The Vivisector (44 page)

‘Perhaps I’ll
give
you the painting—when I’ve finished with it; and after we know all about each other.’ A kind of love token.

As they stood on the landing his hands were outspread to test whether she was prepared to accept his advance.

But she laughed and said: ‘The thought of knowing everything about anybody gives me the horrors!’

He could only see her back as she was walking ahead of him down the stairs. She went buoyantly enough, considering the depths to which he had proposed they should plunge together.

‘Twice I’ve found out all there is to know about a person,’ she said in an almost jaunty voice. ‘I haven’t the courage to face it again. I thought I’d made that clear in the beginning.’

She had taken such precautions to protect herself against the future, he was tempted to push her down those steep stairs; but Olivia Davenport might have survived.

In the stuffy living-room below, with its islands of bourgeois furniture, the climate was more temperate.

‘Oh, dear,’ she twittered, ‘you’ve made me keep my hairdresser waiting. You don’t realize, darling, what you’ve let me in for.’

Since she had returned to the surface, recovered her handbag, and could repair the damage to herself, she was full of the affectations and inflections of the class to which he had been given the opportunity of belonging.

She was mumbling both her lipstick and her words: ‘. . . must keep in touch . . . to meet my friends . . . some of them could be useful to you, Hurtle darling . . . mm mm . . . though I don’t want to coerce you, you know.’

The point of the crimson lipstick withdrew—
click
—into its gold sheath. She smiled at him out of her slick mouth. Her grey eyes had never looked so gravely brilliant and detached.

‘There are two people in particular I’d like you to meet: two of my dearest closest friends.’

He couldn’t have felt less interested. ‘Are they from the old days?’ he asked apathetically. ‘Anybody I used to know? Or might have heard of?’

‘No. They’re comparatively recent—quite recent, in fact. They’re visiting Australia.’

He was reminded of Maman, who had never been able to distinguish between acquaintances and friends, or whose friends were all acquaintances.

‘Which sex?’ he asked with increasing disinterest.

‘One of each.’ Olivia Davenport composed a dimple in the right corner of her mouth: it made her long face look slightly depraved.

Moving towards the door she launched forth on what could have been a rehearsed leavetaking. ‘At the risk of embarrassing, I shall thank you for an
illuminating
experience. Disturbing, too—horribly.’ She turned in the hall for not longer than an instant. ‘Are you embarrassed?’ she rattled on, showing him the enamelled whites of her eyes. ‘I don’t believe you are: you’re too vain, and enjoy what you do to people.’

An old bamboo hatstand threatened to topple as she brushed past it with a little less than her usual grace.

Was he vain? He was tired. He was glad he would soon be alone with his paintings. He had never thought of himself as vain.

Whether it was true or not, he’d better put on a smile while dragging the door open for her; but he could feel the smile thinning into a simper as he gurgled and glugged inanely in the idiom used by the Davenport world: ‘Bye bye Boo dear see you next time watch where you’re going Boo that’s where the dogs do it,’ his mouth stretched like a piece of elastic about to perish: when he wasn’t old, any more than vain.

The chauffeur, a youngish man with the servile good looks not uncommon to his occupation, shut her in. Mrs Davenport arranged herself in a curved position. As she was driven away from the slum in which she had been visiting, she made a sign with her bag from the other side of the glass. She wore the expression of having accomplished something, but none the less she felt relieved now that it was over: she was probably dying for the attentions of the hairdresser’s plump white pansy hands.

Duffield slammed the door after realizing he had been standing there longer than was necessary.

 

From now on Olivia invited him, and he went to her house on several occasions, partly out of curiosity, and partly to exorcize staleness when it threatened his relationship with his work. He soon realized that to accept her invitations was to experience the refinements of boredom, though Olivia herself never failed to give a technically accomplished performance. She was expert at springing little surprises: like a new jewel, specially designed by Cartier or Bulgari; or a visiting professor of Chinese. She had the reputation of being educated, and certainly she had amassed an exotic litter of knowledge. He had overheard her remark to a distinguished Orientalist: ‘I can’t say I
know
Chinese, but confess to four hundred characters,’ while allowing the scholar to take her in to dinner. Perhaps her four hundred characters got her by, with the help of Schiaparelli and a cabochon ruby or two.

Mrs Davenport’s friends could be divided roughtly into three categories. There were the hectic, iridescent, frittering fly-by-nights. Olivia had a weakness for the rag bag, and these were her collection of gay snippets: gin would never drown them, nor benzedrine overcome their colds, only make them more endemic. The fritterers held their drinks rather high and downed them quickly. They appeared to know everybody, but everybody: their conversation was a perpetual tip-and-run.

Then there was the old, slow, swollen-veined, heavily tactical train of tortoises, moving their arthritic necks in the direction of the conversation they were making: some of them relatives—revered, theoretically loved—old barristers, doctors, heaviest of all, the graziers, and old lipstuck ladies who forgot what they had begun to tell, but continued bravely throwing in Galsworthy, Asprey and Our Pioneer Families. All of them tortoises, when not elephants, sometimes a stiff flamingo, but old: some of them on sticks, some with signet rings eating into skin-cancered hands. All had known her so long, they enjoyed the privilege of referring to their hostess as ‘Boo’: she might have been hundreds-and-thousands, the way they sprinkled their anecdotes with her name.

Finally, there were the foreigners. Olivia adored consuls, and the English she had met on board ship or in hotels at Cannes or St Moritz. She was most nearly taken down, but never quite, by an English accent. She loved to speak French with the Italians, and Chinese with the Japanese, and they seemed to understand one another.

How had she got Chinese? He must remember to ask her on some private occasion, though Olivia wouldn’t always tell.

At one of her parties she came up to him, linked arms, trickling diamonds over his sleeve, and casually mentioned: ‘I thought I had something of interest for you, but they couldn’t stay.
He
isn’t at all
well
. He suffers from a
gall
-bladder, or something.’

‘Who?’

‘But, darling,’ she said, in the amusing-peevish voice she sometimes affected at parties, ‘my Greeks—the Pavloussis. I never stop telling you. He owns ships. Disgustingly rich. He’s thinking of starting a passenger-cargo line between here and Europe.’

She pronounced ‘Europe’ as though tasting her own party for a flavour she feared it might lack. She narrowed her eyes, and dared him to reject a mystique of worldliness she wanted him to believe in. He even suspected that if he hadn’t been present and her guests demanded appeasement, she would have denied her faith in the paintings: such was her appetite for superficiality and approval. His was nil; though he took them from time to time in homeopathic doses, not altogether hopefully, as a cure for accidie.

Because he hadn’t expressed regret for her vanished Greeks, Boo Davenport said: ‘I’m afraid we bore you, Hurtle. We’re not
clever
enough.’ She deliberately used the word ‘clever’, which he had discovered was charged with mock-innocent chic for members of her clan. Annoyance wouldn’t allow her to lay claim to one grain of intellect; she let it be understood she shared the native idiocy of her childhood companions and approving elders, who otherwise might have criticized her relationship with the painter as ‘perverse’: which, no doubt, it was.

He couldn’t help laughing, and she couldn’t help asking: ‘What are you laughing at?’ Her irritation increased when he began silently stroking her back as they stood facing the roomful of guests.

In his gyrations, he had noticed the naked back decorated with a number of little rosy bows, or lovers’ knots, or no—bite marks.

‘Have you a maid who dislikes you too much to protect you?’ he whispered as he accepted one of the ritual kisses she was moved to dispense.

‘Why?’ she asked, swallowing her breath abruptly.

She began touching her thighs, feeling her wrists, glancing down her cleavage.

‘There’s Gladswood,’ she admitted. ‘She’s given notice, just when I was on the point of asking her to leave.’

Shortly after, she found an excuse for withdrawing from her guests, and returned draped in a lace shawl, so ostentatiously modest it went with nothing about her.

‘It belonged to a great-aunt,’ she told him. ‘I believe she was married in it.’ The present wearer’s attempt at pious serenity still didn’t make the shawl hers.

‘I know you’re accusing me,’ she said in a moment they had to themselves, ‘and one day I’ll explain.’

While recognizing in Olivia Davenport a core he desired to possess, and which she was apparently determined he shouldn’t, he escaped from her parties with a sense of relief: at least the purpose of his going there. In the white hours of morning, sticky with dew and Moreton Bay fig, his head was clear as he followed the silver tramline on foot, round the scalloped bays, then up the hill to his own darkness, with its clutter of partly-developed ideas and smells of dust and cold fat. Upstairs, he would start walking from room to room, dragging the long flex behind him, hanging the electric pear above half-finished paintings which only now revealed themselves.

On one occasion, however, the electric moment occurred in Mrs Davenport’s ‘salon’. It was one of the flatter evenings, after supper: collars were wilting on male necks; ladies were gazing out across the water with a nostalgia born of night and perspiration; when a young girl, white as lard, of turnip forms, some protégée or relative the hostess hadn’t considered important enough to introduce, fell into an armchair, turned up her eyes, opened her mouth, and began to moan, then laugh, sob, thump and heave, rolling her white eyeballs, thrashing the upholstery with the calves hockey had given her.

There was considerable commotion. Some of the guests, determined that nothing was happening, walked stiffly away, engaged in what looked like a conversation too grave to be interrupted. Others, younger, drunker, dragged one another into neighbouring rooms, from which their partly-suppressed giggles burst in polyphonic spurts round the convulsive solo of the anonymous virtuoso.

‘Won’t somebody
do
something?’ hissed one of the aged tortoise-ladies out of her cuirass of lamé and sapphires, though an energetic barrister had dashed to the telephone and rung almost every doctor in town: all of whom were socially engaged.

Actually the old lady was looking, as she spoke, at the painter who happened to be standing beside her. Her sparkling claws might at any moment fasten themselves in his arm.

‘It’s frightful!’ she rasped. ‘Do look! She’s having a kind of fit. So dreadful for the parents: an epileptic on their hands!’

It was frightful; so much so, he couldn’t stop looking at it: the girl tossing and lowing, sometimes the colour of her own cerise taffeta, sometimes washed white, or drenched with a sickly plant-green.

Her mother in black, her jet trembling in a vertigo of anguish or resentment, was kneeling beside her. ‘Tell me, darling,’ she commanded, ‘what is it? Baby? What is it you want? Or what do I do to you? Only tell me—my only interest is your happiness. Oh! Oh,
Muriel!
’

The mother’s words acted like a blow: the girl gulped; then she threw back her head and stuck out her cerise tongue, before lolling forward again, rolling her china eyeballs.

For an instant the possessed one glanced at the only other of her kind, and they were swept up, and united by sheet lightning, as they could never have been on the accepted plane.

She looked at him, and he saw past her green-sickness and menstrual torments into the hazy future of a bungled marriage and hushed-up attempt at suicide. If his had been the right knife, she might have planted it there and then in her turnip flesh, in front of an audience, and risen laughing from the death which obsessed her.

Instead she lolled and dry-retched.

Fortunately at that moment the hostess returned from supervising a detail of her party somewhere else in the house. She saw at once, and went, her flanks rippling with scales of light, and took a crystal jug, and dashed its contents of iced water into the girl’s face. (The chunks of ice were, probably, not the least of the cure.)

‘There—you see—hysteria!’ She spoke with authority, and everybody knew Mrs Davenport was always right.

Under the shock of the iced water, and blows from the ice-cubes, the girl’s face certainly returned to its natural shape. Her neck looked so ashamed. The cerise dress had turned almost purple where the water had soaked in. She sat staring in horror at what were her own nipples exposed by the clinging disaster of a dress; till a cluster of kindly ladies led the mother and daughter out: to try to restore their self-possession.

Mrs Davenport rang and asked for Emily to be sent. While less noticeable on state occasions, the parlourmaid’s rank wasn’t diminished: she was older, and had been there longer than the more athletic, operative servants. Now she advanced, in blancoed shoes, over the dark mirrors of floors; tonight her self-importance had obviously increased.

‘Tell Turner, Emily’—Mrs Davenport pretended to order, when she was in fact conferring—‘tell him to run them home in the car.’