The Twyborn Affair (19 page)

And there was Eadie, crouched on her knees with a trowel in her hand, her beam broader in one of those skirts she had invariably worn, a miracle of Scottish weave and an intermingling of dogs' hair clotted with compost or manure. Oblivious as far as you could tell. As were the six or seven little red dogs, scratching, swivelling on their rumps, sniffing, one of them lifting a leg behind Eadie's back on a border of sweet alyssum.

To an outburst of barely synchronised clocks in the house behind, and the little terriers giving tongue, she turned on her haunches, and squinted through the smoke from a wilting cigarette at the intruder in her garden.

Making an uglier face she asked, ‘Who are you? Didn't Mildred answer the bell? Who …?' then went off into a long whimpering moan, wrinkling up, coughing, gasping.

‘Oh!' she cried. ‘What you've done to us, Eddie! Whyyy?'

She hung her head, and if the cigarette hadn't slipped from her
lips down inside her front, the situation might have grown intolerable, but in the circumstances she had to slap and grab at her blouse, shouting, ‘God
… damn …
' before retrieving the source of her wrath and flinging it into a patch of snail-fretted acanthus.

She clambered to her feet, tottering on legs seized by cramp, dropping the trowel from stiff fingers, again threatened with a landslide of emotion, while the terriers pounced, one of them worrying at a trouser-cuff, sniffing to decide the category to which this unidentified person, possibly no stranger, belonged.

‘Shouldn't we embrace?' The gruff warning in her voice at once established her as his mother; and as they advanced upon each other, still the victims of their diffidence, he saw that it was she who was beginning to take the initiative, while he, the passive object of her intentions, was drawn into the labyrinth of wrinkles, cigarette fumes, and more noticeable, a gust of early whiskey.

Wasn't this what he had come for? He closed his eyes and let it happen.

He must have continued standing with them closed, for when it was over she demanded, out of a greed which had not been sated, ‘Come on, let me look at your eyes. Your eyes are what I've missed most.'

So he had to open up to the present, to her pair of brown ferrets, and must have repelled them, for she gasped and asked, ‘Are you hungry, darling? Arriving so early—and the Customs—the Customs always make one hungry. What about your luggage? Did Mildred take it up to your room? She looks frail, but she's surprisingly tough—only idle.'

‘I haven't got it. It's at the hotel.'

‘I hope you're not going to make us pay too dearly, Eddie, for being your parents.'

When more than likely Eadie intended he should be the one to pay for a relationship, the mysteries of which might never be solved.

‘You don't always know,' he mumbled, ‘whether it's as difficult for people to have strangers staying, as it is—well, to stay with strangers.'

They were stranded looking at each other on the spot where drawing room became hall. Anywhere else it might have been unbearable to realise that the son with whom she had wrestled, perhaps even tried to throttle in the agony he had caused while forcing his way out of a womb where he was not wanted in the first place, had become the mirror-figure of herself. At least the doorway from drawing room to hall allowed her to shoot off into the dining room beyond, and avoid further exposure.

Then, with her back to him, she complained, ‘My nerves are on end,' and poured herself a resounding whiskey.

Back still turned, she decided, ‘Thatcher will fetch your stuff from the hotel. Thatcher's the gardener—no earthly use, except to take the dogs walking. I doubt anyone else would have him if we turned him loose. So Thatcher has become our fate.'

Once more mistress of herself, Thatcher, and most others, she returned from the dining room into the hall, thrust out her hand, and announced through that voracious smile, ‘Come and I'll show you your room.'

As though he didn't know it.

‘Is the mattress as hard as it used to be?'

But she did not seem to hear as they clumped thumping upstairs, shoulder bumping off shoulder, hands locked in sisterhood.

 

Delicacy must have overtaken Eadie, for she left him alone in what had been, and evidently still was, his room. Nothing appeared to have been disturbed, neither objects such as books, trophies, a sea urchin on a window sill, nor the nightmares and unrealisable romances with which the narrow bed was still alive. He prodded it, and felt the same hair mattress on which he had done youthful penance. She had unlatched the shutters, but the glare of sunlight prevented him re-acquainting himself to any extent with the precipice outside, its fuzz of lantana scrub, nasturtiums, and a few precarious pittosporums. Considering that the geography was so little altered, the furniture disposed to receive him back, there was no reason why he should not resume both his rational and unconscious lives, if the un
reason with which he was cursed, and worse than that, a rebellious body, would allow him to.

In the meantime he prowled inside the fortress of his room, stepping as softly as he could in case his mother might be listening for his movements, to interpret them. Eadie="Eddie." It was true, but in spite of the war years and the aftermath of peace, he had not yet learnt to accept that he was Eddie Twyborn, the son of Mr Justice Twyborn—the incalculable factor. He dreaded Edward more than Eadie, who was himself in disguise.

He continued prowling, softer than before, running his finger down the spines, the titles of dustless books: the rejected Profession
—Private Equity, Real Property, The Law of Contract, The Law of Torts; The Prisoner of Zenda and Robinson Crusoe
; the Kipling birthday presents (‘he's such a splendid writer, darling, as you'll appreciate later on'); Swinburne's reeking perfumes, secret orgasms;
The Man in the Iron Mask—
the Bible.

He opened the last, and in it found, in a handwriting gone green with age, the characters cramped by sincerity and doubts:

He might have protested
oh horror horror my own poor father
if there hadn't been a knocking at the door.

It was Mildred and the gardener Thatcher either end of his cabin-trunk.

Mildred panted, ‘Where shall we put it, Mr Eddie?'

‘On the sofa?'

‘Oh, no! Mrs Twyborn would never approve of that. The springs!'

‘But there aren't any, and I shan't have to stoop.'

‘Shall we leave it here? under the window?' was Mildred's breathless suggestion.

‘The rain will come in.' He identified his mother's disapproving voice.

But Mildred and Thatcher were ready to dump the trunk, and did, under the window. The parlourmaid was smelling rather pleasantly of the powder which had given in to her exertions; while Thatcher who took the dogs for walks, and who had adopted silence, probably as an armature against his mistress, stank of what is known as ‘honest sweat', or more accurately, dirty socks.

They came and went, bringing in the smaller pieces. Eddie Twyborn, so-called, felt guilty, and prowled worse, with less concern for what might be overheard by Eadie.

As the servants were leaving she did in fact appear, having changed into some sort of haphazard frock, exposing freckled arms and a droughty chasm leading to the breasts which had suckled her child. It was not so much this painful revelation as the face she had tried to disguise by smearing it with crimson and white which made him avert his own.

‘Now,' she said, her gaping wound smiling at him from amongst those lesser ones which had healed, ‘you must come down and have a drink—and tell me all about everything,' trying to sound like the girl she might never have been.

Did she know he knew? She bowed her head going downstairs in front of the son she might never have had.

When they were seated in the drawing room, each holding as a protective weapon a glass of whiskey as strong as Eadie knew how to pour, and she had lit one of the cheroots he remembered her smoking in the past, only in the tower room alone with the Judge, he asked straight out, ‘What became of Ruffles—Mum?'

As though beaten at her own game by the one who should have been ‘telling all', she looked at the carpet, and answered, ‘Ruffles died.' It left her with a little tic in one cheek.

While like some old mangy, cancerous dog, Angelos Vatatzes was dragging his body out of a corner of the drawing room to lay his head on Eudoxia's knee, asking forgiveness for his devotion.

The apparition drove Eddie Twyborn to concentrate on something which might convey actuality: the waves painted on the Gulf of Smyrna; lizards on burning marble at Nicaea; arabesques swirl
ing out of the Chabrier waltzes at nightfall above Les Sailles.

‘Anyway, Ruffles apart,' he said to his mother, ‘nothing has changed—here—since I went away. Only the springs have given up.'

Eadie hunched her shoulders and, after plunging her hands into the bowels of her chair as though groping for evidence which might justify his accusation, came out with a high, smoky giggle. ‘You're not cruel, darling, I hope. We're not as well off as we were—on a judge's salary.'

‘Nobody—that is, none of us is ever as well off as we were. It's one of the laws of nature and history.'

He heard her teeth make contact with her glass as she tried to work it out. ‘Darling, stop
scratching
!' She smacked one of her little dogs.

Yes, he was being cruel, but only as he was to himself.

Her eyes were appealing to him, asking for some revelation, not quite that perhaps (wasn't she Judge Twyborn's pragmatic wife?) but a factual account of what he had been doing all these years. Had he been taking part in a war, like all young men of decent upbringing?

In case he was going to deny her this simple luxury, she leaned forward, elbow wobbling slightly on a knee, so that whiskey slopped over the lip of her glass. ‘Delia died too. Now we've Etty. Her devilled drumsticks are scrumptious. But she bosses me. I can't stand it.'

‘She'll probably leave, like Joséphine Réboa.'

‘God forbid! I couldn't bear it.' She bit on her cheroot. ‘Who was Josephine Whatsername?'

‘Somebody who left.'

After that they were at sea.

He thought he felt something crawling somewhere between his crotch and his navel.

Deciding, it seemed, not to let him escape, she leaned farther forward and asked, ‘Darling,
were
you in the War?'

‘Yes—as it happens—I was.'

‘I'm so glad. We would have hoped you were.'

‘Who?'

‘Well, Daddy …'

He would have liked to think that ‘Daddy', of all people, would not have condemned him.

‘… and our friends.'

She was looking at him.

‘Who? your friends?'

‘Well, darling—everybody.'

She was looking at him more intently still. ‘You remember Joanie? Joanie Golson. The
Boyd
Golsons.'

‘Vaguely.'

‘And Marian Dibden?'

She was sitting forward to take stock. Eadie's therapeutic touch was that of a sledge-hammer.

‘When shall I see my father?' he asked.

‘Oh,' she withdrew into her chair, ‘I was going to ring him, then I didn't because I thought he'd be too upset. I thought when he comes home tonight I'd bring you out into the garden.'

‘No.'

‘What, then?'

‘I'll come out—and just meet him—like that.'

‘If it's what you want.' The little dogs skirling at her ankles, she went to pour herself another drink, forgetting his.

Mildred announced. ‘Etty says luncheon is ready, madam.'

Eadie Twyborn ducked her head. ‘Oh, well, if it's what Etty says … I hope it's something delicious for Mr Eddie's return to the fold.'

Mildred snickered, and looked down her powdered front.

There was nothing for it but that mother and son should go into the dining room and continue to ‘tell about everything'. Would Eadie of the corked-on moustache flinch if he casually produced the spangled fan and pomegranate shawl, flung them into the conversation? Wait perhaps, till the Judge was wearing his high heels and black silk stockings.

Eadie said, ‘I can imagine, Eddie, what you must have suffered—from what one heard of life in the trenches.'

In the lull before the guns opened up again there was only the sound of a dog scratching.

‘Did you win any medals?' she asked.

‘Only one.'

‘I'd adore to see it.'

‘I dropped it down a grating in London after I was demobbed.'

‘I expect you could get another,' she said, ‘if you paid them for it.'

 

From his window he had watched darkness gathering, a milky sky purpling over, a recent flowering of lights dancing in a thicket as branches were stirred by an evening breeze, all that was left of a ferry now like a child's illuminated pencil-box slid across a smooth black surface in a gap between trees. (‘You wanted a pencil-box, didn't you, Ed?' ‘Yes, but I thought it'd be a double-decker.' ‘Sorry—next time—when you're older.' Later: ‘Your father gave it so much thought—such a busy man—you should have sounded more grateful.' Silence. He was not ungrateful. He took the disappointing pencil-box to bed. He hid it under his pillow. He would have defended it from loving hands doing things only for his good, removing angular, uncomfortable, ultimately ridiculous pencil-boxes. He would have been prepared to wound the loving hand as he had when it was laid upon him as a comfort, while he was inhaling the ether. ‘They're only going to snip the nasty tonsils, which might otherwise poison your whole system; you won't feel it I promise you, darling.' ‘
Nhhao!
' the shriek it became in the lint funnel as you were sucked down it, down down, through a scent of pale green fur …)