The Vivisector (56 page)

To add to the irritation, and downright mystification, this Madame Pavloussi, obviously a woman of means, was wearing an old fur coat, certainly Persian lamb with probably a sable collar, but all so shabby you wouldn’t have been seen dead in it. Her breath reeked like a full ashtray. She was such a hell-bent smoker it was a wonder she didn’t eat the cigarettes, which she took from a shagreen case, when she remembered to fill it, paper packs otherwise, lumped together with passports and tickets in an old crocodile handbag. There was a note-case to match the bag, with a gold monogram, elegantly done. Once the note-case tumbled out: you could see it was stuffed with notes; it was Madame Pavloussi, not the man, who had the dough. The man didn’t bear too much looking at: too seedy, and sort of morbid. You would have liked to understand what they saw in each other: her in her shabby old Persian lamb, teeth browned by nicotine; him in his food-spotted English tweed, and funny eyes. The eyes gave you the goose-flesh, because he wasn’t exactly looking at you: he was only looking.

Over Rangoon suddenly the lovers kissed, or it was Madame Pavloussi the Greek woman loving up to her paid man. He’d probably carve her up in the end, in some hotel bedroom, and pack her in suitcases, before the staff dropped to it. It would be her who’d drive him to murder by talking at him nonstop: pity you couldn’t have heard what it was about.

It was about Perialos. ‘We mustn’t waste any time in Athens. The more I think about it the more I am convinced Perialos is our great hope.’ Unconscious of the island gestating inside him, she was willing him to keep her company in being saved.

 

They spent three, four days in the hot white dust of Athens where they put up at a modest hotel frequented by European families, and English governesses on their way to or from a job. By day he scarcely saw Hero, who had business to attend to, family to visit. She had become foreign and remote: for which he was grateful; but she began to feel she ought to console him.

She said on the third morning: ‘Did you hear that woman coughing the other side of the wall? It had the sound of an English governess. Poor things, their gentility means everything, and at the same time they are hungry for love. They end by losing all their sport.’

The same night a sense of compassion reminded Hero to ask him to sleep with her. It was the eve of their departure; she was naturally preoccupied: the outcome was conjugal at best, at worst, prophylactic.

‘How fearful,’ she said, ‘if we left the tickets for the
vaporaki
under the mattress! I dread all this confusion of departures. The broken-down taxis!’ She sighed, and heaved, remembering her duty towards him, or the English governesses. He could almost feel her listening for the governess with a cough the other side of the wall.

On coming out of the bathroom she said: ‘These island steamers are very primitive, you know.’ She was trying to brush her hair sleeker than it had ever been. ‘They put the used lavatory paper in baskets in case it blocks up the holes. Fancy! My Aunt Phrosso had a basketful blow in her face on the way to Corfu. She never travel again by Greek.’ Hero laughed with a kind of coarse delight. ‘This is my poor country! Ah, Perialos—how I dread and long for it!’ She ended in a voice of doves.

As she cosseted, and finally plaited together, the live snakes of her hair, the raised arms suggested sun-warmed pottery. The woman who had been in bed with him, amiably submitting to a sexual routine, was in no way related to her. Perhaps the fault was his: he felt numb; his hands ached with possibly arthritic pains. Only when they were lying in their separate beds, and he was opening the door of his house in Flint Street, his fingers began again to flow: the pain was squeezed out. He practised cupping his hands to control the evasive paint, with which he must convey the grey-to-violet dove-tones and glistening, plaited snakes.

When he woke from this spasmodic nap he felt more refreshed than he had been by the bleak orgasm he had pretended to enjoy with the woman in the other bed. She was now crying and moaning through her sleep; while the English governess had started coughing again, perhaps out of sympathy, the other side of the wall.

He was powerless to do anything about anything except fall asleep for the second time: from which he was woken by Hero Pavloussi shouting at him in a grey, hostile light; it was so early.

‘Wake up, my God!’ she shouted. ‘You don’t realize: this day of days, the taxi may break down on the way to Piraeus!’ Her vehemence made the handles on the dressing-table rattle.

Then she started bashing at the fragile, antique telephone, to make sure their coffee would be sent up. She had thickened, coarsened overnight, or so it appeared as she bent to test her suspenders. Her skin looked greasy, livery. He downright disliked her as she stood dipping one horn of a croissant into her coffee.

‘Did you see Cosma?’ he asked.

It was the first time since their arrival either of them had used the name; if it hadn’t been for the sight of her dunking the croissant, he probably wouldn’t have brought it up now.

At once she resumed her true proportions. ‘No.’ Her head had recovered its nobility. ‘I am cheapened enough, but would not cheapen myself any farther by doing such a thing to my husband. ’

‘I saw him—I think—the afternoon before last.’

‘How?’ She was listening like a frozen cat.

‘In an arcade.’

‘Which arcade?’

‘How do I know? I can’t read the Greek lettering.’

He had been pretty sure it was Cosma Pavloussis, in dark glasses. They had almost collided. Then the persistent smile, there for anybody who cared to receive and interpret it the evening of Olivia’s dinner, reappeared on the face of the shipping magnate, or his double, as he sheered off and stood looking at a millinery display in a shop window. If he hadn’t been wearing the dark glasses, it would have been possible to identify him by the little sacs of sallow skin at the corners of the eyelids.

‘What was he doing?’ Hero asked.

She was standing with the remaining horn of a soggy croissant pinched in trembling fingers; there were crumbs floating on the surface of her coffee.

‘He was looking at some rather tawdry hats in a shop window. ’ Then he added, because her face seemed to be expecting it: ‘He’s probably doing some little dancer or actress on the cheap.’

‘I will not love you any more or less, Hurtle, if you draw for me jealous pictures of my husband. Nor will you lower him for me by anything you say.’

‘But didn’t you tell me he could only sleep with paid women after you’d upset his moral values?’

She answered gently: ‘Yes,’ and stuffed into her mouth the remains of the croissant.

Again, as she was bending over the suitcase, smoothing the contents before fastening it, she said very gravely, softly: ‘I pray that God will bless us at Perialos.’

He thought it extremely unlikely that God would show them acts of mercy even on that island of saints; but in his role of stand-in groom he took the bride’s hand, and she appeared shyly grateful for it.

 

The steamer making the voyage to Perialos was appropriately primitive. On the gangways the tightly knotted strings of passengers shuffled with short bemused steps dictated less by the loads they were carrying, than by a ritual in which they were taking part. Hero hadn’t painted on her mouth. Jostled by these bearers of sacrificial kids and hens, or heady offerings of stocks and roses, he felt more innocent, stilted, wooden, already in a sense half-shriven.

They lay all night in their narrow bunks. He slept only an hour or two. There were the distant sounds of vomiting, moaning, invocations, kids bleating. Once for an instant, in a sloping corridor, on groggy legs, he was the only living thing. In the lavatories there stood the baskets of used paper as Hero had predicted.

That night she didn’t speak. He suspected her of praying, and because he had begun to love her again he would have liked to add his petitions to hers; as this wasn’t possible, he filled the darkened cabin of his mind with an involved white calligraphy, which he saw as a correspondence of sorts.

Very early the swell subsided, and they entered a blue morning in which veiled islands were swimming, or in some cases, hedgehogs of brown rock. The steamer functioned at two speeds: one for the immediate foreground; the other for the passive distance on which they might never make an impression. Kerchiefed women continued calling to their Lady for protection, and a theological student spouted like a whale over a consignment of peasant cheeses spread on a covered hold for the passage between islands.

Later in the morning the two foreigners were standing on the sheltered side of the wheelhouse. Since her association and her fur coat had removed Hero Pavloussi to a plane from which Christian voices and glances fell away incredulously, she had been clinging desperately to her companion’s arm for support. They didn’t stop looking ahead: both, he felt, weak at the knees, like discharged hospital cases, or a not yet consummated couple.

Hero finally managed to free her voice from her throat; it allowed her a gummy whisper:
‘Perialos!’
Then the wind had fallen: they had slid the right side of the stone arm of a protective mole.

As soon as it was possible, all the initiates began pouring down on the stone paving, pushing and shrieking; there was a bleating from some quarters, from others a flapping of wings: an inverted cock raised his head, gasping, glaring, wattles quivering. Those who had been waiting for them seized the asperged cheeses and carried them away. A white glare embraced the whole cosmos, excepting those for whom the ceremony had been arranged. It made their arrival more alarmingly significant; they moistened their lips, and looked at each other lovingly, appealing for sympathy in what they were about to undergo.

He said: ‘We were stupid not to have booked a room. Or do you think everyone else belongs?’

‘I do not know where is there to book.’ Hero was struggling with the stones of words.

A great personage of the Church made his exit from the little steamer: his staff of office, his veils proclaimed him. Several monks ran forward. Like hens expecting to be trodden, they hunched over the hand they kissed, before the single bucking taxi drove him up the mountain to the monastery.

‘It is not necessary to book. There is always somewhere.’ Hero smiled, but looked as though she had never been on an island before.

Her coat, which she had taken off when the wind died, was trailing from the crook of her arm. Coming down the gangway she had torn a hole in the fur, but it seemed of no importance to her. The landscape had begun falling into place: which he divided automatically, for the moment feeling more informed than exalted.

Alongside the water a short distance from the mole stood an ochre stucco cube which passed for an inn. Hero came to an agreement with the pirate-landlord for two narrow rooms, each with an iron bedstead and crocheted cotton quilt.

‘Isn’t there a double room in the place?’

‘It is better like this,’ she whispered quickly, though it was doubtful whether the innkeeper would have understood.

So they had reached Perialos. At the now deserted quay two lambs were being dragged from a dinghy, tails flumping, cries rasping and reverberating; a horn from one of them broke off in somebody’s hand.

Their landlord suddenly excused himself.

Hero explained. ‘There is a funeral today, which he has to go to. He is better than he looks.’

They exchanged the smell of damp sheets in the rooms for that of urine in the corridor. They went down to look for food, which they found farther along the quay.

They ate a few sea-scented prawns and lengths of naked cucumber: then a dish of something.

Hero smiled across at him as she masticated. ‘It is good, isn’t it? Primitive, but good. The
soodzookakia!
’ The tepid brown ‘sausages’ aroused all the reverence in her.

Because he wanted to love her particularly on this day of their union through atonement, he smiled back, while hoping to disguise the gristle collected between his teeth: as in hers, he noticed.

‘I don’t want to waste any time, Hurtle. I will tell you what I am planning.’ Hero looked down at her plate, into the tomato dregs with their outer edge of oil. ‘We will go first to the Convent of the Assumption—which we—my husband and I—have visited once before. Then to Theodosios. This is a hermit who is living not so very far away from the convent, beside the chapel of St John of the Apocalypse.’

‘But was this the island?’

‘No. That is Patmos—which is given to the Italians. John only passed through Perialos; but he performed miracles here,’ she added with grave authority.

Pushing back the cutlery through the oily dregs, he felt deeply in love with Hero his hushed bride and fellow neophyte.

They started as soon as she had changed into a very simple, expensively cut, cotton frock, and headed in what she remembered as the direction of the convent. They had only gone a short distance through the village when a procession burst on them out of a narrow side street. What must have been practically the whole population of the port chattered and jostled like the steamer passengers at the beginning and ending of the voyage. Greeks, the peasants at least, all seemed to understand whatever there is to know in their sphere of life, as well as in the greater sphere described with geometrical precision behind it. Only the rich and the foreigners didn’t know: so the peasants were sorry for them, the confident black glances and glistening smiles seemed to imply.

The procession parted slightly, and he realized this was not only a matter of life.

‘It is the funeral we were warned about!’ Hero stood clutching the upper part of his arm, like a woman furtively estimating a prospective lover’s strength.

The procession flowed towards them. They were caught up in the forked stream of kerchiefed women, and men walking on a curve which criticized the two foreigners. Then came the Church, bearing banners, and emblems in gilded wood. The tattered priests and their tallow-faced acolytes obviously intended the two lost souls to participate in the mystery of which they were the guardians. The object from which this emanated was even halted for an instant: when the strangers caught sight of a very old woman on a bier, head lolling on a lace pillow. Though still convincingly a partner to life, she was at the same time removed from the living herd trampling around her, for the corpse, with the yellow, pleated mouth, and hair dressed in a kerchief identical with those of the live women, was wearing those geometrically described arcs of eyelids which everybody revered, and some looked as though they aspired to.