Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘I dunno. Money. A big dark cool house, full of furniture and clothes. And a big American limousine. I’d have to have a chauffeur to drive me about — with a good body — just for show, though. I wouldn’t mind if the chauffeur was a wonk.’

He was cannily relieved to find he hadn’t yet featured in her thoughts. ‘What else?’ he dared to ask.

‘I’d have one of those big — what-you-me-call-’em dogs — that film actresses have.’

Her fantasies were making her breathless.

‘I’d have you, Hurtle;’ she turned on him her big eyes, and great beige, unpainted lips, ‘because I love you, love.’

It was his night off, and they were, in actuality, on their way to the pictures. They were, it seemed, already in key. The jelly-beans she showered on him were of the same colours as her confetti of imagination.

‘D’you think we’ll make ourselves sick,’ she asked, ‘guzzling all these lollies?’

But Nance had removed to another plane. ‘Those old buggers you go away with — I wonder whether they’re worth it. You have to work pretty hard, and don’t dare pick up another job on the side. Not with them paying the hotel. Though you’re still paying the rent at home. This old George Collins, for instance, is very generous up to a point. We did the posh down in Melbourne. He let me choose an evening gown. Took me to a dinner dance. But there’s always a battle for the hard cash. He’s got a wife who’s been an invalid since soon after they married. He says she wouldn’t allow ’im to touch ’er. She knows what goes on, but acts blind provided she’s got what she wants in the home. George — he’s a building contractor — ruptured ’imself some years ago. Now he’s afraid ’e’s got a prostate coming on, and wants to make the most of ’is time — if it wasn’t for the hernia. Oh God,’ she suddenly moaned, ‘these old men turn me up — when you wake, and there’s the truss hangun off of a chair!’

She had taken off her hat, so that her head was now completely hers.

‘They got the dough, though,’ she sighed, ‘if you can dig it out of ’em.’

Not even her spoken thoughts detracted from her head this evening. Treading through the shallows of light, she looked remote and classical. He would have to use her in another context: the head with its heavy-hanging coil of hair.

Just then they arrived at the flea-box, and burrowed into its flaking façade.

When they were seated, Nance hissed: ‘I’m happy,’ looking round glitteringly at the grubby grey interior.

She got him to fetch her peanuts and another bag of lollies. He bought them with his own money. She looked at him reproachfully, only the absence of make-up took the weight out of it.

In any case, the first picture had begun, and because it was a comic one, nothing could be taken too seriously. Their bodies accompanied the sharp runs of the piano. As the custard pie flattened itself on the cross-eyed comedian’s face, Nance recoiled; then she hooted: ‘That’s somethun I’m gunner try out on Billie Lovejoy!’ her teeth gleaming through her laughter and the zinc-filtered light. Again, she shrieked: ‘They’re not gunner bust up all that good furniture?’ They were, it seemed, specially for Nance. By the end she was coughing with peanuts and fulfilment.

During the slides in the interval she got him to buy a couple of Eskimoes.

While they were cracking the chocolate shells and their narrowed tongues began to appreciate the shock of cold, Nance leaned towards him and whispered: ‘I could get down, Hurtle, with you, between the rows. Don’t you know I love you?’

He did, of course. They couldn’t have been anything but lovers. The tremulous music would not have let him escape: for the big feature picture had begun and though its direction was not yet altogether clear, it seemed to promise the agreeable agonies of other people’s frustrated love.

Nance took his hand and put it between her thighs, but flung it away on seeing how serious the picture was becoming. She was soon sobbing for the two aristrocratic sisters parted and lost in the revolution.

‘That one can take care of ’erself. Tereese is strong — she’s got ’er health. But the blind girl — Helenore — gee, she’s frail! I bet someone’ll give ’er a baby. That’s what’s gunner happen. Wait and see. Helenore’s the sort that gets landed.’ Nance wiped her face with the back of her hand.

From time to time she said: ‘I’m not gunner look at this bit. It’s too sad.’ Instead she put her head on his shoulder, and huddled, or rocked to the piano music; once she fiddled with his flies; she bit the lobe of his ear, and said: ‘We know better, don’t we?’ and giggled.

He could have rooted her there and then.

Again the long sad picture had got possession of her. That was what she wanted: to be slowly and sadly possessed by a lost marquise in crushed organdie. And what he wanted was not the common possessive pross he loved by needful spasms, but to shoot at an enormous naked canvas a whole radiant chandelier waiting in his mind and balls.

He eased away from Nance after that, and felt for what she might have done to his flies. They were intact, and he grew detached from the boring picture.

The lost marquise had the baby, but by what turned out to be the right man: a disguised duke. You wondered how the child would grow up. Into a Rhoda Courtney? Or, for that matter, Hurtle Duffield? All children, he suspected, start out as yourself. Finally his egotism made him feel ashamed.

When the lights went up Nance’s face looked large-pored and countrified from the absence of paint and steam of emotion. ‘It’s lovely to have a cry,’ she said, ‘at the pictures.’ She looked around, parading her virtue for anyone who might appreciate it.

They got up and shambled out, the piano still racketing away: it was playing ‘Smiles’, he recognized. The grey walls of the theatre were so agreeably negative.

Down the steps the night air hit them. Nance’s face immediately tightened. Under the commonplace, but pretty confetti of light, she bowed her head, noble in a sense that he looked for and needed. She didn’t attempt to paint herself out. He suspected this would be their wedding night.

Her whole room confirmed it. Though arranged no differently, the furniture, with drawers open as usual, looked of a colour and size in keeping with a ceremony. Inside the cocoon of her yellow room, of her splendid golden body, the occasion remained proportionate, and after she had put out the light, the night continued showering pink-and-green confetti through the black window.

When they had come, Nance said: ‘I will never ever let you go, Hurtle. We could die now.’

Then suddenly he wanted to leave. He didn’t want her to comment on what she imagined he had experienced or seen. However clumsy, slippery, he had to escape quickly from the whore’s increasingly stuffy room: to protect what she had given.

‘What?’ she shouted. ‘You’re not gunner leave me? I bought a few savs I thought we’d do for supper.’

He gave her a kiss. It tried to be tender, but he himself felt it to be dry: all the moisture in him had gone into their marriage of light; while her body continued arching against his, the bristles which had begun shooting again from a neglected mount of Venus prickling on his hand.

‘The savs!’ she moaned and slobbered into his mouth.

As he ran downstairs with his loot a door opened on a landing. He recognized the orange chin of the landlady and retired whore. There were whimpers and other apparitions on the way, not least the shaggy rat he kicked off where the yard opened: then rags of wet washing clinging to him as he burst through.

He fell on his own bed and dreamed in his clothes about the Boudin above the fireplace in Harry Courtney’s study, in which ladies walked over stretches of firm sand tilting their parasols. There were no quicksands, it appeared, to swallow them down.