Patrick White - The Vivisector

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.

They lay all night in their narrow bunks. He slept only an hour or two. There were the distant sounds of vomiting, moaning, invocations, kids bleating. Once for an instant, in a sloping corridor, on groggy legs, he was the only living thing. In the lavatories there stood the baskets of used paper as Hero had predicted.