The Vivisector (60 page)

Mothersole’s face might have looked pained if it had looked less bewildered. ‘I’ve had my fair share of that,’ he mumbled in rather a surly voice.

‘Yes, I suppose so. And I have my work.’

They were both pretty haggard, if not seasick like several of the others, after an unusually rough crossing of the Heads.

As they slid into smoother, sunlit waters, Mothersole took out a handkerchief to wipe the salt off his suit. ‘What sort of things do you paint?’ he asked.

‘Well! For some time now, tables and chairs.’

‘A funny sort of subject, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

‘Why? What could be more honest? I’m not talking about the gimcrack: there’s dishonest furniture, just as there are dishonest human beings. But take an honest-to-God kitchen table, a kitchen chair. What could be more real? I’ve had immense difficulty reaching the core of that reality, in I don’t know how many attempts, but I think I may have done it at last—or thought so until this morning: when everything died on me.’

‘How do you mean “died”?’

‘Exactly that. It no longer—in fact, none of the paintings of a lifetime—had any life.’

‘But once a picture is painted, how can it alter?’ Mothersole was not concerned about paintings: he might never have noticed one; he was distressed by a state of the human mind.

‘Paintings die like anything else, a great many with their creators, and this morning I realized, I think, that I’m already dead.’

They were slipping through a sea grown oily and passive, through broad bands of yellow sunlight, towards the solidly constructed wooden wharf. He would have liked to reach out and touch his temporary friend before the latter finally escaped: for Mothersole shared with the kitchen table that same commodious banality, the simple reality of which was so enviable, and at the same time elusive.

The printer was getting up. ‘Aren’t you coming?’ he asked, because it was polite to do so. ‘The gangway’s down.’

‘No. There’s no longer any reason why I should. I’d only waste an afternoon on the beach: drying up.’ He paused, because he scarcely dared: ‘And I may have got what I wanted.’

The printer’s rubber soles were beginning to withdraw him with matter-of-fact sounds of suction. ‘I shall remember our talk,’ he said. ‘You have my card—haven’t you?’ He might have liked to get it back.

The two men looked at each other, and smiled as each realized he would probably never meet the other again except in nightmares or moments of sentimental weakness.

For the return journey the ferry filled with the same kind of nondescript faces, if none was of the quintessential Mothersole. Their glances no more than flickered over an undesirable element: on the other hand, the sun in their spectacles could have accounted for this expression of distaste verging on apprehension.

As for the outsider, he no longer needed his Mothersole. His teeth grated as he regurgitated the nonsense he had talked while in the throes of rebirth: Hero’s death; his own; that of his paintings. (In his right mind, he never let himself be drawn into talk about his painting, just as he shied away from those who wished to discuss variations on the sexual act.) He remembered another occasion when he had risen from the dead, by seminal dew and the threats of moonlight, in conversation, repulsive, painful, but necessary, with the grocer Cutbush: and now he was born again by the grace of Mothersole’s warm middle-class womb.

Presently he went and stood at the stern. He took out the printer’s card. When he had torn it, he scattered the pieces on the water as Mothersole himself would have wished, if his ethos had allowed. Gulls fell rapaciously, swerved deceived, curving away. He continued watching the seed he had sown in the white furrow; some of it began at once to germinate, to reach such proportions his mind was already grappling with their sometimes exquisite, sometimes bitter fruit: particularly the apricot-coloured child-faces with their dark, crippled
Doppelgänger.

Apart from Rhoda, who was ageless, why had he never painted a child? He had never desired to get one, but the work of art could be less of a botch. Sitting with his hands locked, he was fidgeting to create this child. Or more than one. Or many in the one. For after all there is only the one child: the one you still carry inside you.

So the light was exploding around him as they reached the Quay.

He walked home against an afternoon gale, climbing hills with a speed made possible by the impetus of his thoughts. When he let himself into the darkening house, he began at once to drag at switches. He ran, almost, thundering from room to room, bringing them to life. His despairs of that morning were vibrating on the walls, even the one he hadn’t faced for several months: the cancer glowed inside the monstrance of Hero’s womb as the wooden saints of Perialos raised her up, the sea coiling and uncoiling round the foreshore in its ritual celebration of renewal.

How could his unborn child fail to stir amongst these miracles of the risen dead?

It left him. He would sit whole mornings in the Sulka dressing-gown, a present from Olivia before the war. (For lack of ideas, he might have used the vision of his own tarnished splendour, but remembered another self-portrait.) He stood by open windows looking out, and faces looking up were immediately averted as though they had been hailed on: people never understood that desire is a kind of invisible hail. He continued looking, not so much out, as into himself. As the weather cooled off he exchanged the Sulka robe for an old matted woolen gown with droppings of porridge and condensed milk down the lapels. The gown had become an extension of himself; it wouldn’t be discarded. Sometimes he added to the patina dribbles of fresh milk, for he had taken to drinking it regularly; he told himself he liked it.

‘Why don’t you have it delivered, sir?’ asked the smallgoods girl, whose name was Maree.

He smiled. ‘It wouldn’t be worth it.’

‘Save you the trouble of having to remember,’ she complained, pouting for his shiftlessness, and his smile: the smile was too mysterious.

He used to drink the milk from the bottle at the open window. Then he began forgetting, and would find the milk had turned to curds. There was as sour smell in the scullery, of more than milk: of his own memory. He would pour the curds plopping hatefully out of the bottle, into the sink, and mash them down the hole. The stench shot up his nostrils.

He had prepared boards and a canvas or two, and made a number of drawings, but of faceless abstractions. They didn’t convey the joy he knew he was capable of expressing if desire and idea came together in him. On one occasion he drew a stiffly-wired bouquet of flowers, to which he almost succeeded in adding the face flowering at its heart. As it was, the stiff bunch remained too precise, rather sterile. Once he drew the head and shoulders of a boy, of silver outline, swimming in a sea of light or fleeces, but found to his disgust it was himself he had drawn from memory, the sulky still swaying through the dew-sodden sheep on the expedition to Mumbelong with Father. He destroyed the drawing. Whatever the accusations, he was not, he never had been, in love with himself: with his art, yes; and that was a projection of life, with the ugliness and cruelties, for which some of his critics held him personally responsible. He must have waited till now to create his late child because love is subtler, more elusive, more delicate.

Occasionally he woke in such physical pain he was afraid his body might give up before he was ready. It was about this time too that he read in the paper the account of a Japanese youth of twenty or so, in whom an actual child was found growing: the slow-developing seed of his own unborn twin. On sleepless nights a thought began tormenting the elderly, ‘successful’ painter: had he been deluded into mistaking a monstrous pregnancy of the ego for this child of joy he was preparing to bring forth?

He would lie sweating in the dark, from time to time groaning aloud. Why not? There was nobody to hear; till one night he became conscious of a presence. He felt for the switch of the electric bulb hanging over his bed. Near his feet a rat was sitting on the blanket. Neither he nor the rat stirred for several light-years: they could have been a comfort to each other. Then the rat turned, thumped the boards as he landed on them, not in fear, and slowly moved away, dragging his long tail into outer darkness.

That morning began earlier than most. He slid out of bed, hunched, but slowly purposefully moving, in no way fretted by any of the worries of the night before. The light was silver, still only in tentative possession amongst the ink splashes and deeper pools of dark. He thought he saw something he must do to the archetype of a table he had painted several weeks back, but would wait till sunrise. Through the fringes of the araucaria, above the roofs of houses, the sea was stirring and glinting as though sharpening itself against itself. He too felt keen. There was a sound of billiards—no, milk bottles. Farting once or twice he went barefoot to drink some of the milk he had fetched from the smallgoods. (Ought to have it delivered, of course, as she said.)

The earlier part of the morning he lingered over the opening of shutters, to enjoy the clear light which swilled out the rooms; he could even feel it; he could feel the light trickling down inside the gown, over his not unpleasantly frowsy skin. In this state he could have enjoyed most things. The sounds of morning were still thin, but precise. The voices of women calling to their children hadn’t yet been roughed up; the men hadn’t begun throwing their weight around.

There was one room in his house for which he had never found a use: a small surplus parlour, with pieces of Miss Gilderthorp’s frailest palisander upholstered by this time in dust tones. The parlour led to the conservatory. Now when he opened the shutters, the light which entered, cold and pure, filtered through laurustinus and privet, increased the room’s spinsterish air.

On the other hand, the derelict conservatory was already buzzing, murmuring, drowsing in a tousle of tranquil gold: it was a light reflected out of childhood, in which he should have been gorging on handfuls of stolen crystallized cherries instead of aimlessly trampling around, dragging the dust off aspidistras with the skirt of his old frowsty gown.

It was while he was in the conservatory that the front doorbell started ringing. It rang too long, too hectically for normal circumstances: it made him spin round once or twice on his heels before going to investigate. He wondered if it mattered that his feet were bare; he was, in any case, naked inside his dressing-gown.

She asked: ‘Is this Mrs Angove’s place?’ looking angrily ashamed.

She was carrying a white-enamelled billy, with a chip out of the lid about the size of a thumbnail. The lid grated slightly as she waited for his answer. It was the billy, he felt, which was making her angry.

‘No,’ he replied, from a long way back in his gummed-up throat.

She was wearing a long thick perfect glistening plait: the reason why his voice had taken so long to rise to the surface.

‘No. She doesn’t live here. I can tell you where you’ll find her, though.’ It was fortunate he could.

All the while the rather leggy child was frowning and twitching. Her impatience made the billy rattle.

‘You see that house down there—the beige one on the opposite side—about six away—fairly narrow?’

The girl only made a breathing sound.

‘But you must,’ he insisted. ‘It’s unmistakable: the one with the mock-Romanesque windows.’ Showing off to a child.

She seemed disgusted rather than impressed. She certainly wasn’t frightened. She had that clear skin which mottles: it had mottled up the arms as far as the short, crisp sleeves, and up her long stalk of a neck; only at the nape, where the plait began, the skin remained mysteriously opaque.

‘That is where Mrs Angove lives,’ he said, he hoped, benevolently, while suspecting it sounded pompous. ‘Lucky I know Mrs Angove, isn’t it? And was able to help.’

Mrs Angove was rather a cranky old woman (perhaps not so old) with a hip.

‘Is she sick?’ he asked, coming down the steps as the child descended.

‘I don’t know. She’s a friend of my mother’s.’

‘Anyway, you’re taking her something good. Soup—is it?’

Just then the child caught her toe in a crack in the path, and some of the soup slopped out of the billy and splashed her skirt.

‘Oo-er!’ she shouted in a different voice: she probably had several. ‘I’ve made a mess of me dress!’

Very little of a mess.

‘Would you like to clean it up?’ he murmured without confidence.

The child didn’t answer, but slid through the half-open gate and marched towards Mrs Angove’s, her walk deliberately wooden, holding the billy well away. The heavy plait hanging down her back barely swung.

He went upstairs and began to draw the head of a girl: of about twelve? thirteen? fourteen? He was no good at guessing the ages of the young, perhaps because age wasn’t the straitjacket the well-intentioned would have liked it to be. In any case, the drawings he was making, one after the other, were not necessarily of the child who had come to the door, except for the plait; that was identifiable. Sometimes the drawings petered out in line: arabesques, not entirely frustrated, nor yet voluptuous. In one instance he wound the plait into a formal coronet with which he invested the head, and at once saw his mistake; he had made her a woman too soon: the eyes which he had left sightless on purpose began to stare with an expression he found offensively knowing. It was the mystery of pure being, of unrealized possibilities which fascinated him in children’s eyes.

Come to think of it, there were few children with whom he had been intimately acquainted: only himself—and Rhoda, each of whom was born old. Still, you didn’t have to know them: not if you knew.

 

That evening he decided to put on one of his suits from an earlier period to go to the party of a Mrs Mortimer he had met at an exhibition of paintings and vowed at the time not to meet again. Now, to escape a state of mind balanced between elation and dread, he found himself craving for a world he had hardly entered since before the war, and even then hadn’t cared for.