The Twyborn Affair Read Free Page B

spite of its warmth, she experienced no response, little enough illumination from the white smile in a terracotta face.
    Mrs Golson roused herself from a smell of singed or sun-bleached sheets.
    On the sheet which she had before her on the table she saw that she had written: Dearest Eadie— comma.
    She giggled slightly, remembering how on one occasion Eadie had given herself a moustache, dashed off with burnt cork, and they had dressed up—or Eadie had—and ordered drinks in a hotel winter garden, and joined in with the guests at a formal dinner dance, Eadie in the Judge’s check trousers, Joan in her pale blue charmeuse, everybody staring at them.
    Oh dear, write to poor old Eadie Twyborn, tell her about the couple at the villa—if that would ever be possible …
    7 feb. 1914
    A day which should have been idyllic grew increasingly black, ending in storms, after a real Visitation. Could not believe as this sporty motor surged up our hill that it was Eadie’s pal J.G. sitting in the back seat. But crikey, it was! Angelos tells me not to worry. I don’t, of course. But why should I be persecuted? Eadie has sent her. A. says no, Eadie couldn’t have, it’s nothing but coincidence. Angelos is always right. Or not always. Only when he isn’t wrong.
    But just when I’d begun to order my life, perhaps even make it into something believable, this emissary comes to smash it to pieces. Nothing so brutal as a soft, silly woman.
    Everything, I now see, has been leading up to this act of aggression. Gentle perfection is never allowed to last for long. The more laboriously it has been built up, the more painfully it is brought down.
    Text for every day to come: I must not dwell on Joan Golson’s arrival on the scene .
    Had hardly blundered back to consciousness this morning when A. reminded me that it is my birthday. I hadn’t forgotten, but it’s pleasant to be reminded. He brought out presents: the fan (spangled gauze—slats in mother o’ pearl) and a shawl embroidered with pomegranates. Both extremely pretty. But what I loved best was his less material present, which we shared as never before. Why am I besotted on this elderly, dotty, in many ways tiresome Greek? I can only think it’s because we have been made for each other, that our minds as well as our bodies fit, every bump to every cranny, and quirk to quirk. If I hate him at times it’s because I hate myself. If I love him more deeply than I love E. it’s because I know this other creature too well, and cannot rely entirely on him or her.
    It was one of the hyacinth mornings, a sea breeze blowing not only its own salt but all the early perfumes of the garden in at the window. When Angelos had left me and started sponging himself I sat by the window in my pomegranate shawl fanning myself with the spangled fan. Delicious fluctuations on bare skin. Looked at myself in the glass and decided I would pass. As I do! Or at any rate, on the days when I don’t hate—when I can forgive myself for being me. So that I’m not purely the narcissist I’m sometimes accused of being—by Angelos on his worst days—and as I am, undoubtedly, on mine.
    He comes back into the room rejuvenated by friction, bald head shining, the still black fringes of hair standing out like the spines of a sea-urchin as he rubs himself with his towel. For a man in his sixties his legs are remarkable: muscular, firmly planted on the ground, the old man’s usual ganglion of veins scarcely visible in A.’s case.
    He said, ‘I was wrong to give you these things. You have dressed yourself up like a whore, sitting at the open window by morning light.’ We both laughed. His teeth are still brilliant. Mine will crumble before I’m even half his age. I shall hope to crumble, not teeth alone, but entirely. God spare me a gummy old age!
    Angelos holding his head on one side as he continues drying theback of his