Patrick White - The Vivisector

What? he almost shouted against the gunfire. He must write to Rhoda in the first lull, or during his next leave, after giving longer thought to her preposterous remark. The most he could remember their sharing was an occasional laugh at somebody else’s expense. He would never have allowed Rhoda to intrude on the important, the true part of himself, because the truth might have warped or shrivelled up; so her odd assumption could only be accepted at the level of a joke.

Again she wrote:

… unnecessary for you to write, Hurtle. I know you think of me on and off, because a relationship like ours is at a deeper level — like a conscience.

Yesterday was my eighteenth birthday. I woke early, and was moved to tear up and burn all the diaries I have ever kept, all the easy half-truths. When I was younger I wanted badly to be some kind of artist, in imitation of my brother: I think I was hoping to offer people something more acceptable than myself. Now I realize I shall never be anything but that, and must try to make it a truthful work.

Father came down for my birthday. He has given me a choker of seed-pearls, very pretty, and an ermine muff, Mummy’s presents were a cage of Java sparrows — and a diary. Fortunately she can’t have known I had burnt all my diaries that morning; it was too early for her, and she no longer goes behind the scenes. Mummy’s present is bound in ivory, with a gold clasp and key. In any case, it’s only an ornament.

There wasn’t a party in the evening, thank God, because of the war, but a few people looked in: Vi and Boo, Julian Boileau, two young officers with wounds, a sailor. You wouldn’t know any of the men. Vi played for them, and there was dancing. It was all very jolly and intimate. Mummy revived. She danced, but couldn’t persuade Father. Mummy danced on the landings and along the passages. She invited the maids to come in because, in 1917, we’ve got to be democratic. Everybody but May came. They drank my health in port after the music had stopped. The sailor disappeared — to be sick, we discovered afterwards.

Although she is still my friend, Boo Hollingrake has grown away from me. I think she is hiding something — perhaps an engagement. Even if things had been different, I would probably have remained a spinster, just as you are what they call a ‘virgin soul’. .

A what? He had always hated Rhoda; even if she had been normal, she would have grown up gimlet-eyed, unnatural.

… Julian is always very sweet to me. He brought me a Persian kitten on my birthday, which Mummy is afraid will claw the furniture and mess the carpets, but I am determined to keep Pushkin. In addition to being Julian’s present, he is so appealing, and already attached, when I had always heard cats were cold and selfish things. I am only afraid of his being crushed: he is so small. I smuggle him into my bed, and nobody knows.

On the night of my birthday ‘gathering’, after everybody had gone, Mummy developed a headache, and I sat up with Father while he finished his cigar. We talked, and didn’t talk. He would have liked to reminisce— about you; but I can never help him. Because I am small and a girl, he talks literally above my head, spitting out the words as though he had become in some way afflicted. I would love to show him that I love him, but he doesn’t care for me to touch, and nothing I ever say alters the expression of his eyes. .

There were moments when Rhoda became so recognizably himself, together they blotted out the twin nightmares of war and misunderstanding.

Rhoda wrote:

My dear Hurtle,

Our Father is dead. He died on Tuesday of a stroke. I found him lying on the floor of Mummy’s little sitting-room: he was already gone. Mummy is inconsolable, as though she were responsible. But everybody is responsible. He could never forgive me because he made me. I loved him, and couldn’t have shown him even if I had been allowed. I think it is never possible to show those we love — only to try to pick them up after they have fallen.

You wouldn’t believe, but on the same day my Pushkin was hit and killed while crossing the street. Do you know that a cat looks like a human being as he waits to hurl himself under the wheels? Of course he must have been sick and distracted too. I picked up his poor little body, so limp — the fur and other mangled remains. .

He must write to Rhoda. During several days’ leave he carried around a sheet of paper which grew grubby at the edges in his pocket. His stylo wouldn’t work. He was carrying a pencil too, the lead of which he drove into the ball of his thumb, through grasping it. In the end he didn’t write: he did a drawing of some moss roses, which he stuck in the envelope, and sent.

Rhoda didn’t reply, perhaps because the last shot had been fired; for the guns were suddenly still: there was an armistice. Those who had survived were presumably saved. The knowledge floated, palpitating, on the waves of silence, flooding the travesty of fields, and on into the streets of cities, where people had begun to rejoice for the privilege of dying in other ways.

During the year in Paris when he washed dishes by night to justify himself by day, he was Duffield again. A fresh start, but at the same time a squalid one, seemed to call for the old name. In any case, how could he ever be a Courtney? However intense the nostalgia, he was no longer a member of his ‘family’ as he looked back: at decent Harry, the Edwardian torso now disintegrated; at Maman, no doubt still dancing ‘on the landings and along the passages’ in girls’ white; at little pink-eyed Rhoda, nibbling at the edges of what she would never be allowed to consume. He had gratified at least some of the desires of all three. If he had left them bearing him a grudge, it was because total love must be resisted: it is overwhelming, like religion. He certainly wasn’t religious: he was an artist. But didn’t this reduce him to the status of little pink-eyed Rhoda nibbling round the edges? The association made him focus his mind on other, immediate realities.

When not washing dishes at Le Rat à l’Oeil Ouvert, he was hanging round l’Huissier’s studio, with two American ladies of doubtful age, a youngish Englishman of taste, and sundry Scandinavians, all of whom were making the ‘new’ approach to art. Painting was going to be pure at last. It should have been very new and exciting, but he found it wasn’t what he wanted to do.

If he continued paying for l’Huissier’s formula in hard francs, it was because he hadn’t yet thought how he might extricate himself. In the same way, his physical attitudes were uncertain. He was either hunching himself at his drawing-board, hoping to contain the smell of dishwater and poverty, or alternately, on more extrovert occasions, he flaunted his condition, from unwashed hair to piss-stained crutch.

Altogether the kindlier of the American ladies bought him a meal and wished to discuss ‘organic integrity’, and the youngish Englishman arranged himself tastefully on a divan after coffee, he remained virtually friendless because he had nothing to offer in return.

He was bankrupt by the war, he would sometimes explain, though only to himself. There were also the occasions when, sitting in his cupboard of a room, holding his thunderous head, in the smell of grey water he had brought in with him at four in the morning, he knew that this wasn’t true: what he needed was to go home, to renew himself, if there had been somewhere specific, some person left with whom he might establish contact. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to write to Maman or Rhoda: these links were broken, together with others less obvious in the emotional chain by which he had always secretly imagined he might haul himself to safety. So he sat in his cupboard-room, rocking, cherishing the dregs of a sour red wine, and listening for the bursts of gunfire, the scattering shrapnel, which no longer came.