Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘It’s a pretty crook go when they ask yer to drown a bagful of flamun cats!’ he spat at the stranger.

In his state of controlled agitation the man didn’t wait for an answer, but crunched across the last of the gravel and reached the more soothing stretch of lawn.

‘Wait on, Mr South!’ a child called, before her dark legs slid down, then the seat of her pants, and her inverted dress, out of the tree. ‘I wanter watch an’ see what happens.’

When her dress had subsided it showed her to be a little part-aboriginal girl.

‘Not on your life!’ the gardener shouted back. ‘An’ you’re bloody lucky you’re not in the bag along with the cats.’

The girl might have started sulking if she hadn’t had the stranger to look forward to; now that she could see him properly she began to eye and sidle while pretending not to.

‘Why are they drowning the cats?’ he asked.

‘Because everyone’s goin’ away.’

‘Isn’t that a bit sudden?’ In spite of the warning in the letter, he hadn’t been prepared for such a ruthless departure; his discovery left him feeling breathless, purposeless, stunned, bracing the wind-raked canvas against his thigh.

The child didn’t answer, but took a bull’s-eye out of her cheek and began to examine the run stripes.

‘You’re Soso, are you?’ he asked. ‘The adopted daughter.’

She looked at him in shocked surprise, if not actual animosity. ‘I’m Alice,’ she said rather rudely; then thinking it over, she began to dimple and simper. ‘Yes. They call me Soso.’

‘Will you enjoy going to Europe with your parents?’ he asked like the kind of visitor he had most despised when a child; still under the influence of recent developments he was only capable of imitating others.

The girl shook her head. ‘I’m not goin’ anywhere but La Perouse. ’

It was too involved for him to continue its unravelling. Besides, he had to deliver what had been reduced to a parcel of merchandise. He realized his hands were trembling on the string.

‘Where is your mother?’ he asked.

‘Why at La Per—’ But again Soso took over; her burnished skin lent an additional silky slyness to her smiles as she minced her words: ‘She’s havin’ a read — in her little salong — waitin’ for Mr Duffield the painter.’

To be treated so objectively seemed only natural in such an unlikely situation.

‘I’ll take you to her,’ Soso announced importantly, opening the front door.

At the same time, from inside the house a maid advanced on them, her hands outspread as though to ward them off. ‘You know you was to stay outside in the sun because of what happened with your hair,’ she warned the child.

‘All right, all right, bossy old cow!’ Soso told the maid what she could go and do to herself.

In the circumstances the visitor was ignored; the maid, growing stringier than before, gasped and hissed back: ‘You’ll catch it, my girl, if Madam hears words! You’re not out at the Reserve, you know.’

The child turned and said: ‘Come with me, please, Mr Duffield,’ in the voice of a composed, educated woman.

She marched him through the house and into a small morning-room in which Madame Pavloussi was seated upright, reading, or at least holding, a leather-bound book. He must have been expected, but his suddenly appearing, and in the child’s company, gave the mistress of the house a shock: her face opened too quickly, and she almost mismanaged her stage book.

‘Oh, dear! It is kind — darling — to bring — but why did Gertrude not announce?’

Her formal duty done, Soso marched across the room, and out.

Though there was no practical reason why the caller should have been announced, Madame Pavloussi seemed put out by the fact that a convention hadn’t been observed. The smile kept fluttering on her mouth, and as on a previous occasion, her cheeks lost their look of sculpture: he half expected the scent of warm apples.

She said in an uncertain voice: ‘It is not possible, in these days of upheaval, to give attention to every detail — particularly with a rented maid.’

‘Why “upheaval”?’ he asked as gently as he could; her collapsed English seemed to call for it.

She was examining him more openly than he had felt before. On their previous meetings her eyes had appeared concentrated on, almost glazed by, some conflict of her inner life. Now her attention was directed outwards, or was struggling out, along with her pretty, fluttering smile.

‘My husband,’ she started to apologize, ‘must return to Greece by flying boat yesterday night. I will leave as soon as the arrangements are made to dispose of our belongings in Sydney. There are the cars. There is the lease of this house.’ She drew her eyebrows together. ‘Then we also have our obligations to animals and humans,’ she added with a moist pathos.

He remembered the sackful of cats, and she lowered her eyes, perhaps on catching a reflection in his.

‘My husband is so upset not to have been able to receive you with the painting.’

The painting had been left in the hall, but it did not occur to her to ask about it: she was too upset by her husband’s being upset. Slight emotional upheaval, the slight melancholy of temporary separation, suited her best, he saw. She was on too small a scale to cope with passion or disgust. On a previous occasion, too much fire had shown up her features as ugly, and her limbs too stumpy for her body. Now, comparatively passive, she was almost perfect.

‘Poor Cosmas! He talked about this painting at the last instant, before boarding the flying boat. He asked me to give you his own personal apologies.’ She handed her caller a letter.

The envelope had not been sealed: its contents were flowery and repetitive; the shipowner finally commended his wife: ‘. . in whose taste and judgement I have every faith.’

You couldn’t help wondering whether Hero Pavloussi had read the letter her husband left unsealed: nothing more natural, except there was the law that nice people must behave unnaturally.

‘Well, there it is!’ She became automatically brisk. ‘Will you take a coffee, Mr Duffield? Or should I offer you a drink? I am hardly acquainted with your habits.’ Her smile was bright and brittle to match.

‘You needn’t worry.’ He hoped he said it pleasantly. ‘I only came to deliver the painting, and to talk to your husband about it — if that was what he wanted.’ By now he was sick of the thought of his own painting.

‘One thing,’ she said vaguely, ‘you must tell me where I can get it packed.’

She was moved on an erratic wave of agitation, caused no doubt by a sense of the upheaval to which she had referred. The room was an intimate one, and might have appeared sympathetic if it hadn’t been for the actual owner’s department-store state. In it all, there were a few leather-bound books, of the same tooling as the one Hero had been pretending to read. (He realized she was coming into focus, physically at least, and that he was thinking of her again as ‘Hero’.) The book was printed in Greek, and again he was reminded of the mental and moral labyrinths which might prevent them ever meeting.

‘There is so much,’ she protested, taking a cigarette from a box she couldn’t have rented. ‘There is the little girl, for instance, whom you met — Alice — or Soso, Cosmas likes to call her.’

She lit the cigarette with an enormous lighter, and though he had never seen her smoke, she showed that she was technically adept.

‘Oh yes,’ he returned to one of the points at which she seemed lost, ‘the adopted daughter.’

‘What? Adopted?’ She blew two streams of smoke most professionally out of her nostrils. ‘That was an idea. Cosmas is always full of ideas: he has his moral responsibilities; then he forgets.’ She laughed affectionately, afterwards drawing on her cigarette with an unexpected hungriness. ‘Oh yes, we intended to adopt. But I couldn’t feel it was practical. The mother is an aboriginal woman from — this reserve — wherever it is. She was allowed to come here recently to visit her child, and the little girl was left with what I think you would call “nits”.’ Hero Pavloussi was so comically distressed. ‘She was infested!’