Her eyes were appealing to him, asking for some revelation, not quite that perhaps (wasn’t she Judge Twyborn’s pragmatic wife?) but a factual account of what he had been doing all these years. Had he been taking part in a war, like all young men of decent upbringing?
In case he was going to deny her this simple luxury, she leaned forward, elbow wobbling slightly on a knee, so that whiskey slopped over the lip of her glass. ‘Delia died too. Now we’ve Etty. Her devilled drumsticks are scrumptious. But she bosses me. I can’t stand it.’
‘She’ll probably leave, like Joséphine Réboa.’
‘God forbid! I couldn’t bear it.’ She bit on her cheroot. ‘Who was Josephine Whatsername?’
‘Somebody who left.’
After that they were at sea.
He thought he felt something crawling somewhere between his crotch and his navel.
Deciding, it seemed, not to let him escape, she leaned farther forward and asked, ‘Darling, were you in the War?’
‘Yes — as it happens — I was.’
‘I’m so glad. We would have hoped you were.’
‘Who?’
‘Well, Daddy …’
He would have liked to think that ‘Daddy’, of all people, would not have condemned him.
‘… and our friends.’
She was looking at him.
‘Who? your friends?’
‘Well, darling — everybody.’
She was looking at him more intently still. ‘You remember Joanie? Joanie Golson. The Boyd Golsons.’
‘Vaguely.’
‘And Marian Dibden?’
She was sitting forward to take stock. Eadie’s therapeutic touch was that of a sledge-hammer.
‘When shall I see my father?’ he asked.
‘Oh,’ she withdrew into her chair, ‘I was going to ring him, then I didn’t because I thought he’d be too upset. I thought when he comes home tonight I’d bring you out into the garden.’
‘No.’
‘What, then?’
‘I’ll come out — and just meet him — like that.’
‘If it’s what you want.’ The little dogs skirling at her ankles, she went to pour herself another drink, forgetting his.
Mildred announced. ‘Etty says luncheon is ready, madam.’
Eadie Twyborn ducked her head. ‘Oh, well, if it’s what Etty says … I hope it’s something delicious for Mr Eddie’s return to the fold.’
Mildred snickered, and looked down her powdered front.
There was nothing for it but that mother and son should go into the dining room and continue to ‘tell about everything’. Would Eadie of the corked-on moustache flinch if he casually produced the spangled fan and pomegranate shawl, flung them into the conversation? Wait perhaps, till the Judge was wearing his high heels and black silk stockings.
Eadie said, ‘I can imagine, Eddie, what you must have suffered — from what one heard of life in the trenches.’
In the lull before the guns opened up again there was only the sound of a dog scratching.
‘Did you win any medals?’ she asked.
‘Only one.’
‘I’d adore to see it.’
‘I dropped it down a grating in London after I was demobbed.’
‘I expect you could get another,’ she said, ‘if you paid them for it.’
From his window he had watched darkness gathering, a milky sky purpling over, a recent flowering of lights dancing in a thicket as branches were stirred by an evening breeze, all that was left of a ferry now like a child’s illuminated pencil-box slid across a smooth black surface in a gap between trees. (‘You wanted a pencil-box, didn’t you, Ed?’ ‘Yes, but I thought it’d be a double-decker.’ ‘Sorry — next time — when you’re older.’ Later: ‘Your father gave it so much thought — such a busy man — you should have sounded more grateful.’ Silence. He was not ungrateful. He took the disappointing pencil-box to bed. He hid it under his pillow. He would have defended it from loving hands doing things only for his good, removing angular, uncomfortable, ultimately ridiculous pencil-boxes. He would have been prepared to wound the loving hand as he had when it was laid upon him as a comfort, while he was inhaling the ether. ‘They’re only going to snip the nasty tonsils, which might otherwise poison your whole system; you won’t feel it I promise you, darling.’ ‘Nhhao!’ the shriek it became in the lint funnel as you were sucked down it, down down, through a scent of pale green fur …)
In this evening’s silence, nobody, at least for the time being, was suggesting anything for his good. His isolation was not the target for the sounds breaking around it: the chitter of crickets, the twitter from a formation of small migrating birds, a gibber of possums, more human for the demands they were making on one another, the crash of a tram as it rounded a corner in a sputtering of violet sparks.
Shouldn’t he do something instead of becoming a fixture in this room which had received him back? What rituals were performed before dinner in the house to which he belonged? Did they bathe? Change their clothes? To be on the safe side, he decided not to prepare in any way. Stick to the day’s patina of grime and sweat, an additional layer of himself as protection against the moment when he must beard the Judge in the garden.
A figure, he realised, had come down the steps from the drawing room and was hovering amongst the more amorphous masses of shrubs. Impossible to tell whether it were Edward or Eadie. Cigar smoke was no indication of sex. If Edward, would Eadie have warned him of what to expect? Or had she decided to submit him to the same shock as she had undergone, only intensified by darkness, night perfumes, and fragmentation of distant lights? Perhaps you had done wrong to plan the meeting in the dark garden. Face to face in the dim lighting favoured in this house might have been less unnerving, underwater shapes drifting harmlessly around as they took each other’s measure. Too bad if a predator appeared. But Eadie had probably been frightened off. She would keep away till the worst was over.
Anyway, he had to go down.
Crossing the drawing room he overheard a voice bullying servants. ‘Can we be sure of the soufflé, Etty? You know what a flop the last one was — when Mrs Golson came to lunch …’ A clattering of crockery. ‘By all means take her on your lap, Thatcher. But you did nothing, absolutely nothing, about the cyst between her toes. My poor dear! My darling Biffy! Sentimentality is all very well, but practical attention, Thatcher, is what little dogs respond to.’ A cowering silence, almost, you thought you detected, a fearful stench blowing from the kitchen offices.
He forged on. The sound of his own feet covering a jarrah no-man’s land between threadbare rugs should not have alarmed an ex-lieutenant (D.S.O.); nor should an ex-Empress (hetaira) of Nicaea, expert in matters of protocol and mayhem, have quailed before a situation involving a minor official even when the official was her father; mere blood relationship never ruled out a bloodbath.
With Eadie in the kitchen, it was unavoidably the Judge smoking his solitary cigar in the quiet of the garden.
Lieutenant Twyborn went over the top, down the marble steps from which brocaded skirts swept dead leaves and caterpillars’ droppings.
A shaft of light striking from the house laid bare the long judicial face as well as that of the defendant.
A dry, self-contained man, the Judge was at the culprit’s mercy as never on any of his many circuits.
‘Why didn’t she tell me?’ He had to accuse somebody.
The air around them was tremulous.
‘I expect she thought it would be less upsetting to let you find out.’
As indeed it had been easier not to forewarn by writing, to leave it to a mingling of skin and veins, the texture of cloth, the tokens on a watch-chain, the spider-moustache which descended and withdrew as on the night when the shutters blew open, never before, never again till now. (Angelos hadn’t worn a moustache.)