Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘How do you know?’ he answered feebly back.

Light from the lamps had turned his coat a sour greenish-yellow. His skin must have gone that colour of old pennies, with burnt-out sockets instead of eyes.

‘Eh?’

Her brandy breath alone told him they were almost level again.

‘People do like each other,’ she said. ‘It isn’t all business, is it?’ She added at once, ‘You gotter find out, though.’

She was a fairly large woman, in a large black hat, of lace or net, at the back the largest, wired bow, which had failed to keep its symmetry. Not unnaturally, the artificial light had turned her lips and cheeks to puce: her lips, her eyes were the moister for exertion, or booze.

‘Bit obsessed, aren’t you?’

‘Obsessed? I’m not educated,’ she grumbled, lowering her eyes.

Shame made him simplify his accusation; he said almost gently: ‘You’ve got only one thing on your mind.’

‘They won’t let yer forget about it.’

Walking side by side they could have been quarrelling home from the tramstop after an evening with relatives. His arches, he felt, were falling before their time, while her shoes accompanied her voice in a gritty patter.

‘Can suit meself,’ she was saying. ‘Now and agen. If I like. I’m not a bolster.’

‘Aren’t you drunk?’

‘I’m not sober,’ she said. ‘Or I wouldn’t be trottin’ like a donkey after you.’

It didn’t destroy their intimacy: it seemed, rather, to solder it. Their feet sounded leaden on the hill. Of course he could break away at any point, if he chose, as he had done already in his life. Or had he? Had the breaks, perhaps, been chosen for him?

He tried to concentrate on a Poussin he had seen in the Louvre: solid enough evidence of the painter’s own infallible will.

‘Anyhow, we got here,’ she said.

Standing for an instant in an archway which draped the shadows on her in better imitation than the old black fur, she was looking at him out of the depths of another woman, offering him experience itself rather than the shabby details of it.

Then she was dragging him under what appeared a half-raised curtain of iron lace and cobwebs, into what must have been the carriage yard of a once considerable house. He was walking on the balls of his feet, bumping, rubbing against her shoulder as if he too were suddenly drunk.

‘I oughter tell you’—she had taken his arm and, holding it to her, begun to milk it from the biceps down—‘to tell you there are people in this house who are jealous of others. But I mind my own business. Strickly.’

He didn’t expect they would encounter jealousy at that hour, when a door opened on one of the landings. Almost at once it closed, on a glimpse of blue light and a jaw sprouting orange stubble.

‘Who was that?’ he whispered too loud.

‘The landlady. She was in the trade herself once. But developed varicose veins.’

‘Is she decent?’ he chattered as they went on bumping their way up the once graceful stairs.

‘As a matter of fact,’ said Nance, ‘a cow’s arse is decenter.’ She nearly bust herself, and because he was joined on to her he reacted equally to their Siamese joke.

The light she switched on brought immediate sobriety. It was not a large room, and almost all unmade bed. Such furniture as he caught sight of had most of the drawers and doors open. There was a door open too, on a balcony converted into a kitchen, from which drifted a slight, and probably permanent, smell of gas.

‘Well,’ she said, looking, her nose swivelling at him, ‘you’re a bit different to what I expected. Aren’t you?’ Her sighs and snorts sounded partly reconciled, however.

‘Nothing’s ever what I expect. Not exactly,’ he answered because he had to say something.

It was true though, particularly as he watched the woman take the squashed lace hat off the head of hair to which it had been pinned. She wasn’t the bobbed sort. Her thick black tail of hair was kept wound round behind with the help of a tortoise-shell and paste buckle. It was the kind of hair, he could see, which would always be coming down: too much of it, and too heavy.

‘’Ere,’ she said, kicking off her shoes, ‘aren’t you gunner take yer duds off. A busman’s holiday don’t last for ever. I sometimes get a client as early as the milk.’

In her enthusiasm and hurry a roselight had begun to pour out of the straining camisole; her natural, moist mouth had worked off the cheap veneer; the whites of her eyes, rolling and struggling in her fight for freedom from her clothes, were brilliantly enamelled with naked light.

‘Don’t know why I’m wastun me time! What are you staring at?’ she shouted.

He was staring at the streaming golden paddocks on which the sun was rising through his boyhood as he sat between Sid Cupples and Father. The ridges were perhaps more silver than gold, the gullies more shadowy in which the strings of ewes heaved into a rolling scamper.

‘I love you, I don’t think!’ she muttered. ‘You’re bloody stoopid!’ Coming and nipping him on the cheek. ‘Or perhaps yer dad told yer not to forget the pox.’

Nothing seemed less likely as she began to strip resistance from him, layer by unnecessary layer. (Father would only have thrown a fit to see the suit crumple round his ankles — if it hadn’t been so nasty cheap.) She was peeling, paring; he might have been something else: some exotic fruit.

While his own fingers began itching out after homelier pears, bruised in parts; the gash in a dripping water-melon: the marbled, sometimes scented, sometimes acrid flesh of all fruit ever.

He let down her hair. It fell around them.

He experienced a shock when Rhoda was projected for a moment in amongst the other slides: the pink shadow in her little legs. It might have ruined everything if Nance hadn’t been in control.

‘Not too bad,’ she kept muttering between her teeth. ‘Tisn’t— bad. ’ Might have been Boo Hollingrake, except that Nance was holding the Delicious Monster against her periwinkle of a navel.

Or again, after they had plunged, struggling through the grey waves of the unmade bed, she mumbled on between their mouthfuls: ‘Wonderful — the way — they — worked— out —the joinery! ’

Ahhhh they were flooding together in cataracts of light and darkest deepest velvet.

Sometime that night, or morning, for the oyster tones were taking over, he got up from the sticky sheet to rummage through his pockets for a cigarette. When he had found one he sat on the edge of the bed. She dragged once or twice on the fag, then returned it, and began tracing his backbone with her finger.

‘Was it the first time you did it?’

His vertebrae might have crushed her finger: she withdrew it at once, sucking the breath back through her teeth.

‘What makes you think that?’ He couldn’t sound surly enough.

‘You was shivering like a dog they threw in the water.’

He decided not to answer, and she began as if trying to level out his back with the broad warm palm of her hand; but it was too much for her: she threw herself on him in the end, for her own purposes.

‘Oh God,’ she kept gobbling and crying. ‘Love me — what’s yer bloody — love me— Hurtle! ’ gnashing and biting and sobbing, until he took possession.

She was only really mollified when finally he sat up astride her, looking down at the mess of flesh and wet hair. All this time of after-love she kept an arm over her eyes.

Somebody came knocking at the door and she got up as she was, to open. He caught sight of an old biddy in felt slippers holding a pudding basin to her apron.

‘What is it, dear?’ asked Nance, protecting herself against the draught.