Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘For a time I accepted my guilt: even though I kept telling myself she had used me as an instrument of self-torture. She was a very beautiful woman when she was least unhinged; but depravity could make her coarse, brutal. She was the most depraved woman I’ve ever met. It seemed she had to degrade herself for being unworthy of her husband-God — a rich old satrap, who drowned cats by the sackful — like other gods when they tire of them.’

Shrunk inside his clothes, the printer might have liked to shrink even further, into his private cosmos if it had still been attainable.

‘Well, he succeeded in making me believe I was the cause of his wife’s death. I couldn’t paint for several weeks.’ Better keep it at that level. ‘Then, at the end of the war, I had a letter from a woman friend of Hero’s telling me what really happened.’

‘Of who?’ The printer had wet his lips; he was inclining on his near buttock.

‘Hero. My mistress was a Greek.’

Mothersole could only shake his head, as though depravity had invaded the beaches, the mateship at Gallipoli.

‘This woman told me Hero had spent several of the war years in an asylum. She suffered a lot from malnutrition, like most of the Greeks during the German occupation. She used to talk about me in connection with what she called her “unsuccessful exorcism”: this woman Arta Baïla told me. Shortly before the end of the war, they moved Hero to a hospital — where she died of a cancer. The shortage of drugs made her death a particularly agonizing one.’

‘Mr Duffield, if this story is too painful — there is no need—’ the printer kindly suggested, his own face drawn with discovery.

‘So I didn’t kill her, as her husband said. She died of cancer.’

The gulls still wheeling in beautiful balance were diving for something, possibly sewage, in the ferry’s wake.

‘Or does one really know what sows the seed? Is cancer entirely a physical disease? Did I help kill by failing her? You see, we were never lovers. Oh yes, we fucked like animals; and I was fond, very fond of her; but I didn’t love her, I can see now.’

The more sheltered waters of the harbour could have been taking over, though there wasn’t any visible evidence yet. One particularly smooth gull flew so close Mothersole ducked.

‘Have you ever been in love?’

“Who? I?’ It was too incredible a question for the printer to understand at first. ‘For years of my life, Mr Duffield, I was a married man.’

‘Yes, I know. But you make it sound like a well-sprung bed. Isn’t love — more, shall we say — a matter of suffering and sacrifice? ’

Mothersole’s face might have looked pained if it had looked less bewildered. ‘I’ve had my fair share of that,’ he mumbled in rather a surly voice.

‘Yes, I suppose so. And I have my work.’

They were both pretty haggard, if not seasick like several of the others, after an unusually rough crossing of the Heads.

As they slid into smoother, sunlit waters, Mothersole took out a handkerchief to wipe the salt off his suit. ‘What sort of things do you paint?’ he asked.

‘Well! For some time now, tables and chairs.’

‘A funny sort of subject, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

‘Why? What could be more honest? I’m not talking about the gimcrack: there’s dishonest furniture, just as there are dishonest human beings. But take an honest-to-God kitchen table, a kitchen chair. What could be more real? I’ve had immense difficulty reaching the core of that reality, in I don’t know how many attempts, but I think I may have done it at last — or thought so until this morning: when everything died on me.’

‘How do you mean “died”?’

‘Exactly that. It no longer — in fact, none of the paintings of a lifetime — had any life.’

‘But once a picture is painted, how can it alter?’ Mothersole was not concerned about paintings: he might never have noticed one; he was distressed by a state of the human mind.

‘Paintings die like anything else, a great many with their creators, and this morning I realized, I think, that I’m already dead.’

They were slipping through a sea grown oily and passive, through broad bands of yellow sunlight, towards the solidly constructed wooden wharf. He would have liked to reach out and touch his temporary friend before the latter finally escaped: for Mothersole shared with the kitchen table that same commodious banality, the simple reality of which was so enviable, and at the same time elusive.

The printer was getting up. ‘Aren’t you coming?’ he asked, because it was polite to do so. ‘The gangway’s down.’

‘No. There’s no longer any reason why I should. I’d only waste an afternoon on the beach: drying up.’ He paused, because he scarcely dared: ‘And I may have got what I wanted.’

The printer’s rubber soles were beginning to withdraw him with matter-of-fact sounds of suction. ‘I shall remember our talk,’ he said. ‘You have my card — haven’t you?’ He might have liked to get it back.

The two men looked at each other, and smiled as each realized he would probably never meet the other again except in nightmares or moments of sentimental weakness.

For the return journey the ferry filled with the same kind of nondescript faces, if none was of the quintessential Mothersole. Their glances no more than flickered over an undesirable element: on the other hand, the sun in their spectacles could have accounted for this expression of distaste verging on apprehension.

As for the outsider, he no longer needed his Mothersole. His teeth grated as he regurgitated the nonsense he had talked while in the throes of rebirth: Hero’s death; his own; that of his paintings. (In his right mind, he never let himself be drawn into talk about his painting, just as he shied away from those who wished to discuss variations on the sexual act.) He remembered another occasion when he had risen from the dead, by seminal dew and the threats of moonlight, in conversation, repulsive, painful, but necessary, with the grocer Cutbush: and now he was born again by the grace of Mothersole’s warm middle-class womb.

Presently he went and stood at the stern. He took out the printer’s card. When he had torn it, he scattered the pieces on the water as Mothersole himself would have wished, if his ethos had allowed. Gulls fell rapaciously, swerved deceived, curving away. He continued watching the seed he had sown in the white furrow; some of it began at once to germinate, to reach such proportions his mind was already grappling with their sometimes exquisite, sometimes bitter fruit: particularly the apricot-coloured child-faces with their dark, crippled Doppelgänger.

Apart from Rhoda, who was ageless, why had he never painted a child? He had never desired to get one, but the work of art could be less of a botch. Sitting with his hands locked, he was fidgeting to create this child. Or more than one. Or many in the one. For after all there is only the one child: the one you still carry inside you.

So the light was exploding around him as they reached the Quay.

He walked home against an afternoon gale, climbing hills with a speed made possible by the impetus of his thoughts. When he let himself into the darkening house, he began at once to drag at switches. He ran, almost, thundering from room to room, bringing them to life. His despairs of that morning were vibrating on the walls, even the one he hadn’t faced for several months: the cancer glowed inside the monstrance of Hero’s womb as the wooden saints of Perialos raised her up, the sea coiling and uncoiling round the foreshore in its ritual celebration of renewal.

How could his unborn child fail to stir amongst these miracles of the risen dead?