The Vivisector

by WHITE, PATRICK

  Occasionally he woke in such physical pain he was afraid his body might give up before he was ready. It was about this time too that he read in the paper the account of a Japanese youth of twenty or so, in whom an actual child was found growing: the slow-developing seed of his own unborn twin. On sleepless nights a thought began tormenting the elderly, ‘successful’ painter: had he been deluded into mistaking a monstrous pregnancy of the ego for this child of joy he was preparing to bring forth?

  He would lie sweating in the dark, from time to time groaning aloud. Why not? There was nobody to hear; till one night he became conscious of a presence. He felt for the switch of the electric bulb hanging over his bed. Near his feet a rat was sitting on the blanket. Neither he nor the rat stirred for several light-years: they could have been a comfort to each other. Then the rat turned, thumped the boards as he landed on them, not in fear, and slowly moved away, dragging his long tail into outer darkness.

  That morning began earlier than most. He slid out of bed, hunched, but slowly purposefully moving, in no way fretted by any of the worries of the night before. The light was silver, still only in tentative possession amongst the ink splashes and deeper pools of dark. He thought he saw something he must do to the archetype of a table he had painted several weeks back, but would wait till sunrise. Through the fringes of the araucaria, above the roofs of houses, the sea was stirring and glinting as though sharpening itself against itself. He too felt keen. There was a sound of billiards—no, milk bottles. Farting once or twice he went barefoot to drink some of the milk he had fetched from the smallgoods. (Ought to have it delivered, of course, as she said.)

  The earlier part of the morning he lingered over the opening of shutters, to enjoy the clear light which swilled out the rooms; he could even feel it; he could feel the light trickling down inside the gown, over his not unpleasantly frowsy skin. In this state he could have enjoyed most things. The sounds of morning were still thin, but precise. The voices of women calling to their children hadn’t yet been roughed up; the men hadn’t begun throwing their weight around.

  There was one room in his house for which he had never found a use: a small surplus parlour, with pieces of Miss Gilderthorp’s frailest palisander upholstered by this time in dust tones. The parlour led to the conservatory. Now when he opened the shutters, the light which entered, cold and pure, filtered through laurustinus and privet, increased the room’s spinsterish air.

  On the other hand, the derelict conservatory was already buzzing, murmuring, drowsing in a tousle of tranquil gold: it was a light reflected out of childhood, in which he should have been gorging on handfuls of stolen crystallized cherries instead of aimlessly trampling around, dragging the dust off aspidistras with the skirt of his old frowsty gown.

  It was while he was in the conservatory that the front doorbell started ringing. It rang too long, too hectically for normal circumstances: it made him spin round once or twice on his heels before going to investigate. He wondered if it mattered that his feet were bare; he was, in any case, naked inside his dressing-gown.

  She asked: ‘Is this Mrs Angove’s place?’ looking angrily ashamed.

  She was carrying a white-enamelled billy, with a chip out of the lid about the size of a thumbnail. The lid grated slightly as she waited for his answer. It was the billy, he felt, which was making her angry.

  ‘No,’ he replied, from a long way back in his gummed-up throat.

  She was wearing a long thick perfect glistening plait: the reason why his voice had taken so long to rise to the surface.

  ‘No. She doesn’t live here. I can tell you where you’ll find her, though.’ It was fortunate he could.

  All the while the rather leggy child was frowning and twitching. Her impatience made the billy rattle.

  ‘You see that house down there—the beige one on the opposite side—about six away—fairly narrow?’

  The girl only made a breathing sound.

  ‘But you must,’ he insisted. ‘It’s unmistakable: the one with the mock-Romanesque windows.’ Showing off to a child.

  She seemed disgusted rather than impressed. She certainly wasn’t frightened. She had that clear skin which mottles: it had mottled up the arms as far as the short, crisp sleeves, and up her long stalk of a neck; only at the nape, where the plait began, the skin remained mysteriously opaque.

  ‘That is where Mrs Angove lives,’ he said, he hoped, benevolently, while suspecting it sounded pompous. ‘Lucky I know Mrs Angove, isn’t it? And was able to help.’

  Mrs Angove was rather a cranky old woman (perhaps not so old) with a hip.

  ‘Is she sick?’ he asked, coming down the steps as the child descended.

  ‘I don’t know. She’s a friend of my mother’s.’

  ‘Anyway, you’re taking her something good. Soup—is it?’

  Just then the child caught her toe in a crack in the path, and some of the soup slopped out of the billy and splashed her skirt.

  ‘Oo-er!’ she shouted in a different voice: she probably had several. ‘I’ve made a mess of me dress!’

  Very little of a mess.

  ‘Would you like to clean it up?’ he murmured without confidence.

  The child didn’t answer, but slid through the half-open gate and marched towards Mrs Angove’s, her walk deliberately wooden, holding the billy well away. The heavy plait hanging down her back barely swung.

  He went upstairs and began to draw the head of a girl: of about twelve? thirteen? fourteen? He was no good at guessing the ages of the young, perhaps because age wasn’t the straitjacket the well-intentioned would have liked it to be. In any case, the drawings he was making, one after the other, were not necessarily of the child who had come to the door, except for the plait; that was identifiable. Sometimes the drawings petered out in line: arabesques, not entirely frustrated, nor yet voluptuous. In one instance he wound the plait into a formal coronet with which he invested the head, and at once saw his mistake; he had made her a woman too soon: the eyes which he had left sightless on purpose began to stare with an expression he found offensively knowing. It was the mystery of pure being, of unrealized possibilities which fascinated him in children’s eyes.

  Come to think of it, there were few children with whom he had been intimately acquainted: only himself—and Rhoda, each of whom was born old. Still, you didn’t have to know them: not if you knew.

  That evening he decided to put on one of his suits from an earlier period to go to the party of a Mrs Mortimer he had met at an exhibition of paintings and vowed at the time not to meet again. Now, to escape a state of mind balanced between elation and dread, he found himself craving for a world he had hardly entered since before the war, and even then hadn’t cared for.

  Mrs Mortimer lived in a ground-floor flat overlooking a private beach. He saw, to his disgust, he was the first arrival. From Mrs Mortimer’s point of view, it couldn’t have turned out better if she had arranged it that way herself.

  ‘Fancy, Hurtle,’ she said, though they had spoken for no more than ten minutes at the exhibition, ‘I didn’t imagine for a moment that I’d tempt you—with my boring old party, I mean!’

  ‘Nothing better to do,’ he mumbled, because he had been caught, and there seemed no alternate answer.

  ‘Oh dear, you do live up to your reputation!’ Mrs Mortimer was so delighted she came and rubbed her cheek against his.

  She was a stocky woman with a thyroid throat. During his life, she had suffered from her husband’s good looks and roving eye. He had also left her hard up, she told her new acquaintance at the exhibition. Perhaps this was why she was now blushing all the way up her goitrous throat: her flat cried her poverty in accents of discreet luxury.

  Mrs Mortimer was one of those who collected paintings. ‘Not a single one of yours, darling!’ It made her arch. ‘But that’s understandable: I’m a poor woman.’ By this time she was not so much referring to fact as taking it for granted he had been educated in the right conventions.

  �
��What do you think of this Pascoe?’ she asked, manoeuvring him past a Modigliani she must have forgotten. ‘I can’t judge him objectively, of course. Nobody who’s fallen into the bastard’s hands should even try to.’

  She was not looking at Pascoe’s painting, but at the centre button of Duffield’s shirt, while scratching herself, slowly and thoughtfully, with an index finger, between her breasts. At the exhibition he had suspected Mrs Mortimer of wanting to have an affair with him to confound her handsome, late husband. He was conscious of vibrations now: if they were weaker on this occasion, certainly he felt pretty sexless after the early morning start and those sheets of still directionless drawings.

  ‘Someone’s arriving,’ Mrs Mortimer said, taking his hand and squeezing it, ‘and I haven’t had time to tell you about them. Don’t you find a dossier is a comfort?’ Was she going to be magnanimous and serve him up to someone else? ‘I do hope you won’t be bored by all these silly people,’ was as much as she could whisper; nor was he able to explain he aspired to be a tabula rasa, not a stud.

  Mrs Mortimer’s party was so much the same in different clothes he wondered at what date the archetypal party had been held. The ladies screamed, or cooed, from stylized positions which suggested they were somehow out of joint, eyes straying, anointed eyelids fluttering as they wore the few cultivable topics, either marvellous or ghastly, to further shreds. The men were in general solider, not to say heavier: patches of light were reflected in their well-groomed shoulders and flanks, and you half expected a jingle of brass when their hostess, an adept at flicking the social whip, drove them straining from their last objective to the next.

  One of the husbands, a mature grey with a hint of the investor in his wall eye, came up as though he would like to conspire. ‘Painting anything lately, Hurtle?’ He mentioned that his name was ‘Ian’.

  What could you reply? Am I breathing? Am I shitting? You mumbled instead: ‘No. Not for the moment. Nothing to mention; ’ before turning your back.

  It was difficult to remember why he had come. In his dated clothes, and corroded mask, he had reached a stage where he was at home only with objects; so he began to wander deliberately about the room: a pursuit they were content to leave him at. (It was enough to have him amongst them, to be able to tell afterwards how he had failed to control his language, his wind: Really rather horrid, my dear, when I’d always understood he was a charmer.) So he wandered through the congested room. There was a daguerreotype, with the features of Mrs Mortimer herself, of an old lady brutally lined, managing her best dress against a potted palm and painted clouds. On a full-dimensional table nearby stood a bowl of faintly pink, faintly scented, single roses, into which he stuck his nose, clumsily, unashamedly.

  ‘Hurtle, darling, here is something which may interest!’ Mrs Mortimer came over to announce in a muted blast of gin. ‘There are two young women across there, both attractive, both intelligent, and all of them married. What more could you ask for?’

  As she spoke, she was coaxing the palm of his hand with a finger expertly bent; while the two young women on the opposite side of the room, perhaps sensing they were on the market, smiled coldly at their drinks. Mrs Mortimer was not deterred by coldness from any direction: her role of procuress was more important than her unfulfilled sexual desires.

  ‘Somebody told me Olivia Davenport’s in town,’ said a plain and shiny American girl he had been avoiding.

  ‘Darling old Boo! Yes. Isn’t she adorable? She’s begun to feel the weather, but I’m expecting her to totter thisaway.’ Mrs Mortimer tossed her mane like a skittish filly.

  ‘Well now, won’t that be a pleasure—a pleasure renewed! We met last winter in Nassau. She’s the sweetest, loveliest person. Age hardly matters—I mean, you can be as old as stone if you’ve got that special radiance Mrs Davenport has!’

  The American girl had grown that much shinier for the recollecting her experience in Nassau. Her orange canvas, college-style hat played up to the shininess: so dowdy and confident her connections must have been of the best.

  He couldn’t wait to see the Little Old Lady the American girl thought she had met; while Mrs Mortimer, always patting her party along, started muttering cynically: ‘Don’t you realize you’re standing beside Hurtle Duffield the famous painter?’

  ‘Oh, no! Not Duffield!’ squealed the American girl. ‘Whoever it was can’t have felt more excited to come all this way and discover Australia! The man on board who gave the talks told us about you, sir—oh, about Dobell, and Drysdale, and I dunno who—but Duffield!’ From squealing, she changed her tune and her expression to suit a few drawn-out cello-notes: ‘Mr Duffield, I’d like you to know it’s the most important moment of my life—intellectually, and spiritually.’

  He could hear his own breath expiring, feel the flesh shrivelling on his bones, before sticking his nose into the bowl of roses he had more or less appropriated; they had the rare scent of tea roses; all the hairs were distinct, like the hairs on young, golden skin.

  It was most opportune that Mrs Davenport should arrive, though with so little thunder her entrance might have gone unnoticed: in fact her whole attitude implied she was only ‘looking in’. Though somewhat blanched, she was not all that altered. Her face, perhaps, had been remodelled in white kid, to which had been added a pair of wattles, now quivering with motion or emotion, as she advanced, still erect, into the room, eyes apparently amazed inside their circlets of blue, steps short and tentative: Olivia could afford to play the timid cassowary.

  Mrs Mortimer hurried to rub against her darling Boo. Then, in the hush, she began to trumpet, holding her glass of gin as though a torch to show off her prize: ‘Boo, this is Sharman. You know Sharman. She’s here from Texas.’

  ‘Oh, yes—Sharman.’ Mrs Davenport’s white-kid cheek twitched into a dimple; she tweaked her rope of legendary pearls; she was wearing a little hat: a humble, ugly, smart hat.

  ‘And Hurtle Duffield,’ Mrs Mortimer followed up.

  Mrs Davenport offered her fingers, but he couldn’t arrive at their natural shape for the gloves she was wearing: of a coarse suède, of a blinding, virgin white; nor did she expend any words on him, though everybody was waiting for them. Instead, she pursed up her blood mouth, and narrowed her eyes, so that all those little milky wrinkles appeared at the corners. Then she lowered her chin, as though she had the wind, and raised it again, after quickly conquering that same wind. She barely whispered: ‘Hurtle—’ before petrifying; and everybody watching the two stone figures knew for certain they had been lovers.

  At this point Mrs Mortimer skilfully separated her star guests, and began to fling ‘Boo darling’ round the room. Something clicked into place, and Mrs Davenport remembered her first, her childhood language. She was gargling down amongst her pearls: her teeth showed, and like the pearls, the teeth were real, if tiny. It occurred to him on catching sight of the teeth that Boo Hollingrake still contained the kernels of reality, and that she must be able to admit to it, if only once, since she dared expose her fragile discoloured old-childish teeth.

  But there wasn’t an opportunity, and he continued straying amongst the objects in the impoverished Mrs Mortimer’s room. He thought: Never have I gone farther in the wrong direction, when that chipped billy, the lid, did it have a blue circumference, which might be why the chip suggested an act of fortuitous brutality, like a thumbnail hit by a hammer. In his distraction, he always ended up at the bowl of single roses, each with its tuft of slender, golden hairs.

  At least nobody else would want to intrude on his peculiar, immoral, not to say frightening, colloquy with a bowl of roses, unless it were somebody equally peculiar and out according to the code of Mrs Mortimer’s set.

  ‘Duffield? You don’t, or won’t, know me.’

  It was—not at once, but by degrees—Shuard the music critic, whom he hadn’t seen for years, and never more than briefly. Shuard’s hair, the most noticeable thing about him, grew in waves of steel wool in which the Gumption was visibl
e; the unctuous pores round his nose were still pricked out in black; his hips and buttocks had perhaps increased in suavity. Otherwise he was a nondescript man who lived by journalism and a sprinkling of knowledge, and dining out: he could tell a dirty story better than most.

  ‘I’m not accusing you,’ Shuard said. ‘I’ve been on what I call my sabbatical from the Evening Star. But have now returned to the fray,’ he added, looking the room over.

  Duffield answered in the same vein. ‘Peggy Mortimer has a bargain or two: intelligent, charming and safely married.’ He clamped his jaws: an alliance with Shuard, even against cabbage stalks, was something of a betrayal.

  Shuard laughed his brown-gravy laugh. ‘All a bit long in the tooth, I’d say. I spent a delightful winter in Berlin: every night a little girl on either side. Every night two different little girls, mind you—only to warm the bed, of course.’

  Have to laugh. If you could have shaken Shuard off: but he clung like cobwebs, in grubby festoons; so you began to match grubbiness with grubbiness. ‘One advantage of old age: the hot-water bottles put on flesh, and begin to breathe.’

  Shuard laughed so appreciatively he had to use his handkerchief; as soon as he was disengaged he started off on a different, though only a slightly different tack: ‘I can remember—years ago—dining with the old girl over there.’

  ‘The which?’

  ‘The Sugar Fairy—the Davenport. Oh, it was a slap-up affair: a Greek tycoon, with a wife. I don’t remember anything about it, except that you took the wife down to the water while the old boy was learning a game of marbles. I’ve sometimes wondered what happened.’

  ‘Oh?’

  He did manage to shed Shuard, by practically rubbing him off on the corner of a table, and there on the other side Olivia Davenport was standing, holding up her throat, in conversation with a Santa Gertrudis bull.

  It didn’t prevent her turning at once, and asking most anxiously: ‘Yes, Hurtle?’ An extra white-kid chin appeared: she was obviously frightened, as though she might have to face a topic they had skirted before.