The Vivisector (49 page)

He might have questioned her logic, but asked instead: ‘What happened at Perialos?’

She was so interrupted they found themselves listening to the sea.

‘Nothing,’ she said at last. ‘Or nothing I can tell you. It was in the air.’

He heard his own frustrated breathing on being forced to withdraw from the experience she was unwilling to share.

‘What time is it?’ she asked, looking at a watch she wasn’t wearing. ‘Shouldn’t we be going back inside the house? It is so cold. Feel my arm,’ she chattered and laughed.

He did as he was invited, and felt the rather chill goose-pimples on what had been assured pottery; her grainy flesh made him regretful for the pure soul of his invention.

She linked her arm to his, and turned him round, and said in simple anticipation: ‘Cosmas will bring you to Greece. We must take you to Perialos. I have not dared visit it again till now.’ Her pure joy reinstated her in his opinion.

They walked towards the terrace, the wind off the sea bashing at them; and the shipowner came out of the house, and called: ‘I have learnt the game!’

When they met, he kissed his wife gingerly. ‘You are cold—darling.’ (From time to time the words either of them used in the foreign language came out tentatively, as though they suspected they might be borrowing something which didn’t suit their personal vocabulary.)

‘No, darling,’ she answered, encouraging him. ‘I am not cold.’

‘But you feel cold.’

‘Truly I’m not.’ Then she added: ‘Women can bear more than men.’ She looked towards her fellow guest. ‘Mr Duffield must have suffered many pains tonight listening to my life history.’

‘Oh!’ The shipowner cleared the phlegm from his throat, but remembered not to spit. ‘You’ve been trying that out on him, have you?’

Arm in arm, the Greeks laughed together, perhaps collusively.

When they went in the party had almost collapsed. Some of the guests had already left; others were standing about in their coats listening to an endless anecdote one of them had started, their eyes grateful for anything which might delay their departure. Elderly faces admitted their age; younger ones no longer attempted to disguise their youth; even the splendid house looked more human for an evening’s litter. Emily’s blancoed shoes crunched over broken glass as she went punching the cushions and complaining about cigars. Her face was the colour of old age, and wore the superior, peevish expression of aged servants who have chosen to stay up longer than they are expected to.

While he was clumsily but comfortably getting into his coat without assistance, for the major-domo had disappeared, Miss Anderson approached, and said: ‘Mr Duffield!’

In the pause which followed, the down along her lower jaw appeared to rise in prickly hackles; at no time that evening had she looked so plain, so frumpish, her tight mouth so disapproving; yet her eyes were curiously luminous and large from some embarrassment or fright she was in.

‘I would like,’ she said, ‘to say,’ she almost hiccupped, ‘how much your paintings have meant to me. Fulsomeness is disagreeable, isn’t it? But you will forgive me.’ She closed her jaws, and bowed her head, and went quickly through the front door.

Such an unlikely confession on the part of the headmistress filled him with a hope that some of his other judgements were mistaken, and that any doubts he may have had for the innocence of Hero Pavloussi’s motives had been bred from a flaw in himself.

The chrysanthemums Mrs Davenport had massed at the more dramatic points of her house to emphasize the splendour of her party were looking in some cases draggled and shrunk, when Olivia herself came up to him carrying a few broken flowers which smelled of brown water and autumn.

‘Are you tired?’ she inquired pointlessly. ‘I must remember to ring the masseuse in the morning. I can’t bear chrysanthemums. But what else is there?’ She thrust in his face a couple of enormous crushed mops, and a smaller bloom, lithe as a buttoned foil.

As the remainder of the guests had already thanked, and only needed to trickle away, she stuck her nose in his neck. ‘Tell me, darling—what did you think of the Greeks? Isn’t she interesting? ’ Then she blew giggling down her nose. ‘Gorgeous!’

Boo was slightly drunk, of course: rolling her head against his neck.

Suddenly her tone altered. ‘I can guarantee her!’ she said. ‘I mean her exceptional qualities.’

She could have been a friend defending a friend with the steely loyalty friendship demands; while at the same time her voice was that of the professional procuress: harsh and collected.

Perhaps it was an ambiguous hour, for she softened after that, and kissed him on the mouth, complaining: ‘I am not drunk, as you think, only exhausted. My trouble is: I love you all—whether you believe it or not—and would like to believe you love one another.’ She kissed him again. ‘Will you tell me?’ she pleaded. ‘After you’ve experienced it?’

Lolling against him as they lingered on the chess-board of the empty hall, she gave the impression that she had; whereas social occasions, and assignations planned for her friends, could have been as close as Olivia came to sexual pleasure.

‘Good night, Boo.’ He kissed the mouth she would have liked to appear fulfilled. ‘I’ll leave you to your beauty sleep.’

She flung off, condemning or camping with her right hand, knowing that Emily would pick up the jaded flowers she had dropped.

He went out. All the cars had driven off, except one: an illuminated glass capsule in which the Pavloussis were seated, bending over the dashboard, arguing in full voice about something which was also making them laugh.

They left off, however, as though by prearrangement, and she wound a window down.

‘May we give you a lift?’ she called in Olivia Davenport’s clearest tones.

Her husband was peering over her shoulder. The skin round his eyes made him look like an owl: it was so thick and encrusted, the eyes not all that blind.

‘Yes,’ Pavloussis insisted, in a silky tenor instead of the bass which would have suited him. ‘It is no trouble, Mr Duffield.’

‘Thank you. At this time of night I like to walk.’

Madame Pavloussi stuck out her hooded head. ‘I would like to visit you, Mr Duffield, and see your paintings.’

‘Any time,’ he invited, ‘and Mr Pavloussis.’

‘Cosmas is so busy.’ She pronounced it ‘beesy’, which made it sound more emphatic. ‘I will rather bring Olivia.’ The husband’s imbecile smile appeared to approve. ‘Although Cosmas is the one who really understands.’

The millionaire was preparing something ponderous. ‘In the island of Chios,’ he doled it out, ‘in the village of Mesta—where my old mother still lives—there are Picasso murals in the square painted long before Picasso.’

The car began to bound forward; thrown together in deeper conjugal conspiracy, the occupants laughed and called: ‘Good night, Mr Duffield!’

He was relieved to find himself alone with the indeterminate images time would form.

It was nearly three weeks after her party when he received a note from Olivia asking if she might bring her friend Hero to look at the paintings. Three weeks meant a busy life, extreme discretion—or indifference. He was surprised at himself too, for giving so little thought to the Greeks since their meeting, but matters of greater importance, germinated on the same occasion, had occupied his mind. He scarcely left the house for working. He would run out, usually at dusk, and walk hard round a block or two, when the faces he passed, if they didn’t ignore him, appeared to take fright. He would hurry back with food, anything that could be quickly and easily eaten, and after stuffing his mouth with handfuls of torn-out bread, ‘salmon’ straight from the tin, or chunks of marbled bully, he continued working. Sometimes he cut his hands on the tins and the blood worked in with the paint.

The day of the visit he felt neither inclined nor prepared for ladies of sensibility. Somewhere, he tried to remember, he had an opened tin of chocolate biscuits. He looked and found he had a couple of spoonfuls of tea-dust; to save time he had been drinking water, sometimes a swig of alcohol to cut the knots.

Finally, he put the visitors out of his head: till the sound of the doorbell and knocker in collaboration, brought them back.

After she had drawn a short breath, Olivia said: ‘I hope we haven’t disturbed you.’

‘Why? Isn’t this what we arranged?’ Though his coldness was natural, his surprise must have sounded exaggerated.

‘Oh yes,’ she hissed, ‘but other, more important things crop up.’

She was out to show she had understanding, but the attempt was too obvious. He continued looking coldly at them. They lowered their eyes.

Each had studied her appearance, no doubt in consultation, to make it look unstudied. Olivia was wearing an old, though well-cut coat and skirt, her hair, without a hat, slightly dishevelled. Hero was dressed, surprisingly and unfortunately, in brown, though fashion might have called it ‘cinnamon’: it made her look dowdy, livery, black. Her one affectation was a bunch of violets, which she stood holding like a little girl, and raised to her nose in moments of doubt or embarrassment. In the beginning her embarrassment was almost unbroken. He couldn’t leave off looking at the violets, which she kept permanently raised. He noticed the violet tones in her brown, livery skin.

Because there was nothing else he could do he led them upstairs. Once the front door was shut, their scents closed in on him, and his senses began to respond.

He laughed at one point on the stairs.

‘What is it?’ Olivia asked severely.

‘I remembered there was a Greek I met. In Paris. After the war. Her name was Calvacoressi, I think—Hélène Calvacoressi.’

He heard the toes of their shoes stabbing at the uncarpeted stairs.

‘Was she a cocotte?’ Hero asked in a prim tone he had detected at times on their first meeting.

‘I think she was only a woman,’ he answered mildly.

He couldn’t understand why he had allowed them to come, or why he had been prepared to expose himself by letting them look at his paintings. But they had reached the top: the loose boards on the landing were creaking; he could hear a sound of friction on one of the women, from subterranean silk, or hot rubber. He could hear one in particular, breathing as though submitting to fate; free will was an illusion formerly encouraged by free limbs.

Olivia coughed and said: ‘Hurtle—I’ve been telling Hero how I used to come to your parents’ house—to play—in the old days.’

He grunted. Which version, he wondered, had she painted?

They went into the front room, which was larger than the back studio-bedroom, thus more formal in a way; but it was cold too: the cold light of a cold day splintered through the araucaria.

‘If you’ll sit down I’ll show you some paintings.’

He hadn’t meant his voice to sound ironical, but it did: he had noticed some rat pellets on the boards. There were no chairs, only the grey waste of the bed he hadn’t had time to make. He had slept there the night before: the room still had the smell of sleep.

They sat down, Hero Pavloussi and Olivia Davenport, uneasily contiguous. Hero held the violets over her mouth and chin. Her eyes appeared luminously tragic, though possibly this was what Greek convention demanded.

He began, only dutifully, to turn some of the stacked canvases and boards. None of the paintings interested him now; in fact he wondered why he had painted some of them, and the presence of his two visitors drained them of any significance they had ever had. Yet each of the two subdued women seated on the bed had worked in him at moments in their relationship as compellingly as his original compulsion to paint the dead paintings he was showing.

Hero was mostly silent, relying on her bunch of violets to express subtleties of which she would have been incapable. When she was not brooding behind it, she sat forward, one arm resting on her crossed knees, wrist rather limp, the ball of violets gently moving back and forth. He followed it with his eyes: it might be a turning point.

Whereas Hero was careful to confine herself to monosyllables, Olivia made several practised remarks. She was a professional at the game of looking at paintings, and liked to exercise her skill even on her off days. This was one of the off days, just how far off she was only beginning to realize. She was bored. She was haggard. She was probably menstruating.

One canvas, he noticed, was so appallingly muddy he couldn’t believe it was his.

‘I’m afraid I have nothing to offer you but some stale chocolate biscuits,’ he heard himself announce.

Hero was innocent enough to play. ‘Why should you offer us anything else when you’re showing us the beautiful paintings?’

Olivia displayed her long white throat and a contrived smile. She began to hum. She was so at home she turned her back on the paintings; she started strolling about, looking at dust, at the corpses of flies, out the window, or more specifically, inward at her own thoughts. This left him in greater intimacy with Hero, which, after all, had been the real purpose in Olivia’s bringing her.

Finding herself unprotected, Hero looked for mercy. Instead of a congestion of uncertain, borrowed opinions, signs of a personal life again began to flicker in her.

‘I’m sorry if I appear so ignorant—which I am—Mr Duffield—but interested.’

Her awkward apology restored her beauty. Her heavy eyelids were particularly noticeable. Moreover, they looked sincere. A kind of tenderness was established between them, so innocent he wouldn’t have felt ashamed of it in the most cynical company.

‘Nothing I’ve shown you so far is very important,’ he clumsily mumbled. ‘Not today, at least. Perhaps it’s the light. Or one of the metabolic days.’ Hero’s presence made him feel ashamed of his pretentious word the moment he had used it.

Looking out of the window Olivia was saying: ‘You’ll have to cut down that tree, Hurtle: it’s too depressing. It soaks up the light, and will probably fall on the house if you get a gale from the right quarter.’