Patrick White - The Vivisector

Duffield couldn’t arrive quick enough at the office or cupboard across the gallery where Caldicott the dealer usually sat, wearing a leather eyeshade the colour of milk chocolate above his hairless, milky face. Caldicott was in such practised taste he practically couldn’t give an opinion on any subject, but would sigh and giggle his kind regrets he side-stepped.

‘I can’t say there’s any actual rush, Duffield, for your work.’ Caldicott tried to adjust the eyeshade so that it would give him greater protection. ‘But there’s a more general — growing interest in painting amongst people of the better class — and where one has rushed in,’ he sniggered, and stroked his hairless jaw, ‘there may be others preparing.’

The risk he had just taken encouraged the dealer to remove the eyeshade for a short spell. It had left a crude red mark across the milky forehead, at which Caldicott began to dab with a beautifully initialled handkerchief. His eyes, in contrast to the shade, were bitter chocolate, and in spite of the delicately discoloured lids, not as weak as you would have expected.

‘It takes time and you are ahead of it.’ He lowered his eyelids on his own epigram.

‘In the meantime, I’ve got to live,’ the painter suggested.

‘Oh yes, by all means — to live.’ The dealer showed his teeth in amusement. ‘You have employment, haven’t you?’

‘Yes, I’m a cleaner — at Morgan’s.’

At this contact with life Caldicott bowed his head over the blotter: though he had never laboured, he had been reared in a country where labour is theoretically a sacred rite.

‘Then you will always be able to eat. Nobody need starve in Australia.’

‘But when I withdraw to the scrub, how am I to paint and eat, Mr Caldicott? Unless, of course, I live off the immoral earnings of a woman.’

Caldicott almost fell apart. He enormously enjoyed someone else’s joke in doubtful taste. Though his latest painter was so unknown, so unfashionable, he might begin to cultivate him in a tentative way: ask him to dinner with a broadminded few; bad taste in a protégé could be a social asset.

The hushed ladies in their striped voiles and black-and-white polka-dot crêpe-de-chine adored Mr Caldicott. Instinctively they recognized ‘Maurice’ as one of themselves by the way he tweaked at his non-existent string of pearls; while on a grander, terrifying plane, they accepted him as a guardian of a world of art they could never hope to enter, married as they were to barristers, bankers, physicians, graziers even. So the ladies no more than hovered round his cupboard door, entrance to a desirable, though forbidden, Hades, murmuring felicities such as: ‘Thank you, Mr Caldicott — so stimulating — so gratifying to see we are coming of age in the arts.’

Once, a lady more perspicacious, more informed, than the others, stuck her head inside the cupboard, and announced in a whisper made to carry: ‘I’m glad we’re not going as far as Picasso! ’

She stood there flickering her eyelids, waiting for her measure of praise: and the dealer laughed the conniving laugh his client expected, and rearranged his invisible pearls.

‘Oh, Mrs Farquharson,’ he suddenly remembered, ‘this is one of our artists you’re going to hear more of — Mr Hurtle Duffield.’

The lady flickered appreciatively, and recoiled. It was difficult enough to introduce to her barrister, her banker, or her grazier, a water-colour of grazing sheep, without the artist who had painted it.

On one occasion when a fair gaggle of ladies was appreciating an exhibition, the painter asked the dealer: ‘Is she any of these?’

‘Is she — who? Oh, Mrs Lopez! No. She’s young, and,’ he averted his face, ‘some consider, dashing. She was here recently; but went away again. She lives away. She was widowed soon after her marriage in Ecuador. Or was it Peru? Very tragic — though I can’t say anyone ever met Mr Lopez. (She intends to remarry, I believe, and live in Berkshire.) But don’t let that discourage you. The word carries when a lady buys a painter — if the lady has means — and Mrs Lopez has very substantial means of her own. All these,’ Caldicott’s bitter-chocolate eyes darted out at the tasteful ladies, ‘are chicken-feed.’ Vulgar for Maurice: it must have been the humidity.

His only patron removed, Duffield plunged downstairs. He could feel the sweat running down his ribs, probably rotting the seams of his shirt. To take courage, he tried to visualize his strip of scrub, and the house he had begun to build — it wouldn’t be much more than a shed — in which he proposed living. His blood-blisters and scabs were positive reminders; but the house, founded on an Australian instinct he hoped he possessed, rose only groggily in George Street.

Nance hadn’t seen the house. He hadn’t been seeing much of her: they had started on the phase in which each considers the next move.

Along the street the asphalt was heaving and undulating, a flickering of deck-chair stripes on colourless ladies, one of them half-emerged from the chrysalis of widowhood; heat on summer oceans was the colour of jade, in Sydney, brutally blistered brown. What could an Australian lady of means have married in Ecuador — or Peru? Berkshire was the more likely place.

The careering trams didn’t prevent him becoming involved with his ‘Marriage of Light’, which the faceless Mrs Lopez had carried off. Nance Lightfoot took him by the hand. There was no mistaking the heat they generated together, as he re-enacted the details of his painting; but neither Nance, its source, nor Mrs Lopez, its buyer, nor any future owner, could lay claim to what was sprinkled with drops of his blood. The taste of it on his tongue made him draw back his lips, out of repulsion, or exhilaration. Suddenly, in plate-glass, there he was: more than real. He might do a self-portrait with warts. He had never contemplated it before. The prospective orgy of knowing himself encouraged him to run up the stairs, to the room he was soon going to leave.

However crude and basic the house or shack on the edge of the gorge, it was the artifact he had made. Helped by its primitive nature it soon settled into the ironstone and eucalypt landscape. The rocks might have been fired on a primordial occasion before it was decided to disguise the cleft of the gorge with its austere fringes of vegetation. It remained an oven in summer. Not surprisingly, trees sown in rocky crevices had taken the colour of smoke, of ash, their leaves narrow and listless, but tough. Even now, smoke would unravel without warning, its pungent strands threading through the bush. The whole of one night he stood by his unfinished house and watched the gorge snap and gnash at its own flames, as the trees went up in a clatter of fiery blinds. In the first light he himself felt ashen, not to say emotionally charred, while he still waited with a hacked-off branch to protect, if necessary, his timber skeleton of a house. It continued standing. The half-empty water-tank glittered as the morning clapped its eye on the unpainted iron corrugations.

The bush never died, it seemed, though regular torture by fire and drought might bring it to the verge of death. Its limbs were soon putting on ghostly flesh: of hopeful green, as opposed to the ash-tones of a disillusioned maturity: the most deformed and havocked shrubs were sharpening lance and spike against the future.

He liked to scramble down the face of the gorge through the evening light, chocking his boots against rock, clinging to the hairy trunks of trees, his fingers slithering over the slippery, fleshier ones. Once he caught his mouth trying out the response of one of the pinker, smoother torsoes. He was never so happy as in the communicative silence of the evening light. Sometimes he remembered he had been a painter before growing physically exhausted: musclebound, woodenheaded, contented.