Authors: PATRICK WHITE

The Vivisector (90 page)

He opened the letter, Mrs Volkov had written in a laboured, more, in an anguished hand:

Dear Mr Hurtle Duffield,

I will tell you at the start that I am
making no demands of you
in this letter I was driven to write. I do not expect you to more than glance through it if you have not already thrown it away. If you have it will not inconvenience you.

I must apologize for that we was only poor folk from Dundee, my Father died at sea with the trawlers, Mother dead before that. As a child I went to Carnoustie to my Auntie, to help with the guests. It was a poor town by other standards, but there were the summer visitors who came to the Links. When I was not at the dishes or otherwise cleaning or mending I would go down and paint the used golf balls. Uncle was a hard man. He was caddy master. He was an elder of the Kirk though I do not think a Believer, with him it was a Duty. Because I could not discover my right Duty I was mostly at odds with Uncle. I dreamed of God’s Love and an understanding of His Purposes. I did once for a moment understand if I cannot properly explain. There was some pine trees awful lean it was the sandy soil above the sea I had gone for a walk along the Links because something or everything had forced me out. There was a wasp nest hanging from a bough. I got stung not by putting up my hand my hand was put. I was shocked white, it felt. Although dizzy I should say I remained standing on my feet. It was like red hot needles entering at first very painful then I did not notice any more, only sea and sky as one, and me like a rinsed plate. I have often remember this, and was never struck to the ground, not in the cruellest moments. I cannot tell you more, but you are an artist Mr Duffield and will guess.

So I came to Sydney to the other Uncle who shortly passed on. I was not afraid Mr Duffield. This is where I had been directed, and to have my little girl in sinful joy with a stranger who gave me no love or affection only this wonderful human child. I make no excuses for Kathy who does not need them. She is as you will appreciate a work of art. I do not ‘understand’ music, I do not ‘understand’ painting, except through what has happened in my life.

I have discussed this with our common friend Mr Cecil Cutbush who agrees he has understood the same through what he calls his ‘Infirmity’ (which I am told is also known as the ‘Third Sex’). Some years past I suffered a mild stroke, and you recently a worse. As Mr Cutbush remarked who has more Education, we was all perhaps
stroked by God.
This is what I sensed in the bus, of the two of us at least. And Mr Cutbush has his own ways. Poor Mrs C. it is her lot to bear her unlikely marriage. Then there is Miss Courtney I would never mention any of this matter to her, she is a lady, and me a ‘Sewing Woman’ the mother of Katherine Volkov.

I have ventured to run on Mr Duffield because I believe the afflicted to be united in the same purpose, and you of course as an artist and the worst afflicted through your art can see farther than us who are mere human diseased.

Yours in respectful apology

CHRISTIANA MCBEATH

My dear friend Miss Courtney I do not love less for not including among us, and who must have suffered most inhumanly, but Miss Courtney is of the earth she is
strong
and would carry us all on her back—or so I would say—to the end.

He put Mrs Volkov’s letter as far away from him as he could, not because it was muddled, illiterate, gratuitous, distasteful, but because it was too pertinent: he understood not only with his mind, but through his fingers, both the live, and the bunch of dead twigs, Christiana McBeath’s horribly illuminating argument.

To fortify himself against the truth he hunched his shoulders, but not high enough: he was protruding. And still had to face the board his server had stood ready for him.

As he approached, loitering, this fresh emptiness promised to be the vastest desert he had ever set out to cross: not the faintest mirage to offer illusory solace; and to share the inevitable agonies, the limping army into which Christiana McBeath had conscripted him.

So he began soberly enough, in sombre colours. For these later paintings, themselves an exploration, he made no exploratory drawings—there was no longer time, nor had he the hand for drawings—and here, at least, the direction in which he had to go was already pricked out in him.

Somewhere in the lowest depths of mind or board, he had a sudden irrelevant, half-formed vision of a tucked-up mongrel dog, beggarly tail scraping the ground between its legs. Blot it out. Never felt the least bit doggy, except when clamped to the operating table. Never asked for charity, even at his lowest: though can’t avoid accepting it at times. Why should he beg now? Not when about to enter a hinterland of infinite prospects. He only dreaded the prolonged physical exertion. There was also the nightmare he hadn’t dreamt, but might have: his fall, backwards, through the railing, off the block.

Even that at last was made impossible on this morning of clearest light and indelible sensations. An immensity of space had given him his visual freedom, or more: he was being painted with, and through, and on. While conscious of his articulated crab’s claw going through its usual jerky motions, the strokes themselves on the primed surface often surprised by being unlike what he would have expected, or intended, certainly never during the blaze of his controlled technique, not even since physical limitations had reduced him to niggling round the edges of totality. Watching these daringly loose strokes of paint, which might have looked haphazard if they hadn’t been compelled, he experienced a curious sense of grace.

It was midday and Rhoda had called from below she had something ready for lunch.

He recognized a twinge of guilty satisfaction to think that Mrs Volkov hadn’t admitted Rhoda to their company; though if she were the woman’s ‘dear friend’ how could she have failed to reveal herself to Rhoda in her other role of Christiana McBeath? Unless Rhoda hadn’t wished it, as the letter might have been implying in the end. You reveal yourself to strangers: himself to that printer on the ferry, and to an unknown grocer met by moonlight. To which strangers had Rhoda revealed her love, and for whom? To be honest: he had failed to love Rhoda. Pity is another matter: his ‘Pythoness at Tripod’ had expressed a brilliant, objective pity for an injured, cryptic soul and a body only malice could have created. But pity is half-hearted love.

Rhoda was still calling. ‘Hurtle, are you not coming? . . . It’s something hot and
always
as if to spite me whenever it’s a hot lunch you go out of your way not to come it’s a soufflé if you’d like to know.’

He didn’t believe Rhoda could have thought of a soufflé, let alone made one.

Then he realized he hadn’t answered, so he went out on the landing and shouted: ‘I’m not coming.’ He only breathed: ‘I don’t dare leave off.’

Rhoda didn’t slam the kitchen door.

He worked all that afternoon except when exhaustion drove him to a brief spell on the rucked-up bed; otherwise he might have toppled off the block. He lay, but was unable to close his eyes: the lids could have been propped open with pointed tooth-picks, and the grit under them was terrible.

He worked till the light began to waver.

When Rhoda called again: ‘Hurtle, our dinner is waiting.’ The way she stressed it she seemed to attach particular importance to their eating it together.

It was a most unorthodox hour: she should have been chopping up the horse for her surviving cats.

‘I can’t come. Not tonight.’

Rhoda was perfectly silent, which emphasized the mewing of a kitchenful of cats.

Then she began to shout and curse as best she could. ‘I’m not interested,
personally.
The bally food can waste itself. Not that it will. Nothing’s wasted. The worms will eat it, if no one else.’

During how many days, not continuously, but a week, probably, he had been working on what he no longer considered a painting. Occasionally he went downstairs, and they sat in silence over food, of what nauseating kind he couldn’t remember afterwards: he was indifferent to it; except on one occasion, when he had found behind the mountain of unwashed pots the ruin of a castle, or a collapsed bathing cap, or—Rhoda’s soufflé. He quickly drowned his anguish and the thing itself in a torrent of aluminium.

He would hear sounds outside the door: he realized it was Rhoda listening for whether he had died; when the scratching and snuffling stopped, she must have decided he was not yet ripe for the deaths column. (How would she record their relationship?
Adored brother? Beloved foster—? Son of Jim of Alfreda of Harry of Bessie?
It was too involved to think about.)

He shouldn’t in any case think along such frivolous lines. He was working. His flighty mind must concentrate. Yet that too was beside the point since he was being worked on. Cunningly, they were piling it up, detaching the difficulties one after another. (Spillikins again, he was ominously reminded.) They were all at work strewing and construing. Cec Cutbush was giggling audibly as they struggled towards the summit. Wherever their common sweat fell, the desert didn’t flower, but thorns sprang up in celebration of their victory. If flowering occurred it was in the gelatinous light throughout the upper realm of—how would the archangel name this one when he appeared for its summation?

Tired, though.

If the hand could reach the last inch; but you would never convey in paint: in words perhaps, or phrased in music—modelled in clay—dough—in any other medium. (Your own sheer drudgery is always utter shit.)

But there were the occasions when, confronted with the board, his vision would leap out at him and he was liberated afresh.

There was this day he sensed his psychopomp standing beside him. At once he began scrabbling according to direction on his rickety palette-table. He was mixing the never-yet-attainable blue.

He pursed his lips to repeat the syllables which were being dictated: N-D-G-O. A thrumming of this stiff tongue. The gaps—nobody recognize. She insisted they would, apparently unaware of the precarious state of his faith.

Whether it was she or he who knew better he took his broadest, though frankly feeble brush, and patted the blue on: brush was leaving its hair behind, he noticed. All his life he had been reaching towards this vertiginous blue without truly visualizing, till lying on the pavement he was dazzled not so much by a colour as a longstanding secret relationship.

Now he was again acknowledging with all the strength of his live hand the otherwise unnameable I-N-D-I-G-O.

Only reach higher. Could. And will.

Then lifting by the hairs of his scalp to brush the brushhairs bludge on the blessed blue.

Before the tobbling scrawl deadwood splitting splintering the prickled stars plunge a presumptuous body crashing. Dumped.

Light follows dark not usually bound by the iron feather which stroked.

Must have been Rhoda coming her mouse running skittering round the skirting-board her white squeak snout exhaling desireful powdered words into what your mouth was.

‘Hurturl speak to murrh yer knotd ddead?’

Trying out claws on the lead one.

‘O God speak to me!’ (Rhoda too three counter out ha-ha!)

‘O my God o my darl my darlig Hurt die without my other.’

Her forehead a little scrubbing-board running moisture.

‘My luff o God gif gif I haf believed truly always yurss God.’

Answers weren’t showering on Rhoda’s mouse. God won’t be conned.

Don’s turn. ‘Come soon you sent: Rang the doctored ambulance. Miss Courtnee?’

Rosa’s only moans.

‘Lookther paint ig.’ Don the Painter-Heartstudent-Harkangel. ‘This is thiss iss hizz Miss the paint iss.’

Why all the hissing and whizzing might piss it out no the INDIGO decisive it.

‘My dearest God.’