Wasn’t this what he had come for? He closed his eyes and let it happen.
He must have continued standing with them closed, for when it was over she demanded, out of a greed which had not been sated, ‘Come on, let me look at your eyes. Your eyes are what I’ve missed most.’
So he had to open up to the present, to her pair of brown ferrets, and must have repelled them, for she gasped and asked, ‘Are you hungry, darling? Arriving so early — and the Customs — the Customs always make one hungry. What about your luggage? Did Mildred take it up to your room? She looks frail, but she’s surprisingly tough — only idle.’
‘I haven’t got it. It’s at the hotel.’
‘I hope you’re not going to make us pay too dearly, Eddie, for being your parents.’
When more than likely Eadie intended he should be the one to pay for a relationship, the mysteries of which might never be solved.
‘You don’t always know,’ he mumbled, ‘whether it’s as difficult for people to have strangers staying, as it is — well, to stay with strangers.’
They were stranded looking at each other on the spot where drawing room became hall. Anywhere else it might have been unbearable to realise that the son with whom she had wrestled, perhaps even tried to throttle in the agony he had caused while forcing his way out of a womb where he was not wanted in the first place, had become the mirror-figure of herself. At least the doorway from drawing room to hall allowed her to shoot off into the dining room beyond, and avoid further exposure.
Then, with her back to him, she complained, ‘My nerves are on end,’ and poured herself a resounding whiskey.
Back still turned, she decided, ‘Thatcher will fetch your stuff from the hotel. Thatcher’s the gardener — no earthly use, except to take the dogs walking. I doubt anyone else would have him if we turned him loose. So Thatcher has become our fate.’
Once more mistress of herself, Thatcher, and most others, she returned from the dining room into the hall, thrust out her hand, and announced through that voracious smile, ‘Come and I’ll show you your room.’
As though he didn’t know it.
‘Is the mattress as hard as it used to be?’
But she did not seem to hear as they clumped thumping upstairs, shoulder bumping off shoulder, hands locked in sisterhood.
Delicacy must have overtaken Eadie, for she left him alone in what had been, and evidently still was, his room. Nothing appeared to have been disturbed, neither objects such as books, trophies, a sea urchin on a window sill, nor the nightmares and unrealisable romances with which the narrow bed was still alive. He prodded it, and felt the same hair mattress on which he had done youthful penance. She had unlatched the shutters, but the glare of sunlight prevented him re-acquainting himself to any extent with the precipice outside, its fuzz of lantana scrub, nasturtiums, and a few precarious pittosporums. Considering that the geography was so little altered, the furniture disposed to receive him back, there was no reason why he should not resume both his rational and unconscious lives, if the unreason with which he was cursed, and worse than that, a rebellious body, would allow him to.
In the meantime he prowled inside the fortress of his room, stepping as softly as he could in case his mother might be listening for his movements, to interpret them. Eadie="Eddie." It was true, but in spite of the war years and the aftermath of peace, he had not yet learnt to accept that he was Eddie Twyborn, the son of Mr Justice Twyborn — the incalculable factor. He dreaded Edward more than Eadie, who was himself in disguise.
He continued prowling, softer than before, running his finger down the spines, the titles of dustless books: the rejected Profession—Private Equity, Real Property, The Law of Contract, The Law of Torts; The Prisoner of Zenda and Robinson Crusoe; the Kipling birthday presents (‘he’s such a splendid writer, darling, as you’ll appreciate later on’); Swinburne’s reeking perfumes, secret orgasms; The Man in the Iron Mask—the Bible.
He opened the last, and in it found, in a handwriting gone green with age, the characters cramped by sincerity and doubts:
For Eddie
on the occasion of his 13th birthday
from his father
Edward Twyborn
He might have protested oh horror horror my own poor father if there hadn’t been a knocking at the door.
It was Mildred and the gardener Thatcher either end of his cabin-trunk.
Mildred panted, ‘Where shall we put it, Mr Eddie?’
‘On the sofa?’
‘Oh, no! Mrs Twyborn would never approve of that. The springs!’
‘But there aren’t any, and I shan’t have to stoop.’
‘Shall we leave it here? under the window?’ was Mildred’s breathless suggestion.
‘The rain will come in.’ He identified his mother’s disapproving voice.
But Mildred and Thatcher were ready to dump the trunk, and did, under the window. The parlourmaid was smelling rather pleasantly of the powder which had given in to her exertions; while Thatcher who took the dogs for walks, and who had adopted silence, probably as an armature against his mistress, stank of what is known as ‘honest sweat’, or more accurately, dirty socks.
They came and went, bringing in the smaller pieces. Eddie Twyborn, so-called, felt guilty, and prowled worse, with less concern for what might be overheard by Eadie.
As the servants were leaving she did in fact appear, having changed into some sort of haphazard frock, exposing freckled arms and a droughty chasm leading to the breasts which had suckled her child. It was not so much this painful revelation as the face she had tried to disguise by smearing it with crimson and white which made him avert his own.
‘Now,’ she said, her gaping wound smiling at him from amongst those lesser ones which had healed, ‘you must come down and have a drink — and tell me all about everything,’ trying to sound like the girl she might never have been.
Did she know he knew? She bowed her head going downstairs in front of the son she might never have had.
When they were seated in the drawing room, each holding as a protective weapon a glass of whiskey as strong as Eadie knew how to pour, and she had lit one of the cheroots he remembered her smoking in the past, only in the tower room alone with the Judge, he asked straight out, ‘What became of Ruffles — Mum?’
As though beaten at her own game by the one who should have been ‘telling all’, she looked at the carpet, and answered, ‘Ruffles died.’ It left her with a little tic in one cheek.
While like some old mangy, cancerous dog, Angelos Vatatzes was dragging his body out of a corner of the drawing room to lay his head on Eudoxia’s knee, asking forgiveness for his devotion.
The apparition drove Eddie Twyborn to concentrate on something which might convey actuality: the waves painted on the Gulf of Smyrna; lizards on burning marble at Nicaea; arabesques swirling out of the Chabrier waltzes at nightfall above Les Sailles.
‘Anyway, Ruffles apart,’ he said to his mother, ‘nothing has changed — here — since I went away. Only the springs have given up.’
Eadie hunched her shoulders and, after plunging her hands into the bowels of her chair as though groping for evidence which might justify his accusation, came out with a high, smoky giggle. ‘You’re not cruel, darling, I hope. We’re not as well off as we were — on a judge’s salary.’
‘Nobody — that is, none of us is ever as well off as we were. It’s one of the laws of nature and history.’
He heard her teeth make contact with her glass as she tried to work it out. ‘Darling, stop scratching!’ She smacked one of her little dogs.
Yes, he was being cruel, but only as he was to himself.