Patrick White - The Vivisector

It seemed incredible that Rhoda should resist such a practical solution.

She seemed to have read his thoughts, for she murmured: ‘In any case, I couldn’t manage the stairs — in my condition.’

She was certainly looking very pinched and chalky. She sounded as though she was sucking on a comb and paper: while smiling at him.

‘And all these paintings,’ she dared only mumble.

‘What about the paintings?’ he dared her back.

They were possibly coming to it now.

‘Well,’ Rhoda coughed and smiled, ‘I might be vivisected afresh, in the name of truth — or art.’

‘How? How?’ He was so shocked.

‘Don’t you remember that dog we saw with Maman somewhere in London? I shall never forget its varnished tongue.’

How could he forget the smell of their own wet frightened fur as they huddled together escaping in the cab?

‘But what has that to do with art?’ As if he didn’t know the answer.

She was looking at a painting which seemed to illustrate her argument, and which, he realized, with cold resignation, might break down his defence. When and why had he brought the painting out? Could it have been there during Kathy’s visit? Sometimes, he knew, he would get out of bed still half asleep, and rummage after an old work to prove a point he had been trying to make in his late dream, then return to continued sleep. Afterwards he would find this visible evidence of his dream-life standing against the wall, and often fail to remember the circumstances which had called for it.

The painting at which Rhoda was now staring so painfully was an early ‘Pythoness’: judging by the naturalistic treatment, probably one of the first. His own horror at their finding themselves in the present situation couldn’t prevent him experiencing a twinge of appreciation for his forgotten achievement: the thin, transparent arm; the sponge as organic as the human claw clutching it; the delicate but indestructible architecture of the tripod-bidet, beside which the rosy figure was stood up for eternity.

This aesthetic orgasm lasted what seemed only a long second before the moral sponge was squeezed: its icy judgement was trickling in actual sweat down his petrified ribs.

He heard Rhoda’s voice. ‘I was born vivisected. I couldn’t bear to be strapped to the table again.’

‘I can’t help it,’ he apologized, ‘if I turned out to be an artist.’

There was little else he could say.

‘Shall I fry you some eggs?’ he asked as he led the way downstairs. ‘There’s some bacon, but it may be rancid.’

Rhoda laughed her high little laugh; breathlessness seemed relieved by a descent. ‘Eggs and bacon were always scrumptuous at night! Oh yes, do, Hurtle, do! The bacon might be the kind which tastes rancid from the beginning. I adore bacon when somebody else cooks it for me.’

It was delicious to discover that, on this level, they were still brother and sister: it was the triumph of their education by Maman in superficial intercourse, and they were probably both grateful to have had it.

‘Maman used to cook eggs for us in the bedroom when the money was almost blown. She loved to put on a pretty apron. We’d moved to Battersea by then. Mr Boileau was very bored. He was trying to meet somebody richer.’

As he got out the pan, he asked: ‘How did Maman die, Rhoda?’

‘I think she died because she felt it wasn’t worth living without the inessentials.’

‘Poor thing!’

‘Yes.’ Rhoda sighed. ‘Poor thing!’

Their affection and regret were of the superficial, nostalgic kind Maman herself would have approved, although, enclosed by the asbestos box which passed for a kitchen, it seemed incredible ever to have been children, or that Maman had been any kind of mother.

As the fat began to spit, and the eggs to shrivel, Rhoda was telling him about her life: ‘. . various rich, elderly women. I was officially a companion. But it never really worked. They only felt they had a duty towards me — because of my curvature. At least that worked well enough on the conscience of one of them. She left me a nice little pittance.’

He knew by the tone of voice, she would have liked to draw him into a conspiracy of confidences; but he was concentrated on the eggs.

‘Something to live on modestly,’ Rhoda said; then she raised her voice, and giggled. ‘And I’ve got a pension — an invalid pension! Doesn’t it kill you? I’d never have had the nerve, but a friend said I should apply. She herself was born poor. I think poor people have more nerve when it comes to self-humiliation.’

He was fascinated by the freckled eggs. The ruff of one was ballooning to such proportions he hoped he wouldn’t ruin it. He knew exactly how he would have painted the lacy, freckled egg.

‘Are you rich, Hurtle? They say you’ve made a packet. I suppose one can’t help it once one begins. I read about a sale of paintings to the United States.’

It made him squint more closely at the eggs. ‘I can’t say I’m poor,’ he mumbled.

There was a soft spatter of rain on the window. He was feeling depressed again. He had ruined his best egg while practising self-indulgence.

‘Those are the best,’ he said, pushing a couple on to her plate; one of them burst, and spread, like a joke egg.

‘This one got burnt. I wasn’t concentrating enough.’ Actually both the eggs he gave himself were burnt, not through lack of concentration, but because he had been so fascinated by the gold to deeper-golden, and finally the burning, ruffs.

‘Mmmm!’ Rhoda was chewing on the frizzled bacon.

A brittle rind stuck out of her little, pointed mouth. She helped it in with a finger: not altogether clean, he noticed. He couldn’t criticize his sister because his own nails were on the grubby side.

Hunger they had in common, and a childhood, and probably a respect for the basic acts and values.

So it didn’t occur to him to offer her any of the loaf from which he tore off an occasional handful, to mop up the egg smears and congealing fat; she would help herself. He was right: whenever necessary, Rhoda prised out little clawfuls of bread, to screw around the terrain of her plate. In an awful way, and as Maman’s true child, she was more delicate than he.

‘Lovely!’ Rhoda sighed, and popped her fingers into her mouth to suck up the last of goodness; on her sharp chin there was a dribble of egg it was impossible for her to know about.

He would have liked to enjoy a fart now that they were finished, but supposed he shouldn’t even though she was his sister.

‘When I first heard about you, Hurtle, after I’d come back — God knows why we do — to Australia — except that a cat prefers to die in the gutter it belongs to spiritually — this was after I’d inherited from Mrs Huxtable, the one in Warwick Gardens.’ Rhoda was weaving her story over some brandy he had remembered in a cupboard. ‘When I first got back I was living over by the part they call The Gash. Do you know it?’ He knew so well he didn’t feel he had to answer; it was from there that his ‘Lantana Lovers’ had come to him; he knew it so intimately he could feel the dew from the moonlit bench working into the seat of his pants. ‘Well, that was where I was living, and it was my friend Mrs Cutbush who told me about you. She reads the newspapers as a compensation.’

‘Cutbush?’

‘Yes. The grocer’s wife.’

‘But you can’t know Cutbush? ’

‘Him too. Why shouldn’t I? Though he’s not my favourite person. Incidentally, Cutbush once suggested you were an intimate friend. I didn’t let on I was your sister. Nor did I believe in the relationship he claimed. He had the kind of fertile imagination in which acquaintanceship grows, tropically, into a friendship. ’