Patrick White: The Vivisector

Though some of it was actually near actual. Himself the near stroked on encapsulated in a spatial bus with Mrs Volkov the stroked and stroking pseudo-mother because of course Kathy hadn’t been born she had sprung like himself. Even so Mrs Volkov and Himself co-creators were blowing bubbles at each other which didn’t contain the words. Whoever pricked the empty bubbles first, it was Mrs Volkov who got down at Foy’s, her grey worsted and long groping shoes.

Often the martyred tubes of paint would retaliate by toppling off the adjustable table; once a peanut-butter glass fell, splintering splashing its content of muddy water.

The archangel appeared before he had been summoned; or perhaps Rhoda had sent for him according to some conspiracy.

Best ignore.

Don ignored: always the soul of stillness.

So it was you who had to ask when the silence could no longer be left to ping: ‘D’you make anything of it?’

Almost at once Don replied: ‘Sure.’

Oh God, nothing easy is ever anything but crap. If crap is easy. Not always, nowadays.

But try him out. ‘What, then, Don?’

‘Well, just about everything — hasn’t it?’

‘What d’you mean by everything?’

‘Well — the whole of life.’

Good Christ, better give up! ‘What do you know about life?’

‘I dunno. You just know. ’

How jealous can you become of the truth when unborn children know? Only the permutations are fresh — or so you like to kid yourself.

‘Is it finished, Mr Duffield?’

‘Yes, it’s finished. You who know so much ought to know that. It’s finished. Help me down, Don. Normally I don’t need.’ you never needed: your body did when the flow was interrupted. ‘I’ll want you to stand the board over there. So I can look at it. It’s not what I set out to paint. I didn’t get there — I can see that already. But I’ll want to look — on and off — see how I might’ve done better. I can’t stay painting the same painting for ever, can I?’

Pity Don had seen. Pity you hadn’t a big enough blanket to cover up the whole mess. Or uncover at night. It was good: ‘The Whole of Life’. That is, it wasn’t too bad. (Nobody need know how rich you are till you’re dead. If they did they might whack into you and love you, which could be more disastrous, creatively, than their hate.)

Sign it tomorrow. Or leave them guessing.

‘Thank you, Don. I’m grateful. I’d also like to mention I’m remembering you in my will.’

Poor Don, blushing amongst the down and pimples, the remark was in such bad taste: his father a carpenter, his mother a waitress at The Slap Up, himself dedicated to art and Duffield.

‘I’ll come, Mr Duffield, any time Miss Courtney sends for me.’

‘Why Miss Courtney? Who’s my master I’d like to know? My sister’s no connection.’

Don Lethbridge smiled back, perhaps even murmured something, and went away.

When she sent for them to come and stuff him in his coffin, that was where Rhoda would take over: wind up the Punch-and-Judy show with her own little song-and-dance act.

That winter, as they sat in the grey asbestos kitchen, amongst the broken eggshells she hadn’t yet gathered up, the picked-at bacon rinds, the pots of Gentlemen’s Relish and Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade — no substitutes, Harry Courtney always insisted — he had never felt closer to Rhoda. At breakfast at least, half the rules mightn’t have been written.

He was at peace, almost.

He might ask: ‘Did you forget to turn the gas off, Rhoda?’ and she would answer, fairly gentle: ‘No. I’m pretty sure I turned it off. Well, perhaps there’s a trickle — only a slight one.’

‘That’s the way people get gassed.’

‘I don’t think so, Hurtle. Not if they’ve developed the fresh air habit and left the window open.’

Here Rhoda made a show of inhaling the mixture of gas and chilly air; the window was certainly open on a pale, moted sunlight and the smell of what passed for earth between Flint Street and Chubb’s Lane: a compost of rubble, flowerpot shards, rusty tins, tamped tightly together and dew-cold.

Rhoda’s theory finally made her cough. ‘As a matter of fact,’ she said when she had recovered, ‘a gas man once told me: when they’re called to investigate a case of gassing, more often than not it’s been deliberate.’

‘Yes, but there are also the old people we read about.’

‘Oh, of course there are the old people. That’s different. But we aren’t as old as all that. And still have our minds with us.’

Rhoda was wrong more often than not, but here he was inclined to agree with her. ‘No. We’re not quite senile.’

They both laughed.

Although he no longer bothered with the papers, Rhoda made a point of reading bits aloud: murders, rapes, adulteries; each of them, he suspected, rather enjoyed the experience.

She developed also the less agreeable habit of reading aloud from the deaths column.

‘Hold hard!’ he protested at last. ‘Who wants to read about death?’

‘It’s real, isn’t it? It concerns us, doesn’t it? And what about the murders? You like listening to the murders, Hurtle. They stimulate you.’

‘Murders don’t concern us personally.’

Nance? But Rhoda his sister, drifting round London in her broderie anglaise, with Maman and that ‘stepfather’, wouldn’t have heard about it.

‘Take the names of the dead,’ Rhoda couldn’t tear herself away from the last page, ‘haven’t they a kind of poetry? Even the most grotesque are an attempt at it. And on the practical level, you might come across someone you have to do something about — send a wreath — or write to the family.’

He admired her for her knowledge of procedure, which men didn’t have to worry about: they left it to wives who had learnt it from mothers.

He hadn’t had a wife who knew, only mistresses troubled by the state of their souls; till here was Rhoda.

Rhoda said, on a morning of cold floating greenish blurs of light and vines, or birds’ wings opening and closing in frail but convinced sounds of ascent: ‘Do you remember Mary Challands? ’

‘No.’ He was more interested in the parallels between light and sound. ‘Who is Mary Challands?’

‘She was one of the girls who used to come to Sunningdale. I shared her governess later on, after the Hollingrakes gave up theirs, after Boo went to Tasmania to recover from Andrew Thingummy’s death.’

‘No. Apart from Boo, they were just a mob of girls. I can’t sort out one from the other.’

‘Mary was pale and thin. Compared with most of us, distinguished-looking. She was said to be anaemic. They expected her to die young. She was forced to do — oh, the most disgusting things! She had to drink blood!’

‘What made you think of her now?’

‘I’ve just read she’s died.’

How Rhoda persisted: as if she were trying to test him; when there was this morning of increasing light, full of the frilly sounds of birds; when there was this painting upstairs which the archangel had named ‘The Whole of Life’; when she had seen entire walls at the Retrospective covered with affirmations. But Rhoda had no eyes for paintings. If he had fathered a child, if somebody had offered him a godson, if he had adopted — say, Don Cuppaidge, he might have evoked life for Rhoda and diminished Mary Challands’s triumph.

All the while Rhoda was carrying on: ‘Jolly lucky I remembered her married name. Otherwise they’d wonder why I hadn’t sent a wreath.’

‘Would they — whoever they are?’

‘Oh, yes. I don’t doubt she would have mentioned me in conversation with her husband. Here he is in the column: “beloved wife of Leicester Mildmay”. I’m sure Mary would have referred to someone as — as different as I. And when you’re living with a person everything comes out in time because you’ve got to find something to say.’