The Vivisector (61 page)

Mrs Mortimer lived in a ground-floor flat overlooking a private beach. He saw, to his disgust, he was the first arrival. From Mrs Mortimer’s point of view, it couldn’t have turned out better if she had arranged it that way herself.

‘Fancy, Hurtle,’ she said, though they had spoken for no more than ten minutes at the exhibition, ‘I didn’t imagine for a moment that I’d tempt you—with my boring old party, I mean!’

‘Nothing better to do,’ he mumbled, because he had been caught, and there seemed no alternate answer.

‘Oh dear, you do live up to your reputation!’ Mrs Mortimer was so delighted she came and rubbed her cheek against his.

She was a stocky woman with a thyroid throat. During his life, she had suffered from her husband’s good looks and roving eye. He had also left her hard up, she told her new acquaintance at the exhibition. Perhaps this was why she was now blushing all the way up her goitrous throat: her flat cried her poverty in accents of discreet luxury.

Mrs Mortimer was one of those who collected paintings. ‘Not a single one of yours, darling!’ It made her arch. ‘But that’s understandable: I’m a poor woman.’ By this time she was not so much referring to fact as taking it for granted he had been educated in the right conventions.

‘What do you think of this Pascoe?’ she asked, manoeuvring him past a Modigliani she must have forgotten. ‘I can’t judge him objectively, of course. Nobody who’s fallen into the bastard’s hands should even try to.’

She was not looking at Pascoe’s painting, but at the centre button of Duffield’s shirt, while scratching herself, slowly and thoughtfully, with an index finger, between her breasts. At the exhibition he had suspected Mrs Mortimer of wanting to have an affair with him to confound her handsome, late husband. He was conscious of vibrations now: if they were weaker on this occasion, certainly he felt pretty sexless after the early morning start and those sheets of still directionless drawings.

‘Someone’s arriving,’ Mrs Mortimer said, taking his hand and squeezing it, ‘and I haven’t had time to tell you about them. Don’t you find a dossier is a comfort?’ Was she going to be magnanimous and serve him up to someone else? ‘I do hope you won’t be bored by all these silly people,’ was as much as she could whisper; nor was he able to explain he aspired to be a tabula rasa, not a stud.

Mrs Mortimer’s party was so much the same in different clothes he wondered at what date the archetypal party had been held. The ladies screamed, or cooed, from stylized positions which suggested they were somehow out of joint, eyes straying, anointed eyelids fluttering as they wore the few cultivable topics, either marvellous or ghastly, to further shreds. The men were in general solider, not to say heavier: patches of light were reflected in their well-groomed shoulders and flanks, and you half expected a jingle of brass when their hostess, an adept at flicking the social whip, drove them straining from their last objective to the next.

One of the husbands, a mature grey with a hint of the investor in his wall eye, came up as though he would like to conspire. ‘Painting anything lately, Hurtle?’ He mentioned that his name was ‘Ian’.

What could you reply? Am I breathing? Am I shitting? You mumbled instead: ‘No. Not for the moment. Nothing to mention; ’ before turning your back.

It was difficult to remember why he had come. In his dated clothes, and corroded mask, he had reached a stage where he was at home only with objects; so he began to wander deliberately about the room: a pursuit they were content to leave him at. (It was enough to have him amongst them, to be able to tell afterwards how he had failed to control his language, his wind:
Really rather horrid, my dear, when I’d always understood he was a charmer.
) So he wandered through the congested room. There was a daguerreotype, with the features of Mrs Mortimer herself, of an old lady brutally lined, managing her best dress against a potted palm and painted clouds. On a full-dimensional table nearby stood a bowl of faintly pink, faintly scented, single roses, into which he stuck his nose, clumsily, unashamedly.

‘Hurtle, darling, here is something which may interest!’ Mrs Mortimer came over to announce in a muted blast of gin. ‘There are two young women across there, both attractive, both intelligent, and all of them married. What more could you ask for?’

As she spoke, she was coaxing the palm of his hand with a finger expertly bent; while the two young women on the opposite side of the room, perhaps sensing they were on the market, smiled coldly at their drinks. Mrs Mortimer was not deterred by coldness from any direction: her role of procuress was more important than her unfulfilled sexual desires.

‘Somebody told me Olivia Davenport’s in town,’ said a plain and shiny American girl he had been avoiding.

‘Darling old Boo! Yes. Isn’t she adorable? She’s begun to feel the weather, but I’m expecting her to totter thisaway.’ Mrs Mortimer tossed her mane like a skittish filly.

‘Well now, won’t that be a pleasure—a pleasure renewed! We met last winter in Nassau. She’s the sweetest, loveliest person. Age hardly matters—I mean, you can be as old as
stone
if you’ve got that special
radiance
Mrs Davenport has!’

The American girl had grown that much shinier for the recollecting her experience in Nassau. Her orange canvas, college-style hat played up to the shininess: so dowdy and confident her connections must have been of the best.

He couldn’t wait to see the Little Old Lady the American girl thought she had met; while Mrs Mortimer, always patting her party along, started muttering cynically: ‘Don’t you realize you’re standing beside Hurtle Duffield the famous painter?’

‘Oh,
no!
Not Duffield!’ squealed the American girl. ‘Whoever it was can’t have felt more excited to come all this way and discover Australia! The man on board who gave the talks told us about you, sir—oh, about Dobell, and Drysdale, and I dunno who—but
Duffield!
’ From squealing, she changed her tune and her expression to suit a few drawn-out cello-notes: ‘Mr Duffield, I’d like you to know it’s the most important moment of my life—intellectually, and spiritually.’

He could hear his own breath expiring, feel the flesh shrivelling on his bones, before sticking his nose into the bowl of roses he had more or less appropriated; they had the rare scent of tea roses; all the hairs were distinct, like the hairs on young, golden skin.

It was most opportune that Mrs Davenport should arrive, though with so little thunder her entrance might have gone unnoticed: in fact her whole attitude implied she was only ‘looking in’. Though somewhat blanched, she was not all that altered. Her face, perhaps, had been remodelled in white kid, to which had been added a pair of wattles, now quivering with motion or emotion, as she advanced, still erect, into the room, eyes apparently amazed inside their circlets of blue, steps short and tentative: Olivia could afford to play the timid cassowary.

Mrs Mortimer hurried to rub against her darling Boo. Then, in the hush, she began to trumpet, holding her glass of gin as though a torch to show off her prize: ‘Boo, this is Sharman. You know Sharman. She’s here from Texas.’

‘Oh, yes—Sharman.’ Mrs Davenport’s white-kid cheek twitched into a dimple; she tweaked her rope of legendary pearls; she was wearing a little hat: a humble, ugly, smart hat.

‘And Hurtle Duffield,’ Mrs Mortimer followed up.

Mrs Davenport offered her fingers, but he couldn’t arrive at their natural shape for the gloves she was wearing: of a coarse suède, of a blinding, virgin white; nor did she expend any words on him, though everybody was waiting for them. Instead, she pursed up her blood mouth, and narrowed her eyes, so that all those little milky wrinkles appeared at the corners. Then she lowered her chin, as though she had the wind, and raised it again, after quickly conquering that same wind. She barely whispered: ‘Hurtle—’ before petrifying; and everybody watching the two stone figures knew for certain they had been lovers.

At this point Mrs Mortimer skilfully separated her star guests, and began to fling ‘Boo darling’ round the room. Something clicked into place, and Mrs Davenport remembered her first, her childhood language. She was gargling down amongst her pearls: her teeth showed, and like the pearls, the teeth were real, if tiny. It occurred to him on catching sight of the teeth that Boo Hollingrake still contained the kernels of reality, and that she must be able to admit to it, if only once, since she dared expose her fragile discoloured old-childish teeth.

But there wasn’t an opportunity, and he continued straying amongst the objects in the impoverished Mrs Mortimer’s room. He thought: Never have I gone farther in the wrong direction, when that chipped billy, the lid, did it have a blue circumference, which might be why the chip suggested an act of fortuitous brutality, like a thumbnail hit by a hammer. In his distraction, he always ended up at the bowl of single roses, each with its tuft of slender, golden hairs.

At least nobody else would want to intrude on his peculiar, immoral, not to say frightening, colloquy with a bowl of roses, unless it were somebody equally peculiar and out according to the code of Mrs Mortimer’s set.

‘Duffield? You don’t, or won’t, know me.’

It was—not at once, but by degrees—Shuard the music critic, whom he hadn’t seen for years, and never more than briefly. Shuard’s hair, the most noticeable thing about him, grew in waves of steel wool in which the Gumption was visible; the unctuous pores round his nose were still pricked out in black; his hips and buttocks had perhaps increased in suavity. Otherwise he was a nondescript man who lived by journalism and a sprinkling of knowledge, and dining out: he could tell a dirty story better than most.

‘I’m not accusing you,’ Shuard said. ‘I’ve been on what I call my sabbatical from the
Evening Star.
But have now returned to the fray,’ he added, looking the room over.

Duffield answered in the same vein. ‘Peggy Mortimer has a bargain or two: intelligent, charming and safely married.’ He clamped his jaws: an alliance with Shuard, even against cabbage stalks, was something of a betrayal.

Shuard laughed his brown-gravy laugh. ‘All a bit long in the tooth, I’d say. I spent a delightful winter in Berlin: every night a little girl on either side. Every night two
different
little girls, mind you—only to warm the bed, of course.’

Have to laugh. If you could have shaken Shuard off: but he clung like cobwebs, in grubby festoons; so you began to match grubbiness with grubbiness. ‘One advantage of old age: the hot-water bottles put on flesh, and begin to breathe.’

Shuard laughed so appreciatively he had to use his handkerchief; as soon as he was disengaged he started off on a different, though only a slightly different tack: ‘I can remember—years ago—dining with the old girl over there.’

‘The which?’

‘The Sugar Fairy—the Davenport. Oh, it was a slap-up affair: a Greek tycoon, with a wife. I don’t remember anything about it, except that you took the wife down to the water while the old boy was learning a game of marbles. I’ve sometimes wondered what happened.’

‘Oh?’

He did manage to shed Shuard, by practically rubbing him off on the corner of a table, and there on the other side Olivia Davenport was standing, holding up her throat, in conversation with a Santa Gertrudis bull.

It didn’t prevent her turning at once, and asking most anxiously: ‘Yes, Hurtle?’ An extra white-kid chin appeared: she was obviously frightened, as though she might have to face a topic they had skirted before.

‘Do you know about Hero?’ he asked.

‘About whom?’ She flickered her eyelids: she had made a point of stressing the grammar.

‘Hero Pavloussi.’

‘Oh—Hero! She was so sweet!’ Mrs Davenport visibly dragged up around her the idiom which was safest, the smile which was blandest.

‘Did you know that she died?’ he insisted.

‘Hero
died!
’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘of cancer.’

At first Boo Davenport didn’t appear to understand; then she began crinkling her eyebrows against the tastelessness to which she was being subjected.

‘Of cancer!’ he repeated, or shouted.

She lowered her eyes. ‘I didn’t know. How dreadful!’

At the same moment Mrs Mortimer led forward a young man who was designing for the theatre, and Mrs Davenport drew a deep breath: her smile invited the designer to protect her against further violation.

‘I’ve never known her in better form,’ Peggy Mortimer burbled half into her gin. ‘Isn’t she a very old friend?’ As she waited looking for clues, her mouth remained plastered to the glass, like an active sea-anemone.

He got away. He went out, and down, over the private beach. First there were the trampled succulents, the creeping couch grass, then the sand. There was a bar of blood across the sky, almost parallel with a cramped, grey-skinned sea.

‘Hurtle?’

It was Olivia. She came running out; it looked strange, because of her height, and her reputation, and her now wobbly ankles; besides, she was at the mercy of the rebounding mattress of soft sand. She lumbered on, however, till they both reached where moisture made for firmness.

There she began: ‘Of course I knew. It was the shock, I think—of your dragging me out in public—that forced me to deny it. I knew. I knew! Cosma wrote me a letter with all the more harrowing details of Hero’s life after she left him. He said he held me responsible for most of what had happened—that knowing me and my friends had made her unbalanced.’

‘Did you believe him?’ Because she seemed prepared to.

Olivia could have been counting the ridges in the wet sand. ‘Certainly she loved me.’

‘Certainly?’

‘Oh yes. There was a time when she couldn’t move without me. I wasn’t prepared to be possessed to that extent. I couldn’t breathe.’

‘But you know Hero was my mistress.’

‘I gave her to you—for that purpose—not to kill!’