The Vivisector (36 page)

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Authors: PATRICK WHITE

BOOK: The Vivisector
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When she saw him, she dragged the door wider open. ‘Arr—come on in, then—if it’s you.’ Even so, she begrudged him the welcome; she was looking fat and overpowdered; she narrowed her eyes at something that might be in store for her.
How to convey to Nance what she wouldn’t have believed? He could only flounder in her: she might have been a field of heavy-pollened, white daisies.
‘What’s got inter yer?’ she said at last. ‘Am I someone else?’
If she suspected it, she didn’t sound put out, nor did she expect explanations, preferring to supply her own.
‘All you men are in love with yourselves. That’s what it amounts to. When a man feels real good about ’imself, he has to have a woman, and it’s called love. At least the poofs are honest. They look around for another poof.’ What she visualized gave her the giggles. ‘To be on the right track, you oughter be, all of you, one big set of poofs!’
She was so equable she might have been persuaded to collaborate, if the air of afternoon detachment hadn’t been snatched away from her soon after: she developed that expression of swim or sink, it didn’t matter, as they were swept together into the blowhole, themselves boiling and lashing. Her isolated gull’s cry died away under the grinding of the iron trams.
On the stairs as he went down there was a sailor on his way up. What the sailor and the whore might do together couldn’t make Duffield jealous: his own collusion with the woman who passed for Nance Lightfoot was too complete.
On the next occasion, however, there she was, dressed to go out: formal after her fashion.
She yanked the door wider open. ‘This is a funny time to come!’ It was more or less the same time as before. ‘I gotter go out,’ she threatened. ‘An appointment. If you’d like ter know, it’s a bloke who’s on ’is last leg.’
Although she had painted her lips into a big patent-leather rosette, they were thin and straight under the grease.
‘If you gotter,’ she said, ‘you gotter be quick.’
She didn’t expect conversation, but began dragging off her clothes, those over her head with such determination some of her hair remained standing on end after it had been pulled through.
His belt-buckle nicked at something passive, wall or flesh, as he whipped it through the loops of his pants. The formal room was all sounds. His body had never sounded so lean as when the superfluous clothes slithered and coiled.
As for Nance, lying straight, almost rigid, she looked positively thin: he thought he could see her exasperated ribs milky-blue under the skin.
That afternoon they made the geometry of love, its sparest bones.
‘I’m gunner be late,’ she accused, as she got up and forced herself back into her clothes, ‘when I guaranteed to be on the dot.’ She was professionally committed: in spite of her haste and distraction, she found time to repair the damaged parts of her face.
Nor could he resent her obligations on this second occasion, for he was beginning to feel his way to the end of a labyrinth in which he had been lost several days. The suburban train couldn’t carry him fast enough, his unemployed hands locked between his thighs. All along the street becoming country road, along the track he followed through the scrub, he leaned into the wind, to arrive quicker, to walk inside his no more than necessary shack.
There his
Doppelgänger
was leering at him out of a distorting mirror. He took a brush and extenuated the rather too desirable mouth into a straight line. He was right. The eyes agreed. The shoulders sank into place. For the rest of daylight he hung about, dabbing and wiping, tidying his paint, unexpectedly meticulous in attending to unimportant details. He realized his physical mouth was hanging open, his breath snoring in a solid stream from between his lips, as though he had just woken from a demanding sleep.
In the morning the clear light had already begun to destroy his achievement.
That afternoon he walked into Ironstone, for relief, and found Caldicott’s letter:
 
Dear Hurtle,
I had been hoping for a visit, or for some indication of plans for the future. I don’t want to impose on you; but an artist needs to talk, surely? Or is he nourished solely by self-expression and self? Obviously he is! I am not accusing you, I hope, only suggesting you may not be aware of the effect you have on other people.
You mustn’t think I am trying to possess you: or perhaps I am. I believe that any human being of more than average sensibility is an artist in his life, and particularly in his relationships with other human beings. There the least creative of us cannot resist the impulse to create.
So I am, after all, the guilty one! I should like to hear from you. I should like to see you, at the gallery, or better still at my flat, where I should have an opportunity of showing you the few beautiful objects I have gathered round me, and which make my life excusable.
Several weeks of arthritic aches and neuralgic pains have left me depressed and dull. I made the horrid discovery that white ant has got into my
Á Rebours
and eaten all but the boards. However, I mustn’t burden you with my megrims.
Are you in need of anything, I wonder? I enclose a small cheque as a sign that I am interested in your future work. I respect your attitude while selfishly wishing to alter it.
Your contrite
maurice c.
P.S. A lady with artistic daughter is nibbling bravely at one of your rocks. Alas, a husband and father must first be enticed.
 
He tore up Caldicott’s letter as soon as he had read it. To treat letters in this way had become a habit: he felt less obliged to answer them. Never so important to be free as now; for he had painted out the self-portrait, and was working on a fresh version: more austere, essential, more honest, he hoped, than the over-painted, self-indulgent, by now only nauseating, rejected naturalistic trash.
The line of the mouth decided him: the mouth changed on his return from visiting Nance. The straight line which at first appeared to have solved the problems of the whole, had in the end destroyed; its honesty bred dishonesty in the parts.
Recreating his own body he worked quickly, for him, almost as though he knew in detail what he was about. He should have enjoyed a sense of revived assurance. He would have, if it hadn’t been for Caldicott’s love-letter. That was what it amounted to: poor spinsterly Maurice C., his intellect inviting a rape which discretion would not have allowed his body; he was even paying in advance.
The skeleton portrait had already become such a glass the painter turned his back on it. He was too agitated for the moment, too furtive in his glances from one mirror to the other, to put his faith in glass. He hadn’t torn up Caldicott’s cheque. He had kept, and would have to cash, the cheque. He was shamefully in his friend’s debt, for the reason which remained beyond his control: he would never control his desire to paint.
So he returned at last to wrestling with the honest version of his dishonest self.
He had worked all that week, in exhilaration, exhaustion, hunger, black hate, then an orgy of messy uncooked food fished up out of the jagged tins Caldicott’s cheque had bought. If you could prostitute yourself in one way, perhaps you could in another. But he visualized Maurice C.’s blue-white limbs, like those of a plucked and drawn chicken, shot with the tones of invisible giblets. (Sudden, even more awful thought: was Caldicott by any chance Mrs Lopez-Davenport?)
At that point he received the next note from Nance:
 
Hurtle Duffield you selfish male bastard do you think I am nothing more than a prostitute? If I could paint I could paint a picture of what it is like to be alone at the time when you used to come. My brain my guts would be laid open like at the abatore. That old quilt gives my body prickly heat as I lie and wait. Well, the roses you remember you brought I kept them till they turned brown and even then didn’t throw them out. Oh dear the smell of men and rotting roses, it gives me the heebie jeebies at five o’clock of an afternoon. I wish the tram would go over me.
I wonder whether you will come this arvo? Bet you won’t. So I will go down and knock back a brandy at the old Castle with my friend Iris if she is still around. These is lean times. Val Costello got pinched lifting from one of the fancy counters at Foys, Reen Hislop frisked an alderman’s pockets while he was giving her the quick lunchtime screws. Both Reen and Val are out at the Bay.
I was never so ‘blue’ darl, but will not feel my bluest till I get home and find you have been and gone.
Your sweetheart
NANCE LIGHTFOOT
 
While he worked they were encroaching on him from all quarters: Nance Lightfoot and Maurice C., Mumma and Pa, Father and Maman, Rhoda and her Hump, all resentful, all demanding. In another calling he might have risked destruction by the polypous love they were heaping on him. In the given circumstances, he had to resist them with his mind when his instincts leched after them.
He painted at times with a grimness which was flashed back and forth between glass and board. This skeleton
Doppelgänger,
with his armature in greys and blacks, would no doubt have survived outside pressure if it hadn’t been for a conspiracy taking place between the necessary and the unknown: reckless purples begin to stain the premeditated; pools of virulent green brooded.
He suddenly suspected something else might have been planned; as, indeed, it was.
Nance arrived. It was late on an afternoon. He saw her coming down the track, the stones trying her shoes as usual. This time she was dressed in black. The black dress and the late light gave her a coppery tinge.
‘What,’ he said, ‘are you on your way to a funeral?’ He could have hit her if there had been something suitable to do it with.
‘Could be a funeral,’ she hawked. ‘Don’t know why ever else I come to this place. Funerals—or wedduns!’
She made the doorway.
‘I got somethun in me eye, from lookun outer the fuckun train, thinkun I might ’uv been carried on.’
She went straight up to the glass which had served for weeks as his conscience, and began pulling her eye about as though it were set in elastic. The whites were inflamed, and the light made them look worse: hunted out of the gorge, it clung burning along the ironstone ridges, infusing human blemishes with all the ominous tones. Nance looked thinner than usual, leathery too: her arms were in seamy, oiled leather, as she stood pulling at her eye. A dented gold armlet she was wearing round the left biceps drew attention to the sag.
‘You’ve lost weight.’ He had to exert himself to make conversation with the visitor, but she didn’t appear to hear.
‘It’s best to forget about it,’ she was saying, ‘and you’ll find it’s gone when you wake up.’
She was drunk for the occasion: he could tell by the shape of her mouth.
‘I got somethun for yer,’ she said.
This time it wasn’t food. She untied an old draw-neck leather bag embossed with worn waratahs. Age and light had rubbed the leather a metallic green, dull beside the bright heads of foil on the bottles, one of which had already been cracked.
‘You can’t come to the country,’ said Nance, ‘without you fortify yerself.’
She fussed and swaggered over her supplies, at one point thrusting her pelvis dangerously far out from the rest of her. He had never seen her so lit, and possibly, vengeful.
‘Don’t think I
don’t
—love—the
country.
’
She was walking about, collecting breath for declamation; so he went out for a little.
It was soothing to hear the sound of himself making water, or the black note of a stick breaking underfoot as he stumbled around in the grey dusk. A satin-sounding bird in abrupt flight might have burst from out of his eardrums. He couldn’t have pin-pointed where he was in the kindly formlessness which took his presence for granted. The house was no longer visible; he wished it had been swallowed up, together with Nance and the self-portrait, both no doubt prepared to accuse him on his return.
When here he was, almost barking his shins on the house. A plan, divine or not, seemed to reveal itself always when least desirable.
He went in and began striking matches. Surrounded by the dazzle of his own light he couldn’t see Nance at first, though he could hear her snuffling. She coughed once or twice.
‘Caught a cold,’ he suggested coldly, slipping the chimney off the lamp.
‘Not that I know of. It’s me occupational bronchial tubes.’
The room always looked stranger just after he had lit the lamp. It was the worst time to see it: he could never believe it belonged to him, perhaps because other people had recently owned the few bits of furniture; and now, here was Nance, not belonging either, squeezed by choice into an outer corner of the otherwise empty, derelict bed. She had plaited her arm into the ironwork at the foot as though to stabilize herself.
She looked even yellower by lamplight, her face, particularly the mouth, swollen with brandy and resentment as she sucked on a tumbler she had found and filled.
‘What are we going to quarrel about?’ he asked.
He came and sat down beside her because they were the official lovers.
She tossed back her hair, and sat, or hung by the ironwork of the bed, her chin raised, her throat haggard. ‘I don’t care about anythun enough tonight—not you or me or anythun—not enough to quarrel about.’
The strained physical attitude to which she was clinging made her words and her laugh sound colder, clearer, more truthful than they might have sounded if she had remained lumped in a heap of normal drunken disgust. He had never heard Nance sound so detached from a situation.
But she was involved, it began to appear; she was only nervous of the recitative she had to force out of her:
‘When I was a kid we was never so hard up we didn’t manage most years to get away from the place that killed my dad in the end—the bad seasons and the mortgages—we used to head for the coast and camp there for a couple of weeks it wasn’t much more than a hut that belonged to a Mrs Peabody I forget who she was who charged somethun but only a little. It was a small place not a town just a few match-boxes littered around off the road beside the sea the grass left off gradual where it was stitched on to the sand.’

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