He sat down on one of the benches towards the ferry’s bows. He was prepared for any kind of encounter: what he got was a man, probably as old as himself.
The man remarked that it was hot, but they would cool off when they sailed. The companion he had chosen for the voyage grunted and withdrew inside himself, erecting awnings over his eyes against what he might be about to endure. At the same time he was impatient for it: the hand supporting the long face was trembling; the sinews of the arm were tense all the way down to the blanched point of the elbow.
The new arrival dusted the bench with his newspaper. ‘Pretty smutty the seats get.’ He was smoking a well-matured, fuming pipe which erupted when he coughed. ‘Can’t be helped, I suppose. ’ The man laughed good-humouredly and proceeded to sit on his own half-charred tobacco crumbs.
His new companion was vaguely, disbelievingly soothed. It was the light, of course, and the smooth, glassy water as the ferry swam free of the wharf.
‘Just the morning for playing truant.’ Everything the smoker said was launched with a courtliness older than his years.
You couldn’t help looking at him: in his decent black suit and carefully dented hat, he was the kind that made you feel younger, and at the same time older, much older.
The man was unfolding his paper. ‘I’m a printer by trade,’ he explained, looking and not looking at the print he was holding. ‘A business of my own. But I’m lucky in employing a team of men I can trust under any circumstances.’ He straightened out the paper, to help him, it seemed, past a chokage possibly caused by emotion. ‘I won’t say it’s all truancy,’ he continued. ‘Duty, too. I make a point, every now and then, on a nice day, of visiting my young sister. She’s a polio victim—living at Manly—the air’s bracing. We’re very close, my sister and me,’ again he straightened the straight paper, ‘so it’s pleasure as well as duty, isn’t it?’ The man’s vulnerable, not quite educated voice broke abruptly off, and he turned to his companion as though appealing for approval.
You longed to give it, but didn’t know how to. If it had been possible to draw the printer’s attention to the elaborately careless design of gulls lashing and flashing in the ferry’s wake; but the man would have thought you crazy, or callous.
To bridge the unorthodox silence the printer asked: ‘Don’t you find at our age—I’d guess we’re roughly the same—a man grows closer to his family? Only natural. Provided there is a family, of course.’
‘A sister.’ Must have sounded too pinched, unnatural; then suddenly he wanted to add, and did: ‘My sister’s a cripple, too.’ He was almost panting.
‘Well, now,’ said the delighted printer, ‘isn’t that a coincidence? But not so bad she can’t get something out of life, I hope?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen her—not since before the war—the first one, that is. She’d left before I got back. Families can drift apart.’
His own contribution to banality made him feel elated, but the printer was obviously disturbed by the enormity in what he had been told. He had taken off his well-conditioned hat. He sat staring at the moving water.
‘War is a terrible thing,’ he said, paying his respects. ‘I was in it myself.’
He began to speak of Gallipoli, the blood and bowels of which were soon shimmering with the gentle radiance of a landscape for a rustic picnic; bodies cannoned off bodies in bursts of manly horseplay; the air vibrated with the strong tones of masculine friendship.
‘No, I wasn’t at Gallipoli,’ his companion had to admit.
France was mentioned, Flanders. The printer was entranced to exchange a few of the place-names which had crystallized in his memory. A single pearl of saliva had formed in one corner of his mouth.
‘I would like,’ he said, fumbling in his pocket, ‘to take the liberty—yes—of offering my card. Name’s Mothersole,’ he half-apologized. ‘Used to be ashamed of it as a boy.’
The recipient of the card stared at the name, and at the sound though unfashionable address. He stared longer than he might have, because he hadn’t a card to offer in exchange.
Mothersole, he could feel, was looking at him rather pointedly. ‘Because I’m inquisitive by nature,’ the printer laughed and admitted, ‘may I ask your name and line of business?’
Duffield said, ‘Duffield.’ His heart was beating like a drum; the voluptuousness of his forced confession was intensified by the flow of water around the ferry; he was almost intolerably happy to receive the trust and friendship of this rather boring, decent man.
‘“Duffield”,’ Mothersole repeated over sunken chin, ‘a good, solid, English name.’
At risk of ruining it all, Duffield confessed: ‘I’m a painter—an artist.’
The printer heaved round, shining with enthusiasm and his morning shave. ‘Well, now, if you’re an artist, I must try to interest you in a project I’ve had in mind. The idea,’ he lowered his voice for modesty’s sake, ‘is to print some little books for children—of unusual format—in the shape of animals, say—written by myself, and illustrated by some artist I haven’t discovered—till perhaps now!’
Duffield was glad of the printer’s card: he could continue staring at it.
‘Of course I don’t know—are you a successful artist?’ Mothersole asked.
‘I’m said to be.’
‘Then you won’t be interested. Forget about it.’ He turned to resettle himself, and at the same time half-changed the subject. ‘Any children? Are you married?’
‘No. No.’
Incredulity prevented the printer speaking for some time; then he said: ‘I’m a widower. My wife died at the end of the war—this second one. It was too much for her.’ He might have consoled himself watching the flow of water, but thought to ask: ‘Were you in the second war as well?’
Duffield laughed. ‘I wasn’t caught a second time; or rather, I took on some camouflage work. It didn’t last long. Because we didn’t see eye to eye, they decided I was mentally defective. Fortunately my lungs gave out. I developed pneumonia—twice in one year. You can imagine how thankful I was for those lungs—and my mental defects. The war years are too remote from art—from life, you might say—for any kind of artist. You have to get through them—intellectually, at least—the quickest way possible.’
He realized the effects his irreverence was having on his new friend Mothersole. As for himself, he was hurt because his words were not his own: they were forced out of him by some devilish ventriloquist, to help destroy what he should, in any case, never aspire to. Almost the only thing he and Mothersole could hope to share was the morning of radiant light and water.
‘I was in the second war,’ the printer murmured piously. ‘Not very actively, I must admit. I spent nearly three years sedentary, administering transit camps in the Middle East. I had to be in it—because of my boy.’
What if you had got a son, and the copy showed the same flaws as the original? Or worse still: if the copy had shown a flawless mediocrity? Mothersole at least was of a nature to forgive faults in the source of his fulfilment.
‘I lost my boy,’ he was telling. ‘But I have my grandson. That’s a consolation. It wasn’t enough for my wife, though. You might say she was another of the casualties of war.’
Now that they were crossing the Heads, the swell from the ocean was jostling the sturdy ferry: it had started rolling. Some of the passengers silently turned a greenish yellow; others tried to laugh their sickness off. Only the two incongruous friends or associates seated on a bench near the bows appeared unaware of any change in climate or course: except that the more disreputable figure leaned forward, as the ocean gale struck them, and was baring his teeth, still in a strangely unconscious way, as he spoke.
‘I wonder whether that’s really the reason she died. It’s difficult to know what people die of. For instance, I had a mistress. I took it for granted I’d killed her, because her husband wrote me a letter telling me straight out that I had.’
The printer looked startled a
t sound of a word he wouldn’t have dared, he had no need to, use. He might have re-lit his pipe, but continued clutching it by the bowl after a glance in the direction of the wind.
‘For a time I accepted my guilt: even though I kept telling myself she had used me as an instrument of self-torture. She was a very beautiful woman when she was least unhinged; but depravity could make her coarse, brutal. She was the most depraved woman I’ve ever met. It seemed she had to degrade herself for being unworthy of her husband-God—a rich old satrap, who drowned cats by the sackful—like other gods when they tire of them.’
Shrunk inside his clothes, the printer might have liked to shrink even further, into his private cosmos if it had still been attainable.
‘Well, he succeeded in making me believe I was the cause of his wife’s death. I couldn’t paint for several weeks.’ Better keep it at that level. ‘Then, at the end of the war, I had a letter from a woman friend of Hero’s telling me what really happened.’
‘Of who?’ The printer had wet his lips; he was inclining on his near buttock.
‘Hero. My mistress was a Greek.’
Mothersole could only shake his head, as though depravity had invaded the beaches, the mateship at Gallipoli.
‘This woman told me Hero had spent several of the war years in an asylum. She suffered a lot from malnutrition, like most of the Greeks during the German occupation. She used to talk about me in connection with what she called her “unsuccessful exorcism”: this woman Arta Baïla told me. Shortly before the end of the war, they moved Hero to a hospital—where she died of a cancer. The shortage of drugs made her death a particularly agonizing one.’
‘Mr Duffield, if this story is too painful—there is no need—’ the printer kindly suggested, his own face drawn with discovery.
‘So I didn’t kill her, as her husband said. She died of cancer.’
The gulls still wheeling in beautiful balance were diving for something, possibly sewage, in the ferry’s wake.
‘Or does one really know what sows the seed? Is cancer entirely a physical disease? Did I help kill by failing her? You see, we were never lovers. Oh yes, we fucked like animals; and I was fond, very fond of her; but I didn’t love her, I can see now.’
The more sheltered waters of the harbour could have been taking over, though there wasn’t any visible evidence yet. One particularly smooth gull flew so close Mothersole ducked.
‘Have you ever been in love?’
“Who? I?’ It was too incredible a question for the printer to understand at first. ‘For years of my life, Mr Duffield, I was a married man.’
‘Yes, I know. But you make it sound like a well-sprung bed. Isn’t love—more, shall we say—a matter of suffering and sacrifice? ’
Mothersole’s face might have looked pained if it had looked less bewildered. ‘I’ve had my fair share of that,’ he mumbled in rather a surly voice.
‘Yes, I suppose so. And I have my work.’
They were both pretty haggard, if not seasick like several of the others, after an unusually rough crossing of the Heads.
As they slid into smoother, sunlit waters, Mothersole took out a handkerchief to wipe the salt off his suit. ‘What sort of things do you paint?’ he asked.
‘Well! For some time now, tables and chairs.’
‘A funny sort of subject, if you don’t mind my saying so.’
‘Why? What could be more honest? I’m not talking about the gimcrack: there’s dishonest furniture, just as there are dishonest human beings. But take an honest-to-God kitchen table, a kitchen chair. What could be more real? I’ve had immense difficulty reaching the core of that reality, in I don’t know how many attempts, but I think I may have done it at last—or thought so until this morning: when everything died on me.’
‘How do you mean “died”?’
‘Exactly that. It no longer—in fact, none of the paintings of a lifetime—had any life.’
‘But once a picture is painted, how can it alter?’ Mothersole was not concerned about paintings: he might never have noticed one; he was distressed by a state of the human mind.
‘Paintings die like anything else, a great many with their creators, and this morning I realized, I think, that I’m already dead.’
They were slipping through a sea grown oily and passive, through broad bands of yellow sunlight, towards the solidly constructed wooden wharf. He would have liked to reach out and touch his temporary friend before the latter finally escaped: for Mothersole shared with the kitchen table that same commodious banality, the simple reality of which was so enviable, and at the same time elusive.
The printer was getting up. ‘Aren’t you coming?’ he asked, because it was polite to do so. ‘The gangway’s down.’
‘No. There’s no longer any reason why I should. I’d only waste an afternoon on the beach: drying up.’ He paused, because he scarcely dared: ‘And I may have got what I wanted.’
The printer’s rubber soles were beginning to withdraw him with matter-of-fact sounds of suction. ‘I shall remember our talk,’ he said. ‘You have my card—haven’t you?’ He might have liked to get it back.
The two men looked at each other, and smiled as each realized he would probably never meet the other again except in nightmares or moments of sentimental weakness.
For the return journey the ferry filled with the same kind of nondescript faces, if none was of the quintessential Mothersole. Their glances no more than flickered over an undesirable element: on the other hand, the sun in their spectacles could have accounted for this expression of distaste verging on apprehension.
As for the outsider, he no longer needed his Mothersole. His teeth grated as he regurgitated the nonsense he had talked while in the throes of rebirth: Hero’s death; his own; that of his paintings. (In his right mind, he never let himself be drawn into talk about his painting, just as he shied away from those who wished to discuss variations on the sexual act.) He remembered another occasion when he had risen from the dead, by seminal dew and the threats of moonlight, in conversation, repulsive, painful, but necessary, with the grocer Cutbush: and now he was born again by the grace of Mothersole’s warm middle-class womb.
Presently he went and stood at the stern. He took out the printer’s card. When he had torn it, he scattered the pieces on the water as Mothersole himself would have wished, if his ethos had allowed. Gulls fell rapaciously, swerved deceived, curving away. He continued watching the seed he had sown in the white furrow; some of it began at once to germinate, to reach such proportions his mind was already grappling with their sometimes exquisite, sometimes bitter fruit: particularly the apricot-coloured child-faces with their dark, crippled Doppelgänger.
Apart from Rhoda, who was ageless, why had he never painted a child? He had never desired to get one, but the work of art could be less of a botch. Sitting with his hands locked, he was fidgeting to create this child. Or more than one. Or many in the one. For after all there is only the one child: the one you still carry inside you.
So the light was exploding around him as they reached the Quay.
He walked home against an afternoon gale, climbing hills with a speed made possible by the impetus of his thoughts. When he let himself into the darkening house, he began at once to drag at switches. He ran, almost, thundering from room to room, bringing them to life. His despairs of that morning were vibrating on the walls, even the one he hadn’t faced for several months: the cancer glowed inside the monstrance of Hero’s womb as the wooden saints of Perialos raised her up, the sea coiling and uncoiling round the foreshore in its ritual celebration of renewal.
How could his unborn child fail to stir amongst these miracles of the risen dead?
8
It left him. He would sit whole mornings in the Sulka dressing-gown, a present from Olivia before the war. (For lack of ideas, he might have used the vision of his own tarnished splendour, but remembered another self-portrait.) He stood by open windows looking out, and faces looking up were immediately a
verted as though they had been hailed on: people never understood that desire is a kind of invisible hail. He continued looking, not so much out, as into himself. As the weather cooled off he exchanged the Sulka robe for an old matted woolen gown with droppings of porridge and condensed milk down the lapels. The gown had become an extension of himself; it wouldn’t be discarded. Sometimes he added to the patina dribbles of fresh milk, for he had taken to drinking it regularly; he told himself he liked it.
‘Why don’t you have it delivered, sir?’ asked the smallgoods girl, whose name was Maree.
He smiled. ‘It wouldn’t be worth it.’
‘Save you the trouble of having to remember,’ she complained, pouting for his shiftlessness, and his smile: the smile was too mysterious.
He used to drink the milk from the bottle at the open window. Then he began forgetting, and would find the milk had turned to curds. There was as sour smell in the scullery, of more than milk: of his own memory. He would pour the curds plopping hatefully out of the bottle, into the sink, and mash them down the hole. The stench shot up his nostrils.
He had prepared boards and a canvas or two, and made a number of drawings, but of faceless abstractions. They didn’t convey the joy he knew he was capable of expressing if desire and idea came together in him. On one occasion he drew a stiffly-wired bouquet of flowers, to which he almost succeeded in adding the face flowering at its heart. As it was, the stiff bunch remained too precise, rather sterile. Once he drew the head and shoulders of a boy, of silver outline, swimming in a sea of light or fleeces, but found to his disgust it was himself he had drawn from memory, the sulky still swaying through the dew-sodden sheep on the expedition to Mumbelong with Father. He destroyed the drawing. Whatever the accusations, he was not, he never had been, in love with himself: with his art, yes; and that was a projection of life, with the ugliness and cruelties, for which some of his critics held him personally responsible. He must have waited till now to create his late child because love is subtler, more elusive, more delicate.
The Vivisector Page 46