Patrick White - The Vivisector

When they had finished their tender meal, and she was crying, and wiping her eyes with her hair, and moaning: ‘Oh, God! Oh, God!’ he whispered into her ear: ‘Not when you’ve had your cake.’

Since they were all invoking God tonight, he remembered Effie, a kitchenmaid, in her big pink going-out hat, mopping and crying: God can strike me dead if I ever do ut again I’d never ever ’uv done ut in the first place if I’d ever known what I was gunner let myself in for so there it’s the truth May Lizzie. What have you let yourself in for, Effie? Nothun cheeky boy or not what everyone thinks though Lord you can never be that sure. So, as Hero cried, presumably on account of her botched attempt at suicide, his head was filled with the old hurdy-gurdy tunes, and crushed pink sateen and a tattered moon, and the mound of crystal-sprinkled rock-cakes none of the girls would have dreamt of touching, out of respect for Effie’s fate; only he dared to finger, to pinch up, to suck the least of the crystals, on the quiet.

As soon as Hero had finished crying, she seemed to grow more practical. She opened her eyes, while continuing to flutter the lids at something remote she hadn’t been able to focus on, or face. Washed clean of the immediate past, the eyes themselves shone with an unusually noble candour.

‘I know you only respect the truth, so I will be perfectly honest with you, Hurtle.’ He admired the sculpture of her jaw. ‘I do not understand why I have told you — except that I was emotionally upset — that Olivia went of her own accord. No,’ she said, ‘I have sent Olivia to bring you to me, because it is necessary to tell you I receive a letter from my poor husband.’

Giving Cosma his official title made him sound more ominous.

‘I have read this letter many times. It is in my handkerchief drawer;’ she half rose on the bed as though prepared to prove the letter’s existence. ‘But it is useless to show you;’ she fell back in realizing, ‘it is written in Greek, of course. My husband, who had no formal education, writes other languages only through secretaries.’

Though physically languid, Hero continued clambering over mountains, while he chafed her skin, and considered the significance of Cosma’s reappearance.

‘He writes very kindly — because,’ she said, ‘my husband was always a gentle man. But he is far kinder than I would have expected — in this letter I now receive. He says,’ she breathed tenderly, ‘he realizes how he has failed me—“conjunctively”, I think, is the translation. I have told you about his scruples which I believe are a curse from his old mother. My husband,’ she continued in her translating and translated voice, ‘respects you as an artist and a man, and can understand my taking you as a lover.’

‘When he doesn’t know me?’

‘Doesn’t know you? He has met you at the party of Olivia! How my husband doesn’t know you?’

Hero was so incredulous, her lover was left hanging by her beauty, which offered such a hold he could only continue gratified: the glistening mesh of her eyebrows alone.

Dreamier, or practical, she announced from her pillow turned to swansdown: ‘My husband writes that— nevertheless, ’ she translated it so meticulously ‘he will always be prepared to take me back because of his great love for me.’ Hero closed her eyes. ‘Isn’t that touching, Hurtle, and nice?’

Oh, God! Her lover was touched more than he could have expressed, and suddenly tired. So far he had conceived in paint no more than fragments of a whole. If he were only free of women who wished to hold somebody else responsible for their self-destruction; more difficult still: if he could ignore the tremors of his own balls, then he might reach his resisted objective, whether through mottled sausage skins, or golden chrysalides and splinters of multi-coloured glass perhaps purposefully strewn on a tessellated floor, or the human face drained to its dregs, or the many mirrors in which his sister Rhoda was reflected, or all all of these and more fused in one — not to be avoided — vision of GOD.

To escape from its immensity, and the shocking literalness of his forced admission, he sank his head between the unconscious breasts of his ex-mistress Hero Pavloussi.

When the words began reverberating from her diaphragm: ‘My darling — Hurtle — you know what my answer will be — the only possible answer: that my lover needs my love — that I cannot leave him — even if his object is to destroy me.’

He could feel her stumpy, webbed hands ostensibly caressing his ribs, as though to create something out of wood. There had been a kitchen table at Cox Street, which had borne with knives, and children’s boots, and hot irons. Mightn’t the Whole have been formally contained from the beginning in this square-legged, scrubbed-down, honest-to-God, but lacerated, table?

He let her caress him: he was too well occupied to answer.

He was painting, but had not yet found the direction he must take; he forced himself, as in making love with Hero whenever she demanded it: in each case it was an exercise.

Once when she came to him she showed him cuts in the palms of her hands, and a deeper wound in one knee; drawing down her mouth into its ugliest shape, her chin weighted with contempt, she described with such anatomic detail and idiomatic fluency a certain sexual act, she made him ask: ‘But where can you have learnt such things?’

‘Oh!’ she blared. ‘Where did I? How am I to know? Gutters are too much alike.’ Her face looked bloated; her cracked laugh sounded as though she were drunk, or hallucinated: or real.

Then again, her aggressiveness would dissolve, and she would cry into him for protection: ‘I can no longer expect to reason with myself. Pray for me, won’t you, Hurtle? I have neither learned the language of love nor prayer.’

On returning into what passed for her right mind, she sleeked her hair down and said: ‘No more than anybody else, Hurtle, you are not what you are supposed to be.’

The truth in what she said didn’t help. He could help neither of them, and must resist anyone else’s entry into that void in himself which would blaze eventually with light, if he was to be favoured again.

She left him alone for so long he had to go and investigate. It was late afternoon as he approached the house. Around the head-land the happiest conjunction of light and water, of gentle ripples and rosy swaths of tender cloud, promised a climate of equanimity and affection. Going down the gravel towards the star-shaped flower-bed, it occurred to him how he might make use of those particular cloud forms, when he was jolted out of himself at sight of a strange car stretched along the drive in front of the porch.

Almost at the same moment a large powdered woman came out of the house, wearing a hat studded with what looked like macaroons.

‘It’ll be like old times, Gertie,’ she said as though talking to her sister, but it was only the maid who went with the house.

The maid lowered her chin and simpered. ‘Oh yes, m’m. Yes, Mrs Cargill. Won’t it?’ She could hardly wait to become re-enslaved, but decently.

The lady stood, and the light glanced off her teeth and her thick glasses. Once or twice she licked her lips to make sure the enamel was intact. The chauffeur started going through the motions, but, unlike the maid, he had so worked it out he was on neither one side nor the other.

Both Mrs Cargill and Gertie stared in the direction of the caller. The maid looked stern, while her rightful mistress might have been suspecting the approach of a disease: a not unpleasant one, which her friends would turn into a tactful joke, perhaps even congratulate her on catching.

‘Oh dear!’ She suddenly laughed, and whispered loud: ‘The inventory, Gertie! We forgot the inventory!’