1981
As often happens in the approach to an Australian country house, it was difficult to decide where to breach the Lushington homestead. There were verandas, porches, lights, snatches of piano music, whinging dogs, skittering cats, archways armed with rose-thorns, a drift of kitchen smells, but never any real indication of how to enter. Australian country architecture is in some sense a material extension of the contradictory beings who have evolved its elaborate informaility, as well as a warning to those who do not belong inside the labyrinth.
After blundering around awhile he was finally admitted by the fresh-faced Mrs Edmonds, wife of the groom-cum-dairyman-cum gardener. Herself who aired Mrs Lushington’s furs, and who had brought the invalid white rosebud down to the cottage.
She said, ‘They’re expecting you, sir, in the droring room.’ She was too shy or too untrained to go farther than indicate the direction in which the room lay.
He might have blundered some more if it hadn’t been for light visible in a doorway at the end of the passage and a few groping piano chords of musical comedy origin. The piano act, he suspected, was staged by Mrs Lushington to lure him in.
In fact it was her husband brooding over the piano.
‘Vamping a bit,’ old Lushington explained with a bashful smile. ‘It helps pass the time.’
Leaving the piano, he advanced and asked, ‘What’s your poison, Eddie?” as though he might rely on alcohol to dissolve human restraints.
Lushington himself, still wearing leggings and cord breeches below a balding velvet smoking-jacket, was already comfortably oiled. ‘You’re well, are you?’ he asked. ‘You look well.’
Eddie was prevented answering either of his host’s questions by the entrance of a little yapping Maltese terrier with a delicious sliver of a pink tongue who proceeded to skip around, blinded by his own eyebrows, excited by his own frivolity.
The guest spilled a finger of what smelled like practically neat whiskey as the dog’s mistress appeared.
‘We haven’t met,’ Mrs Lushington said, ‘but I know you, of course, from the Hotel Australia.’
‘How the Australia?’ her husband asked in some surprise.
‘On an occasion when I decided not to lunch there,’ she answered. ‘It all looked too bloody – like some awful club, full of the people one spends one’s life avoiding. Too much flour in everything – and a smell of horseradish.’
Mr Lushington looked perplexed. ‘But we’ve always enjoyed the old Australia. You run into so many of your mates. And you, Marce, have never found anything wrong with the food.’
But Mrs Lushington was holding out. She raised her chin, and smiled. Like Peggy Tyrrell she enjoyed her mysteries, while being more than half prepared to share them with one who was not quite a stranger, but almost.
‘Stop it, Beppi!’ she advised the Maltese, who was chivvying the fur with which she was hemmed.
‘Darling,’ she asked her husband, ‘are you going to pour me a drink?’
As Greg Lushington was too deeply immersed in the mystery of his wife’s betrayal of the Hotel Australia, she advanced and did it for herself with a most professional squirt from a siphon covered with wire-netting.
Marcia was wearing a long coat of vivid oriental patchings over her discreet black, less discreetly sable-hemmed, skirt. It was in the upper regions that discretion ended completely, in an insertion of flesh-coloured, or to match Marcia, beige lace which strayed waistwards in whorls and leaves. Her daring must have deserted her in dressing, for she had stuck an artificial flower in the cleavage of lace or flesh, a species of oriental poppy artistically crushed, its fleshtones tinged with departing flame.
‘Do sit,’ she invited their guest, ‘if you can see somewhere comfortable. Other people’s furniture, like their coffee, is inclined to be unbearable.’
The Lushingtons’ drawing-room furniture was a mixed lot: armchairs and sofa in the chintzy English tradition, with a few pieces of what looked like authentic Chippendale, and rubbing shoulders with them, humbler colonial relations in cedar, crudely carved by some early settler, or more likely, his assigned slave.
There was also the grand piano at which Mr Lushington had been discovered vamping, on it a Spode tureen filled with an arrangement of dead hydrangeas, autumn leaves, and pussy willow, in front of it, framed importantly in gold, a portrait-photograph of a younger Marcia, one hand resting possessively on what must have been the same piano, draped at the time with a Spanish shawl.
Noticing their jackeroo’s interest in pianos, Mrs Lushington asked, ‘Do you play?’
‘I used to,’ he said, ‘badly, I was told, but my enthusiasm made me acceptable.’
‘Greg is the musical one,’ nor did Mrs Lushington resent it. ‘He’ll thump quite happily by the hour. I tried as a child, but my chilblains didn’t enourage me to practice. I think a piano’s necessary, though – as part of a room, to stand things on.’
The Twyborn Affair, Jonathan Cape, London, 1979