Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘Oh yes. There was a time when she couldn’t move without me. I wasn’t prepared to be possessed to that extent. I couldn’t breathe.’

‘But you know Hero was my mistress.’

‘I gave her to you — for that purpose — not to kill!’

He took her by the wrists. ‘How many murders, Boo, are ever proved?’

‘Exactly. Very seldom the ones we know anything about: that other case, for instance.’

‘Which other case?’ He could hear his voice progressively rising on the slack, evening air.

‘The prostitute’—Olivia’s voice had grown equally discordant—‘who fell — or threw herself off a cliff — I forgot where it happened. ’

He was too tired, or too old, to defend himself against false accusations. ‘But Hero died of cancer, didn’t she?’ He had found the strength to shout that.

It was surprising none of the elaborate figures in Mrs Mortimer’s illuminated living-room broke. Olivia Davenport recovered enough of her social conscience to hold her breath, to turn her head, to find out; but the guests were too involved in spinning ‘charm’ and reflecting ‘brilliance’ to notice or hear the regrettable maniacs on the beach.

‘Cancer,’ Olivia had become so blatant she too was now positively shouting the forbidden word, ‘is sometimes only the coup de grâce; and suicide, more often than not, is another kind of murder.’

In more objective circumstances he might have agreed with her. At the present moment, with the livid landscape pressing too close, and the limp air an extra skin, he could only hate Olivia.

She said, without great concern, it seemed: ‘Do you want to break my wrists?’

He immediately dropped what he had forgotten he was holding, but couldn’t divest himself of his accuser.

‘Of course I didn’t know the prostitute,’ she was saying, ‘only what I’ve been told. But you— we —might have saved Hero if we’d been a little less technically accomplished, slightly more experienced in living.’

His breath whistled. ‘I believe — or I think I believed at the back of my mind — that a condemned soul might help save another. ’ What had he ever believed, when he wasn’t painting? If he knew, he might have finished the inscription on the dunny wall. ‘Anyway, we tried — didn’t you know? dragging all the way to that island of infallible saints; but the saints had left, and God was a millionaire her spiritual pride wouldn’t allow her to make use of.’

‘Oh, husbands,’ Olivia mumbled, ‘no gods ever died so quickly or so easily.’

She was looking at her feet, and now he, too, noticed that the tide had come in and was washing over the tops of their shoes, stirring a scum of weed and straw, lifting an empty sardine tin and a used condom. They should have moved, but couldn’t: their feet mightn’t have belonged to them.

‘Always at my most desperate, or cynical,’ Olivia said, watching as the sea continued sucking round their ankles, ‘when I’ve most hated men for their lies and presumptuousness, and their attempts to reduce love to a grotesque sexual act, I’ve felt that somewhere there must be some creature, not quite man, not quite god, who will heal the wounds.’ She raised her head and drew down the corners of her formal mouth. ‘Perhaps that’s why we look to artists of any kind, why we lose our heads over them.’

‘Possibly!’ He took her lightly by the hand. ‘But better wait till they’re dead. What they have to tell or show improves with decontamination — if it doesn’t go up in hot air, or sink into a wall.’

When they reached the drier sand Olivia Davenport began moaning like an elderly woman. ‘How wet! I wonder whether I’ll catch a cold? At least they won’t notice in there: everyone will be too drunk by now.’ She prepared to return to the rout he no longer felt in any way committed to.

He walked along the beach looking for a way back to the road, his shoes squelching under him. There was still a smear of crimson staining the membrane of sky: it made his blood quicken. He was not yet destroyed, or not the artist in him: the flat monochrome of a world beneath the crimson sky-mark was his to recreate in its true form, visible, it seemed, only to himself.

On the third evening after his harrowing but necessary encounter with Olivia he was cleaning some brushes in the bedroom-studio overlooking Chubb’s Lane. A placid golden light and the practical rather humdrum nature of his job encouraged a belief in compatibility. He tried to imagine how it must feel to inspire respect, as opposed to adoration, mistrust, or hate: if you were a joiner, say, or a locksmith, or watchmaker, even a grocer. Not a grocer. Grocers, he remembered, could have an affinity with evil and with artists, which threatened the harmonies the bland evening was pouring out.

Along the lane there was not a discord: certainly the sounds of life, but broken bottles were temporarily debarred; or had the minutest splinters of grassy conflict already begun to fray the curtain of moted light?

‘If we’re gunner play, why don’t we play?’

‘Come on! We’re playing, aren’t we? What’s wrong?’

He could see the first speaker: her sweaty concern; the brown-ringed, brown eyes: big floppy cerise bow crowning the black frizz of hair against the opposite palings of the lane. Her companion of cooler voice remained invisible, closer to his side. At one point he caught sight of what must have been the cause of contention: a ball rising high above the hooded dunny.

The voice of the concerned girl pursued the soaring ball: ‘O- ohhh! ’ in the long arc of a moan.

‘You wanted to play silly old ball, didn’t you? Well, I’m playing! See?’

‘We mighter lost it.’

‘I caught it, didn’t I?’

‘Wasn’t your turn.’

‘You’re not mature, Angela, wanting to play at silly ball. I wanter go home and study.’ The cool voice narrowed, and he recognized the code of priggishness.

‘Go on then! I’ll play by meself. Who wants to study? I’m gunner get married soon as I can leave school.’

‘My mother says I mustn’t think of getting married too soon.’

‘Mmmm. Who’s gunner pay for yer if you don’t?’

Three or four driblets of the tossed ball punctured the silence that had formed.

‘Not yer father!’ Angela tried out.

At once the ball rose so high the sun turned it into a burning replica.

‘What’re you up to, Kathy? I’m gunner lose me ball — me new ball!’

‘Your father’ll buy you another one.’

Voices hesitated after that: time paused; till the molten ball, cooled by its descent, began to re-form, thumped solid, rebounded, and thumped again in somebody’s back yard.

‘You’ve lost me ball!’ Angela moaned, her ripe-banana skin sweating worse than ever.

‘We can go in and get it can’t we?’

‘Not in there! I’m not gunner go in there. He’s funny.’

‘He’s only an old man.’

‘Some old men — I’m not goin’ in there!’ Angela’s cerise bow flackered past the metal-bound palings as she moved up Chubb’s Lane. ‘You only done it — lost me ball — because you wanter go home and study.’

‘You’re obsessed, Angela!’

‘I’m what?’

For an instant a glistening plait raised itself above his dilapidated fence, as though to strike.

He watched the ball settle by shallow bounces at the roots of the Bignonia venusta which crowned the dunny. Then he began to go downstairs, very quickly, youthfully, breathing deeply. He could move with ease because he was still wearing the dressing-gown he had put on that morning and which one thing and another throughout the day had prevented him improving on. At the same time he knew that improvement wasn’t necessary: his returning the ball had been prearranged; nor would he appear as the bogy which troubled the stupid Angela’s imagination: for Kathy he was only an old man. The fact that she could already perceive some, if not all of the truth, made her his spiritual child of infinite possibilities.