The Twyborn Affair (5 page)

Though Mrs Golson re-appeared regularly at the Twyborns', she was on my list of avoidables from the night of the corked moustache until she sprang upon us yesterday.

There was nothing to disturb this afternoon's siesta: Byzantium might never have begun falling apart, figments became the reality parents and lovers like to believe they have created. Could one dismiss as figment Eadie's emissary Joan Golson rising through the dusk in her green motor the other side of the garden wall?

Later this evening, under a resonant sky, Angelos proposed to make music. We did, too.

We launched into the Chabrier waltzes, dashing them off too quickly, turning our backs on other eventualities, side by side on Madame Llewellyn-Boieldieu's stool. I would like to appear less tentative, less receptive of the ruler and the rules. I would love to
splash
music around me, while A. is determined to control my least impulse for extravagance. His hands. His wrist-watch. His veins. Chabrier's oxydised streamers stream out behind us, in my case never freeing themselves because knotted to my wrists, and because the old bastard won't allow me the freedom of music.

All desire for music had left me. I knew I was giving a brazen performance, but saw it through. Blew a raspberry at the end. Overtaken by contrition, I forced an embrace on him. Normally we would have joined also in laughter. Not now. He began what was a visible gnashing: a guard dog's teeth, flared nostrils, not a dog's, those of a frightened man, the gristle in an aristocratic nose rising out of transparency, thickening at a bridge still delicate. There have been times when I could have bitten off this nose.

As he gnashes, he warns, ‘I think she has come again, E.!'

Not so soon. It wasn't possible.

‘Comme hier soir … Ti zeetahiy afti then xeroh …'

I jump up and look out. There she is, sure enough, against the wall, under the olive which till now was my best protection. Her surroundings and her body make her Paris clothes look ridiculous, giving a couturier's model the stamp of Golson's Emporium Sydney Australia. Whatever the label, Paquin or Golson, it is Eadie's Joanie.

I latch the shutters.

This evening we didn't eat. Neither of us had appetite, thirst only. And as he quenches himself in brandy, the Pantocrator rises, like the phoenix strewing his golden plumage on the head of the one faithful—his hetaira.

He says, ‘They shut her in a tower. My wife Anna. Or was it my mother? Or my concubine? Or the Empress Eudoxia?'

‘Oh, come off it, darling! My Australian arse won't take any more!'

I try dousing the two of us. My eyelids will only half-open. I am a bundle of sticks and rag, an old battered umbrella.

My darling's skin is turning black.

‘They shut her in a tower at Pera.'

‘Yesss!'

The ivy alive with Australian sparrows.

I know, I know the smells the feel of a monk's clammy hands candle-wax sweat verdigris cold slimy
kritkarakia
in the tower in which I am in-carc-er-ated the cancerous tower of a dying human relationship.

He breaks up. Laying his head on the keys of the piano. To which we have returned inevitably, to be played out.

I ignore my lover and unlatch the shutter. Outside, the past is spread, in pools of blue, in black limbs, in felted voices. I lean against the sash. If only to be drawn back into what I could not endure, but long for …

 

By now she knew the narrow streets by heart. She knew the abridged biographies of the girls who worked for the pharmacist, every fly which crawled on the chicken livers and rabbits at the poulterer's, the almost petrified heap of excrement (human, she suspected) on the paving at the south-west corner of St Sauveur. She had read every novel in the catalogue at the English Tea-room and Library, excepting those withheld from her by conspiracy. At the Grand Hotel Splendide des Ligures,
ces Anglais Monsieur et Madame Golson
were on the verge of acquiring the status of permanent guests.

Or so it seemed to Curly.

‘Don't know what's got into you, Joanie. Why do we have to stay, treasure?'

‘But you love it,' she replied. ‘And Lady Tewkes would be so offended if she thought we didn't appreciate St Mayeul.'

Curly grunted. He was happy enough eating through the menu, then sleeping it off. He enjoyed paying his respects at the races at Nice, and in the rooms at Monte, where Teakle drove him when Joanie didn't need the car.

She didn't need it all that much, unless on principle, to be driven out for the good of her health like any other lady of means. As she had grown familiar with every detail of St Mayeul's streets, so she was becoming familiar with the roads radiating from the town. She had appropriated, so to speak, even the more obscure lanes. She knew which faces to expect at farm or vineyard. Sometimes young people, children, or the very simple took it into their heads to wave, but Mrs Golson did not return their wave. She was not sure whether she ought in front of her English chauffeur, though in fact it would have been behind his back.

It was really too ridiculous: that she should discover in herself traits belonging not so much to a snobbish woman as a guilty little girl. At the heart of her confusion stood the image of the crackled-pink villa, where the road past the salt-pans burst from the pine-grove and embraced the hill. Actually the road was one with which Mrs Golson was less familiar than most of those which formed the surrounding network, in that she had suppressed her desire to return after her two initial visits. She did not dare, but must of course, eventually. The villa remained so vivid: not the vividness of actuality, more a sensation, a pervasiveness, as in dream landscapes. It worried her. Somehow she must find the strength to break the spell.

She still had not found it when circumstances began the breaking.

She was walking with her husband under the palms in the hotel gardens, an undistinguished though impeccable grid, with its pebble paths, borders in variegated box, and beds stuffed with what Mrs Golson believed are known as French marigolds. She had run into Curly by chance on his return from the races at Nice, where Teakle had driven him earlier that day. Not having the car, she had set out to climb the hill behind the town, and now her feet were hurting. This contributed to the tiresomeness of what Curly was telling about his flutter or two on the horses.

When he went off in another direction. ‘On the way back we took a wrong turning, and found ourselves on a side-road Teakle said you particularly fancy. He's driven you there more than once since we came here.'

‘I can't think of any such road.'

‘We came back through some sick-looking pines—past a string of stinking salt-pans.'

‘To be precise, he drove me there twice.' At once Mrs Golson regretted her precision. ‘I found it not nearly so attractive as I first imagined.'

‘Anyhow, we were almost let in for an accident, not far from where Teakle said you had a puncture.' The way Curly spoke, it was she who had had it, not the car.

Mrs Golson realised she was breathing hard. ‘How—an accident?'

‘A couple coming round a corner—not looking where they were going.'

‘What did this
couple
look like?' Did her enquiry sound too intense?

‘Some old Frog, and a girl, walking hand in hand.'

‘What makes you think he was French?' she asked.

‘Well, he was wearing a beret.'

She was really exasperated. ‘Lots of the English wear them—those who have lived abroad. There's Mr Mercer here at the hotel—and Lord Corfe,' she remembered with warmer satisfaction.

‘That's right. You wouldn't find a bigger Pom than that.'

Mrs Golson merely frowned.

‘Anyhow, this old cove, whatever he was, looked a bit potty. Waved his arms, nearly laughed his head off after we swerved. Likes to live dangerously I reckon.'

Mrs Golson rose above her exasperation, frustration, what amounted almost to misery. ‘Did you have any conversation with them—after you'd practically run them down?'

‘No question of running 'em down. Teakle's too professional. I wouldn't be paying him otherwise. No, we just drove on. What would we have talked to them in?'

‘But the girl—she must have been terrified!'

‘I looked back. And she was looking back. She was in a regular paddy, I'd say, like some women get into for no good reason. The girl was a looker, in more ways than one,' then Mr Golson decided
to add, ‘if you like 'em flat,' and caressed his wife's behind with a hand.

‘I do wish you wouldn't do that, Curly!' She might have addressed him as ‘Boyd' but propriety did not allow her to go so far.

She was looking nervously from side to side, past the trunks of the abraded palms. There was a smell she disliked, perhaps from the (French?) marigolds.

‘I was only being friendly,' he said.

‘There's a time and place for friendliness.' Not even then, her tone seemed to imply.

They had reached the stucco entrance archway.

That night Joan Golson developed another headache. She did not go down with Curly to dinner. She refused even to contemplate a tray with
æufs sur le plat
. She was too restless. She unearthed the sheet of paper on which she had written
Dearest Eadie
(comma). She knew she would not bring herself to write, however accusatory that stylish comma on which her will-power had fizzled out. What could she have said? Subtle she might aspire to be, but her intuitions had often let her down.

 

Curly said a few days later, ‘I'll give you a couple more weeks, Joan. We can join the
Simla
at Marseille. If I don't show up soon at the “shop” they'll be wondering what I'm playing at.'

As democratic Australians the Golsons were in the habit of referring to Golsons' Emporium as the ‘shop'. His wife might now have suggested, had she been at all malicious, that it wouldn't have occurred to them at the ‘shop' to wonder what Curly was playing at. His business duties consisted of little more than initialling the letters they left in his tray, and reading the
Sydney Morning Herald
until it was time to lunch at the club. It was Mr Darling who mattered: they depended on Darling for their considerable income; though no one could deny that E. Boyd Golson, as a member of his family, was a figure, and that he had a gift for jollying the directors at a meeting; anyway they laughed.

As Mrs Golson was to no extent malicious she remained silent;
then she said, ‘If you really want it, we could leave tomorrow, motor back to London for a last fling, and board the wretched
Simla
at Tilbury.'

‘Not if it'll put you out.' He was rather sweet, liable not to want his own way once he had got it. ‘It's only a mystery what you find in St Mayeul. I'd begun to wonder whether you were having an affair.'

She was so furious. ‘An affair with who?' More furious for having forgotten her grammar.

‘I don't know. Somebody. The lift fellow!'

It would have been too ridiculous to go on feeling furious, so she began laughing, rather hysterically it sounded. ‘That hunchback? Do I strike you as being so depraved?'

Curly was bellowing back; he had never looked shinier. ‘You can take a joke at your expense, darling. Expect that's why I married you. Though come to think,' he began subsiding, ‘some of your friends …'

‘Are hunchbacks?'

‘I was thinking of old Eadie Twyborn.'

‘Poor Eadie! We know what she's been through.' Mrs Golson felt she must be looking pale under the faintest dash of rouge she was wearing out of deference to France.

‘She's got quite a reputation.'

‘Eccentric, we know.'

‘Bruce Benson swears he's seen Mrs Judge Twyborn dressed in her husband's pants, ordering drinks in the Australia winter garden.'

‘Are you sure she wasn't wearing the Judge's wig as well?'

Curly nearly split himself. ‘He didn't
say …
'

‘I wouldn't put it past a male gossip.' Then, as Curly mopped his face, ‘Eadie is my friend, and I won't have her traduced by Mr Benson or anybody else,' Mrs Golson asserted sententiously, while hoping the impressive word she had used in poor Eadie Twyborn's defence meant what she thought it did.

‘What he did say,' muttered Curly into his handkerchief, ‘was
that she'd corked on a bloomin'
—moustache
;' and he was off again in the handkerchief.

Mrs Golson announced that she was going to the English Tea-room and Library to look for a novel before the rain set in.

It was a blustery day, by far the most unpleasant since their arrival on the Coast. The wind slapped at her, and worried the tails of her lesser sables. It made her feel nervy, on top of the scene with her husband. Mrs Golson could not be accused of telling a lie in defending her friend; there are the occasions when it is necessary to smudge—‘smudge' somehow made it look dirty—to
blur
the truth. That way Joanie could feel justified, if still unhappy for the blurred thought that she had been defending herself every bit as much as Eadie.

Foolishness no doubt. She composed her mouth, raised her chin, only to be confronted with the image of the pink villa netted in stereoscopic detail by her veil: through branches of olive and almond the faded blue of eaves and shutters, the tumbledown gate, the clumps of lavender and southernwood, the blobs of red or pink pinks. The scene with Curly made what should have appeared romantic, poetic, a refreshing recollection, take on tones which she could only see as sinister. She closed her eyes to dismiss the image, and with it, she hoped, the direction her train of thought might take. There had never been anything the least bit sinister about Joanie Sewell Golson, Daddy's blue-eyed girl, Curly's wife, and Eadie Twyborn's loyal friend.