So he read the Herald, sometimes twice, in case his mind, diverted by some other detail, related to his own work for instance, had missed half a dozen lines crammed slyly into a corner.
Actually he needn’t have bothered: it was enough to watch Rhoda, who looked more and more as though on the point of joining a church. She grew silenter, her eyes larger; her normally delicate features were still further refined by a transparency and tautening of the skin, till she was all eyes, forehead, obsessed mouth. What if Rhoda, too, were in love with Kathy? He started by thinking of them practising some unvisualized, but diabolical perversion, though it tortured him worse to suspect Kathy and Rhoda of meeting on a spiritual level he should never have considered either of them able to attain.
Finally, there were all the signs of physical preparation: wardrobe doors opening and closing; handles rattling; smells of naphthalene and face powder; unexplained sorties at unorthodox hours.
He lost control of himself on hearing her arrive back late for cats yet again. ‘Great shivoos, I expect, in the Cutbush salong to celebrate the return of their star.’
‘I don’t believe either Cutbush has set eyes on Kathy since her return. In fact, her own mother hardly sees her: she’s so busy preparing for her concert. Mr Khrapovitsky, who came up from Melbourne to be with her, has rented a studio so that she can work under the best possible conditions.’
While Kathy rehearsed for her concert, Rhoda was preparing for the night’s ritual of purple flesh. After taking off her coat and menacing her hair, she began tuning up the knife which time had almost sharpened away.
‘Oh dear, how late I am!’ she complained in her most fretful, little-girl’s voice. ‘If you only knew what goes on!’ As though he didn’t know too well. ‘You imagine parties, when it’s sheer drudging. And nerves. Not only Kathy, poor Mrs Volkov wonders whether she’ll be able to face the night. That’s why I went this afternoon. To sit with her.’
Rhoda’s voice kept slithering along the steel with which she was sharpening her scimitar.
‘There was one party,’ she admitted, ‘if you could call it that.’
This was where he sat forward, if not literally.
‘Because it wasn’t prearranged, Mrs Cutbush was keeping Mrs Volkov company. When Kathy came in from a session with Khrapovitsky. It was already fairly late, and I personally would have preferred to come home to bed. But poor Mrs Volkov made a few dropped scones. Mrs Volkov is famous for her dropped scones. And Kathy, who was tired, revived. That’s how the party began.’
‘All on a few dropped scones.’
‘Well—Mrs Volkov never touches alcohol. And Kathy is still only a child. But Mrs Cutbush had very kindly brought along a bottle of gin, knowing there might be callers in the next few days. Mrs Cutbush has had experience in directions where Mrs Volkov has never been.’
‘And were there any callers? To help Mother Cutbush mop up the gin?’
‘Well—there was Mr Khrapovitsky, naturally: he’s Kathy’s teacher, and it’s unpleasant for a young girl to walk back alone through the streets at night. And there was that Shuard—the music critic.’
‘Not prearranged?’
‘I think they thought,’ Rhoda paused, ‘it might be politic. I heard Khrapovitsky explaining to Mrs Volkov that personal contact is all-important.’
She was cutting into the meat by now.
‘Don’t tell me Cutbush wasn’t there!’
‘No. I think he’s lost interest. He’s not what you’d call musical. The only other person was Kathy’s boyfriend Clif—he spells it with one “f”, so Kathy told me.’
‘What do you mean by “boyfriend”?’
‘Frankly, I don’t know. But that’s the term for it.’ She was cutting the meat into long ribbons, then across, to make careful squares. ‘Anyway, Clif is no longer a boy. He’s a very brilliant physiologist, they say.’
‘What—another one?’
Rhoda wasn’t listening: she was too busy with the horseflesh, or what she had dreamt, or was thinking out. ‘Beautiful and gifted women—Kathy is gifted, and will certainly be beautiful—dazzle men as the moon—the planets dazzle them. That isn’t to say their men mean much more to them than the men on earth do to the stars they’re goggling at. Why should they? Somebody like Kathy has a destiny—a path you don’t expect her to diverge from. You can’t expect more than their art from artists. If you did, you might forget about the art, and die of shame for what they’ve shown you of mankind.’
Rhoda was so deep in concentration, or trance, he was able to escape into the yard. He couldn’t have gone upstairs to the paintings from which she had divorced him. Outside, the night was a tangle of vines and stars. Cold, too: it made the water in him swell. After warding off a cat innocent enough to believe it might merge its entity with his, he began to piss on what he recognized, from the orchestration, as the heap of empty tins.
On the night of the concert he sat waiting in the kitchen through which she would pass, as it was easier to reach the bus via Chubb’s Lane. He began his watch unnecessarily early, it might have seemed, but that way there would be no chance of her eluding him. Rhoda would be too afraid she might miss even a competitor in whom she had no interest; she would start far earlier than she need. He could sense from a smell of gunpowder in the air that the occasion as a whole was the experience of her life. Murders were not out of the question, or suicides, on the night of Rhoda’s Kathy’s triumph.
So he sat and waited.
When she didn’t come, but continued dropping hairbrushes, shoes, scratching at the handles of her chest of drawers, he began to call raucously: ‘Rhoda? You’ll be late! Don’t you realize? Late! Late!’ His voice bounced back.
His nerves were in specially fine tune. He farted once. He rattled the keys and money in his pockets as he disliked hearing others do. And nearly missed Rhoda.
Either because it was a formal occasion, or because she had decided to avoid him, she was going out through the front door. He hadn’t heard her leave her room, or cross the living-room carpet, and only jumped up when she almost brought down the hatstand in the hall.
He ran, bursting in to catch her, calling, his voice teetering as the bamboo hatstand righted itself: ‘Weren’t you going to say good-bye?’ Much too loud.
She, on the other hand, spoke too softly. ‘I didn’t want to distress you by letting you see me leave for the concert.’ He couldn’t tell whether she had meant it.
She had frizzed up her hair into the shape of an urn, choked at the neck by what looked like a gold ribbon off a chocolate box. She had powdered herself almost to death; only the patches of dry rouge on the cheekbones and the unhealed scar of a mouth reminded too vividly of life. She was wearing the squirrel coat, too, the collar buttoned up to her gills. Was she straining after extra height?
Then he remembered he was carrying the bunch of violets. As on the occasion during her illness, when he had bought her one and laid it on the tray of rejected food, he was now offering the bunch of Parma violets; nor had he forgotten the pin.
Rhoda clawed at them, mumbling, and pinned them clumsily to her collar: they made her look more livid.
She had achieved none of the height she had aspired to, and for a moment he feared that, in wanting to express herself in some way, she might be going to kiss his hand. He was almost crying for them. Whatever else they had botched in life, they might have had this child whom they both loved, and who was probably suffering somewhere in a crumpled, department-store dress, crouching over a silent keyboard.
Rhoda said: ‘You should make yourself a cup of cocoa.’
‘Cocoa! I’ll be all right—listening to the wireless, in the studio. Oh God, yes! None of the coughing and the faces.’
She lowered her head and began sidling out, as though departure through the front door made this obligatory. Again their love for Kathy might have melted him if he hadn’t remembered that Kathy and Rhoda were probably conspiring to finish him off.
So he called:
‘Enjoy yourself!’ and laughed.
He thought he heard Rhoda laughing back, but the noise made by the flap on the letter-box prevented him knowing for certain.
That good tweed overcoat (English) which never wore out, only discoloured, had holes in the corners of the pockets through which he used to stick his thumbs. Tonight the holes tore worse; he not only felt, he could hear them tear as he raced along Chubb’s Lane, up Dolgelly, up Jones, up Lavernock Streets. Impossible at this hour to cajole a taxi anywhere inside the labyrinth.
So, on reaching the kerb, to command or seduce by what remained of his authority and ‘charm’.
He arrived slamming and scrambling, not late, but close enough to it. He hadn’t reserved a seat: they found him one almost too easily. As he flopped, the victim of his clothes, he was at once engulfed: the strings were tuning, knuckles tightening knuckles; the woodwind croaked mustily. He wouldn’t look yet, but it was most unlikely that Rhoda and her claque would be breathing down his streaming neck.
They began to wade through the Paganini-Rachmaninovs, Tchaikovsky and Tchaikovsky. A girl in what her mother would have described as ‘sea-green’ chiffon wafted daringly into ‘Ocean thou Mighty Monster’. A young man, the paler for his black, sank his teeth in Boris and couldn’t get them out again, chin stuck alarmingly, your own chin straining with his; because by now every agony was yours.
While the basso bowed his frustrated head under the massive, the decent-hearted applause, an elderly lady sitting at a tangent shouted at her companion: ‘That is Mr Hurtle Duffield. The one in the check coat. I can recognize him from his photos in the papers.’
The friend looked as though she had been taken in: through the subsiding applause he could hear her sucking her teeth. ‘He’s a different colour to what I would’uv expected. And sort of—unsuccessful-looking.’
He looked away.
He realized the interval had come. He hadn’t bought a programme, not from stinginess, but because he hadn’t wanted to know too much: to know when Katherine Volkov could be expected to walk through the sombre field of musicians might have become too acute a torment. And now that danger zone, the interval, in which Rhoda might parade herself, cynically, accusingly, flanked no doubt by members of the Volkov-Cutbush set. At least in the motley of students, many of them still little girls and in fancy dress, she wouldn’t look such a glaring exotic. He was the freak: he couldn’t narrow himself in his chair to hid enough of his freakishness.
His bladder was forcing him out. He stood peeing in the row of anonymous men: the relief of a good fart, and the anonymity of it.
‘Didn’t know you were interested in music, Duffield.’
A shorter, pursier, superficially younger, too glossy, aggressively dapper male.
‘Shuard,’ Shuard explained.
Possibly for ethical reasons the critic seemed determined to make no further reference to music. They talked about their friend Mrs Davenport; neither of them had seen her for years, but as they depended on her now, she shone like lacquer in their conversation; memory treated her with an exaggerated kindness.
After getting down from the step which edged the urinal, Shuard began to do up his flies, cocking a leg in the manner favoured by short, pursy men: his thighs, not to mention what lolled between them, revealed themselves to the imagination the more obscenely for being clothed.
Going out the frosted door, Shuard pulled at his companion’s arm, dragging his shoulder to a lower level before whispering: ‘What price the little Volkov?’
The throaty intimacy of it might have gummed them together for ever if the critic hadn’t started to amble off still easing his fat crutch. Spiritually Shuard belonged to the age of private supper-rooms and button boots.
In the second half, renewed orgies of the Paganini- Rachmaninovs: the hired dinner-jackets, the dream-dresses run up by Mother’s love and the old treadle-it-yourself, embraced their sticky ecstasies.
Snooze a little.
Then something pushed him; it was not a hand: it was Katherine Volkov walking half-drugged half-horrified, as he had never seen her, through the field of black-and-white musicians, the menacing crop of their instruments ready to be harvested by anyone who dared pretend to sufficient skill.
He wanted to break his nightmare by calling out: ‘No, Kathy—don’t—wait—I’ll save you!’ though what had he to offer instead?
She came on. At one point she was forced to turn sideways, because the path was too narrow and her dress too wide. (The elderly physiologist’s birthday present?) A loutish Second Violin leered up out of meaty lips. (Was the Second Physiologist, Clif One-f, leering also, more thinly because assuaged, somewhere in the audience?)
Kathy continued advancing, because, it seemed, she couldn’t think of an alternative. Anyway, by now, her fate wouldn’t have let her escape. He was brought so close to her he might have seen the golden down along her long strong arms and the line of her jaw: but knew it by heart. He knew the long legs propping inside the sculpture of the frozen dress.
He closed his eyes for a second.
When he opened them, she had sat down and was having the conventional trouble with the stool: she, and the mahogany knobs she was twisting, contended against each other. She won, though. She was breathing rather too fast. She sat clasping her hands, it could have been in not-too-hopeful prayer. Mrs Volkov, recovered from the stroke which had barely stroked her, only blurred her speech, must have moulded the golden plait into the golden crown. He could see where some of the more tender hairs at the nape of the neck were still resisting.
Suddenly Katherine Volkov bowed her head. Although she had closed her eyes, it was she, not the vegetable conductor, who was in control. Because she willed it, from her quivering shoulders to the toe of her arrogant shoe, they were carried away on the wave of violins. And Katherine Volkov was parting the music with her long strong arms. Her entranced eyes were at times as fixed as electric light bulbs, as she mounted, and mounted, the flood, at times closed, while she flowed with the stream of overscented dreamed-up music: or curled, an archetypal figure he could no longer recognize, in the troughs between certain waves.
Once she dashed her hand against her skirt, with impatience, it seemed, then clawed at the thigh beneath the tulle. Some of the elderly-relative members of the audience glanced at one another: they could have been shocked by too unrestrained a display of ‘artistic temperament’ in a hitherto normal, young Australian girl.
Others sat, moist-eyed, to watch this creature they could feel drawing away from them. Himself dry: never drier. He was grinding from buttock to razor-edged buttock. As he ground his teeth together he wondered whether anybody could hear.
Katherine Volkov had raised her head to compete with the ‘pure’ bits of the ‘Quasi adagio’. Her wobbling chin reminded him of that weakness in her left hand. Poor little Kathy: tears almost dropping from the blue eyes, for the lovely music, for the orgasm she can’t have experienced with the elderly Melbourne physiologist, the music critic Shuard, the grocer-perv Cutbush, or Clif One-f. (He wasn’t going to include Himself.)
After what seemed like several hours of jealousy, remorse, suppliant love, hectic passion, to say nothing of coughing, programme dropping, and a halitosis to the left, he watched Katherine Volkov emerge, her serene shoulders, the majestic mother-plaited crown, rising above a vulgar situation. She gave one last shudder: of thankfulness. She had arrived in more than safety: she was received into the world of light. Realization nearly jerked her head off her neck.
They were all clapping and clap clapping vindicated fulfilled drenched by their part in this voyage to Cythera, at the end of which they had positively laid eyes on the goddess.
Yet Katherine Volkov might eventually disappoint. Although she was showing them the palms of her hands, and her smile conveyed joy, youth, health, all of which they approved, her attitude was hardly grateful enough. While she was going through the repertoire of gestures the audience expected and wanted, she was holding someth
ing back from them: he could tell she had discovered in herself that extra sense which is the source of all creative strength. Anyone unable to recognize nobility might have condemned her as proud, as she stood bowing in her department-store dress and disintegrating hair-do. When the crown actually fell, she caught the plait, easily, laughingly—hadn’t she survived ordeal by music?—and casually waved her hair at them while turning to leave the platform.
Still too drunk to feel consciously displeased at anything about her, the audience roared.
He got up and started clambering out, past stubborn knees, trailing his overcoat across the laps of resentful strangers. Here and there he trod on the spongy insteps of seemingly dropsical women, who didn’t scream, but moaned in harmony with his own painfully throbbing silence.
What mattered was to escape the trauma of Kathy’s performance, and more particularly this new Kathy, herself escaping in the direction she had chosen.
Once he thought he caught sight of Rhoda peering from under powdered lids.
Because he had to forestall Rhoda he continued trampling pushing through the human walls obstructing him. Night and the neon-lit streets promised relief, until he found that every taxi had flitted from them. In the end he walked over half the way home, his anxiety subsiding as he imagined Rhoda at sea in worse difficulties: keeping her nose above the tide, rejected by already overloaded buses. He would be sitting high and dry at Flint Street long before she could possibly make it.
He was crossing the hall when she sprang out of her room at him: each might have been surprising a thief.
‘Why—Hurtle—how very unexpected!’
The Vivisector Page 57