The Vivisector (48 page)

The lecturer had begun again to whisper from the other side.

‘Yes, yes!’ Madame Pavloussi shrieked back. ‘Athens is dusty. It is so dusty, Cosmas has the servants dust his shoes each house he enters.’ She glanced at her husband. ‘They love him for it. Yes,’ she shrieked, because the lecturer was bombarding her, ‘modern Athens is primitive. You do not have to imply. There is poor sewerage. Every summer we go to an island, and there is even less sewerage on the island.’ She laughed, and nodded her sculptured head.

‘Ken—my husband—has bought a Bentley. He’s terribly thrilled with this new relationship.’ Easing one of her earrings, Elise Trotter looked across at Olivia Davenport.

All the while the stately maids were weaving in and out, thin and middle-aged, bearing dishes. The black Spurgeon drew corks and wrapped the napkin, sometimes ever so slightly bloodied. The maids were so fragile, they suggested white fans, open at some precise degree of mathematical formality.

‘Success in all these young countries is something so concrete. ’ Madame Pavloussi dared the painter to contradict.

‘In any country.’ He had to watch the shipowner, seated the other side of the table, forking up his hostess’s saddle of lamb.

‘Yes?’ Madame Pavloussi, for the first time, seemed prepared to give her right-hand neighbour her full attention.

‘It is too fat, and too pink,’ Pavloussis complained as he gorged himself.

‘You are a bear, Cosma!’ Mrs Davenport laughed; the Greek was certainly very shaggy. ‘I love you!’ Whenever he paused, she fed shreds of lamb into the receptive mouth.

Suddenly Boo remembered and looked across. She was smiling in a leisurely way at Hurtle Duffield.

He was about to tell her friend Hero Pavloussi: ‘I am particularly interested in the shape of your ear-lobes’; when he changed it into: ‘Clever of you not to wear jewellery like these other overloaded women.’

‘I wear this ring which Cosmas has given and wishes me to wear. Otherwise, too many jewels are too heavy—and one may always be forced to part with them too suddenly.’ She ended in a fit of coughing, which brought the tears into her eyes. ‘Oh, dear!’ she said, weakly, smiling, at last.

Nobody had noticed because everybody was engaged: it was what would be referred to as a marvellous party.

When they reached the end of the meal, and the strands of blue smoke were woven into those of light, phrases falling thicker and more broken from out of the general amorphous-ness of conversation, on to the shimmer of underwater jewels and the bird floating on motionless wings, he realized he had never been in love, except with painting. He had been in love, he recognized it, with his own ‘Pythoness’ standing permanently beside the tripod-bidet. This was what made his encounter with Madame Pavloussi—Hero: still a myth rather than a name—of particular significance. He was falling in love with her, not in the usual sense of wanting to sleep with her, to pay court to her with his body, which, after all, wasn’t love. Physical love, as he saw it now, was an exhilarating steeplechase in which almost every rider ended up disqualified for some dishonesty or another. In his aesthetic desires and their consummation he believed himself to be honest; and in his desire to worship and be renewed by someone else’s simplicity of spirit, he was not forsaking the pursuit of truth. So he was falling in love with Hero Pavloussi. It had begun, he thought, as they stood in front of the Pythoness Olivia Davenport owned; when Hero had innocently planted in his mind the seed of an idea: the octopus thing.

Remembering the exact moment was to experience something not unlike the orgasm of sensual love. Then, was he again no more than in love with an endlessly sensuous prospect of paint, to which, in her innocence, she had given him access? And how absolute is simplicity of spirit? He looked at the shipowner’s hairy wrists, one of which lay heavily along the back of their hostess’s chair, while the other was held erect and exposed as Pavloussis smoked, with almost spinsterly precision, one of his own Greek cigarettes.

In the drawing-room afterwards Miss Anderson spilled cherry brandy down her front. ‘Don’t worry!’ she kept assuring those who wanted to lead her out and mop up more thoroughly: ‘
I
am not worrying: Mr Duffield was so kind as to lend me his handkerchief. ’ She laughed, and her buck teeth showed, transparent and reckless. She arched her back, as though a man’s arm were pressed in the small of it, herself revolving. He looked at Miss Anderson with different eyes.

The party was sagging under the weight of food and drink. Monaghan the banker had become too congested to keep up the pretence of waking. Mr Trotter—Ken—had cornered the lecturer in Greek and was explaining to him the virtues of his new Bentley; while ladies in groups were inclined to remember girls they had known, now unidentifiably swallowed up in marriage.

‘What is this?’ asked Pavloussis, touching something with a hairy finger.

‘That is a solitaire board,’ Mrs Davenport explained. ‘A game—so-called. Ladies must have played it only to exercise their wrists.’

‘Will you teach me this game?’ The shipowner appeared fascinated by the whorled marbles, which he kept turning in their mahogany sockets.

‘Oh, darling, must we? How trying!’ Olivia protested yawn-fully.

At the same time she made him carry chairs to a table on a little daïs at the farther end of the room, where she proceeded to instruct with exaggerated conscientiousness. They were soon so unnaturally absorbed, their absorption could only have been imposed on them.

Madame Pavloussi said: ‘My husband is so good. He is a simple man—a peasant. I hope you will learn to know him, Mr Duffield.’

Mrs Davenport refused to have the curtains drawn in any of the waterside rooms. Some of the guests had walked out, in spite of the chill, into the garden, where the artificial moonlight had been turned discreetly off. The actual moon was not quite perfect, but perhaps more precious for it, in the thick, velvety texture of night, above the electric outline of the bays.

Hero said: ‘I have never lived for any long time out of sight of the sea. I would not find it natural to live without it.’

It was almost too natural their walking out of the house together, not by mutual consent, but as the game of solitaire had been imposed on other players. Hero had covered her head as protection against the cold. In the beginning all her remarks were chattery and banal. She tended to stride: to try to disguise the fact that her legs were rather short; while he felt shivery and dull: even miserable in his dullness, for he had expected something different. Was it possible his love for Madame Pavloussi would culminate on the operating table on a prearranged afternoon?

Looking back, the rising wind filling her hood, the classic light exposing her face, she gave the impression of being in flight.

‘I have seen Cosma for the first time on the quay after we escape, ’ she needed to explain. ‘After the Catastrophe—at Smyrna—we escaped to Chios. It is his island. He is from a village in the interior, where his mother still lives, and he still goes to visit her. I have been there once, but she doesn’t respect me: I have nothing of my own—not a penny—all of it was lost in the Catastrophe—and I cannot talk to her about jam. She has two daughters and a niece who live at the port where I have met Cosma the first time. They are the kind who spend months to think of the handbags they will order from Athens. You know? All the girls are married to confectioners.’

They had reached the water, where a balustrade had been built to prevent people falling in. In front of them the sea was both dark and restless, as opposed to the solid, illuminated house, with people strolling on the terrace, some lacing themselves with their arms to brace their bodies against the cold.

‘After we reach the mainland, we have stayed in this house on the outskirts of Athens belonging to a cousin of my father. He is very mean. He has locked up the furniture. So my parents sit on packing-cases while the servants bring them cups of coffee. All the servants are here from the
tsiphliki
—oh dear, I am too tired to remember English—the
estate
we have had in Asia Minor. They would like to do something for us, but we have nothing. They can only bring coffee, and cold water from the well.’

She stood looking out over the bay, speaking in a dry, high starved voice. Perhaps she realized, because she coughed slightly, and lowered it, to make it sound more natural. There was a gramophone playing something he had forgotten, and people laughing, at a house along the point.

‘In Athens they organized the refugees,’ she continued in a more controlled, convalescent voice. ‘My sister went to teach at a school. She is the learned one, and had some slight experience among poor Greek children in Smyrna. I was given work at a bank, because I have a head for figures. Oh yes, I have always been practical!’ She snorted in apology. ‘But I was not for the bank in Athens. I work work, and am sick in the end.’ Her voice was drying out again. ‘One evening I have fallen in the snow walking from the train. I haven’t the strength or the will to get up, only to lie and sleep in the snow. Late that night some people passing took me to a house. I didn’t care. I was too happy lying in the snow, which had become in the end beautiful and warm, and—yes, sanctifying.’

She spent a year in a sanatorium on the side of a mountain.

‘When my strength came back I should have felt more grateful. That is the terrible thing: not to feel grateful enough. A woman I got to know brought me a pretty, summer frock, out of kindness; she is not at all an affluent woman. I cried and she thought it was from gratitude, and because I was cured—it was such a day, smelling of warm pine-needles—but I was crying because I didn’t care. She never got to know the real reason. I have tried to make it up to her since, but have never adequately succeeded; it is now too easy for me to give presents.’

He stood against the balustrade bracing his calves, not so much because the night was chilly, as because, in this present rise in fluctuating faith, she must be the pure soul he was longing for. He couldn’t remember having met another, unless May Noble the Courtneys’ cook, though May had been in a sense an artist, and he wanted to admire somebody who was a human being.

‘What about your husband?’ he asked, testing her in a thickened voice. ‘Where is Cosma all the time? When does he reappear in the story?’

‘I shall tell you. It was with this same woman, my friend Arta, I was sitting one day during the visiting hour, not long before I was to be discharged. A man passed Arta thought she recognized as an acquaintance. She called him in. He and I also recognized each other from Chios. He was a man who had helped us bring from the destroyer the belongings we had rescued from Smyrna: our few relics! I found him most sympathetic on the quay at night, but almost anyone who was not a Turk would have appeared acceptable. Now when he had gone Arta told me: “This is Cosmas Pavloussis, who has already made a fortune out of shipping—a peasant from Chios—a millionaire!” Arta was more impressed than I. I became furious with myself. I did not look down on him for being a peasant. I blamed myself for being deceived by his simplicity: anybody so rich could not be entirely honest. So I said: “What an ugly man—and hairy!” Arta I remember laughing and replying: “Hairy men are said to be the kindest, and I should think, the warmest!” But I found her remark repulsive,’ Hero broke off primly.

‘I thought you were the practical one.’

‘Oh, but I am! Wait! After I left the sanatorium and the bank was persuaded to take me back, Cosmas informed himself through Arta. He asked to see me. I did not want him. He send me presents. I do not want them. At this time I did not know what I wanted or what I was like. I was like some empty thing—some jug waiting to be filled up—with purpose. Then he sent a representative to my parents asking them to give me to him. He offered to pay them a lot of money, when in normal circumstances it is the father of the bride who pays the groom to take her. My father was ironical at first, because the
tsiphliki
of my grandfather was so great it took a man a month to ride around it on a horse. Then they change their tune: “Why not, Hero? He is a good man, isn’t he? He was most courteous and considerate the night in Chios when nobody knew a thing about anyone. You praised him then.” Because the circumstances were not comparable I did not bother to argue. I sulked. Till one morning, I remember, I break my nail opening the drawer of a steel filing cabinet. I suddenly think: “Why do I not marry this peasant-millionaire and lie all morning in good sheets without opening my eyes?” My parents were delighted. They ask: “What has changed your mind,
koroula?
” I said: “Nothing” just like that—“nothing!” I said: “The night is dark enough to hide any marriage, provided there is money.” They pretended not to hear.’

She begun whimpering and squirming, her nose thick with catarrh, her voice with distaste. ‘You see? Isn’t that practical?’ she asked.

He could only agree.

‘So I married Cosmas for the wrong reasons. From the wedding I have the
bonbonnière
—too ornate, because he wanted to show how far he had come.’ She blew her nose. ‘But I got to love him. He is such a good man. He respected my feelings from the beginning. Some Greeks are like goats, you know: the heat of the day is the same to them.’

She broke off to look over her shoulder. ‘I am happy,’ she said.

‘Then why are you disturbed, Hero?’

‘I! Why I am
disturbed
—Mr Duffield? Oh,
well!
Anyone who breathes, anyone who exists, is disturbed. But I am not
disturbed
. Actually—I will tell you something: I was not healed, not completely, till Cosmas took me to Perialos. That is an island off the Asia Minor coast. It is an island of saints and miracles. Are you religious?’

‘No.’

‘I am not. But you don’t have to scratch a Greek very deep to find that he is. Even my sister Elly, who is a practising humanist, who married a schoolteacher—another peasant—and lives in a village—to demonstrate her faith in mankind, Elly will go so far as admitting she is a Byzantine. Because, you see, the faces of the people—you only have to look at the icons—are still so close to the saints. I, on the other hand, cannot admit to faith if God allows the Turks to put out a man’s eyes and crucify him on his church door.’