Patrick White - The Vivisector

It left him. He would sit whole mornings in the Sulka dressing-gown, a present from Olivia before the war. (For lack of ideas, he might have used the vision of his own tarnished splendour, but remembered another self-portrait.) He stood by open windows looking out, and faces looking up were immediately averted as though they had been hailed on: people never understood that desire is a kind of invisible hail. He continued looking, not so much out, as into himself. As the weather cooled off he exchanged the Sulka robe for an old matted woolen gown with droppings of porridge and condensed milk down the lapels. The gown had become an extension of himself; it wouldn’t be discarded. Sometimes he added to the patina dribbles of fresh milk, for he had taken to drinking it regularly; he told himself he liked it.

‘Why don’t you have it delivered, sir?’ asked the smallgoods girl, whose name was Maree.

He smiled. ‘It wouldn’t be worth it.’

‘Save you the trouble of having to remember,’ she complained, pouting for his shiftlessness, and his smile: the smile was too mysterious.

He used to drink the milk from the bottle at the open window. Then he began forgetting, and would find the milk had turned to curds. There was as sour smell in the scullery, of more than milk: of his own memory. He would pour the curds plopping hatefully out of the bottle, into the sink, and mash them down the hole. The stench shot up his nostrils.

He had prepared boards and a canvas or two, and made a number of drawings, but of faceless abstractions. They didn’t convey the joy he knew he was capable of expressing if desire and idea came together in him. On one occasion he drew a stiffly-wired bouquet of flowers, to which he almost succeeded in adding the face flowering at its heart. As it was, the stiff bunch remained too precise, rather sterile. Once he drew the head and shoulders of a boy, of silver outline, swimming in a sea of light or fleeces, but found to his disgust it was himself he had drawn from memory, the sulky still swaying through the dew-sodden sheep on the expedition to Mumbelong with Father. He destroyed the drawing. Whatever the accusations, he was not, he never had been, in love with himself: with his art, yes; and that was a projection of life, with the ugliness and cruelties, for which some of his critics held him personally responsible. He must have waited till now to create his late child because love is subtler, more elusive, more delicate.

Occasionally he woke in such physical pain he was afraid his body might give up before he was ready. It was about this time too that he read in the paper the account of a Japanese youth of twenty or so, in whom an actual child was found growing: the slow-developing seed of his own unborn twin. On sleepless nights a thought began tormenting the elderly, ‘successful’ painter: had he been deluded into mistaking a monstrous pregnancy of the ego for this child of joy he was preparing to bring forth?

He would lie sweating in the dark, from time to time groaning aloud. Why not? There was nobody to hear; till one night he became conscious of a presence. He felt for the switch of the electric bulb hanging over his bed. Near his feet a rat was sitting on the blanket. Neither he nor the rat stirred for several light-years: they could have been a comfort to each other. Then the rat turned, thumped the boards as he landed on them, not in fear, and slowly moved away, dragging his long tail into outer darkness.

That morning began earlier than most. He slid out of bed, hunched, but slowly purposefully moving, in no way fretted by any of the worries of the night before. The light was silver, still only in tentative possession amongst the ink splashes and deeper pools of dark. He thought he saw something he must do to the archetype of a table he had painted several weeks back, but would wait till sunrise. Through the fringes of the araucaria, above the roofs of houses, the sea was stirring and glinting as though sharpening itself against itself. He too felt keen. There was a sound of billiards — no, milk bottles. Farting once or twice he went barefoot to drink some of the milk he had fetched from the smallgoods. (Ought to have it delivered, of course, as she said.)

The earlier part of the morning he lingered over the opening of shutters, to enjoy the clear light which swilled out the rooms; he could even feel it; he could feel the light trickling down inside the gown, over his not unpleasantly frowsy skin. In this state he could have enjoyed most things. The sounds of morning were still thin, but precise. The voices of women calling to their children hadn’t yet been roughed up; the men hadn’t begun throwing their weight around.

There was one room in his house for which he had never found a use: a small surplus parlour, with pieces of Miss Gilderthorp’s frailest palisander upholstered by this time in dust tones. The parlour led to the conservatory. Now when he opened the shutters, the light which entered, cold and pure, filtered through laurustinus and privet, increased the room’s spinsterish air.

On the other hand, the derelict conservatory was already buzzing, murmuring, drowsing in a tousle of tranquil gold: it was a light reflected out of childhood, in which he should have been gorging on handfuls of stolen crystallized cherries instead of aimlessly trampling around, dragging the dust off aspidistras with the skirt of his old frowsty gown.

It was while he was in the conservatory that the front doorbell started ringing. It rang too long, too hectically for normal circumstances: it made him spin round once or twice on his heels before going to investigate. He wondered if it mattered that his feet were bare; he was, in any case, naked inside his dressing-gown.

She asked: ‘Is this Mrs Angove’s place?’ looking angrily ashamed.

She was carrying a white-enamelled billy, with a chip out of the lid about the size of a thumbnail. The lid grated slightly as she waited for his answer. It was the billy, he felt, which was making her angry.

‘No,’ he replied, from a long way back in his gummed-up throat.

She was wearing a long thick perfect glistening plait: the reason why his voice had taken so long to rise to the surface.

‘No. She doesn’t live here. I can tell you where you’ll find her, though.’ It was fortunate he could.

All the while the rather leggy child was frowning and twitching. Her impatience made the billy rattle.

‘You see that house down there — the beige one on the opposite side — about six away — fairly narrow?’

The girl only made a breathing sound.

‘But you must,’ he insisted. ‘It’s unmistakable: the one with the mock-Romanesque windows.’ Showing off to a child.

She seemed disgusted rather than impressed. She certainly wasn’t frightened. She had that clear skin which mottles: it had mottled up the arms as far as the short, crisp sleeves, and up her long stalk of a neck; only at the nape, where the plait began, the skin remained mysteriously opaque.

‘That is where Mrs Angove lives,’ he said, he hoped, benevolently, while suspecting it sounded pompous. ‘Lucky I know Mrs Angove, isn’t it? And was able to help.’

Mrs Angove was rather a cranky old woman (perhaps not so old) with a hip.

‘Is she sick?’ he asked, coming down the steps as the child descended.

‘I don’t know. She’s a friend of my mother’s.’

‘Anyway, you’re taking her something good. Soup — is it?’

Just then the child caught her toe in a crack in the path, and some of the soup slopped out of the billy and splashed her skirt.

‘Oo-er!’ she shouted in a different voice: she probably had several. ‘I’ve made a mess of me dress!’

Very little of a mess.