The Vivisector

by WHITE, PATRICK

  Just then Cecil Cutbush steamed out from behind glass, trying to be a grocer, and churchwarden, and the Progress Association and ex-councillor all rolled into one. ‘Well, Mr Duffield, you’re looking a picture! A living picture!’ Still a personage, he laughed for his appropriate remark; but at once the queen in him began to queer things: realizing the personage had crushed the wrong, the stroked hand, Cec was reduced to sensitivity. ‘So sorry—so clumsy.’

  And Mrs Cutbush was disgusted, less by the clumsiness and sensitivity than the interruption. She would have liked to stay, perving undisturbed on a great man to whom she had given suck that day on the pavement, almost sucked up into her womb as her own baby and lover-husband.

  Unluckier for the grocer’s wife when Mrs O’Hara came clacking hard towards her wanting the sago and split peas.

  The noise, the people’s inquiring faces, were becoming diabolical. Mrs O’Hara had a hairy raspberry on one nostril. But worst, the needles at work, in the dead flesh as well as the live. Your mind was just about popping out: the lid wouldn’t hold it if you didn’t didn’t.

  Stagger on. Or back. Sisters are colder.

  But the grocer insisted: ‘I’ll walk some of the way, Mr Duffield’; although he was wearing his apron and pencil.

  Cutbush could have been waiting all his life to make a declaration of love. First he looked over a shoulder to be sure his wife had taken Mrs O’Hara inside. At least he had learnt one lesson: he didn’t attempt to touch; their affair was going to be ‘spiritual’.

  As you shambled endlessly in the direction of Flint, the grocer tiptoed in company. He was still a large man, if no longer upholstered, and his plush vanished. Age, it seemed, had made Cutbush fluid: he moved like plastic with half its volume of liquid inside. Coming at them from the sea, the wind agitated his wide trousers: they were flapping like flags, or a skirt.

  For his great unburdening, the grocer was beginning to choose the unsaleable delicacies among words: exotic stock which had gone dusty rusty on his frustrated shelves, oozing oils from Palermo, rancid juices from the Côte Basque. He licked his lips.

  ‘Mr Duffield—’ he selected the name, and held it up—‘I have never had an opportunity to tell you how much it has meant to us—to us—our comparatively small, but no less avid minority—to have you living in our midst.’ His nostrils enjoyed it the more for smelling slightly off. ‘Our confraternity may be under-privileged, and despised by some, but no one can deny that we appreciate the Higher Things. To walk past your home is, for us, a deeply moving experience. Flint Street has become a place of pilgrimage. ’

  Oh Lord oh lard lard if you could only reach Flint your own pilgrim seize the cold pure rose by her thorns before being larded up in homogrocerdom.

  ‘You remember the night we inadvertently met at The Gash? When the moon came up? I was severely troubled at the time, by conflicts between my home life and my—temperament. I often wondered afterwards whether the distinguished, anonymous—and handsome—stranger, had noticed any signs of stress. Then, several years later, a malicious individual I happen to be connected with, explained a certain painting to me. I was horrified—which is what Malice had been hoping for—till suddenly I realized that, unbeknownst to myself, I had been consummated, so to speak!’

  Oh Lard! The grocer’s whispers were thunderous, his words working like sheet lightning.

  ‘It was more than that. It was like as if, after attending regular service for years in a not very eyesthetical church, the same surroundings was illuminated by a—religion!’

  O Lord save us it was the grocer who was going to have the next stroke. Scuttle scuffle away to Rhoda the cold rose a sister.

  ‘Of course I never told anybody that we’d sort of given birth. I never pointed out to the wife that barren ground can sometimes be what the seed needs. I suppose I’m what people would call a coward.’ The grocer didn’t attempt to hide the drops which were beginning to ooze. ‘I’ve often thought Judas must have been of a homo-sex-ual persuasion.’ Poor bugger didn’t seem to know the thing had caught on.

  Anyway, now that all was said, the unsavoury disciple flapped to a standstill. Murk couldn’t obscure Luv: the big dope was shining with it.

  ‘Forgive me, Mr Duffield, if any indiscretion on my part has embarrassed you. I wouldn’t want—never ever—to be an embarrassment to the one I I I.’ He couldn’t make it.

  Piteous what they lay on your altar, itself a rickety affair, so much shoved out of sight, from bottles of cheap port to unconfessed putrefying sins.

  ‘Grateful for our interesting conversary, Mr Utbus. Mustn’t be late for my lunch. My sister—my—my Rosa—will be hungry.’

  If you knew how, you could use words to get out of anything unpleasant, or important, which was why social intercourse had been invented.

  Rhoda said, ‘Where have you been? I’d begun to worry. You knew I was planning something hot for luncheon.’

  ‘Yes, Rhoda.’ The exercise or intercourse made the words feel almost normal on his tongue. Had to edge into his chair though, accommodate his dead side. That done, he said, and again it felt smooth: ‘I’ve been intercoursing. I had a nice talk with your friends Mr and Mrs Cutbush.’

  Rhoda appeared upset. ‘What about?’ The cubes of fibrous chuck almost shot out of the casserole; the lengths of half-cooked carrot might have bounced if she hadn’t been prudent. ‘What about, Hurtle?’ Naming him made her sound angrier.

  ‘About business. And religion. And sex.’

  Rhoda went a thinned-out white. ‘I hope you haven’t been overdoing it,’ she said. ‘I shall be the one to blame, because I’m responsible for you.’

  On the contrary he felt so strangely normal, perhaps thanks to poor old Cec Cutbush his lover. The lip subtle, almost supple enough, it could begin to pour at any moment. If he had had a sister Rosa of creamy pork flesh enormous Karl Druschki bubs he might have committed comfortable incest and painted a pagan goddess instead of looking for a god—a God—in every heap of rusty tins amongst the wormeaten furniture out the window in the dunny of brown blowies and unfinished inscriptions.

  Ah, he saw! He knew what he must tell Archangel Lethbridge the art student and footwasher. He didn’t throw his fork, but let it fall in the soupy mess in front of him. The fork clanged against the plate.

  ‘What is it?’ Mumbling through the blue-grey gristle, Rhoda frowned furiously.

  ‘Eureka!’

  ‘I—what?’ She hadn’t received a classical education.

  He got away, laughing at what he had found and what he must do.

  Rhoda was livid. No Frau Druschki, more like one of those Japanese pellets which need a tumbler of water to flower. In other days, he might have exploded the variations on Rhoda’s paper rosette opening into an underwater rose. He couldn’t now. There was no time for trifles.

  While the torments of the body persisted, mind was no longer the irreparable mosaic, thought began fitting into thought, there were less shattering bursts of frustration: he might almost have hit on the secret of the maze. Even so, it would probably never become too easy. Nor would the dead arm, the dragging leg, give up their electric life although officially written off. He developed a technique of presenting himself sideways when acquaintances couldn’t be avoided. Human turnips frightened him at times, themselves obviously frightened by the company of what they considered half a vegetable. (How electrified they would have become if he could have introduced them to half the shocks in that so-believed vegetable arm.) Rhoda frightened him most. She understood him so little after all, he began to wonder whether he understood Rhoda, whether he might catch sight of a different person standing naked in the ruins of the conservatory. And the gentle Don, particularly when you caught him looking too discreetly at the paintings: what was he seeing? Was he falling into the same trap as Cutbush?

  But none of these characters, whether fictitious or actual, would matter in the end: they would scatter like tarot cards during the long moment of the Second Fall. Thi
s was his great fear: that he would find himself parcelled again on the pavement before he had dared light the fireworks still inside him.

  So he started preparing: stretching out his ‘good’ arm through the never ending electric rain. He must perfect his speech too, that nobody should misinterpret his spoken intentions. So he sat darting his lizard’s tongue. He caressed his lip perpetually, to correct a smile which would never have expressed his joys, and only leered boozily at disaster. If he was drunk, it was a deep, secret intoxication.

  On a certain evening while a black wind from the Antarctic was threatening not only the last of the ornamental urns on the parapet, but the whole cracked, reeling house, he was preparing to launch his rehearsed speech; when Don Lethbridge showed signs of forestalling.

  ‘Mr Duffield, I don’t see why you need me any more. There’s nothing any more that I can do for you.’ He began picking at the boards with the point of his long Turkish-Italianate shoe. ‘And I need the time. More than the money. Frankly, I can’t go on coming.’

  It brought on a cold sweat. It broke up the rehearsed speech into one of the old jigsaw puzzles.

  ‘But this is—un-sus-pected—Col—ridiculelse. When I’ve only begun to need you. Never told you. I wasn’t capable. The point—now—is.’

  ‘Okay, go easy, man—sir—Mr Duffield.’

  The disciple squatted beside the chair in his crackled, patent leather shoes. First time you had asked for anybody’s pity, and the request was granted. (Perhaps prayer would pay.)

  The boy continued squatting, in a patent leather martyrdom, kneecaps threatening to slit the strained cloth of his pants. ‘Okay, what is it?’

  Composure came more easily in such kind circumstances.

  ‘Well.’ A silver chain of anxiety still swinging, you saw, from your slob’s mouth. ‘My handkerchief is lost.’

  Don Lethbridge reached up his hand and swept the slobbery cobweb away. (Must remember Lethbridge is the other word for goodness.)

  ‘Well.’ Never felt so frank and purposeful, not to say businesslike: cunning. ‘You will buy me—Don—Don—several boards of—of hardboard.’ The number, the proportions, had to be worked out again since agitation had made him forget the carefully calculated mental sum.

  ‘But they’re huge!’

  ‘They have to be.’

  ‘What if they won’t get in through the doors?’

  Don Lethbridge, the simple saint, could bring about your destruction.

  ‘They must! Ease them in! Bring somebody—enough—to help. I’ll—I’ll—pay!’

  ‘Orright! Don’t do yer block! What else?’

  ‘Then you must prime the boards. Won’t you, Don? I—will—show you—exactly. Haven’t the strength for priming. For painting only. Take me my whole lifetime perhaps. Don? I am painting—in my mind—all the time. Now I have to teach my arm.’

  ‘And I reckon you’ll teach it, dear!’ Shooting upright, the archangel had come over so girlish: annunciation made this virgin spin on the balls of her Italianate feet, her floss of hair full of the glad news. ‘You can depend on me—now that I know.’

  The carriers forced the boards through the doorways, after long manoeuvring at unorthodox angles, more passionately up the stairs, under flakes of plaster, and once a whole fist of it. The stairs were reeking of cursing men with dewy armpits.

  Rhoda came out below. ‘What is it? What’s happening?’ she called up. ‘We can’t live at such close quarters and still have secrets.’

  Like hell you couldn’t.

  Rhoda was holding a handkerchief over her nose for fear of succumbing to drunkenness; while the men writhed struggling and thrusting upward with the boards.

  Finally Rhoda screamed: ‘What a bloody shambles, Hurtle! And all for what? To die of it? You’re mad, mad!’ She slammed the door and shut herself in the kitchen.

  The carriers were heaving inside their singlets. He didn’t mind what he paid them. They went down glancing chastely at the scads of notes they were holding.

  On his next visits Don Lethbridge primed the boards. Under further instruction he built a platform: something from which to attack the outer reaches of space. Ascent and descent were equally hellish, by way of solid enough steps, with a rail for the hand to haul on. The body protested, while the will drove; but none of the agonies would be proportionate to the rewards.

  The importance of his mundane occupation had given the virgin Don an Adam’s apple. Now and then he offered pieces of masculine advice. ‘Steady on, mate! Don’t wanter break yer neck before you get there.’

  He was right. Mustn’t dither. You could have been stroked with Parkinson’s disease as well.

  ‘Leave me, will you—please. Don? D’you understand? Thank you.’

  You had to throw overboard everything known good loving trusted which might interfere with the wretched trembling act of faith.

  When the archangel had left him, he sat with his hands between his thighs, his live hand holding his dead (or was it vice versa? he’d soon find out) this one hand pressed against his limp jack his aching balls.

  Finally he stood up. To mount. There was no alternative: his paints laid out on the table clamped to the rostrum. He drove, he dragged himself. And began with little niggles in the non-colours he still only visualized for his purpose. This would be a black painting, with only the merest entrance into a light which was dead white: all that he had experienced under the dead pressure of despair.

  So he was painting again, however painfully. Before he could contemplate his vision of indigo, he had to paint out the death which had stroked him. Some at least of the brush strokes, he recognized, were alive. His painfully electric arm performed extraordinary miracles; though not often enough. The white core had begun to glow, but there were the flat stretches leading to it.

  Disregarding her afflictions Rhoda had climbed the stairs: she was banging on the door. ‘Aren’t you coming, Hurtle? I’ve made us a nice fricasse of rabbit. People eat to live, you know. And they eat together because it’s sociable.’ When he didn’t answer, she shouted: ‘Then you are mad!’ She had got drunk on the smell of strong men the day the boards were delivered, and her drunkenness had lasted.

  ‘Oh—God! Go, fool!’

  He dragged himself down from his rostrum. But she didn’t expect him to open the door, and he didn’t: he was too full of his own failure; he sat and belched out a lot of superfluous air, listening in between to Rhoda clumping down the stairs trailing the rose- peony- camellia-flesh she couldn’t offer. All her men were dead to her: poor Rose, as withered as his once fluent arm, and its arrogantly hopeful substitute.

  At least she hadn’t watched the marionette jerking on his little wooden stage, failing in his act of faith. Don Lethbridge would have to know. He only came now when sent for. He would have to be fetched to manipulate the board. And slosh out the non-painting.

  Don said: ‘Yes, it’s a bit black. It’s a bit dead.’ Here was the beloved disciple as detached as the most brutal critic. ‘Mmmhh. Interesting in a calligraphic way.’ Then, as coolly as he had inflicted them, he set about healing the wounds. ‘The white’s beginning something, Mr Duffield. It’s sort of leading out somewhere. ’

  O God of mercy and straitjackets.

  ‘Will you take off my shoes, Don? Just tonight? I haven’t the strength.’

  When the pains from his affliction weren’t scourging him into trying to paint works he was still incapable of realizing, they were thrilling him with half-glimpsed visions, of an intensity only comparable with his experience on the pavement at the moment he was forced to surrender his will. However, he tried to persuade himself, his present compulsive, not to say convulsive, behavior wasn’t dependent on will-power as he had known it: by which he had been driven in the past, and by which he had bound others. He would never be able to rely on the little flickers and jerks generated by his dynamo to recreate what he perceived. He waited for the grace by which hints of it seeped out through his fingers, not of what he ac
tually saw but of what he was living, and knew: green-sickness of privet blossom; mildew-blue of its formal fruit; the blacker-green despair the araucaria had soaked up from the surrounding earth. Occasionally, when his arm failed him, he would slosh the unreceptive board with a stroke which, more often meaningless, sometimes pointed straight at the heart of the matter. At such moments he tremblingly believed he might eventually suggest—why not—the soul itself: for which the most sceptical carcases of human flesh longed in secret.

  Standing in the lower reaches, the archangel trumpeted up, but muted: ‘I think I’m beginning to see, Mr Duffield. It’s—it’s’—you weren’t sure, it could have been—‘beaut!’ A solemn vindication.

  Oh but at the same time you were so much scrabbled garbage waiting to be tossed into the pit.

  ‘Will you help me down, Don? I’m tired.’

  He was also the respected character whom age and illness had transformed into a national monument. Deputations arrived: by arrangement, it could have been. In any case, Miss Courtney the unfortunate sister had on her best dress to open the door. She conducted them to the plinth on which the tribute was laid.

  Honeysett came, with Sir Kevin and three guilty Trustees, dressed anonymously in business black. Evidently Honeysett had been chosen to play the official interpreter: it was he who spoke, to their accompaniment of grunts, restless eyebrows and whimsical or frightened smiles.

  A dark day outside and a roomful of listening furniture brought him quickly to the reason for their visit, ‘Sir Kevin—and the Trustees—feel you’ll be doing the gallery an honour by allowing us to hold a Retrospective of your work.’ The interpreter’s eyes had the glazed look of someone who may not have memorized the written word; so he laughed, and it deflated him. ‘I don’t expect you’ll object, Hurt.’

  The grunts and murmurs of the others weren’t so sure.

  At his most jolly-extrovert Honeysett began to stroke the dead knee across from him, but the shock of realizing what he was doing transferred him sharply to the live. His mistake made him laugh his heartiest; while Sir Kevin hung his nose, and the other Trustees were possibly trying to remember what they had heard about Art from their wives, in between being a barrister, a manufacturer of refrigerators and a former nightsoil contractor.