The Vivisector (29 page)

He fell asleep on the floor realizing how he could convey the shadow from one of her sprawled breasts.

That morning he worked austerely and perhaps got somewhere with the spreadeagled Nance; but it was only one aspect of him in her. He would have liked to splash amongst the gasping, sucking, tropical colours which had flooded them both in their struggle towards a climax. He tried to concentrate, but couldn’t. He began fiddling, rubbing, masturbating in nervous paint on a narrow board.

Although it was four o’clock and he knew he was expected at the Greek’s, he had to see her.

He almost ran along the streets, until in the one where Nance lived, he started looking for a sign.

Several women had come out of their houses, and were moving casually towards their beat. An old derelict bag was standing in the entrance to Nance’s place: from looking glum, she brightened up.

‘Mrs Lightfoot is expecting you, mister,’ the old girl called, relieved to rediscover a mission in life. ‘She’s on the third—third floor up—green door—on the third’; she was the same biddy who had been ‘fucked for fat’ in the small hours.

He went up after merely mumbling back at his informant. She didn’t expect to be acknowledged, though.

Nance was arranging her hair above her eyes, in heavy loops, or drooping nests, in the dressing-table glass.

She said: ‘Hello. Thought you’d come. I thought you might’uv come last night.’

She began hacking angrily at the looped-back hair with the axes of her hands, then gave up.

‘I was busy, though,’ she admitted: certainly her eyelids looked thick.

She sounded both prosperous and brutal. Her cigarette, hanging heavy from her mouth, scented the room, which smelled also of cut leeks, or armpits.

As she sat in the yellow glare from her dressing-table, with its rattling handles, warped brushes, scattering of beige powder, and a souvenir kewpie, he pressed against her from behind, and she turned round, fastening her teeth in his skin through the V of his open shirt, dragging her fingernails down along the flitch of ribs.

‘Ohhhhh!’ she moaned in an ascending scale, then said very primly: ‘I got business to attend to.’

‘What sort of business?’

‘Well,’ she said, reshaping her mouth, ‘there’s a bloke I know wants me to put some money into a sandwich shop. Might be something in it, don’t you think? All-night snacks along American lines.’

‘Didn’t know you were the financier too.’ To some extent he felt resentful: to find her less dependent on him.

‘You gotter put it somewhere when you make it. I was never shook on the loose board. Some bloody cut-throat might rip it up one night, and you with it.’

He laughed slightly.

‘Eh?’ She laughed back. ‘Aren’t I right?’

But he was remembering his version of her cleft, spreadeagled arse.

‘Besides,’ she transposed her voice to a patently virtuous key, ‘this is a returned man—see? the bloke who wants to start the business—only one lung—got gassed or something in France.’

‘You go for the diggers,’ he couldn’t resist remarking.

‘Jesus and Mary, are you the only pebble on the beach?’

Little did she know it, but he was.

Or perhaps some suspicion of it did cross her mind: her mouth softened as she stood up, and her eyes darkened under the brim of the hat she had just put on. Reaching for her handbag she knocked it off the dressing-table.

‘Come with me—Hurtle—if you like,’ she said quietly. ‘It oughtn’ter take long.’

After stooping for the bag she appeared to him in yet another light, dominated by her serious eyes under a garish royal-blue velvet. She had spoken his difficult name as though she wanted him to compliment her.

‘I might come along,’ he said. ‘Some of the way, anyway.’

She had made him shy. He avoided her. He stood playing with the coins in his pocket, looking at the Alma-Tadema print hanging from a nail above the bed.

‘Interested in art work?’ She would have been pleased for her refinement to be recognized. ‘That was given me as part payment by an old boy who ran an art shop in William Street. Just before they took him over. Poor old bugger was short in more ways than one: he had only one ball.’

‘Looks as if you fancy the ones!’

‘Don’t it!’ She rattled laughing. ‘I never ever thought of that!’

They went downstairs, watching their step on the discoloured marble. Laughter and precaution brought them closer together. He looked up, and saw them in the blotchy mirror on a lower landing: a woman leaning on her lover.

And it was the same in the streets: the women he saw she knew turned away out of delicacy on catching sight of Nance Lightfoot with the genuine article. It made her walk more self-consciously, looking at her insteps, or sideways into shop windows. In one or two instances, girls they passed put on a syrupy expression, and asked: ‘How are we, Nance?’ and she smiled a smile he hadn’t noticed on her till then. ‘Good, thanks,’ she answered, ‘how’s yerself, dear?’ as they parted.

It wasn’t all that far to the solicitor’s office where Nance was to meet the one-lunged digger.

‘We can’t be there too long,’ she coaxed as they approached. ‘It’s late already, and the solicitor bloke’ll wanter be makun tracks.’

In the doorway they ran across a frail green-tinged individual with pinched nostrils who was apparently Nance’s partner-to-be in the sandwich shop.

‘Oh, Mick—Mick Rafferty—this is my friend, Mister—er . . .’ Her voice trailed away: she looked flushed, probably too ashamed to reveal his first name, while realizing she hadn’t learnt his second. To help her would have made it look worse.

The one-lunged digger suggested her friend should wait inside, but Hurtle said he would hang around. Nance left him with smiles of the purest banality.

Yet he was haunted by the harsh gloss of the royal-blue hat, by the changing architecture of the face, and the unconscious poetry of the eyes.

She didn’t know herself. For that matter practically nobody in the street had woken up to themselves. A few glanced at him angrily in passing, and at least mentally edged away, holding him responsible for their moment of unwilling consciousness.

It was not very much later when Nance came hurtling back down the stairs and out of the rundown offices. ‘There! I wasn’t gunner let them palaver. But it’s late, love. What’s the dago gunner say?’

Down the sleek asphalt hill the evening traffic was spurting through the purple shallows.

‘Praps I’m going to give the dago the go-by: tonight and any other night.’

‘What—give up yer job?’ Nance was shocked: at once she began working on his arm. ‘Of course I wouldn’t let you
want.
I’m only thinkun of yer self-respect.’

They walked on rather aimlessly. He hoped she wouldn’t notice he was touched, because he wouldn’t have known how to explain why. Here lay the great discrepancy between aesthetic truth and sleazy reality.

‘I’ll find something. Clean windows,’ he said to keep her quiet, ‘or floors.’

‘Haven’t you any ambition?’ she asked with such a humourless earnestness, again he couldn’t help feeling moved.

He sniggered to hide it. ‘What about yourself?’

‘Why should I be ambitious? I got a steady, remunerative job. But a man’s different.’ Then, as they walked on, she said: ‘And you’re not just a man.’

‘Are you in love with me?’ He gave it a metallic edge.

‘I’d like to be,’ she said, and again, bitterly: ‘Oh yes, I’d like to be!’

Still walking, she started stirring up her handbag, looking for something to blow her nose on. He would have liked to help her, but he couldn’t.

At the bottom of the hill she recovered her cheerfulness. She said very brightly: ‘You never told me where you live, Hurtle. You never even told me yer other name—like we was still on blackmail terms.’

He told her his name was ‘Duffield’, and then, for good measure, that he also answered to ‘Courtney’.

‘You’re not wanted by the johns, are yer?’ Probably she believed that: she threw off a shiver, and plastered herself closer to him.

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘they’re both of them aristercratic names. Or so I’d say.’ She was too trusting: her big ripe purple mouth.

They mounted the hill and soon entered the city proper.

‘If I’d thought we was coming as far as this I’d have dressed different,’ Nance said, with glances at the plate-glass.

Passing a cooked-food shop, he grew reckless. ‘What d’you say if we pick up a chicken and take it back to my place?’ He dreaded the inevitable reply: she was so very trusting.

‘That would be lovely, dear. Then I’ll know where you live. You don’t know a person before you’ve seen their home.’

He avoided more by ducking inside the shop and choosing one of the imitation-looking roast chickens.

He was sixpence short, and had to come outside to confess it.

‘Sixpence won’t put you in debt,’ she said, looking inside the sloppy old handbag.

The chicken, still warm inside the paper, seemed to lubricate their progress, though they continued only slowly strolling.

Nance might have liked to hurry it. ‘Is it much farther, dear?’ she asked at last.

‘No,’ he answered, thinking of the drawings on the balcony.

They were passing one of the pubs towards the Quay, when she shopped and said: ‘We’ll make it a little celebration, Hurtle. But the booze’s gunner be on me.’

While she was in the bottle department the uneasy ponce nursed the parcel of chicken outside: he had to tell himself he was an artist.

She came out smiling as though life begins all over again with a sealed bottle.

‘One day,’ she said, as they strolled on towards what she didn’t know was coming. ‘I’ll have to tell you the story of my life. You wouldn’t believe it, but I was a nurse for a whole twelve month. I got so sleepy I didn’t know in the end if I wasn’t standing on me hands. They tell yer you mustn’t become involved with the patients. As if you could. Even sponging around a bloke’s dick. You’re too dead tired. I don’t say some of them didn’t proposition me, but I never became involved. I don’t think anybody who’s at all professionally inclined becomes involved except with their profession—except now and agen.’

Nance stepped across what a sailor had just vomited on the pavement.

‘At the year of a year I got out. How could I ever ’uv become a starched-up nursing sister? The grammar alone. Mother was set on it, and it probably broke ’er heart. Though I married Snow Lightfoot. He was a postie. The kind that turns scraggy later. Poor Snow—always hurryin’ ter reach the next box.’

He told Nance it was the house in which he lived.

‘Oh dear, you didn’t oughter let me go on about meself!’ She giggled; but she looked fulfilled.

On the way up she changed again: on one of the landings she stood listening. ‘I don’t take to that door,’ she said in a haggard voice. ‘Have you got an instinct, Hurtle? Or are you just another male?’

All his instincts were concentrated on what he was about to, and dreaded to, reveal—but had to.

He unlocked his door and threw it open.

‘They say I’m psychic.’ Nance was gasping less from her confessions than the stiff climb.

At once she was smelling around the room, like a bitch where a dog has lifted its leg.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s a real man’s turnout.’

Again she had changed, and a sonorous melancholy, which was also approval, filled the room. It did look naked, felt cold, and he didn’t know how to answer for it.

In the circumstances, he got down on his knees and began to light the gas fire: that way he could also keep his back turned.

‘What are those?’ Nance was asking.

‘Those,’ he said, without turning to look, ‘are studies—drawings—for paintings I’m going to do.’

He could hear the gasping of the gas fire. He had never been aware before of the composition of its flame.

‘What,’ she said, ‘you’re an artist, then?’

He didn’t contradict, while listening to her heels roaming around.

‘They’ll run you in,’ she said. ‘For doing a woman like that. With ’er bum cut in half. And tits hangun. What’s she doin?’

‘Lighting a fire.’

The worst was over: he sat back on his heels.

Nance was yanking the cork out of a bottle of the cheapest brandy. She had torn a leg off the varnished chicken.

‘Fancy you an artist!’ She spoke through a mouthful of chicken, wondering, it seemed, whether to feel resentful, or to devour the artist along with the flesh she was gnawing off the bone.

He was reminded of Goya’s ‘Saturn’.

‘I don’t think I ever met an artist before—but may ’uv—when I was in bed with one and didn’t know it. There’s a lot a person’ll never probably know. You could know a murderer all yer life and only find out when it’s too late.’

He let her go on. He swilled a good third of a tumbler of brandy. With his mind’s eye, he saw how he would take his drawing ‘Nance Spreadeagle’ a stage further, into the architecture of the body. The abstracted form offered itself almost too easily, which was not surprising: the brandy all but ate flesh, while the shrill heat of the gas stove raised perception to fever-pitch.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, Nance was licking her fingers, making a dainty job of it. ‘Some artists, I read in a magazine, leave fortunes when they pass on. Fancy if they make you a “Sir”! Course you need a business head behind yer!’ She looked sideways at the balcony. ‘What d’you say if I let you paint me in the nude, Hurtle? It ’ud all be experience. And if you give me half-a-dozen tits, they’ll be less likely to recognize me.’

He began undoing her dress, to shut her up.

‘Stopput!’ she said. ‘I’m serious.’

She was, too. It was Nance Lightfoot’s practical night. They lay together on the narrow bed, but he couldn’t have made love to her, because her mind was rushing with a different kind of abandon into other labyrinths.