Patrick White - The Vivisector

Her cheeks grew hollow from drawing on her cigarette.

‘Fortunately our laundress. .’

He felt sick with apprehension for his innermost core, for one of his most precious secrets, and for Alice-Soso’s fate, which to some extent matched his own.

‘I adore our laundress,’ Madame Pavloussi said, ‘a charming young Irishwoman called Bridget O’Something.’ Again she laughed for the comicality of it.

The possibility of his enjoying an innocent relationship with Hero was slipping from him as miserably as the miscarried child. At least he now understood about this from having personally experienced it: he felt wet about the legs.

‘Bridget knew,’ Madame Pavloussi brightly explained, ‘that you rub the hair with — kerosene? Oh dear, the smell was appalling! ’ She wrinkled up her smoke-infested nostrils before exhaling. ‘I can tell you!’ she breathed. ‘And poor Cosmas is so easily disillusioned. I think it was this finally which decided him not to adopt.’

‘Alice won’t go with you to Greece?’

‘Oh, no! No question of it. It would be impossible.’ She sighed. ‘She will go back to her mother — at this reserve — at wherever it is. Of course Cosmas will give money,’ she added, ‘and probably in the long run the child will be a lot better off.’ She had sat down and was smoothing her skirt.

‘How did the cats also disillusion him — that he should have them tied up in the sack?’

She drew down her mouth, in that peculiarly Greek manner, and with it her whole face: its cast was of an ugliness to rouse the imagination.

Then she looked at him piercingly. ‘You are testing me, aren’t you, Mr Duffield — Hurtle?’ She closed her eyes, and actual tears began to come. ‘Oh, you don’t know! He is so good! You can’t understand!’

She got up and strode about the room, arms crossed on her breast, hands gripping her own shoulders. She might have looked over-dramatic, even ridiculous, if her drama hadn’t made her suffer. ‘Everybody,’ she cried out, and repeated more softly: ‘everybody has their faults.’

He saw many progressions from a drawing he had done the night of their first meeting: the stone head lying in the dust beside the formal, stone body; only, in the drawing, the eyes were open.

He said: ‘You’ll feel differently when you’ve wound up your affairs and returned to Greece. How will you go?’

‘By sea?’ It was a question, not an answer. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘Cosmas only went by air because time was involved — and business. I have time to spare.’

She was standing in the centre of the room, on a carpet so aggressively hideous it was surprising she wasn’t sucked down into its maroon-and-brown roses; but the lines of her skirt, of her torso, again those of an archaic sculpture, were indestructible: to remember her as an aesthetic experience should be enough.

‘When you’ve tidied everything up — I mean, the packing, and the cars, and the little aborigine — shall I come to see you?’

She said: ‘Oh, it will take time. Yes. You see, apart from everything else, my Maltese dog — poor little Flora — whom you haven’t seen — is sick.’ He could, in fact, see her, smell her, pink-eyed and shivering in the nest of flannel. ‘She has — I don’t like to think — only the vet more or less promised — I can hardly say — a cancer. This is what, more than anything, upset Cosma, because he is tender-hearted. I am the practical one.’

The stiff, sculptured folds of her skirt did not prevent her advancing, till she was standing quite close to the chair in which he was sitting.

‘I will rather come and visit you,’ she said, ‘because it is inconvenient for you to travel all the way to here.’

She was examining him, and he could see the veins of her eyeballs with all their tributaries.

‘Is Sunday objectionable?’ she asked. ‘On that day I can arrange for our little girl to go to her mother at La Perouse.’

He only hesitated because he could see the grain in her naked lips as they hovered above him, and the hair so very distinct where it had been strained back from the temples.

Just when he was preparing to give the logical answer, the stringy maid appeared and, looking out to sea, announced: ‘The vet has come, madam, about the dog.’

‘Oh,’ she said hoarsely, ‘yes,’ her stone lips barely moving.

An almost summer sunlight slatted the floor of the room over Chubb’s Lane. He had half latched the shutters through which the sounds of the neighbourhood entered, only slightly muffled by Sunday. Now that he was free to observe, he hoped the striped and spangled light would divert anyone else’s attention from what could otherwise have appeared huggermugger and drab. For him the light created something festive in his familiar but probably frowsy surroundings. To remember that a flight of motes was of the same substance as passive grey domestic dust had always delighted him.

‘If you’re hungry, I can open a tin of herrings,’ he suggested, ‘and there’s a loaf of fairly fresh bread.’

She made a mumbled sound, at the same time rejecting his offer with a movement of her head against his shoulder. She was behaving like somebody stupefied by a heavy meal in the middle of the day and the sleep which comes after it; though probably she hadn’t touched food since breakfast, if she had eaten then.

‘Herrings in tomato sauce: not an attractive proposition; but easy, and quickly over.’ It might have sounded like talking to himself in an empty room if she hadn’t again uttered that animal, mumbled sound.

He couldn’t tempt her: whereas she had been so hungry on arrival he had hardly closed the door on the street before she fell on him ravenously, propelling him with her greed somewhere that remained unlocated till he thumped against the padded shoulder of an old dusty sofa and cannoned off the corner of a crashing what-not.

At some point he was infected with her appetite, and took over. If he had been left with breath, he would have liked to explain: yes, you are here, and now there is no reason why morning afternoon evening should be in any way distinguishable if that is what we decide we need. But he had grown ravenous himself. From nibbling to biting to attempting to swallow her burning ear-lobes. On the cracking stairs. It would have been neither surprising nor resistible if their gluttony had thrust them through the splintering banisters and they had landed below in the hall. Instead they gyrated or slipped crouching bruised against the stairboards. Once he almost gouged out the eye of her suspender. While her corkscrew-tongue kept trying to drag from his throat an imagined resistance to her thirst. Feet stumbled, crass and blunt, always mounting, it seemed, raising a dust which started them both coughing.

‘Hero?’ He coughed it up pointlessly; for she had lost her normal identity, and the one she had acquired was nameless.

As they were climbing the stairs her fingers, or claws, used his ribs as rungs. Then, as though she had reached the summit, she seemed to hang from him, suspended by no more than her pelvis and adhesive mouth. Though just when they made the precipice of the landing, and might have toppled right back to the start of their ascent, they were held together by their hearts’ chuffing, not in unison, that might have been fatal, but one valve taking over where the other failed.

On the landing: their knees trembling and knocking. He felt cold behind the knees, kneecaps thin and breakable. Now he was thirsty rather than hungry, now that the last of his saliva had run down outside their mouths, evading their attempts to drink each other up. So, on the landing, he began to tear her breasts apart, to get at the flesh inside the skin: the scented, running juices; in a drought even the bitter seeds could be sucked and spat out.