Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘We must find Rhoda,’ Boo had decided dreamily. ‘I feel she’d do both of us good.’

On his hands and knees amongst the fluff and splinters as he searched for the evasive brush he couldn’t make sense of any such sentiments.

‘How — do us good? Rhoda was never a saint.’

‘She’s your sister.’

‘Not even that. She’s a malicious hunchback, if we have to admit the truth.’

‘We both loved her.’

‘Oh, balls!’

Boo Hollingrake didn’t hear, but Olivia Davenport launched herself in the higher key she favoured for social intercourse: ‘I must produce my friends the Pavloussis. I shall give a formal party — a dinner — so that the gall-bladder can’t escape: provided he accepts in the first place; but she’ll make him.’ Olivia laughed for her strategy. ‘Cosma, poor darling, is a bit of a bore. I adore him. And Hero is doing him an honour by being his wife. I love her.’

‘Who?’

‘Hero. They pronounce it differently.’

He had found his brush. ‘Why do I have to meet these Greeks?’

‘Because I’d like to think I’ve contributed something, if not to your happiness, to your work.’

After that he let her out. They seemed agreed nothing further could be accomplished for the moment.

It was some time before Mrs Davenport was able to compose her dinner party, because the Pavloussis were in Tahiti, and at one point it looked as though they might return to Athens from there, through Panama. Pavloussis was not only hypochondriac, he was so enormously rich he could afford to change his mind without warning and for no very convincing reason: except that now he had more or less concluded his business in Australia; his representatives could dispose of the rented house and their two cars, and arrange for the dog, cats, and aviaries to follow them to Greece. (All these animal and bird possessions, together with a little part-aboriginal girl, had been acquired by the Pavloussis since their arrival in Sydney.)

Mrs Davenport sent Duffield written messages every other day to keep him in touch with the Pavloussis situation. The notes were delivered by the chauffeur in one or other of the Davenport limousines, together with jars of marrons glacés, tins of grouse, and more appropriately, Hymettus honey. Often he didn’t read the letters; but it would have been foolish to waste the food. Particularly he enjoyed the honey: in one tin there was the corpse of an imprisoned bee, which he ate as an experiment, but forgot to notice whether the bee itself tasted any different from the honey which had both nourished and killed; he was too engrossed in a drawing he was making, in which twin eyeballs opened into avenues of experience.

He did read Olivia’s crucial note, because he was forced to make use of it; he had run out of paper in the dunny at the back.

. . if you write down 28th April, Hurtle: the Pavloussis will dine with me that night, and are already looking forward to their meeting with you.

Cosma has been soi-disant ill, on a diet of toast and Vichy at Papeete. Rather than attempt the long journey through the Canal, he will return to Sydney to consult a Jewish doctor who knows his peculiarities. (Cosma insists that doctors must have a dash of Jewish.) I do hope you will like Cosma. He is, I must admit, a funny old koala with black eyelids, which must have grown blacker from Vichy, and hypochondria, and toast.

I think it is my darling Hero who has forced him to listen to reason. I long to see her. She has fallen in love with Australia. However, she too has her problems: her Maltese dog is sick; then there is this little aborigine — Soso they call her, though her name is Alice, whom Cosma insisted on more or less adopting for human reasons. You will adore Hero.

I have not yet decided whom to ask on the night: I want it to be intimate and sympathique . I want us to remember it.

I have sold the Léger, unashamedly, to somebody who doesn’t know it’s a bad one. Why not, if he’s happy? Really that Léger was the great mistake of my life; that is what comes of relying on agents and dealers instead of giving the matter the benefit of one’s own judgement.

Dearest Hurtle, you should pat me on the head for not disturbing you at your work.

In haste,

I love you!

boo

Shall engage the Italian woman for prawn cutlets 28th as you so adore the ones she does.

When he had read the letter, he wiped himself with it, not from malice, but because there was no other way out.

The dunny at the back, though pretty thoroughly trussed with bignonia, enticed the morning sun through its open door. In this shrine to light it pleased him to sit and discover fresh forms amongst the flaking whitewash, to externalize his thoughts in pencilled images, some of these as blatant as a deliberate fart, some so tentative and personal he wouldn’t have trusted them to other eyes. Once he had recorded:

God the Vivisector

God the Artist

God

surrounding with thoughtful piecrust the statement he had never succeeded in completing. On the whole it didn’t disturb him not to know what he believed in — beyond his own powers, the unalterable landscape of childhood, and the revelations of light.

It surprised him to find he had scribbled on a patch of whitewash after reading Olivia Davenport’s informative letter: ‘My Maltese dog is sick. .’

Out of respect for Olivia’s sense of ritual he had taken his dinner-jacket to the cleaner, and would smell of it. Not that it mattered. It was more serious when the cleaner’s tag caught in the zipper, and he wasted half an hour freeing himself. So he was late reaching the house, when he had planned to arrive in good time, even before the hostess had come down, while the canvas was still, so to speak, virgin. On such occasions he liked to help himself to a couple of stiff ones, after which his body and mind became supple enough to cope with the hazards of composition; for experience had taught him that all parties are partly your responsibility, the horrors more so than the triumphs.

On the occasion of Mrs Davenport’s intimate dinner for her Greek friends her house was splendidly floodlit. No crevice of it was exposed to the dangers of mystery. Its extra-solid white-drenched mass and the increased formality of the balustrades, shaven lawns and stereoscopic trees seemed to proclaim that the material world is the one and only. If doubts entered in, they were encouraged by the less than solid wall of bamboos to the west. Nothing could be done about the bamboos: they looked and sounded tattered; nor the sea beyond, which slithered shapelessly, in deep blue, to downright black, coils.

It would have been a chilly night, at least for the time of year, without that slight friction of excitement, of cars arriving and driven away, and activity in the kitchen wing: a sound of flung pans, almost of clashing cymbals, as the voice of an impeccable servant, dropping the accent she had caught from the mistress, accused somebody else of buggering up the charlotte russe.

A manservant he hadn’t seen before, but who claimed to recognize him, received Mr Duffield at the front door with the virtuoso flourishes of the professionally obsequious.

The man asked: ‘Will you be requiring anything, Mr Duffield, from the pockets?’ as he peeled the overcoat off its owner’s back.

In the hall, as though she had been waiting for her favourite guest, old Emily, half member of the family, half honorary nuisance, came creaking forward in her fresh starch.

‘Thought you was letting us down,’ she hissed, her fingers pinching at his sleeve. ‘The Greek gentleman is sick. And She won’t come without. Poor Miss Boo! Fourteen guests on ’er hands! I tell ’er a bricklayer sees more for ’is pains than a fashionable lady.’