The Twyborn Affair by Patrick White Page A

languages he could never understand the one I speak. Oh yes, he does, he does, I know. And doesn’t.
    We read each other’s thoughts as clearly as one can follow the snail’s track across the terrace. In spite of it, he crushes me—regularly. Do I crush him, I wonder? Of course I do—oh Lord, yes—I do! Knowing will never prevent it.
    For this reason it is so important to concentrate on the minutiae: the mauve-to-silver trail of the snail unaware that he’s going to be crushed, the scrapings from the carrot which hasn’t yet been sliced, the lovely long peeling from the white flesh of the unconscious turnip … (I can thank the defection of Joséphine Réboa for most of these revelations.)
    All afternoon I was dragooned at the piano: Jeux d’enfants . Very upright, rigid, I was not rapped across the knuckles with the ruler, only morally. We are the chevaux de bois gyrating, gyrating, the painted nostrils.
    I must break away.
    Tonight again we have been over the Bogomil heresy without my coming any closer to what essentially it means. Perhaps it’s that way with any heresy, more than most others those of sexuality.
E.: But don’t you think it a ferocious act to burn a heretic?
A.: Depending on the times.
E.: But is a human being less human depending on the times?
A.: Who can say? Anna, a correct, a strict woman, believed itnecessary to burn Basil the Bogomil.
E.: Anna your sainted wife believed in the bonfire?
A.: Oh dear no, the Comnena—a forerunner.
E.: Forgive me if I’m confused. Past and present are so interwoven in the Orthodox mind.
(Like cigarette smoke in the kitchen after midnight.)
A.: What you will never understand is the Orthodox mind.
E.: Certainly not in an un-believer like yourself!
A.: One might have believed then—as one does now—in the structure of tradition—of Orthodoxy—as one believes in the visible Church of Ayia Sophia.
E.: And in the Holy Ghost no doubt!
A.: Why do you laugh at the Holy Ghost?
E.: You’re right. One can’t laugh at what is omnipresent.
    All the while a storm is raging. One doesn’t reckon on the storms which arise along this serene coast. One thinks of it as a place of convalescence, honeymoons, benign airs and perfumes. Not the potential suicide in half those drifting euphorically among those same airs and perfumes. Over which the Holy Ghost presides, even in the souls of unbelievers, as he does over most marriages, A. to E., Boyd to Joanie Golson, Eadie Twyborn to Edward her Judge. Sometimes the Holy Ghost is a woman, but whether He, She or It, always there, holding the disintegrating structure together (or so we hope in our agnostic hearts) and will not, must not, withdraw.
    At one stage there was such a crash the largest olive-tree could have been uprooted, thus proving that the Holy Ghost has indeed withdrawn, I have come to need that olive-tree. My lover/husband kisses me on each nipple and in each armpit before falling back asleep. Drunk with heresies, with Orthodoxy, he cannot reach farther. He is growing frail, but of the two, I am the frailer. I used to imagine I could burn for love, but now to drown for it would be the less obtrusive way out.
    At least I’ve written the letter to the Golsons.
    19th March
    Got up this morning with the intention of being precise, methodical, final. The storm had withdrawn very early. A.’s death-mask was still snoring on the pillow. So as not to disturb it I leave him for other rooms before unlatching any shutters. It is a moment of false dawn before the real. Wind still blowing, if not so frantically. Such light as there is gives the impression of being visibly blown in different directions. Silver bouquets strewn on the surface of a black sea. As after any violent storm, one’s own fears have done the worst damage. My olive-tree is standing. The garden would seem an argument for permanence—only one or two insignificant, dispensable