The Vivisector (87 page)

Looking to one side of him, Mrs Volkov said: ‘I’ve never thanked you, Mr Duffield, for the part you played—in—in
moulding
my little gairl.’

Mrs Volkov had probably never shown a blush: she was too anaemic; but now something was happening to her: she all but gave off pale vapours, together with the innocent perfume from some kind of health soap.

‘
Moulded?’
He shouldn’t have: but what else?

And now the abnormal word, from hanging out of Mrs Volkov’s mouth, was protruding from his also, contoured like a film-star’s breast.

As soon as she could manage his lips again, he assured the mother: ‘I think Kathy was born with a pretty good idea of the shape she must take.’

‘I don’t know, I’m sure,’ Mrs Volkov murmured. ‘I received no education, but came here at sixteen, from Carnoustie. And keep to myself.’ Then she actually did blush, a brilliant satiny rose, as she realized for the first time, it seemed: ‘My daughter is my only extravagance.’

They laughed so easily and happily together, acknowledging the ailment they had in common; he only had to go and spoil it by remembering what he was looking for.

‘Where is Rhoda?’

Mrs Volkov appeared alarmed; her answer was in an intake of breath. ‘Miss Courtney—she’s here, of course, Mr Duffield—at your elbow.’

So he turned, and there was his sister, as Mrs Volkov had predicted.

Rhoda lowered her eyelids, and drew in her teeth, which he suspected had been glistening and laughing the moment before in some piece of by-play with Don Lethbridge. (Don was certainly her spy, as she was probably Olivia’s.)

‘I’ve been looking for you, Rhoda.’

She grew increasingly sullen. ‘I don’t know why you should. With everybody courting you.’ One of the seams of the rose dress, so devotedly machined by Mrs Volkov, had burst right open.

‘Don’t you know I depend on you?’ Draw her out.

‘Are you ill then?’ The drifts of powder still clinging to her face made it look more anxious.

What he saw reassured him; though with Rhoda you could never be absolutely sure.

‘I wanted to ask whether you had noticed Mrs—Mrs Davenport, ’ he tried, and watched.

Rhoda hesitated. Though outwardly still—she might have been carved out of grey pumice—her mind, he saw, was skipping on ahead.

‘Olivia Hollingrake,’ he explained, to help them both in a difficult situation.

Immediately Rhoda’s eyelashes, such as they were, began to sift the guileful possibilities with which her mind had been playing.

‘Oh, Boo!’ It was accompanied by what was intended, no doubt, as a radiant expression. ‘Yes, I’ve noticed Boo several times this evening. What a magnificent figure! How wonderfully preserved!’

‘Olivia? About all Olivia’s been able to preserve are the Hollingrake jewels.’

But Rhoda didn’t seem to hear. ‘That dress—it might have screamed on anyone else—a gold dress. I wasn’t close enough to examine it in detail, but from a distance you had the impression of pure, beaten gold. Imagine! And so few women can afford to display a naked back.’ She had faltered at no point in saying her piece.

‘Olivia? A gold dress? To me she looked more than anything like a scruffy old Italian priest stuck with ill-gotten carbuncles.’

Rhoda sighed. ‘Perhaps I tend to see Olly,’ no one in his memory had referred to Olivia as ‘Olly’, ‘in a golden light. Don’t you remember how the light at Sunningdale was always golden—always morning?’

He did; but the light was beside the point.

‘Why didn’t you approach this vision of gold and nakedness?’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t dare!’ She laughed, and contemplated her burst seam with detached interest rather than concern.

‘She said she loved you very dearly. That you had shared secrets and jokes, which you recorded in a diary. I wonder which secrets and jokes you shared with “Olly”.’

‘I destroyed the diaries while I was still a girl.’

‘Then nobody will tell. And the bath water’s gone down the hole.’

Rhoda flinched only very slightly inside her trance. ‘What astonishes me, Hurtle, is that you should need to ask. With an exceptional memory like yours. I’ve never envied you a bit of it.’

So Rhoda too, was putting on the mask: wasn’t there one they called ‘Megaera’?

‘Oh, memory—memory’s too full in the end. If you could tear it up—like a bloody diary.’

Rhoda dropped her mask: she was the tattered moppet smelling of a cheap face-powder she had put on to spite Maman; spiritually, but only spiritually, she was floating in Maman’s borrowed shoes.

‘Then you
are
sick!’ Her pronouncement sounded hopeful, if not joyful.

‘Is that what you want?’

‘You can do things for people when they’re sick. Or old.’

Was it—dreadful thought—what they had
both
always been longing for? To be united, in one senile mind, mumbling over a basin of groats.

‘Not if I’m struck dead!’ he shouted.

Rhoda gave him such a frightened look, she could only be superstitious, in their rational Australian society.

‘I have something to finish,’ he added with less passion, and tried to find consolation in his wristwatch.

But the minutiae of the surroundings were crowding back on him: the white shaft from an overhead lamp turning a painted surface into a sea of molten glass words proliferating
I can’t see what it’s meant to be a man is it a woman a very gnarled one a tree then I expect it’s whatever you want it to be
like most things gold threads in a brocade coat the jujube colours of the seemingly victorious young the few pale pink hairs tenaciously resigned in a very old neck something something particularly horrendous the Prime Minister’s speech and after.

Speech is surely more brutal than paint because it tends to dictate rather than state.

Here is this foetus, for instance, in a fringe of beard, not in jackboots certainly, elastic sides, who has stood the archangel up. This foetus thing is dictating to the faithful disciple what he must tell the magic wand and black box.

‘Surely, though, if you’re so close to—to the “master”—the painter—Mr Hurtle Duffield—you must have seen these paintings everybody’s so interested to hear about? These so-called
God paintings.
’

‘I don’t know. It’s none of my business.’

‘But haven’t you any—any sense of historic importance? You’re his associate, aren’t you?’

‘His what?’

‘Well—let’s put it another way—aren’t you a fellow painter?’

‘No! I’m not a painter. I’m a student. I’m not a painter. And may never be—a painter.’

‘Ah, modesty! I hope you mean what you say, Don, because if you don’t, that would make it less—refreshing.
Ha-ha-ha!
’

Mumble mumble gurgle gurgle.

‘Then what are you—if you’re not a painter. A male nurse?’

‘I haven’t had any training.’

(Isn’t he divine? So moving. This is what’s so exciting about being alive today—to be able to
participate
through television.)

‘What is your official function, I mean—Don?’

‘A what?’

‘I mean—what do you do—for your friend Hurtle?’

(Heugh—heugh! He’s a real winkler!)

‘Oh. I helped to wash and dress him when he came back from hospital. Miss Courtney’s an invalid.’

‘Miss Courtney?’

‘His sister.’

‘Courtney?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hmm. So you
washed
him.’

‘Yes. Only for a little. Because he learnt to manage. Well, I still wash his feet now and again. He can’t reach so far. Not when he’s tired.’

(Divine, isn’t he? This is what I call really
warm.
How did we exist before the telly?)

‘But you can’t tell me—Don—so intimate and all—and you not a male nurse—an aspiring
painter
—you can’t tell me Hurtle hasn’t let fall a hint or two—while you were so nobly washing his feet—or given you a
peep
—come off it, mate—at the so-called
God paintings!
’

All the sawn-out mouths of the masks within hearing distance were working flat out. The telly young man had it sewn up. (Going to give him an award.) So the lacquered mouths clacked, some of them salivating Moselle; one lady was using her lover’s back as a ladder to climb to higher things.

‘Don?’

‘No.’

‘But you can’t tell me they don’t exist. When everybody knows they do.’

‘No.’

‘Well, in that case, we’ll have to terminate our interesting relationship, and disappoint our viewers. Shan’t we?’

‘You can’t talk about what’s too big. The paintings are too big.’

‘Ah? What do you mean by “too big”? What are their dimensions, Don?’

‘Mr Kircaldy, you’ve got me wiped! My father’s only a carpenter. I know. But I know there’s a point you can’t sort of talk beyond. You can only do. Or
be,
sort of. And that is what Mr Duffield. The painter. I can’t talk. I can only. Why can’t you let us all alone to
do?
Otherwise there’ll be nothing—no thing—
done.
There’ll only be people squatting in front of the box, hoping somebody they thought too big for them will turn out as little as themselves. Then they’ll be happy. Watching him pull himself off at a camera.’

What might have grown into a worse scandal than the possible existence of the
God paintings
was fortunately strangled at birth by the crowd which, normally, would have nursed it. Their instinct for something really of this minute began to prick those who specialized in the ephemeral, with the result that the whole of the amorphous monster was moved to suspect, murmur, groan, shuffle and finally shove. The lady who was climbing her lover brought her ladder crashing to the floor.

‘The Prime Minister.’

‘Is he here? I read he was in Pakistan.’

‘Somebody will speak. Got to thank the painter for conning us a good seventy years.’

‘But the Prime Minister—I saw Sam a moment ago. Talking to Gil Honeysett.’

‘Oh, beaut! Don’t you adore Sam? He’s one of the few men who can make a paunch look chic.’

‘Never get another vote from me. Not since he smirched our image overseas.’

‘I’m not interested in images. Men aren’t images. I’d adore to sleep with Sammy-lamb. He looks so utterly tenderized.’

‘Thanks to his missus. She mightn’t let him out, though.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘The main court. Looks like it, anyway. That’s where we’re being swept. That’s where all the gear was.’

‘Should have got there early—got us a good pozzy. Never be in the picture now.’

‘Nobody else ever is. The Brundritts must tip the cameras.’

As the monstrous black sea receded, boiling, sucked through archways, frothing round columns and buttresses, along static cliffs, a few pools were left behind: to trickle, according to some law of water, in the same direction as the original flood.

Smiling her most transparent, her most watery smile, Mrs Volkov started to tiptoe on long feet; then, when it decently could, her shadowy form tripped ever so lightly towards the mass from which, unwisely, she had allowed herself to become detached. ‘Oh dear,’ her voice blew back in faint droplets, ‘I do hope—never meant—not that kind of person.’ She was last heard resigning herself to what she only perversely dreaded. ‘And Kathy said the Prime Minister did her a very great kindness.’

As for the Cutbush couple, they burst out from the sense of duty which had been damming their true desires, and poured away as hard as they could pour, without looking back to explain their natural conduct; while Don Lethbridge followed swiftly, rearranging the clothes the telly had tried to strip from him. The sighs made by his Italianate shoes lingered across the emptied floors.

This left Rhoda. ‘Shall I come with you, Hurtle? Would it, I mean’—she had to cough it up—‘help if I stood beside you?’

When it was he who must help Rhoda, if he couldn’t immediately see how: certainly not let her stand beside him on the daïs.

She must have realized very quickly how awful her proposition looked, for she allowed herself, that is to say, her brutally irregular lump of pumice, to be dragged in what seemed the unavoidable direction, almost colliding with Gil Honeysett as he rose dripping out of the black collective wave.

‘Hi, fella—Hurtle! Where ’uv yer bin? We’re waiting for yer. Or all but. Are yer ready?’

‘Yes, Gil. But my bladder isn’t.’

‘Oh, Christ!’ Gil Honeysett’s schedule made no allowance for an old man’s waterworks. ‘I suppose you’ll have to do it. Won’t you? Give you five minutes at most. After that, there’ll be hell to pay with the A.B.C.’

All along that side of the deserted gallery the pictures had revived: the Duffields. There was scarcely time to glance at them: never look enough at your own paintings.

Though whipped along by Honeysett’s warning, he might have paused to indulge, if the perspective of archways and parquet hadn’t been flooded with a vision: of a figure, small certainly, but in its formal, golden grace instinctively true to archetype. He was walking giddily as he hadn’t for years, but without illusions or expectations; his great joy was in recognizing his psychopomp, so very opportunely descended with ‘love and thoughts’ to give him courage. As they advanced towards each other, her golden, boy’s figure melted into all the tones of rose. She bowed her head, as though to hide the face which might give her away too soon. So they hurried, she coolly, he feverishly: not that he would have dreamt of touching this embodiment of a spirit. He would speak to her, in few, though significant words: let her know he had received and understood the messages.

So he called out: ‘Have you come to show me the way?’ In other circumstances he might have embarrassed himself: too loud, too brazen; it was all the fault of the Trustees’ inferior wine.

Instead, he had embarrassed the psychopomp. ‘The way? To where?’ A voice unexpectedly tuneless, cracked, panicky.