‘In the meantime, here’s an old friend of yours.’ Again the Extrovert in Chief sounded so extraordinarily convinced. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’
A person was definitely evolving out of the aimless struggle of art lovers: a man if it hadn’t been for the aggressively mannish clothes, a woman except for a certain priestly air. The straight black hair had abandoned all pretences, unless its black black. What really let the creature down was the mouth, overflowing with anachronistic crimson, and the jewels, of an importance which refused to be renounced.
‘Hurtle,’ she began at a distance, while telling her enormous pearls as though they had been humble little heads, ‘I don’t want to appear vindictive—forcing my wreckage on you. I should hate to be guilty of that, but I do honestly believe age can be a source of inspiration.’
She probably realized he didn’t share her view, for when she reached him, with the determination of the old and crippled, and her fire of rubies, she laughed a discoloured laugh. ‘I see you can’t, or don’t want to, recognize. “Hollingrake” is the name.’
‘Why—Boo—of course—Boo Davenport.’ She was forcing him to obey the social convention she would have liked him to think she had abandoned.
‘Hollingrake,’ she corrected.
She kept turning her head as though looking for others who might applaud. Or was it for someone she still had to meet?
‘I heard you’d gone back to “Hollingrake”, though nobody explained why.’
It must have been what she expected. ‘Well’—she lowered her blancoed chin—‘I never managed to throw off the Hollingrake. Since we last met—at some ghastly party, wasn’t it?—I remarried. Sebastian was the least demanding of my husbands. He was so considerate I found it intensely mortifying. I should have divorced him if he hadn’t saved me the worst mortification. He died. Now I’ve reneged. I’m a confirmed bachelor.’
The thought struck him that his own bachelorhood might have crossed her mind, and that her joke was an accusation in disguise. He hoped one of the slaves might fill the empty glass each of them continued holding; but nobody came; and he was to experience worse than Olivia’s dirty crack.
Surprisingly she said, though in such a loud voice her remark couldn’t be intercepted: ‘At least nobody can accuse you, Hurtle, of being a virgin soul. Not with all these paintings to contradict them.’ Then, after a quick look over her shoulder, she added in a seismic whisper: ‘I’ve wanted, off and on, to talk to you about the paintings.’
He twitched at the idea: and Olivia had the feverish look of those who can never resist discussing religion.
Fortunately, at that moment, their glasses were filled, and they stood pretending to sip, while gulping, the mock champagne.
‘I’ve even culled a vocabulary’—Olivia Hollingrake confessed between gasps and a near sneeze—‘on nights when I couldn’t sleep—by which we might communicate.’
‘No,’ he protested into a flat dregs of resentment.
‘Oh, but why not?’
‘Because,’ he said, and it seemed to be coming out from the dead side of his face, the buckram half he no longer bothered hiding from her, ‘I’m just beginning. I’m only learning.’
Now it was his turn to look over his shoulder; so many hated him for the sins they believed he had already committed against them, would they be able to endure this supreme flouting of their reason?
He only slowly realized Olivia had taken him by the wrist. He rather enjoyed, from inside his own painfully prickling carapace, her soft, cushiony palm protected by its mail of jewels. She must have caught him staring at one cabochon knuckle in particular, because she lovingly murmured, swallowing the sounds almost at once: ‘That one is pigeon’s blood. An Indian prince—I forget which—gave it to Mummy.’ But that was the only incidental; she had arrived at the next stage of the unfolding of her plan.
‘I want you to take me to your sister. I’d like to congratulate her for the part she’s played in your success. Rhoda was so sweet.’ Olivia laughed. ‘How she must have suffered—she too!’
It was the more indefensible in that Rhoda and her cronies were gathered within hailing distance, against a period of his work which particularly exposed his frailty: his love for Kathy.
Rhoda couldn’t have helped noticing the straits he was in; in fact, she made it clear that she knew. The rose clown was laughing up at her companions, at Cec and Bernice Cutbush, at the transparent Mrs Volkov, and Don Lethbridge in his slackest woolliest blackest sweater and the skinniest blackest pants. Rhoda, in her determination to ignore an outside situation, was doing everything but handsprings to amuse her circle. Her little pointed teeth were working overtime in smiles.
Olivia Hollingrake kept looking in the opposite direction. ‘I remember’—she said, possibly hoping to avert the present at the last moment—‘I remember getting the fright of my life when I discovered Rhoda still only reached my navel, while I kept on shooting up. It made me feel abnormal. But Rhoda was so understanding. I’d invite her in while I was having my bath. And she’d sit stirring the water—telling me about the brother I had a crush on.’
The elderly archness of it shrivelled the senses which would have liked to drag him under, amongst the drowned mangoes and floating ferns, while Rhoda—indeed—stirred the water.
‘Rhoda doesn’t know—Rhoda knew nothing!’ He dragged his hand out of the crustaceous grasp. ‘Never!’
‘She used to write down
everything
in a diary.’
If Rhoda and Olivia were allowed to get together—but each seemed determined it shouldn’t happen, anyhow tonight.
‘With drawings,’ Olivia continued, but vaguely, while looking in the opposite direction.
‘Drawings? I’m pretty sure Rhoda never drew a thing. Tell me, Olivia?’
But Boo Hollingrake was smiling the smile she had caught from her mother. ‘There’s the Prime Minister. I must go and have a few words with Sam. I have a message for him from a cardinal. You know I’m living in Rome? For purely aesthetic reasons,’ she explained. ‘It’s never too late to be converted to other forms of beauty.’
She set off on her next mission as quickly as her bones and the crush permitted; and he would have joined Rhoda, to dissect the relationship Olivia claimed had existed, to discover whether, in spite of her professed dislike, Rhoda had been in fact Olivia’s confidante and spy; only the crowd wouldn’t let him. Not only solid bodies but tumbling spillikins of voices were against his arriving; for as the latter fell into their disorderly spillikin heap, it was impossible to ignore the game: against his will, of course, he continued detaching the more detachable straw-remarks.
‘They say all this is nothing to what he’s still got stashed away in the house. There are nightmares of perversion, really bad, mad things, which he won’t allow anyone to see, and which even he can’t bring himself to look at.’
‘But somebody must have seen them. Otherwise, how do you know?’
‘Somebody told me in confidence. Actually, it was Biddy Prickett.’
‘Then probably Biddy’s been shown all these delectable obscenities. ’
‘Probably she has. She and Ailsa handled his stuff for years.’
‘Let’s go and look for Bid.’
‘I couldn’t help overhearing—but Miss Prickett’s gone off in a huff. Somebody’s insulted her.’
‘Oh, nonsense, Max. A waiter spilled a glass of champagne down her cleavage.’
‘Would one glass break the drought? She seemed to be crying.’
‘She was insulted by someone.’
‘Biddy was insulted.’
‘Hurtle insulted Biddy. I know from a very reliable source she aspired to be his mistress. That’s the root of the matter. Of Biddy’s whole trouble.’
‘The root? Oh, sorry!’
‘Oh, Max!’
He was by now so close to the reason for his setting out, he could no longer see Rhoda herself. She was hidden somewhere inside the heap of spillikin voices, behind the frieze of normal human bodies, or masked Furies, none of the masks deceived: they were too obviously jolly, too jolly drunk, and not on false champers.
While he was struggling, a particularly cynical waiter, himself a little drunk, offered in a shout: ‘Let me freshen you up, Mr Duffield, with a drop of this nice sparkling Moselle,’ and waved the bottle above the sea of greedy heads.
A woman leaned over, one arm restraining her runaway breasts, the other raised to strike. ‘I want to touch you, Hurtle Duffield,’ she called through her cut-out, scarlet-varnished, papier-mâché mouth.
She did touch, too, and withdrew her hand as though it had been shocked by electricity. It should have been: the parts of his stroked body were tingling relentlessly.
Cecil Cutbush was waving, whether to draw attention to himself in his role of Bosom Friend, or simply to encourage the drowning. The closer you came the heavier the swell of voices, the stronger the undertow. Don Lethbridge, up to the chin, looked anxious; never learnt to swim perhaps.
‘I find it hard to believe in—what shall we call them—the pornographic series of drawings or whatever—which everyone talks about, but nobody has seen.’
‘I entirely agree with you, Sir Jack!’
‘And even less, the latest crazy myth.’
‘Oh, what? Do tell us, Sir Jack.’
‘The God paintings.’
‘The what?’
‘The God paintings.’
‘What exactly do you mean, sir?’
‘Is Duffield painting God?’
‘Painting himself, more like it.’
‘How rich! Now that
will
be obscene! At this stage. If only he’d painted himself while he was still only a god.’
‘I consider it frivolous to make such remarks, or pass judgement, before we’ve examined all the facts.’
‘Oh, entirely! I do agree with you, Sir Jack.’
‘I don’t, because by then the cove’ll be dead. He won’t be answerable for the blasphemous muck he leaves behind. And which some of them will feel it their duty to “understand”. I hate the phonies of this world.’
‘But these new paintings—whether they exist or not—somebody must have thought they did.’
‘Oh, I do think it’s exciting to be living now—what with space and everything.’
‘Let’s ask Benny Loebel. Benny? Benno! What about the God paintings?’
Loebel closed his eyes and smiled an appropriately mystic smile. ‘I do not know faht yu expect to hear.’ He wasn’t born a Viennese for nothing.
‘Silly old shyster! Have you see—’
‘I wonder who ever thought it up. God is dead, anyway. Anyway—thank God—in Australia.’
‘Only hypothetically, Marcus.’
‘I’m on your side, Sir Jack—at least, I think I am. Even though Marcus will probably kill me for it, I do hope the God paintings exist. The whole idea’s rather beaut.’
‘I hope for your sake they do, my dear. You’re at your most spectacular when most enthusiastic. Particularly in pink.’
By practising a kind of sidestroke, by half closing his eyes against the spray of words, by straining his neck muscles and kicking out with his good leg, he had almost reached the haven of a still corner under the lee of columnar cliffs, where friendly hands were waiting to haul him to comparative safety. Cecil Cutbush was the first to help, his grip clammier than you would have liked, too damp-spongy, too awful by half; and the irony: that the Cutbush-Volkov set, Rhoda’s friends, should be yours. Rhoda his pseudo-sister, still no more than a rosy blur to the right, could turn out to be only a papier-mâché rock when put to the test, but Cec and Bernice Cutbush had appointed themselves his personal lifesavers.
The Cutbush couple appeared in favour of physical methods of resuscitation. Bernice was all for massaging the biceps and kidneys; for two pins, Cec would have given the mouth-to-mouth a go: his face approached so close, the daring little dash of rouge was the only dry in his largely liquid pores.
‘How are you keeping, on this—this epic night, Mr Duffield?’
Because your smile felt more than ever lopsided, and an answer might have meant a painful struggle, you rewarded Cecil by squeezing his elbow, and at once his face put out flags.
Bernice saw. ‘You must take care of yourself—remember your health, Mr Duffield,’ she warned, and frowned. ‘Keep a hold of your emotions—even when thoughtful friends encourage you to let go. We wouldn’t want to see you take another fit—would we?’
Mrs Cutbush, also, longed to be touched, but he was too cruel, or too prudent, to oblige.
Of all people, it was Shuard the music critic who saved him from his saviors. (Shuard shouldn’t have been invited; but why had anybody been invited?)
Shuard whispered: ‘Some evening I’d like to celebrate in camera—among friends—your great success. Ask in a few girls. There are so many variations now that they’re letting in the Asians to study. And old Cec Cutbush, needless to say. Wouldn’t be complete, would it? without Cecil’s act.’
‘I’ve no idea.’
But Cec had. At mention of his act, jet began encrusting the bosom of his business suit: he was all smirk in the shadow of his ostrich feathers.
‘Incidentally, Hurtle,’ Shuard attempted an even more confidential tone, which remained as audible as brass, ‘I received a letter by this evening’s mail—an
air
letter from the little lady’—actually digging you in the ribs—‘from Kathy Volkov!’
Peugh! Shuard’s breath stinking of stale underclothes.
‘There’s a message in it she wants me to deliver. She wants me to tell . . .’
‘No. No! Not now! Some other time.’ Not Shuard undressing their relationship.
‘She said,’ the man insisted. ‘“Tell my dear old mate, my darling old rooster . . .”’
‘No! I don’t believe. I don’t want to—know. Never!’ His pure soul, his spiritual child.
At least the incident gave the mother her cue. Mrs Volkov, so pale, so shy, so unworldly as to be the ghost of a woman—a wonder the Russian ever got it in—sidled up in an impersonation of somebody who had suffered a stroke. Certainly she’d had one herself, but so slight, or so overcome, she could only count as a cryptovictim.