Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘How repulsive! Revolting!’ Olivia screamed, looking at the plateful of sausages and shuddering into her travesty cloak.

He could only shake his head. He was tucking into the sausages, and in any case he could not have told her about, he could only show her, the bloom on blue. So he thrust the plate at her, and she did actually finger a sausage; after scraping off some of the fat on the edge of the chipped plate, she began to mumble on what might have been a giant lipstick she had made the mistake of buying.

But this wasn’t the reason for her thoughtfulness, which finally she let out: ‘That painting, Hurtle — would you consider selling? I’d treat it with more respect than anybody else, and of course it would go, in the end, with the others, “to the public”.’

Then, suspecting herself of tastelessness, she bit enormously into the sausage, and her face which that evening had shed its van Dongen chic for the gas-lit concavities of a Greco Christ, was further transformed, by strain, into a large, costive, powdered arse.

So they stood: smiling, chewing, swallowing, half-communicating over the empty plate, in the grubby asbestos limbo which had served Miss Gilderthorp as a kitchen.

All the way to Hero Pavloussi’s they remained in that state of half-cocked reality, neither life nor art, which is perhaps the no-man’s land of human failure. Olivia was driving a long, low-slung, bottle-green car, to match her cloak. She had taken off her man’s hat, and her woman’s hair blew at times darkly softly around her head, particularly when they took the corners. The silver mèche stood up like horns above her forehead.

All the dark, Welsh named side-streets of the neighbourhood in which he seemed to live, were failed. Speed and the street-lamps left them looking the colour of brooding moss.

His ‘success’ flared up at him only in the main thoroughfare, particularly in the garish windows of fruit-and-vegetable shops. If he had also experienced the daytime wilt, by night as the trams clanged and sang, swinging and lurching, the vegetable senses revived vertiginously.

Olivia was forcing the dark-green car. At an intersection, a confusion of traffic held them up. ‘Oh, God! ’ she protested, banging her rings on the wheel.

By night he almost believed in invocation.

They were easing past a jacked-up tram. The new blood was fermenting on the warm asphalt. Blood in the street made it impossible to envisage, at least for that moment, a murder, let alone a suicide, in a house.

He and Boo were jerking jolting in the smooth car past the scene of the accident. It was close enough to become their own. They could see the sweat on her forehead below the line of frizzy hair — as the head lolled — in the real situation. Was it what somebody wanted? Or hadn’t wanted enough? but succeeded in bringing off.

As they were pressing on, into a less congealed air, Olivia’s voice started a high flacker above the competing traffic. ‘My mother thought all suicides were immoral. She herself suffered a horribly prolonged old age. Her jewel-case and the deed-box were always within reach. The sheets she died in had been hemmed for her by her mother, to set her up when she married. It’s wonderful how material things used to last. I think it was that, more than anything, which helped the owners believe in God.’

‘They believed in themselves. That’s why,’ he shouted above the sound of speed.

‘The — why? Oh, bugger, I’ve taken the wrong road!’

She began hauling on her mistake, hand over hand, down the choppy side streets, past the moored houses in which middling incomes were snoring and protesting. As for the occupants of the car, sheer intricate activity gave them a status and importance which made God unnecessary. Speed, after reducing your flesh, leaves you on equal terms with the natural forces which have replaced Him. It was exhilarating at least.

Olivia Davenport steered them down the moonlit streets and finally out along the promontory where the Tudor mansion stood. The moon and a still night made the sea look more solid than the land.

‘There! I’ve done my duty!’ she said.

The drive, their conversation, perhaps also their share in the past, had left Olivia with an expression both haggard and childlike.

‘Aren’t you coming in?’ he asked without wishing to encourage a witness of his reunion with Hero.

‘No,’ she gnashed. ‘I’ve said all I have to say to her; and don’t want to spoil things for you — darling.’ Looking along her nose at the dashboard of her car, slightly smiling, she sounded complacent rather than vindictive.

Dew was falling around them: on the enamelled surfaces of car and camellia bushes; on the sheet of sweating zinc which represented the sea. Boo seemed to expect him to kiss her. It was one of the bumping kisses of childhood, if cooler from the cool, metallic-tasting dew.

She drove off, stamping on it.

A long time after he had rung, the thin maid came to open, in a blue flannel dressing-gown, and hair he had only guessed at on previous occasions.

‘I’m sorry to trouble you,’ he said.

She winced at him, and made it obvious she was doing a supreme favour — but might have enjoyed doing it.

He decided to support the fiction of Madame Pavloussi’s departure for Greece. ‘I was afraid you might all have gone by now.’

‘Gone? I go with the house. And if anyone else is going, they haven’t spoke about it.’

So the fiction was supportable.

‘Is she better?’ he asked more tentatively still.

‘Wasn’t ever sick. Not that I know.’

They stood looking at each other a moment before her cartoon face began frowning for the sleep she had been torn out of.

‘She’s up there,’ she said, wincing and frowning and indicating with her head. ‘You’ll see the light on.’ Whatever else might rouse the hackles of her scepticism, she firmly believed in his adultery with the foreign woman.

Left alone in the dark hall, he went up towards Hero’s light.

She was lying stretched out in an attitude which looked studied but probably wasn’t. As sooner or later she would have had to produce her bandaged wrists, there was no reason why she shouldn’t expose them in the beginning; so her arms were arranged along her body, outside the sheet. For the same reason, there was no point in keeping her eyes closed. She had probably closed them instinctively on hearing his approach up the stairs, but decided against defence as he pushed the door wider open: the lids were raised to a degree where interest can still pass as apathy.

Whether she knew it or not, she already had him at a disadvantage. In her moments of ignorance, lust, childishness, or recovering from the hysteria of a half-intended suicide, Hero’s eyes remained noble works of art. They couldn’t be connected with failures of the human mind or body; they were too lustrous, and dark.

Because she could hardly explain the situation away, she used a convalescent tone of voice. ‘I am sorry. I am all the time trying to remember whether I have shut the street-door on leaving your house, Hurtle. It was worried me so much. If I did not close it, thieves could have broken in — to steal — the paintings.’

‘Don’t worry: I’m not yet in the stolen class; and if you hadn’t left the door open, I mightn’t have let in the visitor: I mean your emissary — Olivia.’

‘Did Olivia? I didn’t send her.’ She became more invalid, moving her head against the pillow, her lips paler. ‘Olivia is so devoted she cannot believe her friends might survive without her help.’

Certainly Hero sounded helpless, but the white-bandaged wrists, in collaboration with her terra-cotta skin, reminded him that his delicate acrobat was only temporarily inert. As soon as he went to her the butterflies of tension were fluttering again under his fingers, the worm in him was raising its head. He wondered whether her conscience suffered as little as his on hearing the clash of teeth on teeth as they bit into the same fruit.