Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘they’re both of them aristercratic names. Or so I’d say.’ She was too trusting: her big ripe purple mouth.

They mounted the hill and soon entered the city proper.

‘If I’d thought we was coming as far as this I’d have dressed different,’ Nance said, with glances at the plate-glass.

Passing a cooked-food shop, he grew reckless. ‘What d’you say if we pick up a chicken and take it back to my place?’ He dreaded the inevitable reply: she was so very trusting.

‘That would be lovely, dear. Then I’ll know where you live. You don’t know a person before you’ve seen their home.’

He avoided more by ducking inside the shop and choosing one of the imitation-looking roast chickens.

He was sixpence short, and had to come outside to confess it.

‘Sixpence won’t put you in debt,’ she said, looking inside the sloppy old handbag.

The chicken, still warm inside the paper, seemed to lubricate their progress, though they continued only slowly strolling.

Nance might have liked to hurry it. ‘Is it much farther, dear?’ she asked at last.

‘No,’ he answered, thinking of the drawings on the balcony.

They were passing one of the pubs towards the Quay, when she shopped and said: ‘We’ll make it a little celebration, Hurtle. But the booze’s gunner be on me.’

While she was in the bottle department the uneasy ponce nursed the parcel of chicken outside: he had to tell himself he was an artist.

She came out smiling as though life begins all over again with a sealed bottle.

‘One day,’ she said, as they strolled on towards what she didn’t know was coming. ‘I’ll have to tell you the story of my life. You wouldn’t believe it, but I was a nurse for a whole twelve month. I got so sleepy I didn’t know in the end if I wasn’t standing on me hands. They tell yer you mustn’t become involved with the patients. As if you could. Even sponging around a bloke’s dick. You’re too dead tired. I don’t say some of them didn’t proposition me, but I never became involved. I don’t think anybody who’s at all professionally inclined becomes involved except with their profession — except now and agen.’

Nance stepped across what a sailor had just vomited on the pavement.

‘At the year of a year I got out. How could I ever ’uv become a starched-up nursing sister? The grammar alone. Mother was set on it, and it probably broke ’er heart. Though I married Snow Lightfoot. He was a postie. The kind that turns scraggy later. Poor Snow — always hurryin’ ter reach the next box.’

He told Nance it was the house in which he lived.

‘Oh dear, you didn’t oughter let me go on about meself!’ She giggled; but she looked fulfilled.

On the way up she changed again: on one of the landings she stood listening. ‘I don’t take to that door,’ she said in a haggard voice. ‘Have you got an instinct, Hurtle? Or are you just another male?’

All his instincts were concentrated on what he was about to, and dreaded to, reveal — but had to.

He unlocked his door and threw it open.

‘They say I’m psychic.’ Nance was gasping less from her confessions than the stiff climb.

At once she was smelling around the room, like a bitch where a dog has lifted its leg.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s a real man’s turnout.’

Again she had changed, and a sonorous melancholy, which was also approval, filled the room. It did look naked, felt cold, and he didn’t know how to answer for it.

In the circumstances, he got down on his knees and began to light the gas fire: that way he could also keep his back turned.

‘What are those?’ Nance was asking.

‘Those,’ he said, without turning to look, ‘are studies — drawings — for paintings I’m going to do.’

He could hear the gasping of the gas fire. He had never been aware before of the composition of its flame.

‘What,’ she said, ‘you’re an artist, then?’

He didn’t contradict, while listening to her heels roaming around.

‘They’ll run you in,’ she said. ‘For doing a woman like that. With ’er bum cut in half. And tits hangun. What’s she doin?’

‘Lighting a fire.’

The worst was over: he sat back on his heels.

Nance was yanking the cork out of a bottle of the cheapest brandy. She had torn a leg off the varnished chicken.

‘Fancy you an artist!’ She spoke through a mouthful of chicken, wondering, it seemed, whether to feel resentful, or to devour the artist along with the flesh she was gnawing off the bone.

He was reminded of Goya’s ‘Saturn’.

‘I don’t think I ever met an artist before — but may ’uv — when I was in bed with one and didn’t know it. There’s a lot a person’ll never probably know. You could know a murderer all yer life and only find out when it’s too late.’

He let her go on. He swilled a good third of a tumbler of brandy. With his mind’s eye, he saw how he would take his drawing ‘Nance Spreadeagle’ a stage further, into the architecture of the body. The abstracted form offered itself almost too easily, which was not surprising: the brandy all but ate flesh, while the shrill heat of the gas stove raised perception to fever-pitch.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, Nance was licking her fingers, making a dainty job of it. ‘Some artists, I read in a magazine, leave fortunes when they pass on. Fancy if they make you a “Sir”! Course you need a business head behind yer!’ She looked sideways at the balcony. ‘What d’you say if I let you paint me in the nude, Hurtle? It ’ud all be experience. And if you give me half-a-dozen tits, they’ll be less likely to recognize me.’

He began undoing her dress, to shut her up.

‘Stopput!’ she said. ‘I’m serious.’

She was, too. It was Nance Lightfoot’s practical night. They lay together on the narrow bed, but he couldn’t have made love to her, because her mind was rushing with a different kind of abandon into other labyrinths.

‘Suppose I don’t go in with poor bloody one-lung Rafferty, into the sandwich business? That’s too bad, but you’ve sometimes gotter think about yerself.’ Her fingers were totting up his flies, but absently. ‘Supposing I concentrate on you, eh? Hurtle, love? D’you think anybody’s gunner buy this sort of art work? T’isn’t exactly pretty, is it?’

‘Not supposed to be.’

‘What is it, then? Explain to me. All this about modern art.’

‘If you could put it in words, I wouldn’t want to paint.’

Brandy, and gas heat, and Nance Lightfoot too, were making him doze. When he woke there was less sound of traffic in the street. Nance must have finished the brandy: he heard the bottle thump across the carpet and reach the lino.

She had turned nasty, it seemed. ‘. . got a crick in me bloody neck lyin’ on this narrer bed talkun to a corpse. When I only wanter help yer. You’re just not realistic, Hurtle. Or perhaps it’s me. To get stuck with an intellectual no-hope artist. .’

While trying to soothe her navel, he longed to explore every silence he had ever let slip through lack of appreciation. The gas fire continued hissing at him in blue.

Suddenly she had got her mouth, or muzzle, into his ear: the words were propelled like bullets. ‘What your sort don’t realize, ’ she wasn’t saying, she was firing into his brain, ‘is that other people exist. While you’re all gummed up in the great art mystery, they’re alive, and breakun their necks for love.’

‘You attend to that, don’t you?’

‘What?’

‘Love.’

‘That? There’s more love between the iron and the board!’ She kicked out, but as her shoes were off, she hurt herself.

‘Oh God,’ she moaned in a kind of mental revulsion, ‘when I think of men. The stockbrokers that are gunner miss their trains, the waterside bulls, the ones that apologize for their trusses, and those that are afraid they’ll carry home a load of syph! Oh, God!’ She continued heaving and protesting.