Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘No,’ he said, reaching for the flex, ‘not sleeping.’

Neither sleeping nor waking: it had been one of those moments when you half-consciously watch the slides experience is fitting into the frame of a dissolving mind; such a slide, perhaps, would best convey his conception of the drowning lover-cats.

‘How many were there?’ he asked and smiled.

‘How many what?’

‘Cats.’

‘For God’s sake! I don’t remember!’

He didn’t worry; two lovers could add up to an infinity of cats.

Faced with the problems of disguise, Hero was only momentarily irritated. It was most important that she should cover her strongly-made, stumpy legs. She bumped around in search of tumbled clothes, her webbed hands outstretched. Soon she was snapped back into her formal identity: hooked and smooth.

As for himself, he got very easily into a minimum of garments, with that slight feeling of grit or sand which comes between the contented skin and its covering after making love.

Hero was suddenly upset. ‘Oh, darling, did I do this to you? How bestial! I am disgusted!’

He hadn’t felt them, but she had made her mouth into a tender shape to apply to the scratches, almost gashes, in the crook of his arm, and to the little bows, or lovers’ knots, or bite marks the glass showed him in the angle of his neck and shoulder.

She only left off kissing or sucking when he asked: ‘Are you also Olivia Davenport’s lover?’

‘Poor Olivia! I don’t think anyone — and I include her husbands — was ever her lover.’

It didn’t quite answer his question, but he had no intention of insisting.

‘Will you believe me when I say it is possible to love two people at once?’ she asked very gently.

‘No.’ He tried to answer gently: it sounded brutal.

They embraced for the illusion she had hoped to nourish, and for his own stillborn idea of the pure soul, and in this way came perhaps closest to loving. Their clothes were a comfort, and their undemanding skins.

When she left he went with her, and they wandered the peacefully dead streets in search of a taxi.

‘But you haven’t any shoes!’ she saw and protested, but not enough; his bare feet were no longer so incongruous as her clothed body.

‘I will telephone you, darling,’ she said, and he didn’t bother to remind her that she couldn’t.

The pavement felt cool and agreeably abrasive to his bare soles now that his commitment was slighter; yet this too was an illusion: he would go to her in the Tudor-style mansion, from which only the cats had been exorcized.

As she leaned out of the taxi, looking back, not necessarily at him, the street lighting and her appeased lust had ringed her eyes: they had never appeared more luminously suppliant.

Though he didn’t see her in the days which followed he didn’t escape for long at a time; the sack wouldn’t let him. Smells of sea lettuce of putrefying bait of motor-boats haunted his nostrils. Pa Duffield returned, not to protect, but to assist at his destruction. Don’t go near the water son you never learnt to swim. I can learn can’t I not to drown. Better not trust the water. The flannel vest with discoloured buttons made Pa look scraggier, more distrustful. Nobody likes to rear a kid an’ all for nothun. Or five hundred quid. Pa himself, veins blue in his knotty hands, was helping tie the neck of the sack. This is for love Hurt so lie quiet damn yez all of you lovecats. While he was tying the string Pa was crying the way they do. The neck choking the daylight out you had only a moment left to recognize God by his black eyelids. You might have shouted balls if Hero hadn’t been so devout. Many cats with parti-coloured skins were fighting their sentence inside the bag ever more heavily clinging its smell of sugar soon drowned.

Rising from his dreams he started working wildly. He worked Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday. In addition to the preliminary notes and several drawings, he had painted two versions by Friday. He would have liked to sleep with Hero on the Thursday, but tore once again into the wet sacking.

On the Saturday — shades of Pa — he took an all-in bath, and put on his second-best, the tobacco-coloured suit, because he was planning to go and see his mistress the Greek woman. He had to come running back though, several times, to look at his ‘Infinity of Cats’. Most of the condemned animals were still noticeably furred, but their writhing despair and the action of the water made some of them look skinned, or human. By the time he left to find a taxi he realized the bath had been a wasted move: he was in such a sweat he smelled as rank as a tom. He didn’t care.

At the gates of the Tudor-style house the tamarisk canes were almost visibly sprouting flesh-coloured plumage as the sultriness increased, while all over the star-shaped bed small green anonymous plants were flopping in the over-fortified soil. He should have felt like celebrating the sub-tropical spring, but noticed in the porch the figure of Alice-Soso, the aboriginal ‘daughter’, seated on a dented Globite case.

When he had paid off the taxi he asked: ‘Are you going away?’ as though there had ever been any doubt.

Soso pursed up her face into the shape of a doughnut.

Perhaps to make amends for his pretended ignorance, of which he was now ashamed, he said: ‘You’ll feel happier out at the reserve. Your mother loves you, doesn’t she?’

Soso snort-laughed. ‘She got paid to take me back.’ She sat twisting her hands together. ‘Mumma loves anything that comes her way. And it pays to love.’ She glanced up with a glint which comes from experience.

He looked away on catching sight of her expression. Was he, as she seemed to imply, prostituting himself like anybody else? She was most disturbing, sitting on her case, with her louse-free hair beautifully arranged for her return to the reserve.

Then the rented maid came out, and Madame Pavloussi the temporary owner of the house, who was also his mistress.

Hero, on seeing him, gasped as though plunging into cold water, but immediately concentrated on the child.

‘Did you look through all your drawers, darling, and cupboards? If I must go quickly away, it will make it difficult for me to forward the things you forget. Did you remember your toothbrush? ’

The thin maid kept darting out on little sorties, shading her eyes, challenging the car to show itself. He realized he had seen her before, at the mercy of other contingencies, in Popeye the Sailor; the discovery made him laugh.

At which Hero began a kind of Greek lament: ‘You have my address, Aliki? And will write me a few little words from time to time? Because Mother will always take an interest in your welfare. And dear Daddy.’

Alice whispered: ‘Yeeehs,’ disposing of the moment with a rapturous smile; she didn’t look at Mr Duffield, but he sensed they were in league: they might have suffered the same fracture.

Just then the car crawled round the side of the house, which appeased the maid, and threw Hero up against her departing ‘daughter’.

‘My poor kitten!’ she blurted with complete and genuine abandon. ‘Daddy is going to see to it you will never want.’ The child allowed herself to be embraced. ‘It is nobody’s fault, Aliki. It is only Fate who arranges it.’

Alice couldn’t have believed in Fate. She was opening the car door and arranging herself on the back seat.

Hero frowned, because she had visualized it otherwise. ‘Won’t you sit by Sotiri?’

‘Nah. They’re gunner see me drive up like a lady.’ Alice didn’t look back or wave, though the maid was prepared for such emergencies.

Madame Pavloussi was left too abruptly with her lover, who decided to let her down lightly by making conversation. ‘The chauffeur’s a Greek?’