‘I want you to take me to your sister. I’d like to congratulate her for the part she’s played in your success. Rhoda was so sweet.’ Olivia laughed. ‘How she must have suffered—she too!’
It was the more indefensible in that Rhoda and her cronies were gathered within hailing distance, against a period of his work which particularly exposed his frailty: his love for Kathy.
Rhoda couldn’t have helped noticing the straits he was in; in fact, she made it clear that she knew. The rose clown was laughing up at her companions, at Cec and Bernice Cutbush, at the transparent Mrs Volkov, and Don Lethbridge in his slackest woolliest blackest sweater and the skinniest blackest pants. Rhoda, in her determination to ignore an outside situation, was doing everything but handsprings to amuse her circle. Her little pointed teeth were working overtime in smiles.
Olivia Hollingrake kept looking in the opposite direction. ‘I remember’—she said, possibly hoping to avert the present at the last moment—‘I remember getting the fright of my life when I discovered Rhoda still only reached my navel, while I kept on shooting up. It made me feel abnormal. But Rhoda was so understanding. I’d invite her in while I was having my bath. And she’d sit stirring the water—telling me about the brother I had a crush on.’
The elderly archness of it shrivelled the senses which would have liked to drag him under, amongst the drowned mangoes and floating ferns, while Rhoda—indeed—stirred the water.
‘Rhoda doesn’t know—Rhoda knew nothing!’ He dragged his hand out of the crustaceous grasp. ‘Never!’
‘She used to write down everything in a diary.’
If Rhoda and Olivia were allowed to get together—but each seemed determined it shouldn’t happen, anyhow tonight.
‘With drawings,’ Olivia continued, but vaguely, while looking in the opposite direction.
‘Drawings? I’m pretty sure Rhoda never drew a thing. Tell me, Olivia?’
But Boo Hollingrake was smiling the smile she had caught from her mother. ‘There’s the Prime Minister. I must go and have a few words with Sam. I have a message for him from a cardinal. You know I’m living in Rome? For purely aesthetic reasons,’ she explained. ‘It’s never too late to be converted to other forms of beauty.’
She set off on her next mission as quickly as her bones and the crush permitted; and he would have joined Rhoda, to dissect the relationship Olivia claimed had existed, to discover whether, in spite of her professed dislike, Rhoda had been in fact Olivia’s confidante and spy; only the crowd wouldn’t let him. Not only solid bodies but tumbling spillikins of voices were against his arriving; for as the latter fell into their disorderly spillikin heap, it was impossible to ignore the game: against his will, of course, he continued detaching the more detachable straw-remarks.
‘They say all this is nothing to what he’s still got stashed away in the house. There are nightmares of perversion, really bad, mad things, which he won’t allow anyone to see, and which even he can’t bring himself to look at.’
‘But somebody must have seen them. Otherwise, how do you know?’
‘Somebody told me in confidence. Actually, it was Biddy Prickett.’
‘Then probably Biddy’s been shown all these delectable obscenities. ’
‘Probably she has. She and Ailsa handled his stuff for years.’
‘Let’s go and look for Bid.’
‘I couldn’t help overhearing—but Miss Prickett’s gone off in a huff. Somebody’s insulted her.’
‘Oh, nonsense, Max. A waiter spilled a glass of champagne down her cleavage.’
‘Would one glass break the drought? She seemed to be crying.’
‘She was insulted by someone.’
‘Biddy was insulted.’
‘Hurtle insulted Biddy. I know from a very reliable source she aspired to be his mistress. That’s the root of the matter. Of Biddy’s whole trouble.’
‘The root? Oh, sorry!’
‘Oh, Max!’
He was by now so close to the reason for his setting out, he could no longer see Rhoda herself. She was hidden somewhere inside the heap of spillikin voices, behind the frieze of normal human bodies, or masked Furies, none of the masks deceived: they were too obviously jolly, too jolly drunk, and not on false champers.
While he was struggling, a particularly cynical waiter, himself a little drunk, offered in a shout: ‘Let me freshen you up, Mr Duffield, with a drop of this nice sparkling Moselle,’ and waved the bottle above the sea of greedy heads.
A woman leaned over, one arm restraining her runaway breasts, the other raised to strike. ‘I want to touch you, Hurtle Duffield,’ she called through her cut-out, scarlet-varnished, papier-mâché mouth.
She did touch, too, and withdrew her hand as though it had been shocked by electricity. It should have been: the parts of his stroked body were tingling relentlessly.
Cecil Cutbush was waving, whether to draw attention to himself in his role of Bosom Friend, or simply to encourage the drowning. The closer you came the heavier the swell of voices, the stronger the undertow. Don Lethbridge, up to the chin, looked anxious; never learnt to swim perhaps.
‘I find it hard to believe in—what shall we call them—the pornographic series of drawings or whatever—which everyone talks about, but nobody has seen.’
‘I entirely agree with you, Sir Jack!’
‘And even less, the latest crazy myth.’
‘Oh, what? Do tell us, Sir Jack.’
‘The God paintings.’
‘The what?’
‘The God paintings.’
‘What exactly do you mean, sir?’
‘Is Duffield painting God?’
‘Painting himself, more like it.’
‘How rich! Now that will be obscene! At this stage. If only he’d painted himself while he was still only a god.’
‘I consider it frivolous to make such remarks, or pass judgement, before we’ve examined all the facts.’
‘Oh, entirely! I do agree with you, Sir Jack.’
‘I don’t, because by then the cove’ll be dead. He won’t be answerable for the blasphemous muck he leaves behind. And which some of them will feel it their duty to “understand”. I hate the phonies of this world.’
‘But these new paintings—whether they exist or not—somebody must have thought they did.’
‘Oh, I do think it’s exciting to be living now—what with space and everything.’
‘Let’s ask Benny Loebel. Benny? Benno! What about the God paintings?’
Loebel closed his eyes and smiled an appropriately mystic smile. ‘I do not know faht yu expect to hear.’ He wasn’t born a Viennese for nothing.
‘Silly old shyster! Have you see—’
‘I wonder who ever thought it up. God is dead, anyway. Anyway—thank God—in Australia.’
‘Only hypothetically, Marcus.’
‘I’m on your side, Sir Jack—at least, I think I am. Even though Marcus will probably kill me for it, I do hope the God paintings exist. The whole idea’s rather beaut.’
‘I hope for your sake they do, my dear. You’re at your most spectacular when most enthusiastic. Particularly in pink.’
By practising a kind of sidestroke, by half closing his eyes against the spray of words, by straining his neck muscles and kicking out with his good leg, he had almost reached the haven of a still corner under the lee of columnar cliffs, where friendly hands were waiting to haul him to comparative safety. Cecil Cutbush was the first to help, his grip clammier than you would have liked, too damp-spongy, too awful by half; and the irony: that the Cutbush-Volkov set, Rhoda’s friends, should be yours. Rhoda his pseudo-sister, still no more than a rosy blur to the right, could turn out to be only a papier-mâché rock when put to the test, but Cec and Bernice Cutbush had appointed themselves his personal lifesavers.
The Cutbush couple appeared in favour of physical methods of resuscitation. Bernice was all for massaging the biceps and kidneys; for two pins, Cec would have given the mouth-to-mout
h a go: his face approached so close, the daring little dash of rouge was the only dry in his largely liquid pores.
‘How are you keeping, on this—this epic night, Mr Duffield?’
Because your smile felt more than ever lopsided, and an answer might have meant a painful struggle, you rewarded Cecil by squeezing his elbow, and at once his face put out flags.
Bernice saw. ‘You must take care of yourself—remember your health, Mr Duffield,’ she warned, and frowned. ‘Keep a hold of your emotions—even when thoughtful friends encourage you to let go. We wouldn’t want to see you take another fit—would we?’
Mrs Cutbush, also, longed to be touched, but he was too cruel, or too prudent, to oblige.
Of all people, it was Shuard the music critic who saved him from his saviors. (Shuard shouldn’t have been invited; but why had anybody been invited?)
Shuard whispered: ‘Some evening I’d like to celebrate in camera—among friends—your great success. Ask in a few girls. There are so many variations now that they’re letting in the Asians to study. And old Cec Cutbush, needless to say. Wouldn’t be complete, would it? without Cecil’s act.’
‘I’ve no idea.’
But Cec had. At mention of his act, jet began encrusting the bosom of his business suit: he was all smirk in the shadow of his ostrich feathers.
‘Incidentally, Hurtle,’ Shuard attempted an even more confidential tone, which remained as audible as brass, ‘I received a letter by this evening’s mail—an air letter from the little lady’—actually digging you in the ribs—‘from Kathy Volkov!’
Peugh! Shuard’s breath stinking of stale underclothes.
‘There’s a message in it she wants me to deliver. She wants me to tell . . .’
‘No. No! Not now! Some other time.’ Not Shuard undressing their relationship.
‘She said,’ the man insisted. ‘“Tell my dear old mate, my darling old rooster . . .”’
‘No! I don’t believe. I don’t want to—know. Never!’ His pure soul, his spiritual child.
At least the incident gave the mother her cue. Mrs Volkov, so pale, so shy, so unworldly as to be the ghost of a woman—a wonder the Russian ever got it in—sidled up in an impersonation of somebody who had suffered a stroke. Certainly she’d had one herself, but so slight, or so overcome, she could only count as a cryptovictim.
Looking to one side of him, Mrs Volkov said: ‘I’ve never thanked you, Mr Duffield, for the part you played—in—in moulding my little gairl.’
Mrs Volkov had probably never shown a blush: she was too anaemic; but now something was happening to her: she all but gave off pale vapours, together with the innocent perfume from some kind of health soap.
‘Moulded?’ He shouldn’t have: but what else?
And now the abnormal word, from hanging out of Mrs Volkov’s mouth, was protruding from his also, contoured like a film-star’s breast.
As soon as she could manage his lips again, he assured the mother: ‘I think Kathy was born with a pretty good idea of the shape she must take.’
‘I don’t know, I’m sure,’ Mrs Volkov murmured. ‘I received no education, but came here at sixteen, from Carnoustie. And keep to myself.’ Then she actually did blush, a brilliant satiny rose, as she realized for the first time, it seemed: ‘My daughter is my only extravagance.’
They laughed so easily and happily together, acknowledging the ailment they had in common; he only had to go and spoil it by remembering what he was looking for.
‘Where is Rhoda?’
Mrs Volkov appeared alarmed; her answer was in an intake of breath. ‘Miss Courtney—she’s here, of course, Mr Duffield—at your elbow.’
So he turned, and there was his sister, as Mrs Volkov had predicted.
Rhoda lowered her eyelids, and drew in her teeth, which he suspected had been glistening and laughing the moment before in some piece of by-play with Don Lethbridge. (Don was certainly her spy, as she was probably Olivia’s.)
‘I’ve been looking for you, Rhoda.’
She grew increasingly sullen. ‘I don’t know why you should. With everybody courting you.’ One of the seams of the rose dress, so devotedly machined by Mrs Volkov, had burst right open.
‘Don’t you know I depend on you?’ Draw her out.
‘Are you ill then?’ The drifts of powder still clinging to her face made it look more anxious.
What he saw reassured him; though with Rhoda you could never be absolutely sure.
‘I wanted to ask whether you had noticed Mrs—Mrs Davenport, ’ he tried, and watched.
Rhoda hesitated. Though outwardly still—she might have been carved out of grey pumice—her mind, he saw, was skipping on ahead.
‘Olivia Hollingrake,’ he explained, to help them both in a difficult situation.
Immediately Rhoda’s eyelashes, such as they were, began to sift the guileful possibilities with which her mind had been playing.
‘Oh, Boo!’ It was accompanied by what was intended, no doubt, as a radiant expression. ‘Yes, I’ve noticed Boo several times this evening. What a magnificent figure! How wonderfully preserved!’
‘Olivia? About all Olivia’s been able to preserve are the Hollingrake jewels.’
But Rhoda didn’t seem to hear. ‘That dress—it might have screamed on anyone else—a gold dress. I wasn’t close enough to examine it in detail, but from a distance you had the impression of pure, beaten gold. Imagine! And so few women can afford to display a naked back.’ She had faltered at no point in saying her piece.
‘Olivia? A gold dress? To me she looked more than anything like a scruffy old Italian priest stuck with ill-gotten carbuncles.’
Rhoda sighed. ‘Perhaps I tend to see Olly,’ no one in his memory had referred to Olivia as ‘Olly’, ‘in a golden light. Don’t you remember how the light at Sunningdale was always golden—always morning?’
He did; but the light was beside the point.
‘Why didn’t you approach this vision of gold and nakedness?’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t dare!’ She laughed, and contemplated her burst seam with detached interest rather than concern.
‘She said she loved you very dearly. That you had shared secrets and jokes, which you recorded in a diary. I wonder which secrets and jokes you shared with “Olly”.’
‘I destroyed the diaries while I was still a girl.’
‘Then nobody will tell. And the bath water’s gone down the hole.’
Rhoda flinched only very slightly inside her trance. ‘What astonishes me, Hurtle, is that you should need to ask. With an exceptional memory like yours. I’ve never envied you a bit of it.’
So Rhoda too, was putting on the mask: wasn’t there one they called ‘Megaera’?
‘Oh, memory—memory’s too full in the end. If you could tear it up—like a bloody diary.’
Rhoda dropped her mask: she was the tattered moppet smelling of a cheap face-powder she had put on to spite Maman; spiritually, but only spiritually, she was floating in Maman’s borrowed shoes.
‘Then you are sick!’ Her pronouncement sounded hopeful, if not joyful.
‘Is that what you want?’
‘You can do things for people when they’re sick. Or old.’
Was it—dreadful thought—what they had both always been longing for? To be united, in one senile mind, mumbling over a basin of groats.
‘Not if I’m struck dead!’ he shouted.
Rhoda gave him such a frightened look, she could only be superstitious, in their rational Australian society.
‘I have something to finish,’ he added with less passion, and tried to find consolation in his wristwatch.
But the minutiae of the surroundings were crowding back on him: the white shaft from an overhead lamp turning a painted surface into a sea of molten glass words proliferating I can’t see what it’s meant to be a man is it a woman a very gnarled one a tree then I expect it’s whatever you want it to be like most things gold threads in a brocade coat the jujube colours of the see
mingly victorious young the few pale pink hairs tenaciously resigned in a very old neck something something particularly horrendous the Prime Minister’s speech and after.
Speech is surely more brutal than paint because it tends to dictate rather than state.
Here is this foetus, for instance, in a fringe of beard, not in jackboots certainly, elastic sides, who has stood the archangel up. This foetus thing is dictating to the faithful disciple what he must tell the magic wand and black box.
‘Surely, though, if you’re so close to—to the “master”—the painter—Mr Hurtle Duffield—you must have seen these paintings everybody’s so interested to hear about? These so-called God paintings.’
‘I don’t know. It’s none of my business.’
‘But haven’t you any—any sense of historic importance? You’re his associate, aren’t you?’
‘His what?’
‘Well—let’s put it another way—aren’t you a fellow painter?’
‘No! I’m not a painter. I’m a student. I’m not a painter. And may never be—a painter.’
‘Ah, modesty! I hope you mean what you say, Don, because if you don’t, that would make it less—refreshing. Ha-ha-ha!’
Mumble mumble gurgle gurgle.
‘Then what are you—if you’re not a painter. A male nurse?’
‘I haven’t had any training.’
(Isn’t he divine? So moving. This is what’s so exciting about being alive today—to be able to participate through television.)
‘What is your official function, I mean—Don?’
‘A what?’
‘I mean—what do you do—for your friend Hurtle?’
(Heugh—heugh! He’s a real winkler!)
‘Oh. I helped to wash and dress him when he came back from hospital. Miss Courtney’s an invalid.’
‘Miss Courtney?’
‘His sister.’
‘Courtney?’
‘Yes.’
‘Hmm. So you washed him.’
‘Yes. Only for a little. Because he learnt to manage. Well, I still wash his feet now and again. He can’t reach so far. Not when he’s tired.’
(Divine, isn’t he? This is what I call really warm. How did we exist before the telly?)
The Vivisector Page 67