Patrick White - The Vivisector

It seemed to him that many of them were nourished by air: Caldicott (or so one hoped); the postmistress at Ironstone; himself even. Only Nance smacked her chops over a life-giving diet of glutinous, smoking meat.

He decided to get up early the following morning; in fact, he was seldom seduced into lingering on the ridge of potato-sacks on which he had woken. An intensifying golden light was dusting the pelt of that lean animal his body. Stroking, scratching it, he was so detached, it owed him nothing but its captivity under a roof. His tactile mind was the part of him he cosseted: encouraging it to reach out, to cut through the webs of dew, to find moisture in the slippery leaves, the swords of grass, before the sun had sucked it up.

He got into his pants, incidentally rather smelly, and stiff with recent wipings of paint. He strutted up and down, digging his hardened heels into the splintery boards, tearing at a loaf he had bought the afternoon before, guzzling and thinking and loving; while the moisture tinkled; feathers shook free of dust and dew; the morning shrieked, called, whipped and trolled out of the gorge. In between, silence made the loudest affirmation of all.

Glutted finally with bread, light, sound, he returned to the attack on those giant rocks with which he was obsessed: to dissect on his drawing-board down to the core, the nerves of matter; but pure truth, the crystal eye, avoided him. He the ruthless operator was in the end operated on, and he flung off, groaning and drymouthed from the austerities of black and white. There were several versions of the same theme, some of them more advanced because less ambitious, and he healed himself by adding to their flesh, by disguising their scars, with touches and retouches of paint.

‘What’s it this time, I’d like to know?’

The shock made him blunten what should have been the razor-edge of a mica sun.

‘Rocks,’ he mumbled, resentful, nauseated: under it all, frightened.

‘Looks more like cauliflower ears. Bloody boxers’ ears mucked up for ever by the glove.’

He couldn’t avoid looking round at her.

He saw that Nance and he were strangers to each other, only that Nance, who believed strangers didn’t exist for more than a second or two, had dumped all the stuff she had been lugging, was wetting her mouth, from which exertion had worn off most of the lipstick, and opening her eyes wider and wider, to swallow him up.

He was stifling in the sweet, steamy smell of city nights.

‘You’re good!’ she munched when her appetite allowed. ‘You’re harder, Hurtle, than you used to be.’

‘What have you done to yourself?’ he complained.

‘What?’ She blenched as she went through the possibilities.

‘Your hair.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘that’s the fashion. Don’t you like it?’

She took off what, no doubt, she hoped was a dossy little hat. They had cut off the great, dusty, tumbling mare’s-tail of her hair. In place of it she showed a strong, pale-as-a-candle, shaven nape.

‘ I like it;’ she said complacently, ‘though it’s gunner cost a lot in the long run. Have to get used to it — like payin’ the gas and electricity.’

Her calves bulged more than he remembered, but he had never seen them so exposed, unless in the entirety of physical passion.

‘Look,’ she said, beginning to unpack her largesse from the carriers. ‘That’s potted pig’s-cheek.’ She smelled it. ‘Could ’uv gone off on the way. Didn’t oughterv brought pork.’

Much had gone off, he suspected, since her cornucopia was emptied into his cell. Now that he had her, he didn’t in any way want her, or the grey marble of the pig’s-cheek, or pickles, or the rope of saveloys, or oranges — oranges everywhere: big open-pored navels rolling off the table. The dossy little hat was drifting gauzily over the floorboards. She was so absorbed in her activity she didn’t seem to notice that the pendulum pearls weighing down her lobes were bashing her savagely on the cheeks. She was looking for a tumbler, she said, to freshen up her ‘corsage’, but settled for an empty bottle when told there wasn’t such a thing as a glass. She filled the bottle with water from the tank, and after taking off their silver paper, stuck her wilted orchids in the neck.

‘A bloke give them to me Friday night — a business noise from Brissy.’

Nance was so unconscious of her own vulnerability he couldn’t continue feeling resentful over what he no longer found in her, if that had ever existed: perhaps he had created it as something he needed at the time. He had to begin loving her again for what she was in the concrete present: her chipped-lacquer look; the restless activity of those fake pearls chained to her ears; the forms of her timeless body at the mercy of a travesty in salmon sateen.

But he couldn’t have freed her. Didn’t want to touch her even.

Nor did she want to be touched, it seemed: not after their first, and formally passionate, embrace. She was determined to appear hard, bright, self-contained, proficient in any of the domestic rites he mightn’t have thought she knew about; or possibly she was intimidated by unfamiliar surroundings.

She kept turning round to look.

‘You’re sort of pigging it — and like it!’ she looked at him with the bright indulgence of a big sister, haunches overflowing the hard chair.

Again staring around, rubbing her biceps as though to warm them, she said: ‘Golly, it’s quiet!’ and laughed.

‘It isn’t. You can hear something happening all the time.’

‘I know that, ’ she said through her flaked lips, still rubbing at her own gooseflesh. ‘This is what I come out of. There was always the sound of heat, and hens, or a dog’s bark, or a sheep’s cough. Oh, yes — the ache of it! If I heard a sheep cough now, I’d jump out of me bloody shoes.’

She was wearing gold ones, kid, which the stones must have martyred as she came down the track. When she saw him looking at them, she hid her feet under the chair.

She said: ‘There’s an economical puddun I learnt from Mum I’ll have to make for yer while I’m here if I can remember what you put in.’

On and off she picked at the food she had brought, which no longer looked as though it were there to be eaten. Nance seemed to prefer gum: perhaps the motion of her jaws made her feel she was doing something.

She looked into the gorge. ‘What do you think you’re gunner get out of paintun an ugly old rock?’

‘That’s what I’m trying to find out. Could be the answer.’

‘Eh?’ Her frown was an excruciated one. ‘I may not be what you’d call educated,’ she was beginning.

‘Oh God, Nance, I’m not educated! ’

‘But you know enough not to make sense.’

She sat training a piece of hair to curl around one of her cheekbones: the swinging pearl might have left a scar.

‘But rocks, I mean — who’s gunner ever even pay a tenner for a rock — without there’s someone sittun on it.’

She crossed her legs, and bunched her knees, and drew up her skirt, but dropped it again in helplessness.

‘Nature’s all right,’ she said, ‘but it’s too big for most people. Last Sunday Billie Lovejoy — the old cow with the orange bristles on ’er chin — my landlady — Billie said: “Why don’t we take the ferry, Nance, and go on a little spree to Manly?” Why I agreed I couldn’t say. I wouldn’t value Billie Lovejoy not above a potful of piss, only that she’s ’uman— ’uman, see? And a woman. Well, we took the ferry. There was a bloke tried to contact, but I wasn’t operatun that day. And I sorter got the gripes. All that water! And me an’ Billie sittun on the Steyne — the rollers they was too big —and glassy — beltun up the beach. Gee,’ she moaned, living it again, ‘I would ’uv trotted straight back for the return ride if it hadn’t been for the fellers lyin’ on the beach. ’Uman, see? The ’uman touch.’