The Vivisector
Page 43
‘It’ll be like old times, Gertie,’ she said as though talking to her sister, but it was only the maid who went with the house.
The maid lowered her chin and simpered. ‘Oh yes, m’m. Yes, Mrs Cargill. Won’t it?’ She could hardly wait to become re-enslaved, but decently.
The lady stood, and the light glanced off her teeth and her thick glasses. Once or twice she licked her lips to make sure the enamel was intact. The chauffeur started going through the motions, but, unlike the maid, he had so worked it out he was on neither one side nor the other.
Both Mrs Cargill and Gertie stared in the direction of the caller. The maid looked stern, while her rightful mistress might have been suspecting the approach of a disease: a not unpleasant one, which her friends would turn into a tactful joke, perhaps even congratulate her on catching.
‘Oh dear!’ She suddenly laughed, and whispered loud: ‘The inventory, Gertie! We forgot the inventory!’
The maid scurried into the hall and returned at once with a clipful of fluttering documents.
‘Inventories make me feel guilty,’ Mrs Cargill still whispered out loud. ‘But tenants with the best credentials can give you a surprise. I wonder why we let? For the money, I expect!’
‘Oh yes!’ The maid giggled. ‘We need the money, don’t we?’
In sisterly fashion she began pushing her mistress inside the highly polished car. Her cuffs twittered as she waved. She was so relieved to feel herself again loaded with reliable chains.
Only when Mrs Cargill had been driven away, temporarily, from her house, was the maid prepared to acknowledge the caller.
‘Is Madame Pavloussi expecting you?’ she asked with a polite insolence he returned.
‘No. She isn’t. It’s more of a suprise like.’
She hated that. She couldn’t be sure whether he was quizzing her profession, or whether Mr Duffield was of a class she despised.
‘Madame Pavloussi’s in the little “salong”.’ The maid flung a magic word which must preserve her from any possible humiliation.
‘What!’ he said. ‘Isn’t the drawing-room ever used?’
It wouldn’t be today: all the dust-covers were on.
He went unaccompanied into the room where Hero had always received him, perhaps on account of their intimate relationship.
‘The lease is up, I gather.’ He would save her the trouble.
‘No,’ she said, and dabbed at an imaginary cold. ‘Mrs Cargill has returned sooner than she expected—for family reasons—from her trip to England, and it will suit us both if I hand over.’
Again she dabbed at her non-existent cold, turning her face so that it was touched with the glow which had delighted him as he came down the drive. He kissed her as tenderly as the rosy hour demanded.
She didn’t return his affection, but said tight and dry: ‘I have had to make an important decision. My poor little Flora—I have had to destroy her.’
‘Your who?’
‘My little dog who is suffering all this time—so much—of a cancer. It is selfish of me to prolong it.’
‘Oh yes,—Flora.’ He realized he had never seen the dog which had been the reason they almost hadn’t met.
‘So it is over,’ Hero concluded; she didn’t cry, perhaps because she had cried too much on less tragic occasions; she blew her nose, and looked at the backs of some books of the unread kind belonging to the landlady.
‘Why did you never let me see your dog?’
‘Oh, but darling, I did not want to involve you in unpleasantness. ’
To insulate them more securely from any unpleasantness arising from the disease and death of her pet, she switched to the driest possible subject: ‘. . . Mrs Cargill’s solicitor, with whom I have spent—yesterday—almost the entire morning. It was deadly!’ she remembered, and frowned. ‘Why this man he must repeat everything six times? Am I stupid? Or am I merely a foreigner? And Mrs Cargill accusing me—not of stealing a silver ladle—which is not in the inventory. I think she is probably a very common woman. Her old silver ladle, which I have never seen, must be of the same ugliness and commonness as everything else in her possession.’
‘Where will you go, now that you’re leaving the house?’
The false atmosphere she had encouraged should have made separation a painless matter for them both; but the sea had begun to darken and lift, impinging on the organized room; an invasion of night scents and moisture started them both gasping for breath, their minds’ furniture palpitating, and in some cases, bleeding.
‘Where I will go?’ Hero was locking and unlocking her naked hands: he hadn’t noticed the heavy pearl since the shipping magnate left; while she smiled in advance over something which might sound impossible or idiotic. ‘I will tell you,’ she said, and it relieved her shoulders to take him physically by the hand, and drag him down to the level of practical planning. ‘I will go back to Greece. Oh no, not to my husband. My husband is too generous; I would not impose myself on him. In any case, I will take my lover with me.’
‘What if he won’t be taken from his work?’
‘Oh, his work! I am his work too, aren’t I? You are not so little egoist, Hurtle, that you won’t admit you haven’t finished creating me.’
Though he could feel himself bridle under pressure from Hero’s persuasive hand, it was not a matter of vanity. He realized, on the contrary, he had been feeding on her formally all these weeks, and that the least related corners of his vision borrowed her tones of mind, the most putrescent of which were often the subtlest.
Hero seemed as unaware of the cynicism of her remark as she was of her lover’s attitude. ‘It is now so long since I have seen the island I have been telling you about—Perialos. You will remember how my husband took me? It is this island I wish—I must visit again.’ She kept dragging at his hand in search of the encouragement she wasn’t receiving. ‘I feel the devils may be cast out in the holy places of Perialos.’
‘I wonder whether grace is given as freely as we’re asked to believe.’
‘Why will this not be given,’ she shouted, ‘if I am determined?’ She was positively yanking at his hand as though somewhere at the top of his arm a bell existed.
By now they were standing in almost darkness; there were a few last flames licking the leaden masses of the city in the distance; Hero’s face was brown and sweaty.
‘And what about my devils?’ he asked. ‘What if I want to hang on to them?’
‘Then you do not love me! If you did you would want us to be one—one being—through every possible experience.’
‘Like a husband. I’m not your husband—not even an exorcized one.’
‘Oh, you are so brutal!’
‘I’m an artist,’ he had to say, though it sounded like a vulgar betrayal. ‘I can’t afford exorcism. Is that what you’ve sensed? Is that why you want it?’
‘Oh, but you misinterpret! Deliberately! You do not want to understand!’
She couldn’t spit it contemptuously enough at the darkness surrounding them: while he was tempted by his half-conceived landscape of Perialos, in which the wooden saints were threatened by their own tongues of fire.
None of their journey in the flying boat particularly impressed him. The changes of temperature alone made him feel sick and disgruntled. In the air he huddled in his overcoat and longed for his abandoned house; nobody would coax him out of it again. In any case after childhood, or at most, youth, experience breeds more fruitfully in a room. None of the forms which rose up to meet him as they glided down, none of the colours which should have drenched his senses, were as subtly convincing as those created out of himself. At any point he might have demanded to break away, if he hadn’t been obsessed by his preconception of Perialos: something Hero would never make him admit.
‘Are you ill, Hurtle?’ she used to ask. ‘Have you a fever, darling? ’
She had taken to feeling his forehead for the fever she couldn’t find. She was so solicitous their fellow passengers began t
o guess at something peculiar. They watched for clues, particularly on touching down, but were irritatingly frustrated: what their X-ray eyes might have detected through a bedroom door, didn’t take place in dormitories; the sexes were segregated at their ports of call. Though on land a torn-off branch, stuck in the tropic silt, would shoot overnight—they had seen that for themselves—in the air the fingers of crypto-lovers remained dry, brittle, unproductive, even when grafted into one another. So you had only the expression of their eyes to go by: their eyes would glow at times with that suggestion of phosphorescence which emanates from swamp water at night.
To add to the irritation, and downright mystification, this Madame Pavloussi, obviously a woman of means, was wearing an old fur coat, certainly Persian lamb with probably a sable collar, but all so shabby you wouldn’t have been seen dead in it. Her breath reeked like a full ashtray. She was such a hell-bent smoker it was a wonder she didn’t eat the cigarettes, which she took from a shagreen case, when she remembered to fill it, paper packs otherwise, lumped together with passports and tickets in an old crocodile handbag. There was a note-case to match the bag, with a gold monogram, elegantly done. Once the note-case tumbled out: you could see it was stuffed with notes; it was Madame Pavloussi, not the man, who had the dough. The man didn’t bear too much looking at: too seedy, and sort of morbid. You would have liked to understand what they saw in each other: her in her shabby old Persian lamb, teeth browned by nicotine; him in his food-spotted English tweed, and funny eyes. The eyes gave you the goose-flesh, because he wasn’t exactly looking at you: he was only looking.
Over Rangoon suddenly the lovers kissed, or it was Madame Pavloussi the Greek woman loving up to her paid man. He’d probably carve her up in the end, in some hotel bedroom, and pack her in suitcases, before the staff dropped to it. It would be her who’d drive him to murder by talking at him nonstop: pity you couldn’t have heard what it was about.
It was about Perialos. ‘We mustn’t waste any time in Athens. The more I think about it the more I am convinced Perialos is our great hope.’ Unconscious of the island gestating inside him, she was willing him to keep her company in being saved.
They spent three, four days in the hot white dust of Athens where they put up at a modest hotel frequented by European families, and English governesses on their way to or from a job. By day he scarcely saw Hero, who had business to attend to, family to visit. She had become foreign and remote: for which he was grateful; but she began to feel she ought to console him.
She said on the third morning: ‘Did you hear that woman coughing the other side of the wall? It had the sound of an English governess. Poor things, their gentility means everything, and at the same time they are hungry for love. They end by losing all their sport.’
The same night a sense of compassion reminded Hero to ask him to sleep with her. It was the eve of their departure; she was naturally preoccupied: the outcome was conjugal at best, at worst, prophylactic.
‘How fearful,’ she said, ‘if we left the tickets for the vaporaki under the mattress! I dread all this confusion of departures. The broken-down taxis!’ She sighed, and heaved, remembering her duty towards him, or the English governesses. He could almost feel her listening for the governess with a cough the other side of the wall.
On coming out of the bathroom she said: ‘These island steamers are very primitive, you know.’ She was trying to brush her hair sleeker than it had ever been. ‘They put the used lavatory paper in baskets in case it blocks up the holes. Fancy! My Aunt Phrosso had a basketful blow in her face on the way to Corfu. She never travel again by Greek.’ Hero laughed with a kind of coarse delight. ‘This is my poor country! Ah, Perialos—how I dread and long for it!’ She ended in a voice of doves.
As she cosseted, and finally plaited together, the live snakes of her hair, the raised arms suggested sun-warmed pottery. The woman who had been in bed with him, amiably submitting to a sexual routine, was in no way related to her. Perhaps the fault was his: he felt numb; his hands ached with possibly arthritic pains. Only when they were lying in their separate beds, and he was opening the door of his house in Flint Street, his fingers began again to flow: the pain was squeezed out. He practised cupping his hands to control the evasive paint, with which he must convey the grey-to-violet dove-tones and glistening, plaited snakes.
When he woke from this spasmodic nap he felt more refreshed than he had been by the bleak orgasm he had pretended to enjoy with the woman in the other bed. She was now crying and moaning through her sleep; while the English governess had started coughing again, perhaps out of sympathy, the other side of the wall.
He was powerless to do anything about anything except fall asleep for the second time: from which he was woken by Hero Pavloussi shouting at him in a grey, hostile light; it was so early.
‘Wake up, my God!’ she shouted. ‘You don’t realize: this day of days, the taxi may break down on the way to Piraeus!’ Her vehemence made the handles on the dressing-table rattle.
Then she started bashing at the fragile, antique telephone, to make sure their coffee would be sent up. She had thickened, coarsened overnight, or so it appeared as she bent to test her suspenders. Her skin looked greasy, livery. He downright disliked her as she stood dipping one horn of a croissant into her coffee.
‘Did you see Cosma?’ he asked.
It was the first time since their arrival either of them had used the name; if it hadn’t been for the sight of her dunking the croissant, he probably wouldn’t have brought it up now.
At once she resumed her true proportions. ‘No.’ Her head had recovered its nobility. ‘I am cheapened enough, but would not cheapen myself any farther by doing such a thing to my husband. ’
‘I saw him—I think—the afternoon before last.’
‘How?’ She was listening like a frozen cat.
‘In an arcade.’
‘Which arcade?’
‘How do I know? I can’t read the Greek lettering.’
He had been pretty sure it was Cosma Pavloussis, in dark glasses. They had almost collided. Then the persistent smile, there for anybody who cared to receive and interpret it the evening of Olivia’s dinner, reappeared on the face of the shipping magnate, or his double, as he sheered off and stood looking at a millinery display in a shop window. If he hadn’t been wearing the dark glasses, it would have been possible to identify him by the little sacs of sallow skin at the corners of the eyelids.
‘What was he doing?’ Hero asked.
She was standing with the remaining horn of a soggy croissant pinched in trembling fingers; there were crumbs floating on the surface of her coffee.
‘He was looking at some rather tawdry hats in a shop window. ’ Then he added, because her face seemed to be expecting it: ‘He’s probably doing some little dancer or actress on the cheap.’
‘I will not love you any more or less, Hurtle, if you draw for me jealous pictures of my husband. Nor will you lower him for me by anything you say.’
‘But didn’t you tell me he could only sleep with paid women after you’d upset his moral values?’
She answered gently: ‘Yes,’ and stuffed into her mouth the remains of the croissant.
Again, as she was bending over the suitcase, smoothing the contents before fastening it, she said very gravely, softly: ‘I pray that God will bless us at Perialos.’
He thought it extremely unlikely that God would show them acts of mercy even on that island of saints; but in his role of stand-in groom he took the bride’s hand, and she appeared shyly grateful for it.
The steamer making the voyage to Perialos was appropriately primitive. On the gangways the tightly knotted strings of passengers shuffled with short bemused steps dictated less by the loads they were carrying, than by a ritual in which they were taking part. Hero hadn’t painted on her mouth. Jostled by these bearers of sacrificial kids and hens, or heady offerings of stocks and roses, he felt more innocent, stilted, wooden, already in a sense half-shriven.
That night she didn’t speak. He suspected her of praying, and because he had begun to love her again he would have liked to add his petitions to hers; as this wasn’t possible, he filled the darkened cabin of his mind with an involved white calligraphy, which he saw as a correspondence of sorts.
Very early the swell subsided, and they entered a blue morning in which veiled islands were swimming, or in some cases, hedgehogs of brown rock. The steamer functioned at two speeds: one for the immediate foreground; the other for the passive distance on which they might never make an impression. Kerchiefed women continued calling to their Lady for protection, and a theological student spouted like a whale over a consignment of peasant cheeses spread on a covered hold for the passage between islands.
Later in the morning the two foreigners were standing on the sheltered side of the wheelhouse. Since her association and her fur coat had removed Hero Pavloussi to a plane from which Christian voices and glances fell away incredulously, she had been clinging desperately to her companion’s arm for support. They didn’t stop looking ahead: both, he felt, weak at the knees, like discharged hospital cases, or a not yet consummated couple.
Hero finally managed to free her voice from her throat; it allowed her a gummy whisper: ‘Perialos!’ Then the wind had fallen: they had slid the right side of the stone arm of a protective mole.
As soon as it was possible, all the initiates began pouring down on the stone paving, pushing and shrieking; there was a bleating from some quarters, from others a flapping of wings: an inverted cock raised his head, gasping, glaring, wattles quivering. Those who had been waiting for them seized the asperged cheeses and carried them away. A white glare embraced the whole cosmos, excepting those for whom the ceremony had been arranged. It made their arrival more alarmingly significant; they moistened their lips, and looked at each other lovingly, appealing for sympathy in what they were about to undergo.