The Vivisector (33 page)

She had done a drawing on the bottom of the page which the postmistress would have liked to get a look at, only he went outside.

No suggested date for the visit, but the threat had thrown him into an uproar: he heard that squelching sound in his ears; as he turned off into the scrub he could feel the blood padding through his veins. Nance had unnerved and nerved him at the same time; when he got inside the shack he began to unpack and lay out his neglected paints.

All those months at Ironstone his physical energies had been too thoroughly drained off by the building of his house and the difficulties of day-to-day existence. He decided to eat less, to avoid further calls on Caldicott and Nance. He lived off damper, dried beans, rice, lentils, and the woody swedes he grew himself in the thin soil of the ironstone escarpment. At one point he joined a road gang, and worked with it for a few weeks; with the pay, he debauched himself on butter, tea and sugar. Occasionally he made drawings, little more than notes, which couldn’t relieve his cynicism, nor his rage for physical exertion. He belched sour, and often wondered what had ever persuaded him he might become a painter.

Later on he realized he had been expressing himself in his tentative house: a wood-carving of necessity.

Caldicott had paid him a visit. The dealer walked with a slight limp, the origin of which the painter didn’t discover. Caldicott arrived mopping himself. He had on a tussore suit, the coat of which he was carrying over a shoulder: abandoned, for Caldicott. His hat was a new Panama through which the sweat was spreading. He looked not so much amused at his protégé’s eccentricity, as amazed at his own foolishness. The veins were bursting out of his flushed, hairless skin as he stumbled limping down towards the ledge on which Duffield had perched his misguided shack.

Caldicott peered into the gorge, and must have found the gulf between art and life at its most repulsive. ‘Do you really think you can live in this place, Duffield, and work?’

‘That’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve almost learnt to knock a nail in straight.’ Duffield refused to indulge in the nuances on which Caldicott throve.

The latter expectedly winced. Secretly he hoped his own life might appear a work of art to others, and with this in view he collected paintings, rare objects, limited editions, and kept the gallery in George Street to encourage interesting boors like Duffield whose bad taste might eventually be excused as genius.

‘In any case,’ he said, swallowing down an astringency, ‘you look aggressively healthy—don’t you?’

Duffield felt all scabs and blisters as he fetched a couple of bottles of beer standing in a bucket of lukewarm water in the shadow of the iron tank.

They drank the warm beer out of cups, while the shade of Edith the parlourmaid hovered round them: for a moment the white sun caught the rim of her salver, and Hurtle swallowed his beer in knots.

With Caldicott, distaste was now becoming business. ‘I am planning a mixed show for February. Will you be ready for it? Oh, conventional on the whole; but you, Duffield, will provide the controversial salt.’ Flatter just a little.

Duffield had become a mumbling groaning lump of man, or rock. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know when I shall be ready.’ He kept shifting his position on the very uncomfortable chair.

‘What—aren’t you painting?’ Caldicott looked at him with a kind of disapproving admiration: as though his protégé had turned out to be a disguised labourer.

He took a snapshot or two with a camera he produced jokingly.

Presently Duffield led the way and they ate some rubbery cold salt-beef on a table in the long half-built room; or Caldicott messed the beef about, carefully, rejecting the gristle with the tips of his lips.

When the meal was over, Duffield brought out a bottle of brandy. After the first sip, Caldicott had to look at the label: he shuddered to find his suspicions confirmed, but went on with it, out of camaraderie—or was it mateship?

The sun, at its heaviest, was bulging over their heads. Heat was scratching the corrugated iron.

‘Well, dear boy,’ Caldicott smiled his milk-white smile, ‘provided you’re happily involved in the experiment!’

Then he put his hand on Duffield’s thigh, in a gesture halfway between unconscious affection and conscious appraisal. Almost at once he removed the hand: he could have burnt it; but his smile was trembling painfully.

‘Keep February in mind,’ he fluctuated. ‘I should like to hang
three
Duffields. Three should allow them—some of them, at least—to grasp that your intentions are serious.’

Towards the end he had raised his voice, hoping to hear it ring out in impersonation of a forceful man; but what they both continued hearing was Caldicott’s echo accusing him of a slight indiscretion. Or wasn’t it so slight? He looked at Duffield: one could never tell.

Duffield warmed towards Caldicott limping away through the scrub in his escape back to civilization. If it had been in his power, he would genuinely have liked to help the man out of his cabinet by smashing the panes; but he had never felt so impotent.

When his visitor was long enough gone to be out of earshot, he took the brandy bottle and chucked it into the gorge, where it hit a rock and exploded into a galaxy. He hoped Caldicott hadn’t heard after all. With guilt on his heels, how much more noticeably he would have limped. He was accusing his friend of his frightened little attempt: he was demonstrating against an emotional state of his own, which had unexpectedly given birth to this plume of transcendental glass.

 

And now, what most disturbed and disgusted: Nance was coming; though she still hadn’t given a date. In preparation he took to shaving every morning; he shook out the rumpled bags he used as a mattress between himself and the floor.

As self-protection he had started painting again: his visual abstractions soothed, if they didn’t completely satisfy him; but his thought was growing, out of rock and a shower of glassy light.

Nance didn’t come, and he grew dirtier, more sullen, afraid his material resources might give out before he had arrived at what he was vaguely hoping to achieve: when Caldicott sent him a cheque, without comment, let alone explanation.

The same day he walked into Hornsby to cash the cheque. On his way home, the postmistress at Ironstone was refurbishing her staghorn ferns by pulling off the dead, outer skins. The great heads from which the antlers rose were looking aggressively frontal and glossy, bulging from the trunks of the camphor laurels. The postmistress was a pale widow, who told him through pale lips that staghorns derive their nourishment from the air. She was proud of her ferns: she didn’t know what she would have done without them after her husband passed on.

It seemed to him that many of them were nourished by air: Caldicott (or so one hoped); the postmistress at Ironstone; himself even. Only Nance smacked her chops over a life-giving diet of glutinous, smoking meat.

He decided to get up early the following morning; in fact, he was seldom seduced into lingering on the ridge of potato-sacks on which he had woken. An intensifying golden light was dusting the pelt of that lean animal his body. Stroking, scratching it, he was so detached, it owed him nothing but its captivity under a roof. His tactile mind was the part of him he cosseted: encouraging it to reach out, to cut through the webs of dew, to find moisture in the slippery leaves, the swords of grass, before the sun had sucked it up.

He got into his pants, incidentally rather smelly, and stiff with recent wipings of paint. He strutted up and down, digging his hardened heels into the splintery boards, tearing at a loaf he had bought the afternoon before, guzzling and thinking and loving; while the moisture tinkled; feathers shook free of dust and dew; the morning shrieked, called, whipped and trolled out of the gorge. In between, silence made the loudest affirmation of all.

Glutted finally with bread, light, sound, he returned to the attack on those giant rocks with which he was obsessed: to dissect on his drawing-board down to the core, the nerves of matter; but pure truth, the crystal eye, avoided him. He the ruthless operator was in the end operated on, and he flung off, groaning and drymouthed from the austerities of black and white. There were several versions of the same theme, some of them more advanced because less ambitious, and he healed himself by adding to their flesh, by disguising their scars, with touches and retouches of paint.

‘What’s it this time, I’d like to know?’

The shock made him blunten what should have been the razor-edge of a mica sun.

‘Rocks,’ he mumbled, resentful, nauseated: under it all, frightened.

‘Looks more like cauliflower ears. Bloody boxers’ ears mucked up for ever by the glove.’

He couldn’t avoid looking round at her.

He saw that Nance and he were strangers to each other, only that Nance, who believed strangers didn’t exist for more than a second or two, had dumped all the stuff she had been lugging, was wetting her mouth, from which exertion had worn off most of the lipstick, and opening her eyes wider and wider, to swallow him up.

He was stifling in the sweet, steamy smell of city nights.

‘You’re good!’ she munched when her appetite allowed. ‘You’re harder, Hurtle, than you used to be.’

‘What have you done to yourself?’ he complained.

‘What?’ She blenched as she went through the possibilities.

‘Your hair.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘that’s the fashion. Don’t you like it?’

She took off what, no doubt, she hoped was a dossy little hat. They had cut off the great, dusty, tumbling mare’s-tail of her hair. In place of it she showed a strong, pale-as-a-candle, shaven nape.

‘
I
like it;’ she said complacently, ‘though it’s gunner cost a lot in the long run. Have to get used to it—like payin’ the gas and electricity.’

Her calves bulged more than he remembered, but he had never seen them so exposed, unless in the entirety of physical passion.

‘Look,’ she said, beginning to unpack her largesse from the carriers. ‘That’s potted pig’s-cheek.’ She smelled it. ‘Could ’uv gone off on the way. Didn’t oughterv brought pork.’

Much had gone off, he suspected, since her cornucopia was emptied into his cell. Now that he had her, he didn’t in any way want her, or the grey marble of the pig’s-cheek, or pickles, or the rope of saveloys, or oranges—oranges everywhere: big open-pored navels rolling off the table. The dossy little hat was drifting gauzily over the floorboards. She was so absorbed in her activity she didn’t seem to notice that the pendulum pearls weighing down her lobes were bashing her savagely on the cheeks. She was looking for a tumbler, she said, to freshen up her ‘corsage’, but settled for an empty bottle when told there wasn’t such a thing as a glass. She filled the bottle with water from the tank, and after taking off their silver paper, stuck her wilted orchids in the neck.

‘A bloke give them to me Friday night—a business noise from Brissy.’

Nance was so unconscious of her own vulnerability he couldn’t continue feeling resentful over what he no longer found in her, if that had ever existed: perhaps he had created it as something he needed at the time. He had to begin loving her again for what she was in the concrete present: her chipped-lacquer look; the restless activity of those fake pearls chained to her ears; the forms of her timeless body at the mercy of a travesty in salmon sateen.

But he couldn’t have freed her. Didn’t want to touch her even.

Nor did she want to be touched, it seemed: not after their first, and formally passionate, embrace. She was determined to appear hard, bright, self-contained, proficient in any of the domestic rites he mightn’t have thought she knew about; or possibly she was intimidated by unfamiliar surroundings.

She kept turning round to look.

‘You’re sort of pigging it—and like it!’ she looked at him with the bright indulgence of a big sister, haunches overflowing the hard chair.

Again staring around, rubbing her biceps as though to warm them, she said: ‘Golly, it’s quiet!’ and laughed.

‘It isn’t. You can hear something happening all the time.’

‘I know
that,
’ she said through her flaked lips, still rubbing at her own gooseflesh. ‘This is what I come out of. There was always the sound of heat, and hens, or a dog’s bark, or a sheep’s cough. Oh, yes—the ache of it! If I heard a sheep cough now, I’d jump out of me bloody shoes.’

She was wearing gold ones, kid, which the stones must have martyred as she came down the track. When she saw him looking at them, she hid her feet under the chair.

She said: ‘There’s an economical puddun I learnt from Mum I’ll have to make for yer while I’m here if I can remember what you put in.’

On and off she picked at the food she had brought, which no longer looked as though it were there to be eaten. Nance seemed to prefer gum: perhaps the motion of her jaws made her feel she was doing something.

She looked into the gorge. ‘What do you think you’re gunner get out of paintun an ugly old rock?’

‘That’s what I’m trying to find out. Could be the answer.’

‘Eh?’ Her frown was an excruciated one. ‘I may not be what you’d call educated,’ she was beginning.

‘Oh God, Nance, I’m not
educated!
’

‘But you know enough not to make sense.’

She sat training a piece of hair to curl around one of her cheekbones: the swinging pearl might have left a scar.

‘But rocks, I mean—who’s gunner ever even pay a tenner for a rock—without there’s someone sittun on it.’

She crossed her legs, and bunched her knees, and drew up her skirt, but dropped it again in helplessness.

‘Nature’s all right,’ she said, ‘but it’s too big for most people. Last Sunday Billie Lovejoy—the old cow with the orange bristles on ’er chin—my landlady—Billie said: “Why don’t we take the ferry, Nance, and go on a little spree to Manly?” Why I agreed I couldn’t say. I wouldn’t value Billie Lovejoy not above a potful of piss, only that she’s ’uman—
’uman,
see? And a woman. Well, we took the ferry. There was a bloke tried to contact, but I wasn’t operatun that day. And I sorter got the gripes. All that water! And me an’ Billie sittun on the Steyne—the rollers they was too
big
—and glassy—beltun up the beach. Gee,’ she moaned, living it again, ‘I would ’uv trotted straight back for the return ride if it hadn’t been for the fellers lyin’ on the beach. ’Uman, see? The ’uman touch.’