Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘Sorry,’ he mumbled, ‘the loo is what I’m looking for.’

And she scurried faster: to catch the Prime Minister’s speech, and the famous painter’s reply.

Of course he knew too well the gloomy latrine where he had often taken refuge from personages and situations; but now, as though his hermetic guide, his Kathy Mystagogue, had sent her proxy to liberate him, he turned in the opposite direction.

The entrance hall was deserted, except by the postcards, and a couple of well-lit attendants scoffing a plateful of sandwiches. He went out. The unlikely building was groaning with the legend it couldn’t contain. The audience had begun to applaud the delay, then to thump and stamp; or were they trying to force the creative spirit into its coffin? Jumping on the lid for luck before nailing it down, so that nothing of what was inside would escape them — ever.

He went down the steps, one side of him dragging the other half behind. His body was exhausted, but his mind darted back prickling around him as he staggered laboriously over the grass, and stood pissing, propped against the fortified trunk of a Moreton Bay fig. It was a lovely relief. The evening might have remained one of predominantly watery impressions: of water shifting over knives; if he hadn’t eased his head back, and at once the stars began to ricochet off the branches in a galaxy of resumed activity.

So he shambled on, over the fallen fruit. He succeeded in hailing a taxi somewhere near the cathedral, and was whirled home, into that silence where he had spent half a lifetime begetting, and giving birth.

They were sitting at breakfast in the asbestos compartment which served as kitchen, the usual hugger-mugger of unwashed crockery and battered aluminium waiting at the sink. It was agreeable to prolong breakfast; though neither of them had ever admitted to enjoying its luxury, unless through irritation: which is another luxury. He particularly mistrusted indulgence in the wetter emotions from having to protect the gift still burning inside him. But at breakfast, while their habits were of the slacky instinctive, not yet of the obsessive kind, he did feel drawn to his sister Rhoda. He was not certain how she felt about it: but her more relaxed behaviour suggested she was in agreement with the essentials of their relationship, if not its details. Rhoda was at her most relaxed, her most cat-like, surrounded by her complacent cats, as she read the morning papers, particularly the advertisements and deaths.

It was like that the morning after the opening of Duffield’s Retrospective. He was wearing the nondescript dressing-gown which had outlasted the years, and would jolly well have to see him out in spite of its patina of food spots and paint smears, and general scumble of forgotten origins. It was so comfortable, and would have been a comfort, if you could afford to let yourself be seduced by comfort.

Rhoda, on the other hand, must have thrown away the old dark gown he remembered. Recently she had come out in a net-and-lace garment, which only Mrs Volkov could have created, in dusty pink. Probably it was its off-colour which made Rhoda’s gown look old from the beginning; but she was an old woman, after all, and in the pink confection the impression she gave was unfortunate: she reminded him of stale Turkish delight rolled in grey icing sugar. (What on earth had possessed her to doll herself up like this? Or was it Maman, reaching out from those last rooms in Battersea?)

The morning after the opening Rhoda sat reading the news. The deeper she got into the sheets the worse she always messed them up; and that morning she must have ordered all the papers: to read deliberately under his nose what they were saying about him.

Rhoda’s ankle clicked: still pretty neat; the veins, swollen in what passed for calves, hadn’t affected the ankle. ‘It seems to have been a success,’ she revealed.

‘That is what they say. It isn’t necessarily what they mean. ’

‘Oh, I shan’t pretend it was an unqualified success.’

‘Not if I know the Telegraph. ’

Her ankle went click click as she shucked the newspapers. ‘The Prime Minister appears to have made an extremely witty speech.’

‘Didn’t you hear it, then, last night when you were there?’

‘No. They were very kind. Mr. Honeysett found me and took me up on the daïs. I sat in a leather chair. While the speech was made. But I didn’t hear it. Everybody looked interested to see the painter’s sister. We were photographed for television. They wanted me to speak. But I couldn’t. Not even when they asked me questions. Because I wasn’t sure what you would have wanted me to answer, Hurtle.’

‘Poor Rhoda, you must have suffered.’

‘No. I’ve learnt not to suffer.’

She had got herself into training, no doubt, dragging that converted go-cart round the neighbourhood. Though health and age had forced her to give away the go-cart, the habit of endurance had stuck.

‘I understand the film will be shown tonight. Bernice Cutbush has invited me to go and view it on their set.’ Rhoda couldn’t resist picking up scraps of the vernacular. ‘You too, if you feel like it.’

‘No, thank you! Watch a funeral without a corpse?’

Rhoda laughed, and said: ‘Don’t tell me you’re becoming cynical, ’ trailing a sheet of the Herald through the bacon fat in front of her. ‘In any case, I stood in for the corpse.’

He got up and began the climb to his room. He could have wept for Rhoda, whom he heard putting down the paper by what sounded like handfuls of galvanized iron. Through the hall, even on the stairs, there was a smell of what she referred to as ‘cat pooh’: whereas what he wanted to convey was already rising above the animal — and human — bowel stenches: not that he hadn’t often been inspired by a successful stool, in surroundings of weatherboard and whitewash, under the Bignonia venusta.

He went upstairs. Where Rhoda’s martyrdom had been the daïs, stared at by human eyes and the camera, his was the block, made for his secret purpose and to his own specifications by Ron Cuppaidge the art student.

Now that he was so far improved in health he could dispense with the attendant archangel’s help in mounting the block, but needed, and probably would always need, someone to prime, and manoeuvre into place, the enormous blank boards.

Himself a blank at times, the live hand clamped by his knees, he would sit teetering on the edge of the bed, dreading the desert he had to cross. Experience never lessened the prospect of tortures, the possibility of failures, even death if the spirit refused to accompany him. Just as you can twist the tail of human love once too often, perhaps the creative spirit couldn’t be flogged into climbing that additional inch. In which case: o God, have mercy on us. (He would look round afraid somebody might be tapping his thoughts.)

On the morning after the big shivoo at the State Gallery, he, not Duffield the painter, was stranded in such a condition: his throat had never felt so parched; all the tributaries of his body had dried up: films were forming over his eyes; his mind, worse than passive, pricked in every direction like a pack of unthreaded needles scattering amongst the barren forms of furniture.

Downstairs, Rhoda had begun to bash away at the accumulated pans. How enviable are those to whom it is given to express themselves by scouring a saucepan: their art so contained, finite, yet lustrous. He would even have envied Rhoda the disgusting little cart she used to drag round the streets, with its gobbets of purple flesh and amorphous offal from restaurant bins. This morning he would almost have exchanged the dead weight, the gross deformity of his non-art, for Rhoda’s hump.