The Vivisector (80 page)

At least his thoughts made him laugh while walking under the Moreton Bay figs in the heat of the day. He might have gone up in the furnace if the trees and his own cold limbs hadn’t prevented it: curiously cold for such a shadowless hour, in which only those of wide-open face strolled laughing and talking exchanging their unexceptionable ideas streaming with sweat and fellowship up the gallery steps some of them down into the little unrefreshment pavilion.

He was the black stroke in the landscape, though they didn’t recognize it.

Probably this was the reason he had left the bus: he had felt the need for recognition, and the most puritanical artist is unable to resist loving himself a little in the mirrors offered by his own paintings.

Cynicism revived him as he went up the steps to the gallery. There was no actual cause for gloom. He felt as physically fit as the other man always appears as he looks smiling at you, or at what he believes he sees. At least the attendants recognized, and could hardly fail to behave with kindness towards an old, three-legged, milky-eyed, stump-toothed dog which had hung around the place so long. The soppy expressions on the attendant faces made him feel he ought to wag his tail.

Nobody else at that hour could possibly know him, and he was glad of it now, stalking through the courts past the schoolgirls, earnest or giggly, young men in shorts showing their all, nondescript middle-aged sexless couples, that skinny old biddy and her scabby-handed relic of a husband. It was the humility of the old couple, looking as though they were about to apologize for something, which made him shoot into a side court. Why should old people wear humble expressions when probably they had copped the lot? He swore nothing would ever make him look humble, not if he was brought to the gutter.

So far he had managed to behave very discreetly walking past other men’s works, carefully avoiding the room in which he would most likely come across his own. Storing up the pleasure, or ekeing out his impatience. None of these parties of smudged schoolgirls, skin-tight young men, or the almost allegorical pair of Ancients, would notice how his heart was bumping, any more than identify his face. He must be looking greedy, though. He not exactly ran, but tripped a step or two, before he thought to restrain himself. And found none of his. Nothing yet. Not one.

Supposing they had done away with him holus-bolus into the basement? Supposing he had died and not yet ascended?
His material limbs returned coldly and he slowly walked over what was only parquet.

Honeysett, the Extrovert in Chief, was approaching: chubbier than ever. ‘Thought you’d caught us out, did you? Thought we’d given you away?’ Honeysett laughed so loud the place might have belonged to him.

He took you by the elbow; he was behaving, not as though you were the attendants’ pathetic, scuffy dog, but an elderly brittle humourless child.

‘There’s some of you—I hope it’ll please—amongst the Recent Acquisitions.’

They were again in the entrance hall, where the two Ancients turned their backs.

There was no need to draw his attention to what must have been the whole of his ‘Rocks’ series (including that painful fleshy one), his ‘Electric City’, his ‘Marriage of Light’: in fact, Olivia Davenport’s collection.

‘Is Nance—is Olivia
dead?
’ In challenging Honeysett to tell him what he didn’t wish to hear, he could feel the spit jump out of his own mouth.

Honeysett received it without flinching. ‘Not dead. She’s living in Rome.’

The plaque confirmed that the paintings were a gift, not a bequest: by ‘Mrs. Olivia Hollingrake’.

Honeysett partly explained: ‘She’s gone back to her maiden name. Don’t ask my why.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’

Honeysett was the last person who’d know. He’d like to ask Boo herself one or two questions. Have to think of them, though.

He stuck his nose almost on the surface of ‘Electric City’. ‘Have they been mucking about with it?’

‘Not that I’m aware.’ Honeysett at last sounded cold.

‘Something has happened in the top left corner.’ Or had he been a too impulsive, ignorant young man?

‘Wonder why she gave them away?’

‘She didn’t tell us. It was done through solicitors.’

‘Can’t have cared for them. I always suspected Boo. Anyone who starts telling you about their deep understanding of your work is a bit suspect.’

He wished Honeysett would leave him: he wanted to do things to the paintings which might have looked immodest to an extrovert outsider.

Honeysett seemed to take the hint in spite of his extrovert temperament: he was moving mumbling smiling towards some mission of official urgency.

It was good to be alone with the paintings.

Already on the bus he had wanted to touch something he had achieved in paint. Now he could run his fingers over the surfaces: saliva running, he realized, out of his mouth; he tried to snap it up, but it wouldn’t be caught. Didn’t matter. In the almost deserted gallery.

Some of the colours were blinding him: ‘Marriage of Light’ for instance.

‘A major work!’ He looked round to share his discovery, but of course Honeysett had gone.

Nobody there now.

He began to touch the jagged ‘Rocks’. And the more painful fleshier ones. Nance Lightwood? Lightburn? by any name, her spirit rose out of the glazed past, together with a whiff of body.

He looked round again to catch a possible intruder: schoolgirls are never able to disguise what they know; they have to giggle.

But nobody was there. Only himself. Filling with mucus and tears. He was so grateful for any vision of himself which wasn’t that of the old mangy dog. The murderer was more acceptable. Almost.

Of course—he remembered now why he had set out, not to wallow, but to buy the heart. Rhoda saying: Poor Ruffles my beloved my only affectionate cat Hurtle is sick not a tooth in his head but likes to mumble on something tasty not if you don’t want to but would you when you go out look and buy us a nice heart sheep’s if I cut it up fine I think Ruffles might fancy it.

So it was Ruffles, not himself. So he had come out with Rhoda’s horrible plastic bag; nobody could deny Rhoda his sister brought out the best in him.

On leaving the gallery he would have forgotten the bag if the attendant, his smile grown extra sentimental for the blue plastic lace, hadn’t handed it to him. He took it, and went out. Something ominous seemed to be preparing, against the railings, amongst the columns, at the entrance. The pair of Ancients turned, and began approaching: the skinny woman in her best crow’s black a little in advance; the scaly man shambling after in nubbly pepper-and-salt synthetic tweed. Behind them sheets of light were quivering.

All three of the figures at the entrance suddenly became paralysed.

Till the woman began, after wetting her dried-out-leather lips: ‘Don’t you recognize me—Hurt? hurtle?’ On the second attempt, it came hurtling out.

He stood holding Rhoda’s blue plastic bag against his belly: to protect himself from the knife-thrust.

‘I’m your sister—don’t you know? I’m Lena. The eldest.’

He held Rhoda’s bag, a plastic shield, against Lena’s accusations.

‘We come up from Tralga for a week or two. It’s been easier since the kids was married. This is my husband, Hurtle—Ernie Cobbold.’

Ernie Cobbold held out his hand, scabbed by the stones, the frosts, the wire fences of Tralga: the palm felt of hardened tar.

‘None of the kids with us,’ Lena persisted in her thin, recollected, girl’s voice. ‘We got four kids. Thirteen grandchildren by now.’ She lowered her head: she was wearing a red hat with her black; she licked her beige lips, and smiled. ‘We’re expectin’ the first of the
great
-grandchildren.’

She hung her head as though it were too heavy; nor could her husband help her in the situation: he was no more than the monolith who had got her with their sculpture of stone children.

The plastic bag dangling empty against your belly, you tried to count up the paintings, to show Lena what you had got, but couldn’t do it quickly enough. And probably forget a couple.

‘We looked at your paintings. Yairs.’ Lena remembered to smile kindly.

Ernie Cobbold probably hadn’t seen them at all. His eyes were too puzzled: rims red and sagging; they needed stitching.

Lena said: ‘Of course we seen about you, Hurtle, in the papers. Oh, yairs! But didn’t wanter interfere. Our dear Mumma, she read about you—talked about you. She said she’d stick to the agreement. Never to interfere. Pa died years ago, Mumma only recently.’

He said: ‘Oh?’ Must remember why he had brought Rhoda’s bag.

‘Yes,’ said Lena, ‘don’t you remember—don’t you see the likeness, Hurt? As I remember, we was so alike as kiddies.’

‘Wa—were we?’ The blue plastic bag shuddered. ‘Better write to my solicitors.’ He pushed past Ernie Cobbold: you could almost smell the scourings; in Lena’s case, it was watery homemade plum jam.

His heart was rent: when he had to keep himself whole for some further, still undisclosed, purpose; painting could be the least of it, though at heart it was all.

Revived by the paintings he had seen and touched, he was able to make quite an athletic getaway. He cut down Cathedral Street, then into William, to be with life. He was enjoying the kind of walk only good health and a temporary absence of responsibility can ensure. If his clothes and skin were melting together, that was because the day was blazing higher. At least his sweat was cold.

He had disliked Lena as a kid. How can you be expected to love someone just because you had blood in common? If he had been tempted to let himself get bogged down in her emotion on the gallery steps, it was from the sudden shock of finding the past transformed from a conveniently vague abstraction into a persistent, tearful old woman. It was a very definite shock; he might succumb even now.

But it wasn’t skinny Lena, or Mumma who stuck to the agreement, or the Adam’s apple in Pa’s throat, which made him want to give way; there could be something else he was beginning to remember. To want. Really nothing to cry about. Something probably nobody had, if they stopped to think, and that was why most of them took the trouble not to: emptiness of mind is less disturbing than the soul’s absence.

‘Your change, sir—
please.
And Mr Sitsky has your parcel.’ It was the pink-rinsed hair-do talking at him as if he was deaf, clinking with a coin too, on the marble.

Use had carved the butcher’s chopping block to look like a work of art. In all the refrigerated shop, with its staff who bossed you in your own interest, the wooden block was his one comfort.

He had half a mind to catch a bus in William Street, or hail a taxi; but hesitated: hadn’t they walked all the way to Sunningdale, him and Mumma in the old days, Mumma always with a baby in her? Besides, he felt so fit. Must have looked it too: several women pretended they weren’t taking an interest, you could tell by their mouths, always tell when you were being undressed for a quick one before hubby stuck his key in the lock. He couldn’t let himself think when or how he had last enjoyed a fuck. He was above it.

In London she had played, into their K.271, but ‘the D minor’. And Brussels. And Paris. Mum Volkov, inexorably, kept Rhoda ‘posted’.

The night Ruffles was supposed to be sick unto death, Rhoda remembered something deadly funny:
I really oughtn’t to tell you, because it’s—well, shall we say—humorous. The reason Mrs Volkov wanted you to have the complimentary ticket for Kathy’s concert is that, when she saw you in the bus, she recognized a lost soul. She’s slightly psychic, you know.
Not too psychic when she opened her legs to that legendary Russian.

On entering the suburb to which they all belonged, he spat down into the part of it which some of the locals refer to as Shitters’ Lane. The dust-coloured houses were congesting along the irregular skyline, the air condensing on his eyelashes. He wiped them with the last of the good silk Sulkas Mrs Olivia Hollingrake had presented.

It would be a thankful homecoming. Shed Rhoda’s infernal bag, which had no possible connection with any part of him, but which he had accepted without question. Perhaps because he liked to make little inessential purchases, especially from grocers:
champignons au beurre
okra medium natural artichoke hearts (or were bottoms a better buy?).

On Saturday afternoons she used to serve behind the counter for a shilling or two.

This was where he began falling down falling falling. It was nothing to fall and reach the pavement.

They began running spilling out so many too many people around him.

I might suffocate,
he wanted to shout up at them, but found he couldn’t, or push them back, he couldn’t, he was bound, his strength wasn’t strong enough to burst the iron.

Then the big starling-woman flapping out of the window from behind the tins of Campbell’s Soup the Old Fashioned Hop Scotch.

‘Are you all right?’

His tongue was stuck.

‘Arr Cec cec the gentlemen sick ring the ambulance Cec
Cec-urrlll?
’

A draught of cold sawdust. The starling hovered didn’t watch to touch him wasn’t her kind of worm.

‘Howdyer do it? Never rung for an ambulance in me life.’

Knew the slack-looking man. Knew his apron.

‘How do
I
know? Oh Lord! Dial Triple O and see what happens. ’

Angry. Not a starling after all. A gull growing out of her purple-green-black. utbus in gold as you floating out.

When he returned they were all at it an irregular fence around him he was getting accustomed to it growing on the pavement.

‘She says it’s old Duffield the artist. She knows him well. Friend of Mr Cutbush.’

‘You don’t say!’

The gull-starling flapped and screeched still not touching not prepared to be deceived by any pseudosewage.