Patrick White - The Vivisector

His professional soul disapproving of unorthodox, not to say senile, confidences, the manservant hurried the guest towards the long drawing-room, Emily calling after them in low, penetrating voice: ‘See you later, dear. They say not only the husband’s sick, but the Maltese dog is worse.’

Any further remarks were drowned in the orchestration of lights, crystal, ice, jewellery, and confident voices. As he was led in, the expressions of some of his fellow guests showed they were prepared to carry on as though he hadn’t arrived. One or two, whom he met on and off, looked at him with the eyes of amateur blackmailers. Some he didn’t know pretended that they did, and a lady of Presbyterian cast and an inherited pendant, locked up her long cupboard of a face, and turned her back.

He stood in the arena, his chin sunken, like a bull watching for the first signs of treachery.

Mrs Davenport, whether intentionally or not, must have been the last to take notice, but whipped round when she decided to, and was fully prepared. She was even wearing a crimson dress, a deep crimson, devoted to the lines of her flanks, her thighs, until the knees, where it began to flounce and froth and lead a life of its own: a bit obvious perhaps, in its effect, if it hadn’t been of such a rich, courtly stuff, reminiscent of carnations with a glint of a frost on their rough heads. She came forward, aiming her most stunning smile, trailing invisible streamers of carnation perfume. But the cleverest details of her informally formal toilette were the sleeves: these were pushed back to the elbows, in heavy rucks, and although they must have been worn permanently so, she gave the impression of having that moment deserted the sink, her wrists dripping pearls and diamonds instead of suds.

‘Darling,’ she said, with a distraction she might have been finding delicious, ‘I’m simply at my wits’ end! ’

She bathed her cheek in his, so that all those gathered in the room hushed their mouths for a second in their half-emptied glasses as they meditated on an ambiguous relationship.

‘They haven’t, and probably won’t— come! ’ She performed the passage in a series of little perfumed trills, her mouth melting within a few inches of his own.

‘All the more scoff,’ he said, ‘for those who did.’ Forced by the angle to look down his nose at the convention of her lips, he was afraid he might develop a twitch.

‘Oh, but I was so counting on them!’ Tonight her mèche of natural silver had divided, and was standing erect like a pair of horns above her frown. ‘For your sake,’ she added.

He realized their relationship had subtly altered: Olivia Davenport was hanging distractedly, practically limply, on his arm, looking imploringly up. She could have been imploring him to take over a responsibility, or accept a sacrifice. He wished he had arrived early, as planned, for the couple of stiff whiskies he had been counting on.

Just then the hushed voices of the guests began mounting; there was a pronounced collision of ice-cubes, and all the confusion of announced and important arrival in Mrs Davenport’s off-white drawing-room.

She hurried forward, ululating: ‘Darlings, I’m so relieved! We didn’t realize — that is, we understood Cosma was indisposed.’

A small woman was laughing big. ‘Why should you misunderstand — darling? Cosma is always indisposed. It doesn’t mean he won’t come just because he has a pain in his pinny.’

This echo of an Edwardian nanny cast up on the shores of the Levant started the guests frantically laughing, with the exception of one, at whom the speaker happened to be looking. He was, in fact, too interested to respond.

And immediately she looked away, at her husband, to discover how he had reacted to her frivolous betrayal.

Pavloussis the shipowner was advancing at her heels, an undirected smile guarding his rather fleshy face; his eyelids looked particularly black behind his thick spectacles; his shirt front was studded with black pearls.

From behind the smile he started hoisting himself to the tedious level of communication. ‘It is not I,’ he said, correctly, and coughed, ‘it is our little dog which is sick.’

Because her head was turned in his direction, you couldn’t estimate the degree of his wife’s approval, except that she kept repeating in something like a ventriloquist’s projected voice: ‘Yes, yes! Our little dog. Poor little Flora!’

Her husband continued smiling. He seemed to be holding the smile between himself and the demands of a foreign language; while her attitude suggested she was ready to translate his silences into pronouncements: Cosma Pavloussis, when put to it, would make pronouncements.

Finally she offered her face instead to the assembled guests, and everyone was charmed. It was foreign, but so sweet, several of the ladies were audibly agreed. If they didn’t praise her more highly, it was because they had run through practically the gamut of their vocabulary. Instead they put on their heartiest grins, and might have been preparing to rush in and start fingering the object of their admiration once the formalities were disposed of.

‘Quite a work of art, Duffield. I hope they won’t break her.’ It was Shuard the music critic, whom he knew slightly, and disliked. ‘She’s far too dainty.’

Shuard’s judgement might have done Madame Pavloussi more harm if he didn’t regularly reduce Mozart to ‘daintiness’ in reviewing for the evening press.

The lady of the amethyst pendant and Presbyterian ancestors found the little Greek far too ‘burnt’. What would her skin be like in a few years’ time? A rag, she suggested, moistening her sallow teeth at the prospect.

A mutually appreciative exchange of opinions between Shuard and the Amethyst Pendant gave their neighbour the opportunity to withdraw to the point of isolation he most enjoyed in crowds, and from which he could glut himself on Madame Pavloussi.

She was certainly small: a figurine burnt to an orange-brown, or terra-cotta. What saved her from exquisiteness or the excessively sweet, were the modelling and carriage of her head: the head sat rather oddly on the body, as though by some special act of grace, and she wouldn’t be surprised to have it fall. The eyelids intensified her expression of fatality, and the disbelieving smile with which she rewarded those she found herself amongst.

As she was led, her dress moved with the liquid action of purest, subtlest silk, its infinitesimal bronze flutings very slightly opening on tones of turquoise and verdigris. Again, her miraculous dress was worn with an odd air, not of humility — fatality. It was surprising that, in shaking hands, she appeared to be grasping a tennis racket. Such an incongruous show of strength could have been part of a game she had specially learnt for Anglo-Saxons. Her other, passive, hand she carried mostly palm-upward, which made you wonder if Madame Pavloussi wasn’t in some way deformed; till in a spontaneous gesture she put the hand to her hair, and for the moment was unable to hide an enormous pearl in a nest of diamonds. At once she returned her hand, her arm, to their original cramped position, as though the ring was too heavy, possibly also something she didn’t care for, and she would rather lay down what fate was making her carry.

While Mrs Davenport was showing off her jewel of a friend, the husband was walking up and down on an independent trajectory. Sometimes he paused to look at a painting, or take up an object of virtu, or glance at a human face, without ever really emerging from the legend of his wealth. Those who were forced to pass him lowered their heads and walked softer, for fear of impinging on a cultivated unreality; while his smile of sickly, almost do dering, benevolence was aimed at no one in particular. Though older than his wife he was not yet old, nor even elderly, but seemed already to be rehearsing the role of an old man with a beautiful character.