The Vivisector (35 page)

‘They’re not flowers, are they?’ She was performing an instinctive ritual. ‘Arr, dear, what a lovely bokay! All flowers are lovely.’

The rosebuds drooping from her hand had the heads of strangled birds.

‘They’ve died.’ He forced his hoarse voice. ‘Too much sun. They couldn’t stand the heat.’ His failure to offer a suitable apology made the situation more oppressive, or so he felt, in Nance’s cluttered, whore’s bedroom.

She, on the other hand, resounded with a tenderness he hadn’t heard in her before. ‘They’ll revive,’ she said gently, stroking the dead heads with her fingers.

She fetched a cut-glass jug, and stuck the roses in it, and stood it on a greyish lace doily. Splayed against the dressing-table mirror, the bunch looked more lifeless than before.

‘Red’s best,’ she said. ‘I hope I’m buried with red roses. Why should you always have white at funerals?’

He would have liked to get down and kiss her in the shaven crutch, only he wouldn’t have known how to explain his impulse, and in her present state of reverence she might have been shocked.

She made them a pot of bitter tea, wearing her continued nakedness like a favourite old comfortable dress.

‘Now that you’ve delivered the pictures to Mr Thingummy, and are free and easy—we hope—I’m gunner come up again to pay you a visit at that place of yours.’

She had cut some slices of stale poundcake, and was easing out a datestone carefully from her mouth so as not to endanger a dicky tooth, while talking, and looking at her toenails from a thoughtful distance, and dusting the crumbs from between her breasts.

‘This time it’ll be a real visit—now that I know what the conditions are. I’m not a fool, you know, though I dare say you won’t admit it. Anyway, this time I’ll come, and you can paint me—as I am, I mean.’

She looked very serious, religious. He could have begun to paint her then and there, linking the necklaces of Venus round her throat to the bluish, shaven mount.

‘Well,’ she asked, ‘for fuck’s sake, what’s the matter? What are you starun at?’

That recurring question desolated, as the bottle on the dressing-table suddenly riveted him.

‘The bottle—’ his tongue managed, though thickly—‘what is it?’ The half-swallowed cake was choking him.

She followed the direction of his glance. ‘Oh, it’s an old-fashioned scent bottle. Some old thing I picked up cheap from a junk dealer who began to have tickets on me.’

The air was so languid she was fanning herself with a hand on which the crumbs trembled; while he continued staring at the scent bottle on the dressing-table. Shaded from mauve to smoky grey, and sheathed in silver irises, the bottle was a version of those which used to stand on Alfreda Courtney’s high altar.

‘I suppose I’m sentimental,’ said Nance. ‘I love the
old
things.’

She might have learnt it from Maman herself, who rose like a genie of the scent bottle, accusing him of faithlessness: to a class which had adopted him; to the education invested in him; to a love not so very different, which smelled of melting chocolate and illicit brandy, instead of musty poundcake and a whore’s powder. Maman was sniffing, though.

Soon after that he got up, buttoning his coat, saying he ought to catch his train.

It hadn’t occurred to Nance till now that she was naked. She looked down and discovered her breasts were apparitions, her navel almost an operation.

‘You do love me?’ she whimpered, holding herself in her arms.

His lips tried to reassure her through a flavour of moist dates.

He left her at the crack of the door, just as on the first occasion, her landlady Mrs Lovejoy had stood at the crack, showing the orange bristles on her chin.

 

Those first days after his visit to Nance in Sydney he did several little studies of her which he would elaborate later on when the inclination took him. The ideas in his head were still too hectic and fragmented. He either saw in colours, and the architecture eluded him, or else he was obsessed by forms: Nance’s yellow cheeses; suddenly out of the past Rhoda’s Cranach figure standing beside the iron-legged bidet. In desperation he almost settled for the self-portrait he had been for some time considering. But did he, any more than the others, see himself as he truly was? His doubts drove him to scramble down to the bottom of the gorge, slashed by swords, whipped by wires, trampling on the board-walk of fallen wood, sinking in the mattresses of rotting leaves. Reaching his nadir he lay full length and buried his face in brown water, gulping at it, watching it lap round the pictures of his distorted features.

Obviously he didn’t know himself.

Caldicott sent him the review from the
Herald:

 

Caldicott added palliative words, hardly more than a blur after what had gone before:

 

About the same time a note came from Nance:

 

That night Duffield stood on the edge of the gorge and let out his anguish. It came up out of his chest, his throat, in increasing waves. He was fortunate to enjoy such an immense privacy, for the waves of rage and anguish broke loud enough to reach the indifferent public and the poisonous press. Then he shut up. If his roar had suggested a wounded lion, its echo returned in little protesting driblets of sound, as if from a soul still haunted by the self-pity of which its earthliness had died.

He went into the house, stubbing his toe for good measure.

He had practically decided on a portrait of the self he had not yet explored to its bestial depths, when he received a letter from Caldicott:

 

Duffield got drunk on a bottle of crème de menthe which he bought partly because it nauseated most. Afterwards he slept with the faceless Mrs Davenport on an iron bed he had found at a dump.

The following morning he remembered to finish Caldicott’s letter: poor Maurice never deserved the treatment he got.

 

He didn’t reply to Caldicott: his clothes alone would have prevented him going to the dinner party. The shade of Harry Courtney goggled at the dreadful suit, not to mention his un-scrubbed body; his armpits stank, and he almost didn’t care.

In fact he cared enough to drag the easel into relationship with the glass, and prepare for the portrait: the self-portrait.

If he saw others too clearly, if he smote them, not with the tent-peg but the paintbrush, it was only fair that he too should come in for it. His larrikin self might have ducked, but decent Harry Courtney’s son had been doled out a sense of honour on speech days. He might have inherited from Harry and Maman one or two of the virtues to which they had vaguely addressed themselves; their influence was otherwise in no more evidence than the collar-boxes and English tweed, the right accent and the right names they had urged him to put his faith in. Atavistically he was at their mercy of a laundress and a clergyman, an aristocratic, no-hope drunk who had died of a stroke on the Parramatta Road, and poor scrawny, normally T-T Pa, counting other people’s empties under the pepper tree, before going in to get kids with Mumma on the squeaky bed. All of these he had in his fingertips. The razors were probably his own, not inherited, nor consciously acquired.

As he worked at what was becoming the portrait, the razors took over: they couldn’t resist the quick nick. He remembered the two cut-throats in the long black monogrammed box, with which Harry Courtney improved the sculpture of his beard, or in later years, exposed his face.
See, Hurtle, they’re too dangerous even to touch, never to touch Father’s razors.
He couldn’t resist just a flick: a fly with the razor. His down shivered to feel the steel. How simply awfully the blade carved through the leather strop easy as warm chocolate.
What did I tell you it isn’t the damage it’s the dishonesty of doing things behind my back the risk of cutting yourself or someone—Rhoda—injure somebody for life.
Decent Harry grew so steamy with imagination you watched the blood not running it was too fascinated to run arrested on severed fingers. Father had not made you promise never to do it again, which was honest of Father. You hadn’t done it again in fact because it was frightening the ease with which the blade had carved through the strop.

He had never been altogether dishonest: nor yet entirely honest; because that isn’t possible. Even saints kid themselves a bit. God or whatever couldn’t have been entirely honest in creating the world.

While working, he had to recognize the almost voluptuous love with which he carved his own cheek out of the paint, down to the board: his not convincingly ascetic cheek. The nick to the corner of his not quite honest but human—he hoped—watchful left eye produced the authentic shudder of love. Even the practice of mere skill, those weightless wet dreams of art, rejoiced his mind and refreshed his body.

From withdrawing into his private world he was forgetting about his body. He had seen it as cruder. He had encouraged it to coarsen, to resist values he might still find himself longing for. Maman had done a better job than either of them realized in forcing his head in amongst the scents of the wardrobe. Then the stoppered, clotted, fin de siècle scent bottle on Nance’s dressing-table. He hadn’t screwed the Maman in Nance, but might just once, for the experience.

He took a rest after that, or rather, his no longer clottish body roamed around the scrub. He stopped to stroke leaves he didn’t see, but apprehended. His mind was floating in pure contentment the crushed-out scents the pricking silence of heat and scrub.

Presently he felt the need to go back: to find out how much of the truth reflected by the mirror had united with how much his mind might have confessed. He was at once wearily dejected and daringly fleetingly pleased. He went so far as to smile at his alter ego of the board: when his conscience in the mirror caught him at it. At least teeth were a permissible vanity in any man—but his didn’t appear in the portrait, only in the glass.

So he frowned back at the flat, glum, half-truthful reflection of himself, and began to slog drudgingly. Half of life was drudgery, he had discovered, and by now had begun to suspect ninety per cent of painting was uncreative, at most a laying on of paint, building up to destroy.

So he gouged out his turgid features, reassembled his failed colours, wiped off the smears: it was a long way from razor-play.

Once during the afternoon, at its most monotonous, against the buzz of blow-flies and the stench from a lump of corned brisket, he made a mark that became a positive signpost: his no longer adolescent figure could still have been leaning in desperate ennui beside a window which prevented his closer approach to the outer world. He caught the curve of the body with one slash of the razor, and wasn’t ashamed at confessing to survived elegance.

Of course he really loved it. He loved the elegance. He loved himself. Himself gathered into the corn-coloured folds of Maman’s dress. However much of a coarse, thickset, moral scavenger the present showed, a lyrical onanist of the past hadn’t been altogether suppressed. Here he had caught the two of them in flagrant delight, in his own unlikely body, in paint.

He threw down his brush after that. He could have shouted, but it would have been for what he knew might look otherwise in the morning; so he walked away through his rickety, amateurish barrack of a house. It would begin to darken. Soon there would be nothing left but the prospect of a next day.

During those weeks he went several times to the city, for no reason he could have given. If he had wanted to escape from the portrait he couldn’t have done so: he carried its photograph in his head. At the height of his passion for it, he would look around him at the faces in the street, and some of them, misinterpreting his expression, would frown a warning. If he had lived up a flight of stairs round the corner, he might have found a pretext to accost a stranger, for no more perverse reason than to force an anonymous, preferably innocent face into a relationship with the unfinished portrait. Whether the unknown responded with rapture or disgust, would have been immaterial: proof that he existed for others was what he guiltily hankered after.

He would go along finally to Nance. On the first occasion she pulled the door open a crack, and asked in a rusty sounding voice: ‘Wadderyerwant there?’ though she must have known by now what everybody wanted.