‘If you’re hungry, I can open a tin of herrings,’ he suggested, ‘and there’s a loaf of fairly fresh bread.’
She made a mumbled sound, at the same time rejecting his offer with a movement of her head against his shoulder. She was behaving like somebody stupefied by a heavy meal in the middle of the day and the sleep which comes after it; though probably she hadn’t touched food since breakfast, if she had eaten then.
‘Herrings in tomato sauce: not an attractive proposition; but easy, and quickly over.’ It might have sounded like talking to himself in an empty room if she hadn’t again uttered that animal, mumbled sound.
He couldn’t tempt her: whereas she had been so hungry on arrival he had hardly closed the door on the street before she fell on him ravenously, propelling him with her greed somewhere that remained unlocated till he thumped against the padded shoulder of an old dusty sofa and cannoned off the corner of a crashing what-not.
At some point he was infected with her appetite, and took over. If he had been left with breath, he would have liked to explain: yes, you are here, and now there is no reason why morning afternoon evening should be in any way distinguishable if that is what we decide we need. But he had grown ravenous himself. From nibbling to biting to attempting to swallow her burning ear-lobes. On the cracking stairs. It would have been neither surprising nor resistible if their gluttony had thrust them through the splintering banisters and they had landed below in the hall. Instead they gyrated or slipped crouching bruised against the stairboards. Once he almost gouged out the eye of her suspender. While her corkscrew-tongue kept trying to drag from his throat an imagined resistance to her thirst. Feet stumbled, crass and blunt, always mounting, it seemed, raising a dust which started them both coughing.
‘Hero?’ He coughed it up pointlessly; for she had lost her normal identity, and the one she had acquired was nameless.
As they were climbing the stairs her fingers, or claws, used his ribs as rungs. Then, as though she had reached the summit, she seemed to hang from him, suspended by no more than her pelvis and adhesive mouth. Though just when they made the precipice of the landing, and might have toppled right back to the start of their ascent, they were held together by their hearts’ chuffing, not in unison, that might have been fatal, but one valve taking over where the other failed.
On the landing: their knees trembling and knocking. He felt cold behind the knees, kneecaps thin and breakable. Now he was thirsty rather than hungry, now that the last of his saliva had run down outside their mouths, evading their attempts to drink each other up. So, on the landing, he began to tear her breasts apart, to get at the flesh inside the skin: the scented, running juices; in a drought even the bitter seeds could be sucked and spat out.
He hadn’t tasted more than the small rubbery nipples, when she cried out: ‘You are hurting me! We are animals!’
‘Yes, Hero. Come in here.’
He hadn’t intended to take her into that one, but nothing develops as conceived: the pure soul, for example; the innocent child, already deformed, or putrefying, in the womb.
They got their clothes off in the back room he hadn’t intended. The cold mattress-ticking rustled through their swollen veins; the leather asterisks stamped themselves on their half-melted skins.
At moments they were laughing together over something and he wondered whether he knew what it was. Certainly their love-making sounded pneumatic at times; their lust took on grotesque shapes. Yes, love had its puddingy moments. LOVE: that was what they were laughing at; but immediately stopped shocked short grinding their teeth into each other’s teeth. The portcullis wouldn’t allow them asylum. They looked into each other’s eyes and there were no depths to reach: there were the positions of love.
After demanding the ultimate in depravity, she ran out flat-footed looking for the bathroom, nor did he direct or advise her, because she would arrive at that too by instinct: the bath with the brown stain on the bottom; the French-smelling lavatory bowl; the droppings of verdigris under the geyser; her daemon would cope with all of it. Holding his arm over his eyes, a hand over his dribbled crutch, he waited for her return.
They might have lain all their lives sleeping side by side on the thawed mattress-ticking.
When he woke he noticed that his own body, although more muscular, looked more defenceless than hers because whiter, nakeder: in fact, flesh. You forget about vaccination marks. Here were his, their white, sweating scars waiting to drop off in the end as the scabs had in the beginning; whereas hers were baked into a terra-cotta arm they might dig up a thousand years hence and produce as evidence of ‘civilization’.
She turned over, and her breasts were two extinct volcanoes he wouldn’t approach; they could erupt all over again: himself drowning in lava.
This was where he said: ‘If you’re hungry I can open a tin of herrings.’
They lay a long time barely fondling the parts they had appropriated from each other.
Somewhere in the late afternoon, judging by the resentment with which the inhabitants of Chubb’s Lane were throwing the crockery around in their sinks, she sat up yawning her mouth off, stretching her arms to release, but in fact knotting them. Then she stomped over the boards, on squelching feet, her naked body forced by a recall of prudery into constricting angles, and started floundering about through her handbag. The bag, which he hadn’t noticed, sounded an old shapeless valise stuffed with superfluous necessities, the search a sordid one, at least for anybody as perfectly achieved as Hero Pavloussi. In the end she came across the cigarettes.
Scratching an armpit, he said: ‘You’re quite a bit different from what I expected.’ He continued scratching voluptuously to celebrate his relief; prolonged perfection would have made intolerable demands.
‘I was no different from what I am.’ On lighting a cigarette, she came clumping back to the bed, for modesty’s sake more than ever in the shape of a half-open jack-knife. ‘It is you who want always to create something—even people. Because you see them mostly at their worst, you have wanted somebody at her best.’ Seated again on the bed, strengthened by a comfortable attitude, she was able to behave most objectively. She gathered him into her hand. She was examining him as though these wilted flowers, or bruised fruits, or catch of squid, had never known her creative touch; they were her specimens.
‘Cosmas my husband’—she sat frowning at the penis in her hand—‘is one of these men who must build a monument. I am to represent perfection for him. In the first place, I am of a class he never had access to, except through his money. Of course I married him for his money. My mind told me: However else could you marry such an unpolished man, except for the advantages; so don’t deceive yourself. At least I could be honest about it. But however crude my motive for marrying a millionaire, it was not as crude as what I discover as the real reason. I find I marry Pavloussis for his body. I am soon distracted by this in many ways gross peasant, and he is shocked to find that his monument will become a monument to lust. Because where he is not sensual and lustful with paid women, Cosmas is pure pure. He is soon quite impotent from disappointment in his wife. I remember him telling me: “Not even a prostitute would behave like this. It would offend against her conventions.” I said: “But you are my husband, whom I married for his money, and now I find you give me joy. Am I not to express this?” It was even more shocking for him that I try to rationalize my behaviour. He could understand and accept my marrying him for his money, but not the other. About this time he cancelled a visit to his island—to his mother—because I believed he could not dare to produce his wife.’
‘How did he dare dispose of his “daughter”, and drown the bagful of cats?’
‘That is not to the point!’ She rejected her lover with a force-fulness that made him whinge.
Anger drove her into a less comfortable position. She sat on the edge of the bed, rounding her shoulders to shut him out, with stiffened fingers manipulating her cigarette. She was making a business of smoking; but it did not ease her feelings, as her mouth showed whenever the glow gave it away.
‘Very much to the point,’ he persisted, ‘if you talk about rationalizing behaviour.’
Her silence sounded a sulky one.
‘Or are Greeks perhaps cruel by nature?’ he couldn’t help suggesting.
‘
Who
is cruel? Greeks? Turks? Man is cruel!’ she shouted back. ‘God—God is cruel! We are his bagful of cats, aren’t we? When God is no longer cruel many questions will be answered.’
She was so furious she accompanied her accusations by striking the mattress with her stiffened hand.
‘You drive me to blaspheme!’ she shouted louder still.
‘But you’ve told me you’re not a believer.’
‘No. I do not believe. But blaspheme every day!’
She burst into such a torrent of grief it was now his turn to be shocked. He tried to comfort her by caressing her racked body; but this was not what she wanted: she shook him off in a flurry of wet hair.
‘What I do believe in,’ she cried, ‘is my husband’s goodness, because I have experienced it. You will not believe in it because of the bagful of cats. He loved the cats—which he killed. Yes, he killed them. Why do we kill what we love? Perhaps it is because it becomes too much for us—simply for that reason.’
‘You could have saved the cats.’
She grew quiet at once.
‘Why—yes—I could have saved the cats by giving an order after he had left. But I am myself also condemned, as I sit waiting in the house, and the drowning do not care about the other drowning.’ She reached out. ‘Do you see?’ She laughed hoarsely as she dragged him down with her into her watery inferno.
Their indecently resigned struggles inside the bag must have been observed and judged from a distance by the shaggy god from under his black, heavy eyelids.
She said as they were drawn apart at last through the apathetic depths: ‘Will you turn on the light, please, Hurtle? I will be going now.’
He touched the dry mattress-ticking to which he had been returned. What fascinated him still was the texture of the wet bag, or condemned cell, in relation to the matted, elastic bodies of the prisoners.
‘The light?’ she repeated. ‘Were you sleeping—darling?’ she remembered to add.
‘No,’ he said, reaching for the flex, ‘not sleeping.’
Neither sleeping nor waking: it had been one of those moments when you half-consciously watch the slides experience is fitting into the frame of a dissolving mind; such a slide, perhaps, would best convey his conception of the drowning lover-cats.
‘How many were there?’ he asked and smiled.
‘How many what?’
‘Cats.’
‘For God’s sake! I don’t remember!’
He didn’t worry; two lovers could add up to an infinity of cats.
Faced with the problems of disguise, Hero was only momentarily irritated. It was most important that she should cover her strongly-made, stumpy legs. She bumped around in search of tumbled clothes, her webbed hands outstretched. Soon she was snapped back into her formal identity: hooked and smooth.
As for himself, he got very easily into a minimum of garments, with that slight feeling of grit or sand which comes between the contented skin and its covering after making love.
Hero was suddenly upset. ‘Oh, darling, did I do this to you? How bestial! I am disgusted!’
He hadn’t felt them, but she had made her mouth into a tender shape to apply to the scratches, almost gashes, in the crook of his arm, and to the little bows, or lovers’ knots, or bite marks the glass showed him in the angle of his neck and shoulder.
She only left off kissing or sucking when he asked: ‘Are you also Olivia Davenport’s lover?’
‘Poor Olivia! I don’t think anyone—and I include her husbands—was ever her lover.’
It didn’t quite answer his question, but he had no intention of insisting.
‘Will you believe me when I say it is possible to love two people at once?’ she asked very gently.
‘No.’ He tried to answer gently: it sounded brutal.
They embraced for the illusion she had hoped to nourish, and for his own stillborn idea of the pure soul, and in this way came perhaps closest to loving. Their clothes were a comfort, and their undemanding skins.
When she left he went with her, and they wandered the peacefully dead streets in search of a taxi.
‘But you haven’t any shoes!’ she saw and protested, but not enough; his bare feet were no longer so incongruous as her clothed body.
‘I will telephone you, darling,’ she said, and he didn’t bother to remind her that she couldn’t.
The pavement felt cool and agreeably abrasive to his bare soles now that his commitment was slighter; yet this too was an illusion: he would go to her in the Tudor-style mansion, from which only the cats had been exorcized.
As she leaned out of the taxi, looking back, not necessarily at him, the street lighting and her appeased lust had ringed her eyes: they had never appeared more luminously suppliant.
Though he didn’t see her in the days which followed he didn’t escape for long at a time; the sack wouldn’t let him. Smells of sea lettuce of putrefying bait of motor-boats haunted his nostrils. Pa Duffield returned, not to protect, but to assist at his destruction.
Don’t go near the water son you never learnt to swim.
I can learn can’t I not to drown.
Better not trust the water.
The flannel vest with discoloured buttons made Pa look scraggier, more distrustful.
Nobody likes to rear a kid an’ all for nothun.
Or five hundred quid. Pa himself, veins blue in his knotty hands, was helping tie the neck of the sack.
This is for love Hurt so lie quiet damn yez all of you lovecats.
While he was tying the string Pa was crying the way they do. The neck choking the daylight out you had only a moment left to recognize God by his black eyelids. You might have shouted balls if Hero hadn’t been so devout. Many cats with parti-coloured skins were fighting their sentence inside the bag ever more heavily clinging its smell of sugar soon drowned.