The Twyborn Affair (17 page)

It was his habit to walk the deck before its holy-stoning, while the last wet kisses and the smell of sperm were evaporating. For miles he tramped, up and down and round the corner. He would have liked to think it an exorcism, whereas it was a repetition: he was accompanied by the same, dun-coloured, laden figures returning to the front line; from whatever distance he was still aware of the stench of death. He kept it up hopefully however, all along the choppy periwinkle waves of a Mediterranean on which he was also turning his back, the scents he could recollect, of thyme, pine, carnation and rose, as opposed to the synthetic perfumes of recklessly expectant human beings in the first stages of a long voyage. He liked to think he was reserving himself for something ahead, and that he would emerge at last from the bombardment, not only of a past war, but the past. Unless perhaps, exorcism is a conjuring trick which does not work for those born without the requisites for grace.

At least his clothes were beginning to feel easier on him. He could face faces, the sound of quoits splattering around him, the exaggerated heartiness of returning colonials, and the patronage of the English who were going out to teach them something.

But from most of it he remained aloof, and they wondered why.

They discussed him outside the purser's office, and more brutally, over cocktails in the Smoking Room, investigating the credentials of this possibly regrettable, while desirable young man, this Eddie Twyborn.

Two young women were at it by the rail, one in the authoritarian, English county voice, the other in the loose, but no less assured accent of the established Australian rich. It was an acquaintanceship
formed partly out of boredom, partly for mutual protection, somewhere off Crete, on one of the chillier, choppier afternoons of a periwinkle Mediterranean.

‘I adore the Med, don't you? It makes me feel I'm abroad at last.'

‘I only know it from passing through.'

‘Oh well
—now—
so am I—perhaps for ever.'

‘Oh, why?'

‘Well, you see, I became engaged to an Australian. That's why I'm going out,' the English girl explained, while looking at a rather small sapphire exposed before her on the ship's rail.

‘You won't regret it,' the Australian said without hesitation. ‘By the way,' she added, as though offering her immigrant acquaintance a stanchion. ‘I'm Margaret Gilchrist. My close friends,' she giggled, ‘call me Margs.'

‘Oh?' the county one returned. ‘Well, I'm Angela Parsons. But answer to Angie.' She too threw in a giggle.

So the relationship was established, as much as anything through confidence in each other's high-lit teeth, of which Angie's were only very slightly buckled.

‘I'm so glad we've met,' she said. ‘So far it's been a tremendous bore—so under-populated—any way with men.'

Margs glanced at the small sapphire on the hand grasping the varnished rail. ‘What does your fiancé do?'

Angie grew serious. ‘He farms,' she said. ‘I believe he has,' she manipulated her buckled teeth, ‘what is called a sheep station.'

‘Oh yes, that's what it's called!' Margs giggled approvingly. ‘You're all right there.' But paused. ‘Daddy's a doctor—a specialist in diseases of the heart.'

They both looked appropriately grave, steadying themselves on the rail and rocking with the motion of the ship.

Margs told how she had been nursing a bit at the home of her aunt Lady Ifield, in Sussex. (‘Not really? I believe Mummy knows her!') Angie had been driving an ambulance, which was how she had met Doug when he was returned wounded from the trenches.

The girls agreed the War had been simply ghastly, though not without its rewarding moments.

‘Weren't you ever engaged?' asked Angie.

‘Not actually, but almost,' Margs confessed.

‘Did you sleep with him?'

‘You have to, haven't you? when there's a war on.'

‘Exactly! That's what I felt about Doug.'

It was fascinating for the two friends to be thus engrossed in moral issues.

Angela looked round at a husband helping a queasy wife erect a reluctant deck chair. ‘Have you ever seen such a collection of pot-bellied men?'

‘Every one of them hairy, I'd say.'

‘How can you tell?'

‘By what's missing on top.'

The two young women shrieked at the waves.

‘But hair can be rather fascinating,' Angela said when she had subsided.

Margs looked round. ‘There's a smooth one, though—have you come across him? Eddie Twyborn.'

‘Oh yes.
Lieutenant
Twyborn.'

‘Is he a lieutenant?'

‘Was, I'm told. Decorated too.'

Margs looked ready to gobble up, not only the smoothness, but the decoration.

Furtive in their confidences, they both looked round to see the object of them approaching.

He passed by.

He was walking stiffly, his bearing tentative for a man, holding with Gothic hand against his chest the book he had been, or intended, reading. He was certainly not ‘pot-bellied', and his well-covered skull, the hair of a cut to suggest an army officer, should have exempted him from accusations of hairiness by those who supported Margs's theory.

It was the face, however, which fascinated, not to say awed, the
two observers. It had about it a detachment which could have passed for purity, which each of the girls must have sensed, for Angie said, after he was out of earshot, ‘Do you think a man can be naturally pure? I don't mean monks and priests and things—and even those;' to which Margs, struggling with the proposition, replied, ‘I'd never thought—but I see what you mean. Oh, yes!'

They looked at each other.

‘Did you ever notice his eyes?'

‘Of course! His eyes!'

They looked away.

At that moment the sun rent the slate-coloured awning stretched between world and sky, and at once the waves were decked with an evening panoply of gold and hyacinth.

Margs asked, ‘Would you sleep with a man now that you're engaged to another?'

‘If I did, I'd keep something back for marriage. Marriage is another matter,' Angie nobly replied.

‘How right you are! Exactly how I feel!'

Soon afterwards the girls relinquished the rail and went down to dress for dinner.

 

After taking his clothes off, he lay down on sheets slatted with light, which surrendered their cool all too soon to a sweating body. A couple of days out of Colombo the bunk was as stable as a bed on this motionless sea, its monotony broken only by a random shark's fin; the flying-fish, growing languid, elected to stay below. His own languor did not prevent him forcing himself at his discipline of interrogating La Rochefoucauld, the words tasting musty to a furred tongue, the thought rising like baroque remains in a tropic jungle.

Nos vertus ne sont le plus souvent que des vices déguisés …
; when according to his own experience the reverse was true.

His book tumbling floorwards, he dozed off, and was soon spanned by the protective wings of this great eagle, who should have been vicious, but wasn't. He could have cried out for the
delight they were sharing if he hadn't become otherwise caught up in the stratagems of men, floundering in mud, failing to disentangle himself from the slime and blood of human bowels.

He awoke whimpering, twitching, yelping like a limp puppy.

The steward, a decent little bloke with the scar of an ancient boil visible on a cropped nape, was picking up the fallen book.

‘French, eh?' It might have been his batman Pritchett. ‘Not dressing up for the fancy ball?'

‘Tired of dressing up …' Not only in the carnation robe, the pomegranate shawl, but the webbing, the mud leggings, and starting out through the carnival of gunfire and Verey lights.

‘Go in the altogether, sir,' the pseudo-Pritchett suggested. ‘Give 'em an eyeful.'

He laughed down his nose. ‘Tired of undressing too.'

‘Pritchett' joined in with a snigger. ‘Suffering from the old accidie, are we?'

He opened his eyes. ‘Could be. What do you know about accidie?'

‘Only what a priest told me.' As though released by an invitation the pseudo-Pritchett sat down on the edge of the bunk.

‘The priest was suffering from it?'

‘Not on yer life! 'E was working it out of 'is bloody system—take it from me—only too successfully.' The steward could not resist slapping the passenger on the thigh.

Oh God, not another! (You didn't mean it exactly like that, when you could have kissed the crater of the extinct boil. Poor bloody Pritchett!)

Recovering himself, the steward had risen and started on a dithering voyage of tidying. ‘Only want to encourage you—Lieutenant Twyborn—to join in whatever's offerin'. We're 'ere, aren't we? so why not?'

‘Cut out the Lieutenant.'

‘But we want to honour yer—in some way.' The poor bastard almost in a state of bubbling tears.

‘Thank you.' It sounded so dry, pompous, poopish—insincere,
from one who was sincerely grateful. (A situation for La Rochefoucauld.)

‘Well, good-night, sir. Thank you.' There was not quite a click of heels as the batman-steward withdrew.

Turning a cheek against the hot pillow, Eudoxia Twyborn wept inwardly, for the past as well as a formless future.

 

The Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean had been slowly cajoling the worst out of shipboard relationships; life was lived in a fever which only Fremantle would reduce. Until then, ex-colonels were ready to engage dangers less explicit than those they had survived; the more adventurous among their no longer seasick wives embarked on recces through the steerage and even into the engine-room. Girls grew breathless from expectation. Youths in sandshoes hovered, trousers hoist above hand-knitted ankles. All of them wanted to express
something
, but didn't. With the result that he in particular never mastered the part they expected him to play.

It was the girl with the creamed sunburn who dared blurt at the one they needed as protagonist for their legend. ‘We all know you're Lieutenant Twyborn, so why shouldn't I introduce myself? I'm Angela Parsons of Salisbury, Wilts. Does it sound too American put like that?' Here she giggled and clasped her hands together on the rail. ‘I'm going out to my fiancé—Doug Yeomans—who's farming near Brewarrinna.'

It was his turn to expose himself, as she had every right to expect, standing twisting the small sapphire she was wearing on her engagement finger, the desert light flashing on her slightly buckled teeth.

But he could not oblige her.

So she went off into a recitative of gush, ‘It's so so so … the DSO … we're so so … Well, real courage is not for every mortal to achieve.'

By now quite desperate, he replied, ‘Courage is often despair running in the right direction.' And stalked off.

The other one, her friend, who tackled him not much later, was
the more serious proposition in that she represented extrovert Australia.

‘Aren't you one of
those
Twyborns?'

‘Which?'

‘Well-Edward the Judge.'

‘He's my father.'

‘And Eadie, Eadie's a friend of Mummy's. Not intimate, but a friend.'

She encouraged the son with a bland smile in a tan which had returned since her stint of nursing at Lady Ifield's Sussex mansion.

‘How excited your parents must be to know you're coming.'

‘They don't know.'

‘Oh? But haven't you written?'

‘Not in years.'

There was nothing she could say to that, only reflect her own parents' opinion of Eddie Twyborn's disappearance on the eve of his marriage to nice Marian Dibden, who had done much better for herself in the end with Ken Anstruther the chartered accountant (top of his year).

He saw to it that there was not another encounter until the two acquaintances Margs Gilchrist and Angie Parsons bailed him up by what looked like deliberate accident during the Aden-Colombo run. Planted in the glaring, holy-stoned deck they barred the way. He could feel the sweat trickling down his legs inside crumpled duck.

‘Won't the ball be fun?' gushed Miss Parsons. ‘What are you going as, Mr Twyborn? Or is it a secret?'

‘Going as myself.'

‘Oh, no! Oh, Eddie!' Margs protested. ‘How
elderly
!'

He could only wince and hope to escape.

They couldn't bear it, and when, as they afterwards agreed, he was looking his most divine.

‘I know!' It was Angela's brainwave. ‘What if we dress you up as one of ourselves? You'd be a riot!'

Margs could only shriek in agreement.

‘Might run you out of business.' He did not mean it to sound as sour as he knew it did, although he could see they hadn't heard it as more than a ‘scream'.

He got away soon afterwards.

 

After finishing his dinner of half a leaden kromesky and a few splinters of frozen pheasant, and detaching himself from the colonial aristocracy (the genuinely kind ladies who would have liked to nurse him back from some obscure sickness he was obviously suffering from, and their more suspicious home-made husbands, creaking and sweating in the dinner jackets enforced on them) he did look in on the ball for a little, and spotted his two friends, the one a hearty improvised sultana, her yashmak stuck to the buckled teeth, the other an athletic pierrette in a costume she must have brought along. The latter's sinewy tanned arms were permanently tensed as though for a volley at tennis. The not inappropriately black pompoms revived the metaphor of an infernal game, which his memory loathed, yet mourned as the occasion of his downfall, the confession of his deficiencies.

He had almost succeded in putting revelry behind him when he heard sounds of pursuit and, on looking round, saw that Margs Gilchrist had torn free of her partner, a certain ginger colonel going as a baby in pale blue rompers.