Patrick White - The Vivisector

The maid scurried into the hall and returned at once with a clipful of fluttering documents.

‘Inventories make me feel guilty,’ Mrs Cargill still whispered out loud. ‘But tenants with the best credentials can give you a surprise. I wonder why we let? For the money, I expect!’

‘Oh yes!’ The maid giggled. ‘We need the money, don’t we?’

In sisterly fashion she began pushing her mistress inside the highly polished car. Her cuffs twittered as she waved. She was so relieved to feel herself again loaded with reliable chains.

Only when Mrs Cargill had been driven away, temporarily, from her house, was the maid prepared to acknowledge the caller.

‘Is Madame Pavloussi expecting you?’ she asked with a polite insolence he returned.

‘No. She isn’t. It’s more of a suprise like.’

She hated that. She couldn’t be sure whether he was quizzing her profession, or whether Mr Duffield was of a class she despised.

‘Madame Pavloussi’s in the little “salong”.’ The maid flung a magic word which must preserve her from any possible humiliation.

‘What!’ he said. ‘Isn’t the drawing-room ever used?’

It wouldn’t be today: all the dust-covers were on.

He went unaccompanied into the room where Hero had always received him, perhaps on account of their intimate relationship.

‘The lease is up, I gather.’ He would save her the trouble.

‘No,’ she said, and dabbed at an imaginary cold. ‘Mrs Cargill has returned sooner than she expected — for family reasons — from her trip to England, and it will suit us both if I hand over.’

Again she dabbed at her non-existent cold, turning her face so that it was touched with the glow which had delighted him as he came down the drive. He kissed her as tenderly as the rosy hour demanded.

She didn’t return his affection, but said tight and dry: ‘I have had to make an important decision. My poor little Flora — I have had to destroy her.’

‘Your who? ’

‘My little dog who is suffering all this time — so much — of a cancer. It is selfish of me to prolong it.’

‘Oh yes, — Flora.’ He realized he had never seen the dog which had been the reason they almost hadn’t met.

‘So it is over,’ Hero concluded; she didn’t cry, perhaps because she had cried too much on less tragic occasions; she blew her nose, and looked at the backs of some books of the unread kind belonging to the landlady.

‘Why did you never let me see your dog?’

‘Oh, but darling, I did not want to involve you in unpleasantness. ’

To insulate them more securely from any unpleasantness arising from the disease and death of her pet, she switched to the driest possible subject: ‘. . Mrs Cargill’s solicitor, with whom I have spent — yesterday — almost the entire morning. It was deadly!’ she remembered, and frowned. ‘Why this man he must repeat everything six times? Am I stupid? Or am I merely a foreigner? And Mrs Cargill accusing me — not of stealing a silver ladle — which is not in the inventory. I think she is probably a very common woman. Her old silver ladle, which I have never seen, must be of the same ugliness and commonness as everything else in her possession.’

‘Where will you go, now that you’re leaving the house?’

The false atmosphere she had encouraged should have made separation a painless matter for them both; but the sea had begun to darken and lift, impinging on the organized room; an invasion of night scents and moisture started them both gasping for breath, their minds’ furniture palpitating, and in some cases, bleeding.

‘Where I will go?’ Hero was locking and unlocking her naked hands: he hadn’t noticed the heavy pearl since the shipping magnate left; while she smiled in advance over something which might sound impossible or idiotic. ‘I will tell you,’ she said, and it relieved her shoulders to take him physically by the hand, and drag him down to the level of practical planning. ‘I will go back to Greece. Oh no, not to my husband. My husband is too generous; I would not impose myself on him. In any case, I will take my lover with me.’

‘What if he won’t be taken from his work?’

‘Oh, his work! I am his work too, aren’t I? You are not so little egoist, Hurtle, that you won’t admit you haven’t finished creating me.’

Though he could feel himself bridle under pressure from Hero’s persuasive hand, it was not a matter of vanity. He realized, on the contrary, he had been feeding on her formally all these weeks, and that the least related corners of his vision borrowed her tones of mind, the most putrescent of which were often the subtlest.

Hero seemed as unaware of the cynicism of her remark as she was of her lover’s attitude. ‘It is now so long since I have seen the island I have been telling you about — Perialos. You will remember how my husband took me? It is this island I wish — I must visit again.’ She kept dragging at his hand in search of the encouragement she wasn’t receiving. ‘I feel the devils may be cast out in the holy places of Perialos.’

‘I wonder whether grace is given as freely as we’re asked to believe.’

‘Why will this not be given,’ she shouted, ‘if I am determined?’ She was positively yanking at his hand as though somewhere at the top of his arm a bell existed.

By now they were standing in almost darkness; there were a few last flames licking the leaden masses of the city in the distance; Hero’s face was brown and sweaty.

‘And what about my devils?’ he asked. ‘What if I want to hang on to them?’

‘Then you do not love me! If you did you would want us to be one — one being — through every possible experience.’

‘Like a husband. I’m not your husband — not even an exorcized one.’

‘Oh, you are so brutal!’

‘I’m an artist,’ he had to say, though it sounded like a vulgar betrayal. ‘I can’t afford exorcism. Is that what you’ve sensed? Is that why you want it?’

‘Oh, but you misinterpret! Deliberately! You do not want to understand!’

She couldn’t spit it contemptuously enough at the darkness surrounding them: while he was tempted by his half-conceived landscape of Perialos, in which the wooden saints were threatened by their own tongues of fire.

None of their journey in the flying boat particularly impressed him. The changes of temperature alone made him feel sick and disgruntled. In the air he huddled in his overcoat and longed for his abandoned house; nobody would coax him out of it again. In any case after childhood, or at most, youth, experience breeds more fruitfully in a room. None of the forms which rose up to meet him as they glided down, none of the colours which should have drenched his senses, were as subtly convincing as those created out of himself. At any point he might have demanded to break away, if he hadn’t been obsessed by his preconception of Perialos: something Hero would never make him admit.

‘Are you ill, Hurtle?’ she used to ask. ‘Have you a fever, darling? ’

She had taken to feeling his forehead for the fever she couldn’t find. She was so solicitous their fellow passengers began to guess at something peculiar. They watched for clues, particularly on touching down, but were irritatingly frustrated: what their X-ray eyes might have detected through a bedroom door, didn’t take place in dormitories; the sexes were segregated at their ports of call. Though on land a torn-off branch, stuck in the tropic silt, would shoot overnight — they had seen that for themselves — in the air the fingers of crypto-lovers remained dry, brittle, unproductive, even when grafted into one another. So you had only the expression of their eyes to go by: their eyes would glow at times with that suggestion of phosphorescence which emanates from swamp water at night.