The Twyborn Affair Read Online Free PDF Page B

cloud.
    How enviable this olive tree encased in its cork armour, hardly a tremor in its gnarled arms, its downthrust roots firmly holding. To have such stability—or is oneself the strongest stanchion one can hope for? To realise this is perhaps to achieve stability.
    Writing about oneself at night is release of a kind, but no more than of a kind—like masturbation.
    8 feb.
    Slept v. little as result of the storm and the Visitation. If I had known there was to be a Second Coming I might have abandoned my old child, made for the railway station at St Mayeul, and spent the rest of the night waiting for the first train—whether to Genoa, Nice, Marseille or Perpignan would not have worried the fugitive.
    But this morning was again one of those with which we are blessed in these parts and which exorcise the recurring nightmares.
    That very real one: the shutter has flown open, the whole cliffside a churning mass of pittosporum and lantana scrub pressing in upon, threatening all man-made shoddiness. The giant emu’s head and neck tormented by the wind. As its plumage is ruffled and tossed, its beak descends repeatedly, almost past the useless shutter, almost into the room where I am lying in my narrow bed, fright raised in goose-pimples, when not dissolving into urine.
    Last night, to make this dream more disturbing, my father camein: this tall man with droopy moustache and swollen knuckles—not forgetting the eyes. My father’s eyes are the most expressive part of him: a liquid, apologetic, near-black, terrifying when faced with any kind of dishonesty, terrified in turn by the grief of others, poverty, children. I never dared call my father ‘Dad’—Mother might become, grudgingly, ‘Mum’, a sulky ‘you’ more often than not—but my father could never have been less than ‘Father’.
    I speak of him as though he were dead, when last night he was standing beside me, after the shutter had burst open and the beak of the giant emu was threatening to descend into the room, to tear me open as I cowered on my narrow, sodden mattress (hair, they had decided, on account of the asthma).
    Mastering fear of his own child, my father was standing over me, offering a cold, knobbly hand. Which I took in desperation and love. He was trembling. I could smell his fear. It was that of a man, intensified, and overlaid by those other smells of cigar smoke and port-wine. I guessed that my father must be the only person in the house, otherwise he would not have come in, he would have left me to Nanny, or Mummy, even to Emma or Dora. But here he stood in person by the bed, his waistcoat with one of the points crumpled, the watch-chain with its gold symbols, and the miniature greenstone tiki which somebody had brought back from a holiday at Rotorua, and which I would have loved to fondle had I dared.
    And now his hand. I did not dare.
    â€˜Is anything wrong?’ he asked, ‘darling?’
    He had never ventured on a ‘darling’ before, and this confirmed my belief that Father was the only person in the house.
    â€˜Is there?’
    â€˜No.’
    When everything was. I was swimming in it.
    Then he said, ‘Aren’t we a bit smelly? Shall I change you?’
    â€˜No.’
    I was brimming with love for this man I was privileged to call ‘Father’, while going through life avoiding calling him anything unless it was dragged out of me.
    So I repeated, ‘No’.
    I could see how relieved he was—this tall, stately, scruffy man. Both my parents were given to food-spots, too argumentative, always in too great a hurry to pay much attention to what they were eating. My mother could look the slut of sluts, and did, except when she set out to kill. But the food-spots seemed to dignify my father, like the asterisks in books too technical to read. My father was essentially technical: a closed book if it hadn’t been for his troubled eyes.
    Not like those of