yours. You weren't quite sure what you'd got hold of.
  
• A.: Don't be unkind, E. You can never resist the opportunity to be unkind.
  [Marguerite brings the fruit; she has the sly look of a dog who has just disposed of a couple of pounds of fillet beef.]
  
• A.: Do you know, darling, I'm sure we forgot the enema. If we wrote for it they might send it on.
  
• E.: If we wrote for it Madame Boieldieu might make you pay the rest of what we owe.
  
• A.: But I shall miss that enema. It's unlike anything they make today.
  

The damn enema notwithstanding, lunch on the terrace at ‘My Blue Home' was an occasion I feel I shall remember. My old monster would not know it, but I could have eaten him between the courses. How is it the French can get away with pieces of fish skin done in batter? How can A., by looking at me from beneath those horny eyelids, convince me that we are wearing the purple, standing on the steps at Blachernae or Nicaea? more—that I am no longer a fiction but a real human being …

 

Madame Sasso and one of her boarders, a Mrs Corbould, were seated at an accommodating round table in a small
salon
between kitchen offices and public rooms, discussing over their second glass of
poire William
and before laying out the cards, the husbands they had
buried, womb complications, and decreasing incomes; it was all too personal to include
les Boches
. As it was around 2 a.m., the other boarders had decamped to their beds with hot-water bottles, tins of imported Bath Olivers, and indigestion, while Marguerite had descended to the lower town with whatever she could scavenge from the evening meal.

Crimson plush and
poire William
were lighting the throats and cheeks of the confidential ladies when this young woman, this Madame Vatatzes burst upon them from the surrounding dark.

‘
Mon mari, je crois, est gravement malade
,' she informed Madame Sasso, then remembering that her landlady was a linguist, ‘He is having a heart attack.'

Madame Sasso could not have been more shocked. The announcement brought to mind a suicide in Number 17, from which it had taken her reputation several months to recover.

‘You are sure, madame? You are not excited?'

Less involved, Mrs Corbould was fascinated by the openwork in the yoke of the nightdress this rather angular, flat-chested young woman had been wearing when her emotions carried her into their presence without additional covering.

‘Do not distract yourself, madame. We will see,' Madame Sasso advised, herself trembling.

‘But I know!' Madame Vatatzes insisted.

Madame Sasso also insisted, pushing past the young wife to reach the maid's room which the couple were at present occupying. From being English and discreet, Mrs Corbould did not follow, but poured herself another glass, and sat awaiting developments.

Madame Sasso was quick to see. ‘
Oui, madame, il est bien malade
.'

‘Send for a doctor then—can't you?'

‘
Marguerite est partie
. I dare not ask the cook. I have no other person.' Madame Sasso parried necessity like an expert, then appeared to remember.

She marched out, her black forms falling into place behind the padded buttons. ‘Rouse Mr Genge,' she commanded Mrs Corbould.

Those who knew about such things were aware that Mr Genge,
a
pensionnaire
of some years' standing, was in the habit of warming his blue shanks round Madame Sasso's steamy thighs on cold nights when the
propriétaire
was either forgetful or charitable.

Abandoning her
poire William
, Mrs Corbould rose to the occasion.

Madame Sasso returned to the sickroom.

Monsieur Vatatzes was lying, chin raised, his nightshirt open on a wisp of scruffy hair which his wife was stroking with one hand while holding with the other a bundle of yellow bones, not unlike, Madame Sasso observed, the claw of an elderly black cock, the kind which can be served as several courses after careful stewing.

‘He is coming, darling,' Madame Vatatzes assured her husband with a tenderness Madame Sasso had not experienced before.

‘Who is coming?' he asked. ‘Who?'

‘The doctor.'

‘Oh,' he groaned. ‘Only the doctor.'

To do something, Madame Sasso was pouring a glass of tepid water out of a carafe, when she definitely heard, ‘I have had from you, dear boy, the only happiness I've ever known.'

Madame Vatatzes turned at once to the landlady. ‘Leave us, please. I think it is over.'

Madame Sasso obeyed.

When she had returned to her confidante she could not prevent herself laughing. ‘Poor man, he is out of his wits! Last words can often be amusing, as you, madame, will no doubt have found.'

Mrs Corbould found the last words of Monsieur Vatatzes, if not amusing, provocative.

Madame Sasso was pouring yet another glass of
poire William
when the young woman appeared again.

‘He is dead,' she said, in what sounded not only a broken, but at the same time, an awakening voice.

Still barefoot, she was wearing a long black cloak over the nightdress with the openwork yoke.

Before the two women could go to her, to initiate her into the formal grief it is usual for widows to indulge in, Madame Vatatzes
escaped from them into the night, her gait as long, loping, ungainly, as provocative as Mrs Corbould had found the openwork in a flat nightdress and the elderly Greek's last words.

 

As soon as she returned from that grotesque encounter with the woman of the suppurating bandage, she slipped off the smocked travelling garment she had been wearing over her nightdress, and after rummaging for a sheet of her best monogrammed letter parchment such as she had used weeks before in starting what became the aborted letter to Eadie Twyborn, sat down to write while her emotions, her dashed hopes, her suspicions and doubts were still seething in her. Yet hesitated before beginning, her glance directed beyond the upheaval of bosom, the delicately manicured finger-nails, the plump ineffectual hands, the rings arrayed against the grain of this expensive letter-paper. (Were the rings perhaps vulgar when compared with those of Lady Tewkes—and Eudoxia Vatatzes, despite the fact that one had caught sight of congealed egg lurking in the corner of an agate eye?)

So she held back.

Before writing,

 

My dear Eadie,

 

more sober than on a former occasion, as was the comma more humbly inscribed than that other incised, flaunting one.)

She continued sitting awhile to gather courage for the plunge; then:

Here Mrs Golson again hesitated for fear of what she might dredge up from depths she had never yet explored.

Mrs Golson paused breathless above her slashed parchment. I am mad, she thought, to pour out as never before on Eadie Twyborn. (Or not mad, perhaps literary without ever suspecting.) Then she continued,

Joanie paused again, the perspiration, the downright sweat plumping on the third sheet of parchment.

Mrs Golson's pen faltered, and the next moment she had seized the sheets containing so much that was deplorable, emotional, naked, and was attempting to tear or worry her shame apart.

She had only to some extent succeeded when she heard, ‘What are you up to, treasure?'