Patrick White - The Vivisector

The grocer couldn’t remember a telephone booth nearer than the one in Laggan Street, and the larries had stripped that.

‘Do you believe in God, Mr Cutbush?’

‘Eh? That’s what we were taught, wasn’t it? I’m not going back on that. That is, I wouldn’t be prepared to say I don’t exactly not believe.’

‘In the Divine Vivisector!’

‘The — what did you say, sir?’ Though he hadn’t understood, it chilled the grocer: he could feel it trickling down his back.

The moon was by now showering its light on a world which looked as plain and consistent as your hand — but wasn’t, it seemed. In the distance a tram was screaming like no normal public conveyance, and although the waves of lantana were set as solid as the marble in a tombstone, you looked again and saw them twitch like sleeping flesh.

It was his eyesight: never been the same since the ammonia exploded in the back shop.

‘I believe in Him — I think,’ his companion was saying.

The stranger’s eyes weren’t exactly glittering with tears, because a man wouldn’t cry, or would he after all? in front of another man. The grocer was tingling with a sympathy it mightn’t have been proper to offer.

‘Yes, I believe in Him,’ the stranger repeated. ‘Otherwise, how would men come by their cruelty — and their brilliance?’

The grocer didn’t know how to rise to the occasion; but something mild and reconciled in his companion’s tone reminded him of an incident, interesting, if irrelevant.

‘There was a bloke I knew — a caterer, name of Davy Price — decent, decent all the way — got into a spot of trouble when an entire weddin’ party died of food poisonin’. “Our mistakes are what we make, Cec,” Davy says to me, “and it’s only us can live them down.” The following night ’e blew ’is brains out.’

The anecdote now seemed very irrelevant indeed, but even so, the grocer was put out when his friend made no attempt to respond.

‘Not only that,’ he cheered up a little to remember, ‘’e did it on this very same piece of vacant land. They call it The Gash — did you know?’

The connection between past and present worked, the grocer was relieved to see. The stranger was enjoying a change of mood. Still sitting, he began to slap his thighs with the flats of his hands. The sound it made was hard and brisk.

‘I can’t tell you how much it’s done for me — our talk. I didn’t expect anything like this. I’ll go home now and work.’

‘What — you work at night, do you?’ Distant footsteps on the asphalt made the question sound even darker.

‘Sometimes. It depends. Things look different by artificial light. Some paintings seem to crave for it the moment you conceive them. I think of others in terms of daylight.’

Ah, this was it. ‘You’re an artist, then?’

‘Yes. I paint.’

‘Go on! I never met a real professional artist!’ The grocer wasn’t quite sure how to take it. ‘Can you make a livin’ at it? Looks as if you can,’ he answered himself, because the good, if neglected suit, and imported overcoat, were there as evidence.

‘I’m not interested in business,’ the painter said, ‘but can make enough for my purpose — which is painting. I can even cut a dash if I want to. And I sometimes want to.’

It looked strangely frivolous as he shrugged at his own desire, like women the grocer had seen through windows shrugging off their own reflections in the glass: not that this man appeared to have anything of a woman in him.

‘Yes,’ he was saying, ‘they’re buying me — almost as if I was groceries.’ He glanced at the grocer, who didn’t know whether to defend his trade or accept a compliment. ‘A couple of years ago London and New York began to take notice. So poor Maurice Caldicott was vindicated. He was my agent — and friend — a dealer who took me up, and stuck to me — for the wrong reason, I found out.’

‘What reason?’ asked the grocer, though facts interested him more than motives.

‘He was in love with me.’

‘What — a man?’

‘Why not? He was a human being, and human beings aren’t allowed to choose what they shall love: woman, man, cat — or God.’

The grocer might never have listened to a more seductive argument. ‘That’s an idea I never thought of, and now you put it like that I don’t believe I chose my wife. I thought I did. Oh, I wonder ’oo I would ’av loved if I’d been allowed to choose!’ His mind scarcely dared clothe the abstraction with flesh.

‘My friend Caldicott died a couple of years ago, after what they call “a long illness”—in agony. In the last days of his vivisection he told me he had never held my unkindness against me, because he considered anybody in any way creative needs a source of irritation. He was happy to think he had provided me with just that.’

‘What did he die of?’ The grocer felt guilty asking a question he could answer himself, but he would have been ashamed to have caught the other’s attention.

The artist bloke didn’t notice. ‘I wish I could remember Maurice more distinctly. He was too pale. I used to find him insipid. He might have been a saint. But it’s easier to visualize the devils than the saints.’

Mr Cutbush would have had difficulty in visualizing either, and feared his companion might descend again into some confused private hell.

At least the artist had got up from the bench; his figure in the moonlight overawed the grocer, who became squat, pursy, apologetic: not that he wasn’t as good as anyone else.

‘Bet you have a good time when you paint a picture,’ he smiled up, showing ingratiating teeth. ‘Bet you’ll go ’ome and paint a picture of all this — all this moon light. I’d like to see what you make of it.’

‘A great white arse shitting on a pair of lovers — as they swim through a sea of lantana — dislocating themselves.’

It was the sort of joke an educated person could afford to make. The grocer laughed, of course, but wondered whether he wasn’t being made to laugh at himself.

‘Pleased to have met you,’ he said, holding out his hand as in the beginning, to round the meeting off. ‘You won’t have lived long enough in the neighbourhood to know I used to be a councillor. But resigned. Yairs. Business and family obligations.’ He bent forward to pick up the pencil he had been playing with, and dropped: it was of the blunt kind worn behind the ear.

When he looked up the artist was already moving off: sloppy-elegant walk; not unlike a normal person if you hadn’t heard him throwing off like a Roman candle: all talk.

There was another outburst of strangled laughter from the wasteland.

The unusual encounter, the feel of dew along the bench, his own blind thoughts still nosing after his new friend’s electric suggestions — didn’t remember to get his name out of him to tell the wife — had left the grocer with the shakes. He began recklessly, in spite of the lamp-post in the near distance, to expose himself, then to masturbate at the lantana. Yairs. All this talk of creation. He sat hypnotized, watching the seed he was scattering in vain by moonlight on barren ground.

The painter looked back once, but only very briefly, at what he already knew; it was already working in him.

Caldicott had said in the beginning: ‘You can’t possibly live in it as it is, dear boy. I couldn’t, anyway. The furntire’s too ugly: too many knobs. There’s too much stained glass. I couldn’t live with someone else’s furniture: that’s what it remains when you take it over holus-bolus with a house.’

He had already developed the yellow tinge which intensified towards his death. ‘That’s what I think. But you, Duffield, are different.’ Caldicott laughed; his behaviour apologized to others for the effort he was making.