Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘I feel horribly guilty taking up any of your precious time.’ It might have been sincerely meant, but she had forgotten to change her voice: this was the one she used in the other world.

She seemed to realize her oversight at once, for he detected an irritated preoccupation.

He said: ‘It won’t be wasted. Nothing is. If I’d felt it was going to be a waste of time, I needn’t have let you in, need I?’

‘That’s true,’ she agreed: a little dry, but without abandoning the politeness she had been taught.

She came in, and he thought he might not have been able to stop her if he had wanted to; entry was her birthright. She smelled very fresh: of bunched, sweet, cottage flowers — a scent which didn’t go with her appearance any more than with the smell of gas from the meter under the araucaria. (One day get it seen to.)

‘You won’t find it very comfortable here,’ he felt he had to explain. ‘I bought all this junk with the house. I haven’t done anything about it yet.’

‘It looks fascinating. Lovely old things!’ But her sigh cancelled her formal approval.

Helpfully, she seated herself on a tightly-buttoned sofa in the living-room. She kept her gloves on.

Seeing her out of her depth made him warm towards her again. He wanted to sit beside her, and did.

‘I was afraid you mightn’t like the place,’ he said. ‘Maman would have disapproved,’ and remembering the ritual words: ‘Don’t you want to take your hat off?’

She expressed a kind of wry surprise. ‘No. My hair’s awful,’ though from what you could see it must be perfect: as helmeted as her helmet of a hat.

She did begin to take her gloves off. He watched her hands emerge, whiter for the black skirt, finally the crimson talons.

The hands thus exposed, the simple dress could no longer pretend to disguise.

She lowered her eyelids, and said: ‘Hurtle, I hope you’re going to show me what you’re working on.’

‘Yes. Presently. There’s time.’

He looked for rings. Not even a wedding ring. Two husbands, and her hands still chaste.

‘I’d be curious to know about the husbands.’

‘I wonder you need ask. Everybody knows more about them than I know myself.’

‘And still more curious about the lovers.’

‘There aren’t any!’

He plaited a hand with one of hers.

‘Oh, no! Definitely none! Not again!’ She was passionately against it.

‘Am I condemned — in particular?’

‘Not you in particular.’ Then she added in a quieter tone: ‘Yes— you! ’

They were left looking at each other’s hands. Though she hadn’t attempted to withdraw, her fingers remained cool and unresponsive in the knot of his blunter, harder ones, grubby with half-removed paint and ingrained dirt.

She appeared fascinated by the veins in the back of his hand, but threw off her trance, and said in her more worldly voice: ‘I’ve lost my appetite for suffering!’ while looking at him with an expression of bright greed.

He remembered the cakes he had bought, and went to make tea. Of course the gas burners were clogged. Where would he take her if she wanted to use the lavatory? Out to the dunny? What had she got up to after he left her alone? Most women would have come barging into the kitchen with ironic or unhelpful suggestions.

He looked in once, on the quiet, and watched her bending over a water-colour he had done as a youth: of Alfreda Courtney in a yellow dress. It became obvious that Mrs Davenport was the most insidious kind of deceiver.

‘Those pearls — aren’t you afraid of burglars?’ he asked in a deliberately blatant voice on bringing in the tea.

‘I’m not interested in jewellery,’ she said, to make him look as vulgar as he deserved.

Actually she was looking at the cakes.

They were the little frosted apathetic cakes in paper frills from a shop in a poorer suburb such as his. The thick white cups, the only ones he had, were rattling against the tin tray. The brown teapot stood firm: it was solider.

‘Well, the paintings, then — thugs could break in and — probably not steal — slash them.’

‘That,’ she said, tearing her glance away from the cakes, and giving him her most brilliant smile, ‘that would be an act of God!’

Coming from Olivia Davenport it made him snigger. She was rich enough to dispense with God: as for himself, not exactly rich, but pretty well endowed.

‘Of course you’re heavily insured.’ He was letting her see him at his worst.

‘Oh yes— insurance! But what does it cover?’

Was it possible that Olivia Davenport couldn’t be got at?

They sat drinking the strong red kitchen tea: the same he liked to drink before starting work, because it woke him up and steadied the nerves. Olivia refused the cakes, but at one stage in their conversation, she fingered a paper frill with one of her long red nails, holding her head on one side as though the cakes were a work of art she was making up her mind about. Instead of waking her, the tea seemed to have made her dreamy. He watched her eyes through the rising steam. There was a faint sheen of perspiration on her powdered nose. Again a flaw, or sign of defencelessness, made him feel more tender towards her.

‘When I was living with my first husband,’ she began to explain tentatively, ‘I experimented a little with coca. The Indians chew it, to make their lives more endurable.’

‘And was it rewarding?’

‘To me, slightly nauseating at first, then — nothing. I only did it to please my husband, who’d already formed the habit. He had an idea something was eluding him. He was convinced I had some secret I was keeping from him — perhaps the secret. As he became more degraded and desperate, he began to feel that if I joined him in taking the drug, I might share the enlightenment he suspected me of having. So to pacify him I took to coca. And couldn’t share my “secret”. I couldn’t even share his degradation. I failed him in this too! Oh, he died most horribly, in every way unsatisfied! I don’t want to think about it.’

‘Did you love your husband?’

‘Why — yes! Of course I loved him.’ She put down the thick-lipped teacup as though she wanted to be rid of it. ‘There are different ways of loving, aren’t there? Poor Pepe! I felt sorry for him.’

She got up dusting from her black skirt the crumbs from the cakes she hadn’t eaten.

She adopted a slightly swashbuckling stance. ‘What about the paintings you’re going to show me?’

Those husbands.

‘Has nothing ever eluded you?’ he asked.

‘That isn’t to the point,’ she said in her high clear worldly voice; she frowned too, though not enough to suggest her equanimity had been disturbed.

‘These are all works of mine.’ He jerked his head at the surrounding walls.

There were, in fact, several drawings, water-colours, and small careful oils of an early period, which had become part of the sentimental furniture of life. He no longer regarded them as pictures. He didn’t want to show Boo Davenport his paintings.

‘I don’t think you take me seriously,’ she said.

While crouched forward on the edge of the sofa, halfway between staying and rising, he had put his hands over his face, and found himself agreeably situated: he could look at his unwelcome visitor through the bars of his fingers, if he wished, or withdraw into the darkness of his hands. It occurred to him how uncomfortable the tightly buttoned sofa had always been, but he knew in his heart he would never change it. The uncomfortable sofa, the physical discomfort of most of a lifetime, was of minor importance to the irritation caused by Olivia Davenport’s presence. In the darkness of his hands the problems of Rhoda’s flesh flickered tantalizingly. Sometimes he was closer to, sometimes farther from solving them. Her skin had the transparency of thinned-out watery milk, the shrill smell of milk on the turn; while under the skin the flesh should have the tones, rose to yellow, of skinned chickens. From behind his fingers he could recall the pliability of chickens’ breastbones. He had never touched Rhoda’s breastbone, but it must have had the same sickening pliability as those of the dead chickens.