Patrick White - The Vivisector

Shuard, who was ready to set up as an authority on almost anything, assured her that the little jewelled claws which held the place cards were ‘genuine Faubourg’.

The two late arrivals couldn’t take an interest in the cards as their fate was already known to them.

Madame Pavloussi gestured at her husband in a far corner. He was still wearing the abstracted smile, which might or might not have acknowledged his wife’s sign. It was more likely directed at the whole and nothing of the room, while Monaghan the banker talked on at him. After tempting the shipowner to express his views on the recent rise to power of the German National Socialists, the banker gave up, and switched to yachts. Pavloussis seemed to remain untouched.

‘You see, your husband was in no need of your protection.’

‘No,’ she agreed vaguely.

Either she was disappointed, or else her gaffe over the subject of the painting had made her shy; if it hadn’t been for their hostess’ decree she might have moved away.

The shipowner had an enormous nose, like a ridge of grey pumice, or lava; and brilliantine failed to remove a texture of coral hummocks from his hair. As the banker’s yachts began foundering, Pavloussis spoke through his smile, in a voice unperturbed by its own foreignness or irrelevance.

‘My pressing problem at present is cats. I have four of them. I no longer love my cats, which are selfish and unlovable. I must only find how far I am morally obliged to them. Can you advise me, please, Mr Monragan?’

The banker turned a congested red, and laughed too loud at the foreign joke; while Madame Pavloussi murmured to herself: ‘Yes, yes, the poor cats.’

Although several of the others had joined in the laughter the situation was becoming too strange; on the whole the guests were beginning to look uneasy and unshepherded.

‘It would be far more sensible if everyone sat down.’ The headmistress was coming into her own. ‘Boo has been called away for a little to attend to some domestic matter.’

The company did as told: most of them appeared relieved to have returned temporarily to school.

‘Isn’t it a pretty table?’ continued the headmistress, whose name was Miss Anderson. ‘Boo was always original; but the bird, I remember — the bird belonged to Constance — Mrs Hollingrake.’

Association with an important family and knowledge of its history made Miss Anderson proud. The bird was dutifully admired, except by the banker, who scowled at it: who ever heard of a glass bird, standing amongst a litter of rock, in a dish of water, in the middle of a dining-table!

The headmistress couldn’t resist glancing in a certain direction. ‘I’m sure Mr Duffield must appreciate the arrangement: it’s so artistic.’ Then she burned, all along her downy lower jaw.

No doubt she detested his paintings, and probably this was as close as her uprightness would ever let her come to malice.

But the crystal bird in the centre of the table, to which she would have drawn his attention, if it hadn’t already been drawn, seemed to him one of the happiest surprises Olivia had ever sprung. Perched on a crag of rose-quartz, its wings outspread above the crackled basin of shallow water, in which glimmered slivers of amethyst and a cluster of moss agates, the crystal bird could have been contemplating flight in the direction of Hero Pavloussi seated immediately opposite.

‘Right, Miss Anderson,’ he called back to the headmistress. ‘We can go some of the way together.’

Nervousness, or a wish to interpret subtleties, made them laugh at his flat and fatuous repartee. Miss Anderson looked mollified.

Under cover of their approval he glanced at Madame Pavloussi to see what impression Olivia’s conceit had made. He caught what might have been the last refractions of a childlike pleasure in the pretty-coloured stones before she lowered her eyes. She sat rather glumly looking at her own hands, her chin drawn in as though suffering from indigestion, or a surfeit of English.

At that moment Spurgeon threw the door open, and Mrs Davenport returned to her party, as from a recent triumph. A slight glitter in the whites of her eyes, perhaps from a snifter of gin en route to the dining-room, increased her dash and rakish-ness. Sitting down at the table, she destroyed the castle in lace and linen waiting in her place. The rucked-up sleeves of the carnation dress had grown positively businesslike.

‘I’ve discovered tonight that I’m both a locksmith and a plumber.’ Then she added, looking at him across the table: ‘But there won’t be any prawn cutlets.’ Her face was so expressive of radiant fulfilment it must have confirmed for some of those present that the painter was her lover.

He would have liked to watch Hero Pavloussi for her reactions to Olivia’s return, but his right-hand neighbour began to break down the barrier which, till now, he had kept between them.

She worked with skill and confidence. ‘Since we first met, Mr Duffield, in this house, I’ve bought two of your paintings.’

He couldn’t remember the woman and failed to read her name on the card.

‘Which?’ he asked: when his paintings became merchandise he could only practise resignation if he wasn’t stung to ribaldry.

She mentioned an early work — he could just visualize it — and one sold more recently to pay a heavy bill at the tailor’s.

The woman’s appearance gave no clue to a former meeting. She was wearing an elaborate head-dress of rigidly set toffee curls. Her face was square-cut, not exactly coarse: it had been too carefully worked on; the throat thick and rather muscular; her jewels, though unremarkable, represented a solid investment.

‘Who sold you the paintings?’ he asked, because it was his turn.

She mentioned a Syro-Maltese who passed for French, flickering her silver-green eyelids, composing her orange mouth without disguising her satisfaction.

‘Diacono? Then he must have stung you!’

‘Oh, don’t say that!’ the woman protested in mock despair. ‘I was so anxious to own a Duffield; and you make it too difficult for us to collect you.’ Even when admitting her weaknesses, she gargled her words so effortlessly she must have been to a very good teacher.

He grunted. ‘I don’t remember your name,’ he admitted.

‘Elise Trotter.’ She dipped her smeared eyelids.

Of course — Mrs Trotter! The claret ‘birthmark’ no longer rose up the muscular throat to plaster itself on the square-cut face. He laughed with genuine pleasure, almost affection, but could see she suspected his laughter. She grew opaque as she made a pass at the kind of soup which satisfies nobody, except possibly the cook who has sweated to clarify a convention rather than a soup.

‘Wasn’t there a crèche? ’ he asked.

‘Fancy your remembering!’ Elise failed to restrain Mrs Trotter’s gush of pleasure, and only now the claret birthmark began clothing the heavy face.

Almost at once she recovered her self-possession and confided very earnestly: ‘I love to do something for the children. It’s so rewarding. ’ She turned her social conscience towards him. ‘As a matter of fact,’ she continued, ‘I want to persuade Olivia — she’s so generous of her time — to visit the crèche on Mothers’ Afternoon. ’

‘Mightn’t it start a revolution?’

‘Oh, no! Definitely no!’ Mrs Trotter bit into her theme with conviction. ‘Poor people only hate the rich politically — in the abstract, as it were.’ Here she lowered her artistic eyelids. ‘They adore to see them in their clothes and cars.’

He felt guilty for his own ambiguous allegiances, and would have liked to look towards the one who had been given him, if not as his mistress, his spiritual bride. Wasn’t the crystal bird poised in flight towards the chosen couple?