The Vivisector (43 page)

The hands thus exposed, the simple dress could no longer pretend to disguise.

She lowered her eyelids, and said: ‘Hurtle, I hope you’re going to show me what you’re working on.’

‘Yes. Presently. There’s time.’

He looked for rings. Not even a wedding ring. Two husbands, and her hands still chaste.

‘I’d be curious to know about the husbands.’

‘I wonder you need ask. Everybody knows more about them than I know myself.’

‘And still more curious about the lovers.’

‘There aren’t any!’

He plaited a hand with one of hers.

‘Oh, no! Definitely none! Not again!’ She was passionately against it.

‘Am I condemned—in particular?’

‘Not you in particular.’ Then she added in a quieter tone: ‘Yes—
you!
’

They were left looking at each other’s hands. Though she hadn’t attempted to withdraw, her fingers remained cool and unresponsive in the knot of his blunter, harder ones, grubby with half-removed paint and ingrained dirt.

She appeared fascinated by the veins in the back of his hand, but threw off her trance, and said in her more worldly voice: ‘I’ve lost my appetite for suffering!’ while looking at him with an expression of bright greed.

He remembered the cakes he had bought, and went to make tea. Of course the gas burners were clogged. Where would he take her if she wanted to use the lavatory? Out to the dunny? What had she got up to after he left her alone? Most women would have come barging into the kitchen with ironic or unhelpful suggestions.

He looked in once, on the quiet, and watched her bending over a water-colour he had done as a youth: of Alfreda Courtney in a yellow dress. It became obvious that Mrs Davenport was the most insidious kind of deceiver.

‘Those pearls—aren’t you afraid of burglars?’ he asked in a deliberately blatant voice on bringing in the tea.

‘I’m not interested in jewellery,’ she said, to make him look as vulgar as he deserved.

Actually she was looking at the cakes.

They were the little frosted apathetic cakes in paper frills from a shop in a poorer suburb such as his. The thick white cups, the only ones he had, were rattling against the tin tray. The brown teapot stood firm: it was solider.

‘Well, the paintings, then—thugs could break in and—probably not steal—slash them.’

‘That,’ she said, tearing her glance away from the cakes, and giving him her most brilliant smile, ‘that would be an act of God!’

Coming from Olivia Davenport it made him snigger. She was rich enough to dispense with God: as for himself, not exactly rich, but pretty well endowed.

‘Of course you’re heavily insured.’ He was letting her see him at his worst.

‘Oh yes—
insurance!
But what does it cover?’

Was it possible that Olivia Davenport couldn’t be got at?

They sat drinking the strong red kitchen tea: the same he liked to drink before starting work, because it woke him up and steadied the nerves. Olivia refused the cakes, but at one stage in their conversation, she fingered a paper frill with one of her long red nails, holding her head on one side as though the cakes were a work of art she was making up her mind about. Instead of waking her, the tea seemed to have made her dreamy. He watched her eyes through the rising steam. There was a faint sheen of perspiration on her powdered nose. Again a flaw, or sign of defencelessness, made him feel more tender towards her.

‘When I was living with my first husband,’ she began to explain tentatively, ‘I experimented a little with coca. The Indians chew it, to make their lives more endurable.’

‘And was it rewarding?’

‘To me, slightly nauseating at first, then—nothing. I only did it to please my husband, who’d already formed the habit. He had an idea something was eluding him. He was convinced I had some secret I was keeping from him—perhaps
the
secret. As he became more degraded and desperate, he began to feel that if I joined him in taking the drug, I might share the enlightenment he suspected me of having. So to pacify him I took to coca. And couldn’t share my “secret”. I couldn’t even share his degradation. I failed him in this too! Oh, he died most horribly, in every way unsatisfied! I don’t want to think about it.’

‘Did you love your husband?’

‘Why—yes! Of course I loved him.’ She put down the thick-lipped teacup as though she wanted to be rid of it. ‘There are different ways of loving, aren’t there? Poor Pepe! I felt sorry for him.’

She got up dusting from her black skirt the crumbs from the cakes she hadn’t eaten.

She adopted a slightly swashbuckling stance. ‘What about the paintings you’re going to show me?’

Those husbands.

‘Has nothing ever eluded you?’ he asked.

‘That isn’t to the point,’ she said in her high clear worldly voice; she frowned too, though not enough to suggest her equanimity had been disturbed.

‘These are all works of mine.’ He jerked his head at the surrounding walls.

There were, in fact, several drawings, water-colours, and small careful oils of an early period, which had become part of the sentimental furniture of life. He no longer regarded them as pictures. He didn’t want to show Boo Davenport his paintings.

‘I don’t think you take me seriously,’ she said.

While crouched forward on the edge of the sofa, halfway between staying and rising, he had put his hands over his face, and found himself agreeably situated: he could look at his unwelcome visitor through the bars of his fingers, if he wished, or withdraw into the darkness of his hands. It occurred to him how uncomfortable the tightly buttoned sofa had always been, but he knew in his heart he would never change it. The uncomfortable sofa, the physical discomfort of most of a lifetime, was of minor importance to the irritation caused by Olivia Davenport’s presence. In the darkness of his hands the problems of Rhoda’s flesh flickered tantalizingly. Sometimes he was closer to, sometimes farther from solving them. Her skin had the transparency of thinned-out watery milk, the shrill smell of milk on the turn; while under the skin the flesh should have the tones, rose to yellow, of skinned chickens. From behind his fingers he could recall the pliability of chickens’ breastbones. He had never touched Rhoda’s breastbone, but it must have had the same sickening pliability as those of the dead chickens.

He shivered for his discovery: when through his fingers here was this Boo this Olivia Davenport wasting his time.

‘I can’t think why you sent me that telegram,’ he said irritably, ‘why you had to see me—to tell me about Peru and your husband’s vices.’

Now that his face was hidden from her, she would probably reveal the real reason.

‘Don’t be childish! I wanted to see the paintings!’ She sounded positively passionate; there were knots, he saw, in her long throat.

‘It wasn’t me, then.’ He laughed sniffing through his agreeably protective hands. ‘You wanted to dig up the paintings—your acquisitive instinct at work again—perhaps get hold of something good that isn’t for sale.’

Mrs Davenport looked at her watch. In her extreme politeness she spoke in the most cultivated accent she knew: nothing refaned-Australian about it, very cold and incisive; she had had the best elocution teachers. ‘If you’d rather, I can walk in the street and admire the scenery till my car calls for me in half an hour.’ At the same time she picked up her bag, opened it, shut it, without discovering what, if anything, she had been looking for.

He was particularly pleased with those passionate knots in her throat, the long legs, the useless hands. He could have fucked Olivia Davenport, and risen from their crunching bed still in a splather to give the last touch to Rhoda Courtney’s salt-cellars.

Suddenly he removed his hands from his face: he felt so cheerful. ‘You’re not angry with me, are you? for asking a few questions? ’

‘Why should I be angry?’ She obviously was: those who have money are always angry to realize it isn’t of value.

‘Silly old Boo Hollingrake!’ He smacked her on the bottom as vulgarly as he knew how.

Then he led the way upstairs. Accepting the role he had given her, she followed.

‘Go in there,’ he ordered when they reached the landing, ‘into the front bedroom.’

She went in as he began to open up the little junk-room.

In front, at that hour, the light would be all wrong: the dark-green reflections of the araucaria. He would try out a few old experiments or failures, and get rid of her. She would go down devotedly satisfied to her long black sugar-fed limousine.

She sat at one end of the bed, on the rusty wire, leaning slightly against the roll of lumpy kapok, the stained ticking. While he was bringing out a few failed canvases and botched boards she looked as detached as she had seemed telling about Peru.

Give her a shot of something.

‘What’s that?’ she asked, her expression returning from a distance.

‘That’s a drawing—oh, a sort of night-piece—oh, something I knocked off recently, and may come back to, when I’ve finished what I’m working on.’

‘Isn’t it horrible! I don’t mean aesthetically,’ she corrected herself. ‘Aesthetically I think it could be wonderful.’ She knew all the moves. ‘What’s this figure?’

‘That’s a grocer. His name was Cutbush. He’s machine-gunning the lovers.’

‘I realized that.’

He began to put the drawing away. Shouldn’t have shown it.

‘What’s the significance of the moon?’ she asked.

‘Ah,’ he said guardedly, ‘the moon!’

‘It isn’t the grocer who predominates, or the unfortunate lovers. It’s really a painting of the moon, isn’t it? Why have you made it so vindictive, when it should be gentle and reconciling?’

‘Oh, God!’

He must get the drawing away. He had declared himself in front of Cutbush, whom he probably wouldn’t see again: he couldn’t admit to any weakness in front of Olivia Davenport.

‘It’s too early to discuss a drawing I may develop as a painting. ’ He was conscious of the pedantry in his excuse.

While returning the drawing to the stack he was appalled by the silence he had left behind in the front room.

‘But what are you working on now?’ she called, her voice too rich, too vibrant.

He felt too tired, too awkward, stacking his paintings and drawings in the suffocating junk-cupboard. There was a child’s potty-chair he often wondered how Miss Gilderthorp had acquired. Or was it her own? Her old shrivelled buttocks had once been little rosy ones.

Olivia had come out on the landing. ‘. . . to mistrust me when I could be your friend—when I probably understand you better than anyone has ever . . . when I make absolutely no demands . . .’

Because he was afraid, he didn’t want to leave this small airless room, with its scurf of dead blowflies and the unexplained potty-chair, for the hazards of the landing.

‘What’s in there?’ she suddenly asked, in a pure, but imperious, girl’s voice. ‘In the back room?’

He shot out. ‘That’s my bedroom.’ He sounded as pure as she, but strangled.

As she was going in, he caught her by the rope of pearls, which held, surprisingly: he was lugged in, united to her by the pearls.

They pulled up together in front of Rhoda Courtney.

When she had looked, Boo closed her eyes; she began to sway her head; she began to moan convulsively, and with an uncharacteristic lack of restraint. He was reminded of Nance on the occasions when she had reached a true orgasm. So, now, Boo Hollingrake sounded both appeased and shattered by her experience.

In self-defence she cried out: ‘How could you be so cruel to poor little Rhoda?’

It was his turn to become emotional; in an attempt to disguise these emotions he heard himself shouting: ‘How can you say it’s cruel? It’s the truth!’ He heard his strained, boy’s voice protesting against unjust accusations; while the glass showed him as a handsome, dissipated, middle-aged man making excuses for his weaknesses.

Olivia-Boo was distractedly moving about the room as though stunned by a whole family of Rhoda Courtneys. He had already painted several versions in various stages of abstraction, and would probably need several more.

‘How is it,’ she gasped jerkily. ‘Why, I wonder, have you made no effort to find her, when she seems to have meant so much to you?’

‘You know the way it is’—he answered, in a subsided, bluntened voice—‘the life you lead—you don’t lead it—it gets thrust on you, and carries you in a direction it’s difficult to alter.’

She kept returning to the original, comparatively naturalistic portrait of Rhoda, which didn’t satisfy him as it was.

She began to whimper: ‘. . . why
I
made no effort to get in touch?’

She was drawing him into a union of tearful complicity; whereas the only relationship he could envisage with Olivia Davenport was one that displayed panache.

He was relieved when the doorbell rang.

Olivia immediately dried her eyes. ‘That must be my man,’ she said in an attempt at her normal tone of voice.

It was an opportunity to start easing her out of the room.

But she had become completely, and considering the speed of the transformation, surprisingly self-possessed. ‘You’ll probably hate me,’ she said, ‘but would you consider selling me the one on the easel? And I don’t expect a studio deal.’

‘Not for all the sugar in the world!’ He was pushing, shouting, laughing at her; with none of it did he appear to have upset her equanimity, so he couldn’t resist trying out an even cruder insult: ‘Those husbands you killed off—I expect they discovered too late they were diabetic!’

She decided to ignore that one too. ‘It’s not only as a painting that it haunts me, it’s part of my life—yours too—that we’ve lost, Hurtle.’

The importance she apparently attached to the paintings began to make him feel humbler; and perhaps because the chauffeur had been stationed in the street, just as Emily the parlourmaid had been stood on guard at the foot of the stairs, he would have liked to offer Olivia a genuine tenderness which hadn’t yet been asked for, and which certain conventions and their own natures might always prevent them expressing.