‘One thing,’ she said vaguely, ‘you must tell me where I can get it packed.’
She was moved on an erratic wave of agitation, caused no doubt by a sense of the upheaval to which she had referred. The room was an intimate one, and might have appeared sympathetic if it hadn’t been for the actual owner’s department-store state. In it all, there were a few leather-bound books, of the same tooling as the one Hero had been pretending to read. (He realized she was coming into focus, physically at least, and that he was thinking of her again as ‘Hero’.) The book was printed in Greek, and again he was reminded of the mental and moral labyrinths which might prevent them ever meeting.
‘There is so much,’ she protested, taking a cigarette from a box she couldn’t have rented. ‘There is the little girl, for instance, whom you met—Alice—or Soso, Cosmas likes to call her.’
She lit the cigarette with an enormous lighter, and though he had never seen her smoke, she showed that she was technically adept.
‘Oh yes,’ he returned to one of the points at which she seemed lost, ‘the adopted daughter.’
‘What? Adopted?’ She blew two streams of smoke most professionally out of her nostrils. ‘That was an idea. Cosmas is always full of ideas: he has his moral responsibilities; then he forgets.’ She laughed affectionately, afterwards drawing on her cigarette with an unexpected hungriness. ‘Oh yes, we intended to adopt. But I couldn’t feel it was practical. The mother is an aboriginal woman from—this reserve—wherever it is. She was allowed to come here recently to visit her child, and the little girl was left with what I think you would call “nits”.’ Hero Pavloussi was so comically distressed. ‘She was infested!’
Her cheeks grew hollow from drawing on her cigarette.
‘Fortunately our laundress . . .’
He felt sick with apprehension for his innermost core, for one of his most precious secrets, and for Alice-Soso’s fate, which to some extent matched his own.
‘I adore our laundress,’ Madame Pavloussi said, ‘a charming young Irishwoman called Bridget O’Something.’ Again she laughed for the comicality of it.
The possibility of his enjoying an innocent relationship with Hero was slipping from him as miserably as the miscarried child. At least he now understood about this from having personally experienced it: he felt wet about the legs.
‘Bridget knew,’ Madame Pavloussi brightly explained, ‘that you rub the hair with—kerosene? Oh dear, the smell was appalling! ’ She wrinkled up her smoke-infested nostrils before exhaling. ‘I can tell you!’ she breathed. ‘And poor Cosmas is so easily disillusioned. I think it was this finally which decided him not to adopt.’
‘Alice won’t go with you to Greece?’
‘Oh, no! No question of it. It would be impossible.’ She sighed. ‘She will go back to her mother—at this reserve—at wherever it is. Of course Cosmas will give money,’ she added, ‘and probably in the long run the child will be a lot better off.’ She had sat down and was smoothing her skirt.
‘How did the cats also disillusion him—that he should have them tied up in the sack?’
She drew down her mouth, in that peculiarly Greek manner, and with it her whole face: its cast was of an ugliness to rouse the imagination.
Then she looked at him piercingly. ‘You are testing me, aren’t you, Mr Duffield—Hurtle?’ She closed her eyes, and actual tears began to come. ‘Oh, you don’t know! He is so good! You can’t understand!’
She got up and strode about the room, arms crossed on her breast, hands gripping her own shoulders. She might have looked over-dramatic, even ridiculous, if her drama hadn’t made her suffer. ‘Everybody,’ she cried out, and repeated more softly: ‘everybody has their faults.’
He saw many progressions from a drawing he had done the night of their first meeting: the stone head lying in the dust beside the formal, stone body; only, in the drawing, the eyes were open.
He said: ‘You’ll feel differently when you’ve wound up your affairs and returned to Greece. How will you go?’
‘By sea?’ It was a question, not an answer. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘Cosmas only went by air because time was involved—and business. I have time to spare.’
She was standing in the centre of the room, on a carpet so aggressively hideous it was surprising she wasn’t sucked down into its maroon-and-brown roses; but the lines of her skirt, of her torso, again those of an archaic sculpture, were indestructible: to remember her as an aesthetic experience should be enough.
‘When you’ve tidied everything up—I mean, the packing, and the cars, and the little aborigine—shall I come to see you?’
She said: ‘Oh, it will take time. Yes. You see, apart from everything else, my Maltese dog—poor little Flora—whom you haven’t seen—is sick.’ He could, in fact, see her, smell her, pink-eyed and shivering in the nest of flannel. ‘She has—I don’t like to think—only the vet more or less promised—I can hardly say—a cancer. This is what, more than anything, upset Cosma, because he is tender-hearted. I am the practical one.’
The stiff, sculptured folds of her skirt did not prevent her advancing, till she was standing quite close to the chair in which he was sitting.
‘I will rather come and visit you,’ she said, ‘because it is inconvenient for you to travel all the way to here.’
She was examining him, and he could see the veins of her eyeballs with all their tributaries.
‘Is Sunday objectionable?’ she asked. ‘On that day I can arrange for our little girl to go to her mother at La Perouse.’
He only hesitated because he could see the grain in her naked lips as they hovered above him, and the hair so very distinct where it had been strained back from the temples.
Just when he was preparing to give the logical answer, the stringy maid appeared and, looking out to sea, announced: ‘The vet has come, madam, about the dog.’
‘Oh,’ she said hoarsely, ‘yes,’ her stone lips barely moving.
An almost summer sunlight slatted the floor of the room over Chubb’s Lane. He had half latched the shutters through which the sounds of the neighbourhood entered, only slightly muffled by Sunday. Now that he was free to observe, he hoped the striped and spangled light would divert anyone else’s attention from what could otherwise have appeared huggermugger and drab. For him the light created something festive in his familiar but probably frowsy surroundings. To remember that a flight of motes was of the same substance as passive grey domestic dust had always delighted him.
‘If you’re hungry, I can open a tin of herrings,’ he suggested, ‘and there’s a loaf of fairly fresh bread.’
She made a mumbled sound, at the same time rejecting his offer with a movement of her head against his shoulder. She was behaving like somebody stupefied by a heavy meal in the middle of the day and the sleep which comes after it; though probably she hadn’t touched food since breakfast, if she had eaten then.
‘Herrings in tomato sauce: not an attractive proposition; but easy, and quickly over.’ It might have sounded like talking to himself in an empty room if she hadn’t again uttered that animal, mumbled sound.
He couldn’t tempt her: whereas she had been so hungry on arrival he had hardly closed the door on the street before she fell on him ravenously, propelling him with her greed somewhere that remained unlocated till he thumped against the padded shoulder of an old dusty sofa and cannoned off the corner of a crashing what-not.
At some point he was infected with her appetite, and took over. If he had been left with breath, he would have liked to explain: yes, you are here, and now there is no reason why morning afternoon evening should be in any way distinguishable if that is what we decide we need. But he had grown ravenous himself. From nibbling to biting to attempting to swallow her burning ear-lobes. On the cracking stairs. It would have been neither surprising nor resistible if their gluttony had thrust them through the splintering banisters and they had landed below in the hall. Instead they gyrated or slipped crouching bruised against
the stairboards. Once he almost gouged out the eye of her suspender. While her corkscrew-tongue kept trying to drag from his throat an imagined resistance to her thirst. Feet stumbled, crass and blunt, always mounting, it seemed, raising a dust which started them both coughing.
‘Hero?’ He coughed it up pointlessly; for she had lost her normal identity, and the one she had acquired was nameless.
As they were climbing the stairs her fingers, or claws, used his ribs as rungs. Then, as though she had reached the summit, she seemed to hang from him, suspended by no more than her pelvis and adhesive mouth. Though just when they made the precipice of the landing, and might have toppled right back to the start of their ascent, they were held together by their hearts’ chuffing, not in unison, that might have been fatal, but one valve taking over where the other failed.
On the landing: their knees trembling and knocking. He felt cold behind the knees, kneecaps thin and breakable. Now he was thirsty rather than hungry, now that the last of his saliva had run down outside their mouths, evading their attempts to drink each other up. So, on the landing, he began to tear her breasts apart, to get at the flesh inside the skin: the scented, running juices; in a drought even the bitter seeds could be sucked and spat out.
He hadn’t tasted more than the small rubbery nipples, when she cried out: ‘You are hurting me! We are animals!’
‘Yes, Hero. Come in here.’
He hadn’t intended to take her into that one, but nothing develops as conceived: the pure soul, for example; the innocent child, already deformed, or putrefying, in the womb.
They got their clothes off in the back room he hadn’t intended. The cold mattress-ticking rustled through their swollen veins; the leather asterisks stamped themselves on their half-melted skins.
At moments they were laughing together over something and he wondered whether he knew what it was. Certainly their love-making sounded pneumatic at times; their lust took on grotesque shapes. Yes, love had its puddingy moments. LOVE: that was what they were laughing at; but immediately stopped shocked short grinding their teeth into each other’s teeth. The portcullis wouldn’t allow them asylum. They looked into each other’s eyes and there were no depths to reach: there were the positions of love.
After demanding the ultimate in depravity, she ran out flat-footed looking for the bathroom, nor did he direct or advise her, because she would arrive at that too by instinct: the bath with the brown stain on the bottom; the French-smelling lavatory bowl; the droppings of verdigris under the geyser; her daemon would cope with all of it. Holding his arm over his eyes, a hand over his dribbled crutch, he waited for her return.
They might have lain all their lives sleeping side by side on the thawed mattress-ticking.
When he woke he noticed that his own body, although more muscular, looked more defenceless than hers because whiter, nakeder: in fact, flesh. You forget about vaccination marks. Here were his, their white, sweating scars waiting to drop off in the end as the scabs had in the beginning; whereas hers were baked into a terra-cotta arm they might dig up a thousand years hence and produce as evidence of ‘civilization’.
She turned over, and her breasts were two extinct volcanoes he wouldn’t approach; they could erupt all over again: himself drowning in lava.
This was where he said: ‘If you’re hungry I can open a tin of herrings.’
They lay a long time barely fondling the parts they had appropriated from each other.
Somewhere in the late afternoon, judging by the resentment with which the inhabitants of Chubb’s Lane were throwing the crockery around in their sinks, she sat up yawning her mouth off, stretching her arms to release, but in fact knotting them. Then she stomped over the boards, on squelching feet, her naked body forced by a recall of prudery into constricting angles, and started floundering about through her handbag. The bag, which he hadn’t noticed, sounded an old shapeless valise stuffed with superfluous necessities, the search a sordid one, at least for anybody as perfectly achieved as Hero Pavloussi. In the end she came across the cigarettes.
Scratching an armpit, he said: ‘You’re quite a bit different from what I expected.’ He continued scratching voluptuously to celebrate his relief; prolonged perfection would have made intolerable demands.
‘I was no different from what I am.’ On lighting a cigarette, she came clumping back to the bed, for modesty’s sake more than ever in the shape of a half-open jack-knife. ‘It is you who want always to create something—even people. Because you see them mostly at their worst, you have wanted somebody at her best.’ Seated again on the bed, strengthened by a comfortable attitude, she was able to behave most objectively. She gathered him into her hand. She was examining him as though these wilted flowers, or bruised fruits, or catch of squid, had never known her creative touch; they were her specimens.
‘Cosmas my husband’—she sat frowning at the penis in her hand—‘is one of these men who must build a monument. I am to represent perfection for him. In the first place, I am of a class he never had access to, except through his money. Of course I married him for his money. My mind told me: However else could you marry such an unpolished man, except for the advantages; so don’t deceive yourself. At least I could be honest about it. But however crude my motive for marrying a millionaire, it was not as crude as what I discover as the real reason. I find I marry Pavloussis for his body. I am soon distracted by this in many ways gross peasant, and he is shocked to find that his monument will become a monument to lust. Because where he is not sensual and lustful with paid women, Cosmas is pure pure. He is soon quite impotent from disappointment in his wife. I remember him telling me: “Not even a prostitute would behave like this. It would offend against her conventions.” I said: “But you are my husband, whom I married for his money, and now I find you give me joy. Am I not to express this?” It was even more shocking for him that I try to rationalize my behaviour. He could understand and accept my marrying him for his money, but not the other. About this time he cancelled a visit to his island—to his mother—because I believed he could not dare to produce his wife.’
‘How did he dare dispose of his “daughter”, and drown the bagful of cats?’
‘That is not to the point!’ She rejected her lover with a force-fulness that made him whinge.
Anger drove her into a less comfortable position. She sat on the edge of the bed, rounding her shoulders to shut him out, with stiffened fingers manipulating her cigarette. She was making a business of smoking; but it did not ease her feelings, as her mouth showed whenever the glow gave it away.
‘Very much to the point,’ he persisted, ‘if you talk about rationalizing behaviour.’
Her silence sounded a sulky one.
‘Or are Greeks perhaps cruel by nature?’ he couldn’t help suggesting.
‘Who is cruel? Greeks? Turks? Man is cruel!’ she shouted back. ‘God—God is cruel! We are his bagful of cats, aren’t we? When God is no longer cruel many questions will be answered.’
She was so furious she accompanied her accusations by striking the mattress with her stiffened hand.
‘You drive me to blaspheme!’ she shouted louder still.
‘But you’ve told me you’re not a believer.’
‘No. I do not believe. But blaspheme every day!’
She burst into such a torrent of grief it was now his turn to be shocked. He tried to comfort her by caressing her racked body; but this was not what she wanted: she shook him off in a flurry of wet hair.
‘What I do believe in,’ she cried, ‘is my husband’s goodness, because I have experienced it. You will not believe in it because of the bagful of cats. He loved the cats—which he killed. Yes, he killed them. Why do we kill what we love? Perhaps it is because it becomes too much for us—simply for that reason.’
‘You could have saved the cats.’
She grew quiet at once.
‘Why—yes—I could have saved the cats by giving an order after he had left. But I am myself also condemned, as I si
t waiting in the house, and the drowning do not care about the other drowning.’ She reached out. ‘Do you see?’ She laughed hoarsely as she dragged him down with her into her watery inferno.
Their indecently resigned struggles inside the bag must have been observed and judged from a distance by the shaggy god from under his black, heavy eyelids.
She said as they were drawn apart at last through the apathetic depths: ‘Will you turn on the light, please, Hurtle? I will be going now.’
He touched the dry mattress-ticking to which he had been returned. What fascinated him still was the texture of the wet bag, or condemned cell, in relation to the matted, elastic bodies of the prisoners.
‘The light?’ she repeated. ‘Were you sleeping—darling?’ she remembered to add.
‘No,’ he said, reaching for the flex, ‘not sleeping.’
Neither sleeping nor waking: it had been one of those moments when you half-consciously watch the slides experience is fitting into the frame of a dissolving mind; such a slide, perhaps, would best convey his conception of the drowning lover-cats.
‘How many were there?’ he asked and smiled.
‘How many what?’
‘Cats.’
‘For God’s sake! I don’t remember!’
He didn’t worry; two lovers could add up to an infinity of cats.
Faced with the problems of disguise, Hero was only momentarily irritated. It was most important that she should cover her strongly-made, stumpy legs. She bumped around in search of tumbled clothes, her webbed hands outstretched. Soon she was snapped back into her formal identity: hooked and smooth.
As for himself, he got very easily into a minimum of garments, with that slight feeling of grit or sand which comes between the contented skin and its covering after making love.
Hero was suddenly upset. ‘Oh, darling, did I do this to you? How bestial! I am disgusted!’
He hadn’t felt them, but she had made her mouth into a tender shape to apply to the scratches, almost gashes, in the crook of his arm, and to the little bows, or lovers’ knots, or bite marks the glass showed him in the angle of his neck and shoulder.
The Vivisector Page 40