Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘Perhaps I’ll give you the painting — when I’ve finished with it; and after we know all about each other.’ A kind of love token.

As they stood on the landing his hands were outspread to test whether she was prepared to accept his advance.

But she laughed and said: ‘The thought of knowing everything about anybody gives me the horrors!’

He could only see her back as she was walking ahead of him down the stairs. She went buoyantly enough, considering the depths to which he had proposed they should plunge together.

‘Twice I’ve found out all there is to know about a person,’ she said in an almost jaunty voice. ‘I haven’t the courage to face it again. I thought I’d made that clear in the beginning.’

She had taken such precautions to protect herself against the future, he was tempted to push her down those steep stairs; but Olivia Davenport might have survived.

In the stuffy living-room below, with its islands of bourgeois furniture, the climate was more temperate.

‘Oh, dear,’ she twittered, ‘you’ve made me keep my hairdresser waiting. You don’t realize, darling, what you’ve let me in for.’

Since she had returned to the surface, recovered her handbag, and could repair the damage to herself, she was full of the affectations and inflections of the class to which he had been given the opportunity of belonging.

She was mumbling both her lipstick and her words: ‘. . must keep in touch. . to meet my friends. . some of them could be useful to you, Hurtle darling. . mm mm. . though I don’t want to coerce you, you know.’

The point of the crimson lipstick withdrew— click —into its gold sheath. She smiled at him out of her slick mouth. Her grey eyes had never looked so gravely brilliant and detached.

‘There are two people in particular I’d like you to meet: two of my dearest closest friends.’

He couldn’t have felt less interested. ‘Are they from the old days?’ he asked apathetically. ‘Anybody I used to know? Or might have heard of?’

‘No. They’re comparatively recent — quite recent, in fact. They’re visiting Australia.’

He was reminded of Maman, who had never been able to distinguish between acquaintances and friends, or whose friends were all acquaintances.

‘Which sex?’ he asked with increasing disinterest.

‘One of each.’ Olivia Davenport composed a dimple in the right corner of her mouth: it made her long face look slightly depraved.

Moving towards the door she launched forth on what could have been a rehearsed leavetaking. ‘At the risk of embarrassing, I shall thank you for an illuminating experience. Disturbing, too — horribly.’ She turned in the hall for not longer than an instant. ‘Are you embarrassed?’ she rattled on, showing him the enamelled whites of her eyes. ‘I don’t believe you are: you’re too vain, and enjoy what you do to people.’

An old bamboo hatstand threatened to topple as she brushed past it with a little less than her usual grace.

Was he vain? He was tired. He was glad he would soon be alone with his paintings. He had never thought of himself as vain.

Whether it was true or not, he’d better put on a smile while dragging the door open for her; but he could feel the smile thinning into a simper as he gurgled and glugged inanely in the idiom used by the Davenport world: ‘Bye bye Boo dear see you next time watch where you’re going Boo that’s where the dogs do it,’ his mouth stretched like a piece of elastic about to perish: when he wasn’t old, any more than vain.

The chauffeur, a youngish man with the servile good looks not uncommon to his occupation, shut her in. Mrs Davenport arranged herself in a curved position. As she was driven away from the slum in which she had been visiting, she made a sign with her bag from the other side of the glass. She wore the expression of having accomplished something, but none the less she felt relieved now that it was over: she was probably dying for the attentions of the hairdresser’s plump white pansy hands.

Duffield slammed the door after realizing he had been standing there longer than was necessary.

From now on Olivia invited him, and he went to her house on several occasions, partly out of curiosity, and partly to exorcize staleness when it threatened his relationship with his work. He soon realized that to accept her invitations was to experience the refinements of boredom, though Olivia herself never failed to give a technically accomplished performance. She was expert at springing little surprises: like a new jewel, specially designed by Cartier or Bulgari; or a visiting professor of Chinese. She had the reputation of being educated, and certainly she had amassed an exotic litter of knowledge. He had overheard her remark to a distinguished Orientalist: ‘I can’t say I know Chinese, but confess to four hundred characters,’ while allowing the scholar to take her in to dinner. Perhaps her four hundred characters got her by, with the help of Schiaparelli and a cabochon ruby or two.

Mrs Davenport’s friends could be divided roughtly into three categories. There were the hectic, iridescent, frittering fly-by-nights. Olivia had a weakness for the rag bag, and these were her collection of gay snippets: gin would never drown them, nor benzedrine overcome their colds, only make them more endemic. The fritterers held their drinks rather high and downed them quickly. They appeared to know everybody, but everybody: their conversation was a perpetual tip-and-run.

Then there was the old, slow, swollen-veined, heavily tactical train of tortoises, moving their arthritic necks in the direction of the conversation they were making: some of them relatives — revered, theoretically loved — old barristers, doctors, heaviest of all, the graziers, and old lipstuck ladies who forgot what they had begun to tell, but continued bravely throwing in Galsworthy, Asprey and Our Pioneer Families. All of them tortoises, when not elephants, sometimes a stiff flamingo, but old: some of them on sticks, some with signet rings eating into skin-cancered hands. All had known her so long, they enjoyed the privilege of referring to their hostess as ‘Boo’: she might have been hundreds-and-thousands, the way they sprinkled their anecdotes with her name.

Finally, there were the foreigners. Olivia adored consuls, and the English she had met on board ship or in hotels at Cannes or St Moritz. She was most nearly taken down, but never quite, by an English accent. She loved to speak French with the Italians, and Chinese with the Japanese, and they seemed to understand one another.

How had she got Chinese? He must remember to ask her on some private occasion, though Olivia wouldn’t always tell.

At one of her parties she came up to him, linked arms, trickling diamonds over his sleeve, and casually mentioned: ‘I thought I had something of interest for you, but they couldn’t stay. He isn’t at all well . He suffers from a gall -bladder, or something.’

‘Who?’

‘But, darling,’ she said, in the amusing-peevish voice she sometimes affected at parties, ‘my Greeks — the Pavloussis. I never stop telling you. He owns ships. Disgustingly rich. He’s thinking of starting a passenger-cargo line between here and Europe.’

She pronounced ‘Europe’ as though tasting her own party for a flavour she feared it might lack. She narrowed her eyes, and dared him to reject a mystique of worldliness she wanted him to believe in. He even suspected that if he hadn’t been present and her guests demanded appeasement, she would have denied her faith in the paintings: such was her appetite for superficiality and approval. His was nil; though he took them from time to time in homeopathic doses, not altogether hopefully, as a cure for accidie.