The Vivisector

by WHITE, PATRICK

  He knew his hand was trembling on the door.

  ‘I brought this,’ she said. ‘My mother won’t let me keep it. Isn’t it nice?’

  She was holding in her arms a skinny, growling, tabby kitten, or half-grown cat, which flattened itself still flatter as he looked it over.

  ‘I’m not a cat lover,’ he said.

  ‘Arrh!’ The extra effort to restrain the elastic cat with her arms made her protest vibrate, like a groan. ‘Did you ever have one?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How do you know, then, that you aren’t a cat lover?’

  ‘No! No!’ He thought he no longer cared for Kathy Volkov.

  In his determination to resist, he was trying to look his crankiest, exaggeratedly shaking his uncombed head; the door he was holding swung and creaked as his whole body rejected the unwanted cat.

  Kathy’s mouth had taken on the shape of ugly, rubbery desperation. Her nose had grown hot-looking and shiny: she might have been preparing to cry; when the cat, at its flattest, its most tigerish, sprang out of her arms and through the doorway into the house.

  Kathy seemed less surprised and startled than he. ‘There!’ she said. ‘That’s an omen! Isn’t it?’

  He began to feel furious. ‘An ill omen, if you like! What am I going to do with a cat?’

  ‘Feed it—and it’ll keep you company.’

  ‘But I don’t want it! I’ve got my work. I’ve got the wireless.’

  ‘Anyway we’d better find the thing.’ The cat had aged her, and made her suddenly practical.

  She walked very straight, straight past him into the house. Her plait, he noticed, had become two. The two pigtails, although comparatively thin, looked rather guileful, lying limp on the shoulder-blades he had touched on another occasion.

  ‘Where’s your friend?’ he asked as he followed. ‘The little Italian. Why didn’t you bring her?’

  ‘Oh, Angela. She’s not all that much of a friend. There’s nothing much in Angela. You wouldn’t find her interesting.’

  Not only practical, Kathy was assured today. Now that she had got inside the house she was walking with the short, confident steps of a woman of the prissier kind. He could imagine the mother.

  ‘As soon as we find this damn cat you’ll have to take it home.’ His bare feet made the decision sound more emphatic.

  ‘Mother says it’ll eat too much.’

  ‘Somewhere, then. There are plenty of people for cats.’

  ‘I do know one other person, but she’s got too many.’

  The house was hardly his any longer as Kathy stalked through it on her long, loosely articulated legs.

  ‘Fancy living in it!’ She stared at the furniture with her borrowed, older woman’s eyes. ‘It’s good, though. I like it. It’s not nearly as bad as they say.’

  ‘Who says?’ They were standing in the little, suddenly far more precious, derelict conservatory.

  ‘People.’

  ‘Who haven’t seen it!’

  ‘Ooh, I love this!’ She began turning in the conservatory, not exactly in a waltz, but swinging her thin pigtails. ‘Isn’t it dreamy!’

  ‘It hasn’t been kept up. It’s nothing—a ruin.’

  ‘Oh, but I could use this!’

  As she continued turning within the conservatory’s narrow limits, she began also to hum. A golden tinsel of light hung around her lithe, mackerel body; while out of the dislodged tiles and shambles of broken glass her shuffling feet produced discordancies, but appropriate ones: Kathy Volkov would probably never teeter over into sweetness. There was a smell of trapped warmth and inward-pressing privet. Once or twice she slapped down the leathery tongue of an aspidistra.

  ‘Yes,’ she sighed, subsiding.

  They found the cat crouching amongst a hoard of cardboard boxes at the far end of the scullery. This was at least convenient. He filled an empty herring tin with milk he had brought from the smallgoods the evening before. Some of the milk, and a smear of tomato sauce, slopped over on the flagging.

  ‘There!’ said Kathy Volkov. ‘You must shut it in for a few days—and feed it—and talk to it—then it’ll know it belongs.’ She closed the door behind them as they left the kitchen.

  ‘It’s all very well giving advice when you won’t have to live with it.’

  ‘No. But I could.’

  She plumped down with such force in one of the chairs in the living-room the dust shot out visibly: the motes were suspended in her radiance.

  ‘I could live here all right!’ She spoke so vehemently, passionately, she was no longer the pretended older woman, but again the little girl who was his ever present spiritual child. ‘I could live here, and practise somewhere at the centre of the house, and nobody would turn nasty.’

  ‘I might.’

  But she didn’t seem to take that seriously. She was sitting with her legs stretched out in front, dreamily looking at the toes of her dusty shoes. After all she had more or less won the battle for the cat’s adoption.

  ‘What kind of music do you play?’ he asked very carefully.

  ‘Do you know about music? I don’t believe you’re interested in it.’

  ‘Well, of course I am! I listen to it regularly on the wireless.’

  In the kitchen there was, in fact, a primitive radio in a wormeaten, dulled mahogany case, with a moon of tarnished brocade through which the sound filtered: music edged with tin; foggy oracles of voices. Years ago he had bought it second-hand. There it stood, looking as though it belonged to a wind-raked seaside cottage to which a sea captain had retired. It was corroded; sometimes the knobs would stick; but it continued to give service, and would tune in from force of habit. You couldn’t say he didn’t understand music: though its meanings were probably those his unconscious desired at the moment of listening.

  ‘Yes,’ said Kathy, sticking her tongue deep down inside one corner of her mouth: she might have had a gumboil; he had forgotten all about them till now, ‘you may listen to music. A lot of people do. But you wouldn’t die without it.’

  ‘Well, no. I wouldn’t die without it. That’s a bit extravagant, isn’t it? Even if I were a musician.’ At once he heard how insensitive he was to his own youth as well as hers. ‘That is, I’m a painter,’ he added more humbly. ‘I suppose I’d have died—at your age—if I’d been prevented from painting and drawing.’

  They were united for a moment in his submerged living-room: never more than a waiting-room of the spirit, in which he had restlessly lounged, or sat rigid on the edge of a chair, grinding his jaws together; till release came with the force of an afternoon southerly, and he would run upstairs, the problems of his real, his creative life, dissolving inside him.

  Now it was Kathy Volkov sitting on the edge of the chair. Suddenly he saw how little of the child there was in her: her eyes were terrible as she tortured one of the thin pigtails, untying and retying a crumpled pink bow.

  ‘You couldn’t understand how I must! I must! How I’ll die! Nobody could ever understand!’

  ‘But I do! I was young, wasn’t I? Aren’t I an artist?

  She was already so much the egotist her eyes were blind to anyone or anything but herself. He wanted to protect her from that situation. At this instant he was prepared to give himself up wholly to the salvation of Kathy Volkov: so he began walking towards her, on his knees, like the beggars he could remember outside European cathedrals; while her eyes continued blazing in a blind fury of desperation.

  All at once, just before reaching the island or chair on which she was stranded, his excitement over Kathy, his admiration, his own need for her, melted into an agonizing and helpless love. He almost failed to prevent himself blubbering at her, dragging her down to such a wretched level of reality, he probably would have disgusted her for ever.

  Instead, when he reached her, in this wholly ridiculous kneeling position, he managed to get possession of her head. ‘I’m the one who could help you—if only you could see!’ He was holding her head against his, making
a virtue of the awkwardness. ‘I haven’t had a child—I know—but I know what it is to have been one—in much the same situation. Can’t that be a consolation, Kathy? To both of us? To me, it almost makes you my child.’

  Still holding her head, he could see her eyeballs beginning to grind around in their sockets. She wrenched herself away from him.

  ‘But I’m not a child!’ How it echoed!

  She had got up, and was standing over him, menacingly, it appeared for the moment.

  Then she altered her voice and said very quietly: ‘Can’t we see the rest of the house?’ She slid her fingers along the backs of his fingers; she said: ‘It’s interesting.’

  His bones started to creak and click: only now he realized how rheumaticky he was becoming; but she had taken him by the hand, and was helping him up as a matter of course. He looked along her long, skinny arm, and saw the potential strength already exerting itself, partly muscular, partly as reflections of sinewy light.

  He heard his feeble dust-coloured voice trying to disguise the sounds of age: ‘I’ve read about copper bracelets and rings to draw it off—arthritis I mean—in some way, apparently, they absorb the inflammation.’

  Because none of it had any connection with herself, she only made a grunting sound, and he was ashamed of having told her something so uninteresting and irrelevant.

  She was looking vaguely here and there. ‘Did you paint all these paintings?’ She still didn’t sound interested, though.

  ‘Yes.’ He was content to let his ‘child’ lead him through his own house by the hand.

  ‘They’re so different from one another,’ she commented languidly. ‘Not all by the same person.’ With her far hand she had got hold of one of the pigtails, and was sucking the end.

  ‘Well, of course! These down here are mostly early paintings. I hadn’t yet found my style. But I like to think there are already signs of it.’

  She made a sucking sound, in no way committed, through a mouthful of wet hair. He felt repelled, and had to remind himself that sucking a pigtail was a childish habit.

  ‘Isn’t it the same with composers? Aren’t they derivative at first? And what about interpretative musicians? I bet your tastes and style as a musician won’t remain fixed—not if you’re any good.’

  The narrow stairs were forcing them gravely together as they mounted. Here too, there were paintings on the wall, and he could tell by the twitching of her fingers, the angle of her head, that she was glad they were there: you can escape from arguments by looking absently out of windows, he knew from his own experience.

  As they continued their precise ascent, he tried again to winkle her out. ‘Who is your favourite composer?’ He would have frowned on any such question put to him as a boy.

  She sighed, then mumbled quickly: ‘Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Liszt. Liszt’s my favourite. He’s so difficult. And brilliant.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ It was dishonest, because none of them, till now, had been of great importance to him. ‘What about Bach, Mozart, Beethoven?’

  ‘Oh, yes! They’re wonderful, aren’t they?’ she murmured sententiously, like a lady at a reception.

  They had reached the top landing. In the front room they stood looking out through the araucaria-coloured light, over the roofs, at a slow sea.

  ‘But you can’t understand about Liszt!’ She was smiling convinced out of the window. ‘Mr Khrapovitsky says I must start studying the First Concerto now. It doesn’t matter how many years I take.’ She was swaying slightly: at the end of the unspecified period, the chandeliers would crash about her shoulders, and her shining head rise untouched.

  ‘What’s that?’ She dropped his hand to point.

  It was one of the later, almost completely abstracted versions of his ‘Pythoness at Tripod’; something he mightn’t have shown Kathy if he had given the matter consideration in advance.

  ‘It’s an abstract painting.’ He tried to make it sound discouraging.

  Why had he never grown a mustache? An uneven fringe of hair above the mouth might have been a great help in not explaining things.

  Kathy was saying: ‘I know a hunchback, a friend of my mother’s. I thought it was horrible at first. Now I no longer think about it.’ Her eyes suddenly took aim at him. ‘Why did you paint the hunchback?’ She was prepared to wait for his answer; then she couldn’t. ‘Because it was more difficult! Do you see? Like Liszt!’

  ‘No,’ he said, trying to remember. ‘I had my purely painterly reasons: those come first, of course. Then I think I wanted to make amends—in the only way I’ve ever known how—for some of my own enormities.’

  She brooded over the painted board; or perhaps she was looking inward at the difficulties of Liszt.

  ‘Don’t you pity your mother’s friend?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  She hadn’t suffered enough: because pity was not yet one of her personal needs, she hadn’t bothered to understand, let alone confer it.

  She was again leading him, no longer by the hand, but stalking ahead on her cool, proppy legs.

  She glanced inside the junk-room. ‘There’s a smell of rats in there,’ she said.

  ‘You can’t escape from rats in any of these old houses.’

  ‘There’s none in ours. My mother’s too afraid of rats breathing on the food: that’s what gives you hepatitis. Every month she takes the lino up, and scrubs the boards underneath.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s why your father ran away.’ It may have been a dirty one, but it made her smile. ‘Was he an artist of some kind?’

  ‘He was a seaman—but left his ship. He married my mother while he was in hiding. He did marry her, whatever they tell you.’

  ‘I’ve heard nothing.’

  The story of her father, which had halted them between the upper rooms, had also emphasized the shape and intensified the colour of her eyes: they were mercilessly blue and clear-cut.

  ‘Do you remember him?’ he asked.

  ‘Not much. I can remember—once. It was very early. The light was funny, damp grey. He had a smell I’d never smelt before. I remember that because it was so different from what I was used to—the smell of my mother.’

  Her eyes had faded. The old floorboards were audibly ticking.

  ‘And after he left—was that the last you heard of him?’

  ‘We heard from somebody that he’d been seen on the opalfields. ’

  ‘From sea to opalfields! He could have had something of the artist in him, even if he didn’t know it.’

  ‘Yes!’ She was so pleased she bared her teeth; her hand began burning, crushing his; her eyes would have stared wider open if their shape had allowed.

  She began trembling violently. ‘That’s what I see in this concerto I’ve begun studying with old Khrap: the colours of opals! That’s what I want to try to give it when I know how.’

  But at once she grew embarrassed. ‘What else?’ she mumbled. ‘Isn’t there anything else to look at?’

  They dragged on automatically, again bound together at the hands, and stumbled into the back room, from which he hadn’t thought of moving the drawing of the nude girl, simply because it hadn’t occurred to him Kathy Volkov might worm her way so deep into his house and life.

  Now he was horrified at this climax.

  ‘Is that supposed to be me?’

  ‘Not consciously. It’s the figure of a girl.’

  She ignored his reply. ‘But you haven’t seen me. My navel isn’t that shape.’ Her hand fell apart from his, only too easily now. ‘And I’m different there.’ She went and touched the dark smudge at the meeting of the thighs. ‘Otherwise it’s not a bad likeness.’ Her use of a word peculiar to unexceptional women paying morning calls long ago made her judgement sound uncannier.

  He would have liked to take the drawing-board down, or at least turn its blank back to them; but his ingenuity had dwindled, like his strength. He flopped down on the old plangent bed, where the state of its rucked-up grey blankets and grubby sheets was immediate
ly emphasized by his presence.

  Fortunately an inner distraction seemed to prevent Kathy noticing as much as she might have noticed, or else the objects which attracted her attention were closer to her own interests. After taking up and reorganizing one or two things on the chest: chunks of quartz and agate, a dried-up pomander which she sniffed at briefly, a pewter mug full of buttons, pins, and the melted ends of sealing wax, she began to talk to him in disconnected snatches, while showing no sign of expecting answers.

  ‘D’you really use sealing wax? I’ve always wanted to. I use coloured inks according to how I feel. Shall we write to each other, Mr Duffield?’

  The formal address destroyed the enormous headway he felt they had made in their relationship.

  He answered bleakly tentative: ‘There won’t be much point in writing, will there? If we continue to see each other?’

  She became more nervously excited, twitching as she talked and moved. She looked out of the window, eyes unflinching, at the now blindingly yellow light.

  ‘Of course there’ll be a point!’ She was forced to close her blinded eyes; she was smiling slightly: she had a rather thin mouth. ‘Don’t you think we’ll put in the letters the things we don’t say to each other? I mean—you couldn’t say the things you paint, could you?’

  She was swaying in the blaze of evening. His head felt as though it were reduced to skull, with the thoughts feverishly rattling in it.

  ‘My dear child’—it sounded unbearably gauche—‘will you let me hold your head—as we did—before? I want to remember the shape of it.’

  He did long—yes, to drink it down—swallow it whole—its beauty.

  She opened her eyes, and grinned rather heartily, like a girl in a newspaper photograph. ‘What a funny thing! I’ve got to go and practise. This is the time.’ If she had been older, she might have been warding him off with appointments at her dress-maker’s or hairdresser’s.

  But she did in fact come towards him, over the endless, intervening floor.

  Now that he had what he wanted, love and terror were flapping inside him in opposition. He must smell terrible, too: an old, unsavoury man. That, certainly, and their uncomfortable attitude, not to say his silliness as he laid her head against his, must ensure purity.