She only said, and that slowly: ‘You should know, Hurtle.’
‘How—I?’
‘You were a child, weren’t you? I think, perhaps, in many ways, you are still; otherwise you wouldn’t see the truth as you do: too large, and too hectic.’
Shortly after, she finished her imaginary tidying and shut herself up with her cats. He went to the back door, and chucked out the empty bottle, which exploded somewhere in the dark yard.
At least he had his work, however closely he was threatened by human vice, his sister Rhoda, the approach of old age and the behaviour of those who only bought his paintings to flog. There were the paintings; but fortunately there was also painting: the physical act which rejuvenated and purified when he and nameless others were at their most corrupt. Of course it was a miserable refuge too—oh God, yes, when he cared to admit it: he was an old man, turning his back and distorting truth to get at an effect, which he did, he knew, better than anybody else—well, almost anybody. But there were the days when he himself was operated on, half-drunk sometimes, shitting himself with agony, when out of the tortures of knife and mind, he was suddenly carried, without choice, on the wings of his exhaustion, to the point of intellectual and—dare he begin to say it?—spiritual self-justification.
Anyway, he painted.
During the days which followed Kathy Volkov’s necessary but forgettable visit, he drew constantly and furiously. He did many drawings for what he could see was becoming his ‘Girl at Piano’. Out of numerous false starts and the vulgar gloss of a concert grand, the old upright piano grew, the sloping line of the inclined case almost parallel to the straight line of the young girl’s back, her thick plait, the candlesticks empty except for the solid drifts of wax and encrustations of verdigris. As he saw it, any light must flow from a suggestion of the girl’s face.
So he continued drawing, and rejecting, and compiling. At one stage he drew the boy of sinewy thighs and starfish breasts with Kathy’s shadow falling across him. Perhaps the boy’s mouth was Kathy’s; the ribs were a boy’s, as primitive as bacon bones. He destroyed the drawing for having no connection; though in some actual sense, it could have been a complement to the wholly feminine girl inclined at the upright piano with its blind candlesticks.
Obsessed all these days, he realized he had forgotten his promise of a fur coat to Rhoda. He decided to pretend he had never made it; or at least he would pretend for the time being. Soon after her arrival he had bought her the promised transistor, which continued tinkling and reverberating amongst her permanently indolent cats even after she had gone out on cat business. Fortunately he was too busy to hear the twangled music except by snatches.
It appeared from these that Rhoda was dedicated to pop. But wasn’t Kathy, his spiritual child, a daughter of the neighbourhood?
While preparing a board for the painting he was almost ready to paint, it occurred to him he hadn’t seen Kathy for days: it might have been weeks. He coughed slightly on finding himself so unmoved: shocking, no doubt, to some busybody of a moralist born without a visual sense. But he had his drawings; he had conceived this painting in which Kathy was present, not the sweaty schoolgirl of vulgar lapses, touchingly tentative aspirations, and at times brutal, because unconscious, sensuality, but the real Katherine Volkov, almost a woman, of studied ice and burning musical passion, who was daring him to transfer his own passion to the primed board. The face he caught sight of in the glass surprised him: haggard and drained for one who was at the point of running over to excess.
Though he would have liked to wait till the following morning early and work through the hours of daylight, he could no longer restrain himself. He began that afternoon. At times he heard his panting, or groaning, or wheezing (a bronchial old age?) as he thrust against the virgin board. There were the other moments after the initial terror, when it became so exquisitely easy he could feel the flesh returning to his face; the sweat tasted deliciously salt, which his tongue lapped from a corner of his mouth. In the same way, his possessed girl was beginning to create in spite of herself. The inclining body was both exhilarated by the music escaping out of it, and tormented by what might escape altogether. Avoiding the accusation of technique and emptiness, he must somehow fill the rectangular board with a volume of music. It was their common problem: the girl appeared to writhe, to one side, as she crouched at her piano.
The piano remained a dead expanse. The candlesticks he could build up with a brilliance of verdigris and icicles of wax; but he couldn’t so far bring the bloody piano to life. Yes, bloody. He drew blood: slashing, and gashing; and retreated from the thing he had so foolishly undertaken.
As the light was failing he went down in search of Rhoda his sister, whom he didn’t exactly want to find, and who would be out, in any case, dispensing her charitable offal. Her own cats, acclimatized by now, were mostly limbering up for the night; he caught glimpses of them, trying out their claws on privet trunks, their voices on the dusk, or lurking amongst the leathery leaves of the conservatory. He found himself beginning to resent Rhoda’s absence, even the exodus of her cats: when he sighted one old matted tom lolling on the mantelpiece against the marble columns of a clock. Immediately the clock pinged the cat opened his yellow eyes, the claws shot out from the sheath of cracked pad, to fight a duel of understanding.
The intruder could have shouted. At once he went clambering back up to his room snatched at paper tried out the wire entanglement the barbs the coiled springs of the cat: or Cat. He could visualize the great barbed pads coiled glimmering inside the scrims of the piano case.
When Rhoda came in she called out triumphantly: ‘Hurtle? I bought a cooked chicken!’
His mouth sagged, but he went down to her wretched chicken. Rhoda was breathless and radiant from her labours. At once they began tearing the chicken apart with their equally exhausted, grubby hands: while cats hovered. The king of the mantelpiece got the parson’s nose, and almost choked on it.
After wiping the grease from her mouth, Rhoda announced: ‘I’m going to bed. I don’t know when I felt so tired.’
He might have echoed her remark if it wouldn’t have been against his principles.
While she was blundering around the kitchen, clapping the used plates together, Rhoda happened to touch him on the arm. ‘My dear boy, I’m so happy for you!’ he couldn’t surely have heard her say; his consummation was such a private matter, it became immoral for Rhoda, who was also his sister, to refer to, let alone feast on it.
So he escaped as quickly as possible from his voyeuse. He stumbled up the stairs, barking one of his shins—lucky not to have fallen on his face—and slept.
In the clear light of morning he scrabbled after clean brushes; he couldn’t have wasted time ridding the dirty ones of their crust: he had to paint.
He painted the coiled tiger just visible inside Katherine Volkov’s piano. The keys under her fingers were yellow and slightly clawed. The gashes in the woodwork would stay. He painted the long thick plait waiting to lash the music out of its glistening tail.
Finishing at what was still an early hour, he felt sleek, jovial and generous. Whether she liked it or not, Rhoda would have to submit to his generosity.
At breakfast he began. ‘Do you know what I’m planning to do this morning?’ He looked out through the kitchen door at the almost amiable cat inhabitants of his yard.
By contrast Rhoda was looking pinched and sour. ‘It can’t be much of a plan if you propose to share it.’
He was so full of kindness he wouldn’t let her reject him. ‘We’re going to get dressed and take the tram to a fur “salong” I investigated some time ago. I’m going to have them fit you out.’
Rhoda was standing on her usual little box to lend her height for the washing-up. The silence sounded made for breaking as she recklessly stirred the crockery in the sink.
Presently she said faintly: ‘I wonder whether you know how cruel you are—to expose me to ridicule.’
‘How more ridiculou
s in a good coat than looking like something off a dump?’ He sounded the soul of bourgeois reason. ‘You used to be a great one for clothes and dressing up.’
‘Oh, yes!’ She sighed. ‘Then! And “dressing up” is just what it was!’ It might have ended in bitterness if steam from the sink hadn’t made her sneeze.
Suddenly she asked in a different voice: ‘What time should I be ready?’
It was such a volte-face he felt a bit resentful, but mumbled: ‘Give us time to get into our clothes.’
As she flung the water off her hands he recognized her feverish look.
They so seldom went about together, any neighbour seeing them that morning must have been surprised. His stride carried him somewhat ahead. Because it was a cold day he had put on his overcoat. He hid his unemployed hands in the pockets. He couldn’t hide Rhoda, though. She was wearing a cloak in green-tinged, black serge with a large wooden button fastening it under her pointed chin. He had hit the nail on the head mentioning the dump at breakfast: all her clothes looked come-by-chance, when her size and shape must have forced her to have them made for her.
Who, seeing him with Rhoda, would believe in his success? Didn’t believe in it himself: such transparent brilliance only emphasized his deformities.
In desperation he turned round from time to time, and called back over the intervening space. ‘Are you all right? Am I walking too fast?’ and finally: ‘It isn’t far now’; as though she didn’t know the tram stop.
Rhoda had obviously got it into her head that he was trying to make a fool of her. She composed her mouth and didn’t answer as she trotted along after him.
It was the same in the tram: his attempts at adorning a sense of duty with love, all seemed to fall flat. He truly loved Rhoda. Wasn’t she his past? The knowledge they shared had a common source.
He cleared his throat of an obstruction. ‘How do you like the idea of nutria? That’s a practical, discreet fur.’ What came out in a blast, ended as too much of a whisper when muted midway.
Rhoda, who never wore a hat, pushed back her greying, straying hair, held up her wedge-shaped chin, and said: ‘Squirrel is what I’ve always hankered after. I wanted Maman to give me squirrel, but she wouldn’t.’
‘Perhaps she was right. Squirrel was a soubrette’s fur. Don’t think it’s in fashion any more. Probably tears very easily too.’
They must have looked and sounded odd, seated side by side on the tram bench, fatally belonging to each other while not owning to it. Most of the passengers were too refined to stare: only the children did, fish-mouthed, in one case picking his nose; the children looked right inside.
Rhoda said: ‘If I have to go through with this, I want squirrel, Hurtle.’
Because she was deforming his intentions he remained silent for a whole section.
Then he said, looking with distaste at the circumspect expressions surrounding them: ‘It isn’t a major issue, though you want to turn it into one.’ The tram bell seemed to mark the end of a round, with him the loser.
Rhoda was sitting as erect as her body allowed. It was he who could afford to loll, not sloppily, at an elegant angle, as he had sometimes noticed in the glass: having shoes fitted, for instance.
‘Who’s trying to expose you to ridicule, I’d like to know? Tarting yourself up in squirrel! My idea was to see you warmly, presentably clothed in winter, instead of looking a fright.’
‘Oh, dry up, Hurtle! I couldn’t begin to compete with your vanity and arrogance.’
A couple of children began to laugh; while all the hatted ladies had been born deaf, it seemed: they glanced at the view or their engagement books. Only one of them, less controlled, or more honest, was fascinated by his ankles in the left-over pair of Sulka socks, a present from Boo Davenport, he had come across that morning.
He uncrossed his legs, and squirmed around on the unyielding bench. He hated the prudent faces of the powdered ladies; he hated them for their discretion towards his hunchbacked sister, and at least one of them for her stupid admiration of what she saw as elegance of form: when he too, if they had known, was a freak, an artist.
It brought him very close to Rhoda. It made him glance at her, wondering whether she could have been hiding some secret gift inside her deformity all these years; but her expression wouldn’t allow him even to guess at its nature.
Arriving at what he had taken to calling the fur ‘salong’, and which Rhoda had refused to see as their private joke, they were accepting each other, if not as closely united as he wished.
The big Jewess in charge surged towards him with a smile which acknowledged his fame. ‘You remember,’ he fairly spat it at her, ‘I discussed with you a relative who would need special attention.’
‘Oh yes, Mr Duffield!’ The Jewess tilted her head till her moist lips were glistening with light and understanding.
‘This is my sister.’ He stepped aside, unveiling Rhoda.
The woman had been well trained; but it was obviously something of an occasion. The fitter she brought was nervous to the point of neurosis. The manager came as they contemplated Rhoda’s hump.
‘I thought, perhaps, nutria.’
‘Squirrel, Hurtle. We agreed on squirrel.’
Once this was established, Rhoda settled down as though in the hands of Maman. He wished Maman had been there; even Harry would have managed the situation better; Harry’s worldliness would have risen to the choosing of skins.
Both the Courtney children grew noticeably shyer, he knew, in leaving the fur ‘salong’. Would he pay a deposit? He did—humbly, if they had guessed—in notes: while Rhoda turned her back.
They were received into an almost empty tram for the return journey. As they rode the hills of Sydney, the luxury of seeming privacy and a glow from his recent generosity allowed him to ask: ‘What about Kathy?’
‘Who?’
‘Kathy Volkov. Have you seen her?’
Rhoda’s nostrils began to get their pinched look: scenting a prelude to bribery, no doubt.
‘Oh, I see her. Yes. When I visit her mother,’ she casually admitted. ‘I go there fairly often. They’re very excited.’
‘Why should they be—excited?’ His voice sounded dislocated; the motion of the tram was churning them round against each other whether they liked it or not.
‘Because of the recent developments, of course.’ Rhoda was perhaps attempting to tell calmly, unless he had irritated her by not knowing. Had she already told, and he was drunk or thoughtful at the time? Or was he already senile? He certainly couldn’t remember, and was relieved when the tram pitched her into her narrative. ‘Yes. Mr Khrapovitsky retired from the Con,’ she shouted against the screeching of the tram. ‘Mrs Khrapovitsky—well-connected, it appears—has inherited property in Melbourne. They are moving—down—there. He’s keeping Kathy on, because she’s an exceptional pupil. She’ll stay with a relative—Mrs Volkov’s cousin.’
‘When is she leaving?’ he shouted back into Rhoda’s teeth.
‘End of the month.’
He quickly calculated, and saw how cruel it was, but only too probable: the sort of thing that does happen.
‘Will you be seeing her?’ he asked with assumed meekness.
Rhoda wet her lips. ‘I’ve been bidden,’ she began (why the hell did she use ‘bidden’?) ‘by Bernice Cutbush—to a little afternoon party. It can only be boring for a child—but poor Mrs Cutbush—and Kathy at times does suggest she’s older than she is.’
He subsided on the wicked seat he was sharing with Rhoda. They were mostly silent. He tried to nauseate himself by remembering the smell of school tunic on a hot evening; while the poetry of Katherine Volkov constantly headed his misery in other directions.
It was fortunate he had his work. In the following weeks he painted several versions more or less abstract of his ‘Girl at Piano’. There were drawings too, which poured out on his board, on odd scraps of paper, on the walls of the dunny. He even returned to his conception of the boy-girl, both in
drawings and, finally, in paint. The half-veiled face might have been tattooed in purple: or was it an eruption of pimples? Evil-looking by either interpretation; but the evil painting, coming to a head, relieved him to some extent.
In the meantime Rhoda had been for several fittings for the fur coat, which was giving trouble.
‘She’s so nice,’ she said, ‘really—when you get to know her.’
‘Who is?’ He was irritated by Rhoda’s sly innocence; he almost put up an arm to prevent her brushing against Katherine Volkov, the actual one he was at present creating in his mind, as opposed to the figment of his original lust.
‘The lady at the fur place,’ Rhoda was explaining. ‘So understanding. She was in Auschwitz. Has the numbers tattooed on her arm.’
‘Too flabby.’
‘You reduce everything to a physical level. How do you suppose anyone survives? How did Mrs Grünblatt, for instance?’
In the end you couldn’t talk to Rhoda.
She had taken to smothering herself in powder, which didn’t at all improve her nose: the transparent tip kept its same gleam of gristle, while a chalky residue collected round the periphery. Whether Mrs Grünblatt was the sole reason for these attempts at camouflage, he couldn’t decide: Rhoda was so secretive, yet at the same time naive.
For instance, she threw in: ‘Mrs Grünblatt used to be acquainted with a painter—his name, I think, was Groze—or something like it.’
‘Grosz?’ He snorted; if Mrs Grünblatt was of the school of Grosz, he could visualize her mental drawings of Rhoda.
One evening she returned wearing a dab of dry rouge on each cheekbone and an unmistakable thread of lipstick. He restrained himself from telling her she had been to the ‘little afternoon party’ given by Mrs Cutbush for Kathy and Mrs Volkov; nor did Rhoda confess.
As the deadline approached, he looked regularly in the letter-box for the tattooed message. He bound one of the boy-girl’s ankles, in spite of which, the sores continued escaping through the bandage.
The Vivisector Page 54