The Vivisector

by WHITE, PATRICK

  For a moment he suspected his new, desirable, but peculiarly unresponsive friend hadn’t been listening to him. Then again he could tell that he had. He was the kind that can listen and think at the same time: deep.

  ‘She’s a bloody awful cook,’ Mr Cutbush changed the subject, or almost. ‘But I didn’t marry ’er for ’er cookun.’ He laughed his rather throaty laugh. ‘And got what I asked for. I shouldn’t complain. ’ He remembered to inquire: ‘Does your missus do yer well? At the table, I mean.’

  ‘I’m not married.’

  ‘Go on! You don’t say! There’s time, though.’ The grocer glanced towards the other’s crutch.

  Here and there on the shore of the lantana sea there was a glint from tins not yet completely rusted.

  ‘Perhaps you’re better off, mister. Knock up a grill at yer own convenience.’

  The stranger apparently didn’t hear. He sat staring out over the lantana-filled ravine: a potential suicide perhaps?

  There was a sudden outbreak of what might have been taken for murder by anyone not in the know; the grocer was: he knew it as the laughter of lovers locked together in the lantana depths.

  As an antidote to possible embarrassment, he turned and said to his difficult friend: ‘Not much of a view, but a touch of nature in the middle of the city. I can see that you’re a nature lover.’

  The man laughed for the first time. ‘Yes and no! I was watching the skyline. There’s a very brief pause when the houses opposite remind me of unlit gas fires.’

  Obviously a nut. But an educated one. To humour him, the grocer asked: ‘D’you think the phase is on its way?’

  ‘I’m afraid we must have missed it—while you were talking.’

  ‘Well, if I made yer miss something, I can only apologize.’ The grocer flounced on their common seat.

  They sat in silence for a little, while the sunken sun tightened its vice on the last of the horizon.

  ‘No.’ The stranger had sunk his chin: you could almost see down the rims of his eyes. ‘I don’t think I missed it after all.’ It came so long afterwards, Mr Cutbush couldn’t at first understand what it referred to. ‘Or if I did, I must have wanted to.’

  He turned his first smile on the grocer, who appeared captivated by it: fatter, complacent, broody; but suddenly again, tentative and uneasy.

  ‘I had a peculiar experience tonight,’ Cutbush wet his lips, and decided to share it. ‘I looked in at the window, and saw a person—gentleman—standing without a stitch. Had everything to hide, too.’

  Though he threw open his hairy coat, the stranger evidently wasn’t prepared to reveal more than his naked thoughts. He leaned forward, hands locked between his knees, chin thrust at the growing darkness.

  ‘I came here this evening,’ he said, ‘because I particularly wanted to be on my own. I don’t know why; most of the time I am alone; though I have more friends than I can cope with—or acquaintances, at least. I am not in need—of anything, or anyone.’

  He challenged the darkness so aggressively, the grocer recoiled. ‘Okay, okay, mister! Good for you!’

  ‘When I saw this house I bought—several years ago—I said to myself: “This is the house I shall work in, and die in.” It’s not in any way an exceptional house. You can walk about in it, though. And it’s on a corner. It has entrances on two different streets—so that you can easily escape from a fire—or a visitor. Oh, it’s pleasing!’ He unlocked his hands, and immediately locked them again.

  The grocer sat looking at as much as he could see of the hands. ‘If you have a house, that’s something,’ he suggested listlessly. ‘Not everybody can afford to buy their own home. Not everybody’s that successful.’

  ‘I can’t say I’m not successful—now—not that it means anything. ’

  The grocer spat. ‘I dunno.’ The conversation was becoming too clever. ‘This house—’ he yawned,—‘is it in this neighbourhood? ’

  The stranger continued leaning forward in the dark the sun had left and the moon hadn’t yet demolished. ‘I had another house. It was burnt down. Fortunately. Yes, I think—fortunately—in the bushfires which came soon afterwards. You see, I had a friend who died.’

  ‘A friend, did you?’ Revived interest made the grocer shuffle his behind around on the bench. ‘And ’ow did ’e die, sir—your friend?’

  ‘I don’t know, and shall never know. They couldn’t decide—whether it was suicide or accidental death. Or murder. Well, of course it wasn’t murder—because I’m here. She could only have fallen over. She was drunk—and maniacal. That’s what they decided. It was too obvious.’

  ‘Was your friend a lady, then?’

  ‘I’ve been accused of loving myself. How could I? When I’ve always known too much about myself.’ He stopped so abruptly his breath made a sound like a snore. ‘I wonder why I’m telling you this?’

  The grocer, too, was amazed. ‘Some people,’ he began very slowly, diffidently, ‘are driven to loving themselves—as a sort of consolation.’

  ‘But I’ve never been in need of consolation! I have what I know and what I can see. I have my work.’

  ‘Ah?’

  ‘Not that it’s as simple as that. Not always. Not when it’s dragged out of you, in torment and anguish, by a pair of forceps.’

  The grocer couldn’t remember a telephone booth nearer than the one in Laggan Street, and the larries had stripped that.

  ‘Do you believe in God, Mr Cutbush?’

  ‘Eh? That’s what we were taught, wasn’t it? I’m not going back on that. That is, I wouldn’t be prepared to say I don’t exactly not believe.’

  ‘In the Divine Vivisector!’

  ‘The—what did you say, sir?’ Though he hadn’t understood, it chilled the grocer: he could feel it trickling down his back.

  The moon was by now showering its light on a world which looked as plain and consistent as your hand—but wasn’t, it seemed. In the distance a tram was screaming like no normal public conveyance, and although the waves of lantana were set as solid as the marble in a tombstone, you looked again and saw them twitch like sleeping flesh.

  It was his eyesight: never been the same since the ammonia exploded in the back shop.

  ‘I believe in Him—I think,’ his companion was saying.

  The stranger’s eyes weren’t exactly glittering with tears, because a man wouldn’t cry, or would he after all? in front of another man. The grocer was tingling with a sympathy it mightn’t have been proper to offer.

  ‘Yes, I believe in Him,’ the stranger repeated. ‘Otherwise, how would men come by their cruelty—and their brilliance?’

  The grocer didn’t know how to rise to the occasion; but something mild and reconciled in his companion’s tone reminded him of an incident, interesting, if irrelevant.

  ‘There was a bloke I knew—a caterer, name of Davy Price—decent, decent all the way—got into a spot of trouble when an entire weddin’ party died of food poisonin’. “Our mistakes are what we make, Cec,” Davy says to me, “and it’s only us can live them down.” The following night ’e blew ’is brains out.’

  The anecdote now seemed very irrelevant indeed, but even so, the grocer was put out when his friend made no attempt to respond.

  ‘Not only that,’ he cheered up a little to remember, ‘’e did it on this very same piece of vacant land. They call it The Gash—did you know?’

  The connection between past and present worked, the grocer was relieved to see. The stranger was enjoying a change of mood. Still sitting, he began to slap his thighs with the flats of his hands. The sound it made was hard and brisk.

  ‘I can’t tell you how much it’s done for me—our talk. I didn’t expect anything like this. I’ll go home now and work.’

  ‘What—you work at night, do you?’ Distant footsteps on the asphalt made the question sound even darker.

  ‘Sometimes. It depends. Things look different by artificial light. Some paintings seem to crave for it the moment you conceive them. I th
ink of others in terms of daylight.’

  Ah, this was it. ‘You’re an artist, then?’

  ‘Yes. I paint.’

  ‘Go on! I never met a real professional artist!’ The grocer wasn’t quite sure how to take it. ‘Can you make a livin’ at it? Looks as if you can,’ he answered himself, because the good, if neglected suit, and imported overcoat, were there as evidence.

  ‘I’m not interested in business,’ the painter said, ‘but can make enough for my purpose—which is painting. I can even cut a dash if I want to. And I sometimes want to.’

  It looked strangely frivolous as he shrugged at his own desire, like women the grocer had seen through windows shrugging off their own reflections in the glass: not that this man appeared to have anything of a woman in him.

  ‘Yes,’ he was saying, ‘they’re buying me—almost as if I was groceries.’ He glanced at the grocer, who didn’t know whether to defend his trade or accept a compliment. ‘A couple of years ago London and New York began to take notice. So poor Maurice Caldicott was vindicated. He was my agent—and friend—a dealer who took me up, and stuck to me—for the wrong reason, I found out.’

  ‘What reason?’ asked the grocer, though facts interested him more than motives.

  ‘He was in love with me.’

  ‘What—a man?’

  ‘Why not? He was a human being, and human beings aren’t allowed to choose what they shall love: woman, man, cat—or God.’

  The grocer might never have listened to a more seductive argument. ‘That’s an idea I never thought of, and now you put it like that I don’t believe I chose my wife. I thought I did. Oh, I wonder ’oo I would ’av loved if I’d been allowed to choose!’ His mind scarcely dared clothe the abstraction with flesh.

  ‘My friend Caldicott died a couple of years ago, after what they call “a long illness”—in agony. In the last days of his vivisection he told me he had never held my unkindness against me, because he considered anybody in any way creative needs a source of irritation. He was happy to think he had provided me with just that.’

  ‘What did he die of?’ The grocer felt guilty asking a question he could answer himself, but he would have been ashamed to have caught the other’s attention.

  The artist bloke didn’t notice. ‘I wish I could remember Maurice more distinctly. He was too pale. I used to find him insipid. He might have been a saint. But it’s easier to visualize the devils than the saints.’

  Mr Cutbush would have had difficulty in visualizing either, and feared his companion might descend again into some confused private hell.

  At least the artist had got up from the bench; his figure in the moonlight overawed the grocer, who became squat, pursy, apologetic: not that he wasn’t as good as anyone else.

  ‘Bet you have a good time when you paint a picture,’ he smiled up, showing ingratiating teeth. ‘Bet you’ll go ’ome and paint a picture of all this—all this moonlight. I’d like to see what you make of it.’

  ‘A great white arse shitting on a pair of lovers—as they swim through a sea of lantana—dislocating themselves.’

  It was the sort of joke an educated person could afford to make. The grocer laughed, of course, but wondered whether he wasn’t being made to laugh at himself.

  ‘Pleased to have met you,’ he said, holding out his hand as in the beginning, to round the meeting off. ‘You won’t have lived long enough in the neighbourhood to know I used to be a councillor. But resigned. Yairs. Business and family obligations.’ He bent forward to pick up the pencil he had been playing with, and dropped: it was of the blunt kind worn behind the ear.

  When he looked up the artist was already moving off: sloppy-elegant walk; not unlike a normal person if you hadn’t heard him throwing off like a Roman candle: all talk.

  There was another outburst of strangled laughter from the wasteland.

  The unusual encounter, the feel of dew along the bench, his own blind thoughts still nosing after his new friend’s electric suggestions—didn’t remember to get his name out of him to tell the wife—had left the grocer with the shakes. He began recklessly, in spite of the lamp-post in the near distance, to expose himself, then to masturbate at the lantana. Yairs. All this talk of creation. He sat hypnotized, watching the seed he was scattering in vain by moonlight on barren ground.

  The painter looked back once, but only very briefly, at what he already knew; it was already working in him.

  6

  Caldicott had said in the beginning: ‘You can’t possibly live in it as it is, dear boy. I couldn’t, anyway. The furntire’s too ugly: too many knobs. There’s too much stained glass. I couldn’t live with someone else’s furniture: that’s what it remains when you take it over holus-bolus with a house.’

  He had already developed the yellow tinge which intensified towards his death. ‘That’s what I think. But you, Duffield, are different.’ Caldicott laughed; his behaviour apologized to others for the effort he was making.

  It still surprised Duffield to hear anyone address him by name, but he showed no sign of this in his considered answer. ‘The furniture doesn’t put me off. I’ve always lived with other people’s furniture, except for a table I made myself at Ironstone. I think I’ll learn something from living with this lot.’ He kicked out at random and struck a finicking rosewood leg.

  The table at Ironstone, solid in appearance, but unstable on acquaintance, was too painful to think about. He had kept the curtain of hair tightly drawn in front of her face, for fear he might catch sight of one of the transformation scenes.

  The house in Flint Street he had bought cheap from a distant cousin of the deceased owner anxious to be rid of an embarrassment. The deceased had lived on in it many years after her father, a retired produce merchant, died. The house was at least spacious, and in the days of the produce merchant, who built it, must have had pretensions. Urns still stood on the parapet, and iron lace luxuriated. Gutters, on the other hand, had melted into festoons, and the split and rusty down-pipes gushed whenever there was a deluge.

  A lot would have to be done about the electric wiring; he would see to it in time. Some of the rooms were without wiring at all. On the upper floor, where the daylight poured in for painting, there was a single electric bulb on the end of a long flex to be carried after dark from room to room. He would have to improve on that, too.

  But from the beginning, in spite of its imperfection and disrepair, he had a secret passion for his house. Nobody would invade this one, on the corner of Flint and Brecon Streets. In that quarter many of the street names were Welsh: Rhoose, Lavernock, Dolgelly, Jones. The masked houses had a secretive air which didn’t displease him: he wasn’t one of those who resented lowered eyelids, for he had usually known what lay behind him.

  The back staircase to his house opened on Chubb’s Lane. Here the clothes-lines and corrugated iron took over; ladies called to one another over collapsing paling fences; the go-carts were parked and serviced, and dragged out on shrieking wheels. In the evening the young girls hung around in clusters, sucking oranges, sharing fashion mags, and criticizing one another’s hair as though they had been artists. There was a mingled smell of poor washing, sump oil, rotting vegetables, goatish male bodies, soggy female armpits, in Chubb’s Lane.

  The two faces of his house complemented each other; one taken away might have upset the balance: together they made what was necessary for his fulfilmelt and happiness. Though what was happiness? Painting—even taking into account its agonies and failures. And who could define balance? Probably all the inhabitants of Chubb’s Lane and nine-tenths of Flint Street considered him a crank, but had been prepared for crankiness by the former owner of Number Seventeen. After a couple of years, when it was realized he would pay his bills like anybody respectable, and had neither seduced young girls nor buggered little boys, he was accepted by the neighbours with smiles which, if not exactly warm, were the politest any of them could muster. They got used to him standing, afternoons, at his upper-back sun-drenched w
indow over the lane, or on the sagging balcony of the upper front, where an increasing araucaria shaded his familiar face with menacing black and flesh-green. None of them would have known they were his daily bread, and that when he retreated suddenly into the rooms where they had never been, it was because he could postpone the moment no longer: he had submitted their blander substance to the acid of his own experience, and must now begin, often resentfully, always compulsively, to paint.

  To the neighbourhood he was, sort of, the Artist. As they didn’t understand what it amounted to, some of them generated spasms of hate; but they couldn’t direct it, or not for long: he had become part of the landscape, like the iron railings and the gas meters. Because he was what you might have called handsome, there were girls who would have liked to develop a crush, if there hadn’t been something which prevented them. In one light he was their admitted possession, their almost pride, in another as shameful as some of their submerged thoughts. He was referred to as Old Hurtle and Turtle before he had begun noticeably to shrivel. Few of them would have cared to run the gauntlet of his company walking from the tram stop. The flintiest granny of the neighbourhood might have been reduced to silence and little-girlhood by one who was not, as they admitted, old of limb or feature, but who must have been born older than any of them could aspire to be. So they preferred to avoid situations in which they might be reminded of their inability to solve his queer conundrum.

  Nor did it occur to him to help them in a relationship which was above words.