Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘His what?’

‘Well — let’s put it another way — aren’t you a fellow painter?’

‘No! I’m not a painter. I’m a student. I’m not a painter. And may never be — a painter.’

‘Ah, modesty! I hope you mean what you say, Don, because if you don’t, that would make it less — refreshing. Ha-ha-ha! ’

Mumble mumble gurgle gurgle.

‘Then what are you — if you’re not a painter. A male nurse?’

‘I haven’t had any training.’

(Isn’t he divine? So moving. This is what’s so exciting about being alive today — to be able to participate through television.)

‘What is your official function, I mean — Don?’

‘A what?’

‘I mean — what do you do — for your friend Hurtle?’

(Heugh — heugh! He’s a real winkler!)

‘Oh. I helped to wash and dress him when he came back from hospital. Miss Courtney’s an invalid.’

‘Miss Courtney?’

‘His sister.’

‘Courtney?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hmm. So you washed him.’

‘Yes. Only for a little. Because he learnt to manage. Well, I still wash his feet now and again. He can’t reach so far. Not when he’s tired.’

(Divine, isn’t he? This is what I call really warm. How did we exist before the telly?)

‘But you can’t tell me — Don — so intimate and all — and you not a male nurse — an aspiring painter —you can’t tell me Hurtle hasn’t let fall a hint or two — while you were so nobly washing his feet — or given you a peep —come off it, mate — at the so-called God paintings! ’

All the sawn-out mouths of the masks within hearing distance were working flat out. The telly young man had it sewn up. (Going to give him an award.) So the lacquered mouths clacked, some of them salivating Moselle; one lady was using her lover’s back as a ladder to climb to higher things.

‘Don?’

‘No.’

‘But you can’t tell me they don’t exist. When everybody knows they do.’

‘No.’

‘Well, in that case, we’ll have to terminate our interesting relationship, and disappoint our viewers. Shan’t we?’

‘You can’t talk about what’s too big. The paintings are too big.’

‘Ah? What do you mean by “too big”? What are their dimensions, Don?’

‘Mr Kircaldy, you’ve got me wiped! My father’s only a carpenter. I know. But I know there’s a point you can’t sort of talk beyond. You can only do. Or be, sort of. And that is what Mr Duffield. The painter. I can’t talk. I can only. Why can’t you let us all alone to do? Otherwise there’ll be nothing — no thing— done. There’ll only be people squatting in front of the box, hoping somebody they thought too big for them will turn out as little as themselves. Then they’ll be happy. Watching him pull himself off at a camera.’

What might have grown into a worse scandal than the possible existence of the God paintings was fortunately strangled at birth by the crowd which, normally, would have nursed it. Their instinct for something really of this minute began to prick those who specialized in the ephemeral, with the result that the whole of the amorphous monster was moved to suspect, murmur, groan, shuffle and finally shove. The lady who was climbing her lover brought her ladder crashing to the floor.

‘The Prime Minister.’

‘Is he here? I read he was in Pakistan.’

‘Somebody will speak. Got to thank the painter for conning us a good seventy years.’

‘But the Prime Minister — I saw Sam a moment ago. Talking to Gil Honeysett.’

‘Oh, beaut! Don’t you adore Sam? He’s one of the few men who can make a paunch look chic.’

‘Never get another vote from me. Not since he smirched our image overseas.’

‘I’m not interested in images. Men aren’t images. I’d adore to sleep with Sammy-lamb. He looks so utterly tenderized.’

‘Thanks to his missus. She mightn’t let him out, though.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘The main court. Looks like it, anyway. That’s where we’re being swept. That’s where all the gear was.’

‘Should have got there early — got us a good pozzy. Never be in the picture now.’

‘Nobody else ever is. The Brundritts must tip the cameras.’

As the monstrous black sea receded, boiling, sucked through archways, frothing round columns and buttresses, along static cliffs, a few pools were left behind: to trickle, according to some law of water, in the same direction as the original flood.

Smiling her most transparent, her most watery smile, Mrs Volkov started to tiptoe on long feet; then, when it decently could, her shadowy form tripped ever so lightly towards the mass from which, unwisely, she had allowed herself to become detached. ‘Oh dear,’ her voice blew back in faint droplets, ‘I do hope — never meant — not that kind of person.’ She was last heard resigning herself to what she only perversely dreaded. ‘And Kathy said the Prime Minister did her a very great kindness.’

As for the Cutbush couple, they burst out from the sense of duty which had been damming their true desires, and poured away as hard as they could pour, without looking back to explain their natural conduct; while Don Lethbridge followed swiftly, rearranging the clothes the telly had tried to strip from him. The sighs made by his Italianate shoes lingered across the emptied floors.

This left Rhoda. ‘Shall I come with you, Hurtle? Would it, I mean’—she had to cough it up—‘help if I stood beside you?’

When it was he who must help Rhoda, if he couldn’t immediately see how: certainly not let her stand beside him on the daïs.

She must have realized very quickly how awful her proposition looked, for she allowed herself, that is to say, her brutally irregular lump of pumice, to be dragged in what seemed the unavoidable direction, almost colliding with Gil Honeysett as he rose dripping out of the black collective wave.

‘Hi, fella — Hurtle! Where ’uv yer bin? We’re waiting for yer. Or all but. Are yer ready?’

‘Yes, Gil. But my bladder isn’t.’

‘Oh, Christ!’ Gil Honeysett’s schedule made no allowance for an old man’s waterworks. ‘I suppose you’ll have to do it. Won’t you? Give you five minutes at most. After that, there’ll be hell to pay with the A.B.C.’

All along that side of the deserted gallery the pictures had revived: the Duffields. There was scarcely time to glance at them: never look enough at your own paintings.

Though whipped along by Honeysett’s warning, he might have paused to indulge, if the perspective of archways and parquet hadn’t been flooded with a vision: of a figure, small certainly, but in its formal, golden grace instinctively true to archetype. He was walking giddily as he hadn’t for years, but without illusions or expectations; his great joy was in recognizing his psychopomp, so very opportunely descended with ‘love and thoughts’ to give him courage. As they advanced towards each other, her golden, boy’s figure melted into all the tones of rose. She bowed her head, as though to hide the face which might give her away too soon. So they hurried, she coolly, he feverishly: not that he would have dreamt of touching this embodiment of a spirit. He would speak to her, in few, though significant words: let her know he had received and understood the messages.

So he called out: ‘Have you come to show me the way?’ In other circumstances he might have embarrassed himself: too loud, too brazen; it was all the fault of the Trustees’ inferior wine.

Instead, he had embarrassed the psychopomp. ‘The way? To where?’ A voice unexpectedly tuneless, cracked, panicky.

‘Why,’ he shouted louder, laughing, ‘to the Infernal River!’ as his psychopomp became an anonymous wrinkled soubrette hurrying in her pink from the LADIES.