Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘Yes,’ she said, smiling. ‘We found him — Sotiri. Isn’t it a nice name? It means “Saviour”.’

Then they went in, and he noticed the painting still propped against the hall wall, packaged as he had brought it.

Madame Pavloussi said: ‘You don’t know how all that is happening recently is tearing me in pieces. I never thought I will become so attached to Australia.’

After they had gone inside what Soso-Alice had referred to on the first occasion as the ‘little salong’, Hero turned on him with that same brown, Byzantine hunger, and when she had locked the door, he rooted her — that afternoon you couldn’t have called it anything else — on Mrs Cargill’s Axminster carpet.

Their obscenities over, she had to face him, because the geography of the house and the presence of servants didn’t allow her an escape to the bathroom. She knelt shivering in front of him, and said after crossing her arms on her breasts: ‘I have written to Cosma and told him I cannot join him because you are my lover.’

He noticed in her skin the verdigris tints from some play of fortuitous light. He even felt jealous: that he should have made his discovery pragmatically rather than intuitively.

‘I can’t deny I’m your lover,’ he agreed, glancing at one of Mrs Cargill’s ‘Town Cries’.

‘Also,’ she said, ‘I cannot bring myself to kill my little dog Flora — who is suffering from this cancer. You see, I believe in miraculous recoveries.’

Hero was shivering worse than ever: so much so, it was transferred to her detached lover.

When he had drawn her down, they lay together, no longer sexually, goose-flesh rasping against goose-flesh. They were holding in their arms mild dyspepsia, incurable disease, old age, death, worst of all — scepticism. He couldn’t suggest to Hero Pavloussi that his paintings alone might survive the debacle, because it wouldn’t have been of comfort to her; it was no more than a slight satisfaction to him while his body continued a source of pride.

But he bowed to it. His bones almost clicked with the speed at which he rejected the flesh in favour of the one substance: paint. He got up, removing his skeleton from her arms.

Soon after, they escaped from the horrible room, and she asked, manoeuvring it skilfully over her teeth: ‘When shall I see you again?’

He didn’t see her as often as he expected, because officially and socially she was sticking to the story of her departure. He might have felt aggravated if it hadn’t been for the series of drowning cats on which he was at present working, and which more than filled any possible void.

On an occasion when the need for him brought her to Flint Street, Hero said: ‘I believe you are so egoist, Hurtle, you have already forgotten what I have given up for your sake. I cannot see you loving anybody— ever. ’

Even so, she spoke with a pronounced satisfaction, accepting her punishment along with the pleasure she had chosen. If he appeared to her more bitterly mysterious than seemed natural, it was because she deliberately turned her back on his paintings.

She did once remark: ‘You are so wrong, so perverse, to pick on this one deed of my darling Cosma, and pump it up into a big moral issue and theme of art.’

It trickled round him while he worked half-listening. Since her physical presence had come to mean less, he was less disturbed by having her there. At one point he hooted his approval.

‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘Is it again my English?’

‘“Pump it up into a big moral issue”!’

‘What is wrong with this?’

‘Nothing. It’s — very — nice. Only you’re not — vulgar enough to see.’

He stood back to examine this most fiendishly obdurate corner, which still refused to collaborate.

Sometimes she sat listlessly, but respectfully enough, because her lover was inescapably a painter. She could accept the condition; the actual symptoms were what revolted her: they could have been dropsical or pustular.

Anyway, she wasn’t going to look — while he continued stroking his doomed cats.

Returning from the heights and depths of his trampoline act with Hero Pavloussi, he was thrown hot and spattering into his paintings of the drowning. In all but one of these versions, the victims’ fate was ordained by implication and a presence of light. But in one painting he couldn’t resist introducing the Satrap Himself: he was almost completely covered with black hair, the face livid, except for the eyelids, which were black too. The painter couldn’t touch the eyelids tenderly enough: the doomed god became as tragic as the cats he had condemned.

‘If I give you nothing but what is ugly and ludicrous, then I have failed,’ Hero said gloomily.

‘How do you know if you haven’t looked?’

‘Oh, no, I haven’t looked at what I know would be ugly!’

‘If it’s ugly as you say, it hasn’t had time to grow beautiful. It will, though. It’s true enough, anyway, and I’m truly, humbly grateful, Hero, for what you have given me — you and Cosma.’

As far as he could fathom, his fault lay in loving her more in her drowned condition. He even loved her cheated husband. Now that he was filled with this love, and could have poured into her some of the tenderness he had spent on the paintings, for there was still an abundance of it, she pushed him away and got up.

‘You are all dirty with paint,’ she complained. ‘Shall we go and eat somewhere, if there is anywhere that will have you?’

The banality to which she had deliberately reduced them both by her condemnations did not detract from her beauty. He had forgotten about it during his preoccupation with her tortured, dripping, shivering soul. Now her actual head began to engross him equally, though differently. Since he had transformed the drowning Hero into a work of art, he desired her physical beauty less. He might covet it from time to time, as on the spur of the moment he might have coveted the rose-quartz or the crystal bird on Olivia Davenport’s dining-table; but his desire for material possessions was not a deep one.

She must have grown conscious of his admiration, if not its kind or degree, because she began moistening her lips, nervously smiling, glancing obliquely at the glass.

‘If you do love me, as I think you are perhaps too sensitive to admit,’ she said, putting out an encouraging hand, ‘why can’t we make together, out of our love, something beautiful and lasting instead of morbid, drowned cats?’

He put on his coat. He was afraid she might see herself as a kind of Boucher: a vision of pink tits and dimpled cheeks.

The next time she came to him he had a surprise for her.

‘What is it?’ she asked quickly, breathlessly, so that he was particularly conscious of her short teeth, and on one side, towards the back, a gap he hadn’t noticed before; in spite of the rapacious expression of the open lips, with which he was familiar from the moments when she was about to satisfy her lust, her head had never looked more perfectly cast: a masterpiece.

His hesitation, and preoccupation with something about her appearance, made her repeat nervously: ‘What — is it?’ Immediately after, she changed her tune; she put on a knowing look, and thrust herself against him, as though joining in the joke: it was the usual surprise. ‘Won’t you show me?’

They were standing by the doorway of the increasingly cluttered junk- and store-room on the upper landing.

‘Well,’ he hesitated still, ‘you may be disappointed. It’s only another painting.’

‘Is it the painting?’ She forced him right into the room. ‘The one I know you can make if you want to? Our painting!’

She made it sound like jazzed-up Tchaikovsky.