Patrick White - The Vivisector

He hadn’t seen Nance Lightfoot for months when he was handed her letter at the post-office store.

Dear Cock,

What are you up to ‘up the line’! I bet the art ladies are bringing you picnics of champers and chicken mayernaise. Well good luck to them and art, but not all the mayernaise on Darling Pt is going to paint my painting back the marriage one.

I am wondering about you dear Hurt, whether you have got enough to eat — and bush fires on top. I will come up to see you one of these days, so dust the art ladies away, I am a bull where ladies is concerned.

I am hungry I don’t mind telling you after a diet of commercial travellers and railway porters. I lie there. I let them look at my armpits.

There was a bloody Irish merchant seaman bilked me out of the money and pinched half a bottle of gin. You could of stood his socks up on their smell.

Dear love and Cock, I will die of you if I don’t soon see you, just the shape of it. Course I don’t mean that, I mean more than that. I could eat you up raw.

NANCE

She had done a drawing on the bottom of the page which the postmistress would have liked to get a look at, only he went outside.

No suggested date for the visit, but the threat had thrown him into an uproar: he heard that squelching sound in his ears; as he turned off into the scrub he could feel the blood padding through his veins. Nance had unnerved and nerved him at the same time; when he got inside the shack he began to unpack and lay out his neglected paints.

All those months at Ironstone his physical energies had been too thoroughly drained off by the building of his house and the difficulties of day-to-day existence. He decided to eat less, to avoid further calls on Caldicott and Nance. He lived off damper, dried beans, rice, lentils, and the woody swedes he grew himself in the thin soil of the ironstone escarpment. At one point he joined a road gang, and worked with it for a few weeks; with the pay, he debauched himself on butter, tea and sugar. Occasionally he made drawings, little more than notes, which couldn’t relieve his cynicism, nor his rage for physical exertion. He belched sour, and often wondered what had ever persuaded him he might become a painter.

Later on he realized he had been expressing himself in his tentative house: a wood-carving of necessity.

Caldicott had paid him a visit. The dealer walked with a slight limp, the origin of which the painter didn’t discover. Caldicott arrived mopping himself. He had on a tussore suit, the coat of which he was carrying over a shoulder: abandoned, for Caldicott. His hat was a new Panama through which the sweat was spreading. He looked not so much amused at his protégé’s eccentricity, as amazed at his own foolishness. The veins were bursting out of his flushed, hairless skin as he stumbled limping down towards the ledge on which Duffield had perched his misguided shack.

Caldicott peered into the gorge, and must have found the gulf between art and life at its most repulsive. ‘Do you really think you can live in this place, Duffield, and work?’

‘That’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve almost learnt to knock a nail in straight.’ Duffield refused to indulge in the nuances on which Caldicott throve.

The latter expectedly winced. Secretly he hoped his own life might appear a work of art to others, and with this in view he collected paintings, rare objects, limited editions, and kept the gallery in George Street to encourage interesting boors like Duffield whose bad taste might eventually be excused as genius.

‘In any case,’ he said, swallowing down an astringency, ‘you look aggressively healthy — don’t you?’

Duffield felt all scabs and blisters as he fetched a couple of bottles of beer standing in a bucket of lukewarm water in the shadow of the iron tank.

They drank the warm beer out of cups, while the shade of Edith the parlourmaid hovered round them: for a moment the white sun caught the rim of her salver, and Hurtle swallowed his beer in knots.

With Caldicott, distaste was now becoming business. ‘I am planning a mixed show for February. Will you be ready for it? Oh, conventional on the whole; but you, Duffield, will provide the controversial salt.’ Flatter just a little.

Duffield had become a mumbling groaning lump of man, or rock. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know when I shall be ready.’ He kept shifting his position on the very uncomfortable chair.

‘What — aren’t you painting?’ Caldicott looked at him with a kind of disapproving admiration: as though his protégé had turned out to be a disguised labourer.

He took a snapshot or two with a camera he produced jokingly.

Presently Duffield led the way and they ate some rubbery cold salt-beef on a table in the long half-built room; or Caldicott messed the beef about, carefully, rejecting the gristle with the tips of his lips.

When the meal was over, Duffield brought out a bottle of brandy. After the first sip, Caldicott had to look at the label: he shuddered to find his suspicions confirmed, but went on with it, out of camaraderie — or was it mateship?

The sun, at its heaviest, was bulging over their heads. Heat was scratching the corrugated iron.

‘Well, dear boy,’ Caldicott smiled his milk-white smile, ‘provided you’re happily involved in the experiment!’

Then he put his hand on Duffield’s thigh, in a gesture halfway between unconscious affection and conscious appraisal. Almost at once he removed the hand: he could have burnt it; but his smile was trembling painfully.

‘Keep February in mind,’ he fluctuated. ‘I should like to hang three Duffields. Three should allow them — some of them, at least — to grasp that your intentions are serious.’

Towards the end he had raised his voice, hoping to hear it ring out in impersonation of a forceful man; but what they both continued hearing was Caldicott’s echo accusing him of a slight indiscretion. Or wasn’t it so slight? He looked at Duffield: one could never tell.

Duffield warmed towards Caldicott limping away through the scrub in his escape back to civilization. If it had been in his power, he would genuinely have liked to help the man out of his cabinet by smashing the panes; but he had never felt so impotent.

When his visitor was long enough gone to be out of earshot, he took the brandy bottle and chucked it into the gorge, where it hit a rock and exploded into a galaxy. He hoped Caldicott hadn’t heard after all. With guilt on his heels, how much more noticeably he would have limped. He was accusing his friend of his frightened little attempt: he was demonstrating against an emotional state of his own, which had unexpectedly given birth to this plume of transcendental glass.

And now, what most disturbed and disgusted: Nance was coming; though she still hadn’t given a date. In preparation he took to shaving every morning; he shook out the rumpled bags he used as a mattress between himself and the floor.

As self-protection he had started painting again: his visual abstractions soothed, if they didn’t completely satisfy him; but his thought was growing, out of rock and a shower of glassy light.

Nance didn’t come, and he grew dirtier, more sullen, afraid his material resources might give out before he had arrived at what he was vaguely hoping to achieve: when Caldicott sent him a cheque, without comment, let alone explanation.

The same day he walked into Hornsby to cash the cheque. On his way home, the postmistress at Ironstone was refurbishing her staghorn ferns by pulling off the dead, outer skins. The great heads from which the antlers rose were looking aggressively frontal and glossy, bulging from the trunks of the camphor laurels. The postmistress was a pale widow, who told him through pale lips that staghorns derive their nourishment from the air. She was proud of her ferns: she didn’t know what she would have done without them after her husband passed on.