Patrick White - The Vivisector

She broke off to look over her shoulder. ‘I am happy,’ she said.

‘Then why are you disturbed, Hero?’

‘I! Why I am disturbed —Mr Duffield? Oh, well! Anyone who breathes, anyone who exists, is disturbed. But I am not disturbed . Actually — I will tell you something: I was not healed, not completely, till Cosmas took me to Perialos. That is an island off the Asia Minor coast. It is an island of saints and miracles. Are you religious?’

‘No.’

‘I am not. But you don’t have to scratch a Greek very deep to find that he is. Even my sister Elly, who is a practising humanist, who married a schoolteacher — another peasant — and lives in a village — to demonstrate her faith in mankind, Elly will go so far as admitting she is a Byzantine. Because, you see, the faces of the people — you only have to look at the icons — are still so close to the saints. I, on the other hand, cannot admit to faith if God allows the Turks to put out a man’s eyes and crucify him on his church door.’

He might have questioned her logic, but asked instead: ‘What happened at Perialos?’

She was so interrupted they found themselves listening to the sea.

‘Nothing,’ she said at last. ‘Or nothing I can tell you. It was in the air.’

He heard his own frustrated breathing on being forced to withdraw from the experience she was unwilling to share.

‘What time is it?’ she asked, looking at a watch she wasn’t wearing. ‘Shouldn’t we be going back inside the house? It is so cold. Feel my arm,’ she chattered and laughed.

He did as he was invited, and felt the rather chill goose-pimples on what had been assured pottery; her grainy flesh made him regretful for the pure soul of his invention.

She linked her arm to his, and turned him round, and said in simple anticipation: ‘Cosmas will bring you to Greece. We must take you to Perialos. I have not dared visit it again till now.’ Her pure joy reinstated her in his opinion.

They walked towards the terrace, the wind off the sea bashing at them; and the shipowner came out of the house, and called: ‘I have learnt the game!’

When they met, he kissed his wife gingerly. ‘You are cold — darling.’ (From time to time the words either of them used in the foreign language came out tentatively, as though they suspected they might be borrowing something which didn’t suit their personal vocabulary.)

‘No, darling,’ she answered, encouraging him. ‘I am not cold.’

‘But you feel cold.’

‘Truly I’m not.’ Then she added: ‘Women can bear more than men.’ She looked towards her fellow guest. ‘Mr Duffield must have suffered many pains tonight listening to my life history.’

‘Oh!’ The shipowner cleared the phlegm from his throat, but remembered not to spit. ‘You’ve been trying that out on him, have you?’

Arm in arm, the Greeks laughed together, perhaps collusively.

When they went in the party had almost collapsed. Some of the guests had already left; others were standing about in their coats listening to an endless anecdote one of them had started, their eyes grateful for anything which might delay their departure. Elderly faces admitted their age; younger ones no longer attempted to disguise their youth; even the splendid house looked more human for an evening’s litter. Emily’s blancoed shoes crunched over broken glass as she went punching the cushions and complaining about cigars. Her face was the colour of old age, and wore the superior, peevish expression of aged servants who have chosen to stay up longer than they are expected to.

While he was clumsily but comfortably getting into his coat without assistance, for the major-domo had disappeared, Miss Anderson approached, and said: ‘Mr Duffield!’

In the pause which followed, the down along her lower jaw appeared to rise in prickly hackles; at no time that evening had she looked so plain, so frumpish, her tight mouth so disapproving; yet her eyes were curiously luminous and large from some embarrassment or fright she was in.

‘I would like,’ she said, ‘to say,’ she almost hiccupped, ‘how much your paintings have meant to me. Fulsomeness is disagreeable, isn’t it? But you will forgive me.’ She closed her jaws, and bowed her head, and went quickly through the front door.

Such an unlikely confession on the part of the headmistress filled him with a hope that some of his other judgements were mistaken, and that any doubts he may have had for the innocence of Hero Pavloussi’s motives had been bred from a flaw in himself.

The chrysanthemums Mrs Davenport had massed at the more dramatic points of her house to emphasize the splendour of her party were looking in some cases draggled and shrunk, when Olivia herself came up to him carrying a few broken flowers which smelled of brown water and autumn.

‘Are you tired?’ she inquired pointlessly. ‘I must remember to ring the masseuse in the morning. I can’t bear chrysanthemums. But what else is there?’ She thrust in his face a couple of enormous crushed mops, and a smaller bloom, lithe as a buttoned foil.

As the remainder of the guests had already thanked, and only needed to trickle away, she stuck her nose in his neck. ‘Tell me, darling — what did you think of the Greeks? Isn’t she interesting? ’ Then she blew giggling down her nose. ‘Gorgeous!’

Boo was slightly drunk, of course: rolling her head against his neck.

Suddenly her tone altered. ‘I can guarantee her!’ she said. ‘I mean her exceptional qualities.’

She could have been a friend defending a friend with the steely loyalty friendship demands; while at the same time her voice was that of the professional procuress: harsh and collected.

Perhaps it was an ambiguous hour, for she softened after that, and kissed him on the mouth, complaining: ‘I am not drunk, as you think, only exhausted. My trouble is: I love you all — whether you believe it or not — and would like to believe you love one another.’ She kissed him again. ‘Will you tell me?’ she pleaded. ‘After you’ve experienced it?’

Lolling against him as they lingered on the chess-board of the empty hall, she gave the impression that she had; whereas social occasions, and assignations planned for her friends, could have been as close as Olivia came to sexual pleasure.

‘Good night, Boo.’ He kissed the mouth she would have liked to appear fulfilled. ‘I’ll leave you to your beauty sleep.’

She flung off, condemning or camping with her right hand, knowing that Emily would pick up the jaded flowers she had dropped.

He went out. All the cars had driven off, except one: an illuminated glass capsule in which the Pavloussis were seated, bending over the dashboard, arguing in full voice about something which was also making them laugh.

They left off, however, as though by prearrangement, and she wound a window down.

‘May we give you a lift?’ she called in Olivia Davenport’s clearest tones.

Her husband was peering over her shoulder. The skin round his eyes made him look like an owl: it was so thick and encrusted, the eyes not all that blind.

‘Yes,’ Pavloussis insisted, in a silky tenor instead of the bass which would have suited him. ‘It is no trouble, Mr Duffield.’

‘Thank you. At this time of night I like to walk.’

Madame Pavloussi stuck out her hooded head. ‘I would like to visit you, Mr Duffield, and see your paintings.’

‘Any time,’ he invited, ‘and Mr Pavloussis.’

‘Cosmas is so busy.’ She pronounced it ‘beesy’, which made it sound more emphatic. ‘I will rather bring Olivia.’ The husband’s imbecile smile appeared to approve. ‘Although Cosmas is the one who really understands.’

The millionaire was preparing something ponderous. ‘In the island of Chios,’ he doled it out, ‘in the village of Mesta — where my old mother still lives — there are Picasso murals in the square painted long before Picasso.’