Patrick White - The Vivisector

He shivered for his discovery: when through his fingers here was this Boo this Olivia Davenport wasting his time.

‘I can’t think why you sent me that telegram,’ he said irritably, ‘why you had to see me — to tell me about Peru and your husband’s vices.’

Now that his face was hidden from her, she would probably reveal the real reason.

‘Don’t be childish! I wanted to see the paintings!’ She sounded positively passionate; there were knots, he saw, in her long throat.

‘It wasn’t me, then.’ He laughed sniffing through his agreeably protective hands. ‘You wanted to dig up the paintings — your acquisitive instinct at work again — perhaps get hold of something good that isn’t for sale.’

Mrs Davenport looked at her watch. In her extreme politeness she spoke in the most cultivated accent she knew: nothing refaned-Australian about it, very cold and incisive; she had had the best elocution teachers. ‘If you’d rather, I can walk in the street and admire the scenery till my car calls for me in half an hour.’ At the same time she picked up her bag, opened it, shut it, without discovering what, if anything, she had been looking for.

He was particularly pleased with those passionate knots in her throat, the long legs, the useless hands. He could have fucked Olivia Davenport, and risen from their crunching bed still in a splather to give the last touch to Rhoda Courtney’s salt-cellars.

Suddenly he removed his hands from his face: he felt so cheerful. ‘You’re not angry with me, are you? for asking a few questions? ’

‘Why should I be angry?’ She obviously was: those who have money are always angry to realize it isn’t of value.

‘Silly old Boo Hollingrake!’ He smacked her on the bottom as vulgarly as he knew how.

Then he led the way upstairs. Accepting the role he had given her, she followed.

‘Go in there,’ he ordered when they reached the landing, ‘into the front bedroom.’

She went in as he began to open up the little junk-room.

In front, at that hour, the light would be all wrong: the dark-green reflections of the araucaria. He would try out a few old experiments or failures, and get rid of her. She would go down devotedly satisfied to her long black sugar-fed limousine.

She sat at one end of the bed, on the rusty wire, leaning slightly against the roll of lumpy kapok, the stained ticking. While he was bringing out a few failed canvases and botched boards she looked as detached as she had seemed telling about Peru.

Give her a shot of something.

‘What’s that?’ she asked, her expression returning from a distance.

‘That’s a drawing — oh, a sort of night-piece — oh, something I knocked off recently, and may come back to, when I’ve finished what I’m working on.’

‘Isn’t it horrible! I don’t mean aesthetically,’ she corrected herself. ‘Aesthetically I think it could be wonderful.’ She knew all the moves. ‘What’s this figure?’

‘That’s a grocer. His name was Cutbush. He’s machine-gunning the lovers.’

‘I realized that.’

He began to put the drawing away. Shouldn’t have shown it.

‘What’s the significance of the moon?’ she asked.

‘Ah,’ he said guardedly, ‘the moon!’

‘It isn’t the grocer who predominates, or the unfortunate lovers. It’s really a painting of the moon, isn’t it? Why have you made it so vindictive, when it should be gentle and reconciling?’

‘Oh, God!’

He must get the drawing away. He had declared himself in front of Cutbush, whom he probably wouldn’t see again: he couldn’t admit to any weakness in front of Olivia Davenport.

‘It’s too early to discuss a drawing I may develop as a painting. ’ He was conscious of the pedantry in his excuse.

While returning the drawing to the stack he was appalled by the silence he had left behind in the front room.

‘But what are you working on now?’ she called, her voice too rich, too vibrant.

He felt too tired, too awkward, stacking his paintings and drawings in the suffocating junk-cupboard. There was a child’s potty-chair he often wondered how Miss Gilderthorp had acquired. Or was it her own? Her old shrivelled buttocks had once been little rosy ones.

Olivia had come out on the landing. ‘. . to mistrust me when I could be your friend — when I probably understand you better than anyone has ever. . when I make absolutely no demands. .’

Because he was afraid, he didn’t want to leave this small airless room, with its scurf of dead blowflies and the unexplained potty-chair, for the hazards of the landing.

‘What’s in there?’ she suddenly asked, in a pure, but imperious, girl’s voice. ‘In the back room?’

He shot out. ‘That’s my bedroom.’ He sounded as pure as she, but strangled.

As she was going in, he caught her by the rope of pearls, which held, surprisingly: he was lugged in, united to her by the pearls.

They pulled up together in front of Rhoda Courtney.

When she had looked, Boo closed her eyes; she began to sway her head; she began to moan convulsively, and with an uncharacteristic lack of restraint. He was reminded of Nance on the occasions when she had reached a true orgasm. So, now, Boo Hollingrake sounded both appeased and shattered by her experience.

In self-defence she cried out: ‘How could you be so cruel to poor little Rhoda?’

It was his turn to become emotional; in an attempt to disguise these emotions he heard himself shouting: ‘How can you say it’s cruel? It’s the truth!’ He heard his strained, boy’s voice protesting against unjust accusations; while the glass showed him as a handsome, dissipated, middle-aged man making excuses for his weaknesses.

Olivia-Boo was distractedly moving about the room as though stunned by a whole family of Rhoda Courtneys. He had already painted several versions in various stages of abstraction, and would probably need several more.

‘How is it,’ she gasped jerkily. ‘Why, I wonder, have you made no effort to find her, when she seems to have meant so much to you?’

‘You know the way it is’—he answered, in a subsided, bluntened voice—‘the life you lead — you don’t lead it — it gets thrust on you, and carries you in a direction it’s difficult to alter.’

She kept returning to the original, comparatively naturalistic portrait of Rhoda, which didn’t satisfy him as it was.

She began to whimper: ‘. . why I made no effort to get in touch?’

She was drawing him into a union of tearful complicity; whereas the only relationship he could envisage with Olivia Davenport was one that displayed panache.

He was relieved when the doorbell rang.

Olivia immediately dried her eyes. ‘That must be my man,’ she said in an attempt at her normal tone of voice.

It was an opportunity to start easing her out of the room.

But she had become completely, and considering the speed of the transformation, surprisingly self-possessed. ‘You’ll probably hate me,’ she said, ‘but would you consider selling me the one on the easel? And I don’t expect a studio deal.’

‘Not for all the sugar in the world!’ He was pushing, shouting, laughing at her; with none of it did he appear to have upset her equanimity, so he couldn’t resist trying out an even cruder insult: ‘Those husbands you killed off — I expect they discovered too late they were diabetic!’

She decided to ignore that one too. ‘It’s not only as a painting that it haunts me, it’s part of my life — yours too — that we’ve lost, Hurtle.’

The importance she apparently attached to the paintings began to make him feel humbler; and perhaps because the chauffeur had been stationed in the street, just as Emily the parlourmaid had been stood on guard at the foot of the stairs, he would have liked to offer Olivia a genuine tenderness which hadn’t yet been asked for, and which certain conventions and their own natures might always prevent them expressing.