The Vivisector

by WHITE, PATRICK

  ‘But they’re not innocent. Nobody is—not even a baby.’ To take her revenge, and make everything as clear as crystal, Olivia let fall her words in an accent not unlike Hero’s own. ‘And they’re under no ordinary attack. Can’t you see? The moon is shitting on them!’

  If Hero understood the word, she didn’t show it; perhaps it was one she hadn’t learnt.

  ‘Like an enormous seagull!’ Olivia shrieked.

  Hero wavered somewhat in her interrogation. ‘And this figure? Why is he a grocer?’ she asked.

  Again it was Olivia who answered. ‘He was a grocer in fact. I can remember his name was Cutbush. Even the best painters owe something to reality.’

  ‘That’s right. I met the bloke one evening on this bench. He had something rotten about him, but only slightly, humanly rotten in the light of the Divine Destroyer. I mean the grocer’s attempts at evil are childlike beside the waves of enlightened evil proliferating from above; and he usually ends by destroying himself.’ He was unwilling to go any farther.

  But Olivia was determined to add a last humiliating touch. ‘Hurtle sees him, I think, as a damned soul in the body of a solitary masturbator.’ Her crimson nail accused the trajectory of milky sperm dribbled across the canvas.

  Now that she had perverted herself, and possibly someone else, she was ready to return to normal. She took hold of the points of her elbows. She looked excruciated, and peculiarly solitary.

  Hero, on the other hand, appeared to have gained in stature; she had lost less dignity than any of them; presently she raised her head and said: ‘This painting may be everything that is claimed for it. But I recognize something of what I have experienced—something of what I am.’ She held her head higher. ‘I would like to buy it, Mr Duffield, if you will accept me as its owner.’

  She could only be atoning for her gaffe over the ‘Pythoness’; but whatever the source of her radiance, he was dazzled by it.

  Regardless of Olivia Davenport, he said: ‘I’d like you to take the thing, forgetting about money for once.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ She showed her blunt little teeth in a smile. ‘Cosmas would never accept. He is too respectful of business obligations. ’

  Olivia too. She had undertaken to bring about a transaction. However different in its kind, and painful the emotional approach, she seemed appeased by what promised to be a round conclusion.

  Hero insisted. ‘Please, sir. You must tell me your figure.’

  What the hell, then: hadn’t his value increased since Mumma and Pa sold him in the beginning? He named a pretty steep sum.

  At mention of real money, Olivia recovered her delicacy: she began going slowly down; the sound of her feet on the uncarpeted stairs, and of her shoulders thumping the plaster of the narrow stairway as she swayed from side to side, made the silences in between stream out far more audibly.

  Hero sat scribbling a cheque with a casualness he had never been able to master, and a fountain pen of a kind only to be found in rich women’s crocodile handbags. With still greater casualness she tossed the cheque on to the littered chest, as though she felt they had both been contaminated enough by such a sordid contract. His offering the painting in the first place as a gift was evidently a feeble, if spontaneous burst of idealism. Or had Olivia told her he was the product of a dirty deal between Cox Street and Sunningdale? And had Hero forgotten the circumstances in which she had taken up the offer of her hairy millionaire?

  Still in business, he asked where he should send the painting; she replied without second thought: ‘Surely you will bring it? My husband will like to see you. He is so busy. But I will let you know.’

  She was so practically, so earnestly, devoted to her man of affairs, it was pretty certain the event Olivia had been so anxious, then so unwilling, to procure, would not take place.

  ‘Is that agreed?’ Hero asked; then changing her tone, she said: ‘We must have exhausted your patience.’ And again, her voice blurring with emotion: ‘The Divine Destroyer—is that what you truly believe?’ She took his hand, and for a brief moment seemed to be looking in it for an explanation of some division in herself. ‘No, you needn’t tell me,’ she hastened. ‘It is true. There is that side as well. I know it.’

  At once she turned her odd behaviour into conventional thanks: she had taken his hand for no other reason than to shake it, which she did with candour, grinning at him with the shy pleasure of a little girl.

  ‘Thank you—Hurtle—so very much.’

  The burnt and brooding terra-cotta had gone from her cheeks: they glowed with the suffusion of rose: he would have expected the juice to run out if he had bitten into them.

  ‘Time’s up!’ Olivia called from below in a stop-watch voice. ‘The car, Hero!’

  Nothing of what had taken place prevented their glances from shuttling in and out of each other in the room above; there was no need for answers where vibrations existed.

  To avoid giving way to these, he had to betray a third person: ‘Olivia is the victim of her chauffeur. We’d better go down.’

  Madame Pavloussi laughed her scented laugh: it was the scent of cloves, or pinks. ‘Not the chauffeur,’ she said, negotiating the stairs. ‘Only herself dominates Olivia.’

  Mrs Davenport stood watching her friends as they came downstairs.

  Madame Pavloussi remarked in her accent of languid cloves: ‘We have been discussing you, darling. I have said only now you are what is known as Pure Will.’

  Olivia Davenport looked at Duffield, giving him a slow, shuttered stare, before exploding into a rackety laughter. ‘Naturally I respect time. Don’t you? Where should we be? Where would Hurtle be?’ She composed her lips in a private smile intended for him; it implied: I shall write you a letter and invite you to discuss in detail everything that has happened.

  ‘Oh, I agree,’ Madame Pavloussi said with exaggerated conviction. ‘You are so right.’ Now that she had returned to earth she seemed determined to sound flat. ‘Where should we be? There is this mercantile thing this afternoon to which Cosmas has asked me to come. Wives will be worn!’

  ‘Oh, but darling, how perfectly ghastly! And you can’t go like that—in brown. Wouldn’t it be more sympathique—Hero—if you came home with me—and rested?’

  ‘I am not tired,’ Madame Pavloussi assured her.

  They were fitting themselves into the car as the chauffeur stood holding the door. Obstacles imposed on them by their formal lives and rubber disguises made them crawl and wriggle.

  As they were easing the rubber and the expressions on their faces, he realized the train of events hadn’t allowed him to show them the Octopus-Oracle, his main obsession since Hero Pavloussi had sown it in him the night of the party. Now he was glad he hadn’t exposed Rhoda’s gelatinous body to their gibbered judgements: Olivia inspired by her passionate love for someone she only imagined she had known; Hero ready to lament by heart deformity and the lost little sister, if she didn’t turn her back on a reminder of her gaffe. Rhoda was subtler than either of them could have grasped. If he hadn’t been able to love Rhoda, he couldn’t love his own parti-coloured soul, which at best he took for granted; at worst, it frightened him.

  While the two women were driven away, showering recognition on him each with royal flutterings of a hand, he wasn’t certain, but fancied he could see Olivia holding Hero’s other hand.

  He waved. He couldn’t care. He was still too obsessed by the grey suckers of the Octopus.

  He received two letters on almost identical paper by the same afternoon delivery.

  Dear Hurtle,

  Although I have in my head a letter explaining my behaviour the day of our visit, I hesitate to write it down for fear that my argument will not convince you.

  Because, for certain reasons, I always fail in love, I was hoping to experience a kind of voluptuous fulfilment through those I love, but suddenly felt in myself the old excruciating disgust, as though I were helping destroy something which might never be recovered, by letting the enemy into
the last stronghold of purity.

  If I appear to have behaved deceitfully in the beginning towards Cosma Pavloussis in spite of my affection for him, it is because most men have minds and interests which prevent them understanding their wives’ actual needs, whether sensual or psychic. I still believe this, and with anyone but Hero might have been prepared to finish the game. Now it is you who are the loser, Hurtle. I am not—I have to admit if I am honest—because I shall still enjoy in Hero the delicacy which at the last moment I resisted handing over, and which only another woman is capable of appreciating.

  Affectionately yours,

  OLIVIA D.

  ‘Delicacy’ did not prevent him letting out the fart he had been preparing. He began to crumble Olivia D.’s literary letter, but the stiff, expensive paper resisted.

  The letter from Hero Pavloussi, which he expected to be even more stylistic, wasn’t at all: it came straight to the point.

  Dear Mr Duffield,

  I have discussed the matter with my husband, who will be delighted to receive you and the painting on Friday 26th of this month at 11 a.m., if a morning call doesn’t too much inconvenience you. It is only difficult in the case of my husband to arrange another appointment because he is always too busy.

  I will explain to you how to find the house. You will take the main road till past the convent, after which you will turn left in a kind of loop. Shortly on, there is an afterthought from this loop, aimed directly towards the sea. Do not miss it. The house is a medium Sydney house in the Tudor style. There are tamarisks at the gate, and inside, a bed in the shape of a starfish planted with what I think the gardener has called violas (blue-and-yellow).

  Although we are leaving probably fairly precipitately for Greece, my husband and I are anxious to start the experience of living with the painting, rather than crate it up with everything else and only see it when we arrive.

  We look forward, both of us.

  Sincerely

  hero PAVLOUSSI

  If you should miss the turn, we rent the house from a Mrs Cargill, whose name is known.

  He ordered a van to take him with the painting: when a second letter forced a change of plan.

  My dear Mr Duffield,

  You will forgive us I hope, but my husband asks for a meeting same time only the day following the one we agreed.

  So sorry!

  Yours in haste

  H. PAVLOUSSI

  On the agreed morning the van put him down with his veiled painting at the door of what might have been described as a medium house, though in ‘Sydney-prosperous’ rather than the Tudor style. The tamarisk canes were still naked for winter, and the violas (blue-and-yellow) had been removed from the starfish bed since Madame Pavloussi wrote her instructions; the bed itself, not yet replanted, was built up high with rich-looking soil from somewhere else. He might have felt depressed by these signs of impermanence if the native sea hadn’t been sparkling and prancing round the promontory on which the amorphous house was pitched.

  After the van had gone, while he was standing juggling with his awkward painting, trying to control the wrapping the wind was tearing at, a man who looked like a gardener came round the side of the house carrying a heavily loaded sack. The man crossed the gravel, making for the part of the garden where the lawn sloped down towards the water. As he walked, the sack became convulsed by a struggle inside it. The sinews tautened in the gardener’s neck. He looked a bilious yellow under his weather-beaten skin.

  ‘It’s a pretty crook go when they ask yer to drown a bagful of flamun cats!’ he spat at the stranger.

  In his state of controlled agitation the man didn’t wait for an answer, but crunched across the last of the gravel and reached the more soothing stretch of lawn.

  ‘Wait on, Mr South!’ a child called, before her dark legs slid down, then the seat of her pants, and her inverted dress, out of the tree. ‘I wanter watch an’ see what happens.’

  When her dress had subsided it showed her to be a little part-aboriginal girl.

  ‘Not on your life!’ the gardener shouted back. ‘An’ you’re bloody lucky you’re not in the bag along with the cats.’

  The girl might have started sulking if she hadn’t had the stranger to look forward to; now that she could see him properly she began to eye and sidle while pretending not to.

  ‘Why are they drowning the cats?’ he asked.

  ‘Because everyone’s goin’ away.’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit sudden?’ In spite of the warning in the letter, he hadn’t been prepared for such a ruthless departure; his discovery left him feeling breathless, purposeless, stunned, bracing the wind-raked canvas against his thigh.

  The child didn’t answer, but took a bull’s-eye out of her cheek and began to examine the run stripes.

  ‘You’re Soso, are you?’ he asked. ‘The adopted daughter.’

  She looked at him in shocked surprise, if not actual animosity. ‘I’m Alice,’ she said rather rudely; then thinking it over, she began to dimple and simper. ‘Yes. They call me Soso.’

  ‘Will you enjoy going to Europe with your parents?’ he asked like the kind of visitor he had most despised when a child; still under the influence of recent developments he was only capable of imitating others.

  The girl shook her head. ‘I’m not goin’ anywhere but La Perouse. ’

  It was too involved for him to continue its unravelling. Besides, he had to deliver what had been reduced to a parcel of merchandise. He realized his hands were trembling on the string.

  ‘Where is your mother?’ he asked.

  ‘Why at La Per—’ But again Soso took over; her burnished skin lent an additional silky slyness to her smiles as she minced her words: ‘She’s havin’ a read—in her little salong—waitin’ for Mr Duffield the painter.’

  To be treated so objectively seemed only natural in such an unlikely situation.

  ‘I’ll take you to her,’ Soso announced importantly, opening the front door.

  At the same time, from inside the house a maid advanced on them, her hands outspread as though to ward them off. ‘You know you was to stay outside in the sun because of what happened with your hair,’ she warned the child.

  ‘All right, all right, bossy old cow!’ Soso told the maid what she could go and do to herself.

  In the circumstances the visitor was ignored; the maid, growing stringier than before, gasped and hissed back: ‘You’ll catch it, my girl, if Madam hears words! You’re not out at the Reserve, you know.’

  The child turned and said: ‘Come with me, please, Mr Duffield,’ in the voice of a composed, educated woman.

  She marched him through the house and into a small morning-room in which Madame Pavloussi was seated upright, reading, or at least holding, a leather-bound book. He must have been expected, but his suddenly appearing, and in the child’s company, gave the mistress of the house a shock: her face opened too quickly, and she almost mismanaged her stage book.

  ‘Oh, dear! It is kind—darling—to bring—but why did Gertrude not announce?’

  Her formal duty done, Soso marched across the room, and out.

  Though there was no practical reason why the caller should have been announced, Madame Pavloussi seemed put out by the fact that a convention hadn’t been observed. The smile kept fluttering on her mouth, and as on a previous occasion, her cheeks lost their look of sculpture: he half expected the scent of warm apples.

  She said in an uncertain voice: ‘It is not possible, in these days of upheaval, to give attention to every detail—particularly with a rented maid.’

  ‘Why “upheaval”?’ he asked as gently as he could; her collapsed English seemed to call for it.

  She was examining him more openly than he had felt before. On their previous meetings her eyes had appeared concentrated on, almost glazed by, some conflict of her inner life. Now her attention was directed outwards, or was struggling out, along with her pretty, fluttering smile.

  ‘My husband,’ she started to apolo
gize, ‘must return to Greece by flying boat yesterday night. I will leave as soon as the arrangements are made to dispose of our belongings in Sydney. There are the cars. There is the lease of this house.’ She drew her eyebrows together. ‘Then we also have our obligations to animals and humans,’ she added with a moist pathos.

  He remembered the sackful of cats, and she lowered her eyes, perhaps on catching a reflection in his.

  ‘My husband is so upset not to have been able to receive you with the painting.’

  The painting had been left in the hall, but it did not occur to her to ask about it: she was too upset by her husband’s being upset. Slight emotional upheaval, the slight melancholy of temporary separation, suited her best, he saw. She was on too small a scale to cope with passion or disgust. On a previous occasion, too much fire had shown up her features as ugly, and her limbs too stumpy for her body. Now, comparatively passive, she was almost perfect.

  ‘Poor Cosmas! He talked about this painting at the last instant, before boarding the flying boat. He asked me to give you his own personal apologies.’ She handed her caller a letter.

  The envelope had not been sealed: its contents were flowery and repetitive; the shipowner finally commended his wife: ‘. . . in whose taste and judgement I have every faith.’

  You couldn’t help wondering whether Hero Pavloussi had read the letter her husband left unsealed: nothing more natural, except there was the law that nice people must behave unnaturally.

  ‘Well, there it is!’ She became automatically brisk. ‘Will you take a coffee, Mr Duffield? Or should I offer you a drink? I am hardly acquainted with your habits.’ Her smile was bright and brittle to match.

  ‘You needn’t worry.’ He hoped he said it pleasantly. ‘I only came to deliver the painting, and to talk to your husband about it—if that was what he wanted.’ By now he was sick of the thought of his own painting.