The Vivisector

by WHITE, PATRICK

  ‘Why, Boo,’ he said when she stood beside the bed, ‘what sort of party have you come from?’

  For Olivia Davenport was dressed in a man’s black suit, its austerity barely holding out against the luxury of her figure. Over her travesty she was wearing a long bottle-green cloak kept together at the throat by a silver chain. A shaving brush stood erect at the back of her Borsalino.

  She began hectoring at once: ‘This is no laughing matter, Hurtle.’ Certainly she was dead pale, but a pallor which might have been assisted. ‘Hero has almost killed herself. She didn’t want you to be told, but I felt you ought to be—as you drove her to it.’

  ‘Where is she?’ On all fours, he had begun to search for his lost shoes.

  ‘At her house. She telephoned. Fortunately I was free to go.’

  As he was groping amongst the fluff and splinters, Olivia told how Hero had tried to open her veins.

  ‘If she had succeeded, you would have been responsible. Wouldn’t you?’ It was her pleasure to rub it in.

  ‘If she had wanted to succeed, she would have,’ he said rather wearily putting on his shoes. ‘Only then she wouldn’t have been able to indulge herself on the telephone.’

  Olivia didn’t gush tears, but wilted somewhat inside her drag; what she said sounded soggy-nosed: ‘Always the people one loves most end up the most unlovable.’

  ‘Has Hero let you down?’

  ‘Oh—Hero! Don’t be ridiculous—irrelevant!’ But Olivia herself had faltered into irrelevance: she couldn’t resist, at least with her eyes, foraging around for paintings.

  ‘What’s this?’ she gasped, though she might have known, and he didn’t bother to tell her she was bending over the reason for Hero’s false suicide.

  ‘Ohhh!’ she began moaning in crescendo, and here he was reminded of Hero, only Olivia’s was a contralto voice. ‘I wonder if you know how good you are? But of course you do! You’re too detached, too hateful, not to.’

  He had a strong desire to eat something before facing further hysterics.

  But Olivia turned on him. ‘You’ve made me drunk!’ She did actually appear to reel inside the swirling cloak. ‘May I kiss you for it, Duffield?’ She didn’t wait to be allowed. ‘If Hero had more taste, she might respect you as an artist though she can’t love you as a man.’

  Going downstairs he tried to remember what, if anything, he had in the fridge: while Olivia talked on about—love? art?—he couldn’t be bothered to work out which, according to Olivia, was which.

  ‘Don’t you agree?’ she called out.

  He called back: ‘Yes. Oh, yes!’

  ‘I don’t believe you were listening. What were you thinking about?’ she asked.

  ‘Cold sausage!’ he remembered in triumph.

  Olivia also remembered. ‘Poor little Hero!’ She began to suck her teeth and whimper. ‘Only a woman could understand her behaviour.’

  ‘Why,’ he asked, ‘did you go to her dressed up as a man?’

  Olivia slightly hesitated. ‘I look well in it,’ she said in an honest voice: then she added with a hard dry laugh: ‘And because women cling to their illusions—even after they’ve tried to kill themselves.’

  He had found the plateful of sausages. Under their film of fat, the cold cooked sausages were glowing: a milky, opalescent blue. He remembered from Mumbelong a dented baking-tin left out for cats, its dregs of milk transformed by the frost into a skin of bluish ice; human skins turning blue with cold, or gin; old men in particular, their veins, and foreskins from which the former brazen stream had dwindled to an anxious trickle.

  ‘How repulsive! Revolting!’ Olivia screamed, looking at the plateful of sausages and shuddering into her travesty cloak.

  He could only shake his head. He was tucking into the sausages, and in any case he could not have told her about, he could only show her, the bloom on blue. So he thrust the plate at her, and she did actually finger a sausage; after scraping off some of the fat on the edge of the chipped plate, she began to mumble on what might have been a giant lipstick she had made the mistake of buying.

  But this wasn’t the reason for her thoughtfulness, which finally she let out: ‘That painting, Hurtle—would you consider selling? I’d treat it with more respect than anybody else, and of course it would go, in the end, with the others, “to the public”.’

  Then, suspecting herself of tastelessness, she bit enormously into the sausage, and her face which that evening had shed its van Dongen chic for the gas-lit concavities of a Greco Christ, was further transformed, by strain, into a large, costive, powdered arse.

  So they stood: smiling, chewing, swallowing, half-communicating over the empty plate, in the grubby asbestos limbo which had served Miss Gilderthorp as a kitchen.

  All the way to Hero Pavloussi’s they remained in that state of half-cocked reality, neither life nor art, which is perhaps the no-man’s land of human failure. Olivia was driving a long, low-slung, bottle-green car, to match her cloak. She had taken off her man’s hat, and her woman’s hair blew at times darkly softly around her head, particularly when they took the corners. The silver mèche stood up like horns above her forehead.

  All the dark, Welsh named side-streets of the neighbourhood in which he seemed to live, were failed. Speed and the street-lamps left them looking the colour of brooding moss.

  His ‘success’ flared up at him only in the main thoroughfare, particularly in the garish windows of fruit-and-vegetable shops. If he had also experienced the daytime wilt, by night as the trams clanged and sang, swinging and lurching, the vegetable senses revived vertiginously.

  Olivia was forcing the dark-green car. At an intersection, a confusion of traffic held them up. ‘Oh, God!’ she protested, banging her rings on the wheel.

  By night he almost believed in invocation.

  They were easing past a jacked-up tram. The new blood was fermenting on the warm asphalt. Blood in the street made it impossible to envisage, at least for that moment, a murder, let alone a suicide, in a house.

  He and Boo were jerking jolting in the smooth car past the scene of the accident. It was close enough to become their own. They could see the sweat on her forehead below the line of frizzy hair—as the head lolled—in the real situation. Was it what somebody wanted? Or hadn’t wanted enough? but succeeded in bringing off.

  As they were pressing on, into a less congealed air, Olivia’s voice started a high flacker above the competing traffic. ‘My mother thought all suicides were immoral. She herself suffered a horribly prolonged old age. Her jewel-case and the deed-box were always within reach. The sheets she died in had been hemmed for her by her mother, to set her up when she married. It’s wonderful how material things used to last. I think it was that, more than anything, which helped the owners believe in God.’

  ‘They believed in themselves. That’s why,’ he shouted above the sound of speed.

  ‘The—why? Oh, bugger, I’ve taken the wrong road!’

  She began hauling on her mistake, hand over hand, down the choppy side streets, past the moored houses in which middling incomes were snoring and protesting. As for the occupants of the car, sheer intricate activity gave them a status and importance which made God unnecessary. Speed, after reducing your flesh, leaves you on equal terms with the natural forces which have replaced Him. It was exhilarating at least.

  Olivia Davenport steered them down the moonlit streets and finally out along the promontory where the Tudor mansion stood. The moon and a still night made the sea look more solid than the land.

  ‘There! I’ve done my duty!’ she said.

  The drive, their conversation, perhaps also their share in the past, had left Olivia with an expression both haggard and childlike.

  ‘Aren’t you coming in?’ he asked without wishing to encourage a witness of his reunion with Hero.

  ‘No,’ she gnashed. ‘I’ve said all I have to say to her; and don’t want to spoil things for you—darling.’ Looking along her nose at the dashboard of her car,
slightly smiling, she sounded complacent rather than vindictive.

  Dew was falling around them: on the enamelled surfaces of car and camellia bushes; on the sheet of sweating zinc which represented the sea. Boo seemed to expect him to kiss her. It was one of the bumping kisses of childhood, if cooler from the cool, metallic-tasting dew.

  She drove off, stamping on it.

  A long time after he had rung, the thin maid came to open, in a blue flannel dressing-gown, and hair he had only guessed at on previous occasions.

  ‘I’m sorry to trouble you,’ he said.

  She winced at him, and made it obvious she was doing a supreme favour—but might have enjoyed doing it.

  He decided to support the fiction of Madame Pavloussi’s departure for Greece. ‘I was afraid you might all have gone by now.’

  ‘Gone? I go with the house. And if anyone else is going, they haven’t spoke about it.’

  So the fiction was supportable.

  ‘Is she better?’ he asked more tentatively still.

  ‘Wasn’t ever sick. Not that I know.’

  They stood looking at each other a moment before her cartoon face began frowning for the sleep she had been torn out of.

  ‘She’s up there,’ she said, wincing and frowning and indicating with her head. ‘You’ll see the light on.’ Whatever else might rouse the hackles of her scepticism, she firmly believed in his adultery with the foreign woman.

  Left alone in the dark hall, he went up towards Hero’s light.

  She was lying stretched out in an attitude which looked studied but probably wasn’t. As sooner or later she would have had to produce her bandaged wrists, there was no reason why she shouldn’t expose them in the beginning; so her arms were arranged along her body, outside the sheet. For the same reason, there was no point in keeping her eyes closed. She had probably closed them instinctively on hearing his approach up the stairs, but decided against defence as he pushed the door wider open: the lids were raised to a degree where interest can still pass as apathy.

  Whether she knew it or not, she already had him at a disadvantage. In her moments of ignorance, lust, childishness, or recovering from the hysteria of a half-intended suicide, Hero’s eyes remained noble works of art. They couldn’t be connected with failures of the human mind or body; they were too lustrous, and dark.

  Because she could hardly explain the situation away, she used a convalescent tone of voice. ‘I am sorry. I am all the time trying to remember whether I have shut the street-door on leaving your house, Hurtle. It was worried me so much. If I did not close it, thieves could have broken in—to steal—the paintings.’

  ‘Don’t worry: I’m not yet in the stolen class; and if you hadn’t left the door open, I mightn’t have let in the visitor: I mean your emissary—Olivia.’

  ‘Did Olivia? I didn’t send her.’ She became more invalid, moving her head against the pillow, her lips paler. ‘Olivia is so devoted she cannot believe her friends might survive without her help.’

  Certainly Hero sounded helpless, but the white-bandaged wrists, in collaboration with her terra-cotta skin, reminded him that his delicate acrobat was only temporarily inert. As soon as he went to her the butterflies of tension were fluttering again under his fingers, the worm in him was raising its head. He wondered whether her conscience suffered as little as his on hearing the clash of teeth on teeth as they bit into the same fruit.

  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-G
od, 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.