The Vivisector

by WHITE, PATRICK

  Or again, after they had plunged, struggling through the grey waves of the unmade bed, she mumbled on between their mouthfuls: ‘Wonderful—the way—they—worked—out—the joinery!’

  Ahhhh they were flooding together in cataracts of light and darkest deepest velvet.

  Sometime that night, or morning, for the oyster tones were taking over, he got up from the sticky sheet to rummage through his pockets for a cigarette. When he had found one he sat on the edge of the bed. She dragged once or twice on the fag, then returned it, and began tracing his backbone with her finger.

  ‘Was it the first time you did it?’

  His vertebrae might have crushed her finger: she withdrew it at once, sucking the breath back through her teeth.

  ‘What makes you think that?’ He couldn’t sound surly enough.

  ‘You was shivering like a dog they threw in the water.’

  He decided not to answer, and she began as if trying to level out his back with the broad warm palm of her hand; but it was too much for her: she threw herself on him in the end, for her own purposes.

  ‘Oh God,’ she kept gobbling and crying. ‘Love me—what’s yer bloody—love me—Hurtle!’ gnashing and biting and sobbing, until he took possession.

  She was only really mollified when finally he sat up astride her, looking down at the mess of flesh and wet hair. All this time of after-love she kept an arm over her eyes.

  Somebody came knocking at the door and she got up as she was, to open. He caught sight of an old biddy in felt slippers holding a pudding basin to her apron.

  ‘What is it, dear?’ asked Nance, protecting herself against the draught.

  ‘I thought ter make a puddun, Mrs Lightfoot, but am fucked for fat,’ the old woman said. ‘Could you loan me a penny or two for suet?’

  ‘A puddun at five in the mornun? You muster wet yer bed, dear.’ But she scratched around on the dressing-table and gave the old thing half-a-crown.

  ‘I won’t forget. A nice slice of puddun for Mrs Lightfoot.’

  ‘You could light ’er breath with a match any hour of the twenty-four,’ Nance said when her neighbour had gone.

  She was shivering now. It was so grey. Her shivery, suety flesh was grey, and the desert range of the sheets. Two or three blades of clean steel had struck between the slats of a blind.

  ‘You’re like the others,’ she observed, sandpapering her arms with her hands.

  For he was buttoning up his underpants, perhaps too fast for etiquette.

  ‘Silly, bloody-lookun men! Silly-lookun plucked men! You all look plucked once you’ve had what you come for.’

  It made him laugh; but she’d lost her sense of humour.

  ‘I didn’t want to tangle with the milkman,’ he laughed.

  ‘Why the milkman?’

  ‘Or whatever the early client is.’

  She couldn’t cotton on to the reference, and started sniffing, sniffling, got down on all fours beside the grate, poking at the black gobbets and grey flakes of dead fire.

  He had to leave off what he was doing: the complicated problem of buttons in a room from which he was trying to escape. He was fascinated by her again. Where there had been golden-pear tones, a matt charcoal had taken over, with the long black shadows of her hair flowing into the deeper shadow of hearth and grate. He was fascinated by the burnt-out cleft of her formal arse.

  Nance was holding a match to a ball of grubby paper and a couple of pale splinters of kindling.

  ‘I’m gunner sleep,’ she announced. ‘If I’m in luck, I’ll sleep all day.’

  Her drooping cheek, chalky at the edges, was gilded afresh by the little flame.

  ‘Shall I be able to get in?’

  ‘When?’ she asked, listening.

  There was the sound of paper catching fire.

  ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘When I come.’

  ‘Course,’ she said. ‘Course you can. It’s me business, isn’t it?’

  Her thigh thumped the carpet as she reeled over on to the pivot of an elbow. ‘You had it free for once: that doesn’t mean for every time. I’ve always been practical,’ she said. ‘Greasy little dishwasher!’

  As she lolled looking at him from out of her tent of hair, her chalk-and-charcoal skin, her black lips, began yet another transformation. Shavings of golden light were crumbled on her breasts and thigh through the slats of the decrepit blind; little rosy flames began to live around the contours of her mouth, so that he was forced to get down on his knees beside her in his half-dressed goose-pimpled state, to identify himself with what was at least a vision of his power: he didn’t doubt he would translate the world into terms of his own.

  Whether she realized or not, she allowed his mouth a moment’s entry into the warm, but now directionless, current of hers, then bit him, with affection rather than passion.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ she bellowed, ‘I gotter get some sleep, you little bastard!’ and flopped back on the gritty carpet.

  He was by no means a ‘little bastard’. In spite of the wretched, rucked-up suit and cheap, bulbous-toed shoes, he was a man of some distinction. He would have invented it for himself if the eyes of others hadn’t told him, particularly those of women and girls: respectable ladies, old enough to enjoy detachment, smiled happily at his looks; disgruntled, shapeless housewives devoured him greedily, bitterly; neat young colourless women, of erect carriage and fragile jawbones, blushed for their own, timid thoughts, and averted their faces; schoolgirls nursed their lapful of Globite, and yearned after the abstractions of love as the tram rocked their slommacky bodies.

  It was always worst, or more open, in trams. He remembered how, in his boyhood, his thoughts had often fallen victim to the eyes of strangers. It was a moment of delicious shame, sometimes even consummation. No chance of that since experience had given him a key of his own. He was so quick to lock the intruder out, he might have felt lonely if it hadn’t been for his thoughts: not the consecutive, reasoned grey of intellectual thought, but the bursts of kaleidoscopic imagery, both flowering in his mind, and filtered sensuously through his blood.

  On the surface he was employed at Café Akropolis, Railway Square. He got there around five in the afternoon and did whatever was asked of him: gutting and scaling fish, peeling and slicing potatoes, with spells of the greyer washing-up. Sometimes his thoughts would flare up marvellously even then. He knocked off anywhere between midnight and two.

  Nick asked: ‘You painting the home out?’

  ‘I’m painting,’ he answered.

  ‘You no take care, Jack, you spoil your good clothes.’ The Greek offered his piece of advice with indifference: he respected material virtues and wasn’t responsible for his employees’ habits.

  About one-thirty that morning Duffield left with the standard parcel of left-over fish. It was only twenty-four hours since his meeting with Nance beside the bay. On and off during his daylight freedom he had considered returning to her room after he knocked off at the Greek’s; but now he hurried back towards his own, as though to a meeting with a lover. From this distance he couldn’t believe in himself as ponce, in the prostitute as mistress: he could only believe in his vision of her, which already that day he had translated into concrete forms. Hence all those dribbles and flecks Nick the Greek had noticed on his ‘good clothes’, the hardened scales of paint he hadn’t had time to scrape off his skin.

  Though in a different locality, the house where he lodged was not unlike the one in which Nance Lightfoot lived. In spite of the hour a quarrel was still in progress the other side of a closed door; on the landings lingered smells of gas, and of food recently grilled and fried; the cold was beginning to encroach. He caught the sole of his shoe on a stair, and wrenched himself free for the last lap, the sole applauding or deriding.

  He couldn’t break quick enough into his room, and on yanking at the cord which provided light, there stood the three studies of Nance propped on a converted balcony after the style of Nance’s own. Two of the versions had gone so cold
he dropped the parcel of fish scraps. He rushed, mumbling moaning for his own shortcomings, and kicked the boards into a corner. Then he got down, and tried to help the abortive paint with his fingers, but already it had hardened. Only the black-and-white drawing of the spreadeagled female form coaxing fire out of a grate led him to hope; though he kicked that too, more gently, up the arse. He threw himself on the floor, and lay there functionless, till the abrasive carpet began to grow meaningful, under his cheek, and in his mind.

  It seemed to him that he loved this woman he hardly knew as a person: at least he loved and needed her form. Whether he desired her sexually was a matter of how far art is dependent on sexuality. He remembered with repulsion, if also recurring fascination, the stormy tones of a large bruise on one of her thighs. He had kissed, but could he have loved the bruise? Could this coarse, not exactly old, but lust-worn, prostitute, love her new ponce after one drunken encounter? He couldn’t believe it. She needed him, though, for some reason she kept hidden behind the forearm shielding her eyes after the throaty confessions of love.

  He fell asleep on the floor realizing how he could convey the shadow from one of her sprawled breasts.

  That morning he worked austerely and perhaps got somewhere with the spreadeagled Nance; but it was only one aspect of him in her. He would have liked to splash amongst the gasping, sucking, tropical colours which had flooded them both in their struggle towards a climax. He tried to concentrate, but couldn’t. He began fiddling, rubbing, masturbating in nervous paint on a narrow board.

  Although it was four o’clock and he knew he was expected at the Greek’s, he had to see her.

  He almost ran along the streets, until in the one where Nance lived, he started looking for a sign.

  Several women had come out of their houses, and were moving casually towards their beat. An old derelict bag was standing in the entrance to Nance’s place: from looking glum, she brightened up.

  ‘Mrs Lightfoot is expecting you, mister,’ the old girl called, relieved to rediscover a mission in life. ‘She’s on the third—third floor up—green door—on the third’; she was the same biddy who had been ‘fucked for fat’ in the small hours.

  He went up after merely mumbling back at his informant. She didn’t expect to be acknowledged, though.

  Nance was arranging her hair above her eyes, in heavy loops, or drooping nests, in the dressing-table glass.

  She said: ‘Hello. Thought you’d come. I thought you might’uv come last night.’

  She began hacking angrily at the looped-back hair with the axes of her hands, then gave up.

  ‘I was busy, though,’ she admitted: certainly her eyelids looked thick.

  She sounded both prosperous and brutal. Her cigarette, hanging heavy from her mouth, scented the room, which smelled also of cut leeks, or armpits.

  As she sat in the yellow glare from her dressing-table, with its rattling handles, warped brushes, scattering of beige powder, and a souvenir kewpie, he pressed against her from behind, and she turned round, fastening her teeth in his skin through the V of his open shirt, dragging her fingernails down along the flitch of ribs.

  ‘Ohhhhh!’ she moaned in an ascending scale, then said very primly: ‘I got business to attend to.’

  ‘What sort of business?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, reshaping her mouth, ‘there’s a bloke I know wants me to put some money into a sandwich shop. Might be something in it, don’t you think? All-night snacks along American lines.’

  ‘Didn’t know you were the financier too.’ To some extent he felt resentful: to find her less dependent on him.

  ‘You gotter put it somewhere when you make it. I was never shook on the loose board. Some bloody cut-throat might rip it up one night, and you with it.’

  He laughed slightly.

  ‘Eh?’ She laughed back. ‘Aren’t I right?’

  But he was remembering his version of her cleft, spreadeagled arse.

  ‘Besides,’ she transposed her voice to a patently virtuous key, ‘this is a returned man—see? the bloke who wants to start the business—only one lung—got gassed or something in France.’

  ‘You go for the diggers,’ he couldn’t resist remarking.

  ‘Jesus and Mary, are you the only pebble on the beach?’

  Little did she know it, but he was.

  Or perhaps some suspicion of it did cross her mind: her mouth softened as she stood up, and her eyes darkened under the brim of the hat she had just put on. Reaching for her handbag she knocked it off the dressing-table.

  ‘Come with me—Hurtle—if you like,’ she said quietly. ‘It oughtn’ter take long.’

  After stooping for the bag she appeared to him in yet another light, dominated by her serious eyes under a garish royal-blue velvet. She had spoken his difficult name as though she wanted him to compliment her.

  ‘I might come along,’ he said. ‘Some of the way, anyway.’

  She had made him shy. He avoided her. He stood playing with the coins in his pocket, looking at the Alma-Tadema print hanging from a nail above the bed.

  ‘Interested in art work?’ She would have been pleased for her refinement to be recognized. ‘That was given me as part payment by an old boy who ran an art shop in William Street. Just before they took him over. Poor old bugger was short in more ways than one: he had only one ball.’

  ‘Looks as if you fancy the ones!’

  ‘Don’t it!’ She rattled laughing. ‘I never ever thought of that!’

  They went downstairs, watching their step on the discoloured marble. Laughter and precaution brought them closer together. He looked up, and saw them in the blotchy mirror on a lower landing: a woman leaning on her lover.

  And it was the same in the streets: the women he saw she knew turned away out of delicacy on catching sight of Nance Lightfoot with the genuine article. It made her walk more self-consciously, looking at her insteps, or sideways into shop windows. In one or two instances, girls they passed put on a syrupy expression, and asked: ‘How are we, Nance?’ and she smiled a smile he hadn’t noticed on her till then. ‘Good, thanks,’ she answered, ‘how’s yerself, dear?’ as they parted.

  It wasn’t all that far to the solicitor’s office where Nance was to meet the one-lunged digger.

  ‘We can’t be there too long,’ she coaxed as they approached. ‘It’s late already, and the solicitor bloke’ll wanter be makun tracks.’

  In the doorway they ran across a frail green-tinged individual with pinched nostrils who was apparently Nance’s partner-to-be in the sandwich shop.

  ‘Oh, Mick—Mick Rafferty—this is my friend, Mister—er . . .’ Her voice trailed away: she looked flushed, probably too ashamed to reveal his first name, while realizing she hadn’t learnt his second. To help her would have made it look worse.

  The one-lunged digger suggested her friend should wait inside, but Hurtle said he would hang around. Nance left him with smiles of the purest banality.

  Yet he was haunted by the harsh gloss of the royal-blue hat, by the changing architecture of the face, and the unconscious poetry of the eyes.

  She didn’t know herself. For that matter practically nobody in the street had woken up to themselves. A few glanced at him angrily in passing, and at least mentally edged away, holding him responsible for their moment of unwilling consciousness.

  It was not very much later when Nance came hurtling back down the stairs and out of the rundown offices. ‘There! I wasn’t gunner let them palaver. But it’s late, love. What’s the dago gunner say?’

  Down the sleek asphalt hill the evening traffic was spurting through the purple shallows.

  ‘Praps I’m going to give the dago the go-by: tonight and any other night.’

  ‘What—give up yer job?’ Nance was shocked: at once she began working on his arm. ‘Of course I wouldn’t let you want. I’m only thinkun of yer self-respect.’

  They walked on rather aimlessly. He hoped she wouldn’t notice he was touched, because he wouldn’t hav
e known how to explain why. Here lay the great discrepancy between aesthetic truth and sleazy reality.

  ‘I’ll find something. Clean windows,’ he said to keep her quiet, ‘or floors.’

  ‘Haven’t you any ambition?’ she asked with such a humourless earnestness, again he couldn’t help feeling moved.

  He sniggered to hide it. ‘What about yourself?’

  ‘Why should I be ambitious? I got a steady, remunerative job. But a man’s different.’ Then, as they walked on, she said: ‘And you’re not just a man.’

  ‘Are you in love with me?’ He gave it a metallic edge.

  ‘I’d like to be,’ she said, and again, bitterly: ‘Oh yes, I’d like to be!’

  Still walking, she started stirring up her handbag, looking for something to blow her nose on. He would have liked to help her, but he couldn’t.

  At the bottom of the hill she recovered her cheerfulness. She said very brightly: ‘You never told me where you live, Hurtle. You never even told me yer other name—like we was still on blackmail terms.’

  He told her his name was ‘Duffield’, and then, for good measure, that he also answered to ‘Courtney’.

  ‘You’re not wanted by the johns, are yer?’ Probably she believed that: she threw off a shiver, and plastered herself closer to him.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘they’re both of them aristercratic names. Or so I’d say.’ She was too trusting: her big ripe purple mouth.

  They mounted the hill and soon entered the city proper.

  ‘If I’d thought we was coming as far as this I’d have dressed different,’ Nance said, with glances at the plate-glass.

  Passing a cooked-food shop, he grew reckless. ‘What d’you say if we pick up a chicken and take it back to my place?’ He dreaded the inevitable reply: she was so very trusting.

  ‘That would be lovely, dear. Then I’ll know where you live. You don’t know a person before you’ve seen their home.’