‘Since now.’
‘But it doesn’t—it isn’t like you!’
The way she held the cigarette it was something offensive but inevitable: a cat’s turd, for instance, discovered in the corner of her room.
‘I think I thought it might be bad for me,’ she said, and laughed.
Ostensibly because his little sister was playing up he didn’t open more of the telegrams; while actually he was too intent on frisking Mrs Volkov’s image for her motives.
As they sauntered through the glaring rooms, Rhoda breathed: ‘All of Hurtle’s naked women!’ Her languor was for Honeysett, who enjoyed the unlikeliness of the situation; but Gil, like Mrs Volkov, was kind.
Remember those pale lips in the bus trying to draw you into what could only be an ectoplasmic relationship.
Irritation drove him to shake out the telegram again: it was a cable—no, a rocket, he realized—launched from New York.
Glad he had fallen behind the others, he was still gladder he hadn’t opened the rest of the sheaf. What if Hero? What if Nance—
Colthirst?
Oh God, senility was the worst threat of all, and here were the ghosts threatening him with it, the poltergeists standing him on end.
But why VOLKOV? Unless to show him she was his equal. It was what he had wanted for his spiritual child, his Kathy: other names could only be adoptive. She was not his equal, however; her
‘love and thoughts’
stroked him with the tails of Maman’s sables. He was their little boy, whose head they were shoving inside the wardrobe, to drug him with scents, to protect themselves from his third eye.
At the first opportunity he detached Rhoda from Honeysett. ‘It wasn’t Mrs Volkov. It was Kathy. In New York,’ he whispered.
Rhoda must have been expecting it. ‘Why not? I believe the child was very fond of you. And you were too self-absorbed to notice.’ His accuser had never looked so ravaged, still holding her cigarette on high, though no longer parallel with the parquet. Suddenly he realized the floors were buckling and groaning as the wheels of the enemy chariots began to grind across them.
‘Boy! We’re for it!’ Honeysett ran forward bellowing, jingling his money, as though to dive headfirst into waves there was no question of stopping.
The Trustees had been at pains to harness society with intellect. There was, in addition, a rabble of nonentities wished on them by the painter, with such ill humour one could only suppose he regretted his own sense of duty. Naturally the sister had to come, and in any case, everybody would want to have a look at the sister; but some of the others lowered the tone: they smelled of failure or modesty.
So, whatever the organizers had intended, the elements of their rout were varied: some arrived, their fashion the blowsier for formal dinners, trailing, along with their stoles and the fringes of their conversation, scents of the liqueurs and cigars from which they had been rudely dragged; others more ascetic, in day clothes, discovered traces of the delicacies they had swallowed in a hurry: aspic from chickens’ breasts, oil dribbled from a dolmas, the last exquisite grain of caviare stuffing a hollow tooth; while a humble few were round-eyed still from their strong cuppa and beans on toast. Almost all had fortified themselves in some way at some early stage of the evening, and were now controlling a resentful scepticism arising out of gas and heartburn. One or two were possessed by a devil of excitement: they hoped for an experience; which nice people and professional intellectuals were for once united in condemning as ignorant and tasteless.
‘Are you going to come clean? Do you—
honestly
—believe he’s any good?’
‘They buy him overseas.’
‘Oh yes, ill-advised Americans. The press never stops telling us. But I can’t believe in the great myth. I haven’t the faith expected of me.’
‘No, Elspeth. Faith isn’t expected of university graduates.’
‘All the worst bitches are dogs! I wonder, darling, why I adore you?’
They looked back over their furs or ritual black, to determine on what ground their words had fallen, but failed disappointingly to identify it.
‘D’you think that’s him?’
‘Too young.’
‘Too old.’
‘I can recognize him from the pictures in the papers.’
‘Too shaky. He’s had a stroke—not Parkinson’s disease.’
Listening to them trample across the parquet he was reminded of a visit with Harry Courtney: a prehistoric landscape, in which sheep were mounting a ramp, pressing inside the woolshed, pattering over the slatted floor, automatically scattering their pellets.
The present mob might have trampled Rhoda underfoot if it hadn’t suddenly realized she was something beyond its experience; so it propped, and divided: to avoid an object which looked strange and could have proved dangerous. While continuing to patter in their changed directions, the human sheep bleated their distress, or in milder, woollier cases, sympathy, or self-pity.
‘Certainly quaint. To say the least. Poor little thing!’ Foetuses stirred uneasily in the alcohol of memory: it wasn’t as bad as this, but might have been if it had lived.
‘Never went much on culture. Ten dollars, too. You expect more for ten dollars.’
‘Look at all the lovely paintings.’
‘Where’s the champagne?’
‘Too soon. And it won’t be—you realize that, don’t you?’
‘Champagne’s what I paid for.’
‘You expect too much, Clyde. You’ll get the bubbles at least.’
‘Whatever you accuse us of, you can’t say we aren’t a
sound
society. Don’t look now—that’s the painter over my left shoulder. And the sister.’
‘The sister’s his worst distortion yet. I wonder what they talk about.’
‘Technique.’
‘You’ve got it on the brain.’
‘I want to look at the paintings.’
‘You don’t come to look at the paintings. If you’re all that keen, you come back one morning when there’s nobody here.’
‘Isn’t it lovely? Lovely! A lovely party.’
‘This is the biggest con man Australia has produced.’
‘At this rate we’ll never get round. Look, there’s Margery!’
‘I propose to take the paintings in chronological order.’
‘If you’re going to be a stodge-podge. This isn’t professional night.’
‘You can’t call him an amateur; he fetches too much.’
‘I just want to look at the paintings. They do things to me. I don’t know what. But they do.’
‘Can’t wait.’
‘Darling, there are too many people.’
‘One has to admit old Hurtle’s a wizard.’
‘Most of this raggle-taggle wouldn’t.’
‘Oh yes—I think they’d agree he’s a wizard. They might argue whether he’s great.’
‘Aren’t you destroying one of your own stable, Bid?’
‘Whether he’s mine or anybody else’s, I can’t help being honest. None the less, I adore Hurtle.’
‘With your dried-up peanut of a spinster’s mind.’
‘Mrs Macready has an early one. She says the early ones are the ones.’
‘If you want to be insulting.’
‘They’re an investment.’
‘Every Sunday at St Stephen’s.’
‘If you want to show me the worst in you, you’re going about it the right way.’
‘They’ll catch him over his income tax.’
‘Mrs Macready’s going to sell the early one.’
‘If you want me to tell you why you’re a misfit, Patrick, it’s because you hate everybody.’
‘Mrs Macready says London and New York are off him. He was never what he’s cracked up to be. But there’s still a market for him in Australia.’
‘Because I can’t love peanuts, Biddy, it doesn’t mean I don’t love.’
‘I’m going home. You’ve upset me too much. You’ve made me feel ill.’
Oh oh.
‘Where’s the
pissoir?
’
‘Somewhere in the underworld.’
‘It’s the champagne, buddy.’
‘She’s a Jewess.’
‘What do I think of them? It’s as if I haven’t been seeing till now—and now I’m blinded.’
When all but the woolliest had thrown off their sheepskins, the forms most of them revealed were heraldic in their ferocity. Even those who spoke in his defence screeched with tongues of thin metal; their armoured claws might have sacrificed his liver to their convictions. He found himself moving sideways: a technique he had adopted after his return from the dead, and thought he no longer needed; but on the present occasion there was no escaping, except along walls of paintings, which might at any moment pronounce a more vindictive sentence than that of the judges themselves.
‘Look—a bat, wouldn’t you say? Practically embracing one of his own excremental daubs!’
‘Oh, come! It’s the crush. You couldn’t fit in a praying mantis.’
‘I do believe Hurtle Duffield’s got the wind up. Never thought I’d witness that. Cold fish!’
‘Viscious bastard!’
‘I think he’s divine. I’d adore to sleep with him.’
‘You must be the only one who didn’t.’
‘I’ve never slept with an old man.’
‘And little girls.’
‘That’s the propaganda. I was told by Arch Parfitt—and he ought to know—that Hurtle Duffield switched to boys.’
‘All his life. There’s an old queen, a Paddo grocer, his bosom friend.’
‘But it’s all so gimmicky—one conjuring trick after another. Painting is pure today. This is an austere age. Illusions don’t belong in it—not his kind anyway.’
‘I’d part with ten years of my life to have painted that “Pythoness at Tripod”.’
‘And hanged yourself afterwards out of remorse. Anybody but Hurtle Duffield would have.’
‘Look at those salt-cellars he’s given her! The salt-cellars alone are genius.’
‘I’m going, Dick. D’you hear? I’ve gotter go. Something funny about those oysters. If I don’t go I’m gunner spew on the spot.’
‘Oh Mr Duffield what a wonderful evening for you—and so soul-satisfying for the rest of us. Will you sign my souvenir catalogue, please? Oh, not if it—not if it—in any way . . . If he hadn’t looked so peculiar, Mildred, I’d say the man meant to be rude.’
‘He’s sick.’
‘You don’t suppose he thinks I’d sell the autograph? Mrs Macready did. But that was a whole handwritten letter. She sold it to an American.’
‘He’s sick, I tell you. He’s a sick man.’
‘The paintings are sick.’
‘I’d like to speak to him, but of course I never shall. There are so many things I’d like to ask him to explain.’
‘Don’t ask a painter, don’t ask anybody to explain. All you’ll ever know is what you find out yourself by butting your head
through
the wall.’
‘I like to believe in revelations. And these paintings are, for me, almost revelations. That is why I could go down on my knees, and beg,
beg
him for one little word which might remove the last scale from my eyes. Because I’m sure he has the answer. I’m sure it’s here in the paintings. If I could only see.’
‘“Numen” is the word I’ve been trying to remember all the evening. Not apropos. I’ll probably die a sceptic.’
O numinous occasion sighted in distorting mirrors of variable treachery! Now that the trap was closing on him, what he longed for was a room of reasonable proportions furnished with a table and chair. The thought of himself perched on a chopping-block, reaching up with his functional arm, became so ludicrous he almost toppled. But steadied himself on one of the paintings. By coincidence or design, it was one of that series of furniture he had painted after Hero’s death, soon after the Second War, at a time when he felt his creative life must be leaving him; yet the tables and chairs now appeared the most honest works he had ever conceived, and probably for that reason, the most nearly numinous.
Which didn’t mean he could stop himself attempting to reach higher, from his chopping block or scaffold, towards total achievement or extinction.
He fished out his handkerchief to mop up his sweat.
‘A glass of champagne, Mr Duffield?’
‘Is it good?’ A blunt question, it sounded unintentionally severe.
‘Oh yes, it’s good!’ The young waiter, his rather innocent skin freshly scrubbed, his smile too ready, lowered his eyes: on such a night the counterfeit made the true look fake.
When the waiter had left him, he sank his chin, and guzzled the insipid gaseous wine. It didn’t make him feel what is known as ‘better,’ only unhappy in a different way, as he wandered a little through ‘his’ exhibition, holding the empty glass as though it were some other object.
Here and there they filled the glass, not the original waiter, though it could have been: they were all alike in their confident, though transient, modernity.
Good Gil Honeysett, that bloody extrovert, came and held him by the elbow, and said: ‘Everybody’s asking to meet you, but I staved them off, just in case you mightn’t want it.’
‘What do you take me for? A nut?’
Gil didn’t answer, but smiled around in other directions out of his decent, sweaty face.
You were standing, you realized, beside a small daïs spread with a square of Axminster carpet.
‘That carpet, Gil—it’s about the most hideous I’ve ever seen.’
‘Yes, it is, it’s hideous.’
‘And the chair—it reeks of public service.’
Brought out of a board-room probably, it stood displaying its chafed leather, waiting to fulfil some possibly reprehensible function.
Suddenly Gil Honeysett tickled the ominous ramrod of a microphone very lightly. ‘Later on, the Prime Minister wants to say a few words, Hurt. We’d be happy if you’d reply—making it as brief as you like.’
Play for time, play for safety, play for silence, the only state in which truth breeds.
‘Okay, Duffield?’
‘Mm.’
Gil was so radiant in the innocent conviction that human nature is predictable. If you had been younger, if you had been in a position to indulge in the more extravagant licence of creativity, you might have done a face, mouth but no eyes, swathed in the fleshy veils of the human arse.