The Twyborn Affair by Patrick White Page B

branches lying uncouth amongst the silver tussocks, the hummocks and cushions of lavender, dianthus, southernwood, and thrift. My rented garden. Nothing is mine except for the coaxing I’ve put into it. For that matter, nothing of me is mine, not even the body I was given to inhabit, nor the disguises chosen for it—A. decides on these, seldom without my agreement. The real E. has not yet been discovered, and perhaps never will be.
    Oh yes, only return to that point at which I ran from the tennis court, from Marian’s hysterical giggle, her white, sinewy arms, the thud of the felted ball as she drove it at the ivy-throttled screen, disturbed sparrows twittering, ascending.
    Around me in this half-light of deserted rooms evidence of the minutiae on which I’m trying to base my doctrine of life. In the false dawn it doesn’t work. The Holy Ghost was never such a ghost. I am perhaps the only stereoscopic object to be found—if I could believe in myself, but I can’t. Moving very slightly on the bathroom tiles was this little ball of hair-combings, which I had thrown at the waste-basket, and missed. All my misses, if they could be gathered up, embodied like this insubstantial ball of hair, would make a monument to futility.
    If there were need for that. The fact that I sit here writing as I do, and rereading what I have written , is evidence enough. By now I should be inundated, along with all that I cherish—my old A., our life together, the piano duets, glimpses of thrift and pinks, even myfailures in the kitchen (those burnt-out saucepans) sea and light, sea and light.
    Already walking down the coast road I regretted my intention, and seeing myself, never more clearly, as I am. I’ve always hated stubbing my bare toes. I’m neither an Australian nor an Orthodox martyr. If I had taken him by the hand, my dear Angelos might have been walking beside me, far more exposed than I, his old testicles swinging in the grey light, towards fulfilment by immersion. Instead, I am alone. Everything important, alas, can only be experienced alone—the rocks I must clamber down before entering this repulsively oily sea.
    Then the plunge. I am swimming. Yes, I can swim as I could never walk barefoot. I am swimming in the direction of Africa, of nowhere. That, surely, is what I have chosen? It is just because I can swim with ease that finally I burst out laughing. Like an amateur, I swallow a gutful of water. And light. All the refractions of light around me—violet into blue blue. I swallow it and spout it out. I am the Amateur Suicide. I turn and snooze back through healing water. I am not ashamed, as I shall be later. For the present, snoozing and spouting. Rising, as Angelos must be rising out of those other, grey waves, to bare his teeth at the bathroom mirror, farting, regardless of whether I’m there or not. This is marriage, I would like to think, enduring marriage as authorised by our version of the Holy Ghost.
    But I must escape, and not through suicide. I knew it as I dashed the (healing) water from my face and body on those damn rocks, to which I should have had no intention of returning. Was this why I wrote the letter to Joanie Golson? to enlist her sympathy, her help? Can you escape into the past? Perhaps you can begin again that way. If you can escape at all.
    When I got back, Angelos said, ‘Where were you? I began to worry. What were you doing? Look, your feet are bleeding!’
    â€˜Yes, they’re bleeding, I’ll put iodine on them. That will be hell—but your wife Anna would have approved. Actually, I only went for a swim—nothing less orthodox than that, darling .’
    A. laughed. ‘I wondered where you were, and why you didn’t bring me my coffee.’
    This is why you can’t help loving A.—in the absence of a Holy Ghost, his trust in one frailer than himself.
    Â 
    Mrs Golson had just returned from the English Tea-room and Library