The Vivisector (83 page)

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. This 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 actually 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.

‘We’re planning for next year.’ Sir Kevin vibrated with seriousness.

‘Time to call in stuff from overseas.’ Honeysett was shouting as though you were deaf, when Rhoda was the deaf one.

What did they expect you to say? ‘Well, it’s an honour—yes—certainly.’ He heard himself: humble-mumble, mock surprised—nauseating. ‘It’s an honour for the paintings—independently. It’s so long ago—there doesn’t seem to be—much connection.’
That was a lie;
but if they embalm you, they must expect a mummy.

They left him in his chair, in the sealed room used only as a waiting-room: or tomb.

In the hall they were making conversation with Miss Courtney. Somebody was a busybody.

‘Oh yes,’ she was telling. ‘He’s painting all the time . . . No, I don’t know. But he’s very absorbed in it. It’s wonderful, isn’t it? Because painting has been his whole life. So you can’t say he isn’t very much alive—can you?’ She giggled: silly old Rhoda asking for reassurance.

He obliterated them after that, not by cultivated deafness, but with the swirling onrush of half-visualized images and raw ideas.

He continued painting, or agonizing. And exercising. They told him he was looking fine. In time he forgot to contradict.

When they began preparing for his exhibition Honeysett came to him at Flint Street. Rhoda had no right to let him upstairs, but she did. Because her brother hadn’t died after all, because she felt safe again, she indulged in her old spitefulness.

Honeysett’s invasion almost blasted you off the perch. ‘You must come in, Hurt—to the gallery—any time you like—discuss the hanging—let us have your views.’ Always a masculine man, he lost his voice on a high, tentative, feminine note. ‘So this is what you’re working on, eh? The new paintings!’

You were so indecently exposed on the scaffold you could imagine your own buttocks trembling white old into the intruder’s face hear the little
pfft pfft
of fright smell the smell of puffballs unearthed.

Turn round and/or fall.

‘Get out, Gil! Why do you persecute me? Why did Rhoda? She’s the devil’s!’ Always in moments of distress the words clotted round the root of his tongue.

‘Okay, Hurt. Don’t upset yourself. Okay. It was a mistake. We’ll let you know when everything’s ready.’

Honeysett began to retreat, his great sponges already on the stairs: a pneumatic bull threatening matchwood; while you continue gasping throbbing for what you had experienced for what you now understood of the indignity of rape.

Couldn’t paint any more but clamber down off the squeaking scaffold it mightn’t hold together long enough nothing would if the termites got to work.

 

On the other hand, there were mornings when the mere physical pains throbbed higher, to break into life, or live pain. He dabbed and scratched frantically. He reached out and drew his brush across the hard surface in a broad blaze of conviction and watched the few last drops of fulfilment spurt and trickle and set for ever. He was learning to paint; but as he tottered on the crude block groping for some more persuasive way in which to declare his beliefs, it seemed that he might never master the razor-edge where simplicity unites with subtlety.

In between perching—in the dressing-table glass he had once caught sight of what was half a vulture half an old buckled umbrella rustily clawing a trembling paintbrush—he practised at improving his physical condition. Nowadays he trailed only slightly, unless he happened to come across someone he hadn’t expected, or when the great buses began to topple screaming ballooning down on him. Then he recognized at once, in the eyes of strangers closest to him, his own fear disguised as pity. They were glad of this excuse to pity, because it made them feel virtuous again; and wouldn’t this demi-corpse, standing between themselves and death, act as proxy for them?