Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘Is that agreed?’ Hero asked; then changing her tone, she said: ‘We must have exhausted your patience.’ And again, her voice blurring with emotion: ‘The Divine Destroyer — is that what you truly believe?’ She took his hand, and for a brief moment seemed to be looking in it for an explanation of some division in herself. ‘No, you needn’t tell me,’ she hastened. ‘It is true. There is that side as well. I know it.’

At once she turned her odd behaviour into conventional thanks: she had taken his hand for no other reason than to shake it, which she did with candour, grinning at him with the shy pleasure of a little girl.

‘Thank you — Hurtle — so very much.’

The burnt and brooding terra-cotta had gone from her cheeks: they glowed with the suffusion of rose: he would have expected the juice to run out if he had bitten into them.

‘Time’s up!’ Olivia called from below in a stop-watch voice. ‘The car, Hero!’

Nothing of what had taken place prevented their glances from shuttling in and out of each other in the room above; there was no need for answers where vibrations existed.

To avoid giving way to these, he had to betray a third person: ‘Olivia is the victim of her chauffeur. We’d better go down.’

Madame Pavloussi laughed her scented laugh: it was the scent of cloves, or pinks. ‘Not the chauffeur,’ she said, negotiating the stairs. ‘Only herself dominates Olivia.’

Mrs Davenport stood watching her friends as they came downstairs.

Madame Pavloussi remarked in her accent of languid cloves: ‘We have been discussing you, darling. I have said only now you are what is known as Pure Will.’

Olivia Davenport looked at Duffield, giving him a slow, shuttered stare, before exploding into a rackety laughter. ‘Naturally I respect time. Don’t you? Where should we be? Where would Hurtle be?’ She composed her lips in a private smile intended for him; it implied: I shall write you a letter and invite you to discuss in detail everything that has happened.

‘Oh, I agree,’ Madame Pavloussi said with exaggerated conviction. ‘You are so right.’ Now that she had returned to earth she seemed determined to sound flat. ‘Where should we be? There is this mercantile thing this afternoon to which Cosmas has asked me to come. Wives will be worn!’

‘Oh, but darling, how perfectly ghastly! And you can’t go like that — in brown. Wouldn’t it be more sympathique —Hero — if you came home with me — and rested?’

‘I am not tired,’ Madame Pavloussi assured her.

They were fitting themselves into the car as the chauffeur stood holding the door. Obstacles imposed on them by their formal lives and rubber disguises made them crawl and wriggle.

As they were easing the rubber and the expressions on their faces, he realized the train of events hadn’t allowed him to show them the Octopus-Oracle, his main obsession since Hero Pavloussi had sown it in him the night of the party. Now he was glad he hadn’t exposed Rhoda’s gelatinous body to their gibbered judgements: Olivia inspired by her passionate love for someone she only imagined she had known; Hero ready to lament by heart deformity and the lost little sister, if she didn’t turn her back on a reminder of her gaffe. Rhoda was subtler than either of them could have grasped. If he hadn’t been able to love Rhoda, he couldn’t love his own parti-coloured soul, which at best he took for granted; at worst, it frightened him.

While the two women were driven away, showering recognition on him each with royal flutterings of a hand, he wasn’t certain, but fancied he could see Olivia holding Hero’s other hand.

He waved. He couldn’t care. He was still too obsessed by the grey suckers of the Octopus.

He received two letters on almost identical paper by the same afternoon delivery.

Dear Hurtle,

Although I have in my head a letter explaining my behaviour the day of our visit, I hesitate to write it down for fear that my argument will not convince you.

Because, for certain reasons, I always fail in love, I was hoping to experience a kind of voluptuous fulfilment through those I love, but suddenly felt in myself the old excruciating disgust, as though I were helping destroy something which might never be recovered, by letting the enemy into the last stronghold of purity.

If I appear to have behaved deceitfully in the beginning towards Cosma Pavloussis in spite of my affection for him, it is because most men have minds and interests which prevent them understanding their wives’ actual needs, whether sensual or psychic. I still believe this, and with anyone but Hero might have been prepared to finish the game. Now it is you who are the loser, Hurtle. I am not — I have to admit if I am honest — because I shall still enjoy in Hero the delicacy which at the last moment I resisted handing over, and which only another woman is capable of appreciating.

Affectionately yours,

OLIVIA D.

‘Delicacy’ did not prevent him letting out the fart he had been preparing. He began to crumble Olivia D.’s literary letter, but the stiff, expensive paper resisted.

The letter from Hero Pavloussi, which he expected to be even more stylistic, wasn’t at all: it came straight to the point.

Dear Mr Duffield,

I have discussed the matter with my husband, who will be delighted to receive you and the painting on Friday 26th of this month at 11 a.m., if a morning call doesn’t too much inconvenience you. It is only difficult in the case of my husband to arrange another appointment because he is always too busy.

I will explain to you how to find the house. You will take the main road till past the convent, after which you will turn left in a kind of loop. Shortly on, there is an afterthought from this loop, aimed directly towards the sea. Do not miss it. The house is a medium Sydney house in the Tudor style. There are tamarisks at the gate, and inside, a bed in the shape of a starfish planted with what I think the gardener has called violas (blue-and-yellow).

Although we are leaving probably fairly precipitately for Greece, my husband and I are anxious to start the experience of living with the painting, rather than crate it up with everything else and only see it when we arrive.

We look forward, both of us.

Sincerely

hero PAVLOUSSI

If you should miss the turn, we rent the house from a Mrs Cargill, whose name is known.

He ordered a van to take him with the painting: when a second letter forced a change of plan.

My dear Mr Duffield,

You will forgive us I hope, but my husband asks for a meeting same time only the day following the one we agreed.

So sorry!

Yours in haste

H. PAVLOUSSI

On the agreed morning the van put him down with his veiled painting at the door of what might have been described as a medium house, though in ‘Sydney-prosperous’ rather than the Tudor style. The tamarisk canes were still naked for winter, and the violas (blue-and-yellow) had been removed from the starfish bed since Madame Pavloussi wrote her instructions; the bed itself, not yet replanted, was built up high with rich-looking soil from somewhere else. He might have felt depressed by these signs of impermanence if the native sea hadn’t been sparkling and prancing round the promontory on which the amorphous house was pitched.

After the van had gone, while he was standing juggling with his awkward painting, trying to control the wrapping the wind was tearing at, a man who looked like a gardener came round the side of the house carrying a heavily loaded sack. The man crossed the gravel, making for the part of the garden where the lawn sloped down towards the water. As he walked, the sack became convulsed by a struggle inside it. The sinews tautened in the gardener’s neck. He looked a bilious yellow under his weather-beaten skin.