The Twyborn Affair (4 page)

On the other hand there is not much that escapes those old dragnet eyes of his. Angelos is a specialist in dredging up the moral wreckage of others, while inclined to remain impervious to his own. His eyes will flicker past his worst faults.

I had barely finished kissing those nut-shell eyelids, and he thrusting himself against me, his laughter radiating through my whole body, when we heard a motor assaulting the hill, emerging from the pines, shaving the garden wall. And there is Mrs E. Boyd Golson staring out; one would say ‘glaring' if one didn't know her to be myopic and afraid of limiting her social successes by taking to spectacles.

At least her driver didn't toot, but trust the Golsons to have a
klaxon disguised as a brass serpent slithering down to rest on a mudguard.

Angelos couldn't know what had descended on us, except that it was something distasteful, something not quite, but almost American.

I lead him away, along the path, into our refuge, where we are left to face the night.

Angelos says, ‘I would have liked to make music with you, E., if all inclination has not left me.' His tenses go to pot in a crisis. I tell him I have no inclination either. I bring him the
œufs brouillés
, but he has no appetite. I make myself eat his helping as well as mine. As I gobble the eggs I can feel a trickle down my chin. I must look as thoroughly vulgar as the situation and Joanie Golson call for. Poor cow! She can't help it any more than I can.

I know that before long the Emperor of All Byzantium (Nicaea thrown in for good measure—Mistra too) will begin to accuse the Colonies. Rain is battering the shutters. Madame Réboa will no doubt have started showing her ulcer to a fresh victim. For all his Byzantine pretensions A. might have sprung on Joséphine this evening if she hadn't shed the apron along with the servitude she inherited in our house. Instead he sits rocking in the rented
demi-fauteuil style provençal
.

A. says, ‘I will never hold anything against you. Nor anybody. Not even that gangster Palaiologos. Where is Anna my wife?'

The rain is sawing at the shutters. He must know how I hate the name of Anna.

‘I expect Anna has taken her martyrdom to Heaven by special ladder.'

I don't think he heard.

‘A good woman, but without the flair of the Empress Eudoxia.' He arranges his tongue against his palate before going off into his usual tumbled Imperial catalogue. ‘She used to wait on the steps … along with the Panhypersevastos … the Grand Stratopedarchs … the Primikerios the Constable the Logothete …'

During the recitation he slips lower on his throne. I pour my Emperor another brandy.

He asks, ‘Did Anna die at Blachcrnae? Or was it after we moved to Nicaea?'

Or Smyrna? Or Alexandria? Or even Athens? The Stations of the Greek Cross.

I help him upstairs, by now so sloshed he is only for undressing. Old cold feet, like skate on the fishmonger's slab, the feet of my 68-year-old child, the snoring funnel of the aged mouth …

The shutter tears free of the latch, and the room is incorporated into the churning night, the garden threatened with uprooting, its only stable feature the immense olive, in the branches of which the moon appears caught for a second or two, and at intervals the scud of cloud.

How enviable this olive tree encased in its cork armour, hardly a tremor in its gnarled arms, its downthrust roots firmly holding. To have such stability—or is oneself the strongest stanchion one can hope for? To realise this is perhaps to achieve stability.

Writing about oneself at night is release of a kind, but no more than of a kind—like masturbation.

8 feb.

Slept v. little as result of the storm and the Visitation. If I had known there was to be a Second Coming I might have abandoned my old child, made for the railway station at St Mayeul, and spent the rest of the night waiting for the first train—whether to Genoa, Nice, Marseille or Perpignan would not have worried the fugitive.

But this morning was again one of those with which we are blessed in these parts and which exorcise the recurring nightmares.

That very real one: the shutter has flown open, the whole cliffside a churning mass of pittosporum and lantana scrub pressing in upon, threatening all man-made shoddiness. The giant emu's head and neck tormented by the wind. As its plumage is ruffled and tossed, its beak descends repeatedly, almost past the useless shutter, almost into the room where I am lying in my narrow bed, fright raised in goose-pimples, when not dissolving into urine.

Last night, to make this dream more disturbing, my father came
in: this tall man with droopy moustache and swollen knuckles—not forgetting the eyes. My father's eyes are the most expressive part of him: a liquid, apologetic, near-black, terrifying when faced with any kind of dishonesty, terrified in turn by the grief of others, poverty, children. I never dared call my father ‘Dad'—Mother might become, grudgingly, ‘Mum', a sulky ‘you' more often than not—but my father could never have been less than ‘Father'.

I speak of him as though he were dead, when last night he was standing beside me, after the shutter had burst open and the beak of the giant emu was threatening to descend into the room, to tear me open as I cowered on my narrow, sodden mattress (hair, they had decided, on account of the asthma).

Mastering fear of his own child, my father was standing over me, offering a cold, knobbly hand. Which I took in desperation and love. He was trembling. I could smell his fear. It was that of a man, intensified, and overlaid by those other smells of cigar smoke and port-wine. I guessed that my father must be the only person in the house, otherwise he would not have come in, he would have left me to Nanny, or Mummy, even to Emma or Dora. But here he stood in person by the bed, his waistcoat with one of the points crumpled, the watch-chain with its gold symbols, and the miniature greenstone tiki which somebody had brought back from a holiday at Rotorua, and which I would have loved to fondle had I dared.

And now his hand. I did not dare.

‘Is anything wrong?' he asked, ‘darling?'

He had never ventured on a ‘darling' before, and this confirmed my belief that Father was the only person in the house.

‘Is there?'

‘No.'

When everything was. I was swimming in it.

Then he said, ‘Aren't we a bit smelly? Shall I change you?'

‘No.'

I was brimming with love for this man I was privileged to call ‘Father', while going through life avoiding calling him
anything
unless it was dragged out of me.

So I repeated, ‘No'.

I could see how relieved he was—this tall, stately, scruffy man. Both my parents were given to food-spots, too argumentative, always in too great a hurry to pay much attention to what they were eating. My mother could look the slut of sluts, and did, except when she set out to kill. But the food-spots seemed to dignify my father, like the asterisks in books too technical to read. My father was essentially technical: a closed book if it hadn't been for his troubled eyes.

Not like those of my more than troubled, my dotty 68-year-old child. Again eyes which are as near as anything black, but ready to splinter into hilarity and rages. Vatatzes is protected by malice, madness, the Byzantine armour inherited from his ancestors, and the infallible weapon with which he overcomes his chief adversary's last resistance.

I have often wondered what sexual solace my parents were able to offer each other. This matter of tense when speaking of parents: as far as I know mine aren't dead, yet almost always I speak of them as though they were. They seemed indestructible; it was their child who died, one of the premature suicides.

When I said he need not change me, Father re-latched the shutter, and managed a smile. The night-light made the smile dip and shudder on his long face. Then, incredibly, he bent and, whether by accident, kissed me on the mouth. It seemed to me I was drawn up into the drooping moustache, as though inside some great brooding loving spider without being the spider's prey; if anything, I was the spinner of threads trying to entangle him more irrevocably than his tentative sortie into loving could ever bind me.

Then the moment broke. He tiptoed out, lapped in and dislocated by the elongating light, and I fell back blissful on my bed of piss which the two of us had agreed to ignore.

This morning was so bland I brought the table out on the terrace at the back without asking Angelos whether I should. He accepted without comment. Too much on his mind, I suspected: Byzantium, Nicaea, our Visitor of the evening before. As he sat behind his
cigarette smoke, under the trellis which is already fuzzing with green, on his face that expression of irony which so often foreshadows cruelty, I wondered whether he hadn't shared what was either my fantasy or my dream.

To sidetrack my suspicion I launched into the kind of banal remark one makes in the cause of self-protection. ‘Isn't it a lovely morning here on the terrace?'

No reply. I sit watching his pointed teeth, the quiver of a veined eyelid, a slight trembling of the hand holding the cigarette.

‘Well—-isn't it?' My chest begins to pout inside my morning-gown, which normally would have gratified my nakedness, ourselves alone together until the arrival of the recently defected Joséphine Réboa.

‘Nobody,' he aims it with precision, ‘can talk of loveliness,' he douses the cigarette in his bowl of unfinished coffee, ‘who has not experienced Smyrna. This,' he almost screams, ‘this French
post-card is nothing! La Côte Morte
!' Laughing, but unbalanced by his laughter, this horrible desiccated wretch, to whom I am committed by fate and orgasm—never love. ‘At this hour we used to sit on the terrace, looking out across the Gulf—our senses drenched with the tones, the scent of stocks at whatever season—the mauve marble of our house on the Prokymea stained with gold—before the blood began to flow …'

‘Oh, come off it!'

I realise I am trembling with rage. I am nauseated by the cigarette doused in the bowl of half-drunk coffee, roused by the friction of my gown against my skin, drugged by the colours and scents of Smyrna as conjured up by the old magician. (Isn't this how our relationship works?)

‘The year she made her pilgrimage to Tinos—before the Turk was driven out of Thessaly …'

‘Oh yes, we're off now—off to the Martyrs' Stakes, the Orthodox races …'

‘… I went with her, but only to see they treated her respectfully on the steamer—that they gave her the cabin I'd reserved for Anna
Vatatzes—that they did not seat boors at her table in the saloon—and replaced the stained tablecloth. Otherwise, I sat on deck, amongst the peasant women surrounded by their bunches of fowls and bleating kids, the cheeses they were bringing to sell receiving the spray from their vomit. This was
my
pilgrimage from Smyrna to Tinos. On arrival I sit waiting for my sainted wife at a café on the
paralia—
because my faith, or lack of it, will not allow me to go up to the church with her.'

‘Masochist, Angelos!'

I am enraged, always, at the sight of the saintly Anna's face, herself a walking candle lighting candles in the dark church. I reach for my lover's hand, past the broken crusts, past the used cups. I disturb the surface of cold
café au lait
in which the cigarette has disintegrated. When I have locked his fingers in mine, we sinners sticky with half-dried semen sit and watch as she kisses her own reflection in the glass protecting the jewelled icon from sinners, germs, and thieves.

Then I lean forward, I cannot restrain my impulse, I kiss the hand I am holding, and we are bobbing like two helpless corks on the tide of our emotions.

‘At breakfast, E.!'

I bow my head. I am exposed from my divided breast, past the slope on which my navel is embossed, as far as the muslin folds of my lap.

‘Why are you crying, Eudoxia?'

‘Fuck it—I'm not! Being emotional isn't necessarily crying, is it? If I weren't emotional, you'd call me a cold fish—or worse still, an Anglo-Saxon. Of all the insulting names you call me, that is seldom one of them.'

We sit laughing, legs entangled under the table, his old bony kneecaps eating into me, neither of us aware that this will be the Day of the Second Coming of Our Lady Mrs E. Boyd Golson.

All day long the dream of my Father kept recurring. In a series of waking dreams I found myself adding details to it.

Mummy came in. I was lying vaguely telling the rosary of dreams and thoughts while sucking the forbidden lolly I had hidden under
the pillow. She rattatted on my bedroom door, only as a joke, because she barged straight in. I thought at first she must have wanted to catch me at something, but soon realised this was the last thing in her head, she was too exhilarated, so excited it did not even occur to her that she was the one who might be caught out. She was dressed in a pair of check pants and a coat which could have belonged to my father. Certainly the waistcoat of crumpled points was his, though she hadn't been able to commandeer the watch-chain. She was wearing a hat, its brim pulled low, which I recognised as a Sewell Sweatfree Felt. Chugging along in the rear was Joanie Golson, her bosom expiring in palest blue charmeuse.

Mummy announced, ‘We are going out, darling. If there's anything you want, Daddy'll be here, reading through some—legal stuff.' She gulped down what was turning into a hiccup.

Though the shutters were closed, and only a feeble glimmer from the night-light swimming in its saucer, a green moon could have been presiding over a painted scene. Its most incredible detail was that Mummy had corked on a moustache: the perspiration had worked its way to the surface and was winking through this corked band, while behind Mrs Judge Twyborn, Mrs Boyd Golson glugged and panted, her charmeuse melons parting and rejoining, parting and rejoining.

Having done their duty by Eadie's tiresome child, the couple left, and I began drowsing and waking, drowsing again, to the tune of Joanie's globular breasts.