Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘The money’s all there.’ Mrs Halliday spoke as one who had seen the bank statements. ‘She wisely kept her hand on the purse.’

Mrs Horsfall laughed approvingly, and sank her chin.

‘They say there was another husband — a Mr Lopez,’ Mrs Trotter almost whispered.

‘Oh, that!’ Mrs Halliday threw Lopez away. ‘That was something brief and mysterious. In Peru, wasn’t it, Jo? Nobody knows, and nobody asks.’

‘She must be awfully unhappy,’ Mrs Trotter said, and her claret eyelids thickened.

‘I’m sure not,’ said Jo Horsfall.

Mrs Trotter opened her handbag and shut it. ‘They say she’s a nymphomaniac — and a nymphomaniac can only be unhappy.’

‘What? Olivia?’ Mrs Horsfall roared, Mrs Halliday shrieked, and a pair of bulbuls bathing in a giant clamshell on the lawn flitted into a pomegranate tree, where they sat shaking their shocked top-knots.

When Mrs Halliday had subsided, she said on the level: ‘One very good authority claims that Olivia’s a lesbian.’

‘A what?’ Mrs Trotter asked.

‘Rot, Moira!’ Mrs Horsfall drew down the corners of her mouth. ‘A girl I know put the acid on her, and it didn’t work.’

All three suddenly icily remembered the man.

‘Is Olivia an old friend?’ Mrs Halliday appealed, looking at him through her lattice.

‘I’ve never met her.’

Was it believable? they considered in silence.

‘I didn’t catch your name,’ Mrs Halliday twittered amusingly. ‘Emily does mumble so.’

‘Duffield.’

‘Oh, Ohhh? Neoh! Not the artist — the painter? Duf -field!’

Thus bombarded he could only hang his head while the room reverberated.

‘I adore paintings,’ Mrs Trotter said as she had been taught. ‘I’m going to get one — when we’ve properly settled in.’

Mrs Halliday and Mrs Horsfall were left fishing for their compacts.

Beyond the garden the sea was dying. There was no indication how the silence might have ended if the door hadn’t opened. Someone, their hostess apparently, came in.

‘I’m so terribly sorry— every body!’ She held out her long hands so that the palms were helplessly exposed at the ends of her arms.

In her apology she included the man who happened, incidentally, to be there. She kissed all the ladies, reviving Mrs Trotter’s claret birthmark; the man she embraced with her most candid smile.

Mrs Davenport was wearing a suit of white pyjamas, tout simple —or not so simple: it was too elaborately subtle; whereas the natural white streak in her brilliantly black hair looked shamelessly artificial. While the three visiting ladies chattered against one another in the same high social key: of their regrets for their hostess’ neglect, of the races and the cricket, of Maggie Purser, Mrs Davenport came close up to him and said in a very confidential tone: ‘Aren’t you drinking, Hurtle Duffield?’

He said: ‘No, thank you,’ prim for him.

Then, because she remained so cool, particularly her eyes, which were of a clear, unperturbed grey, he blurted quickly, clumsily: ‘On the other hand, give me a gin and water. A long gin — with not much water,’ anticipating the first draught, the sweet, fumigating fumes.

He intended to stay where he was, but found himself collaborating with his hostess amongst the ice and crystal. He dropped several cubes of ice, and would have begun grovelling after them.

‘Leave it!’ she ordered, kicking out with a gold sandal.

The ice shot under the table.

Her technique was so assured she must have acquired it at an early age. She took it all for granted, with a touch of contempt for what her guest must inwardly despise; while the ladies continued intoning in the background.

‘Oh, darling. .’

‘No, darling. .’

‘. . all the helpers would be enchanted, and the babies too, if you would visit, Mrs Davenport, any afternoon. .’

The nymphomaniac, or lesbian, remained superbly cold: probably frigid enough to have killed off her brace of husbands.

‘I must apologize particularly,’ she confessed to her male visitor.

‘It isn’t what I expected!’ But he laughed as the sweet gust of gin explored his skull and eased him out.

‘Nor did I expect.’ She added one of her brilliant smiles. ‘You didn’t answer my letter.’

Downing the rest of the gin he couldn’t see the point.

‘Mus go mus go darling!’ Mrs Halliday was shrieking, blinking through her latticed brim.

‘Mus go mus go you beastly old Oliviur!’ Mrs Horsfall was tightening her silver-studded belt.

Mrs Trotter said: ‘Mr Trotter — my husband — and I — would be most honoured, Mrs Davenport, if we could entertain you one evening — to dinner, ’ she managed to remember.

Olivia Davenport, with her long crimson fingernails and one rope of knotted pearls, was so amused by it all as she handed them over to Emily. ‘’Bye, darlings!’ she screeched according to convention.

Almost before the maid had whisked them off the scene Mrs Davenport returned very gravely into her other self. She was certainly a work of art, but not his, or not at the moment: he saw her as a too facile van Dongen.

While swilling her gin, his memory kept trying to unravel something about her. From the expression of her eyes she might have wanted to assist.

She was sucking on her knot of pearls, when suddenly she leaned forward, and said: ‘Boo Hollingrake.’

‘But your eyes were brown.’

‘Grey. One thing you can’t change is eyes.’

Yet he distinctly remembered a brown, smudged, steamy beauty in the perforated shade of the Monstera deliciosa at the bottom of the stone steps.

‘I can see you most clearly,’ he said, because the other was too private a vision, ‘in the William Street post office, on a rainy morning. There’s no reason why I should remember you so vividly on that occasion. You’d come there to post a letter. You were looking sad — and mysterious. Your eyes must have been grey, if you say they were. I was buying stamps for my — for Freda Courtney.’

Boo Hollingrake rejected her pearls finally; she shook her head. ‘I’m sorry I’ve forgotten all about it — if it was of any importance to you. Girls of a certain age are inclined to look sad and mysterious, especially on wet mornings. I think they feel they must make amends in some way for their own dullness.’ Her delivery was crisp, her glance ironic.

He wondered whether she had also forgotten their more spontaneous encounter. There was no sign that she remembered how frenziedly her thighs had worked; of course she could never have been aware, not even at the moment itself, of the stickiness in his underpants.

Olivia Boo Hollingrake Lopez Davenport got up, feeling her way back into the sandals she had slipped off. ‘I expect you’ll want me to show you the paintings.’

She said it so casually the paintings were probably her greatest interest. She introduced him to the Braque, the Picasso, the Max Ernst, several Klees, and others, and others. He was becoming a little sour, and was glad he could disguise it under gin.

‘How is it,’ he asked, ‘I never heard your real, your baptismal name?’

She made a deliberately stylized grimace. ‘I loathed it, till I realized it was something I was stuck with, and that I’d better make the most of it.’

Leading him from one painting to the next, Olivia Davenport reminded him of certain women introducing men you suspect of having been their lovers. She was so cool and practised: he could feel his jealousy increasing. He wondered about his own miserable works: whether she had shoved them in the laundry, or even whether she still owned them. Rich women who had bought cheap, sometimes couldn’t resist showing they knew how to sell better.