Patrick White - The Vivisector

But Hero Pavloussi had been appropriated by the companion on her left: an intellectually aggressive young man from Adelaide, a lecturer in Greek, with a reputation for sodomy. The jealous groom resented his bride’s sodomite.

Boo Davenport was saying: ‘You refuse soup. Fair enough; soup isn’t to everybody’s taste. You turn up your nose at this rather exceptional mousse. How do you exist, darling? On air? Tell me — do — for my figure’s sake!’

Pavloussis shifted position, and sulkily churned out: ‘Noh! I eat. I eat bread. I drink water.’ They had, in fact, brought him what he had asked for: a basket of bread and a jug of water. ‘I eat and drink thus, because I suffer with the intestines.’

His wife looked at him in pain, though he didn’t notice; while the young man from Adelaide was explaining the Oresteia, which to his certain knowledge only he was capable of understanding.

Pavloussis sulkily consented: ‘I will try a small spoonful of your mousse.’

‘But it’s my mousse!’ Mrs Davenport made an amusing pretence of protecting her plate with her arm. ‘Let them give you some of your own.’

Not only his face, his whole body refused it. ‘Mmm! It is good — your mousse.’

It pleased him to lean over her as he ate, an arm extended along the back of her chair. Apart from anything else, the hostess was put out because the cutlery was being disorganized.

Madame Pavloussi wrenched herself away from the Oresteia . ‘You see — Cosmas is so bon enfant he can’t bear to offend her, although he suffers, and will pay for it.’ She laughed in melancholy sympathy.

‘I’m glad you consent to address me. I thought you’d cast me off.’

‘I — had— cast? ’ Though she was feeling her way, it sounded like a whipcrack; she ground her short teeth together. ‘You are too successful.’ She took a great draught of wine. ‘I am afraid.’ She dried her lips methodically. ‘I am not successful at anything — except that I catch a — a good husband. And then it is not I. It is Cosmas. Who begs me till I have to accept.’ Her laughter became reckless.

The lecturer had begun again to whisper from the other side.

‘Yes, yes!’ Madame Pavloussi shrieked back. ‘Athens is dusty. It is so dusty, Cosmas has the servants dust his shoes each house he enters.’ She glanced at her husband. ‘They love him for it. Yes,’ she shrieked, because the lecturer was bombarding her, ‘modern Athens is primitive. You do not have to imply. There is poor sewerage. Every summer we go to an island, and there is even less sewerage on the island.’ She laughed, and nodded her sculptured head.

‘Ken — my husband — has bought a Bentley. He’s terribly thrilled with this new relationship.’ Easing one of her earrings, Elise Trotter looked across at Olivia Davenport.

All the while the stately maids were weaving in and out, thin and middle-aged, bearing dishes. The black Spurgeon drew corks and wrapped the napkin, sometimes ever so slightly bloodied. The maids were so fragile, they suggested white fans, open at some precise degree of mathematical formality.

‘Success in all these young countries is something so concrete. ’ Madame Pavloussi dared the painter to contradict.

‘In any country.’ He had to watch the shipowner, seated the other side of the table, forking up his hostess’s saddle of lamb.

‘Yes?’ Madame Pavloussi, for the first time, seemed prepared to give her right-hand neighbour her full attention.

‘It is too fat, and too pink,’ Pavloussis complained as he gorged himself.

‘You are a bear, Cosma!’ Mrs Davenport laughed; the Greek was certainly very shaggy. ‘I love you!’ Whenever he paused, she fed shreds of lamb into the receptive mouth.

Suddenly Boo remembered and looked across. She was smiling in a leisurely way at Hurtle Duffield.

He was about to tell her friend Hero Pavloussi: ‘I am particularly interested in the shape of your ear-lobes’; when he changed it into: ‘Clever of you not to wear jewellery like these other overloaded women.’

‘I wear this ring which Cosmas has given and wishes me to wear. Otherwise, too many jewels are too heavy — and one may always be forced to part with them too suddenly.’ She ended in a fit of coughing, which brought the tears into her eyes. ‘Oh, dear!’ she said, weakly, smiling, at last.

Nobody had noticed because everybody was engaged: it was what would be referred to as a marvellous party.

When they reached the end of the meal, and the strands of blue smoke were woven into those of light, phrases falling thicker and more broken from out of the general amorphous-ness of conversation, on to the shimmer of underwater jewels and the bird floating on motionless wings, he realized he had never been in love, except with painting. He had been in love, he recognized it, with his own ‘Pythoness’ standing permanently beside the tripod-bidet. This was what made his encounter with Madame Pavloussi — Hero: still a myth rather than a name — of particular significance. He was falling in love with her, not in the usual sense of wanting to sleep with her, to pay court to her with his body, which, after all, wasn’t love. Physical love, as he saw it now, was an exhilarating steeplechase in which almost every rider ended up disqualified for some dishonesty or another. In his aesthetic desires and their consummation he believed himself to be honest; and in his desire to worship and be renewed by someone else’s simplicity of spirit, he was not forsaking the pursuit of truth. So he was falling in love with Hero Pavloussi. It had begun, he thought, as they stood in front of the Pythoness Olivia Davenport owned; when Hero had innocently planted in his mind the seed of an idea: the octopus thing.

Remembering the exact moment was to experience something not unlike the orgasm of sensual love. Then, was he again no more than in love with an endlessly sensuous prospect of paint, to which, in her innocence, she had given him access? And how absolute is simplicity of spirit? He looked at the shipowner’s hairy wrists, one of which lay heavily along the back of their hostess’s chair, while the other was held erect and exposed as Pavloussis smoked, with almost spinsterly precision, one of his own Greek cigarettes.

In the drawing-room afterwards Miss Anderson spilled cherry brandy down her front. ‘Don’t worry!’ she kept assuring those who wanted to lead her out and mop up more thoroughly: ‘ I am not worrying: Mr Duffield was so kind as to lend me his handkerchief. ’ She laughed, and her buck teeth showed, transparent and reckless. She arched her back, as though a man’s arm were pressed in the small of it, herself revolving. He looked at Miss Anderson with different eyes.

The party was sagging under the weight of food and drink. Monaghan the banker had become too congested to keep up the pretence of waking. Mr Trotter — Ken — had cornered the lecturer in Greek and was explaining to him the virtues of his new Bentley; while ladies in groups were inclined to remember girls they had known, now unidentifiably swallowed up in marriage.

‘What is this?’ asked Pavloussis, touching something with a hairy finger.

‘That is a solitaire board,’ Mrs Davenport explained. ‘A game — so-called. Ladies must have played it only to exercise their wrists.’

‘Will you teach me this game?’ The shipowner appeared fascinated by the whorled marbles, which he kept turning in their mahogany sockets.

‘Oh, darling, must we? How trying!’ Olivia protested yawn-fully.

At the same time she made him carry chairs to a table on a little daïs at the farther end of the room, where she proceeded to instruct with exaggerated conscientiousness. They were soon so unnaturally absorbed, their absorption could only have been imposed on them.