The Vivisector

by WHITE, PATRICK

  ‘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—everybody!’ 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 noi
ses 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.

  ‘I don’t know. She went away with Maman,’ he stammered, ‘after the remarriage. During the war I lost touch. She isn’t my sister, you know,’ he offered as an unconvincing excuse.

  In any case, Olivia must have known that. She had sensed the larrikin in him after the rout of girls had stampeded through the hydrangeas in the lower garden at Sunningdale.

  Now, standing at the top of the stairs, she said with a sincerity he couldn’t doubt—in fact she barely avoided turning it into a whimper: ‘My poor darling monkey—Rhoda!’ Then she led him into what became her bedroom.

  He couldn’t at first look at anything but his own paintings: they were too crude, disproportionate: and those clotted, painful textures. He kept spinning on his heels, as though to avoid renewing acquaintance, except superficially. But he couldn’t have avoided. They were hanging on every wall: his imperfections and his agonies. He went up very close to his ‘Marriage of Light’; in that way, involved with the technique, he was less conscious of the body of an actual woman fragmented in the cause of art. Not Nance Lightfoot lying broken on a rocky ledge. That was another picture of course, unpainted, and in every way too black: black dress, wounds stitched with the jet of flies, already the long caravans of ants. Not least, his own black horror kneeling beside his murder. By comparison, the ‘Marriage of Light’ was a declaration of love, and if he concentrated on the more objective aspects, he could throw modesty away and congratulate himself, on having achieved his intention as a whole, and for the brilliant sensuousness of many details.

  But while gyrating drunkenly, breathing colour through his strained nostrils, brazenly putting out his hand to stroke the paint, the origins of his present joy kept blowing back at him in black gusts. Even the most abrasive of his rock series, the best of which Mrs Davenport had taken pains to collect, resolved themselves in his mind’s eye into a configuration of large, soft, passive breasts.

  ‘Not the sort of thing to hang in a bedroom,’ he grumbled in self-defence.

  ‘Which?’

  ‘All these paintings of rocks. I did them as a kind of endurance test.’ She wouldn’t have the eye to see through his dishonesty.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I, too, pass the test?’ she asked very coldly.

  Perhaps she had passed it. So much obsessed by his own paintings, by the love, disgust, and at times fear, which they roused in him, he had hardly noticed the bedroom. Apart from the paintings there was very little in it: an unexpectedly virginal dressing-table, and a bed narrow enough to appear ostentatious.

  ‘In any case,’ she said, ‘I find the paintings far less cerebral than you want to suggest; and as I’m the one who owns them I see them as I like to see them. Look at these’—she touched the sleeping-animal rocks which had upset a critic’s sensibility when they were first exhibited—‘actually sentimental. I almost said “feminine”,’ she added, ‘but perhaps it wouldn’t convey what I mean. On the whole I find women less feminine than they’re supposed to be, and certainly more realistic than men.’

  Her grey eyes were picking holes in him, though her breasts, pointed at him through the white silk, accused him less than he would have expected, far less, in fact, than Nance’s big clanging doorbells: those had accused him most of the time.

  Suddenly the outer Mrs Davenport seemed to soften, as though she had become engrossed in a private vision. ‘This is the painting which appeals to me, I sometimes think, more than any I own.’

  She liked to stress ownership: or she chose her words carelessly: or they interpreted meanings differently. In any case she had dismissed him as she advanced on her ‘Marriage of Light’.

  She was mouthing: ‘. . . all that I understand as beauty . . .’

  If she had known poor bloody Nance.

  ‘... in the morning when they open the curtains—that’s its best moment.’

  In her conventional room.

  ‘. . . after they’ve left me I lie looking at it. At my “Marriage of Light”.’

  In that narrow bed: even now grinding her neck against the pillow.

  She was exposing herself completely. Here was another one, he saw, offering her throat to be cut, but by a more tortuous, a more jagged knife. Well, he wouldn’t accept the invitation to a second murder.

  Rising from her vision, Mrs Davenport turned to him, smiling a smile of deliberate sweetness. ‘I wonder whether I don’t understand your paintings better than you do yourself.’

  If he wasn’t visibly rocking on his heels, she must have smelt his rage, but pretended she hadn’t; the social graces were so well developed in her.

  ‘Actually, Hurtle—I’m going to call you “Hurtle”—I sometimes feel artists are so preoccupied with technical problems they lose sight of what they’re trying to achieve. That’s why so many paintings, poems, remain technical exercises. Only the great artist,’ she was observing him closely, ‘senses where he is going, though he may not understand.’

  She was so clearly convinced, he felt confused in his reactions to what she had been expounding. She had turned him into a clumsy plumber: or Pa Duffield’s boy.

  ‘I’d like to discuss that with you,’ he collected himself enough
to say, from inside his imitation of a Bond Street suit, ‘because I think you may be right.’

  But Mrs Davenport had finished dispensing her patronage. She was reminded by the chiming of a little crystal clock, perfect also in its way.

  She said: ‘I’m sorry. I must turn you out,’ still smiling with an exquisite clarity and reasonableness.

  For the moment there was no point at which he might pierce her composure. She was too well encased in the shining armour of the fashionable-rich. The most he could do was cultivate his own ungraciousness while remaining in her power, for she had got possession of that only important part of him: his paintings.

  As he began lumbering unwillingly away from them, he forced out what he intended as an accusation, but which could have sounded like a reproach: ‘One of the eternal dinner parties! I can imagine the sort of thing: barristers, stockbrokers, perhaps a scoured grazier or two—and the successful wives!’

  She gave what no doubt her satellites would have considered a ‘delicious chuckle’, pressed a bell, and came and linked her arm with his.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ she told him, ‘I’m planning to eat a poached egg—off a tray—in bed. I’ve had a rather trying afternoon. ’

  Walking towards the stairs they shared the intimacy of her revelation, and he allowed himself to enjoy not only her poached egg, but the casual motion of their conspiring bodies.

  ‘May I pay you a visit? May I telephone you?’ she asked when they had reached the half-landing and were standing underneath the Courtneys’ Boudin.

  ‘There isn’t a telephone.’ He couldn’t help feeling proud of his wisdom.

  She didn’t appear to notice it, however. She answered with the same grey-eyed seriousness which was one of the more attractive aspects of her strength: ‘There are other ways of getting in touch.’

  He was looking into her cleavage. The scent of that elaborate cleanliness on which she had endless leisure and money to spend might have turned him into frustrated sculpture if the parlourmaid hadn’t been stationed at the foot of the stairs. He realized how expertly his departure had been organized.