Just then the hushed voices of the guests began mounting; there was a pronounced collision of ice-cubes, and all the confusion of announced and important arrival in Mrs Davenport’s off-white drawing-room.
She hurried forward, ululating: ‘Darlings, I’m so relieved! We didn’t realize—that is, we understood Cosma was indisposed.’
A small woman was laughing big. ‘Why should you misunderstand—darling? Cosma is always indisposed. It doesn’t mean he won’t come just because he has a pain in his pinny.’
This echo of an Edwardian nanny cast up on the shores of the Levant started the guests frantically laughing, with the exception of one, at whom the speaker happened to be looking. He was, in fact, too interested to respond.
And immediately she looked away, at her husband, to discover how he had reacted to her frivolous betrayal.
Pavloussis the shipowner was advancing at her heels, an undirected smile guarding his rather fleshy face; his eyelids looked particularly black behind his thick spectacles; his shirt front was studded with black pearls.
From behind the smile he started hoisting himself to the tedious level of communication. ‘It is not I,’ he said, correctly, and coughed, ‘it is our little dog which is sick.’
Because her head was turned in his direction, you couldn’t estimate the degree of his wife’s approval, except that she kept repeating in something like a ventriloquist’s projected voice: ‘Yes, yes! Our little dog. Poor little Flora!’
Her husband continued smiling. He seemed to be holding the smile between himself and the demands of a foreign language; while her attitude suggested she was ready to translate his silences into pronouncements: Cosma Pavloussis, when put to it, would make pronouncements.
Finally she offered her face instead to the assembled guests, and everyone was charmed. It was foreign, but so sweet, several of the ladies were audibly agreed. If they didn’t praise her more highly, it was because they had run through practically the gamut of their vocabulary. Instead they put on their heartiest grins, and might have been preparing to rush in and start fingering the object of their admiration once the formalities were disposed of.
‘Quite a work of art, Duffield. I hope they won’t break her.’ It was Shuard the music critic, whom he knew slightly, and disliked. ‘She’s far too dainty.’
Shuard’s judgement might have done Madame Pavloussi more harm if he didn’t regularly reduce Mozart to ‘daintiness’ in reviewing for the evening press.
The lady of the amethyst pendant and Presbyterian ancestors found the little Greek far too ‘burnt’. What would her skin be like in a few years’ time? A rag, she suggested, moistening her sallow teeth at the prospect.
A mutually appreciative exchange of opinions between Shuard and the Amethyst Pendant gave their neighbour the opportunity to withdraw to the point of isolation he most enjoyed in crowds, and from which he could glut himself on Madame Pavloussi.
She was certainly small: a figurine burnt to an orange-brown, or terra-cotta. What saved her from exquisiteness or the excessively sweet, were the modelling and carriage of her head: the head sat rather oddly on the body, as though by some special act of grace, and she wouldn’t be surprised to have it fall. The eyelids intensified her expression of fatality, and the disbelieving smile with which she rewarded those she found herself amongst.
As she was led, her dress moved with the liquid action of purest, subtlest silk, its infinitesimal bronze flutings very slightly opening on tones of turquoise and verdigris. Again, her miraculous dress was worn with an odd air, not of humility—fatality. It was surprising that, in shaking hands, she appeared to be grasping a tennis racket. Such an incongruous show of strength could have been part of a game she had specially learnt for Anglo-Saxons. Her other, passive, hand she carried mostly palm-upward, which made you wonder if Madame Pavloussi wasn’t in some way deformed; till in a spontaneous gesture she put the hand to her hair, and for the moment was unable to hide an enormous pearl in a nest of diamonds. At once she returned her hand, her arm, to their original cramped position, as though the ring was too heavy, possibly also something she didn’t care for, and she would rather lay down what fate was making her carry.
While Mrs Davenport was showing off her jewel of a friend, the husband was walking up and down on an independent trajectory. Sometimes he paused to look at a painting, or take up an object of virtu, or glance at a human face, without ever really emerging from the legend of his wealth. Those who were forced to pass him lowered their heads and walked softer, for fear of impinging on a cultivated unreality; while his smile of sickly, almost do dering, benevolence was aimed at no one in particular. Though older than his wife he was not yet old, nor even elderly, but seemed already to be rehearsing the role of an old man with a beautiful character.
In brushing against one whose eyes invoked the particular of which the generality is composed, Pavloussis shied away. ‘Wonderful people! Beautiful house! My wife is enjoying herself,’ he pronounced, still smiling, not for his particular examiner, but for a whole abstract cosmos.
Duffield was interested in the little sacs of dark skin at the corners of the shipowner’s eyelids: they provided something ugly, excrescent, in the otherwise excessively bland.
This non-meeting occurred very quickly and, it seemed, irrelevantly. He returned to his increasing grudge against their hostess for not introducing Madame Pavloussi after insisting that they must be forced together. Her friend’s presence had drugged Olivia: she looked haggard, vulgar even, as she stuck her nose in a glass of gin; while Madame Pavloussi nursed her glass with both hands, as though it had been a handleless cup of innocent spring water.
Passing and repassing at the end of the room, his calves aching with tension, he heard a woman remark: ‘But I adore his paintings.’ A second replied: ‘I adore him! He’s always been one of my heart-throbs.’ He should have treated his adorers kindly, but allowed them to peter out in the abashed smiles of schoolgirl crushes.
The major-domo confessed to the hostess in velvety tones that dinner was served.
Mrs Davenport’s voice sounded comparatively raucous: ‘Oh, thank you, Spurgeon; I hope everyone’s as ravenous as I.’
The Amethyst Pendant folded her disapproving lips over her moist, greenish teeth. As a headmistress and an O.B.E. she couldn’t allow herself to approve of any kind of eccentricity.
The hostess’ example released something: what should have been a leisurely and graceful progress to the dining-room became bit of a rout; the burr and bray of male laughter jostled with the thin reeds of girlish giggles; a banker just missed knocking a T’ang horse off its stand; while the guests of honour smiled indulgently, seeming to find nothing, or perhaps everything, unusual.
It was at this point that Olivia Davenport remembered what she had forgotten, or was forced to face an anxiety she had been disguising. Her head held high, as though to keep her hair out of the water, she started an awkward swimming movement against the swell made by her mismanaged guests, dragging her friend after her. Jerked out of her Tanagra graces into a state of uncertainty, Madame Pavloussi’s attitudes became Cycladic; she followed bravely where she was drawn, her shoulders slightly hunched, her bronze dress opening and closing on its depths of turquoise and verdigris. Her arms appeared stumpy from closer, as her legs would be too, he guessed, under the play of liquid silk.
On reaching their objective Olivia Davenport shook the invisible drops off her immaculate coiffure, and announced with awful distinctness, if only for themselves: ‘Hero—this is my great friend Hurtle Duffield. My two dear friends! It’s rather like bringing together the two halves of friendship—into a whole.’ Then, as though she might have said something too ‘clever’ for a social occasion, she explained more practically: ‘I’m giving you Hurtle, Hero, for dinner.’
There was no sign that a plan had been discussed beforehand by the two women. In fact Madame Pavloussi, standing in front of him, continued looking dazed, if not frightened, by the possibility that
she was intended as a sacrifice; while there flickered briefly through his mind an image of himself trussed on a gold plate, threatened by a knife and fork in her small, rather blunt hands.
Olivia was barely allowed to enjoy a sense of achievement: Emily’s creaking shoes were approaching through the shallows. When she had paddled close enough to clutch her mistress by the arm, she advanced her lips, which tonight were powdered as pale as her cheeks, and began a piece of muted recitative:
‘This Italian lady has locked herself in the convenience, dear, and won’t come out to do the prawn cutlets, because she says Ethel was unkind to her, and she couldn’t help bumping the charlotte russe. Now Ethel is wondering what ought to be done, Miss Boo?’
‘Oh God, who am I?’ Mrs Davenport stamped, and frowned black.
Emily appeared shaken to discover that the one who should have known the answer, didn’t.
‘Can’t Spurgeon fetch her out?’
‘Mr Spurgeon washes ’is ’ands of it, dear.’
Olivia remembered to smile at her two favourites before repeating: ‘Oh, God! Nothing I undertake fails to turn into shambles. The simplest little occasion! Come with me, Emily!’
She marched off through her shambles. Objects in jade trembled on their pedestals as she managed her explosive dress. Emily followed, slower, on account of her rheumatism and her status.
‘Shouldn’t we find the others?’ Madame Pavloussi anxiously asked, because the laughter sounded several doors away.
‘Yes,’ he agreed, but casually. ‘There’ll be no prawn cutlets, but an otherwise excellent dinner.’
Madame Pavloussi was already striding on her short legs across empty rooms. ‘I am wondering what will become of my poor husband. He will feel unhappy, left to so many strangers.’
‘I shouldn’t have thought he needed protection.’
‘I suppose not.’ She sighed.
They turned a corner, and the thunder told them they were almost there; Madame Pavloussi appeared less anxious to arrive.
‘Look at this painting!’ she whispered, and nudged him conspiratorially. ‘Is she a girl? Or an octopus?’
‘Probably an octopus.’ He laughed at a good joke.
It was the original version of Rhoda Courtney Olivia had winkled out of him. In other circumstances he might have resented the reaction of this charming, but probably ignorant, woman. Now he forgave, because she herself was a work of art, and he would have liked to fall in love with her.
‘You agree?’ She laughed back; her teeth looked short, and strong, and real.
‘I’d never thought of the octopus. You’re right, though.’ She had given the painting a new life, in which suckers grew from the thin arms, the tones less milky-pink than grey.
If left to himself he would have continued thinking about it; but Madame Pavloussi’s nostrils had taken up a scent.
‘You don’t know the girl?’ she asked.
‘She was my sister.’
‘Oh, I am so, so sorry!’ His companion was gasping, and twisting her enormous pearl.
He was less conscious of her as he flirted with his slowly developing vision: the octopus-Rhoda, sponge attached to one sucker, beside the more or less unalterable bidet on its iron stand.
‘You say she was your sister. Your sister is dead?’
‘I don’t know,’ he had to confess.
Madame Pavloussi’s eyes had begun to water: they were magnificent in their horror—or was it pity? He could not yet have told with any certainty.
‘But you must admit,’ she cried in self-protection, ‘the painter is cruel. Why do painters have to deform everything they see? I do not understand what is modern painting about. Perhaps you will explain to me—one day—I mean, after dinner.’
‘Of course—if there’s time.’ Lucky he hadn’t signed his painting.
She appeared so distraught he would have liked to take her hand, but here they were on the threshold of the dining-room.
The marooned guests were standing around, wondering, though not yet seriously. While waiting, they admired the table. Their first thoughts had naturally been for the place cards, and some of them were still preoccupied with these; through bad eyesight or discretion they had not yet discovered what they were in for.
‘Aren’t the little stands exquisite! She really has exceptional taste,’ one lady was remarking.
Shuard, who was ready to set up as an authority on almost anything, assured her that the little jewelled claws which held the place cards were ‘genuine Faubourg’.
The two late arrivals couldn’t take an interest in the cards as their fate was already known to them.
Madame Pavloussi gestured at her husband in a far corner. He was still wearing the abstracted smile, which might or might not have acknowledged his wife’s sign. It was more likely directed at the whole and nothing of the room, while Monaghan the banker talked on at him. After tempting the shipowner to express his views on the recent rise to power of the German National Socialists, the banker gave up, and switched to yachts. Pavloussis seemed to remain untouched.
‘You see, your husband was in no need of your protection.’
‘No,’ she agreed vaguely.
Either she was disappointed, or else her gaffe over the subject of the painting had made her shy; if it hadn’t been for their hostess’ decree she might have moved away.
The shipowner had an enormous nose, like a ridge of grey pumice, or lava; and brilliantine failed to remove a texture of coral hummocks from his hair. As the banker’s yachts began foundering, Pavloussis spoke through his smile, in a voice unperturbed by its own foreignness or irrelevance.
‘My pressing problem at present is cats. I have four of them. I no longer love my cats, which are selfish and unlovable. I must only find how far I am morally obliged to them. Can you advise me, please, Mr Monragan?’
The banker turned a congested red, and laughed too loud at the foreign joke; while Madame Pavloussi murmured to herself: ‘Yes, yes, the poor cats.’
Although several of the others had joined in the laughter the situation was becoming too strange; on the whole the guests were beginning to look uneasy and unshepherded.
‘It would be far more sensible if everyone sat down.’ The headmistress was coming into her own. ‘Boo has been called away for a little to attend to some domestic matter.’
The company did as told: most of them appeared relieved to have returned temporarily to school.
‘Isn’t it a pretty table?’ continued the headmistress, whose name was Miss Anderson. ‘Boo was always original; but the bird, I remember—the bird belonged to Constance—Mrs Hollingrake.’
Association with an important family and knowledge of its history made Miss Anderson proud. The bird was dutifully admired, except by the banker, who scowled at it: who ever heard of a glass bird, standing amongst a litter of rock, in a dish of water, in the middle of a dining-table!
The headmistress couldn’t resist glancing in a certain direction. ‘I’m sure Mr Duffield must appreciate the arrangement: it’s so artistic.’ Then she burned, all along her downy lower jaw.
No doubt she detested his paintings, and probably this was as close as her uprightness would ever let her come to malice.
But the crystal bird in the centre of the table, to which she would have drawn his attention, if it hadn’t already been drawn, seemed to him one of the happiest surprises Olivia had ever sprung. Perched on a crag of rose-quartz, its wings outspread above the crackled basin of shallow water, in which glimmered slivers of amethyst and a cluster of moss agates, the crystal bird could have been contemplating flight in the direction of Hero Pavloussi seated immediately opposite.
‘Right, Miss Anderson,’ he called back to the headmistress. ‘We can go some of the way together.’
Nervousness, or a wish to interpret subtleties, made them laugh at his flat and fatuous repartee. Miss Anderson looked mollified.
Under cover of their approval he glanced at Madame Pavloussi to see what im
pression Olivia’s conceit had made. He caught what might have been the last refractions of a childlike pleasure in the pretty-coloured stones before she lowered her eyes. She sat rather glumly looking at her own hands, her chin drawn in as though suffering from indigestion, or a surfeit of English.
At that moment Spurgeon threw the door open, and Mrs Davenport returned to her party, as from a recent triumph. A slight glitter in the whites of her eyes, perhaps from a snifter of gin en route to the dining-room, increased her dash and rakish-ness. Sitting down at the table, she destroyed the castle in lace and linen waiting in her place. The rucked-up sleeves of the carnation dress had grown positively businesslike.
‘I’ve discovered tonight that I’m both a locksmith and a plumber.’ Then she added, looking at him across the table: ‘But there won’t be any prawn cutlets.’ Her face was so expressive of radiant fulfilment it must have confirmed for some of those present that the painter was her lover.
He would have liked to watch Hero Pavloussi for her reactions to Olivia’s return, but his right-hand neighbour began to break down the barrier which, till now, he had kept between them.
She worked with skill and confidence. ‘Since we first met, Mr Duffield, in this house, I’ve bought two of your paintings.’
He couldn’t remember the woman and failed to read her name on the card.
‘Which?’ he asked: when his paintings became merchandise he could only practise resignation if he wasn’t stung to ribaldry.
She mentioned an early work—he could just visualize it—and one sold more recently to pay a heavy bill at the tailor’s.
The woman’s appearance gave no clue to a former meeting. She was wearing an elaborate head-dress of rigidly set toffee curls. Her face was square-cut, not exactly coarse: it had been too carefully worked on; the throat thick and rather muscular; her jewels, though unremarkable, represented a solid investment.
‘Who sold you the paintings?’ he asked, because it was his turn.
She mentioned a Syro-Maltese who passed for French, flickering her silver-green eyelids, composing her orange mouth without disguising her satisfaction.
The Vivisector Page 36