Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘No!’ he laughed. ‘Accomplished!’

‘It was the only practical thing to do: young girls must be saved from themselves.’

When they had exchanged the conventional kiss, a heated one on her part, and he had refused several lifts, he began the walk home. There was actual lightning over the sea: silent puffs, in which he again saw the girl’s eyeballs populated with the ant-forms of anxiety.

On arriving home he noted them down on a block he came across on the shelf of the bamboo hatstand. He tore off the leaves, and put them away, almost at once forgetting where: Rhoda in all her aspects was his continued obsession.

He worked most of the remaining night, and began again in the afternoon, drifting from one version to the next. He slashed brutally at one Rhoda Courtney, but got what he wanted: sheet lightning invaded the eyeballs.

Olivia Davenport came to him soon after three, the hour when she must have finished lunch. She came without messengers of any kind, and no sign of a car, not even a humble Austin. Her mouth must have been done in a hurry: one arc of the bow was drawn higher than the other.

He was furious. ‘Why do you want to come here wasting my time?’

‘Didn’t you say nothing is ever wasted?’

As he was unable to contradict she pushed past him into the hall, the obscurity and airlessness of which was pervaded by her scent of flowers. Again on this occasion she was dressed in black, brief and unerring.

She made him feel older, grumbling, mumbling, unsavoury, flat-footed.

Looking at herself in the glass glued into the jungle of Miss Gilderthorp’s bamboo hatstand she said: ‘I know you think I’m brutal by inclination.’

He laughed through the phlegm which had gathered in his chest during the concentration she had destroyed. ‘You wouldn’t know what brutal is — to break in on somebody’s work! You wouldn’t know what work is, beyond composing menus, and rubbing out your armpits.’ He laughed through grosser phlegm than before.

She was arranging her already perfect hair. ‘I mean that girl—’ she said, ‘Muriel Devereux. Madge Devereux, the mother, is Mummy’s second cousin.’

For a moment Boo Hollingrake looked as though she had forgotten why she had come. Her nostrils narrowed in judgement on the smells of the house. Then she remembered.

She took his hands, and began working on them as though they were dough, while insisting: ‘Let me be with you! Show me the paintings! Let me look at Rhoda!’

In her anxiety her splendid teeth had become those of a little girl, with minute bubbles between them, while he was older, surlier, frowsy in his work-clothes. His crutch was probably smelling of piss; but he wouldn’t worry; and she would pretend not to be aware.

They were going slowly up.

He had been working in the back room, where he had slept the night before. The mattress-ticking was exposed by a ruck of grey blanket he had pushed back on waking. It was several weeks since he had stuffed the last of the sheets into the copper in the shed at the back. (Must remember to boil the sheets.)

Olivia stood at first too obviously respectful, then began prowling round with what sounded like insolent familiarity; but any attitude she adopted would have been distasteful to him. He must see that she remained behind his back.

In this way he kept his world reasonably well divided, as Olivia Davenport kept hers divided, perpetually, and expertly. He worked, at first jumpily, then with a sombre, bitter-tasting resignation through which he saw what he wanted to achieve but small chance of getting there, finally with a voluptuous directness in which his brush could do no wrong: it was continually turning blind corners to arrive at a fresh aspect of truth.

He even forgave Boo, who was so quiet he began to wonder whether she might be up to something. According to the glass, she was lying on the unmade bed, only vaguely looking at the paintings she had asked to see, perhaps already sated with them. As he continued gently stroking paint to life under the eyes of this voyeuse, he and Olivia could have reached one of the peaks of their relationship.

The conceit amused him, though not as much as catching sight of Mrs Davenport’s reflection reaching up through its abandon to pick its nose with one long crimson fingernail.

Presently she said, in a smooth, convinced voice: ‘You’re losing her. You’re giving her something Rhoda never had.’

‘What?’ The shock made him tremble; he threw away the brush.

He had been working on the last figurative and probably final version of the ‘Pythoness at Tripod’.

‘Perhaps it isn’t — was never intended to be Rhoda,’ he lied.

‘That’s how it began,’ she answered drowsily, ‘but became too hysterical in feeling.’

He could have been struck by lightning: he was, in fact, still involved with the incident of the night before.

‘Well, we know Rhoda was hysterical,’ Olivia went on. ‘But she was always conscious of the reasons for hysteria. That was her great virtue — and why you hated her. She was never a human cow driven by something she couldn’t see or understand.’

Olivia opened her eyes, and dared him to contradict.

‘What do you mean — hysterical — a human cow?’ Of course he understood, but that didn’t prevent him trying to laugh it off; he resented her intuition.

‘You know perfectly well—’ she wouldn’t leave it alone—‘that poor dumb lump of a girl: Muriel Devereux. You’re bringing the two of them together — Rhoda and Muriel — to suit your own purposes. Is it honest?’

‘Only the painting can answer that — when it’s finished.’

He could have strangled Olivia. As he approached her he could have shouted: I am what matters; without me the painting couldn’t happen, and you and your kind would have that much less to babble about.

Instead he said humbly: ‘You’re right, Boo; but the painter’s only human after all, and uses human means to disguise his shortcomings.’

Yes, he could have killed her, but bent over her and touched her hair with this rather admirable humility he had found.

Suddenly she drew down his face, and thrust her tongue into his mouth; when she wasn’t lashing at his tongue with hers, she was gouging his eyes with her cheekbones.

‘I could show you,’ she kept gasping, ‘a trick or two.’

A bracelet of heavy gold-and-cornelian seals kept bludgeoning, and ringing in, his left ear. It looked as though she meant to stun him into subjection: till he put his hand.

Then it was she was began to tremble. ‘Oh, no! No!’ She arched her back, sawing against the pillow, trying to get round the knee which was pinning her.

‘Lie still!’ he was begging her at one stage, because he might, quite sincerely, have taught her something she didn’t know about.

But Olivia Davenport seemed determined to demonstrate that rape is not inevitable.

When she was mistress of the situation, they lay looking at each other from the slipless pillow, and Olivia started explaining, using her most candidly grey-eyed expression: ‘Actually — I came here this afternoon for a reason you wouldn’t guess.’ She hesitated, then announced with a touch of what was coyness for her, though in the key to which Olivia Davenport climbed for social commerce: ‘I’ve had a little windfall.’ After another hesitation, she asked: ‘Hurtle, I wonder whether it would make you happy if I bought you a nice car?’

He couldn’t believe in her innocence; he sat up shouting: ‘With gold spittoons? And a gold pisspot for emergencies?’

She said meekly, but again unconvincingly: ‘I was only thinking of your happiness.’

While he crawled about the floor searching for the brush — his special one — which he had so rashly thrown down, she was arranging her hair in front of the original and most naturalistic version of Rhoda Courtney. Although he couldn’t have admitted it, he was proud of the painting: it was so translucent.