Patrick White - The Vivisector

He could hear his own breath expiring, feel the flesh shrivelling on his bones, before sticking his nose into the bowl of roses he had more or less appropriated; they had the rare scent of tea roses; all the hairs were distinct, like the hairs on young, golden skin.

It was most opportune that Mrs Davenport should arrive, though with so little thunder her entrance might have gone unnoticed: in fact her whole attitude implied she was only ‘looking in’. Though somewhat blanched, she was not all that altered. Her face, perhaps, had been remodelled in white kid, to which had been added a pair of wattles, now quivering with motion or emotion, as she advanced, still erect, into the room, eyes apparently amazed inside their circlets of blue, steps short and tentative: Olivia could afford to play the timid cassowary.

Mrs Mortimer hurried to rub against her darling Boo. Then, in the hush, she began to trumpet, holding her glass of gin as though a torch to show off her prize: ‘Boo, this is Sharman. You know Sharman. She’s here from Texas.’

‘Oh, yes — Sharman.’ Mrs Davenport’s white-kid cheek twitched into a dimple; she tweaked her rope of legendary pearls; she was wearing a little hat: a humble, ugly, smart hat.

‘And Hurtle Duffield,’ Mrs Mortimer followed up.

Mrs Davenport offered her fingers, but he couldn’t arrive at their natural shape for the gloves she was wearing: of a coarse suède, of a blinding, virgin white; nor did she expend any words on him, though everybody was waiting for them. Instead, she pursed up her blood mouth, and narrowed her eyes, so that all those little milky wrinkles appeared at the corners. Then she lowered her chin, as though she had the wind, and raised it again, after quickly conquering that same wind. She barely whispered: ‘Hurtle—’ before petrifying; and everybody watching the two stone figures knew for certain they had been lovers.

At this point Mrs Mortimer skilfully separated her star guests, and began to fling ‘Boo darling’ round the room. Something clicked into place, and Mrs Davenport remembered her first, her childhood language. She was gargling down amongst her pearls: her teeth showed, and like the pearls, the teeth were real, if tiny. It occurred to him on catching sight of the teeth that Boo Hollingrake still contained the kernels of reality, and that she must be able to admit to it, if only once, since she dared expose her fragile discoloured old-childish teeth.

But there wasn’t an opportunity, and he continued straying amongst the objects in the impoverished Mrs Mortimer’s room. He thought: Never have I gone farther in the wrong direction, when that chipped billy, the lid, did it have a blue circumference, which might be why the chip suggested an act of fortuitous brutality, like a thumbnail hit by a hammer. In his distraction, he always ended up at the bowl of single roses, each with its tuft of slender, golden hairs.

At least nobody else would want to intrude on his peculiar, immoral, not to say frightening, colloquy with a bowl of roses, unless it were somebody equally peculiar and out according to the code of Mrs Mortimer’s set.

‘Duffield? You don’t, or won’t, know me.’

It was — not at once, but by degrees — Shuard the music critic, whom he hadn’t seen for years, and never more than briefly. Shuard’s hair, the most noticeable thing about him, grew in waves of steel wool in which the Gumption was visible; the unctuous pores round his nose were still pricked out in black; his hips and buttocks had perhaps increased in suavity. Otherwise he was a nondescript man who lived by journalism and a sprinkling of knowledge, and dining out: he could tell a dirty story better than most.

‘I’m not accusing you,’ Shuard said. ‘I’ve been on what I call my sabbatical from the Evening Star. But have now returned to the fray,’ he added, looking the room over.

Duffield answered in the same vein. ‘Peggy Mortimer has a bargain or two: intelligent, charming and safely married.’ He clamped his jaws: an alliance with Shuard, even against cabbage stalks, was something of a betrayal.

Shuard laughed his brown-gravy laugh. ‘All a bit long in the tooth, I’d say. I spent a delightful winter in Berlin: every night a little girl on either side. Every night two different little girls, mind you — only to warm the bed, of course.’

Have to laugh. If you could have shaken Shuard off: but he clung like cobwebs, in grubby festoons; so you began to match grubbiness with grubbiness. ‘One advantage of old age: the hot-water bottles put on flesh, and begin to breathe.’

Shuard laughed so appreciatively he had to use his handkerchief; as soon as he was disengaged he started off on a different, though only a slightly different tack: ‘I can remember — years ago — dining with the old girl over there.’

‘The which?’

‘The Sugar Fairy — the Davenport. Oh, it was a slap-up affair: a Greek tycoon, with a wife. I don’t remember anything about it, except that you took the wife down to the water while the old boy was learning a game of marbles. I’ve sometimes wondered what happened.’

‘Oh?’

He did manage to shed Shuard, by practically rubbing him off on the corner of a table, and there on the other side Olivia Davenport was standing, holding up her throat, in conversation with a Santa Gertrudis bull.

It didn’t prevent her turning at once, and asking most anxiously: ‘Yes, Hurtle?’ An extra white-kid chin appeared: she was obviously frightened, as though she might have to face a topic they had skirted before.

‘Do you know about Hero?’ he asked.

‘About whom?’ She flickered her eyelids: she had made a point of stressing the grammar.

‘Hero Pavloussi.’

‘Oh — Hero! She was so sweet!’ Mrs Davenport visibly dragged up around her the idiom which was safest, the smile which was blandest.

‘Did you know that she died?’ he insisted.

‘Hero died! ’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘of cancer.’

At first Boo Davenport didn’t appear to understand; then she began crinkling her eyebrows against the tastelessness to which she was being subjected.

‘Of cancer!’ he repeated, or shouted.

She lowered her eyes. ‘I didn’t know. How dreadful!’

At the same moment Mrs Mortimer led forward a young man who was designing for the theatre, and Mrs Davenport drew a deep breath: her smile invited the designer to protect her against further violation.

‘I’ve never known her in better form,’ Peggy Mortimer burbled half into her gin. ‘Isn’t she a very old friend?’ As she waited looking for clues, her mouth remained plastered to the glass, like an active sea-anemone.

He got away. He went out, and down, over the private beach. First there were the trampled succulents, the creeping couch grass, then the sand. There was a bar of blood across the sky, almost parallel with a cramped, grey-skinned sea.

‘Hurtle?’

It was Olivia. She came running out; it looked strange, because of her height, and her reputation, and her now wobbly ankles; besides, she was at the mercy of the rebounding mattress of soft sand. She lumbered on, however, till they both reached where moisture made for firmness.

There she began: ‘Of course I knew. It was the shock, I think — of your dragging me out in public — that forced me to deny it. I knew. I knew! Cosma wrote me a letter with all the more harrowing details of Hero’s life after she left him. He said he held me responsible for most of what had happened — that knowing me and my friends had made her unbalanced.’

‘Did you believe him?’ Because she seemed prepared to.

Olivia could have been counting the ridges in the wet sand. ‘Certainly she loved me.’

‘Certainly?’