Patrick White - The Vivisector

Although it was four o’clock and he knew he was expected at the Greek’s, he had to see her.

He almost ran along the streets, until in the one where Nance lived, he started looking for a sign.

Several women had come out of their houses, and were moving casually towards their beat. An old derelict bag was standing in the entrance to Nance’s place: from looking glum, she brightened up.

‘Mrs Lightfoot is expecting you, mister,’ the old girl called, relieved to rediscover a mission in life. ‘She’s on the third — third floor up — green door — on the third’; she was the same biddy who had been ‘fucked for fat’ in the small hours.

He went up after merely mumbling back at his informant. She didn’t expect to be acknowledged, though.

Nance was arranging her hair above her eyes, in heavy loops, or drooping nests, in the dressing-table glass.

She said: ‘Hello. Thought you’d come. I thought you might’uv come last night.’

She began hacking angrily at the looped-back hair with the axes of her hands, then gave up.

‘I was busy, though,’ she admitted: certainly her eyelids looked thick.

She sounded both prosperous and brutal. Her cigarette, hanging heavy from her mouth, scented the room, which smelled also of cut leeks, or armpits.

As she sat in the yellow glare from her dressing-table, with its rattling handles, warped brushes, scattering of beige powder, and a souvenir kewpie, he pressed against her from behind, and she turned round, fastening her teeth in his skin through the V of his open shirt, dragging her fingernails down along the flitch of ribs.

‘Ohhhhh!’ she moaned in an ascending scale, then said very primly: ‘I got business to attend to.’

‘What sort of business?’

‘Well,’ she said, reshaping her mouth, ‘there’s a bloke I know wants me to put some money into a sandwich shop. Might be something in it, don’t you think? All-night snacks along American lines.’

‘Didn’t know you were the financier too.’ To some extent he felt resentful: to find her less dependent on him.

‘You gotter put it somewhere when you make it. I was never shook on the loose board. Some bloody cut-throat might rip it up one night, and you with it.’

He laughed slightly.

‘Eh?’ She laughed back. ‘Aren’t I right?’

But he was remembering his version of her cleft, spreadeagled arse.

‘Besides,’ she transposed her voice to a patently virtuous key, ‘this is a returned man — see? the bloke who wants to start the business — only one lung — got gassed or something in France.’

‘You go for the diggers,’ he couldn’t resist remarking.

‘Jesus and Mary, are you the only pebble on the beach?’

Little did she know it, but he was.

Or perhaps some suspicion of it did cross her mind: her mouth softened as she stood up, and her eyes darkened under the brim of the hat she had just put on. Reaching for her handbag she knocked it off the dressing-table.

‘Come with me — Hurtle — if you like,’ she said quietly. ‘It oughtn’ter take long.’

After stooping for the bag she appeared to him in yet another light, dominated by her serious eyes under a garish royal-blue velvet. She had spoken his difficult name as though she wanted him to compliment her.

‘I might come along,’ he said. ‘Some of the way, anyway.’

She had made him shy. He avoided her. He stood playing with the coins in his pocket, looking at the Alma-Tadema print hanging from a nail above the bed.

‘Interested in art work?’ She would have been pleased for her refinement to be recognized. ‘That was given me as part payment by an old boy who ran an art shop in William Street. Just before they took him over. Poor old bugger was short in more ways than one: he had only one ball.’

‘Looks as if you fancy the ones!’

‘Don’t it!’ She rattled laughing. ‘I never ever thought of that!’

They went downstairs, watching their step on the discoloured marble. Laughter and precaution brought them closer together. He looked up, and saw them in the blotchy mirror on a lower landing: a woman leaning on her lover.

And it was the same in the streets: the women he saw she knew turned away out of delicacy on catching sight of Nance Lightfoot with the genuine article. It made her walk more self-consciously, looking at her insteps, or sideways into shop windows. In one or two instances, girls they passed put on a syrupy expression, and asked: ‘How are we, Nance?’ and she smiled a smile he hadn’t noticed on her till then. ‘Good, thanks,’ she answered, ‘how’s yerself, dear?’ as they parted.

It wasn’t all that far to the solicitor’s office where Nance was to meet the one-lunged digger.

‘We can’t be there too long,’ she coaxed as they approached. ‘It’s late already, and the solicitor bloke’ll wanter be makun tracks.’

In the doorway they ran across a frail green-tinged individual with pinched nostrils who was apparently Nance’s partner-to-be in the sandwich shop.

‘Oh, Mick — Mick Rafferty — this is my friend, Mister — er. .’ Her voice trailed away: she looked flushed, probably too ashamed to reveal his first name, while realizing she hadn’t learnt his second. To help her would have made it look worse.

The one-lunged digger suggested her friend should wait inside, but Hurtle said he would hang around. Nance left him with smiles of the purest banality.

Yet he was haunted by the harsh gloss of the royal-blue hat, by the changing architecture of the face, and the unconscious poetry of the eyes.

She didn’t know herself. For that matter practically nobody in the street had woken up to themselves. A few glanced at him angrily in passing, and at least mentally edged away, holding him responsible for their moment of unwilling consciousness.

It was not very much later when Nance came hurtling back down the stairs and out of the rundown offices. ‘There! I wasn’t gunner let them palaver. But it’s late, love. What’s the dago gunner say?’

Down the sleek asphalt hill the evening traffic was spurting through the purple shallows.

‘Praps I’m going to give the dago the go-by: tonight and any other night.’

‘What — give up yer job?’ Nance was shocked: at once she began working on his arm. ‘Of course I wouldn’t let you want. I’m only thinkun of yer self-respect.’

They walked on rather aimlessly. He hoped she wouldn’t notice he was touched, because he wouldn’t have known how to explain why. Here lay the great discrepancy between aesthetic truth and sleazy reality.

‘I’ll find something. Clean windows,’ he said to keep her quiet, ‘or floors.’

‘Haven’t you any ambition?’ she asked with such a humourless earnestness, again he couldn’t help feeling moved.

He sniggered to hide it. ‘What about yourself?’

‘Why should I be ambitious? I got a steady, remunerative job. But a man’s different.’ Then, as they walked on, she said: ‘And you’re not just a man.’

‘Are you in love with me?’ He gave it a metallic edge.

‘I’d like to be,’ she said, and again, bitterly: ‘Oh yes, I’d like to be!’

Still walking, she started stirring up her handbag, looking for something to blow her nose on. He would have liked to help her, but he couldn’t.

At the bottom of the hill she recovered her cheerfulness. She said very brightly: ‘You never told me where you live, Hurtle. You never even told me yer other name — like we was still on blackmail terms.’

He told her his name was ‘Duffield’, and then, for good measure, that he also answered to ‘Courtney’.

‘You’re not wanted by the johns, are yer?’ Probably she believed that: she threw off a shiver, and plastered herself closer to him.