The Vivisector (41 page)

‘Good for him!’ said the military-looking one in her peaked cap and studded belt. ‘But not for me, Mrs Trotter,’ she added, and took up a copy of
Vogue;
it returned them all to the waiting-room.

A wave had begun to rise in Mrs Trotter, from out of her bust, flooding her neck, and reaching the roots of her naturally carroty hair, till her face and throat looked completely covered with a claret birthmark.

Mrs Halliday averted her eyes. ‘What’s that wretched Olivia up to?’ She parted her jewellery in search of a watch.

‘Changing, we were told,’ the military lady reminded them. ‘If you ask me, she bloody well forgot she was expecting us.’

‘Mrs Davenport’s so terribly busy.’ Mrs Trotter might have been defending herself. ‘She’s promised to help me with the
crèche
. She’s promised me a cheque. Only she’s almost run off her feet.’

The military one guffawed.

‘Truly, Mrs Horsfall!’ Mrs Trotter protested. ‘Don’t be unfair! ’

But Mrs Horsfall continued guffawing into the pages she was looking at. ‘Here’s Maggie Purser going as Emma Hamilton!’

‘Don’t slay me!’ Mrs Halliday was wearing a hat with a latticed brim through which she liked to use her eyes. ‘At least it’ll come natural.’ She was turning this way and that, and frowning through her pastrywork. ‘Why does Olivia allow her gardener to plant salvia of all things? It’s so ghastly—I mean—so municipal—and hidjus.’

The salvia beyond the window did appear an unchivalrous mistake beside the cooler flowers of Mrs Halliday’s person, to say nothing of the austere room, with its few dispersed, but perfect objects.

‘I’m mad about Mrs Davenport,’ Mrs Trotter clumsily confessed.

Mrs Horsfall sat turning the pages. ‘I’m going through a sort of depressive phase.’

‘Oh,
neoh,
Jo darling! Mrs Halliday tried to assist. ‘All you need is a change of something.’

Mrs Horsfall closed the glossy pages and let the magazine fall plunk on the pearl-shell table. ‘Charitable, Moira, this afternoon. ’ She sat back, grinning and basking.

By moments they became aware of the man sitting amongst them. Mrs Trotter almost apologized once, but didn’t dare in the circumstances.

Instead she asked, and again she was plastered with the claret birthmark: ‘Do you think Mrs Davenport’s unhappy—all alone—since Mr Davenport died?’

Mrs Horsfall said: ‘Guy’s death was an immense relief. Guy Davenport would have made any woman’s life hell.’

‘I understand—’ Mrs Trotter had difficulty bringing it out—‘he died very tragically.’

Mrs Horsfall took aim at Mrs Trotter. ‘He was walking on the roof of a train. He was decapitated,’ she said, ‘by a tunnel.’

Mrs Trotter made a sincere though wrong sound, while opening her handbag to look for help.

‘I wonder Olivia didn’t sue the L.M.S.,’ Mrs Horsfall continued. ‘Anyone else would have.’

‘Oh, but surely darling—walking on the roof of
their
train?’ Mrs Halliday pointed out.

‘Why not? Olivia would have looked divine in court. She could get away with anything. But she didn’t need to.’

‘The money’s all there.’ Mrs Halliday spoke as one who had seen the bank statements. ‘She wisely kept her hand on the purse.’

Mrs Horsfall laughed approvingly, and sank her chin.

‘They say there was another husband—a Mr Lopez,’ Mrs Trotter almost whispered.

‘Oh, that!’ Mrs Halliday threw Lopez away. ‘That was something brief and mysterious. In Peru, wasn’t it, Jo? Nobody knows, and nobody asks.’

‘She must be awfully unhappy,’ Mrs Trotter said, and her claret eyelids thickened.

‘I’m sure not,’ said Jo Horsfall.

Mrs Trotter opened her handbag and shut it. ‘They say she’s a nymphomaniac—and a nymphomaniac can only be unhappy.’

‘What? Olivia?’ Mrs Horsfall roared, Mrs Halliday shrieked, and a pair of bulbuls bathing in a giant clamshell on the lawn flitted into a pomegranate tree, where they sat shaking their shocked top-knots.

When Mrs Halliday had subsided, she said on the level: ‘One very good authority claims that Olivia’s a lesbian.’

‘A what?’ Mrs Trotter asked.

‘Rot, Moira!’ Mrs Horsfall drew down the corners of her mouth. ‘A girl I know put the acid on her, and it didn’t work.’

All three suddenly icily remembered the man.

‘Is Olivia an old friend?’ Mrs Halliday appealed, looking at him through her lattice.

‘I’ve never met her.’

Was it believable? they considered in silence.

‘I didn’t catch your name,’ Mrs Halliday twittered amusingly. ‘Emily does mumble so.’

‘Duffield.’

‘Oh, Ohhh?
Neoh!
Not the artist—the painter?
Duf
-field!’

Thus bombarded he could only hang his head while the room reverberated.

‘I adore paintings,’ Mrs Trotter said as she had been taught. ‘I’m going to get one—when we’ve properly settled in.’

Mrs Halliday and Mrs Horsfall were left fishing for their compacts.

Beyond the garden the sea was dying. There was no indication how the silence might have ended if the door hadn’t opened. Someone, their hostess apparently, came in.

‘I’m so terribly sorry—
every
body!’ She held out her long hands so that the palms were helplessly exposed at the ends of her arms.

In her apology she included the man who happened, incidentally, to be there. She kissed all the ladies, reviving Mrs Trotter’s claret birthmark; the man she embraced with her most candid smile.

Mrs Davenport was wearing a suit of white pyjamas,
tout simple
—or not so
simple:
it was too elaborately subtle; whereas the natural white streak in her brilliantly black hair looked shamelessly artificial. While the three visiting ladies chattered against one another in the same high social key: of their regrets for their hostess’ neglect, of the races and the cricket, of Maggie Purser, Mrs Davenport came close up to him and said in a very confidential tone: ‘Aren’t you drinking, Hurtle Duffield?’

He said: ‘No, thank you,’ prim for him.

Then, because she remained so cool, particularly her eyes, which were of a clear, unperturbed grey, he blurted quickly, clumsily: ‘On the other hand, give me a gin and water. A long gin—with not much water,’ anticipating the first draught, the sweet, fumigating fumes.

He intended to stay where he was, but found himself collaborating with his hostess amongst the ice and crystal. He dropped several cubes of ice, and would have begun grovelling after them.

‘Leave it!’ she ordered, kicking out with a gold sandal.

The ice shot under the table.

Her technique was so assured she must have acquired it at an early age. She took it all for granted, with a touch of contempt for what her guest must inwardly despise; while the ladies continued intoning in the background.

‘Oh, darling . . .’

‘No, darling . . .’

‘. . . all the helpers would be enchanted, and the babies too, if you would visit, Mrs Davenport, any afternoon . . .’

The nymphomaniac, or lesbian, remained superbly cold: probably frigid enough to have killed off her brace of husbands.

‘I must apologize particularly,’ she confessed to her male visitor.

‘It isn’t what I expected!’ But he laughed as the sweet gust of gin explored his skull and eased him out.

‘Nor did
I
expect.’ She added one of her brilliant smiles. ‘You didn’t answer my letter.’

Downing the rest of the gin he couldn’t see the point.

‘Mus go mus go darling!’ Mrs Halliday was shrieking, blinking through her latticed brim.

‘Mus go mus go you beastly old Oliviur!’ Mrs Horsfall was tightening her silver-studded belt.

Mrs Trotter said: ‘Mr Trotter—my husband—and I—would be most honoured, Mrs Davenport, if we could entertain you one evening—to
dinner,
’ she managed to remember.

Olivia Davenport, with her long crimson fingernails and one rope of knotted pearls, was so amused by it all as she handed them over to Emily. ‘’Bye, darlings!’ she screeched according to convention.

Almost before the maid had whisked them off the scene Mrs Davenport returned very gravely into her other self. She was certainly a work of art, but not his, or not at the moment: he saw her as a too facile van Dongen.

While swilling her gin, his memory kept trying to unravel something about her. From the expression of her eyes she might have wanted to assist.

She was sucking on her knot of pearls, when suddenly she leaned forward, and said: ‘Boo Hollingrake.’

‘But your eyes were brown.’

‘Grey. One thing you can’t change is eyes.’

Yet he distinctly remembered a brown, smudged, steamy beauty in the perforated shade of the
Monstera deliciosa
at the bottom of the stone steps.

‘I can see you most clearly,’ he said, because the other was too private a vision, ‘in the William Street post office, on a rainy morning. There’s no reason why I should remember you so vividly on that occasion. You’d come there to post a letter. You were looking sad—and mysterious. Your eyes must have been grey, if you say they were. I was buying stamps for my—for Freda Courtney.’

Boo Hollingrake rejected her pearls finally; she shook her head. ‘I’m sorry I’ve forgotten all about it—if it was of any importance to you. Girls of a certain age are inclined to look sad and mysterious, especially on wet mornings. I think they feel they must make amends in some way for their own dullness.’ Her delivery was crisp, her glance ironic.

He wondered whether she had also forgotten their more spontaneous encounter. There was no sign that she remembered how frenziedly her thighs had worked; of course she could never have been aware, not even at the moment itself, of the stickiness in his underpants.

Olivia Boo Hollingrake Lopez Davenport got up, feeling her way back into the sandals she had slipped off. ‘I expect you’ll want me to show you the paintings.’

She said it so casually the paintings were probably her greatest interest. She introduced him to the Braque, the Picasso, the Max Ernst, several Klees, and others, and others. He was becoming a little sour, and was glad he could disguise it under gin.

‘How is it,’ he asked, ‘I never heard your real, your
baptismal
name?’

She made a deliberately stylized grimace. ‘I loathed it, till I realized it was something I was stuck with, and that I’d better make the most of it.’

Leading him from one painting to the next, Olivia Davenport reminded him of certain women introducing men you suspect of having been their lovers. She was so cool and practised: he could feel his jealousy increasing. He wondered about his own miserable works: whether she had shoved them in the laundry, or even whether she still owned them. Rich women who had bought cheap, sometimes couldn’t resist showing they knew how to sell better.

‘As you’re a painter,’ Mrs Davenport said at the critical moment in his bitterness, ‘you’re probably dying to worship at your own shrine.’

He tried to hide his shame by making indeterminate noises into his dwindling gin.

‘If only you’d replied to my letter, and told me you were coming, ’ she said severely, ‘I could have had the gardeners bring them down.’

‘A little exercise won’t hurt us.’ He hoped he wasn’t too blatant in helping himself to another drink.

‘It isn’t that. I’ll have to take you into my bedroom,’ she said without a trace of coyness.

In the circumstances, his own attempt at humour sounded disgracefully arch. He heard his: ‘Don’t expect we’ll find it untidy! ’ before an attempt to drown the escaping remark in a cackle of ice.

She seemed determined to ignore what she didn’t want to hear. She began leading him upstairs. Like her possessions, whether the white silk she was dressed in, or the stone head of a buddha in a niche, her movements were of a true perfection. She had the most beautifully straight back. Of course Boo Sugar Hollingrake could bloody well afford to be straight-backed and simple.

On a half-landing there was a strip-lit painting: a Boudin.

‘What’s this?’ He couldn’t believe it.

‘Can’t you tell?’

‘Yes, I know. But where did it come from?’

‘I bought it at the sale, after Mrs Courtney—Mrs Boileau had left.’

Whether the Boudin was a good one, he couldn’t have judged at that moment. It was something he had grown up with and out of; its reappearance made him weak at the knees.

‘I’m glad you bought it,’ he said. ‘I expect you remembered it from when we were children. It used to hang in Harry’s study.’

He would have liked to explain to her how the Boudin had become a reality of his own at St Yves de Trégor, where he had noticed for the first time, flat, firm sand lying like flesh under a white muslin of sea.

But even if he had been able to explain in words, she mightn’t have allowed it. ‘Oh, no. I don’t think I ever noticed the Boudin at Sunningdale. I can’t remember. Nothing like that interested me as a child. Paintings were only furniture. No, I bought this one later on simply because it appealed to me as painting.’

She was so sure of herself; till arriving at the landing Mrs Davenport flawed her performance: she tripped against the top stair. For a moment her behind stuck out like that of an awkward, angular girl. He felt he wanted to embrace this loss of perfection. He did put out his hand, but she had already recovered herself without his help.

‘You’re far more sentimental than they say!’ she gasped back at him over her shoulder in a voice which surprised him: it had the same timbre as Rhoda’s.

Immediately after, she turned; they were facing each other on the landing. ‘Where is Rhoda?’ she asked.

Olivia was pale, probably only as the result of nearly falling on her face, whereas he could imagine himself looking pale from the shock of her mind cutting into his.