The Vivisector (40 page)

Tonight as he clanged through the iron gate he gratefully smelled the scent from the weeping trunk. Dew was already gathering in the rusty gutters, spilling down the burst pipes. He still intended to have something done about the pipes and gutters, but always enjoyed hearing the dew trickle as far as the excrescent moss with which the foundations of his house were cushioned.

Not that the house was his by more than title; it belonged to those who had originally lived there: the late Miss Gilderthorp and her produce-merchant father, with whose possessions the rooms were furnished. Possibly this was the most an artist of any kind was spiritually entitled to. He had come across few other painters, and then only sniffed around them. He wouldn’t have pried into their beliefs; but he had seen that investments were a great comfort and a source of increasing corruption to one fashionable painter he had met. So he was unhappy with his own money when it came: while prudently investing it. He allowed himself one or two luxuries, such as the patronage of a good tailor, made-to-measure shirts, jars of imported pâté de foie, a bottle of Napoleon brandy. He also dabbled in luxurious fantasies: he might invest in an expensively scented mistress and lie with her on the late Miss Gilderthorp’s bed, on the sheets he boiled himself—when he remembered—pushing them round the copper with a stick, in a lean-to at the back; or he could imagine buying an exotic car, an Isotta or a Bugatti, which he had heard about, but never seen. He had never learnt to drive; he would arrange to have his car driven, in the small hours, into the shed which opened on Chubb’s Lane: where he could watch it when he felt inclined. He saw himself sitting on the supple upholstery, which would never lose the perfume of its youth, or opening the bonnet to examine what would never become a smelly machine; it would remain a system of philosophy, which, in its visual aspect, he would paint. He would paint.

As there was so much he had to paint, the fantasies he was amused to indulge in came no closer to actuality than masturbation to fulfilled love. While the houses the other side of Chubb’s Lane spawned their bawling little sun-tinted, photographic children, he poured out his paintings. Nobody in the neighbourhood had seen them, but they read about him. The
Herald,
after mentioning ‘two Duffield canvases recently acquired by the Tate Gallery, London, and one by the Museum of Modern Art, New York,’ warned against the evils of success. He was hardly affected by the warning, and only superficially by the sales. He went on living, and spawning, protected by the house and furniture which were never his own.

This evening after he had let himself in, ‘his’ house took on a festive air. He soon had electric pears hanging in different branches of it. For company more than anything else, he liked to turn on all the lights, finishing up with the powerful bulb, still lolling on a long flex, which he would carry from room to room on the upper floor, and finally aim at their focus point: his easel.

Then, after running down, on this evening of some significance, he first fried himself eggs and bacon in the kitchenette Miss Gilderthorp had partitioned off from her father’s original stone kitchen. The little room, with its asbestos walls and unshaded bulb, smelled of congealed fat, and something not unlike urine, the source of which he had never been able to trace.

He loved his eggs and bacon. He liked to fry the eggs till the ruffs stood out, brown-edged and stiff, around the yolks. He never cut the rinds off the rashers: after he had finished eating, he enjoyed sucking the rinds while considering what the night contained.

The world of moonlight and lantana was dragging at him tonight: the big-arsed moon aiming at the dislocated lovers; the cryptoqueer grocer-councillor machine-gunning them from the Council bench. He could see how his composition would be divided.

But what had he
said?
He tried to remember, but couldn’t hear all the inflections of his voice, or what exactly the grocer might have heard.

Drifting in this vaguely unhappy cloud which had risen on his mental horizon, he neglected the bacon rinds, even the lantana lovers. What he visualized instead was the big tureen: chunks of pork floating in it; the coarse
tranches
of bubbly bread. Our Father Decent Harry had tucked a corner of his napkin into his collar; it was allowed ‘in foreign parts’.

It was Courtney, not Duffield, who mooned his way back to the upper rooms. The stair rail, polished by hands, was also roughened by resin, wrinkles of paint, smears of the honey which he loved to eat comb-and-all: Alfreda Courtney would have thrown a fit on the stairs.

He wandered for a while around the upper floor, carrying the blinding pear on its flex before adjusting it to meet his easel’s needs.

But diffidently.

He was afraid on almost all nights: more on this propitious one; so much so, he began thinning out the scumble of objects on the chest of drawers, searching for, fumbling at the envelope received the same afternoon, one of the few letters in recent months he had been tempted to open. Was it the texture of the paper? Or scent? Or the handwriting? It could have been the hand of a woman or a man.

For this third reading he held the letter at a distance in the full glare of the naked bulb. In certain circumstances, he knew, his normally hard dry palms became damp spongy ones.

 

‘Olivia.’ He wrinkled up his nose somewhat, and remembered the bacon rinds he had forgotten. Understandably, Caldicott hadn’t thought it necessary to warn him against ladies of means who collect paintings. He had learnt about them by experience, some of it congenial. He had nibbled at Turkish delight while listening to problems of the soul, not to say the marriage bed. More than one husband would have been proud to admit Duffield’s relationship with his wife’s soul.

But ‘Olivia’: and twice widowed.

While he had suspected Caldicott of playing a drag role, poor old Maurice had been cleverly forming a client’s taste. Six or no, seven paintings over the years. What distracted now was the thought of those paintings exposed to the eyes of somebody unknown, even if the messages had remained necessarily obscure.

Olivia Davenport: her name alone had dynamited the solid marble night and his intention of developing the big-arsed moon, the lantana sea, and the gunner-grocer shooting sperm at marked lovers. So when he had dragged at Miss Gilderthorp’s collapsed and almost intractable Venetian blind to shut out the exploded ruins, he sat down at the desk in the corner, and allowed an impulse to take possession.

It was curiously weightless relief: to draw his sister Rhoda Courtney standing beside the bidet on its iron tripod in the hotel bedroom at St Yves de Trégor. If he had betrayed a timid, wizened tenderness by raucously breaking open the door protecting her nakedness, the drawings were at least a kind of formal expiation: Rhoda’s hump sat for moments on his own shoulders. As his resistance of years collapsed, he knew how he should convey the iron in crippled bones; he saw the mesh of light, the drops of moisture in the Thermogene tuft. With few pauses, he made several drawings, each of which contributed something to what he wanted.

He might have waited till morning, but was so convinced every iron line had set, he fetched a board he had prepared that afternoon, and began his ‘Pythoness at Tripod’. He was seething with it. He would hardly need to accept Mrs Thingummy—Davenport’s invitation for the seventh.

In each of the two rooms on the upper floor was a bed: he would sleep on either, according to his mood and the demands of his work. There was in addition a rusty stretcher where he had dossed down once or twice, in the little junk-room, or cupboard, which opened on the upper landing: dreams influenced his choice or rejection of a bed. Now that he was working at this painting, his sleep was always brief and broken. He would wake frowsy, battered, tormented by guilt for something left undone. He could have lain longer, combing out his armpits with fingers sticky from his night of paint, but wasn’t allowed; he had to jump up at once: what if he ever died in his sleep, leaving a skeleton pythoness hung with a rag or two of imperfect flesh? If he thought about death it was usually in terms of work unfinished, and for this reason, he found death terrifying.

While working he ate very little: eggs—sometimes swallowed raw; bacon, because it soothed him to suck the rinds. He drank quantities of coffee, with milk or without. Often he was infuriated to find his mouth full of dregs: he was forced to spit them into the sink, and continue spitting; he couldn’t get rid of the last of the bloody horrible dregs.

But his painting was coming along, together with two new versions of it. As the meeting with his patroness approached, the act of painting became a duel between Mrs Davenport and Rhoda Courtney. Rhoda’s pointed mask wore at times an expression of malicious cunning; while at her obdurate worst, he would bring on her rival, at least her swashbuckling figure, for he hadn’t solved the problem of Mrs Davenport’s face.

Early on the day of his social engagement he thought he wouldn’t go. Rhoda was parading such an air of tenderly rapt dedication to her oracles, she could have won; in fact at that instant he was so well pleased with what he had done, he caught himself standing back, his mouth furled in a juicy funnel as though to suck up the milky tones of Rhoda Courtney’s sickly flesh. He left off as he began to dribble.

Shortly after he decided after all to appear at Mrs Davenport’s. Opposed to Rhoda’s iron will was his own desire to preen. (During lunch he had gone so far as to make an idealized drawing of himself on the back of an unopened letter.) So now he nipped along the bathroom and put a match to the geyser. The brown stain on the bottom of the bath didn’t encourage total immersion: instead he washed his neck, his feet, his armpits, and his crutch.

Unlike his face, his body was still unravaged, and he would dress it well, in a suit by Benson (late of Holly & Edwards, New Bond Street). The back, he realized from the glass, was a masterpiece of cutting.

A dash of Cologne on a handkerchief, in which he sank his face: he should have heard his spurs jingle; but he was at once depressed by the weight of everything imaginable.

He went down down, the depth and length of his house, it was never far enough in a crisis, out to the wreck of what had been Miss Gilderthorp’s conservatory. It was in almost every event the least effective antidote to melancholy. This afternoon a jaundiced light had blundered in through the vaulting of deathless aspidistra, the tracery of asparagus fern, to splinter into fragments of many-coloured glass and rustling, empty chrysalides on the tessellated floor. From outside there was a scent of runt apples rotting in the arrow-grass at the roots of the privets.

He backed out of the conservatory, carefully shutting the door on what he must preserve for some use still to be decided.

A survivor-parlourmaid, tough as an aspidistra, heavy with powder instead of dust, opened the door of Mrs Davenport’s large house. Of a period no longer fashionable, the house had been made desirable by wealth. There were glimpses of tame sea through clumps of bamboo and strelitzia, but a bed of salvia burning too fiercely spoiled to some extent the jade-and-tussore effects of the bamboo.

‘Mr—Duffield? Oh, yes, Mr Duffield!’ The parlourmaid gave him her whiskery smile. ‘Madam will be so pleased.’

She led him over floors of long, dull-red, beautifully waxed timber, explaining that her mistress was upstairs changing. The size of the house, and the clatter of their feet alternating with a stealthy padding as they trekked across islands of Bokharan rugs, seemed to force the maid into collusion with the guest.

In the smaller room into which she introduced him, three ladies were unexpectedly seated, two of them discussing their friends while the third listened, brightly erect.

When the maid presented the new arrival, murmuring something which approximated to a name, the two chatterers were silenced. Out of the embarrassment caused by the surprise entrance, the prettiest lady inquired in the jolly voice you put on for your friends’ servants, especially if the friends are rich: ‘How are your feet treating you, Emily?’

Emily replied: ‘No better, Mrs Halliday. My feet will be the death of me,’ and hobbled out.

The silence was not lightened by the commingled perfumes of synthetic flowers, not even by the more aseptic scent of gin. He sat down in what had become a waiting-room. Each of the ladies, in her way, appeared to be estimating his possibilities. There was a Miro on one wall, a Léger? yes, but a bad one, on another. Very white and austere, the walls.

‘Don’t you drink?’ Mrs Halliday suddenly ear-splittingly asked, making a great play with a decanter and her bracelets. ‘So good for you!’

‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘but not now,’ his voice sounding hoarse.

He might have to use his wits.

The third and hitherto silent lady braced herself to make a contribution. ‘Mr Trotter—my husband—never touches alcohol before sundown. It’s a matter of principle.’