Patrick White - The Vivisector

Rhoda went on masticating her toast. For some reason she was wearing on the collar of her everyday dress a cameo brooch which had been their mother’s — no, it had belonged to Maman. The brooch made him more than ever determined not to submit to the operation Rhoda suggested.

He was relieved she didn’t bring the matter up again.

In the years after Kathy left, he was persuaded to allow two exhibitions of his more recent paintings: one with the girls at the Tank Stream Galleries, the other at Loebel’s marble palace. The exhibitions were decorously received, the paintings vulgarly snapped up. He wouldn’t have told anyone details of the sales, only the press got hold of half the story.

In 1964 Hurtle Duffield refused a knighthood, partly because he wasn’t the man they believed they were honouring, and partly because he wouldn’t have dared confess to Rhoda that he had accepted the thing.

So they continued living and blundering and working and chopping up the purple horse-flesh in Flint Street.

He decided that, before he died, he must paint a picture which would refute all controversies, even convert his sister’s scepticism.

Rhoda said: ‘I think I’m beginning to understand your painting, Hurtle, after these last two exhibitions. The horrors are less horrible if you’ve created them yourself. Is that it?’

She was looking at him, waiting for him, then lowering her eyes because she had been taught discretion as a girl.

‘No,’ he said, and it cannoned off the coarse white kitchen plate. ‘I’m trying,’ already he realized how stupid it would sound, ‘I’m still trying to arrive at the truth.’

‘Then perhaps I don’t understand after all. The truth can look so dishonest.’

‘Exactly!’ He ricocheted, when he should have shot her straight to the floor. ‘That’s why we’re at loggerheads.’ He was beating the stupid plate with the spoon. ‘It’s not dishonest! It’s not! If it were only a question of paint — but is it dishonest to pour out one’s life-blood?’

He felt in himself a terrible void, which he identified at once with the absence of his daughter Kathy; yet, if she had been present, he knew he wouldn’t necessarily be able to invoke her intuitive genius in his defence. More likely, the carnal, brutal, thoughtless (or calculating) Kathy would blow bubble-gum in his face and confirm Rhoda’s opinion of him.

Rhoda said: ‘Do you remember the tutor you had who committed suicide? And you painted it on the wall?’

‘Whatever made you think of that?’

‘I’ve often wondered about it. It was so bewildering at the time. I’d always seen Mr Shewcroft as unkempt and repulsive, but as soon as he’d killed himself I began to think of him as handsome and brave, though Miss Gibbons tried to convince me his suicide was a dishonest act. But whatever made you do something so horrible and unnecessary as that painting?’

‘I was only a child of course, but I think I was trying to find some formal order behind a moment of chaos and unreason. Otherwise it would have been too horrible and terrifying.’

‘Don’t tell me you’re a mystic! At least I can honestly say I believe in nothing. I need never be afraid.’

‘Of what?’

‘That the conjuring trick won’t come off. That my “god” may let me down.’

He found himself crushing the empty shell of the egg he had just eaten.

‘I really do pity you, my dear,’ Rhoda pursued, ‘if you should believe in a “god”. Whatever I suffered in my childhood and youth from being ugly and deformed, at least it gave me this other strength: to recognize the order, and peace, and beauty in nothingness.’

‘I believe,’ he said, ‘in art.’ He would have liked to elaborate, but was only strong enough to add: ‘I have my painting.’

‘Your painting. And yourself. But those too, are “gods” which could fail you.’

This, perhaps the worst truth of all, he had never been able to face except in theory. Had he brought Rhoda into his house to help him to?

‘Ah, yes — failing powers!’ He laughed. ‘I hope I may be struck blind.’ He jibbed at using the word ‘dead’.

Rhoda laughed too. ‘We shall be a fine pair!’

In the silence which followed he scented a dishonest terror in her. As for himself: he felt curiously calmed by Rhoda’s weakness. If critical opinion ever decided before his death that he was worthless as a painter, he might discover in his fingertips some unsuspected gift for expressing himself; he might even calm Rhoda’s fears.

He must watch himself, however. He entered a phase of attrition by apprehension, as a result of which his cunning hand was forced to increased displays of virtuosity. Perhaps Rhoda didn’t notice. Certainly none of the buyers did. Flattery flowed as never before. Americans would pay grotesque sums for paintings he sometimes secretly admitted to be amongst his worst.

On one occasion Rhoda remarked, after a painting had been crated up: ‘That was one I couldn’t believe in, Hurtle.’

‘I’m surprised you believe in any of my paintings. Doesn’t it go against your “faith”? Undermine the strength you were trying to explain to me recently?’ As he went upstairs, he hoped his reply had been savage enough.

Some of his paintings and drawings of this period would not be seen in his lifetime unless dragged into the open by force. Certainly Rhoda would never see them. They were the fruit of his actual life, as opposed to the one in which he painted pictures for Americans to buy, and where the dealers jollied him along. His actual life, or secret work, was magnificent, if terrifying. It was lived almost exclusively at night while Rhoda was lying in her salvaged cot. As he roamed through the overflowing house the flora and fauna of his past were released, sometimes also the suppurating flesh and green-tinged offal. He appropriated all of it: the corpses with the goddesses, pressed flowers and furry, wet-nosed animals, not least the glove which fitted tightest and neatest, of smoothest kid.

The landings creaked. Once during a storm he heard an urn fall from a parapet. Only after years he was getting to know the house, by its smooth grain as well as its splinters: not forgetting the crash of its disintegrating ornamental urns. If only he could have reached the derelict conservatory; but Rhoda always lay between, turning in her iron cot. So he never succeeded wholly in reliving the poetry Katherine Volkov had danced for him, and which they alone knew how to interpret.

He would return upstairs: to draw; sometimes to paint, because the artificial light furthered his real illusions. Sometimes he would wake up in the criss-crossed yellow morning, and find on the floor beside his bed drawings on which his mind wouldn’t comment. There was one drawing in which all the women he had ever loved were joined by umbilical cords to the navel of the same enormous child. One cord, which had withered apart, shuddered like lightning where the break occurred; yet it was the broken cord which seemed to be charging the great tumorous, sprawling child with infernal or miraculous life.

Though they were horrible and frightening, the secret drawings and occasional paintings of this period were what sustained his spirit; even when he couldn’t always grasp the significance, he could bask in his own artistry: that monstrous child, for instance, with the broken umbilical cord. Superficially the cord was reminiscent of a dry string of byrony waving from an English hedge. It was only when he began to consider its deeper implications that his body would tingle painfully as though from an electric shock. Was he the child who still had to expect birth? And what of death? Sometimes he stood shivering as he waited on the river bank, until his little psychopomp appeared, dressed in the silver tunic, hair streaming with light and music. She would never approach closer than to show him she was beckoning; after which, he was content to follow.