Free The Twyborn Affair by Patrick White Page B

only indirectly through the conversation of Eadie and the Judge. I could not have heard about him from Joan because I was either away at boarding school or, after the night of the corked-on moustache,hiding under the hydrangeas whenever she came. Eadie would call, ‘Joan’s here. Where are you, darling? Aren’t you a silly old shy thing! Our friend wants to see you.’ It made you burrow deeper into the hydrangeas, into the smell of mould and slaters. After that historic night I couldn’t bear her. (‘You’ll have to understand, Joanie, we have a brumby for a child. It must be my fault, Edward would not have got a brumby on any other woman.’ Giggle giggle, and the brumby is soon the least of their preoccupations.)
    When here was E. Boyd Golson in the flesh, or I should say, his Harris tweeds, his Jermyn Street boots, his bay rum, with a lingering of Havana cigar and Armagnac—every inch a well-appointed gentleman of means. That he was incidentally an Australian would not have mattered to those who, unlike his wife, care for men. Curly Golson is both pretty awful and rather exciting—to those who care. That I might have cared, wrecked poor Joanie’s evening. While Curly cracked, and bulged, and shone—stimulated by his encounter with a female.
    Again, I must not be a bitch. I’m sure he loves and serves his wife. Does she deserve it? That is another question.
    All the way back along the road to Les Sailles in the Austin car he was as full of gallantry as I can imagine a bull moose in the mating season. I almost reached up and touched the horns, velvety but strong, sprouting out of Curly’s tweed cap.
    Our conversation:
C.: You know, the first time I saw you I thought, damn shame, but I’d never be able to talk to that lady. She’s French, or something.
E.: [regrettably as arch as C.] Was there another time?
C.: The time I nearly ran you down—or Teakle, that’s our man. When you were out walking with your husband …
E.: That time … Well, I do perhaps remember. But vaguely. Other cars have almost run us down. Angelos becomes excited talking. We have so much to discuss. And walk too far out.
C.: [glum] Mrs Golson and I sometimes hardly talk for days—unless about what there is for dinner—or whether we ought to get our boots mended.
E.: Really? [Pause] That’s sad, isn’t it?
C.: Never thought of it as anything but normal.
E.: Still sad.
    Oh, the Australian emptiness! At this point I couldn’t help laughing, and that made it sadder still. My brutality—wanting to get my own back as we were thrown against each other all the way along the atrocious road through the pinède , the ruts reminiscent of those approaching Mittagong. Once, cracking, he edged an arm around me and a rut allowed me to edge him off. Hypocritically. When I could have enjoyed his Harris shoulder.
    The difference between the sexes is no worse than their appalling similarity …
    Just after that, after mounting the rise, the bull moose straining at the wheel, we burst out upon ‘Crimson Cottage’. And there was Angelos standing on the doorstep. I could see he must have run out fifty times, wondering whether his ‘wife’ had been crushed by some vehicle, raped by a peasant, or abducted by a rich man like the one now fetching her back in a motor.
    Yet when we descended from this monstrous machine, and he had staggered down the path, almost tripping over rosemary and wormwood, which do disregard the bounds of garden aesthetics, as A., loaded with brandy, oversteps social decency, these two incongruous males, the gallant Curly and my lovingly licentious Greek, fell upon each other, I’m sure only from relief at finding male company.
    While I was left to hobble, and enjoy the scents of the evening garden, so much subtler if less exciting than the male stench.
    (I would like to think myself morally justified in being true to what I