The Twyborn Affair Read Free Page A

of legal papers. Edward smelled of stale cigar. Eadie, too, smelled of cigar, the cheroots she smoked with Edward up in the tower-room, alone. Nobody and everybody knew about Eadie Twyborn’s cigars. She and the Judge had what was considered the perfect marriage, that is, until their disaster, which in no way damaged their relationship, only them.
    Eadie was drunk when she said, ‘You, Joan, are the one I depend on—for some reason. I can scratch my navel and you won’t bawl me out. I can blub if I feel like it, and you’ll—oh, I don’t know.’ She did, though; you and Eadie both did.
    â€˜Of course my stupid darling judge comes first.’ Eadie poured some more into her own brandy balloon; she was quite maudlin—disgusting really. ‘It’s brought Edward and me closer.’
    Joan re-arranged her letter-paper. She wrote in her large, bulbous hand—tonight it looked enormous:
    Â 
    Dearest Eadie ,
    Â 
    There she stopped as though daunted by that exceptionally stylish comma; and might get no farther.
    She was practically snoozing: it was the bland, buttery eggs and the half-bottle of champagne Curly had insisted on ordering; it was Curly’s cure for everything. She loved him, she supposed, his generosity, even his baldness: she would lie holding his head against her breast as though brooding on a giant egg.
    But as she sat snoozing, or allowing her mind to flicker amongst the tufts and wands of plants, the scents of evening, the silken swaths of colour with which the bay was strewn, the owners came out from the house, in which lights were burning, making its walls, which should have looked less substantial in their dissolution by dusk, if anything more solid, like a hollowed pumpkin with a candle in it. She heaved sniggering in the Louis Whichever bergère , but only for a moment; her actual surroundings were too ephemeral, banal, too downright vulgar. Back in the garden the others had reached her side and were supporting her, the cold bloodless fingers of the more controlled elderly pianist, and the terracotta, votive hands of his mistress-wife. They were leading her along the paths of the garden, then through the rooms of their enchanted house, past the upright, ‘fun’ piano (no, they couldn’t be the owners; they were the tenants of the pseudo-villa) the lamp with its porcelain shade lighting them in their solemn progress.
    Somewhere in a narrow hall, in the region of a console, above it a mirror, they parted from the man in black. He would stay behind, no doubt reading; yes, he looked a bookworm. She might have turned to thank him had she known in which language to communicate with her friends. So far, she realised, language had not mattered: they relied on touch, glances, and the smiles which united the three of them, as the two on the music-stool had been united earlier that evening by music and a sensual embrace. (Though she had not taken part in it, Joan Golson could feel the warm saliva in her mouth.)
    And now, though she should have thanked him for his kindness, she did not turn towards this man standing hesitating in the hall, but allowed the young woman to lead her on, bumping their way, burrowing down passages the villa or cottage had failed to suggest to a common voyeuse . Until settling into a room of apparent importance and their evident goal, the woman or girl was helping her out of clothes which clung like refractory cobwebs, and into the bed which she had warmed with a copper warmer conveniently standing amongst a hearthful of glowing pine-knots.
    Joan was acutely conscious of the embossed pattern of fruit andflowers on the copper warmer which was first slid between the sheets waiting to receive her. Language was what she could not sort out: perhaps it was the language of silence as the young woman turned her noble head towards her, the invited guest holding in her whiter, plumper fingers a stronger terracotta hand, but from which, in