The Vivisector (27 page)

A
what?
He had always hated Rhoda; even if she had been normal, she would have grown up gimlet-eyed, unnatural.

 

There were moments when Rhoda became so recognizably himself, together they blotted out the twin nightmares of war and misunderstanding.

Rhoda wrote:

 

He
must
write to Rhoda. During several days’ leave he carried around a sheet of paper which grew grubby at the edges in his pocket. His stylo wouldn’t work. He was carrying a pencil too, the lead of which he drove into the ball of his thumb, through grasping it. In the end he didn’t write: he did a drawing of some moss roses, which he stuck in the envelope, and sent.

Rhoda didn’t reply, perhaps because the last shot had been fired; for the guns were suddenly still: there was an armistice. Those who had survived were presumably saved. The knowledge floated, palpitating, on the waves of silence, flooding the travesty of fields, and on into the streets of cities, where people had begun to rejoice for the privilege of dying in other ways.

 

During the year in Paris when he washed dishes by night to justify himself by day, he was Duffield again. A fresh start, but at the same time a squalid one, seemed to call for the old name. In any case, how could he ever be a Courtney? However intense the nostalgia, he was no longer a member of his ‘family’ as he looked back: at decent Harry, the Edwardian torso now disintegrated; at Maman, no doubt still dancing ‘on the landings and along the passages’ in girls’ white; at little pink-eyed Rhoda, nibbling at the edges of what she would never be allowed to consume. He had gratified at least some of the desires of all three. If he had left them bearing him a grudge, it was because total love must be resisted: it is overwhelming, like religion. He certainly wasn’t religious: he was an artist. But didn’t this reduce him to the status of little pink-eyed Rhoda nibbling round the edges? The association made him focus his mind on other, immediate realities.

When not washing dishes at Le Rat à l’Oeil Ouvert, he was hanging round l’Huissier’s studio, with two American ladies of doubtful age, a youngish Englishman of taste, and sundry Scandinavians, all of whom were making the ‘new’ approach to art. Painting was going to be pure at last. It should have been very new and exciting, but he found it wasn’t what he wanted to do.

If he continued paying for l’Huissier’s formula in hard francs, it was because he hadn’t yet thought how he might extricate himself. In the same way, his physical attitudes were uncertain. He was either hunching himself at his drawing-board, hoping to contain the smell of dishwater and poverty, or alternately, on more extrovert occasions, he flaunted his condition, from unwashed hair to piss-stained crutch.

Altogether the kindlier of the American ladies bought him a meal and wished to discuss ‘organic integrity’, and the youngish Englishman arranged himself tastefully on a divan after coffee, he remained virtually friendless because he had nothing to offer in return.

He was bankrupt by the war, he would sometimes explain, though only to himself. There were also the occasions when, sitting in his cupboard of a room, holding his thunderous head, in the smell of grey water he had brought in with him at four in the morning, he knew that this wasn’t true: what he needed was to go home, to renew himself, if there had been somewhere specific, some person left with whom he might establish contact. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to write to Maman or Rhoda: these links were broken, together with others less obvious in the emotional chain by which he had always secretly imagined he might haul himself to safety. So he sat in his cupboard-room, rocking, cherishing the dregs of a sour red wine, and listening for the bursts of gunfire, the scattering shrapnel, which no longer came.

In one of these fits he remembered May Noble his fellow artist. He would write to May. Detached, and as he remembered, honest, the cook might be expected to illuminate the situation—if she replied.

May did reply:

 

Edging along the sea-wall, flicking prawnshells into the water, his old army overcoat rubbing and catching on the pockmarked stone, the young man had every opportunity for night thoughts, except that the night itself, with its smears of oily light and sounds of lolling, tepid sea, was so accommodating.

Then, too, his early dislocation, when Duffields sold and Mr and Mrs Courtney bought him, helped him accept May’s information as final. He hadn’t bothered to keep up a correspondence with someone he remembered with affectionate respect: she had fulfilled her purpose. In any case, he hadn’t the cook’s new address. He had even less clues to the whereabouts of Mrs Julian Boileau and her entourage. Returning home by cargo he had sometimes wondered whether the glittering liner they were passing carried the Julian Boileaus in it. He visualized them stretched on deck-chairs, sipping a frosted nightcap and making languid conversation. Rhoda he imagined, head between the rails, watching their long turbulent wake, just as he was standing watching his.

Of course he could have exerted himself, through agents, solicitors, lapsed acquaintances, to trace his ex-‘family’, but lacked the ultimate belief in the efficacy of family ties. He was dependent on himself for anything he might become, and when he was too tired, too poor, too hungry, too discouraged, self-opinion was his consolation: to sign himself ‘Duffield’, not on the half-realized paintings he almost immediately painted out, but on those he was still only capable of painting in his head.

In the deserted park at that hour the sounds of Sydney were solider than the shapes of night: opaque fluorescence of a fog-horn somewhere in the harbour; drawn-out squeal of a leaping train; empty bottle slapping fat water; a smoker’s cough. In the not-so-deserted park he realized somebody was approaching, following the curve of the sea-wall, stubbing and rubbing. At moments it sounded as though a thigh was cannoning off the stone upholstery; while he continued leaning, elbows riveted to the wall: he should have been able to avert the collision, but didn’t seem to have the power to move.

‘Holy
Moses!
’

A woman’s rather large, soft, furry form spattered against and around him: not all soft; her forehead on his was hard as a billiard ball.

‘Though I hit an iron post!’ she yelled. ‘A bloody lamp-post without the lamp!’

Because she had got a fright she sounded angry at first, then began to laugh, her laughter smelling of scent and brandy. ‘You haven’t got much to say,’ she said, as she continued standing against him, as he continued standing or leaning where he had been put.

‘I don’t feel like it.’ He heard his own awkwardness.

‘Feel like what? Wait till you’re asked!’

‘Thought it was the man who asks—and the woman decides.’

‘Not always she don’t! By crikey, no! More often than not, she takes what comes. Arr, dear!’

She leaned over the wall beside him; the tail of her fur hung down black, pointing at the water.

‘I’ve always been hopin’ ter find something of value in the sea.’ The brandy was making her dreamier. ‘A pearl, or somethun. And never found nothun—but a used Frenchie!’

Again she went off into shrieks, not particularly for him, for some larger audience of abstract, night faces, and as she laughed a finger of light picked at the gold in her open mouth.

She must have felt his recoil, for she began revising her performance at once; she stuck her arm through his, and said: ‘What about goin’ for a little walk? Up to my place. Eh? What do they call you, dear? Eh?’

‘Hurtle.’ He let her have the naked truth.

She sounded melancholy. ‘Some of them think from the start you’re gunner come at blackmail. They think of funny names.’

‘My name isn’t funny,’ he rasped. ‘Or if it is, it’s the only one I’ve got.’

‘Is it?’ She disbelieved. ‘They call me Nance,’ she told him in an ever so slightly formal voice.

He hung back: suffocated by fur and brandy, he’d had enough of Nance.

‘Aren’t you comin’ up to my place?’ she asked and tugged, hopeful still.

‘I got a hole in me pocket.’

She started shrieking again. ‘You have, eh? Then you can walk behind and do it for nothun!’

The silence shut her up at last.

‘If that’s what you meant.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t what I meant. I meant I’m stone-broke. ’

He began to slip away over the trampled grass. If he had dared, he would have started running; but the woman might have started too, her fur flopping, her breath trumpeting after him.

‘What makes you think it’s a luxury?’ Not only her voice, the sound of her feet was following him over the dead grass. ‘’Oo never asks, never finds out.’

He imagined too strong a jaw raised against the night to deliver its oracle.

He didn’t answer, but went on slithering across the park, his army overcoat by now as heavy as an inescapable dream.

On the edge of an oval, faint dandelion lamps were flowering.

‘Hey, dig?’ she called. ‘Wait a mo, digger.’ She was thundering over the iron ground. ‘’Ow d’you know we wouldn’t
like
each other?’

‘How do
you
know?’ he answered feebly back.

Light from the lamps had turned his coat a sour greenish-yellow. His skin must have gone that colour of old pennies, with burnt-out sockets instead of eyes.

‘Eh?’

Her brandy breath alone told him they were almost level again.

‘People do like each other,’ she said. ‘It isn’t all business, is it?’ She added at once, ‘You gotter find out, though.’

She was a fairly large woman, in a large black hat, of lace or net, at the back the largest, wired bow, which had failed to keep its symmetry. Not unnaturally, the artificial light had turned her lips and cheeks to puce: her lips, her eyes were the moister for exertion, or booze.