On arriving home he noted them down on a block he came across on the shelf of the bamboo hatstand. He tore off the leaves, and put them away, almost at once forgetting where: Rhoda in all her aspects was his continued obsession.
He worked most of the remaining night, and began again in the afternoon, drifting from one version to the next. He slashed brutally at one Rhoda Courtney, but got what he wanted: sheet lightning invaded the eyeballs.
Olivia Davenport came to him soon after three, the hour when she must have finished lunch. She came without messengers of any kind, and no sign of a car, not even a humble Austin. Her mouth must have been done in a hurry: one arc of the bow was drawn higher than the other.
He was furious. ‘Why do you want to come here wasting my time?’
‘Didn’t you say nothing is ever wasted?’
As he was unable to contradict she pushed past him into the hall, the obscurity and airlessness of which was pervaded by her scent of flowers. Again on this occasion she was dressed in black, brief and unerring.
She made him feel older, grumbling, mumbling, unsavoury, flat-footed.
Looking at herself in the glass glued into the jungle of Miss Gilderthorp’s bamboo hatstand she said: ‘I know you think I’m brutal by inclination.’
He laughed through the phlegm which had gathered in his chest during the concentration she had destroyed. ‘You wouldn’t know what brutal is—to break in on somebody’s work! You wouldn’t know what work is, beyond composing menus, and rubbing out your armpits.’ He laughed through grosser phlegm than before.
She was arranging her already perfect hair. ‘I mean that girl—’ she said, ‘Muriel Devereux. Madge Devereux, the mother, is Mummy’s second cousin.’
For a moment Boo Hollingrake looked as though she had forgotten why she had come. Her nostrils narrowed in judgement on the smells of the house. Then she remembered.
She took his hands, and began working on them as though they were dough, while insisting: ‘Let me be with you! Show me the paintings! Let me look at Rhoda!’
In her anxiety her splendid teeth had become those of a little girl, with minute bubbles between them, while he was older, surlier, frowsy in his work-clothes. His crutch was probably smelling of piss; but he wouldn’t worry; and she would pretend not to be aware.
They were going slowly up.
He had been working in the back room, where he had slept the night before. The mattress-ticking was exposed by a ruck of grey blanket he had pushed back on waking. It was several weeks since he had stuffed the last of the sheets into the copper in the shed at the back. (Must remember to boil the sheets.)
Olivia stood at first too obviously respectful, then began prowling round with what sounded like insolent familiarity; but any attitude she adopted would have been distasteful to him. He must see that she remained behind his back.
In this way he kept his world reasonably well divided, as Olivia Davenport kept hers divided, perpetually, and expertly. He worked, at first jumpily, then with a sombre, bitter-tasting resignation through which he saw what he wanted to achieve but small chance of getting there, finally with a voluptuous directness in which his brush could do no wrong: it was continually turning blind corners to arrive at a fresh aspect of truth.
He even forgave Boo, who was so quiet he began to wonder whether she might be up to something. According to the glass, she was lying on the unmade bed, only vaguely looking at the paintings she had asked to see, perhaps already sated with them. As he continued gently stroking paint to life under the eyes of this voyeuse, he and Olivia could have reached one of the peaks of their relationship.
The conceit amused him, though not as much as catching sight of Mrs Davenport’s reflection reaching up through its abandon to pick its nose with one long crimson fingernail.
Presently she said, in a smooth, convinced voice: ‘You’re losing her. You’re giving her something Rhoda never had.’
‘What?’ The shock made him tremble; he threw away the brush.
He had been working on the last figurative and probably final version of the ‘Pythoness at Tripod’.
‘Perhaps it isn’t—was never intended to be Rhoda,’ he lied.
‘That’s how it began,’ she answered drowsily, ‘but became too hysterical in feeling.’
He could have been struck by lightning: he was, in fact, still involved with the incident of the night before.
‘Well, we know Rhoda was hysterical,’ Olivia went on. ‘But she was always conscious of the reasons for hysteria. That was her great virtue—and why you hated her. She was never a human cow driven by something she couldn’t see or understand.’
Olivia opened her eyes, and dared him to contradict.
‘What do you mean—hysterical—a human cow?’ Of course he understood, but that didn’t prevent him trying to laugh it off; he resented her intuition.
‘You know perfectly well—’ she wouldn’t leave it alone—‘that poor dumb lump of a girl: Muriel Devereux. You’re bringing the two of them together—Rhoda and Muriel—to suit your own purposes. Is it honest?’
‘Only the painting can answer that—when it’s finished.’
He could have strangled Olivia. As he approached her he could have shouted: I am what matters; without me the painting couldn’t happen, and you and your kind would have that much less to babble about.
Instead he said humbly: ‘You’re right, Boo; but the painter’s only human after all, and uses human means to disguise his shortcomings.’
Yes, he could have killed her, but bent over her and touched her hair with this rather admirable humility he had found.
Suddenly she drew down his face, and thrust her tongue into his mouth; when she wasn’t lashing at his tongue with hers, she was gouging his eyes with her cheekbones.
‘I could show you,’ she kept gasping, ‘a trick or two.’
A bracelet of heavy gold-and-cornelian seals kept bludgeoning, and ringing in, his left ear. It looked as though she meant to stun him into subjection: till he put his hand.
Then it was she was began to tremble. ‘Oh, no! No!’ She arched her back, sawing against the pillow, trying to get round the knee which was pinning her.
‘Lie still!’ he was begging her at one stage, because he might, quite sincerely, have taught her something she didn’t know about.
But Olivia Davenport seemed determined to demonstrate that rape is not inevitable.
When she was mistress of the situation, they lay looking at each other from the slipless pillow, and Olivia started explaining, using her most candidly grey-eyed expression: ‘Actually—I came here this afternoon for a reason you wouldn’t guess.’ She hesitated, then announced with a touch of what was coyness for her, though in the key to which Olivia Davenport climbed for social commerce: ‘I’ve had a little windfall.’ After another hesitation, she asked: ‘Hurtle, I wonder whether it would make you happy if I bought you a nice car?’
He couldn’t believe in her innocence; he sat up shouting: ‘With gold spittoons? And a gold pisspot for emergencies?’
She said meekly, but again unconvincingly: ‘I was only thinking of your happiness.’
While he crawled about the floor searching for the brush—his special one—which he had so rashly thrown down, she was arranging her hair in front of the original and most naturalistic version of Rhoda Courtney. Although he couldn’t have admitted it, he was proud of the painting: it was so translucent.
‘We must find Rhoda,’ Boo had decided dreamily. ‘I feel she’d do both of us good.’
On his hands and knees amongst the fluff and splinters as he searched for the evasive brush he couldn’t make sense of any such sentiments.
‘How—do us good? Rhoda was never a saint.’
‘She’s your sister.’
‘Not even that. She’s a malicious hunchback, if we have to admit the truth.’
‘We both loved her.’
‘Oh, balls!’
Boo Hollingrake didn’t hear, but Olivia D
avenport launched herself in the higher key she favoured for social intercourse: ‘I must produce my friends the Pavloussis. I shall give a formal party—a dinner—so that the gall-bladder can’t escape: provided he accepts in the first place; but she’ll make him.’ Olivia laughed for her strategy. ‘Cosma, poor darling, is a bit of a bore. I adore him. And Hero is doing him an honour by being his wife. I love her.’
‘Who?’
‘Hero. They pronounce it differently.’
He had found his brush. ‘Why do I have to meet these Greeks?’
‘Because I’d like to think I’ve contributed something, if not to your happiness, to your work.’
After that he let her out. They seemed agreed nothing further could be accomplished for the moment.
It was some time before Mrs Davenport was able to compose her dinner party, because the Pavloussis were in Tahiti, and at one point it looked as though they might return to Athens from there, through Panama. Pavloussis was not only hypochondriac, he was so enormously rich he could afford to change his mind without warning and for no very convincing reason: except that now he had more or less concluded his business in Australia; his representatives could dispose of the rented house and their two cars, and arrange for the dog, cats, and aviaries to follow them to Greece. (All these animal and bird possessions, together with a little part-aboriginal girl, had been acquired by the Pavloussis since their arrival in Sydney.)
Mrs Davenport sent Duffield written messages every other day to keep him in touch with the Pavloussis situation. The notes were delivered by the chauffeur in one or other of the Davenport limousines, together with jars of marrons glacés, tins of grouse, and more appropriately, Hymettus honey. Often he didn’t read the letters; but it would have been foolish to waste the food. Particularly he enjoyed the honey: in one tin there was the corpse of an imprisoned bee, which he ate as an experiment, but forgot to notice whether the bee itself tasted any different from the honey which had both nourished and killed; he was too engrossed in a drawing he was making, in which twin eyeballs opened into avenues of experience.
He did read Olivia’s crucial note, because he was forced to make use of it; he had run out of paper in the dunny at the back.
. . . if you write down 28th April, Hurtle: the Pavloussis will dine with me that night, and are already looking forward to their meeting with you.
Cosma has been soi-disant ill, on a diet of toast and Vichy at Papeete. Rather than attempt the long journey through the Canal, he will return to Sydney to consult a Jewish doctor who knows his peculiarities. (Cosma insists that doctors must have a dash of Jewish.) I do hope you will like Cosma. He is, I must admit, a funny old koala with black eyelids, which must have grown blacker from Vichy, and hypochondria, and toast.
I think it is my darling Hero who has forced him to listen to reason. I long to see her. She has fallen in love with Australia. However, she too has her problems: her Maltese dog is sick; then there is this little aborigine—Soso they call her, though her name is Alice, whom Cosma insisted on more or less adopting for human reasons. You will adore Hero.
I have not yet decided whom to ask on the night: I want it to be intimate and sympathique. I want us to remember it.
I have sold the Léger, unashamedly, to somebody who doesn’t know it’s a bad one. Why not, if he’s happy? Really that Léger was the great mistake of my life; that is what comes of relying on agents and dealers instead of giving the matter the benefit of one’s own judgement.
Dearest Hurtle, you should pat me on the head for not disturbing you at your work.
In haste,
I love you!
boo
Shall engage the Italian woman for prawn cutlets 28th as you so adore the ones she does.
When he had read the letter, he wiped himself with it, not from malice, but because there was no other way out.
The dunny at the back, though pretty thoroughly trussed with bignonia, enticed the morning sun through its open door. In this shrine to light it pleased him to sit and discover fresh forms amongst the flaking whitewash, to externalize his thoughts in pencilled images, some of these as blatant as a deliberate fart, some so tentative and personal he wouldn’t have trusted them to other eyes. Once he had recorded:
God the Vivisector
God the Artist
God
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 pre
pared. 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.
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