Patrick White - The Vivisector

Because he hadn’t expressed regret for her vanished Greeks, Boo Davenport said: ‘I’m afraid we bore you, Hurtle. We’re not clever enough.’ She deliberately used the word ‘clever’, which he had discovered was charged with mock-innocent chic for members of her clan. Annoyance wouldn’t allow her to lay claim to one grain of intellect; she let it be understood she shared the native idiocy of her childhood companions and approving elders, who otherwise might have criticized her relationship with the painter as ‘perverse’: which, no doubt, it was.

He couldn’t help laughing, and she couldn’t help asking: ‘What are you laughing at?’ Her irritation increased when he began silently stroking her back as they stood facing the roomful of guests.

In his gyrations, he had noticed the naked back decorated with a number of little rosy bows, or lovers’ knots, or no — bite marks.

‘Have you a maid who dislikes you too much to protect you?’ he whispered as he accepted one of the ritual kisses she was moved to dispense.

‘Why?’ she asked, swallowing her breath abruptly.

She began touching her thighs, feeling her wrists, glancing down her cleavage.

‘There’s Gladswood,’ she admitted. ‘She’s given notice, just when I was on the point of asking her to leave.’

Shortly after, she found an excuse for withdrawing from her guests, and returned draped in a lace shawl, so ostentatiously modest it went with nothing about her.

‘It belonged to a great-aunt,’ she told him. ‘I believe she was married in it.’ The present wearer’s attempt at pious serenity still didn’t make the shawl hers.

‘I know you’re accusing me,’ she said in a moment they had to themselves, ‘and one day I’ll explain.’

While recognizing in Olivia Davenport a core he desired to possess, and which she was apparently determined he shouldn’t, he escaped from her parties with a sense of relief: at least the purpose of his going there. In the white hours of morning, sticky with dew and Moreton Bay fig, his head was clear as he followed the silver tramline on foot, round the scalloped bays, then up the hill to his own darkness, with its clutter of partly-developed ideas and smells of dust and cold fat. Upstairs, he would start walking from room to room, dragging the long flex behind him, hanging the electric pear above half-finished paintings which only now revealed themselves.

On one occasion, however, the electric moment occurred in Mrs Davenport’s ‘salon’. It was one of the flatter evenings, after supper: collars were wilting on male necks; ladies were gazing out across the water with a nostalgia born of night and perspiration; when a young girl, white as lard, of turnip forms, some protégée or relative the hostess hadn’t considered important enough to introduce, fell into an armchair, turned up her eyes, opened her mouth, and began to moan, then laugh, sob, thump and heave, rolling her white eyeballs, thrashing the upholstery with the calves hockey had given her.

There was considerable commotion. Some of the guests, determined that nothing was happening, walked stiffly away, engaged in what looked like a conversation too grave to be interrupted. Others, younger, drunker, dragged one another into neighbouring rooms, from which their partly-suppressed giggles burst in polyphonic spurts round the convulsive solo of the anonymous virtuoso.

‘Won’t somebody do something?’ hissed one of the aged tortoise-ladies out of her cuirass of lamé and sapphires, though an energetic barrister had dashed to the telephone and rung almost every doctor in town: all of whom were socially engaged.

Actually the old lady was looking, as she spoke, at the painter who happened to be standing beside her. Her sparkling claws might at any moment fasten themselves in his arm.

‘It’s frightful!’ she rasped. ‘Do look! She’s having a kind of fit. So dreadful for the parents: an epileptic on their hands!’

It was frightful; so much so, he couldn’t stop looking at it: the girl tossing and lowing, sometimes the colour of her own cerise taffeta, sometimes washed white, or drenched with a sickly plant-green.

Her mother in black, her jet trembling in a vertigo of anguish or resentment, was kneeling beside her. ‘Tell me, darling,’ she commanded, ‘what is it? Baby? What is it you want? Or what do I do to you? Only tell me — my only interest is your happiness. Oh! Oh, Muriel! ’

The mother’s words acted like a blow: the girl gulped; then she threw back her head and stuck out her cerise tongue, before lolling forward again, rolling her china eyeballs.

For an instant the possessed one glanced at the only other of her kind, and they were swept up, and united by sheet lightning, as they could never have been on the accepted plane.

She looked at him, and he saw past her green-sickness and menstrual torments into the hazy future of a bungled marriage and hushed-up attempt at suicide. If his had been the right knife, she might have planted it there and then in her turnip flesh, in front of an audience, and risen laughing from the death which obsessed her.

Instead she lolled and dry-retched.

Fortunately at that moment the hostess returned from supervising a detail of her party somewhere else in the house. She saw at once, and went, her flanks rippling with scales of light, and took a crystal jug, and dashed its contents of iced water into the girl’s face. (The chunks of ice were, probably, not the least of the cure.)

‘There — you see — hysteria!’ She spoke with authority, and everybody knew Mrs Davenport was always right.

Under the shock of the iced water, and blows from the ice-cubes, the girl’s face certainly returned to its natural shape. Her neck looked so ashamed. The cerise dress had turned almost purple where the water had soaked in. She sat staring in horror at what were her own nipples exposed by the clinging disaster of a dress; till a cluster of kindly ladies led the mother and daughter out: to try to restore their self-possession.

Mrs Davenport rang and asked for Emily to be sent. While less noticeable on state occasions, the parlourmaid’s rank wasn’t diminished: she was older, and had been there longer than the more athletic, operative servants. Now she advanced, in blancoed shoes, over the dark mirrors of floors; tonight her self-importance had obviously increased.

‘Tell Turner, Emily’—Mrs Davenport pretended to order, when she was in fact conferring—‘tell him to run them home in the car.’

Emily appeared discreetly shocked. ‘ Which car, Miss Boo?’

Mrs Davenport frowned at the implication that she was ignorant of protocol; but Emily had been with them so long: as far back as a grandmother.

‘Well, not the Rolls — naturally,’ said the mistress. ‘Mrs Devereux wouldn’t want to be made conspicuous. Something — something homely: the Austin, say.’

Emily looked appeased; while Mrs Davenport tore the head of a tiger-lily which was growing brown.

The muted guests, who had been listening, began making their excuses; though it was not the end of the party, some had suffered a genuine shock; and the most brazen of gigglers felt they wanted to remove themselves, to be able to pull out all the stops. There was a constant sound of doors, cars, feet, lavatory cisterns. Two or three promising young men who lived in boarding houses, slipped into the dining-room to fill with lobster salad the strong manilla envelopes they had brought for that purpose.

‘You’re not leaving, Hurtle?’ Mrs Davenport complained.

Even if she had been offering herself, he wouldn’t have wanted her tonight: he was too engrossed in his vision of sheet lightning.

She followed him into the hall. ‘You don’t think I was brutal, do you?’