The Vivisector

by WHITE, PATRICK

  ‘Shuard?’

  ‘Yes. They say he’s a music critic.’

  ‘But that’s impossible! How could Shuard be known to Cutbush? ’

  ‘Well, he was at one time living in Gidley Street, in a furnished room—between wives. I understand he’s had several wives—not that Mr Shuard could be called an immoral man, Mrs Cutbush says; he only let the wrong ones choose him.’

  ‘But why should they invite Shuard to Kathy Volkov’s party?’

  ‘What could be more thoughtful? And he wasn’t invited—he was only asked to look in—because, Mrs Cutbush felt, it might be an advantage for Kathy to know a music critic.’

  ‘To start so early! And with Shuard!’

  ‘How—so early? And with Shuard? He’s such a well-travelled man. And witty raconteur.’

  Yes! Warming himself in Berlin between little girls.

  ‘I don’t understand you, Hurtle. Some of your remarks are so peculiar.’ She was looking into the bottom of her cup as though reading a fortune.

  He got himself out of the way: he felt so sick.

  That winter he did fall ill, with pneumonia. Rhoda sent for a strong fellow, the carrier who moved her things in the beginning, to bring down one of the beds from upstairs, and set it up in the living-room. ‘So that I can attend to my brother.’

  She made him lie there on his own bed surrounded by geographical features he would have to learn more accurately. Rhoda brought him thin, greasy soups which he drank with forced gratitude. She produced a Spode-looking chamberpot, and would carry it out slip slop, to empty; for some time he was too weak to crawl as far as his sanctuary the dunny.

  He asked her: ‘Do you remember St Yves de Trégor?’

  ‘Never ’eard of ’im.’

  ‘The place in Brittany where we stayed with Harry and Freda Courtney. There was a full pisspot under the bed.’

  She blushed. ‘No—I don’t remember.’

  ‘Don’t you? I remember everything.’

  ‘You! You’re peculiar!’

  ‘It isn’t peculiar. It’s natural. If you’ve lived it.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve lived it enough! But some of it you like to forget. Surely that’s more normal?’

  He couldn’t argue with her.

  At one stage he asked her to bring him drawing paper: he wanted to compose a letter to Kathy; though he didn’t tell Rhoda that. He wrote secretly:

  My dearest Kathy,

  I am

  There he stopped, because that, finally, was as much as he knew. In any case, he had never been good with words. It would have been more natural if he could have painted a picture. He did in fact make a drawing to send instead; but that too, he destroyed: a confession of such tenderness might have shocked the wrong person should she have picked it up, perhaps even the one who should have received it.

  How dispose of the destroyed drawing, the crumpled failure of a letter? He didn’t trust the furniture in a room which didn’t belong to him. In the meantime, the scraps of paper were always present, as tangible as twisted iron, moving around inside his bed. Eat them by small crumbs? He might have choked. So his guilt remained precariously hidden in the bed.

  At the beginning of his illness Rhoda, in spite of her respiratory condition, had insisted on making up the bed, or tugging at the rumpled clothes from the sides. Now he obviously couldn’t let her.

  ‘But you haven’t the strength!’ she gasped.

  Who had, remained to be proved. ‘I can’t let you,’ he hissed. ‘Rhoda!’ He was sweating cold like a boy who must hide the stains of shame.

  Finally he planned a journey, out of the house, across the yard, as far as the incinerator. It was on a day of drizzle; he couldn’t wait: Rhoda would be away from home collecting catmeat. The rain was falling softly enough; but traps were set all the way across the yard: shards of glittering blue slate; jags of bottle; puddles of water deceptively dimpled; the soaking curtains of Bignonia venusta hanging from the dunny ballooned out and clung to his gown, the pickets of which were crammed with guilty paper.

  Watched by a crouching piebald cat he was slowly advancing on felt feet from one stationary position to the next: when Rhoda tore round the corner of the house. Must have been in the conservatory; she usually stood her Wellingtons there.

  Rhoda tore. ‘I caught you out!’ she shrieked. ‘You! When all we do is for your own good!’

  At least he had reached the incinerator. In opening up, the lid showered him with flakes of charred rust. Too much to hope the match would kindle.

  He could imagine Rhoda’s white look as she tore across the yard.

  Matches breaking. He got a thin little flame going on a shaving of paper, which ought to have blazed up—it was positively incendiary—if his papery hands hadn’t fumbled, and the lid of the incinerator crashed shut.

  Rhoda was using language she never used: ‘You bloody fool! You mad evil devil of an old bugger!’

  While the gentle rain taunted them both, she was dragging at his waist, at his dressing-gown cord—slipping; she was away out at last on the acorn at the end of the cord.

  Although he was laughing, he was desperate to return to the incinerator; while she wouldn’t let him.

  ‘What are we to do with you?’ she screamed. ‘Put you in a straitjacket?’

  ‘The Gestapo should know!’ His shout came out as a whisper; for rain in finest webs was gumming up his lips.

  It was so deadly important that he should burn the incriminating evidence: when the incinerator began to roar; and he was led easily back into the house.

  Rhoda had exhausted herself.

  He put his hand on her wet hump, as he had never done before, and it was solid. ‘Poor Rhoda, I know you are my rock, but I’m so happy to have recovered my independence.’ Since the burning of the papers, he was not so much physically weak as light with joy.

  Rhoda subsided. ‘Independence—whatever that means. I’ve just been with Mrs Volkov, who woke up this morning and found her speech was blurred. It gave her such a fright she wants to send for Kathy. If she does, Kathy’s career may be ruined—and perhaps others.’

  Rhoda was so hysterical, melodramatic, he decided she ought to be left to recover. Because Mrs Volkov had never emerged from her name and her abstract virtues to become a person, her blurred speech could only remain a matter for his conventional concern, in spite of their secret relationship.

  It was the sudden thought of a blighted hand which paralysed him as he floundered into bed. So he lay wondering whether he believed in God the Merciful as well as God the Vivisector; he wondered whether he believed in God as he lay massaging his right hand.

  The following summer there was a drought in which he flourished physically, though it did nothing to improve the yellow wastes of his spirit. In all his paintings of that summer the faceless forms floated in search of a reason. Gravitating towards a promise of metamorphosis, his embryos did add up to something if the eye could see; the trouble was: most eyes could not.

  When, for instance, he took two or three of his canvases over to the Tank Stream Gallery, the directors descended on him, all smiles, but sideways glances at the paintings, and hints, and murmurs, and jolliness, and grunts: Ailsa Harkness the steel eagle, and her partner Biddy Prickett; there was more of the red ferret in Biddy.

  He stood fanning himself with his panama hat, still elegant, but stained, in the tussore suit which never showed its age because it had always been that colour. The timeless is never dated: then why was this pair of ignorant, self-opinionated women shilly-shallying over the paintings?

  Miss Harkness smiled, and glanced, and said: ‘Are you well? You look well. You must take care of yourself, you know.’

  Miss Prickett was without lashes, or else they were too pink to see. ‘Why don’t you take a trip, Hurtle? There’s no use pretending you aren’t disgustingly rich.’ In spite of Biddy Prickett, he could feel the smirk settle on his face. ‘Or marry some luscious girl. If you haven’t already gone and done it. You were a
lways such an old pretender.’ Biddy’s laugh was meant to jolly you along, but had an utter mirthlessness.

  Ailsa Harkness was grasping a painting as though it needed breaking open. ‘So these are the newest. Lovely! There are at least three Americans waiting for you to fill in their cheques. I’d say they’ll be more than excited to find you’ve started a fresh phase.’

  Fresh phase: or the end? He could never pass judgement on his work, except in his depths, the way to which is so tortuous.

  When he got in, Rhoda was out and a letter had come. He began at once fumbling to read: lucky he still had his eyesight.

  Dear Mr Duffield . . .

  Mustn’t lose heart. He couldn’t. It was for the moment the major part of him.

  ... How dreadful of me not to write when I promised. But nor did you! It is just that whenever I start a letter in my head I know how insipid I am going to look. When you think of all the time I am made to spend at ghastly school I ought to be more literate.

  I am studying day and night now for the State heats of the Concerto Contest. (I shall perform here because, they say, I am residing in Victoria.) I am study the Piano Concerto in E Flat Major of Liszt, which I find more and more of a challenge! I have made some progress, Khrap thinks, though my left hand is still a little weak. O God I’ve got to be good! I wonder if I was a Roman Catholic would that make it any easier? Or Christian Science? Unfortunately I am only me, and nothing or no one will ever change that.

  I study so hard I seldom see my friends, of whom I have many by now in Melbourne. Sometimes I take time off to go to the house of my best friend Meredith Thurston. She is my age. Her mother died when she was six, and her father is a physiologist, very brilliant though great fun. Last Sunday Gerry took us to Davy’s Bay. We sat on the sand licking ice-creams without our shoes, it was blissful. On her sixteenth birthday Gerry allowed Meredith to choose a dress at Foy and Gibson’s, and because it was almost my birthday too he gave me the same opportunity. No expense spared! I chose the most fabulous white gown which I shall keep to wear (with alterations) on the platform at my famous ‘debut’!

  Don’t think I am not grateful enough to Gerry for his kindness, and any girl would be flattered, he is such a handsome man still, only going a bit round the middle, but I feel his gesture was more than anything charitable, he sees me in much the same position as Merry who has lost her mother, myself with a father who ran away.

  Another if smaller reason why I must succeed in what I am doing—to be out of reach of charity!

  Well, I shall see you this winter if all goes well, I know it will, in Sydney, because I shall win the State, I shall play in Sydney, I shall win the final, the Commonwealth!

  Yours most sincerely

  KATHERINE VOLKOV

  Oh dear this looks as insipid as I knew it would, and you will think me of no account. I wonder why you intimidate me? Gerry Thurston doesn’t, and he too is a brilliant man. Love and kisses and the best kiss of all.

  kathy

  The Quasi Adagio is still giving me trouble. I can’t always bring it out clear enough, then at other times it becomes so very easily and naturally pure.

  k

  He had reached the upper floor by this. He sat down on the edge of the bed, wetting his lips; they had dried right out. He was palpitating. The stairs combined with the letter had made his heart his blood chug. A breeze, clattering through the old lopsided blind, to some extent helped reconstitute the bits of him which had come unstuck.

  Presently he reached for paper and let his hand loose. It was a vague but soothing preamble, not yet himself really, but his hand: till his head began to follow. The line flowed out of his head, down through the arteries, through his fingers. He began drawing at last.

  Rhoda must have come in and noticed his hat; she called up: ‘Are you there, Hurtle? Are you all right?’ She didn’t mention Kathy’s letter: must have come while she was out; he was glad it was his secret.

  ‘Hurtle?’

  He got up, suddenly enraged; he stamped out on the landing, and would have shouted if his throat hadn’t been so dry: ‘For God’s sake, can’t you leave me alone?’ He found himself baring his teeth.

  Rhoda shouted back: ‘All right! Keep your hair on! I only wondered.’

  ‘Why the hell can’t you leave me alone?’ he rattled huskily back.

  ‘I wondered whether you’d had a stroke. That’s all. That’s what Mrs Volkov had, if we’d care to admit it. Only a very little one. She says God was kind.’

  If she hadn’t slammed the kitchen door Rhoda would have heard him laugh: before he went back to his drawing. Mrs Volkov could bloody well have died of her stroke for all he cared. His hand had to reconnect with his intention before they re-entered the maze together; but it came about with merciful ease. He was again drawing purposefully. He visualized Katherine Volkov carried away by the strong swirl of music, over her mother’s dead body.

  Out of these drawings he finally painted ‘The Lopsided Blind’ and ‘Spiral’. He worked on them alternately because each originated in Kathy’s letter, and though different in their moral climate and aesthetic treatment, they also complemented each other. In the painting of the looped, tatty old Venetian, the girl’s face was visible in the corner the blind revealed. Her incised shells of eyes contained kernels of vision not yet germinated. Most of the body, except for the rather square hands, was cut off at the windowsill. The girl’s face was as rapacious and tragic as a young sun-blinded eagle sensing nourishment in an interplay of colour it couldn’t see. He aimed his barrage at this one corner not obscured by the dusty blind or oppressed by the sun-blistered sash.

  The second painting appeared less clearly defined, though on second thought, and examination, the architecture of the spiral was unequivocal. The girl-figure was not at the mercy of this whirlwind of music or fatality. Her feet were firmly placed; the ambiguous, half-veiled expression of the face ultimately revealed conscious will, whether also sensibility, he bitterly wondered during a series of wet afternoons, remembering Kathy as a vulgar little schoolgirl-tart. How her mac would have smelt of rubber; her sodden plait, with its stringy pink ribbon, would have tasted of rain.

  But again, on the first day of sun and redemption, he saw the painting as originally conceived, or as close as you can ever get. If he had never achieved what he was aiming at, he strewed such bloody gobbets of himself along the way, those similarly involved had recognized their own half-realized intentions; the ignorant gushers and sceptics didn’t matter.

  This winter it was Rhoda who went down with pneumonia. Lying in the iron cot she looked not unlike the little pink-haired girl who had tried to smother him in a disgusting kiss smelling of talcum powder and hot flannel. His resistance then made him genuinely humble now.

  “Rhoda—what can I do for you?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She didn’t even open her eyes.

  Anything positive that had ever existed between them was entombed in one word and her small, suddenly marble, features.

  He couldn’t stop looking at her.

  Out of his memories of May Noble he cooked dishes for her: fish, of the most delicate, transparent flesh, with oysters nestling round the fillets; breasts of chicken suave with cream and mushrooms. Once he bought a bunch of violets and laid them on the tray, on the corner of an admittedly grey cloth.

  But Rhoda said: ‘Can’t you leave me alone? Food nauseates me. It’s the drugs that doctor prescribes, I suppose,’ always speaking with her eyes closed; at least it eased out her frown.

  ‘Shall I fetch another doctor?’

  ‘No.’ The oracle began to stir. ‘What use is a doctor? Everything depends on yourself. Didn’t you know?’

  His humility was wearing thin. ‘What about Mrs Volkov? And God’s kindness? Which let her off with a little stroke!’ He allowed himself to indulge in a laugh.

  Rhoda snorted through her marble nostrils. ‘Mrs. Volkov is a very simple woman—though she did have Kathy. Parents and children, I think, are only
accidentally related.’

  After that he took the tray out. He took the violets and threw them into the garbage bin.

  Rhoda would cough: sometimes her phlegm was marked with threads of blood.

  Suspecting he had noticed, she said: ‘I shall be up in a fortnight. ’ She opened her eyes. ‘To hear Kathy play in the final at the Town Hall.’

  ‘But we don’t know that she’ll reach the final.’

  ‘Oh, but you don’t keep up! You’re always painting. She won her State. I heard it on my little transistor. She played the Liszt—exquisitely.’ Rhoda spoke with Maman’s voice, apparently unaware of it, and closed her eyes again.

  She was up before the fortnight, feeling her way about in a pair of quilted slippers, and coughing drier. Not long after, although the weather was viciously inclined, she started, more slowly, dragging the go-cart down the closer streets loaded with offal for neglected cats. In a mackintosh cape, she looked like a tent hastily erected in wet and darkness.

  One evening he saw an opportunity. ‘Surely Kathy’s concert will be an occasion to try out the coat? After an illness, too. In winter.’

  Rhoda began slinging the dishes around. ‘If it will give you any satisfaction, Hurtle, to watch other people recognize your generosity.’

  He must get it out quick, but his tongue was swollen. ‘Not at all. I shan’t be there.’

  ‘Not at Kathy’s concert?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not to wallow in Liszt. And Tchaikovsky. And Rachmaninov. By a pack of students. For another pack.’

  ‘I’m not surprised, Hurtle. You were always an intellectual snob. I can’t help loving all lovely music.’

  She was too virtuous to argue with.

  Instead he nursed his hatred of Kathy Volkov for her failure to tell him of her success, while bitterly accusing his own self-absorbed nature which prevented him reading newspapers. He would make sure not to miss the announcement of the final, so that he could study Rhoda’s, probably secret, preparations for the night: to catch her not wearing the fur coat, or better still, wearing it. The hurt he would inflict on himself by not watching Katherine Volkov walk out across the platform, raked by applause from students, relatives, and elderly men, was not his least luxurious thought.