Patrick White - The Vivisector

Until a morning when his glittering cerebrations bred in him such a hopelessness he trod flat-footed across the boards, alone in his aching, powerless body, and began a version practically unrelated to those he had done already. The big, pink, cushiony forms suggested sleeping animals rather than the rocks of his mind: they neither crushed nor cut, but offered themselves trustfully to the one-eyed sun scattering down on them a shower of milky seed or light. Done without forethought, unless he had planned it in his sleep, it was over so quickly, compulsively, he didn’t want to look at it for fear of finding the disaster he suspected. He sat instead on the edge of the creaking veranda, dangling his empty hands between his thighs, while the gorge gave up its long, writhing viscera of mist.

Caldicott wrote:

Dear Duffield

Since February is approaching, this is to remind you of your promise of three paintings for my mixed show. The others, so far, are a pretty staid lot. Dare I say: we depend on you to set the Harbour on fire!

I enclose for your amusement the two snapshots we took the day of my visit.

Kind regards

m. c.

In one of the snaps Caldicott was shyly attempting to look amused at the unlikely situation in which he had landed himself. His suit, his shirt, his forearms, all looked wrong for the occasion, but he stood propped against the edge of the veranda, hoping from under his wilting Panama to smile the unlikeliness off. In one corner of the picture the unpainted iron tank glared in ferocious competition. Caldicott had added a postscript to his letter:

I don’t doubt these pictorial records will eventually increase my importance in the eyes of Australia, not to say the world.

Hurtle grimaced to read it, and to look. He didn’t care to recognize the more substantial figure in the second photograph. He loathed what he saw. His only reason for wearing clothes could have been to appear clothed. He remembered deciding to receive his guest barefooted, to offend his sensibility. Now he was appalled by his own dirty, horny feet. In the snapshot they looked deformed. Or was it distorted? Just as you distort appearances to arrive at truth.

Caldicott had come off better. After setting the camera for the picture, he had hurried round to add to the composition, in which he was shown as little more than a tremulous, adoring ghost.

Duffield tore the two snapshots into little pieces, and began stumping with quick, febrile steps, on flat, calloused feet, through his jerry-built house. Not even his work offered a refuge: he had emptied himself of the obsessive rocks which had occupied him for so many weeks.

February became a swelter. He sweated into Sydney on several occasions, blaming either Caldicott or Nance. The three promised paintings he delivered to the gallery on time, while suggesting he had only looked in by chance. A length of hairy, ungracious cord lashing the canvases together made his cargo look uncommonly crude.

Caldicott pushed back his chocolate eyeshade and advanced on the corded bundle, the spit glistening out from between his exquisitely oval teeth. ‘Needless to say, my — my expectations — Hurtle — are enormous.’

Only recently Caldicott had pointed out that his friend might call him ‘Maurice’, but Hurtle had continued to resist: he was clumsy with first names, unless addressing dogs, or Nance.

He stood mopping himself with a handkerchief he had washed for the visit, and dried on a bush: it was a blinding white, and still smelled of the sun.

‘I don’t expect anything to come of it,’ he kept repeating. ‘And you’ll be the loser!’ He laughed. ‘But I take it you know what you’re up to.’

Caldicott, as often, could have been wanting to communicate something of great, though difficult, importance, but Duffield was already making his getaway down the stairs, in unaccustomed boots.

He ate a sandwich in a tea-room, sprinkling the ham with some of the dry mustard provided by the management. He wondered whether to wait, or go at once to Nance’s place. To wait would have been a formality; so he started off through the afternoon steam, foolishly carrying a bunch of uniform rosebuds disguised in a hood of tissue paper.

Nance was lying lumped on the bed grunting in her sleep. The stained upper sheet, which eventually she would give for laundering to old Mrs Gorman the midnight pudding-maker, had scuffled up around her armpits. She rubbed her head against the pillow, and groaned, her eyelids too heavy to open, her throat too dry to utter.

So he got in beside her without even taking off his clothes, only removing his boots after some trouble with the knotted laces.

It was a relief, though, finally. When he had come, and the acid was no longer eating him, he lay caressing her hair with a hand which seemed to be recovering its normal function after a long period of feverish stress, such as an illness, or some creative activity. To remain in his present normal employment he would have given anything — except the gift he was cursed with.

After her first half-awakened grimace of recognition, Nance continued lying with her eyes ostentatiously closed. Her sleep-sallowed face looked content, smiling slightly, perhaps for her own formal pretence, or his importunity. He regretted his rough approach, though probably her vocation had denied her the luxury of a man who wasn’t clumsy. If only he could have afforded something more beautiful and valuable than the bunch of drooping roses, but even if he had been able, he could think of nothing which would have impressed her by its value, and pleased him equally by its beauty.

Presently she opened her eyes and said: ‘You’re a prickly old sod, aren’t yes? And yer buttons are eatin’ inter me flesh.’

As she swept him off, she was all flesh, his appetite for which was satisfied: his only remaining pleasure lay in the sallow tones of her skin, and the texture of her breasts, like those bland cheeses which reward the eye rather than the tongue.

‘What have you brought me?’ she asked, although it was too obvious.

Her indolent buttocks had grown tense as she approached the dressing-table and caught sight of the tissue cornet wrapping the flowers.

‘They’re not flowers, are they?’ She was performing an instinctive ritual. ‘Arr, dear, what a lovely bokay! All flowers are lovely.’

The rosebuds drooping from her hand had the heads of strangled birds.

‘They’ve died.’ He forced his hoarse voice. ‘Too much sun. They couldn’t stand the heat.’ His failure to offer a suitable apology made the situation more oppressive, or so he felt, in Nance’s cluttered, whore’s bedroom.

She, on the other hand, resounded with a tenderness he hadn’t heard in her before. ‘They’ll revive,’ she said gently, stroking the dead heads with her fingers.

She fetched a cut-glass jug, and stuck the roses in it, and stood it on a greyish lace doily. Splayed against the dressing-table mirror, the bunch looked more lifeless than before.

‘Red’s best,’ she said. ‘I hope I’m buried with red roses. Why should you always have white at funerals?’

He would have liked to get down and kiss her in the shaven crutch, only he wouldn’t have known how to explain his impulse, and in her present state of reverence she might have been shocked.

She made them a pot of bitter tea, wearing her continued nakedness like a favourite old comfortable dress.

‘Now that you’ve delivered the pictures to Mr Thingummy, and are free and easy — we hope — I’m gunner come up again to pay you a visit at that place of yours.’

She had cut some slices of stale poundcake, and was easing out a datestone carefully from her mouth so as not to endanger a dicky tooth, while talking, and looking at her toenails from a thoughtful distance, and dusting the crumbs from between her breasts.