Patrick White - The Vivisector

She looked along the street, away from him. ‘The unusual lines aren’t what you’d call popular,’ she said.

To console her, he told her: ‘Keep at it, and they will be.’

‘Cecil’s too artistic for a man — for a business— a business man.’ Her throat swelling turned a confession into an accusation: she couldn’t forgive poor old Cec his unusual line in cuissons. ‘That’s our whole trouble,’ she said.

Probably a good woman, and the grocer, who had saved your life by Triple O, good also, if ‘artistic’. Two goods could obviously make a bad marriage.

Just then Cecil Cutbush steamed out from behind glass, trying to be a grocer, and churchwarden, and the Progress Association and ex-councillor all rolled into one. ‘Well, Mr Duffield, you’re looking a picture! A living picture!’ Still a personage, he laughed for his appropriate remark; but at once the queen in him began to queer things: realizing the personage had crushed the wrong, the stroked hand, Cec was reduced to sensitivity. ‘So sorry — so clumsy.’

And Mrs Cutbush was disgusted, less by the clumsiness and sensitivity than the interruption. She would have liked to stay, perving undisturbed on a great man to whom she had given suck that day on the pavement, almost sucked up into her womb as her own baby and lover-husband.

Unluckier for the grocer’s wife when Mrs O’Hara came clacking hard towards her wanting the sago and split peas.

The noise, the people’s inquiring faces, were becoming diabolical. Mrs O’Hara had a hairy raspberry on one nostril. But worst, the needles at work, in the dead flesh as well as the live. Your mind was just about popping out: the lid wouldn’t hold it if you didn’t didn’t.

Stagger on. Or back. Sisters are colder.

But the grocer insisted: ‘I’ll walk some of the way, Mr Duffield’; although he was wearing his apron and pencil.

Cutbush could have been waiting all his life to make a declaration of love. First he looked over a shoulder to be sure his wife had taken Mrs O’Hara inside. At least he had learnt one lesson: he didn’t attempt to touch; their affair was going to be ‘spiritual’.

As you shambled endlessly in the direction of Flint, the grocer tiptoed in company. He was still a large man, if no longer upholstered, and his plush vanished. Age, it seemed, had made Cutbush fluid: he moved like plastic with half its volume of liquid inside. Coming at them from the sea, the wind agitated his wide trousers: they were flapping like flags, or a skirt.

For his great unburdening, the grocer was beginning to choose the unsaleable delicacies among words: exotic stock which had gone dusty rusty on his frustrated shelves, oozing oils from Palermo, rancid juices from the Côte Basque. He licked his lips.

‘Mr Duffield—’ he selected the name, and held it up—‘I have never had an opportunity to tell you how much it has meant to us — to us — our comparatively small, but no less avid minority — to have you living in our midst.’ His nostrils enjoyed it the more for smelling slightly off. ‘Our confraternity may be under-privileged, and despised by some, but no one can deny that we appreciate the Higher Things. To walk past your home is, for us, a deeply moving experience. Flint Street has become a place of pilgrimage. ’

Oh Lord oh lard lard if you could only reach Flint your own pilgrim seize the cold pure rose by her thorns before being larded up in homogrocerdom.

‘You remember the night we inadvertently met at The Gash? When the moon came up? I was severely troubled at the time, by conflicts between my home life and my — temperament. I often wondered afterwards whether the distinguished, anonymous — and handsome — stranger, had noticed any signs of stress. Then, several years later, a malicious individual I happen to be connected with, explained a certain painting to me. I was horrified — which is what Malice had been hoping for — till suddenly I realized that, unbeknownst to myself, I had been consummated, so to speak!’

Oh Lard! The grocer’s whispers were thunderous, his words working like sheet lightning.

‘It was more than that. It was like as if, after attending regular service for years in a not very eyesthetical church, the same surroundings was illuminated by a— religion! ’

O Lord save us it was the grocer who was going to have the next stroke. Scuttle scuffle away to Rhoda the cold rose a sister.

‘Of course I never told anybody that we’d sort of given birth. I never pointed out to the wife that barren ground can sometimes be what the seed needs. I suppose I’m what people would call a coward.’ The grocer didn’t attempt to hide the drops which were beginning to ooze. ‘I’ve often thought Judas must have been of a homo-sex-ual persuasion.’ Poor bugger didn’t seem to know the thing had caught on.

Anyway, now that all was said, the unsavoury disciple flapped to a standstill. Murk couldn’t obscure Luv: the big dope was shining with it.

‘Forgive me, Mr Duffield, if any indiscretion on my part has embarrassed you. I wouldn’t want — never ever — to be an embarrassment to the one I I I.’ He couldn’t make it.

Piteous what they lay on your altar, itself a rickety affair, so much shoved out of sight, from bottles of cheap port to unconfessed putrefying sins.

‘Grateful for our interesting conversary, Mr Utbus. Mustn’t be late for my lunch. My sister — my — my Rosa — will be hungry.’

If you knew how, you could use words to get out of anything unpleasant, or important, which was why social intercourse had been invented.

Rhoda said, ‘Where have you been? I’d begun to worry. You knew I was planning something hot for luncheon.’

‘Yes, Rhoda.’ The exercise or intercourse made the words feel almost normal on his tongue. Had to edge into his chair though, accommodate his dead side. That done, he said, and again it felt smooth: ‘I’ve been intercoursing. I had a nice talk with your friends Mr and Mrs Cutbush.’

Rhoda appeared upset. ‘What about?’ The cubes of fibrous chuck almost shot out of the casserole; the lengths of half-cooked carrot might have bounced if she hadn’t been prudent. ‘What about, Hurtle?’ Naming him made her sound angrier.

‘About business. And religion. And sex.’

Rhoda went a thinned-out white. ‘I hope you haven’t been overdoing it,’ she said. ‘I shall be the one to blame, because I’m responsible for you.’

On the contrary he felt so strangely normal, perhaps thanks to poor old Cec Cutbush his lover. The lip subtle, almost supple enough, it could begin to pour at any moment. If he had had a sister Rosa of creamy pork flesh enormous Karl Druschki bubs he might have committed comfortable incest and painted a pagan goddess instead of looking for a god — a God —in every heap of rusty tins amongst the wormeaten furniture out the window in the dunny of brown blowies and unfinished inscriptions.

Ah, he saw! He knew what he must tell Archangel Lethbridge the art student and footwasher. He didn’t throw his fork, but let it fall in the soupy mess in front of him. The fork clanged against the plate.

‘What is it?’ Mumbling through the blue-grey gristle, Rhoda frowned furiously.

‘Eureka!’

‘I— what? ’ She hadn’t received a classical education.

He got away, laughing at what he had found and what he must do.

Rhoda was livid. No Frau Druschki, more like one of those Japanese pellets which need a tumbler of water to flower. In other days, he might have exploded the variations on Rhoda’s paper rosette opening into an underwater rose. He couldn’t now. There was no time for trifles.

While the torments of the body persisted, mind was no longer the irreparable mosaic, thought began fitting into thought, there were less shattering bursts of frustration: he might almost have hit on the secret of the maze. Even so, it would probably never become too easy. Nor would the dead arm, the dragging leg, give up their electric life although officially written off. He developed a technique of presenting himself sideways when acquaintances couldn’t be avoided. Human turnips frightened him at times, themselves obviously frightened by the company of what they considered half a vegetable. (How electrified they would have become if he could have introduced them to half the shocks in that so-believed vegetable arm.) Rhoda frightened him most. She understood him so little after all, he began to wonder whether he understood Rhoda, whether he might catch sight of a different person standing naked in the ruins of the conservatory. And the gentle Don, particularly when you caught him looking too discreetly at the paintings: what was he seeing? Was he falling into the same trap as Cutbush?