Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘Are you going to come clean? Do you— honestly —believe he’s any good?’

‘They buy him overseas.’

‘Oh yes, ill-advised Americans. The press never stops telling us. But I can’t believe in the great myth. I haven’t the faith expected of me.’

‘No, Elspeth. Faith isn’t expected of university graduates.’

‘All the worst bitches are dogs! I wonder, darling, why I adore you?’

They looked back over their furs or ritual black, to determine on what ground their words had fallen, but failed disappointingly to identify it.

‘D’you think that’s him?’

‘Too young.’

‘Too old.’

‘I can recognize him from the pictures in the papers.’

‘Too shaky. He’s had a stroke — not Parkinson’s disease.’

Listening to them trample across the parquet he was reminded of a visit with Harry Courtney: a prehistoric landscape, in which sheep were mounting a ramp, pressing inside the woolshed, pattering over the slatted floor, automatically scattering their pellets.

The present mob might have trampled Rhoda underfoot if it hadn’t suddenly realized she was something beyond its experience; so it propped, and divided: to avoid an object which looked strange and could have proved dangerous. While continuing to patter in their changed directions, the human sheep bleated their distress, or in milder, woollier cases, sympathy, or self-pity.

‘Certainly quaint. To say the least. Poor little thing!’ Foetuses stirred uneasily in the alcohol of memory: it wasn’t as bad as this, but might have been if it had lived.

‘Never went much on culture. Ten dollars, too. You expect more for ten dollars.’

‘Look at all the lovely paintings.’

‘Where’s the champagne?’

‘Too soon. And it won’t be — you realize that, don’t you?’

‘Champagne’s what I paid for.’

‘You expect too much, Clyde. You’ll get the bubbles at least.’

‘Whatever you accuse us of, you can’t say we aren’t a sound society. Don’t look now — that’s the painter over my left shoulder. And the sister.’

‘The sister’s his worst distortion yet. I wonder what they talk about.’

‘Technique.’

‘You’ve got it on the brain.’

‘I want to look at the paintings.’

‘You don’t come to look at the paintings. If you’re all that keen, you come back one morning when there’s nobody here.’

‘Isn’t it lovely? Lovely! A lovely party.’

‘This is the biggest con man Australia has produced.’

‘At this rate we’ll never get round. Look, there’s Margery!’

‘I propose to take the paintings in chronological order.’

‘If you’re going to be a stodge-podge. This isn’t professional night.’

‘You can’t call him an amateur; he fetches too much.’

‘I just want to look at the paintings. They do things to me. I don’t know what. But they do.’

‘Can’t wait.’

‘Darling, there are too many people.’

‘One has to admit old Hurtle’s a wizard.’

‘Most of this raggle-taggle wouldn’t.’

‘Oh yes — I think they’d agree he’s a wizard. They might argue whether he’s great.’

‘Aren’t you destroying one of your own stable, Bid?’

‘Whether he’s mine or anybody else’s, I can’t help being honest. None the less, I adore Hurtle.’

‘With your dried-up peanut of a spinster’s mind.’

‘Mrs Macready has an early one. She says the early ones are the ones.’

‘If you want to be insulting.’

‘They’re an investment.’

‘Every Sunday at St Stephen’s.’

‘If you want to show me the worst in you, you’re going about it the right way.’

‘They’ll catch him over his income tax.’

‘Mrs Macready’s going to sell the early one.’

‘If you want me to tell you why you’re a misfit, Patrick, it’s because you hate everybody.’

‘Mrs Macready says London and New York are off him. He was never what he’s cracked up to be. But there’s still a market for him in Australia.’

‘Because I can’t love peanuts, Biddy, it doesn’t mean I don’t love.’

‘I’m going home. You’ve upset me too much. You’ve made me feel ill.’

Oh oh.

‘Where’s the pissoir? ’

‘Somewhere in the underworld.’

‘It’s the champagne, buddy.’

‘She’s a Jewess.’

‘What do I think of them? It’s as if I haven’t been seeing till now — and now I’m blinded.’

When all but the woolliest had thrown off their sheepskins, the forms most of them revealed were heraldic in their ferocity. Even those who spoke in his defence screeched with tongues of thin metal; their armoured claws might have sacrificed his liver to their convictions. He found himself moving sideways: a technique he had adopted after his return from the dead, and thought he no longer needed; but on the present occasion there was no escaping, except along walls of paintings, which might at any moment pronounce a more vindictive sentence than that of the judges themselves.

‘Look — a bat, wouldn’t you say? Practically embracing one of his own excremental daubs!’

‘Oh, come! It’s the crush. You couldn’t fit in a praying mantis.’

‘I do believe Hurtle Duffield’s got the wind up. Never thought I’d witness that. Cold fish!’

‘Viscious bastard!’

‘I think he’s divine. I’d adore to sleep with him.’

‘You must be the only one who didn’t.’

‘I’ve never slept with an old man.’

‘And little girls.’

‘That’s the propaganda. I was told by Arch Parfitt — and he ought to know — that Hurtle Duffield switched to boys.’

‘All his life. There’s an old queen, a Paddo grocer, his bosom friend.’

‘But it’s all so gimmicky — one conjuring trick after another. Painting is pure today. This is an austere age. Illusions don’t belong in it — not his kind anyway.’

‘I’d part with ten years of my life to have painted that “Pythoness at Tripod”.’

‘And hanged yourself afterwards out of remorse. Anybody but Hurtle Duffield would have.’

‘Look at those salt-cellars he’s given her! The salt-cellars alone are genius.’

‘I’m going, Dick. D’you hear? I’ve gotter go. Something funny about those oysters. If I don’t go I’m gunner spew on the spot.’

‘Oh Mr Duffield what a wonderful evening for you — and so soul-satisfying for the rest of us. Will you sign my souvenir catalogue, please? Oh, not if it — not if it — in any way. . If he hadn’t looked so peculiar, Mildred, I’d say the man meant to be rude.’

‘He’s sick.’

‘You don’t suppose he thinks I’d sell the autograph? Mrs Macready did. But that was a whole handwritten letter. She sold it to an American.’

‘He’s sick, I tell you. He’s a sick man.’

‘The paintings are sick.’

‘I’d like to speak to him, but of course I never shall. There are so many things I’d like to ask him to explain.’

‘Don’t ask a painter, don’t ask anybody to explain. All you’ll ever know is what you find out yourself by butting your head through the wall.’

‘I like to believe in revelations. And these paintings are, for me, almost revelations. That is why I could go down on my knees, and beg, beg him for one little word which might remove the last scale from my eyes. Because I’m sure he has the answer. I’m sure it’s here in the paintings. If I could only see.’

‘“Numen” is the word I’ve been trying to remember all the evening. Not apropos. I’ll probably die a sceptic.’

O numinous occasion sighted in distorting mirrors of variable treachery! Now that the trap was closing on him, what he longed for was a room of reasonable proportions furnished with a table and chair. The thought of himself perched on a chopping-block, reaching up with his functional arm, became so ludicrous he almost toppled. But steadied himself on one of the paintings. By coincidence or design, it was one of that series of furniture he had painted after Hero’s death, soon after the Second War, at a time when he felt his creative life must be leaving him; yet the tables and chairs now appeared the most honest works he had ever conceived, and probably for that reason, the most nearly numinous.