The Vivisector

by WHITE, PATRICK

  He closed his eyes, feeling he had achieved a definite stage in relationship with his spiritual child.

  But she began to resist. ‘It makes me nervous if I’m late for practice,’ she breathed close to his ear. ‘I’ve got to sit down always at the same time.’ Her cheek, fidgeting to escape, must have been grated by his more abrasive one; but she didn’t shed her kindness. ‘Here’s a surprise for you!’

  She popped into his mouth what began as a smooth jewel, but which melted abruptly into all that was soft and sweet-succulent. At the same time she seemed to crest over on him, breathing or crying, enveloping him like a wave.

  ‘What is it—Kathy—darling?’ he rattled as he was sucked under.

  ‘It’s like he smelled when he kissed me! My father! That only time I can remember.’

  He despaired more and more for the delicate relationship he had conceived: because her own innocent natural scent and distress over her lost father were cancelled out by the skill with which she had planted kisses in his mouth. That too could be innocent, of course: pure innocence, or ignorance. If he had not begun to suspect the innocence of his own desires he could have better accepted such an interpretation of Kathy Volkov’s behaviour.

  Then, when they were growing together like two insidious vines, she tore herself away with a force which should have reassured him.

  ‘Good-bye for now!’ she said, and giggled.

  If he didn’t wince, it was because his normal reactions had been sent too far astray.

  ‘Can you let yourself out?’ he feebly asked. ‘I don’t want to come down,’ he added, even feebler, and something about work.

  ‘Sure!’

  He might have hated her for that, but was prevented by some of the silent expressions she had used, and for the shape of her unconsciously noble head.

  She began leaping down the stairs, practically tearing the banisters down: so it sounded.

  ‘I’ll come tomorrow,’ she called back. ‘No—not tomorrow—but soon—to see how the kitten’s doing.’

  He had forgotten the wretched growling cat.

  ‘If I don’t come,’ she shouted up. ‘I’ll write you a letter like we arranged.’

  He was almost composing his.

  After some other semi-intelligible and not particularly relevant information, she shrieked: ‘Gee. I almost broke me neck!’

  She went out banging and clattering. The silence continued vibrating some time afterwards; while he huddled in a corner of the bed, already sensing the agonies of an empty letter-box, or worse still, her clear voice as it rocketed up the stairs on arrival, accurately aimed at his vulnerable core.

  About dusk he got up and went out. There was laughter in the darkening streets; a window opened, and shut; a breeze was blowing through dusty lace. Up at the thoroughfare a spawn of artificial light had begun to hatch and pulsate. The drunks were spewing. On a corner a big patent-leather mouth, boiling bust, and acquisitive eyes might have been for hire if he had brought the cash with him; but he hadn’t: no conventional defences could now protect him from the attacks to which he was being subjected.

  He walked around, past the wide bright shops, down the stale side streets, over hacked-off vegetable stalks and slivers of dog shit. Up a lane, where the last of an apocalyptic sky was burning the top of a paling fence, a figure had bent over a little go-cart, dispensing meat to cats. The cats lurked, mewed; some of them advanced when coaxed; in the shadows others growled and coughed over the charitable offal with which they were being fed. There was little love lost: the cats were gorging themselves on what was their due. Perhaps the voluntary martyr was rewarded by not being accepted; as the food was doled out, claws occasionally reached up to slash, and once a pair of growling jaws seemed to fasten in the charitable hand. The cat person continued bending over the improvised cart. The stench had become predominantly horse-flesh; while the cat lover’s sex remained indeterminate: a small person, however. (For God’s sake, not another child!)

  The voice offered no immediate clues while ringing clearly enough in the narrow deserted lane. ‘Prrh! Prrh! Puss? puss! You big devil, I know you! You cat! Claw me! Well, claw me! What good did it ever do anybody?’

  As she withdrew her clawed hand the cat person became a woman: ‘Big Swollen Cheeks!’ she spat at the mangy, chewed cat: while throwing him another gobbet of dark flesh.

  She straightened up, or would have done so: coming level with her in the wasted light, the intruder saw that she was a hunchback. And more. He had hardly recovered from the other attack when here was this fresh one.

  ‘Not—Rhoda?’

  ‘Yes, Hurtle.’ Raising her face on its thin little neck, she bared her teeth: in the half-dark, they appeared fine and curved, spaced like a cat’s.

  The smell of horse-flesh was overpoweringly rich.

  ‘Yes!’ she confirmed her identity in what sounded like a long hiss; while he began to crush, not her cat’s paws, her bird’s claws, the once delicate made coarse and stiff and knobbed.

  He no longer minded the smell of horse.

  ‘Rhoda!’ he was spouting, gasping. ‘Rhoda? Rhoda! Rhoda!’

  She didn’t join in, though once he thought he caught sight of her uvula waving up at him out of the cavern of her throat.

  If he hadn’t sensed the child buried in this old, shabby woman—she looked much older than he, no doubt ageing more quickly as the result of her physical affliction—he would have said she was quite unmoved by their finding each other: whatever the life she had led, it had taught her to control the expression of her face and the behaviour of her deformed body. It was only through his intuition that he could feel her spirit reaching out, in spite of her, to embrace his; while he, as always, fluctuated; half exhilarated to identify the sister of his conscience, half disgusted to know he would always have to overcome a repulsion; he had only ever been able to love Rhoda at moments of leavetaking, or unusual stress, as now in their grotesque and strained reunion.

  He heard himself saying: ‘You haven’t changed, Rhoda. D’you think you’ve changed?’ which was only half of what he meant to ask, and did: ‘D’you think I’ve changed?’

  She wiped her hands on the sides of her dress. ‘I couldn’t very well give an opinion. Not yet.’ She laughed her same cold little laugh. ‘Physically, yes. Who hasn’t?’ Her hump hadn’t, and it was for that reason, he could see, she had paused an instant. ‘You were so good-looking as a boy: dashing and dreamy at the same time. But nobody would expect you—by our age—not to look dilapidated.’

  While she was speaking she tugged several times at the cord she used for pulling the go-cart; the wheels made a painful, squealing sound, and the few remaining cats made off.

  ‘The light’—he pleaded reasonably—‘you mustn’t pass judgement by—not even a street lamp—a glimmer down a lane!’ But although his argument was sound enough, he knew it was wasted. ‘Why don’t we go back to where I live, so that we can talk, and get to know about each other? Rhoda?’

  He even took her by the hand, and forgot he was repelled by the stickiness of drying horse-flesh. She disengaged herself, not, he felt, on account of any dislike for him—in fact, she appeared completely indifferent—but perhaps because Maman might have considered it a breach of the conventions.

  It was not that either. ‘I’ve done my duty by these cats, but the others may be missing me.’

  ‘Which others?’

  ‘The cats I have living with me—fourteen of them—no, fifteen since yesterday.’

  ‘If you’d rather, let’s go to your place.’ She had made him pitch his voice too high: it bounced with a boyish insistence.

  ‘No.’

  This should have been final, but he couldn’t believe it was; although she was walking away, the go-cart sometimes grating, sometimes squealing behind her, the pace suggested indecision.

  He ran after her.

  ‘But Rhoda—after discovering each other! Isn’t it human?’ As he coaxed, he watched obliquely for signs of he
r giving in: he might have been her young brother; the stone manners of this old woman made him feel gauche.

  Then he had a brainwave. ‘I’ve got a cat! Come along to my place. Won’t you? Somebody—a friend—dumped it on me. You can advise me what to do.’ He knew nothing about anything: even by this stage in his experience he was incapable of dealing with the contingencies of life.

  ‘Oh,’ she snorted, ‘cats! There are too many of them.’

  But because he needed her—he suddenly realized how desperately—he must use every means to trap her.

  He was forced to grow cunning. ‘I’ll make us something good to eat. What about a Welsh rabbit?’

  Rhoda was as unimpressed as he would have been in a similar situation. Trudging along, they might have been returning from the lower garden of their childhood, if he hadn’t noticed her shoes: the dated strap-shoes of an elderly dowdy woman, but designed for Rhoda’s dwarf existence; he wondered where she got them.

  She had neither accepted nor refused his latest proposition when they reached the thoroughfare. All the lights were focused on them; traffic whizzed towards them, and whammed past; here and there, shopkeepers looked up from their evening transactions to take in a pantomime.

  Something extraordinary was happening: a man of distinguished head, of fairly youthful, even athletic, body, clothed, it seemed, only in the name of decency, in shirt and pants and a pair of old sandshoes, had started to blubber shamefully. Of course he was old, really; he couldn’t have disguised it. As he walked along blubbering, the bugger kept blowing out his lips and sucking them in and hiccupping—well, it could have been from emotion—while leading a freak of a woman by the hand. It was the cat woman! A sour little puss herself. But what could you expect: her hump and all? As they shuffled and staggered, pulling the blood-stained cart behind them, tears had boiled up in the cat woman’s cold eyes, and were running over the pink rims. So the couple advanced: past the wilting spinach and flabby turnips, the trays of squid and dull-eyed mullet. It was no wonder decent people left the two derelicts plenty room to pass; drunks, or more probably, metho artists, didn’t enter into their substantial, working lives.

  It was the bunch of keys in his pocket which helped him take hold of himself: the keys to the house in Flint Street.

  ‘I’ve lived here,’ he calculated roughly, ‘thirty years! Didn’t you know about it? You must have known.’

  ‘I’d heard, of course. I’d read. I’ve even seen you once or twice. But what good would it have done either of us if I’d come thrusting myself?’

  The more clearly he saw, the more cunning he grew. ‘We could be a help to each other, couldn’t we?’

  Again he tried taking her hand. It was cold. She withdrew it to back the stinking cart under the araucaria.

  ‘It’s a comparatively large house,’ he began to explain before remembering: ‘Oh, not compared with Sunningdale!’ He heard their double silence and was glad those hiccups had ended. ‘I want to show you over it.’

  As he opened it, the house seemed to stagger under his determination.

  ‘Wait here,’ he ordered in the hall.

  He ran ahead to switch on the lights of all the rooms in his once proud, now suppliant, house. In the scullery he kicked the herring tin Kathy had made him put for the cat; he heard the milk scattering: probably some of it on his pants. By the time he returned, reducing his run to a strut, Rhoda had left the hall and advanced into the living-room, so he could see this grimy old woman, his sister, in clear detail. She was standing with her head, her small triangular white face, poked forward: looking. She was more like an animal than a woman, perhaps as the result of her association with cats.

  She spoke, though. ‘I don’t like to imagine what they would think of it all.’

  ‘If you judge it by Courtney standards!’ He tried to ease his irritation by pulling up his slack trousers. ‘But people live differently, on the whole more honestly, now. What were we but a bunch of new-rich vulgarians gorging ourselves and complaining? ’

  Rhoda’s expression became so fixed and wooden he had a vision of her perched like a ventriloquist’s doll on Boo Davenport’s knee; the mouth moved: ‘Oh yes,’ she tinkled, ‘but I’m glad to have lived some of my life under a chandelier!’

  Again he had to pull up his pants, which had only started slipping since he met her: she irritated him so. ‘I can do without chandeliers—or think up one of my own.’

  ‘Oh, I agree. There’s very little that is necessary, beyond a crust of bread and a hole to curl up in.’

  He must try not to feel so irritated: when she was his sister, whom he loved. Of course the real reason for his irritation, he had to admit, was not her failure to appreciate his home, which he had stopped seeing as an actual house, but her continued un-awareness of its raison d’être—the paintings: all of which, even the most tentative youthful ones, were shimmering tonight, for Rhoda, in their true colours.

  Rhoda only nosed past them: not even a cat, more of a rat, a small white one, its pinker charms dulled by age and grime. The pink, moist hair had become a dirty grey-white fuzz. The seams of the little sharp white face were almost pricked out in black.

  She did pause once, beside, not in front of, his water-colour of Maman. ‘The yellow dress! Pretty dress—’ her voice trailed as she moved on.

  He would have to remember she had probably grown into someone quite different from what he had decided she was. Even if he couldn’t love this, or perhaps any, version of his sister, he was still full of affection for her: just as you can be fond of an old worm-eaten, ugly piece of furniture for its age and associations; the emotion of affection is not less genuine than love.

  And he needed Rhoda, he mustn’t forget.

  He returned to the cat. ‘I forgot the cat.’

  ‘Oh, cats! What’s this?’ She was pointing from where they were standing in Miss Gilderthorp’s dust-coloured morning room, or lesser parlour.

  ‘That’s the conservatory.’ For the first time since bringing Rhoda home he was ready to make excuses. ‘It’s nothing much. There isn’t a light in there, anyway. And it’s a bloody wreck—always has been.’

  ‘Looks interesting,’ she persisted, peering through the glass door.

  ‘Only a ruin.’

  ‘Can’t you shine a light through the door? Oh, go on, Hurtle, do! Don’t be a meanie!’ Her assumed girlishness, with its edge of sarcasm, brought them closer than they had been that night.

  So he got up on an unwilling chair and shone the parlour light bulb through the conservatory door.

  ‘Oh, I like that! It has something. It has a poetry,’ Rhoda calmly said.

  Was she daring to appropriate some idea which hadn’t yet suggested itself? He had never seen the conservatory by artificial light. Certainly the blacker shadows and the far more brilliant refractions from broken glass made him share her reaction; but he didn’t want to share: the conservatory was too private. Strange it should appeal to all three of them.

  He got down off the creaking chair and the light resettled in its rightful room.

  Rhoda sighed. ‘I’m liking your house better; but oh dear, I no longer care for old houses. I’m too old. You’re old, too—older as far as I can remember—but not my kind of old.’

  She began shuffling, and he thought he could detect, for the first time, a wheezing.

  He remembered: ‘The cat! It’s in the kitchen—the scullery. The kitchen’s pretty grim, but you’d better see everything, Rhoda—where I live.’

  Following, she became increasingly fretful. ‘All kitchens are awful,’ she complained. ‘I practically live on bread and cheese. Couldn’t touch meat after cutting up the horse every evening.’

  ‘The old girl who lived here before, put in this hideous asbestos box of kitchenette to make things easier, you see.’

  Rhoda’s head followed his explanations. Something had released the catch which had been holding it: now it could function freely on its spring.

  ‘This is the
scullery. I believe it’s called a “walk-in pantry” nowadays.’ They enjoyed a slight giggle together. ‘This, incidentally, is where my friend left the cat. Puss? Puss?’ he called.

  Rhoda seemed definitely to have tired of cats.

  ‘Out here,’ he continued revealing, ‘is the main part of the big, former kitchen—which is never used now. Isn’t it grim?’

  ‘Ghastly!’

  ‘Cool, though, in summer.’

  ‘I wonder what became of May?’ Her interest in their old cook made Rhoda look as though she were following a scent; she found, almost at once. ‘Why, of course, she must be dead!’ she shrieked.

  He hated that damn cat. ‘Puss? Puss?’ he called in an affected, amateurish voice.

  ‘Might as well save yourself the breath. Cat must have gone,’ Rhoda said. ‘You left the back door open.’

  She was right: startled by the apparition of Kathy he must have forgotten to close the door between the main kitchen and the yard.

  ‘I’ve had no experience of cats,’ he said. ‘I was relying on my friend.’

  ‘And the friend’s had none either.’

  ‘There’s still the whole of the upstairs to show.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Is there?’

  She began shuffling more noticeably: worse still, wheezing on the stairs. He tried not to feel guilty by remembering that Rhoda was to be employed as a moral force, or booster of his conscience. If only she could have realized how necessary she was; but she mustn’t know about Kathy, or what Kathy could grow into if the powers over which human nature has no control established a dictatorship.

  He was doing the honours of the upstairs in a kind of estate-agent voice: ‘. . . bath’s a bit stained. The old-fashioned geyser never lets you down once you’ve learnt its tricks . . . Junk mostly in here—got to have somewhere to store paintings—and I sometimes sleep on the stretcher if I feel like it . . . The two bedrooms are also studios—move about from one to the other—they’re so different in character—the light’s different.’