Patrick White - The Vivisector

It was something he had begun to bring out, and returned automatically to the wall. ‘I didn’t expect you’d take to it. No other reason I can think of.’

‘But why not? How do you know? You know nothing about me. From what I have seen, this is something I will understand.’

Was she determined to atone for her gaffe over the ‘Pythoness’?

For the first time since their arrival, Olivia’s interest appeared aroused. ‘Which is it?’ she asked, disbelieving and possessive.

She left the window and came round.

‘Oh, that! That’s repulsive! It’s obscene! I remember it as a drawing only.’ She held it against the painting for springing up behind her back.

‘Why shouldn’t it appeal to me, though? That is what I am questioning,’ Hero insisted. ‘In some senses I am myself obscene and repulsive. Why must I not recognize it?’

Because he didn’t know enough to be able to contradict her, and Olivia, who probably did, appeared to have no wish to, they continued all three staring at the painting: which lived as never before.

‘What is it called?’ Hero asked.

He hesitated. ‘I haven’t decided on a title, but at the moment I think of it as “Lantana Lovers under Moonfire”.’

‘Oh, yes, I know it! Lantana — it is from the most detestable things! And look at these houses along the ridge,’ she indicated with the bunch of violets, ‘they remind me of the houses of Athens — at a time of evening — just after the sun had gone. I tell Cosma they are like gas fires from which the heat had been turned off: so grey, and — burnt-out.’

She might have shot him. He began laughing uncontrollably, teeth almost chattering: to find that, in spite of the distance between them, there was a point above the lantana from which they were able to communicate.

Even more uncontrolled, he asked: ‘And what does Cosma think?’

‘Oh, Cosmas agrees. He is most innately perceptive.’

Olivia was furious to find herself left out. ‘The whole thing’s disgusting. Not as painting —morally. It’s Duffield the exhibitionist at his most abominable!’

A grain of truth in what she said didn’t prevent him enjoying it, anyway for that moment.

‘So — so unnatural!’ It was thrown in for good measure, but had a girlish sound.

‘You’re not exactly a child of nature yourself, Boo.’ He squeezed her under her left breast.

Probably she would never forgive him his blatancy, and in front of her friend Hero Pavloussi; while Hero might have remained unaware: she seemed genuinely to be concentrating on the painting.

‘Tell me what it means,’ she asked, looking at him seriously.

‘But, darling,’ Olivia shrieked, ‘ you’ re supposed to know! ’ Having mastered several hundred characters of Chinese, she couldn’t bear to think she hadn’t learnt the language her friend was talking with her friend.

Hero calmly said: ‘No. I don’t know. That is, I know in my insides what it conveys to me. But I do not know the painter’s intention. It is probably something quite different. All right. I accept that. But the painting also has something for me personally.’

In defending her convictions she had abandoned the ball of violets, which lay on the muddle of grey blanket.

Guarded in the presence of Olivia, who already knew, he began to explain the meaning of the painting: the lovers in their vegetable bliss unconscious of a vindictive moon; then, on the earthly plane, the gunner-grocer aiming at them out of frustration and envy from the street bench. There were so many gaps in his explanation he could feel himself sweating.

‘Yes, I see,’ Hero was saying earnestly; she was probably quite humourless, ‘the moon is in one of its destructive phases — like anybody. That, I understand. The innocent lovers are under attack. ’

‘But they’re not innocent. Nobody is — not even a baby.’ To take her revenge, and make everything as clear as crystal, Olivia let fall her words in an accent not unlike Hero’s own. ‘And they’re under no ordinary attack. Can’t you see? The moon is shitting on them!’

If Hero understood the word, she didn’t show it; perhaps it was one she hadn’t learnt.

‘Like an enormous seagull!’ Olivia shrieked.

Hero wavered somewhat in her interrogation. ‘And this figure? Why is he a grocer?’ she asked.

Again it was Olivia who answered. ‘He was a grocer in fact. I can remember his name was Cutbush. Even the best painters owe something to reality.’

‘That’s right. I met the bloke one evening on this bench. He had something rotten about him, but only slightly, humanly rotten in the light of the Divine Destroyer. I mean the grocer’s attempts at evil are childlike beside the waves of enlightened evil proliferating from above; and he usually ends by destroying himself.’ He was unwilling to go any farther.

But Olivia was determined to add a last humiliating touch. ‘Hurtle sees him, I think, as a damned soul in the body of a solitary masturbator.’ Her crimson nail accused the trajectory of milky sperm dribbled across the canvas.

Now that she had perverted herself, and possibly someone else, she was ready to return to normal. She took hold of the points of her elbows. She looked excruciated, and peculiarly solitary.

Hero, on the other hand, appeared to have gained in stature; she had lost less dignity than any of them; presently she raised her head and said: ‘This painting may be everything that is claimed for it. But I recognize something of what I have experienced — something of what I am.’ She held her head higher. ‘I would like to buy it, Mr Duffield, if you will accept me as its owner.’

She could only be atoning for her gaffe over the ‘Pythoness’; but whatever the source of her radiance, he was dazzled by it.

Regardless of Olivia Davenport, he said: ‘I’d like you to take the thing, forgetting about money for once.’

‘Oh, no!’ She showed her blunt little teeth in a smile. ‘Cosmas would never accept. He is too respectful of business obligations. ’

Olivia too. She had undertaken to bring about a transaction. However different in its kind, and painful the emotional approach, she seemed appeased by what promised to be a round conclusion.

Hero insisted. ‘Please, sir. You must tell me your figure.’

What the hell, then: hadn’t his value increased since Mumma and Pa sold him in the beginning? He named a pretty steep sum.

At mention of real money, Olivia recovered her delicacy: she began going slowly down; the sound of her feet on the uncarpeted stairs, and of her shoulders thumping the plaster of the narrow stairway as she swayed from side to side, made the silences in between stream out far more audibly.

Hero sat scribbling a cheque with a casualness he had never been able to master, and a fountain pen of a kind only to be found in rich women’s crocodile handbags. With still greater casualness she tossed the cheque on to the littered chest, as though she felt they had both been contaminated enough by such a sordid contract. His offering the painting in the first place as a gift was evidently a feeble, if spontaneous burst of idealism. Or had Olivia told her he was the product of a dirty deal between Cox Street and Sunningdale? And had Hero forgotten the circumstances in which she had taken up the offer of her hairy millionaire?

Still in business, he asked where he should send the painting; she replied without second thought: ‘Surely you will bring it? My husband will like to see you. He is so busy. But I will let you know.’

She was so practically, so earnestly, devoted to her man of affairs, it was pretty certain the event Olivia had been so anxious, then so unwilling, to procure, would not take place.