Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘Hmmm.’

‘Mary became a Roman Catholic — surely you remember that? Converted while still a young girl.’

‘It seems to have done her good. Or else it was all that blood she drank. To be dying only now.’

Years earlier, he might have painted Mary Challands Mildmay. He could see her corpse so clearly: the bones of her transparent feet, the skin of a pale fish-saint — possibly skate.

‘Oh yes, you can laugh, Hurtle — you, a sceptic!’

‘But I thought you were the sceptic?’

‘Oh, yes — I am and I’m not. Fancy — poor Mary Challands!’ Rhoda kept her nose on the Deaths, practically guzzling the page in her desire to do what she had been taught: the Right Thing.

He would have liked to comfort his sister with some kind of faith, but had never gone over to one. He sat staring at his paint-stained hands.

Rhoda was determined to carry on: ‘He was in insurance, I believe — a bachelor with a fine collection of old silver. They married later in life. Mary told me, while we were still in correspondence, he “left her alone”, and they were very happy together. ’

‘Oh God, Rhoda, then it was the blood and the Roman Catholicism which sustained her! It wasn’t life!’

‘I don’t know.’

Some of the empty eggshells had bounced off like ping-pong balls. Rhoda bent to scoop them up. She bumped her nose on the edge of the kitchen table.

Because he felt to blame, he began protesting: ‘I don’t want to criticize the dead.’

‘Nobody’s criticizing anybody. Everybody’s free to hold their own opinions.’ The bump had made her eyes water.

He went out after that: to loose the warm stool he had been nursing inside him as a comfort, to let it uncoil into the Pit, under the Bignonia venusta.

Who was winning? He still hadn’t finished the inscription on the dunny wall. Most likely it would finish him.

When he had girded himself again he decided to go very quickly upstairs to have no more truck with Rhoda, but she waylaid him in the hall.

‘Last night I had to go out in connection with finding a home for a cat. One the way back I looked in at Mrs Volkov’s, and as I was leaving she gave me this letter for you.’

‘Why on earth should Mrs Volkov write me a letter. What’s it about?’

‘She didn’t offer to tell, and I was too discreet to ask.’ Rhoda gathered her gown around her, and retired into the asbestos kitchen.

He was tempted to leave the letter lying on the bracket of the bamboo hatstand where she had let it fall. Most letters are suspect because they make demands: most suspect a letter from Mrs Volkov, whom he had never considered as a writer of letters. It could only be a huge demand, though nothing material, he imagined: which made it more disturbing.

He took the letter, however, and went upstairs. The faint hope that a person like Mrs Volkov, with her reputation for peculiar powers, might reveal something of the substance of her letter through the envelope, made him fumble at it through his pins and needles, unusually painful that morning. On the half-landing he tripped with his ‘dead’ foot over the hem of his gown. He heard the tear only distantly.

On reaching the top-front he was conscious of a stream of ice-green light pouring through the araucaria, with the waters of the bay in the distance a glistening pale sunlit white.

He opened the letter, Mrs Volkov had written in a laboured, more, in an anguished hand:

Dear Mr Hurtle Duffield,

I will tell you at the start that I am making no demands of you in this letter I was driven to write. I do not expect you to more than glance through it if you have not already thrown it away. If you have it will not inconvenience you.

I must apologize for that we was only poor folk from Dundee, my Father died at sea with the trawlers, Mother dead before that. As a child I went to Carnoustie to my Auntie, to help with the guests. It was a poor town by other standards, but there were the summer visitors who came to the Links. When I was not at the dishes or otherwise cleaning or mending I would go down and paint the used golf balls. Uncle was a hard man. He was caddy master. He was an elder of the Kirk though I do not think a Believer, with him it was a Duty. Because I could not discover my right Duty I was mostly at odds with Uncle. I dreamed of God’s Love and an understanding of His Purposes. I did once for a moment understand if I cannot properly explain. There was some pine trees awful lean it was the sandy soil above the sea I had gone for a walk along the Links because something or everything had forced me out. There was a wasp nest hanging from a bough. I got stung not by putting up my hand my hand was put. I was shocked white, it felt. Although dizzy I should say I remained standing on my feet. It was like red hot needles entering at first very painful then I did not notice any more, only sea and sky as one, and me like a rinsed plate. I have often remember this, and was never struck to the ground, not in the cruellest moments. I cannot tell you more, but you are an artist Mr Duffield and will guess.

So I came to Sydney to the other Uncle who shortly passed on. I was not afraid Mr Duffield. This is where I had been directed, and to have my little girl in sinful joy with a stranger who gave me no love or affection only this wonderful human child. I make no excuses for Kathy who does not need them. She is as you will appreciate a work of art. I do not ‘understand’ music, I do not ‘understand’ painting, except through what has happened in my life.

I have discussed this with our common friend Mr Cecil Cutbush who agrees he has understood the same through what he calls his ‘Infirmity’ (which I am told is also known as the ‘Third Sex’). Some years past I suffered a mild stroke, and you recently a worse. As Mr Cutbush remarked who has more Education, we was all perhaps stroked by God. This is what I sensed in the bus, of the two of us at least. And Mr Cutbush has his own ways. Poor Mrs C. it is her lot to bear her unlikely marriage. Then there is Miss Courtney I would never mention any of this matter to her, she is a lady, and me a ‘Sewing Woman’ the mother of Katherine Volkov.

I have ventured to run on Mr Duffield because I believe the afflicted to be united in the same purpose, and you of course as an artist and the worst afflicted through your art can see farther than us who are mere human diseased.

Yours in respectful apology

CHRISTIANA MCBEATH

My dear friend Miss Courtney I do not love less for not including among us, and who must have suffered most inhumanly, but Miss Courtney is of the earth she is strong and would carry us all on her back — or so I would say — to the end.

He put Mrs Volkov’s letter as far away from him as he could, not because it was muddled, illiterate, gratuitous, distasteful, but because it was too pertinent: he understood not only with his mind, but through his fingers, both the live, and the bunch of dead twigs, Christiana McBeath’s horribly illuminating argument.

To fortify himself against the truth he hunched his shoulders, but not high enough: he was protruding. And still had to face the board his server had stood ready for him.

As he approached, loitering, this fresh emptiness promised to be the vastest desert he had ever set out to cross: not the faintest mirage to offer illusory solace; and to share the inevitable agonies, the limping army into which Christiana McBeath had conscripted him.

So he began soberly enough, in sombre colours. For these later paintings, themselves an exploration, he made no exploratory drawings — there was no longer time, nor had he the hand for drawings — and here, at least, the direction in which he had to go was already pricked out in him.