The Vivisector (46 page)

 

surrounding with thoughtful piecrust the statement he had never succeeded in completing. On the whole it didn’t disturb him not to know what he believed in—beyond his own powers, the unalterable landscape of childhood, and the revelations of light.

It surprised him to find he had scribbled on a patch of whitewash after reading Olivia Davenport’s informative letter: ‘My Maltese dog is sick . . .’

 

Out of respect for Olivia’s sense of ritual he had taken his dinner-jacket to the cleaner, and would smell of it. Not that it mattered. It was more serious when the cleaner’s tag caught in the zipper, and he wasted half an hour freeing himself. So he was late reaching the house, when he had planned to arrive in good time, even before the hostess had come down, while the canvas was still, so to speak, virgin. On such occasions he liked to help himself to a couple of stiff ones, after which his body and mind became supple enough to cope with the hazards of composition; for experience had taught him that all parties are partly your responsibility, the horrors more so than the triumphs.

On the occasion of Mrs Davenport’s intimate dinner for her Greek friends her house was splendidly floodlit. No crevice of it was exposed to the dangers of mystery. Its extra-solid white-drenched mass and the increased formality of the balustrades, shaven lawns and stereoscopic trees seemed to proclaim that the material world is the one and only. If doubts entered in, they were encouraged by the less than solid wall of bamboos to the west. Nothing could be done about the bamboos: they looked and sounded tattered; nor the sea beyond, which slithered shapelessly, in deep blue, to downright black, coils.

It would have been a chilly night, at least for the time of year, without that slight friction of excitement, of cars arriving and driven away, and activity in the kitchen wing: a sound of flung pans, almost of clashing cymbals, as the voice of an impeccable servant, dropping the accent she had caught from the mistress, accused somebody else of buggering up the
charlotte russe.

A manservant he hadn’t seen before, but who claimed to recognize him, received Mr Duffield at the front door with the virtuoso flourishes of the professionally obsequious.

The man asked: ‘Will you be requiring anything, Mr Duffield, from the pockets?’ as he peeled the overcoat off its owner’s back.

In the hall, as though she had been waiting for her favourite guest, old Emily, half member of the family, half honorary nuisance, came creaking forward in her fresh starch.

‘Thought you was letting us down,’ she hissed, her fingers pinching at his sleeve. ‘The Greek gentleman is sick. And She won’t come without. Poor Miss Boo! Fourteen guests on ’er hands! I tell ’er a bricklayer sees more for ’is pains than a fashionable lady.’

His professional soul disapproving of unorthodox, not to say senile, confidences, the manservant hurried the guest towards the long drawing-room, Emily calling after them in low, penetrating voice: ‘See you later, dear. They say not only the husband’s sick, but the Maltese dog is worse.’

Any further remarks were drowned in the orchestration of lights, crystal, ice, jewellery, and confident voices. As he was led in, the expressions of some of his fellow guests showed they were prepared to carry on as though he hadn’t arrived. One or two, whom he met on and off, looked at him with the eyes of amateur blackmailers. Some he didn’t know pretended that they did, and a lady of Presbyterian cast and an inherited pendant, locked up her long cupboard of a face, and turned her back.

He stood in the arena, his chin sunken, like a bull watching for the first signs of treachery.

Mrs Davenport, whether intentionally or not, must have been the last to take notice, but whipped round when she decided to, and was fully prepared. She was even wearing a crimson dress, a deep crimson, devoted to the lines of her flanks, her thighs, until the knees, where it began to flounce and froth and lead a life of its own: a bit obvious perhaps, in its effect, if it hadn’t been of such a rich, courtly stuff, reminiscent of carnations with a glint of a frost on their rough heads. She came forward, aiming her most stunning smile, trailing invisible streamers of carnation perfume. But the cleverest details of her informally formal
toilette
were the sleeves: these were pushed back to the elbows, in heavy rucks, and although they must have been worn permanently so, she gave the impression of having that moment deserted the sink, her wrists dripping pearls and diamonds instead of suds.

‘Darling,’ she said, with a distraction she might have been finding delicious, ‘I’m simply at my wits’
end!
’

She bathed her cheek in his, so that all those gathered in the room hushed their mouths for a second in their half-emptied glasses as they meditated on an ambiguous relationship.

‘They haven’t, and probably won’t—
come!
’ She performed the passage in a series of little perfumed trills, her mouth melting within a few inches of his own.

‘All the more scoff,’ he said, ‘for those who did.’ Forced by the angle to look down his nose at the convention of her lips, he was afraid he might develop a twitch.

‘Oh, but I was so
counting
on them!’ Tonight her
mèche
of natural silver had divided, and was standing erect like a pair of horns above her frown. ‘For
your
sake,’ she added.

He realized their relationship had subtly altered: Olivia Davenport was hanging distractedly, practically limply, on his arm, looking imploringly up. She could have been imploring him to take over a responsibility, or accept a sacrifice. He wished he had arrived early, as planned, for the couple of stiff whiskies he had been counting on.

Just then the hushed voices of the guests began mounting; there was a pronounced collision of ice-cubes, and all the confusion of announced and important arrival in Mrs Davenport’s off-white drawing-room.

She hurried forward, ululating: ‘Darlings, I’m so
relieved!
We didn’t realize—that is, we understood Cosma was indisposed.’

A small woman was laughing big. ‘Why should you misunderstand—darling? Cosma is always indisposed. It doesn’t mean he won’t come just because he has a pain in his pinny.’

This echo of an Edwardian nanny cast up on the shores of the Levant started the guests frantically laughing, with the exception of one, at whom the speaker happened to be looking. He was, in fact, too interested to respond.

And immediately she looked away, at her husband, to discover how he had reacted to her frivolous betrayal.

Pavloussis the shipowner was advancing at her heels, an undirected smile guarding his rather fleshy face; his eyelids looked particularly black behind his thick spectacles; his shirt front was studded with black pearls.

From behind the smile he started hoisting himself to the tedious level of communication. ‘It is not I,’ he said, correctly, and coughed, ‘it is our little dog which is sick.’

Because her head was turned in his direction, you couldn’t estimate the degree of his wife’s approval, except that she kept repeating in something like a ventriloquist’s projected voice: ‘Yes, yes! Our little dog. Poor little Flora!’

Her husband continued smiling. He seemed to be holding the smile between himself and the demands of a foreign language; while her attitude suggested she was ready to translate his silences into pronouncements: Cosma Pavloussis, when put to it, would make pronouncements.

Finally she offered her face instead to the assembled guests, and everyone was charmed. It was foreign, but so sweet, several of the ladies were audibly agreed. If they didn’t praise her more highly, it was because they had run through practically the gamut of their vocabulary. Instead they put on their heartiest grins, and might have been preparing to rush in and start fingering the object of their admiration once the formalities were disposed of.

‘Quite a work of art, Duffield. I hope they won’t break her.’ It was Shuard the music critic, whom he knew slightly, and disliked. ‘She’s far too dainty.’

Shuard’s judgement might have done Madame Pavloussi more harm if he didn’t regularly reduce Mozart to ‘daintiness’ in reviewing for the evening press.

The lady of the amethyst pendant and Presbyterian ancestors found the little Greek far too ‘burnt’. What would her skin be like in a few years’ time? A rag, she suggested, moistening her sallow teeth at the prospect.

A mutually appreciative exchange of opinions between Shuard and the Amethyst Pendant gave their neighbour the opportunity to withdraw to the point of isolation he most enjoyed in crowds, and from which he could glut himself on Madame Pavloussi.

She was certainly small: a figurine burnt to an orange-brown, or terra-cotta. What saved her from exquisiteness or the excessively sweet, were the modelling and carriage of her head: the head sat rather oddly on the body, as though by some special act of grace, and she wouldn’t be surprised to have it fall. The eyelids intensified her expression of fatality, and the disbelieving smile with which she rewarded those she found herself amongst.

As she was led, her dress moved with the liquid action of purest, subtlest silk, its infinitesimal bronze flutings very slightly opening on tones of turquoise and verdigris. Again, her miraculous dress was worn with an odd air, not of humility—fatality. It was surprising that, in shaking hands, she appeared to be grasping a tennis racket. Such an incongruous show of strength could have been part of a game she had specially learnt for Anglo-Saxons. Her other, passive, hand she carried mostly palm-upward, which made you wonder if Madame Pavloussi wasn’t in some way deformed; till in a spontaneous gesture she put the hand to her hair, and for the moment was unable to hide an enormous pearl in a nest of diamonds. At once she returned her hand, her arm, to their original cramped position, as though the ring was too heavy, possibly also something she didn’t care for, and she would rather lay down what fate was making her carry.

While Mrs Davenport was showing off her jewel of a friend, the husband was walking up and down on an independent trajectory. Sometimes he paused to look at a painting, or take up an object of virtu, or glance at a human face, without ever really emerging from the legend of his wealth. Those who were forced to pass him lowered their heads and walked softer, for fear of impinging on a cultivated unreality; while his smile of sickly, almost do dering, benevolence was aimed at no one in particular. Though older than his wife he was not yet old, nor even elderly, but seemed already to be rehearsing the role of an old man with a beautiful character.

In brushing against one whose eyes invoked the particular of which the generality is composed, Pavloussis shied away. ‘Wonderful people! Beautiful house! My wife is enjoying herself,’ he pronounced, still smiling, not for his particular examiner, but for a whole abstract cosmos.

Duffield was interested in the little sacs of dark skin at the corners of the shipowner’s eyelids: they provided something ugly, excrescent, in the otherwise excessively bland.

This non-meeting occurred very quickly and, it seemed, irrelevantly. He returned to his increasing grudge against their hostess for not introducing Madame Pavloussi after insisting that they must be forced together. Her friend’s presence had drugged Olivia: she looked haggard, vulgar even, as she stuck her nose in a glass of gin; while Madame Pavloussi nursed her glass with both hands, as though it had been a handleless cup of innocent spring water.

Passing and repassing at the end of the room, his calves aching with tension, he heard a woman remark: ‘But I adore his paintings.’ A second replied: ‘I adore
him!
He’s always been one of my heart-throbs.’ He should have treated his adorers kindly, but allowed them to peter out in the abashed smiles of schoolgirl crushes.

The major-domo confessed to the hostess in velvety tones that dinner was served.

Mrs Davenport’s voice sounded comparatively raucous: ‘Oh, thank you, Spurgeon; I hope everyone’s as ravenous as I.’

The Amethyst Pendant folded her disapproving lips over her moist, greenish teeth. As a headmistress and an O.B.E. she couldn’t allow herself to approve of any kind of eccentricity.

The hostess’ example released something: what should have been a leisurely and graceful progress to the dining-room became bit of a rout; the burr and bray of male laughter jostled with the thin reeds of girlish giggles; a banker just missed knocking a T’ang horse off its stand; while the guests of honour smiled indulgently, seeming to find nothing, or perhaps everything, unusual.

It was at this point that Olivia Davenport remembered what she had forgotten, or was forced to face an anxiety she had been disguising. Her head held high, as though to keep her hair out of the water, she started an awkward swimming movement against the swell made by her mismanaged guests, dragging her friend after her. Jerked out of her Tanagra graces into a state of uncertainty, Madame Pavloussi’s attitudes became Cycladic; she followed bravely where she was drawn, her shoulders slightly hunched, her bronze dress opening and closing on its depths of turquoise and verdigris. Her arms appeared stumpy from closer, as her legs would be too, he guessed, under the play of liquid silk.

On reaching their objective Olivia Davenport shook the invisible drops off her immaculate coiffure, and announced with awful distinctness, if only for themselves: ‘Hero—this is my great friend Hurtle Duffield. My two dear friends! It’s rather like bringing together the two halves of friendship—into a whole.’ Then, as though she might have said something too ‘clever’ for a social occasion, she explained more practically: ‘I’m giving you Hurtle, Hero, for dinner.’

There was no sign that a plan had been discussed beforehand by the two women. In fact Madame Pavloussi, standing in front of him, continued looking dazed, if not frightened, by the possibility that she was intended as a sacrifice; while there flickered briefly through his mind an image of himself trussed on a gold plate, threatened by a knife and fork in her small, rather blunt hands.