Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘As you’re a painter,’ Mrs Davenport said at the critical moment in his bitterness, ‘you’re probably dying to worship at your own shrine.’

He tried to hide his shame by making indeterminate noises into his dwindling gin.

‘If only you’d replied to my letter, and told me you were coming, ’ she said severely, ‘I could have had the gardeners bring them down.’

‘A little exercise won’t hurt us.’ He hoped he wasn’t too blatant in helping himself to another drink.

‘It isn’t that. I’ll have to take you into my bedroom,’ she said without a trace of coyness.

In the circumstances, his own attempt at humour sounded disgracefully arch. He heard his: ‘Don’t expect we’ll find it untidy! ’ before an attempt to drown the escaping remark in a cackle of ice.

She seemed determined to ignore what she didn’t want to hear. She began leading him upstairs. Like her possessions, whether the white silk she was dressed in, or the stone head of a buddha in a niche, her movements were of a true perfection. She had the most beautifully straight back. Of course Boo Sugar Hollingrake could bloody well afford to be straight-backed and simple.

On a half-landing there was a strip-lit painting: a Boudin.

‘What’s this?’ He couldn’t believe it.

‘Can’t you tell?’

‘Yes, I know. But where did it come from?’

‘I bought it at the sale, after Mrs Courtney — Mrs Boileau had left.’

Whether the Boudin was a good one, he couldn’t have judged at that moment. It was something he had grown up with and out of; its reappearance made him weak at the knees.

‘I’m glad you bought it,’ he said. ‘I expect you remembered it from when we were children. It used to hang in Harry’s study.’

He would have liked to explain to her how the Boudin had become a reality of his own at St Yves de Trégor, where he had noticed for the first time, flat, firm sand lying like flesh under a white muslin of sea.

But even if he had been able to explain in words, she mightn’t have allowed it. ‘Oh, no. I don’t think I ever noticed the Boudin at Sunningdale. I can’t remember. Nothing like that interested me as a child. Paintings were only furniture. No, I bought this one later on simply because it appealed to me as painting.’

She was so sure of herself; till arriving at the landing Mrs Davenport flawed her performance: she tripped against the top stair. For a moment her behind stuck out like that of an awkward, angular girl. He felt he wanted to embrace this loss of perfection. He did put out his hand, but she had already recovered herself without his help.

‘You’re far more sentimental than they say!’ she gasped back at him over her shoulder in a voice which surprised him: it had the same timbre as Rhoda’s.

Immediately after, she turned; they were facing each other on the landing. ‘Where is Rhoda?’ she asked.

Olivia was pale, probably only as the result of nearly falling on her face, whereas he could imagine himself looking pale from the shock of her mind cutting into his.

‘I don’t know. She went away with Maman,’ he stammered, ‘after the remarriage. During the war I lost touch. She isn’t my sister, you know,’ he offered as an unconvincing excuse.

In any case, Olivia must have known that. She had sensed the larrikin in him after the rout of girls had stampeded through the hydrangeas in the lower garden at Sunningdale.

Now, standing at the top of the stairs, she said with a sincerity he couldn’t doubt — in fact she barely avoided turning it into a whimper: ‘My poor darling monkey — Rhoda!’ Then she led him into what became her bedroom.

He couldn’t at first look at anything but his own paintings: they were too crude, disproportionate: and those clotted, painful textures. He kept spinning on his heels, as though to avoid renewing acquaintance, except superficially. But he couldn’t have avoided. They were hanging on every wall: his imperfections and his agonies. He went up very close to his ‘Marriage of Light’; in that way, involved with the technique, he was less conscious of the body of an actual woman fragmented in the cause of art. Not Nance Lightfoot lying broken on a rocky ledge. That was another picture of course, unpainted, and in every way too black: black dress, wounds stitched with the jet of flies, already the long caravans of ants. Not least, his own black horror kneeling beside his murder. By comparison, the ‘Marriage of Light’ was a declaration of love, and if he concentrated on the more objective aspects, he could throw modesty away and congratulate himself, on having achieved his intention as a whole, and for the brilliant sensuousness of many details.

But while gyrating drunkenly, breathing colour through his strained nostrils, brazenly putting out his hand to stroke the paint, the origins of his present joy kept blowing back at him in black gusts. Even the most abrasive of his rock series, the best of which Mrs Davenport had taken pains to collect, resolved themselves in his mind’s eye into a configuration of large, soft, passive breasts.

‘Not the sort of thing to hang in a bedroom,’ he grumbled in self-defence.

‘Which?’

‘All these paintings of rocks. I did them as a kind of endurance test.’ She wouldn’t have the eye to see through his dishonesty.

‘Why shouldn’t I, too, pass the test?’ she asked very coldly.

Perhaps she had passed it. So much obsessed by his own paintings, by the love, disgust, and at times fear, which they roused in him, he had hardly noticed the bedroom. Apart from the paintings there was very little in it: an unexpectedly virginal dressing-table, and a bed narrow enough to appear ostentatious.

‘In any case,’ she said, ‘I find the paintings far less cerebral than you want to suggest; and as I’m the one who owns them I see them as I like to see them. Look at these’—she touched the sleeping-animal rocks which had upset a critic’s sensibility when they were first exhibited—‘actually sentimental. I almost said “feminine”,’ she added, ‘but perhaps it wouldn’t convey what I mean. On the whole I find women less feminine than they’re supposed to be, and certainly more realistic than men.’

Her grey eyes were picking holes in him, though her breasts, pointed at him through the white silk, accused him less than he would have expected, far less, in fact, than Nance’s big clanging doorbells: those had accused him most of the time.

Suddenly the outer Mrs Davenport seemed to soften, as though she had become engrossed in a private vision. ‘This is the painting which appeals to me, I sometimes think, more than any I own.’

She liked to stress ownership: or she chose her words carelessly: or they interpreted meanings differently. In any case she had dismissed him as she advanced on her ‘Marriage of Light’.

She was mouthing: ‘. . all that I understand as beauty. .’

If she had known poor bloody Nance.

‘… in the morning when they open the curtains — that’s its best moment.’

In her conventional room.

‘. . after they’ve left me I lie looking at it. At my “Marriage of Light”.’

In that narrow bed: even now grinding her neck against the pillow.

She was exposing herself completely. Here was another one, he saw, offering her throat to be cut, but by a more tortuous, a more jagged knife. Well, he wouldn’t accept the invitation to a second murder.

Rising from her vision, Mrs Davenport turned to him, smiling a smile of deliberate sweetness. ‘I wonder whether I don’t understand your paintings better than you do yourself.’

If he wasn’t visibly rocking on his heels, she must have smelt his rage, but pretended she hadn’t; the social graces were so well developed in her.