Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘Would you like to clean it up?’ he murmured without confidence.

The child didn’t answer, but slid through the half-open gate and marched towards Mrs Angove’s, her walk deliberately wooden, holding the billy well away. The heavy plait hanging down her back barely swung.

He went upstairs and began to draw the head of a girl: of about twelve? thirteen? fourteen? He was no good at guessing the ages of the young, perhaps because age wasn’t the straitjacket the well-intentioned would have liked it to be. In any case, the drawings he was making, one after the other, were not necessarily of the child who had come to the door, except for the plait; that was identifiable. Sometimes the drawings petered out in line: arabesques, not entirely frustrated, nor yet voluptuous. In one instance he wound the plait into a formal coronet with which he invested the head, and at once saw his mistake; he had made her a woman too soon: the eyes which he had left sightless on purpose began to stare with an expression he found offensively knowing. It was the mystery of pure being, of unrealized possibilities which fascinated him in children’s eyes.

Come to think of it, there were few children with whom he had been intimately acquainted: only himself — and Rhoda, each of whom was born old. Still, you didn’t have to know them: not if you knew.

That evening he decided to put on one of his suits from an earlier period to go to the party of a Mrs Mortimer he had met at an exhibition of paintings and vowed at the time not to meet again. Now, to escape a state of mind balanced between elation and dread, he found himself craving for a world he had hardly entered since before the war, and even then hadn’t cared for.

Mrs Mortimer lived in a ground-floor flat overlooking a private beach. He saw, to his disgust, he was the first arrival. From Mrs Mortimer’s point of view, it couldn’t have turned out better if she had arranged it that way herself.

‘Fancy, Hurtle,’ she said, though they had spoken for no more than ten minutes at the exhibition, ‘I didn’t imagine for a moment that I’d tempt you — with my boring old party, I mean!’

‘Nothing better to do,’ he mumbled, because he had been caught, and there seemed no alternate answer.

‘Oh dear, you do live up to your reputation!’ Mrs Mortimer was so delighted she came and rubbed her cheek against his.

She was a stocky woman with a thyroid throat. During his life, she had suffered from her husband’s good looks and roving eye. He had also left her hard up, she told her new acquaintance at the exhibition. Perhaps this was why she was now blushing all the way up her goitrous throat: her flat cried her poverty in accents of discreet luxury.

Mrs Mortimer was one of those who collected paintings. ‘Not a single one of yours, darling!’ It made her arch. ‘But that’s understandable: I’m a poor woman.’ By this time she was not so much referring to fact as taking it for granted he had been educated in the right conventions.

‘What do you think of this Pascoe?’ she asked, manoeuvring him past a Modigliani she must have forgotten. ‘I can’t judge him objectively, of course. Nobody who’s fallen into the bastard’s hands should even try to.’

She was not looking at Pascoe’s painting, but at the centre button of Duffield’s shirt, while scratching herself, slowly and thoughtfully, with an index finger, between her breasts. At the exhibition he had suspected Mrs Mortimer of wanting to have an affair with him to confound her handsome, late husband. He was conscious of vibrations now: if they were weaker on this occasion, certainly he felt pretty sexless after the early morning start and those sheets of still directionless drawings.

‘Someone’s arriving,’ Mrs Mortimer said, taking his hand and squeezing it, ‘and I haven’t had time to tell you about them. Don’t you find a dossier is a comfort?’ Was she going to be magnanimous and serve him up to someone else? ‘I do hope you won’t be bored by all these silly people,’ was as much as she could whisper; nor was he able to explain he aspired to be a tabula rasa, not a stud.

Mrs Mortimer’s party was so much the same in different clothes he wondered at what date the archetypal party had been held. The ladies screamed, or cooed, from stylized positions which suggested they were somehow out of joint, eyes straying, anointed eyelids fluttering as they wore the few cultivable topics, either marvellous or ghastly, to further shreds. The men were in general solider, not to say heavier: patches of light were reflected in their well-groomed shoulders and flanks, and you half expected a jingle of brass when their hostess, an adept at flicking the social whip, drove them straining from their last objective to the next.

One of the husbands, a mature grey with a hint of the investor in his wall eye, came up as though he would like to conspire. ‘Painting anything lately, Hurtle?’ He mentioned that his name was ‘Ian’.

What could you reply? Am I breathing? Am I shitting? You mumbled instead: ‘No. Not for the moment. Nothing to mention; ’ before turning your back.

It was difficult to remember why he had come. In his dated clothes, and corroded mask, he had reached a stage where he was at home only with objects; so he began to wander deliberately about the room: a pursuit they were content to leave him at. (It was enough to have him amongst them, to be able to tell afterwards how he had failed to control his language, his wind: Really rather horrid, my dear, when I’d always understood he was a charmer. ) So he wandered through the congested room. There was a daguerreotype, with the features of Mrs Mortimer herself, of an old lady brutally lined, managing her best dress against a potted palm and painted clouds. On a full-dimensional table nearby stood a bowl of faintly pink, faintly scented, single roses, into which he stuck his nose, clumsily, unashamedly.

‘Hurtle, darling, here is something which may interest!’ Mrs Mortimer came over to announce in a muted blast of gin. ‘There are two young women across there, both attractive, both intelligent, and all of them married. What more could you ask for?’

As she spoke, she was coaxing the palm of his hand with a finger expertly bent; while the two young women on the opposite side of the room, perhaps sensing they were on the market, smiled coldly at their drinks. Mrs Mortimer was not deterred by coldness from any direction: her role of procuress was more important than her unfulfilled sexual desires.

‘Somebody told me Olivia Davenport’s in town,’ said a plain and shiny American girl he had been avoiding.

‘Darling old Boo! Yes. Isn’t she adorable? She’s begun to feel the weather, but I’m expecting her to totter thisaway.’ Mrs Mortimer tossed her mane like a skittish filly.

‘Well now, won’t that be a pleasure — a pleasure renewed! We met last winter in Nassau. She’s the sweetest, loveliest person. Age hardly matters — I mean, you can be as old as stone if you’ve got that special radiance Mrs Davenport has!’

The American girl had grown that much shinier for the recollecting her experience in Nassau. Her orange canvas, college-style hat played up to the shininess: so dowdy and confident her connections must have been of the best.

He couldn’t wait to see the Little Old Lady the American girl thought she had met; while Mrs Mortimer, always patting her party along, started muttering cynically: ‘Don’t you realize you’re standing beside Hurtle Duffield the famous painter?’

‘Oh, no! Not Duffield!’ squealed the American girl. ‘Whoever it was can’t have felt more excited to come all this way and discover Australia! The man on board who gave the talks told us about you, sir — oh, about Dobell, and Drysdale, and I dunno who — but Duffield! ’ From squealing, she changed her tune and her expression to suit a few drawn-out cello-notes: ‘Mr Duffield, I’d like you to know it’s the most important moment of my life — intellectually, and spiritually.’