The Twyborn Affair by Patrick White

Author:Patrick White [White, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Australia
Published: 1979-03-10T13:00:00+00:00

That noon, while enjoying the luxury of a solitary Sunday frowst, after the minimum of cold mutton with mustard pickle, and the dwindling warmth of a brew of tea, he heard a sound of hooves and the metal of a horse’s bridle. He looked out and saw, not his mistress of last night, but Mrs Lushington his employer’s wife tethering her hack to the rail outside the feed room.

It was startling in these circumstances and at this hour of day. He heard himself muttering. He took up the pot to pour another cup of tea, by now tepid and repulsive, but found himself instead draining the pot to its dregs through the spout.

Fortified, if ashamed, he went out to the encounter with this stranger already knocking at the door.

‘I hope I’m not intruding,’ she began what sounded a prepared speech. ‘Usually on Sunday, after lunch, I go for a ride, otherwise Ham gets out of hand. As I was passing this way I thought I’d look in—see how they’re treating you—whether they’ve made you comfortable.’

She smiled out of unadorned lips, unnatural only in dealing with a rehearsed recitative.

He brought her in, or rather, she brought herself.

She said, ‘It’s a horrid little house if you look at it squarely.’

‘I’ve grown attached to it.’ He might begin resenting Marcia.

‘At least in your case it’s only temporary.’

Her conscience salved, she started stalking through the house as though she didn’t own it and hadn’t been there before; perhaps she hadn’t. For Sunday afternoon and the land which was hers, she was shabbily dressed, in the old dead-green velour and stretched cardigan in natural wool, with riding pants which, in spite of exclusive tailoring, did not show her at her best. As she went she peered into rooms, dilating and contracting her nostrils in the manager’s doorway while glancing with a frown at the photographs of Kath and Kim, murmuring on reaching the cook’s bedroom, ‘Poor Peggy Tyrrell—rough as bags, but such a dear,’ turning her back on Eddie Twyborn’s unmade bed.

When they reached the dining-kitchen she started rapping on the oilcloth, which made the crumbs on its surface tremble and her engagement finger flash.

‘I ought to apologise,’ she said, teeth champing on the words the other side of those bland lips, ‘for anything that happened. It was my fault. Oh, I know you’d think it was, Eddie, even if I didn’t admit it. Because you’re a man.’

She paused as though giving him a chance to exonerate her.

‘I shouldn’t have thought of blaming you,’ he said. ‘It was a moment of shared lust. It surprised me that I enjoyed it. But I did.’

Marcia looked most surprised. She suppressed a little gasp. Her eyes were glowing. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it isn’t the sort of thing a man usually says to his mistress. I knew I was right. You’re different, Eddie. You have a quality I’ve always hoped for—and never found—in a man.’

‘To me it’s only conscience—for having fucked the wife of a man I respect.’

‘Oh, darling,’

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