The Vivisector

by WHITE, PATRICK

  Upstairs, Loebel heaved down to business amongst the ‘important veuorks’; while an opalescent veil persisted, which the dealer perhaps didn’t perceive, or if he did, couldn’t penetrate.

  ‘What is this, Mr Duffield?’ Propert asked.

  ‘A collage I’m playing about with. Haven’t finished. It may not develop into anything much.’ Lying on the floor it looked as though it wouldn’t, not beyond its initial stage of haphazard seductiveness: you couldn’t help kicking at it.

  Propert, on the other hand, couldn’t resist picking it up. He was smiling. They were both smiling; while Loebel remained holding an important work the other side of the veil.

  Propert said: ‘Oh, I like this! Will you let me have it, Mr Hurtle Duffield?’

  ‘No. I’m working on it.’

  ‘But when it’s finished—after you’ve gone on from here and done whatever you have to.’

  ‘No. I can’t think there’ll be too many stages. Doesn’t interest me enough. From the beginning, it’s too indeterminate.’

  They still liked each other, however. They continued genuinely smiling; and Loebel couldn’t interpret what was happening.

  ‘What appeals to me is its tentativeness,’ Propert was saying. ‘I’d like to keep it in a state of becoming’—his chubby, quince face was taking an enormous risk—‘before the music sets into architecture.’

  Fortunately Loebel had the window to look out of, into the concrete world: it was he who made the discovery. ‘Maestro, you heff visitors. Are zey unexpected?’

  The latch on the back gate had clicked. You could hear the squeal of Rhoda’s little cart as she dragged it into the yard.

  ‘No. I was expecting her about this time.’

  In the upper room, the figures of all three had been transformed into statuary by the unexpectedness of the expected.

  Close enough to the window, the chubby Propert had grown uncharacteristically sharp: out of his fixed eyes arrows shot along his line of vision. ‘An unusually pretty girl. Is she your daughter?’

  It was too exhausting: it was too cruel.

  ‘No. My sister.’

  ‘You haff such a sister? So small?’ Loebel floundered.

  A kindly attempt at pity landed like the clumsiest of blows: when lightning struck the third statue into man.

  ‘Yes, I have a sister.’ He parted the other figures to arrive at the window. ‘The old—the oldish woman. The little girl isn’t—naturally—my sister. She’s a friend—less than that—a neighbourhood acquaintance,’ he heard himself babbling on.

  The two visitors had retreated with their shame into the middle of the room leaving him in full possession of the picture of Kathy and Rhoda together in the yard. He was the one who should have felt ashamed: of Rhoda. In fact he felt nothing of the sort; for Rhoda had been drawn into the circle of Kathy’s radiance. Whether two children, or two women, Rhoda and Kathy were equals, it appeared, not to say familiars. Rhoda was recovering her breath after the journey with the laden cart. One of Kathy’s arms was loosely linked to Rhoda’s as they stood chattering and laughing, aimlessly and breathlessly. He couldn’t—in any case he didn’t want to—hear what they were saying to each other, because their loving smiles suggested they would not have wished him to share in their conversation.

  Loebel hid his embarrassment in saying: ‘Vee are using your valuable time, maestro.’

  Propert had put on silence for the hunchback sister of a great man. Of the two visitors, he was probably the more shocked: Loebel, as a Jew, would have experienced a wider range of humiliation.

  Down in the yard Rhoda and Kathy were straining again, dragging the cart with its tins of refuse on the last lap of its journey to the kitchen. Kathy was doing most of the pulling: she was full of the strength of youth and affection; while Rhoda too, appeared fulfilled as she jerked dreamily at the cord in token gestures of exertion.

  ‘Vee vill pop!’ Loebel’s buzz came from the doorway. ‘It is how long—I did not know—you heff zis relative viz you? In fect, I did not know you heff any relative at all. It goes to show it is so very difficult to completely know.’

  ‘No. Yes! I’d be obliged if you’ll see yourselves to the door. Yes. I’m a little tired.’

  Propert was smiling an unhappy smile for the bright collage of their relationship which, in spite of its early promise, had come visibly unstuck.

  ‘Good-bye, Hurtle Duffield. Next time we must discuss the paintings.’

  His handshake demonstrated all the assurance of middle-aged collegiate manliness: which his smile seemed to deny. Propert’s smile was struggling to get out: you were reminded of the membrane on the sweetbreads his godmother in Vermont used to feed to her Russian blue.

  When the two visitors had left the house, the only sounds were those of muffled voices in the kitchen, tins jostling each other, a grizzling of awakened cats. Apparently Rhoda had no intention of announcing her return or producing her friend. Instead, she had taken the steel and started what became a long sharpening of her knife.

  The two voices laughed together intermittently, their laughter strangely similar in tone. Surely Kathy could only be imitating Rhoda?

  Lying on the bed, in the ever more deeply burnished light, he must have looked an inanimate lump of grey; though his mind, fidgeting through possibilities, didn’t allow him any rest. Would Rhoda’s friendship with Kathy lessen the chances of his destruction? Would it, on the other hand, destroy what he hoped to create from Kathy? Rhoda’s presence, planned as his comfort and moral defence, could end, like many a sulky fire, by burning down the whole house.

  So he continued brooding, as the sky smouldered over Chubb’s Lane.

  In the dusk a door opened and closed below. He knew then that Kathy was coming to him. It could only be Kathy flying up the stairs. The house shuddered. He decided she should find him sick.

  ‘Duff?’ she called. ‘What—lying in the dark! You’re not sick, are you?’

  She was making it easy to that extent.

  ‘It’s not dark.’ He was too conscious of a last glow of light which her forehead and bare arms were rekindling. ‘But I am sick.’

  ‘What’s wrong? Eh?’ She spoke with a spontaneous warmth, dropping down beside him on the bed, prepared to catch anything infectious.

  As for himself, he caught his breath. ‘Nothing exactly wrong—nothing you could put your finger on: old age nudging.’

  ‘But you’re not what anyone would call old!’ She crept further, insinuating herself like one of those damned cats around Rhoda their patroness.

  He would have liked to shout: ‘Go away!’ Instead, he murmured, heaving: ‘You’re cutting off the circulation in my legs. You’re heavy, Kathy.’

  ‘Don’t you like to be comforted when you’re sick?’

  ‘Comfort’ wasn’t acceptable to anyone on fire: too eider-downy; he couldn’t have explained that.

  ‘I expect Miss Courtney ’ull bring you up a bowl of broth, won’t she?’

  ‘You didn’t tell me—neither of you did—that you knew each other.’

  ‘Oh? No. She had the little room that my mother lets. We didn’t know she was your sister.’

  ‘She isn’t.’

  Kathy had crept closer up. At least the darkness would prevent him watching her skin burn, and the moment when those dangerously inflammable strands at the nape of her neck must catch. If she was still unaware of the fire inside him, she could only be simple, or inhuman.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

  His mouth moved, but didn’t succeed in articulating.

  ‘Oh!’ she sighed. ‘I’d like to fall in love—with somebody appropriate. ’

  ‘What’s “appropriate”?’

  Her downy mouth was drifting over his; she seemed to have abandoned speech for touch.

  ‘Haven’t you your music?’ He tried to thrust her off with his thighs; but the law of nature engineered his failure: she settled deeper.

  ‘Yes, my music,’ she breathed. �
��Mr Khrapovitsky says I must study harder.’

  She was digging into his maternal, his creative entrails.

  ‘Old enough to be your grandfather,’ he muttered against her lips.

  But she didn’t hear, because fire and sea were roaring through them: if only one could have halted the other.

  At least he was, technically, the passive one; he could console himself morally with that: he hadn’t attempted.

  In the hot dusk Kathy was devouring him, with sticky kisses at first, then, not with words, but a kind of gobbledegook of jerky passion. The surprising part of it was she took their behaviour completely for granted—excepting his passivity.

  ‘Don’t you like me?’ she asked between mouthfuls.

  From amongst the wreckage of what he had aspired to, he didn’t. He had hoped to love, not possess her.

  ‘Don’t you?’ she gasped.

  ‘No, Kathy, I love you.’ That seemed to satisfy her: now she could accept the dry science of his approach.

  Anatomically, she was in every detail what he could have desired—or almost. The shock of discovering her only deficiency made him spill out incontinently and without thought for the consequences.

  He became as curiously unafraid of Kathy, and finally, unsurprised. She was by now half snoozing, at the same time exploring his stubble; while he listened to Rhoda pulling her charitable cart, across the yard, up the lane, away. Had it occurred to Rhoda at any point that her charity might be needed at home?

  ‘Kathy,’ he began, swallowing hard, because since she was nothing more than his mistress, whatever he might say must sound embarrassingly trite, ‘I only wonder how it happened that you learned so much so soon.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About men.’

  ‘Honestly,’ she said, ‘I’ve never ever been with a man. My mother would have had a fit.’

  Honestly, she was becoming intolerable.

  ‘Boys, though—’ she mumbled in her drowsiness—‘boys won’t always leave you alone: you do it to have peace.’

  Suddenly he was free of her weight, by no effort on his part. He could hear and feel her sitting up in the surrounding darkness, reviving her conscience, or brushing off her lethargy, or both: it intrigued him to realize all the sounds she was making were those of a mature woman.

  Kathy seemed to be agitated by the first inroads of guilt. ‘Oh, dear!’ she began to mutter, then moan: ‘I’m late! I’m late for practice. How I hate that—to be late.’ The darkness was all movement, the window-pane quivering with artificial lights. ‘Khrapovitsky is right: I must study harder. I was good, though, at the last lesson. Khrap even had to admit it.’

  He tried to invoke deafness and did succeed in retreating into himself for a moment; when he was sucked back, he heard: ‘. . . if only I will give all of myself—all of my time—to music. So he says.’

  The fireworks of Liszt were coruscating in and over Chubb’s Lane: the cheap bangers, the intoxicated Catherine-wheels, the soaring, feathered rockets.

  He heard her scratching after the switch. ‘Don’t turn on the light, Kathy.’

  ‘Good night, Duffle,’ she said, feeling with her lips, giving him a cool wet kiss.

  He listened to her blundering down the stairs: his aborted spiritual child.

  Incredible to think it was still that night: he was going down, after hearing Rhoda return with her empty cart. He would have liked to give her fairer warning than the sound of his slippers or a cough before opening the kitchen door; though he was wearing a shirt and trousers he was afraid he might look naked. Appeased sensuality helped him temporarily not to mind. He put on a slight swagger, to show he didn’t. But Rhoda kept her eyelids lowered.

  From behind these she was preparing a meal: of cold sliced luncheon sausage, which would taste of nothing, not even sawdust; some lettuce she had shredded into thin ribbons; hard-boiled eggs, blue as bruises where the white met the yellow. She was brewing tea, but he got out the brandy bottle and had him a good slug, still without Rhoda choosing to notice. One day, he promised himself, he would bring home a plump chicken, and stuff it with truffles, and lace it with fine champagne—didn’t they accuse him of being rich?—and nurse it gently, gently, on a bed of spitting butter: a meal for an elderly sensualist, and, of course, his sister, or lapsed conscience.

  He tried out on his teeth a ribbon or two of knife-flavoured lettuce. ‘You never thought to mention Kathy Volkov.’

  Rhoda was sucking on half a naked withered tomato. How sly, he wondered, were the eyes behind their lowered blinds?

  ‘Why should it have occurred to me? We all lead our own lives,’ she protested. ‘Mrs Volkov is my friend. I wasn’t aware Kathy was yours. She’s a child—and an artist in her own right.’

  Rhoda, he saw, had developed the mouth of a governess. One drooping shoulder, and all her movements as she rearranged the plate and laid together her knife and fork, were the motions of self-righteousness disguised as humility.

  He remembered: ‘That fur coat we discussed—I must buy it for you. We’ll go in the morning,’ he said too forcefully. ‘You’ll have to be specially fitted.’ He couldn’t help it sounding cold.

  Rhoda was looking at her empty plate. ‘But I don’t want it. Expensive presents are in every way an embarrassment. Besides, ’ she smiled, and raised her eyes, ‘fur coats are one of the traditional bribes women are offered by men.’

  ‘Aren’t I your brother?’

  She didn’t answer, but got up, to move virtuously around in the strait asbestos kitchen. She was in a tidying mood; if untidiness hadn’t already existed, she would have invented it.

  He was so exasperated he took another swig of brandy.

  ‘How did you come to meet Mrs Volkov?’ He couldn’t leave it alone, or disguise his impatience: waiting for her answer he started swinging a leg, youthful, but desperately so.

  ‘How?’ she repeated, sweeping invisible crumbs. ‘We first met—as far as I can remember—when I was living over by The Gash. I think I met her with Mrs Cutbush. Bernice Cutbush is a friend of Mrs Volkov’s.’

  ‘Cutbush! The grocer? Is Cutbush also Mrs Volkov’s friend?’ His swinging leg, which had felt comparatively limber, and lithe, and youthful in spite of his irritation, was immediately petrified.

  ‘I can’t say Mr Cutbush has ever been Mrs Volkov’s friend. That wouldn’t be possible.’

  ‘How not possible?’

  ‘Not according to her moral code. Mrs Volkov is very strict, though I’m sure—well, I know Mr Cutbush was present on some occasions—it couldn’t have been otherwise—in his own house. Mrs Volkov was sorry for Mrs Cutbush. You might say they have disappointments in common. Mrs Volkov’s husband ran away; Mr Cutbush stayed at home, but might have run. This, I believe, is why the two women were drawn together. Mrs. Volkov would walk over to Gidley Street: she used to be a great walker, and walking’s cheaper. Sometimes she’d take Kathy with her.’

  ‘Is Mr Cutbush known to Kathy?’

  ‘He could hardly help being. When she grew older, she’d sometimes lend a hand in the shop, only Saturdays of course. Of course, it was only a sort of joke—an entertainment for the child—though he used to pay her a shilling or two.’

  ‘But a man of that character!’

  Rhoda gave a short laugh. Her rather prominent teeth glistened. Although she had lived close to life, her affliction had kept her aloof from it. Like a statue, her marble was prone to breakage only. ‘Kathy could hardly come to harm with a man like Cecil Cutbush. He’s a man’s man.’ Again she laughed, quite naturally. ‘Or boy’s.’

  He just prevented the bottle from toppling.

  ‘Poor Cutbush was almost caught out once: he got off by the skin of his teeth. It was a horrid pimply boy, too.’

  ‘What sort of age?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Of an age by which vice has had time to develop. Twelve, perhaps—or thirteen. This boy, luckily for Cutbush, was well known as a liar—though Cutbush himself is what you would ca
ll a compulsive liar—respected as a man of business, however—and churchwarden. He had to resign from the council after the scandal.’

  He could visualize the Cutbush circle: the two women drinking tea, the grocer’s tearful wife and the Scot whose virtue was probably her vice, holland blinds half-drawn against a heat they intensified; it collected round the brown teapot and the cut-glass stand with its enormous floured scones. Miss Courtney the lodger had been allowed in because she was small enough to stimulate the charitable aspirations of her two companions. They put up with the stench of horse-flesh which, frankly, used to nauseate Mrs Cutbush almost as much as her husband did. Because he too lived in the house, he couldn’t very well be kept out, but sat sucking his moustache after his cup of tea. Cecil’s shiny serge thighs were what nauseated Bernice most of all. And Kathy? Kathy will be holding the fort: Mrs Volkov glowed with the virtue of having produced a child, whether by husband, or mere, casual male. The grocer’s phlegmy voice confirmed that Kathy was a girl with a head on her shoulders; while the blowflies settled on the turned butter melting out of their scone feast.

  Kathy amongst the canisters, under the lowering bacon-flitch, her throat reflecting the kaleidoscopic labels on the tins she popped into paper bags, could still have been immaculate. But for how long? with her boy’s bum and starfish breasts: only the pimples were missing; or perhaps they existed subcutaneously, along with the lies, the compulsive lies.

  In the circumstances, his hands were almost throttling the brandy bottle. ‘I wonder you can enjoy the company of liars, and buggers, and hysterics, and Scottish prigs.’

  Rhoda seemed hypnotized by his blenched knuckles. ‘Aren’t they other human beings? Almost everybody carries a hump, not always visible, and not always of the same shape.’

  ‘But that child—I wonder how much she understands?’ If he could have burnt Rhoda open with the blow-lamp he was becoming, he would have done so: to find out what she was keeping locked away from him.