Patrick White - The Vivisector

It still surprised Duffield to hear anyone address him by name, but he showed no sign of this in his considered answer. ‘The furniture doesn’t put me off. I’ve always lived with other people’s furniture, except for a table I made myself at Ironstone. I think I’ll learn something from living with this lot.’ He kicked out at random and struck a finicking rosewood leg.

The table at Ironstone, solid in appearance, but unstable on acquaintance, was too painful to think about. He had kept the curtain of hair tightly drawn in front of her face, for fear he might catch sight of one of the transformation scenes.

The house in Flint Street he had bought cheap from a distant cousin of the deceased owner anxious to be rid of an embarrassment. The deceased had lived on in it many years after her father, a retired produce merchant, died. The house was at least spacious, and in the days of the produce merchant, who built it, must have had pretensions. Urns still stood on the parapet, and iron lace luxuriated. Gutters, on the other hand, had melted into festoons, and the split and rusty down-pipes gushed whenever there was a deluge.

A lot would have to be done about the electric wiring; he would see to it in time. Some of the rooms were without wiring at all. On the upper floor, where the daylight poured in for painting, there was a single electric bulb on the end of a long flex to be carried after dark from room to room. He would have to improve on that, too.

But from the beginning, in spite of its imperfection and disrepair, he had a secret passion for his house. Nobody would invade this one, on the corner of Flint and Brecon Streets. In that quarter many of the street names were Welsh: Rhoose, Lavernock, Dolgelly, Jones. The masked houses had a secretive air which didn’t displease him: he wasn’t one of those who resented lowered eyelids, for he had usually known what lay behind him.

The back staircase to his house opened on Chubb’s Lane. Here the clothes-lines and corrugated iron took over; ladies called to one another over collapsing paling fences; the go-carts were parked and serviced, and dragged out on shrieking wheels. In the evening the young girls hung around in clusters, sucking oranges, sharing fashion mags, and criticizing one another’s hair as though they had been artists. There was a mingled smell of poor washing, sump oil, rotting vegetables, goatish male bodies, soggy female armpits, in Chubb’s Lane.

The two faces of his house complemented each other; one taken away might have upset the balance: together they made what was necessary for his fulfilmelt and happiness. Though what was happiness? Painting — even taking into account its agonies and failures. And who could define balance? Probably all the inhabitants of Chubb’s Lane and nine-tenths of Flint Street considered him a crank, but had been prepared for crankiness by the former owner of Number Seventeen. After a couple of years, when it was realized he would pay his bills like anybody respectable, and had neither seduced young girls nor buggered little boys, he was accepted by the neighbours with smiles which, if not exactly warm, were the politest any of them could muster. They got used to him standing, afternoons, at his upper-back sun-drenched window over the lane, or on the sagging balcony of the upper front, where an increasing araucaria shaded his familiar face with menacing black and flesh-green. None of them would have known they were his daily bread, and that when he retreated suddenly into the rooms where they had never been, it was because he could postpone the moment no longer: he had submitted their blander substance to the acid of his own experience, and must now begin, often resentfully, always compulsively, to paint.

To the neighbourhood he was, sort of, the Artist. As they didn’t understand what it amounted to, some of them generated spasms of hate; but they couldn’t direct it, or not for long: he had become part of the landscape, like the iron railings and the gas meters. Because he was what you might have called handsome, there were girls who would have liked to develop a crush, if there hadn’t been something which prevented them. In one light he was their admitted possession, their almost pride, in another as shameful as some of their submerged thoughts. He was referred to as Old Hurtle and Turtle before he had begun noticeably to shrivel. Few of them would have cared to run the gauntlet of his company walking from the tram stop. The flintiest granny of the neighbourhood might have been reduced to silence and little-girlhood by one who was not, as they admitted, old of limb or feature, but who must have been born older than any of them could aspire to be. So they preferred to avoid situations in which they might be reminded of their inability to solve his queer conundrum.

Nor did it occur to him to help them in a relationship which was above words.

The evening of his meeting with Cutbush, years after his purchase of the house Maurice Caldicott had found for him and his distant patroness Mrs Davenport had helped him indirectly to buy, he was walking with unusual briskness through the streets, here and there slapping an iron lamp-post for company, or because for the moment he didn’t have the means of expressing himself in any other way. He laughed once or twice on remembering his conversation with the rather cagey grocer. He glanced up at the marbled moon. If he had exposed himself to someone he was only faintly disturbed: it was doubtful he would ever see that person again; and hadn’t the grocer exposed himself? Striding across the suburb which conveniently separated their lives, his own footsteps sounded solider than the whole architecture of moonlight.

On arriving home he let himself in through the front door. Under the influence of the evergreen araucaria the night looked even whiter. The roots of the tree had broken the pavement and lifted it up. Although he knew, he often forgot about it, and tripped, and had to steady himself on the trunk where it pressed against the railings. The bark oozed a resin which might have felt sticky and unpleasant if it hadn’t been for the other irremovable encrustations collected on his hard palm, almost that of a labourer.

Tonight as he clanged through the iron gate he gratefully smelled the scent from the weeping trunk. Dew was already gathering in the rusty gutters, spilling down the burst pipes. He still intended to have something done about the pipes and gutters, but always enjoyed hearing the dew trickle as far as the excrescent moss with which the foundations of his house were cushioned.

Not that the house was his by more than title; it belonged to those who had originally lived there: the late Miss Gilderthorp and her produce-merchant father, with whose possessions the rooms were furnished. Possibly this was the most an artist of any kind was spiritually entitled to. He had come across few other painters, and then only sniffed around them. He wouldn’t have pried into their beliefs; but he had seen that investments were a great comfort and a source of increasing corruption to one fashionable painter he had met. So he was unhappy with his own money when it came: while prudently investing it. He allowed himself one or two luxuries, such as the patronage of a good tailor, made-to-measure shirts, jars of imported pâté de foie, a bottle of Napoleon brandy. He also dabbled in luxurious fantasies: he might invest in an expensively scented mistress and lie with her on the late Miss Gilderthorp’s bed, on the sheets he boiled himself — when he remembered — pushing them round the copper with a stick, in a lean-to at the back; or he could imagine buying an exotic car, an Isotta or a Bugatti, which he had heard about, but never seen. He had never learnt to drive; he would arrange to have his car driven, in the small hours, into the shed which opened on Chubb’s Lane: where he could watch it when he felt inclined. He saw himself sitting on the supple upholstery, which would never lose the perfume of its youth, or opening the bonnet to examine what would never become a smelly machine; it would remain a system of philosophy, which, in its visual aspect, he would paint. He would paint.