Patrick White - The Vivisector

Which didn’t mean he could stop himself attempting to reach higher, from his chopping block or scaffold, towards total achievement or extinction.

He fished out his handkerchief to mop up his sweat.

‘A glass of champagne, Mr Duffield?’

‘Is it good?’ A blunt question, it sounded unintentionally severe.

‘Oh yes, it’s good!’ The young waiter, his rather innocent skin freshly scrubbed, his smile too ready, lowered his eyes: on such a night the counterfeit made the true look fake.

When the waiter had left him, he sank his chin, and guzzled the insipid gaseous wine. It didn’t make him feel what is known as ‘better,’ only unhappy in a different way, as he wandered a little through ‘his’ exhibition, holding the empty glass as though it were some other object.

Here and there they filled the glass, not the original waiter, though it could have been: they were all alike in their confident, though transient, modernity.

Good Gil Honeysett, that bloody extrovert, came and held him by the elbow, and said: ‘Everybody’s asking to meet you, but I staved them off, just in case you mightn’t want it.’

‘What do you take me for? A nut?’

Gil didn’t answer, but smiled around in other directions out of his decent, sweaty face.

You were standing, you realized, beside a small daïs spread with a square of Axminster carpet.

‘That carpet, Gil — it’s about the most hideous I’ve ever seen.’

‘Yes, it is, it’s hideous.’

‘And the chair — it reeks of public service.’

Brought out of a board-room probably, it stood displaying its chafed leather, waiting to fulfil some possibly reprehensible function.

Suddenly Gil Honeysett tickled the ominous ramrod of a microphone very lightly. ‘Later on, the Prime Minister wants to say a few words, Hurt. We’d be happy if you’d reply — making it as brief as you like.’

Play for time, play for safety, play for silence, the only state in which truth breeds.

‘Okay, Duffield?’

‘Mm.’

Gil was so radiant in the innocent conviction that human nature is predictable. If you had been younger, if you had been in a position to indulge in the more extravagant licence of creativity, you might have done a face, mouth but no eyes, swathed in the fleshy veils of the human arse.

‘In the meantime, here’s an old friend of yours.’ Again the Extrovert in Chief sounded so extraordinarily convinced. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’

A person was definitely evolving out of the aimless struggle of art lovers: a man if it hadn’t been for the aggressively mannish clothes, a woman except for a certain priestly air. The straight black hair had abandoned all pretences, unless its black black. What really let the creature down was the mouth, overflowing with anachronistic crimson, and the jewels, of an importance which refused to be renounced.

‘Hurtle,’ she began at a distance, while telling her enormous pearls as though they had been humble little heads, ‘I don’t want to appear vindictive — forcing my wreckage on you. I should hate to be guilty of that, but I do honestly believe age can be a source of inspiration.’

She probably realized he didn’t share her view, for when she reached him, with the determination of the old and crippled, and her fire of rubies, she laughed a discoloured laugh. ‘I see you can’t, or don’t want to, recognize. “Hollingrake” is the name.’

‘Why — Boo — of course — Boo Davenport.’ She was forcing him to obey the social convention she would have liked him to think she had abandoned.

‘Hollingrake,’ she corrected.

She kept turning her head as though looking for others who might applaud. Or was it for someone she still had to meet?

‘I heard you’d gone back to “Hollingrake”, though nobody explained why.’

It must have been what she expected. ‘Well’—she lowered her blancoed chin—‘I never managed to throw off the Hollingrake. Since we last met — at some ghastly party, wasn’t it? — I remarried. Sebastian was the least demanding of my husbands. He was so considerate I found it intensely mortifying. I should have divorced him if he hadn’t saved me the worst mortification. He died. Now I’ve reneged. I’m a confirmed bachelor.’

The thought struck him that his own bachelorhood might have crossed her mind, and that her joke was an accusation in disguise. He hoped one of the slaves might fill the empty glass each of them continued holding; but nobody came; and he was to experience worse than Olivia’s dirty crack.

Surprisingly she said, though in such a loud voice her remark couldn’t be intercepted: ‘At least nobody can accuse you, Hurtle, of being a virgin soul. Not with all these paintings to contradict them.’ Then, after a quick look over her shoulder, she added in a seismic whisper: ‘I’ve wanted, off and on, to talk to you about the paintings.’

He twitched at the idea: and Olivia had the feverish look of those who can never resist discussing religion.

Fortunately, at that moment, their glasses were filled, and they stood pretending to sip, while gulping, the mock champagne.

‘I’ve even culled a vocabulary’—Olivia Hollingrake confessed between gasps and a near sneeze—‘on nights when I couldn’t sleep — by which we might communicate.’

‘No,’ he protested into a flat dregs of resentment.

‘Oh, but why not?’

‘Because,’ he said, and it seemed to be coming out from the dead side of his face, the buckram half he no longer bothered hiding from her, ‘I’m just beginning. I’m only learning.’

Now it was his turn to look over his shoulder; so many hated him for the sins they believed he had already committed against them, would they be able to endure this supreme flouting of their reason?

He only slowly realized Olivia had taken him by the wrist. He rather enjoyed, from inside his own painfully prickling carapace, her soft, cushiony palm protected by its mail of jewels. She must have caught him staring at one cabochon knuckle in particular, because she lovingly murmured, swallowing the sounds almost at once: ‘That one is pigeon’s blood. An Indian prince — I forget which — gave it to Mummy.’ But that was the only incidental; she had arrived at the next stage of the unfolding of her plan.

‘I want you to take me to your sister. I’d like to congratulate her for the part she’s played in your success. Rhoda was so sweet.’ Olivia laughed. ‘How she must have suffered — she too!’

It was the more indefensible in that Rhoda and her cronies were gathered within hailing distance, against a period of his work which particularly exposed his frailty: his love for Kathy.

Rhoda couldn’t have helped noticing the straits he was in; in fact, she made it clear that she knew. The rose clown was laughing up at her companions, at Cec and Bernice Cutbush, at the transparent Mrs Volkov, and Don Lethbridge in his slackest woolliest blackest sweater and the skinniest blackest pants. Rhoda, in her determination to ignore an outside situation, was doing everything but handsprings to amuse her circle. Her little pointed teeth were working overtime in smiles.

Olivia Hollingrake kept looking in the opposite direction. ‘I remember’—she said, possibly hoping to avert the present at the last moment—‘I remember getting the fright of my life when I discovered Rhoda still only reached my navel, while I kept on shooting up. It made me feel abnormal. But Rhoda was so understanding. I’d invite her in while I was having my bath. And she’d sit stirring the water — telling me about the brother I had a crush on.’

The elderly archness of it shrivelled the senses which would have liked to drag him under, amongst the drowned mangoes and floating ferns, while Rhoda — indeed — stirred the water.