The Vivisector (54 page)

That he couldn’t love her entirely, or call out through the window, or run after her offering the small change of the flirtatious male, was due to the fact that he was left with his painting in the darkening cubby-hole of a room, and in the painting they each existed on another level, neither pathetic nor tragic, neither moral nor, as she continued erupting in his eardrums, ‘pornographic’. They were, rather, an expression of truth, on that borderline where the hideous and depraved can become aesthetically acceptable. So, in the hot little, dusk-bound room, the man’s phallus glowed and spilled, while the woman, her eyes closed, her mouth screaming silent words, fluctuated between her peacock-coloured desires and the longed-for death-blow.

He felt too weak for more. He went into the front bedroom, already cooler and darker for the encroaching araucaria. Lying beneath its fringed pagoda, on the unmade bed, he saw how he might illuminate the woman’s face still further. But in the morning. For the moment he could only lie and add up the sum of his working life, the details of which remained with him indelibly, unlike his age: he could never remember that; your age is something forced on you by other people.

He must have been sleeping. His consciousness throbbed back into him too suddenly and too hot like the final episode of a second-class film ending in a flash of transparency: he heard the clatter. Night had fallen in the meantime, but by no means opaque. His dry tongue, flickering, tasted a lemonade of light filtered through the araucaria.

He was frightened: no, not frightened; nothing is frightening this side of exhausted creativity. He was even interested in the sounds of somebody moving about in his house—still far down—climbing upward.

He reached for the flex and switched the light on. The footsteps sounded less tentative. From more determined, they became downright aggressive as they reached the landing.

‘Why, Boo,’ he said when she stood beside the bed, ‘what sort of party have you come from?’

For Olivia Davenport was dressed in a man’s black suit, its austerity barely holding out against the luxury of her figure. Over her travesty she was wearing a long bottle-green cloak kept together at the throat by a silver chain. A shaving brush stood erect at the back of her Borsalino.

She began hectoring at once: ‘This is no laughing matter, Hurtle.’ Certainly she was dead pale, but a pallor which might have been assisted. ‘Hero has almost killed herself. She didn’t want you to be told, but I felt you ought to be—as you drove her to it.’

‘Where is she?’ On all fours, he had begun to search for his lost shoes.

‘At her house. She telephoned. Fortunately I was free to go.’

As he was groping amongst the fluff and splinters, Olivia told how Hero had tried to open her veins.

‘If she had succeeded, you would have been responsible. Wouldn’t you?’ It was her pleasure to rub it in.

‘If she had wanted to succeed, she would have,’ he said rather wearily putting on his shoes. ‘Only then she wouldn’t have been able to indulge herself on the telephone.’

Olivia didn’t gush tears, but wilted somewhat inside her drag; what she said sounded soggy-nosed: ‘Always the people one loves most end up the most unlovable.’

‘Has Hero let you down?’

‘Oh—
Hero!
Don’t be ridiculous—irrelevant!’ But Olivia herself had faltered into irrelevance: she couldn’t resist, at least with her eyes, foraging around for paintings.

‘What’s this?’ she gasped, though she might have known, and he didn’t bother to tell her she was bending over the reason for Hero’s false suicide.

‘Ohhh!’ she began moaning in crescendo, and here he was reminded of Hero, only Olivia’s was a contralto voice. ‘I wonder if you know how good you are? But of course you do! You’re too detached, too hateful, not to.’

He had a strong desire to eat something before facing further hysterics.

But Olivia turned on him. ‘You’ve made me drunk!’ She did actually appear to reel inside the swirling cloak. ‘May I kiss you for it, Duffield?’ She didn’t wait to be allowed. ‘If Hero had more taste, she might respect you as an artist though she can’t love you as a man.’

Going downstairs he tried to remember what, if anything, he had in the fridge: while Olivia talked on about—love? art?—he couldn’t be bothered to work out which, according to Olivia, was which.

‘Don’t you agree?’ she called out.

He called back: ‘Yes. Oh,
yes!
’

‘I don’t believe you were listening. What were you thinking about?’ she asked.

‘Cold sausage!’ he remembered in triumph.

Olivia also remembered. ‘Poor little Hero!’ She began to suck her teeth and whimper. ‘Only a woman could understand her behaviour.’

‘Why,’ he asked, ‘did you go to her dressed up as a man?’

Olivia slightly hesitated. ‘I look well in it,’ she said in an honest voice: then she added with a hard dry laugh: ‘And because women cling to their illusions—even after they’ve tried to kill themselves.’

He had found the plateful of sausages. Under their film of fat, the cold cooked sausages were glowing: a milky, opalescent blue. He remembered from Mumbelong a dented baking-tin left out for cats, its dregs of milk transformed by the frost into a skin of bluish ice; human skins turning blue with cold, or gin; old men in particular, their veins, and foreskins from which the former brazen stream had dwindled to an anxious trickle.

‘How repulsive! Revolting!’ Olivia screamed, looking at the plateful of sausages and shuddering into her travesty cloak.

He could only shake his head. He was tucking into the sausages, and in any case he could not have told her about, he could only show her, the bloom on blue. So he thrust the plate at her, and she did actually finger a sausage; after scraping off some of the fat on the edge of the chipped plate, she began to mumble on what might have been a giant lipstick she had made the mistake of buying.

But this wasn’t the reason for her thoughtfulness, which finally she let out: ‘That painting, Hurtle—would you consider selling? I’d treat it with more respect than anybody else, and of course it would go, in the end, with the others, “to the public”.’

Then, suspecting herself of tastelessness, she bit enormously into the sausage, and her face which that evening had shed its van Dongen chic for the gas-lit concavities of a Greco Christ, was further transformed, by strain, into a large, costive, powdered arse.

So they stood: smiling, chewing, swallowing, half-communicating over the empty plate, in the grubby asbestos limbo which had served Miss Gilderthorp as a kitchen.

All the way to Hero Pavloussi’s they remained in that state of half-cocked reality, neither life nor art, which is perhaps the no-man’s land of human failure. Olivia was driving a long, low-slung, bottle-green car, to match her cloak. She had taken off her man’s hat, and her woman’s hair blew at times darkly softly around her head, particularly when they took the corners. The silver
mèche
stood up like horns above her forehead.

All the dark, Welsh named side-streets of the neighbourhood in which he seemed to live, were failed. Speed and the street-lamps left them looking the colour of brooding moss.

His ‘success’ flared up at him only in the main thoroughfare, particularly in the garish windows of fruit-and-vegetable shops. If he had also experienced the daytime wilt, by night as the trams clanged and sang, swinging and lurching, the vegetable senses revived vertiginously.

Olivia was forcing the dark-green car. At an intersection, a confusion of traffic held them up. ‘Oh,
God!
’ she protested, banging her rings on the wheel.

By night he almost believed in invocation.

They were easing past a jacked-up tram. The new blood was fermenting on the warm asphalt. Blood in the street made it impossible to envisage, at least for that moment, a murder, let alone a suicide, in a house.

He and Boo were jerking jolting in the smooth car past the scene of the accident. It was close enough to become their own. They could see the sweat on her forehead below the line of frizzy hair—as the head lolled—in the real situation. Was it what somebody wanted? Or hadn’t wanted enough? but succeeded in bringing off.

As they were pressing on, into a less congealed air, Olivia’s voice started a high flacker above the competing traffic. ‘My mother thought all suicides were immoral. She herself suffered a horribly prolonged old age. Her jewel-case and the deed-box were always within reach. The sheets she died in had been hemmed for her by her mother, to set her up when she married. It’s wonderful how material things used to last. I think it was that, more than anything, which helped the owners believe in God.’

‘They believed in themselves. That’s why,’ he shouted above the sound of speed.

‘The—why? Oh, bugger, I’ve taken the wrong road!’

She began hauling on her mistake, hand over hand, down the choppy side streets, past the moored houses in which middling incomes were snoring and protesting. As for the occupants of the car, sheer intricate activity gave them a status and importance which made God unnecessary. Speed, after reducing your flesh, leaves you on equal terms with the natural forces which have replaced Him. It was exhilarating at least.

Olivia Davenport steered them down the moonlit streets and finally out along the promontory where the Tudor mansion stood. The moon and a still night made the sea look more solid than the land.

‘There! I’ve done my duty!’ she said.

The drive, their conversation, perhaps also their share in the past, had left Olivia with an expression both haggard and childlike.

‘Aren’t you coming in?’ he asked without wishing to encourage a witness of his reunion with Hero.

‘No,’ she gnashed. ‘I’ve said all I have to say to her; and don’t want to spoil things for you—darling.’ Looking along her nose at the dashboard of her car, slightly smiling, she sounded complacent rather than vindictive.

Dew was falling around them: on the enamelled surfaces of car and camellia bushes; on the sheet of sweating zinc which represented the sea. Boo seemed to expect him to kiss her. It was one of the bumping kisses of childhood, if cooler from the cool, metallic-tasting dew.

She drove off, stamping on it.

A long time after he had rung, the thin maid came to open, in a blue flannel dressing-gown, and hair he had only guessed at on previous occasions.

‘I’m sorry to trouble you,’ he said.

She winced at him, and made it obvious she was doing a supreme favour—but might have enjoyed doing it.

He decided to support the fiction of Madame Pavloussi’s departure for Greece. ‘I was afraid you might all have gone by now.’

‘Gone? I go with the house. And if anyone else is going, they haven’t spoke about it.’

So the fiction was supportable.

‘Is she better?’ he asked more tentatively still.

‘Wasn’t ever sick. Not that I know.’

They stood looking at each other a moment before her cartoon face began frowning for the sleep she had been torn out of.

‘She’s up there,’ she said, wincing and frowning and indicating with her head. ‘You’ll see the light on.’ Whatever else might rouse the hackles of her scepticism, she firmly believed in his adultery with the foreign woman.

Left alone in the dark hall, he went up towards Hero’s light.

She was lying stretched out in an attitude which looked studied but probably wasn’t. As sooner or later she would have had to produce her bandaged wrists, there was no reason why she shouldn’t expose them in the beginning; so her arms were arranged along her body, outside the sheet. For the same reason, there was no point in keeping her eyes closed. She had probably closed them instinctively on hearing his approach up the stairs, but decided against defence as he pushed the door wider open: the lids were raised to a degree where interest can still pass as apathy.

Whether she knew it or not, she already had him at a disadvantage. In her moments of ignorance, lust, childishness, or recovering from the hysteria of a half-intended suicide, Hero’s eyes remained noble works of art. They couldn’t be connected with failures of the human mind or body; they were too lustrous, and dark.

Because she could hardly explain the situation away, she used a convalescent tone of voice. ‘I am sorry. I am all the time trying to remember whether I have shut the street-door on leaving your house, Hurtle. It was worried me so much. If I did not close it, thieves could have broken in—to steal—the paintings.’

‘Don’t worry: I’m not yet in the stolen class; and if you hadn’t left the door open, I mightn’t have let in the visitor: I mean your emissary—Olivia.’

‘Did Olivia? I didn’t send her.’ She became more invalid, moving her head against the pillow, her lips paler. ‘Olivia is so devoted she cannot believe her friends might survive without her help.’

Certainly Hero sounded helpless, but the white-bandaged wrists, in collaboration with her terra-cotta skin, reminded him that his delicate acrobat was only temporarily inert. As soon as he went to her the butterflies of tension were fluttering again under his fingers, the worm in him was raising its head. He wondered whether her conscience suffered as little as his on hearing the clash of teeth on teeth as they bit into the same fruit.

When they had finished their tender meal, and she was crying, and wiping her eyes with her hair, and moaning: ‘Oh, God! Oh, God!’ he whispered into her ear: ‘Not when you’ve had your cake.’

Since they were all invoking God tonight, he remembered Effie, a kitchenmaid, in her big pink going-out hat, mopping and crying:
God can strike me dead if I ever do ut again I’d never ever ’uv done ut in the first place if I’d ever known what I was gunner let myself in for so there it’s the truth May Lizzie.
What have you let yourself in for, Effie?
Nothun cheeky boy or not what everyone thinks though Lord you can never be that sure.
So, as Hero cried, presumably on account of her botched attempt at suicide, his head was filled with the old hurdy-gurdy tunes, and crushed pink sateen and a tattered moon, and the mound of crystal-sprinkled rock-cakes none of the girls would have dreamt of touching, out of respect for Effie’s fate; only he dared to finger, to pinch up, to suck the least of the crystals, on the quiet.