The Vivisector (42 page)

‘I don’t know. She went away with Maman,’ he stammered, ‘after the remarriage. During the war I lost touch. She isn’t my sister, you know,’ he offered as an unconvincing excuse.

In any case, Olivia must have known that. She had sensed the larrikin in him after the rout of girls had stampeded through the hydrangeas in the lower garden at Sunningdale.

Now, standing at the top of the stairs, she said with a sincerity he couldn’t doubt—in fact she barely avoided turning it into a whimper: ‘My poor darling monkey—Rhoda!’ Then she led him into what became her bedroom.

He couldn’t at first look at anything but his own paintings: they were too crude, disproportionate: and those clotted, painful textures. He kept spinning on his heels, as though to avoid renewing acquaintance, except superficially. But he couldn’t have avoided. They were hanging on every wall: his imperfections and his agonies. He went up very close to his ‘Marriage of Light’; in that way, involved with the technique, he was less conscious of the body of an actual woman fragmented in the cause of art. Not Nance Lightfoot lying broken on a rocky ledge. That was another picture of course, unpainted, and in every way too
black:
black dress, wounds stitched with the jet of flies, already the long caravans of ants. Not least, his own black horror kneeling beside his murder. By comparison, the ‘Marriage of Light’ was a declaration of love, and if he concentrated on the more objective aspects, he could throw modesty away and congratulate himself, on having achieved his intention as a whole, and for the brilliant sensuousness of many details.

But while gyrating drunkenly, breathing colour through his strained nostrils, brazenly putting out his hand to stroke the paint, the origins of his present joy kept blowing back at him in black gusts. Even the most abrasive of his rock series, the best of which Mrs Davenport had taken pains to collect, resolved themselves in his mind’s eye into a configuration of large, soft, passive breasts.

‘Not the sort of thing to hang in a bedroom,’ he grumbled in self-defence.

‘Which?’

‘All these paintings of rocks. I did them as a kind of endurance test.’ She wouldn’t have the eye to see through his dishonesty.

‘Why shouldn’t I, too, pass the test?’ she asked very coldly.

Perhaps she had passed it. So much obsessed by his own paintings, by the love, disgust, and at times fear, which they roused in him, he had hardly noticed the bedroom. Apart from the paintings there was very little in it: an unexpectedly virginal dressing-table, and a bed narrow enough to appear ostentatious.

‘In any case,’ she said, ‘I find the paintings far less cerebral than you want to suggest; and as I’m the one who owns them I see them as I like to see them. Look at these’—she touched the sleeping-animal rocks which had upset a critic’s sensibility when they were first exhibited—‘actually sentimental. I almost said “feminine”,’ she added, ‘but perhaps it wouldn’t convey what I mean. On the whole I find women less feminine than they’re supposed to be, and certainly more realistic than men.’

Her grey eyes were picking holes in him, though her breasts, pointed at him through the white silk, accused him less than he would have expected, far less, in fact, than Nance’s big clanging doorbells: those had accused him most of the time.

Suddenly the outer Mrs Davenport seemed to soften, as though she had become engrossed in a private vision. ‘This is the painting which appeals to me, I sometimes think, more than any I own.’

She liked to stress ownership: or she chose her words carelessly: or they interpreted meanings differently. In any case she had dismissed him as she advanced on her ‘Marriage of Light’.

She was mouthing: ‘. . . all that I understand as beauty . . .’

If she had known poor bloody Nance.

‘... in the morning when they open the curtains—that’s its best moment.’

In her conventional room.

‘. . . after they’ve left me I lie looking at it. At my “Marriage of Light”.’

In that narrow bed: even now grinding her neck against the pillow.

She was exposing herself completely. Here was another one, he saw, offering her throat to be cut, but by a more tortuous, a more jagged knife. Well, he wouldn’t accept the invitation to a second murder.

Rising from her vision, Mrs Davenport turned to him, smiling a smile of deliberate sweetness. ‘I wonder whether I don’t understand your paintings better than you do yourself.’

If he wasn’t visibly rocking on his heels, she must have smelt his rage, but pretended she hadn’t; the social graces were so well developed in her.

‘Actually, Hurtle—I’m going to call you “Hurtle”—I sometimes feel artists are so preoccupied with technical problems they lose sight of what they’re trying to achieve. That’s why so many paintings, poems, remain technical exercises. Only the great artist,’ she was observing him closely, ‘
senses
where he is going, though he may not understand.’

She was so clearly convinced, he felt confused in his reactions to what she had been expounding. She had turned him into a clumsy plumber: or Pa Duffield’s boy.

‘I’d like to discuss that with you,’ he collected himself enough to say, from inside his imitation of a Bond Street suit, ‘because I think you may be right.’

But Mrs Davenport had finished dispensing her patronage. She was reminded by the chiming of a little crystal clock, perfect also in its way.

She said: ‘I’m sorry. I must turn you out,’ still smiling with an exquisite clarity and reasonableness.

For the moment there was no point at which he might pierce her composure. She was too well encased in the shining armour of the fashionable-rich. The most he could do was cultivate his own ungraciousness while remaining in her power, for she had got possession of that only important part of him: his paintings.

As he began lumbering unwillingly away from them, he forced out what he intended as an accusation, but which could have sounded like a reproach: ‘One of the eternal dinner parties! I can imagine the sort of thing: barristers, stockbrokers, perhaps a scoured grazier or two—and the successful wives!’

She gave what no doubt her satellites would have considered a ‘delicious chuckle’, pressed a bell, and came and linked her arm with his.

‘As a matter of fact,’ she told him, ‘I’m planning to eat a poached egg—off a tray—in bed. I’ve had a rather trying afternoon. ’

Walking towards the stairs they shared the intimacy of her revelation, and he allowed himself to enjoy not only her poached egg, but the casual motion of their conspiring bodies.

‘May I pay you a visit? May I telephone you?’ she asked when they had reached the half-landing and were standing underneath the Courtneys’ Boudin.

‘There isn’t a telephone.’ He couldn’t help feeling proud of his wisdom.

She didn’t appear to notice it, however. She answered with the same grey-eyed seriousness which was one of the more attractive aspects of her strength: ‘There are other ways of getting in touch.’

He was looking into her cleavage. The scent of that elaborate cleanliness on which she had endless leisure and money to spend might have turned him into frustrated sculpture if the parlourmaid hadn’t been stationed at the foot of the stairs. He realized how expertly his departure had been organized.

‘Thanks, Boo!’ She might even have planned that he should sound adolescent in his leavetaking.

But as he started down the last flight, trying out the carpet with suspicious feet, she leaned forward and caught him by the sleeve, and kissed him coolly on the mouth.

‘It was so good—’ she breathed—‘so good to find you again—after all this time.’ Emily’s presence and their returned youth made it look so chaste.

He stumbled on, to the foot of the stairs, where the maid waited approvingly, repowdered in the meantime to the roots of her moustache.

He didn’t look back because he was afraid he might have caught Olivia Davenport frowning, or wiping her mouth, and in any case the front doorbell was ringing: it was rung a brassy twice.

‘Oh dear, I can’t stand bells!’ Emily was giggling and jittering. ‘Never get used to ’em! It’s me nerves: bells give them a start.’

At the door a young man from a florist’s van handed in a sheaf of roses: the tissue of white paper made the perfect white buds look frostily remote.

‘Lovely roses! But they don’t last.’ Emily laughed, a few grains of powder trembling on the hairs of a mole. ‘Good thing they don’t—the house ’ud be chock-a-block.’

He would have liked to read the card inside the semitransparent paper; no doubt the maid didn’t need to.

She was still nursing the veiled roses as he got away up the slope. He walked, and walked. He walked through Rose Bay, Double Bay, and was halfway past Rushcutters, when his intention had been to hail a taxi in the beginning. At least physical exertion restored him to himself: he began to see how he would convey Rhoda Courtney’s skeletal pelvis. He would always have his painting.

The house shook as he slammed the door: then the dust the silence settling.

 

He was working at four versions of ‘Pythoness’, eagerly and angrily. So as not to interrupt, he was living on hard-boiled eggs, and had grown costive. He found himself straining and groaning on the seat. In the end it worried him more than Rhoda’s transparent, milky flesh. There was a smell of sour milk in Miss Gilderthorp’s scullery, subtler than the smell of the dunny at the back; he preferred the dunny to the French-smelling water-closet in the house.

The day the front doorbell rang he had a fit of Emily Davenport’s nerves, but his constipation allowed him to button at once, and quickly reach the door.

In the porch the telegraph lad was lounging and picking.

He said: ‘It’s a reply-paid,’ without appearing impressed by anything about old Mr nutty Duffield.

Mr Duffield read: must repeat must see you FRIDAY pm WHATEVER time CONVENIENT wire LOVE—OLIVIA.

The contorting boy asked: ‘Want me to take the reply?’ He was scratching himself through his flies.

‘Yes.’

Old Duffield was scooting down the hall, and back. Worked up. Couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

He said: ‘Yes, thank you, Andy. I shan’t be a minute writing it out.’

He was an awful sight: an old, nutty man, covered in paint.

Old Duffield held the form against a tree-trunk so you couldn’t hardly read what he was writing: yes FRIDAY ANY time PROVIDED Visit short WORKING hurtle.

The telegraph boy lifted his long leg and settled his serge crutch in the saddle.

 

Olivia Davenport was due on Friday afternoon. In a two-day panic which preceded her visit, he had tried to introduce some order into his house. He had never attempted it before, and hardly knew where to begin, wandering from room to room trailing an old shirt for a duster. The shadow of his prospective visitor, standing between him and his work, made him hate her. He flung aside one of the finicky chairs, and a leg flew off willingly. So he gave up. Why should this woman, whose detachment was a mask for a meddlesome nature, want to interrupt a life she couldn’t possibly understand? Everything about it was foreign to her: the dust pockets, the brooding plush, the ruined conservatory with its leathery plants and its chrysalides—all necessary to him by now, as on another level, his work. But even more disagreeable than the lack of understanding she must bring to his house, to his manner of living, was his suspicion—no, the certainty—it was downright shocking—that Olivia Davenport understood his paintings.

She arrived at three-thirty on the Friday afternoon.

As he opened the door the car which had brought her was driven away so discreetly it became noticeable to the whole street, in much the same way as Mrs Davenport’s simple black drew attention to her elegance. She was very plainly dressed indeed, excepting for the rope of knotted pearls, each so large anyone would have taken them for false, and on her hat a little wreath of intermingled amethysts and diamonds. The hat was in the shape of a helmet, with a glint of metal from the cocks’ feathers curved in a sickle under her chin. Her face was longer, the line of the jaw more emphatic than he remembered; it could have made a less wealthy woman look plain.

‘I feel
horribly
guilty taking up
any
of your precious time.’ It might have been sincerely meant, but she had forgotten to change her voice: this was the one she used in the other world.

She seemed to realize her oversight at once, for he detected an irritated preoccupation.

He said: ‘It won’t be wasted. Nothing is. If I’d felt it was going to be a waste of time, I needn’t have let you in, need I?’

‘That’s true,’ she agreed: a little dry, but without abandoning the politeness she had been taught.

She came in, and he thought he might not have been able to stop her if he had wanted to; entry was her birthright. She smelled very fresh: of bunched, sweet, cottage flowers—a scent which didn’t go with her appearance any more than with the smell of gas from the meter under the araucaria. (One day get it seen to.)

‘You won’t find it very comfortable here,’ he felt he had to explain. ‘I bought all this junk with the house. I haven’t done anything about it yet.’

‘It looks fascinating. Lovely old things!’ But her sigh cancelled her formal approval.

Helpfully, she seated herself on a tightly-buttoned sofa in the living-room. She kept her gloves on.

Seeing her out of her depth made him warm towards her again. He wanted to sit beside her, and did.

‘I was afraid you mightn’t like the place,’ he said. ‘Maman would have disapproved,’ and remembering the ritual words: ‘Don’t you want to take your hat off?’

She expressed a kind of wry surprise. ‘No. My hair’s awful,’ though from what you could see it must be perfect: as helmeted as her helmet of a hat.

She did begin to take her gloves off. He watched her hands emerge, whiter for the black skirt, finally the crimson talons.