You could hardly answer, Nothing; surely being is enough? looking, smelling, listening, touching.
Instead you said, ‘I’m thinking of going into the country. To work.’
In response to a serious aspiration, the Judge became more than ever earnest. ‘A practice in a country town — somewhere like Wagga, say — no, Bathurst. I don’t approve of nepotism, but could probably persuade Birkett and Blair to take you in. A very reputable firm of solicitors. Blair I know personally. I can’t see why you shouldn’t aim higher eventually. But feel your way back into the profession you were intended for. I’d die so much happier for seeing you dedicated to the Law.’
The velvet of sentiment and the private bin Edward Twyborn kept in reserve for celebrations introduced a seductive solemnity into their tête-à-tête. Eddie wished he could take himself as seriously as his father required, or that the Judge might have understood the greater seriousness of coming to terms with a largely irrational nature.
‘I thought of taking a job, as a labourer more or less — hard physical labour — on the land — and in that way perhaps, getting to know a country I’ve never belonged to.’
Judge Twyborn’s eyes had never looked deeper, more troubled, as though some private obsession of his own were on the point of being discovered.
In fact his son barely noticed; he was too surprised at the improbable idea which had come to him the moment before. Its morality must have appeared admirable, if stark, to the one in whom he was confiding. His more innocent confidant would not have seen it as Eddie Twyborn escaping from himself into a landscape.
Oh yes, it was an idea he would more than consider; he could not wait to put it into action; he was already surrounded by the train smell, frosty air, his oilskin rolled, heavy boots grating on the gravel of a country siding. (Would those who came across him notice that the boots were recently bought and that his hands looked as ineffectual as they might prove to be?)
But the landscape would respond, the brown, scurfy ridges, fat valleys opening out of them to disclose a green upholstery, the ascetic forms of dead trees, messages decipherable at last on living trunks.
‘I’d never thought of anything like that — for you, Ed,’ Judge Twyborn admitted glumly; the port no doubt made it sound the sadder. ‘That the son of a professional man like myself … Oh well, why not?’ He laughed rather disconsolately. ‘The Law — or medicine, or any other profession, shouldn’t be allowed to become a religion. Lots of reputable young men have made a go of it on the land. We can get someone to take you on — not as a labourer. When members of our class are involved,’ the Judge approached it gingerly, ‘they call it jackerooing.’
An easier way? Eddie suspected it was, and not without a touch of nepotism, when he had aspired to be a ‘hand’.
‘I’ll speak to Greg Lushington. I see him on and off at the Club.’
What had been a solemn occasion became the more solemn for an excess of port and an excessive unreality.
When the door was flung open. ‘I can’t bear it any longer. The girls have pissed. Aren’t you men ready for your coffee?’
She had stuck the Spanish comb at an even more improbable angle. She had started blinking and expostulating.
‘I’m worried about Biffy’s cyst. All my little dogs die of cancer. Soon I shall be left alone — without the strength for rearing puppies.’
Cheeks pale by now, her mouth gaped open like a target in a fair.
Surprisingly, Judge Twyborn aimed. ‘You’ll never be left alone, my dear. There’ll be a host of surviving fleas — and probably a paralysed husband.’
On and off the parents had hopes of displaying their son to those they considered their friends: Edward’s fellow judges, barristers, doctors, architects, sometimes a leavening of graziers. (‘You’ll find country people speak a different language,’ Eadie told him, ‘but they’re warm-hearted, well-meaning’ adding in the course of her introductory remarks, which were intended as persuasion, ‘Some have greater pretensions. Ethel Tucker, for example, is reading Proust, if you can believe, down in the Riverina.’)
She would start sighing, almost mewing, before announcing, ‘We’re having a few close friends to a little drinks party. We’d so love it if you’d look in.’
He staved it off. ‘I don’t feel I’m ready. The languages alone.’
She sat looking at him incredulously.
‘Though Ethel and I might become mates if we don’t rush it.’
‘Oh, Ethel’s no great shakes. Take it from me. We were at school together. Ethel was practically illiterate. I had to write her love-letters for her.’
‘Was the marriage a success?’
‘Marriage doesn’t necessarily come of the love-letters,’ she mused.
She looked at him. ‘You’re not ashamed of us, are you, Eddie?’
Unable to explain the reason for his diffidence, he could only murmur, ‘Two such honourable characters … Why should I be?’
She blushed. ‘I’m not all that honourable. And you sound as legal as your father while pretending not to be.’
Exposure in its most painful form was for some reason delayed till later than he had expected. ‘If you don’t want to meet anybody else, I must bring you together with my old friend Joanie.’
‘Joanie?’
‘Golson — Sewell that was.’
‘Hardly remember. Suppose I do — just; I was quite small.’
‘But later, surely. You can’t have been away all the time at boarding school. She remembers you and is dying to meet you.’
He gave no indication of accepting or refusing.
‘She’ll be coming to afternoon tea tomorrow. I do hope you’ll make the effort, darling.’
After that she took her dogs into the garden and gave them a good flea-powdering in preparation for Mrs Golson’s visit.
The day of the visit turned out heavy: morning yawned through a green-gold late autumn haze; hibiscus pollen clung to the shoulder blundering against those brooding trumpets; the air you breathed felt coated with fur; and under the rose bushes which Mrs Golson must skirt that afternoon, a crop of giant, speckled toadstools had shot from the compost overnight.
At breakfast (Eadie presiding over a battery of shapely but dented Georgian silver, in a steam of strong Darjeeling) the Judge informed them, ‘I ran into Lushington, lunching yesterday at the Club.’ Before revealing the outcome of their meeting, he paused to convey a liberal forkful of kedgeree past the spidery moustache. ‘He says,’ said the Judge while masticating conscientiously, ‘he’ll take you on at a — nominal — wage. Like many of the rich,’ here the Judge defended himself by hunching his shoulders and clamping down on the kedgeree, ‘Greg Lushington is stingy. Oh, he doesn’t mean to be. He understands it as thrift — which is how he came by what he’s got. Thrift is something we poor professional coots are unable to indulge in. We can only aim at retiring early, to cosset investments.’ He let out an enormous sigh, and continued munching, stray grains of rice trembling on the tips of the more detached hairs in his moustache.
‘Sometimes I wonder, darling, whether you are emulating Gladstone.’
‘How?’
‘All this — mastication.’
He ignored it, while continuing to munch.
‘Lushington would see you, Eddie. But returned last night to his property.’
‘Most of the time half-sloshed,’ said Eadie.
‘How do you know?’
‘I can tell,’ she said, ‘by instinct.’
Silence fell on a debris of haddock bones and rejected rice. Eadie was entering the desert which lies between the breakfast cuppa and the first snifter.
‘Lushington says that, as a jackeroo, you’ll share a cottage with the manager — which, I take it, is meant as compensation for the nominal wage you’ll be receiving.’