Free The Twyborn Affair by Patrick White

doesn’t go against good sense.’
    â€˜But us Golsons!’ Curly insisted.
    â€˜Do we count?’ Joanie answered.
    For an instant they looked at each other, trying to decide.
    Then Curly ventured, ‘I don’t want it to look as though we’re doing a skedaddle, Joan dear, but I can’t see it ’ud be practical to let the Simla sail without us.’
    â€˜Yes, darling, I know it would only be sensible to catch the Simla .’ Agitation and the division of loyalties caused Mrs Golson to lash her rather large thighs around each other inside the peach chiffon négligée. ‘At least you might investigate—run over to Marseille with Teakle and pay a deposit on the cabin.’
    Play for time, play for time … Surely there would be a letter of thanks? too much to hope for an invitation? at least a formal call when the ankle allows. Even if they missed the Simla her passionate desire to renew acquaintance with Madame Vatatzes convinced Mrs Golson that she was ready to face the passions of war—a war which in any case was only rumoured and too remote from the Golsons to affect their actual lives.
    When Curly said, ‘You can be sure I’ve paid the deposit. It only remains to clinch the deal. And that’s what I’m going to do. It wouldn’t be reasonable, Joanie, if I didn’t.’
    â€˜Well,’ she said, looking down her front into the jabot in beige Brussels in which the dollop of chocolate had lodged, ‘you are a man of course, and your attitude is that of a man. Don’t think I don’t appreciate you, darling.’ She raised her head and aimed aravaged smile, while stroking the necklaces of Venus in the plump throat which he admired and she deplored. ‘ But as a foolish romantic woman I can’t help thinking of all the people—the little people—that femme de chamber Joséphine, honest old Teakle remaining behind in poor England—even the abominably superior Miss Clitheroe—all those we’d be running away from and leaving to be swallowed up by a war;’ then when she had risen, and executed a figure or two in peach chiffon, ‘the Vatatzes too—that old man and his young wife—who don’t belong anywhere, it seems—but will be caught—subjected to all the terrors—the horrors.’
    Mrs Golson had never thought like this before. She could not help feeling impressed by her own illumination.
    And Curly was so proud of Joanie. He would have liked to bed her if he hadn’t decided to run over to Marseille and make sure of their passage to Sydney—‘home’, as opposed to Joanie’s ‘Home’, where the shops were, the real, Bond Street ones, not Golsons’ Emporium.
    Joan Golson thought she had probably lost. She would be carried back out of the iridescence into a congealing of life, from which only Eadie Twyborn had rescued her at brief moments. And she had neglected Eadie. That letter she had started and never got down to writing. But what could one say when all was surmise, suspicion, doubt, or dream? One would never be able to conclude, never live out the promises.
    15 March
    The extraordinary coincidence of yesterday! That it had to happen—my ankle is nothing, a slight twist, today barely noticeable—but it had to happen: one of those coincidences of which my life, I believe any life, is composed—in this case so that Mrs Golson might appear as I sat outside the hotel garden, surrounded by onlookers offering their formal French sympathy, which falls short of practical assistance. Oh, we Australians are pretty good in a crisis! For once I’m not speaking ironically. Joanie did not know it, but I could have fallen on her bosom as she raised me up and led me into thatpretentious Hôtel des Splendeurs et Misères des Golsons Internationals. The sticky sweets of le goüter—les gäteaux et le porto , not forgetting le Massenet ,