The Vivisector

by WHITE, PATRICK

  ‘I took a stroll.’ As she exhaled, he explained that he had felt the need for air.

  ‘Walking at night can be agreeable, if one is in a happy frame of mind.’

  She had had time to change into an old grey gown, and a flannel nightie gathered at the neck like a Christmas cracker. She was holding a comb which had belonged to Maman, and as the tension eased, she resumed combing at the dusty-looking wisps of her hair, the powder and rouge gone from her cheeks, absorbed, no doubt, by the evening’s emotions.

  ‘Did you enjoy your concert?’ he asked.

  She closed her eyes and composed her mouth in a girlish smirk. ‘It was altogether divine.’

  It was a word he had never heard her use: probably picked it up from Kathy.

  Rhoda opened her eyes; looking at him with the utmost seriousness, she dared him to contradict her. ‘Kathy played magnificently, as of course you’ll know from listening to the wireless.’

  He grunted taking off his coat, while Rhoda continued combing her hair: if she wasn’t careful, there wouldn’t be any of it left.

  Irritated by the action of the comb, the dull hair, and the unexpected turn of events, he sharpened his tongue on her. ‘I’m surprised you got back so early—perhaps by levitation.’

  ‘Mr Cutbush very kindly gave me a lift each way in their car—Mrs Volkov and myself.’

  ‘And Kathy? And Khrapovitsky? And Shuard? And Clif? All squeezed in, thigh to thigh! Kathy,’ he laughed, ‘sitting in somebody’s fat lap?’

  She ignored the tone of this. ‘What the young people do is their own business. Mr Shuard, I believe, went straight off to write his review.’

  It was time he turned round: he had been arranging his coat far too long on the bamboo stand. Because the knobs were too large, he couldn’t hang the coat by its loop, but had to drape it: which gave the back an obvious hump.

  ‘And what were the results?’ He wheezed it at her: when he almost never wheezed.

  ‘You mean to say you didn’t listen in for the results?’ Rhoda’s scorn rose between them; she looked as though she might be going to hit him with Maman’s old ivory comb. ‘They always announce the results on the wireless.’

  ‘No. I’d gone out.’ He felt so genuinely tired, he no longer expected his voice to convince; there was nothing he could do about it, though.

  ‘It’s extraordinary,’ she said, ‘what a self-centred man you are. Of course you have a right to be, but it’s still extraordinary—on some occasions.’

  Although she was withdrawing, it was he who had been dismissed, not by his sister Rhoda whom he had engaged as a conscience, but by Maman; and again, as Rhoda reached the door, it was Maman with a vengeance, translated into terms of Rhoda through an inherited comb, smiling with discoloured, conspiratorial, at the same time vindictive, teeth. ‘What did you think of the young lady who sang the Weber? Didn’t you find her dress a little outré? In the higher bits we were waiting for her to burst out.’ Comb poised, Rhoda was not only listening, she was also watching for his reply.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It didn’t worry me—the dress. In fact, I scarcely noticed.’

  He was too tired: or too fascinated by that comb; he couldn’t make the effort to disguise his blunder. He saw how he might paint the comb, with the drift of dead hair in its teeth: he was already groping his way towards placing it as a formal link between their present and their past.

  Rhoda’s eyes, surprisingly, filled with a brilliant tenderness. ‘You’re fagged out. You should take a hot bath, Hurtle. Make yourself a cup of cocoa.’ He was relieved she was compassionate enough not to offer to make the stuff for him.

  She had gone, but called back a warning: ‘That thing—the geyser—will blow up in your face one day if you don’t have something done about it.’

  He couldn’t care: the geyser was one of the minor volcanoes in his life.

  Next morning he didn’t go down, though Rhoda, he sensed, was anxious that he should.

  ‘No,’ he called in answer to her question.

  ‘Would you at least like the paper?’

  No, he wouldn’t: whether Kathy had won or not. That she had won, he knew; Rhoda’s voice would otherwise have conveyed failure. As far as he was concerned, Kathy’s success had exorcized her.

  The whole morning he could feel Rhoda brooding over his indifference, except when she was gone with her cart to fetch the evening’s supply of horse. About lunchtime he went down to her. He felt delightfully comfortable sloppy in his loose old gown. And cocky. How dreadfully boyish old men could become; but he understood what made them so: it was the unimportant victories.

  Rhoda had arranged the still apparently untouched morning paper like an antimacassar over the back of his chair.

  He clapped his hands together in jolly explosion, and asked: ‘When does the little Volkov propose to leave us?’ So hearty pompous: he could see himself as he acted it.

  Rhoda hesitated: she was wearing the apron which normally proclaimed her authority, establishing her as cook, as opposed to mere mistress of the house. ‘You did know, then, that Kathy won.’

  Squeezing off a corner of cheese, he ignored the accusation. ‘What are her plans? Has she decided where to study?’

  Rhoda’s decision to abandon subterfuge had the effect of a blind going up too quickly. ‘Mr Khrapovitsky favours Vienna.’ A name was mentioned, which conveyed nothing. ‘She’s leaving in the spring—our spring.’ ‘Our spring’ in Maman’s accent gave Kathy’s departure a high glaze.

  ‘Good luck to her,’ he said.

  He could feel the cheese already turning his stomach sour, and belched in an attempt to rid himself of some of his gloom. Rhoda didn’t hear: she had her own loss to bear. She brought him a slice of fried bread, left over from breakfast, with a limp rasher of bacon on it: he pushed away the lot.

  If the image of the yellow comb which had flared up in his imagination died away almost at once, it was perhaps something to do with his being physically run down, or mentally depressed, or because his work as a painter was finished: not that he hadn’t plenty still to say; he’d only lost the desire to say it. He wondered whom he had been addressing all these years. No artist can endure devoted misinterpretation indefinitely, any more than he can survive in a vacuum of public contempt; or was he the self-centred monster Rhoda accused him of being? God knew, he had multiplied, if not through his loins; he was no frivolous masturbator tossing his seed on to wasteland. He had sympathized with the passionate illusions of several women, and could hardly be held responsible for their impulse to destroy themselves through what they misunderstood as love; until finally: had he himself been destroyed by a little egotistical girl whom he valued above his vocation? On an occasion of desultory doodling, the cowled phallus wore Kathy’s face. In the end he bought a bottle of mixed vitamins from the chemist to save the fuss of consulting doctors.

  ‘Hurtle,’ Rhoda began, ‘I’m going to ask a favour of you. Kathy Volkov is leaving for Vienna in under a fortnight. She would like to pay you a visit, but is too shy to suggest it.’

  Was the spring already upon them? From Rhoda’s first intimations he had visualized it as an abstraction in distance, not their actual turbulent fortnight of searing westerlies and brown blossom.

  ‘Kathy shy? I hadn’t noticed it in the past.’

  ‘She’s growing up now.’

  ‘I should have said she sprang out of her mother fully grown.’

  ‘You’re so brutal at times. And what you have against Kathy I’ll never understand. Not her loving nature, surely? Her beauty? Her brilliance? I know parents sometimes grow to resent their children if they’re in any way transcendent—as much as if they were ugly or stunted. What so many of them really look for is a healthy, normal, biddable child who will flatter their complacency like a glass. But Kathy will never be that. And you, Hurtle, are not a parent.’

  He was hardly in a position to modify her statement, and having made it, Rhoda was preparing to leave him; when she remem
bered: ‘What am I to tell her?’

  He felt limp; he mumbled, rubber-tongued: ‘Kathy will come if and when she wants.’

  When she didn’t materialize, his subservience forced him to ask: ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘Nothing. You gave me nothing to tell.’

  He hated Rhoda, the reflection of his complacency: when Rhoda, the reality, not Katherine Volkov, the figment, was what he had been given to love. He did, of course, love her, because she was his sister: or he would learn to, under the dictatorship of the past.

  He must, at least, inquire: ‘When is it Kathy leaves?’

  Rhoda answered: ‘The day after tomorrow,’ and went on arranging a litter of kittens on the teats of a recumbent mother. She might have been screwing them on, but it appeared logical the way she did it.

  It was a Sunday morning, and he stood sizing a couple of canvases recently bought. The soothing servility of the occupation, the broad, effortless strokes, the colourlessness, was helping paint out his mind. He was enjoying himself in a purely negative way: which made it no less delectable, possibly less destructible. As he worked, the Sunday air was treating his skin with lanoline, distant bells lulling the less manageable emotions, one or two shavings of harmless cloud curled in a bland sky, the big snow-green breasts of a viburnum across the street nuzzled by the iron noses of a fence. He remembered seeing—was it ‘The Pretty Baa Lambs’? Was it the Tate? The Ashmolean? On a Sunday. Maman in white, for spring, and because she fancied herself in white. By Ford Madox Brown: he read it out. No, she corrected, it’s Patou.

  He was enjoying a laugh at his childish thoughts, drifting, like cotton-woolly baa-lamb clouds, or inflating into green-tinted parasols of stationary guelder rose, when something started cutting in: a canned evangelical hymn, a thundering blur from several streets away—or actual, closer voices.

  Perhaps from growing deaf, like Rhoda, he hadn’t at first heard the voices, now in accompaniment to hers down in the kitchen. Rising about the distant hymn, they cut and grated, unpleasantly and unavoidably. He threw away his brush, but stopped to pick it up. His back. He trod size into the boards. Then he was revolving in desperation looking for a hiding-place: though he had nothing to hide.

  A door was thrown open now.

  Rhoda must have stopped laughing the moment before: her voice was so clear and girlish. ‘Hurtle? Are you there, dear?’ So unheard of: what was she planning to do to him? ‘Kathy Volkov has come. She would like to say good-bye. Not if you’re busy. Kathy doesn’t want to disturb you. She’s flying tomorrow to Vienna. ’ It might have been Murwillumbah by train. ‘Hurtle?’ Rhoda angrier, less girlish.

  He had to answer.

  He called back, trying to keep his voice down in case it might sound unnatural. ‘Tell her to come up. If she wants.’

  In the meantime he had to occupy himself. He threw the sized canvases against the wall; one of them bounced off something else and showed a black streak across its surface.

  Feet were ascending. Could it be Rhoda as well? To spoil his chances on a last, perhaps the very last, occasion. He listened for her wheezing, her little clicketing steps. Instead he heard an outbreak, followed by a quick suppression, of laughter. He failed to separate or to identify the footsteps, except that, as they approached, he realized a man was taking part in the visitation.

  Although she didn’t ‘want to disturb’, Kathy strode in; the room was shaking. Nor was her appearance what he would have expected; but perhaps he was too old to keep pace with the evolution of appearances. She had let her hair flow free; or more probably, she had brushed it out to give it that electrified look. Though Rhoda had told him Kathy was growing up, she was dressed in a little girl’s, an Alice-in-Wonderland style. Well, Kathy was cool and cryptic enough for Alice. Her shiftless shift, almost a pregnancy uniform, now that he came to think, ridiculed his memories of her body.

  When this should have been a moment of intimate poignancy, its messages addressed only to him, he suspected he was half the purpose of her visit; in fact, the young man who followed her in became too obviously the other half, or worse: the sole reason for her coming.

  Arching her eyebrows, lowering her chin, swallowing—which made a dimple come in spite of her apparently sterner intentions—Kathy casually announced: ‘I’d like you to meet my boyfriend—Clif Harbord—Mr Duffield. Perhaps I ought to say Harbord’s a doctor, but not the ordinary kind.’ Nervousness made her giggle.

  She might have intended to create a situation jagged with vulgarity; or her jaws could have taken the wrong direction: they were so busy chewing. Out of loyalty to Dr Harbord?

  For Clif, too, was gummed up. He was of the leaner, more sinewy type of male animal, with continuous eyebrows, his handshake an encounter with wire.

  ‘An honour to meet you, Mr Duffield!’

  Evidently Clif was one who felt the set forms of human intercourse would never let him down. When he had spoken, he put his hands on his hips, and stood breathing an invigorating air, as he looked around a famous room from under those straight black eyebrows.

  ‘So this is it!’

  Kathy, too, was looking, though not at the room. ‘Clif’s interested to see the paintings. Anyway, that’s what he says.’ At any moment she would have to bludgeon somebody; but which would it be? ‘Of course he doesn’t understand art. He’s a scientist. ’ She glanced an instant at the painter, before her laughter, glugging upward through her throat, got into trouble with her gum; when she had sorted things out, she sighed juicily, and added: ‘A scientist who wants to understand.’

  ‘Lay off the scientists!’ Clif complained; and the effort of getting it out, over his pellet of gum, made his lips look even juicier than Kathy’s. ‘There’s nothing so esoteric as it looks—or sounds. I understand music, don’t I?’

  ‘Okay,’ Kathy yelped, gulping on her gum. ‘Music’s a science as well as an art. Don’t you agree, Mr Duffield?’

  Although she had hinted, by a glance, that he might be her ally, he was feeling too remote to reply.

  Clif had dropped on the bed, where he lolled around, appreciating art. His approach was somewhat physical. He scratched his chest once or twice, and once grabbed at a handful of his flies. His lean shanks, above the socks, seemed pleased to advertise their bristles.

  There was a moment when Clif and Kathy exchanged gum. They got the giggles as they mouthed it into each other, swallowing at the same time borrowed saliva and siphoned laughed. He didn’t see their embrace, but sensed it from behind his back. The lean and hairy Clif charged Kathy with vitality: or so the scent and violence of chewed gum conveyed; and straining of the rusty bed; and the ends of Kathy’s frayed-out electric hair.

  At one point he was forced to turn. He stared so hard he would remember for ever these two young human animals wordlessly involved: it was a matter of skin, claws, and the fascinated retina.

  He stared so long, Clif looked at his wrist. ‘Ought to be going, Kathy—keep to the schedule. And Mr Duffield will ’uv had us.’ Not that he was prepared to consider Mr Duffield as a physical fact: he was concentrated between the shining hair on his own polished shinbone, and Kathy, who wasn’t bothering.

  Till she burst out loudly: ‘Okay—yes! We must have bored him by now.’ She stuck out her tongue, with it a veil of gum through which she sniggered: ‘We’re so horribly infantile!’

  At once she began pummelling her lover out of the room, denying him any opportunity to say good-bye, because, in her own case, she didn’t want to expose herself to that.

  So there was a scrimmage on the stairs, a dangerous creaking of match-stick banisters, before Kathy, surprisingly, returned.

  She must have got rid of the gum, for her mouth was still and resolute. Her eyes had something of the explosive violence of splintering ice. Her electric hair was floating: if it hadn’t been rooted in her scalp, it might have flown.

  ‘You know, don’t you, Mr-Hur-Hurtle—I didn’t mean it to be like this.’ She bit on the words ballooning
inside her blistering lips.

  Having reached him, she slid her arms up under his, till the palms of her rigid hands were resting on his shoulder-blades, and he recognized the woman Rhoda had tried to tell him Kathy was becoming. At the same time she thrust herself up and under him, till they fitted more perfectly than in any sexual hold. In fact, there appeared to be nothing sexual in Kathy’s present motives; her eyes alone would have beaten off any attempt.

  Instead, he realized, as the eyes swam closer, larger, he was merging with her in an empathy such as can only be acknowledged at the moment and discarded afterwards as an impossible illusion.

  ‘Did you hear me play at the concert?’ she asked with a moodiness, or diffidence, in a voice which suggested catarrh.

  He confessed to being at the concert.

  ‘I was awful—awful!’ She rested her head against his cheek; but even though she had closed her eyes and dropped her defences, he knew he shouldn’t offer a caress: collaborators can only be sceptical lovers.

  ‘They gave you the prize.’ Now it was the way parents comfort little girls: when she wasn’t one any longer.

  ‘Khrapovitsky told me I was technically atrocious. He won’t forgive me. I know it wasn’t what I wanted—what I should have done—but felt it was what they expected. Otherwise, how could I have ever escaped—begun to live?’ Kathy Volkov was still the little girl, trickling warm against his shoulder.

  Then she opened her splintered eyes.

  ‘That’s all!’ she shouted with such force it racked his shoulder-blades. ‘When I come back I’ll play for you and show you!’ Her conviction bit into his cheek with a fury of actual teeth; only they weren’t lovers: they were the dedicated collaborators. ‘I’ll play!’

  Then the physical part of Kathy disentangled itself from their pact and he heard her going down the stairs.

  Again an old man, he hoped he hadn’t smelt musty to a young girl, who for her part, had smelt too eager, and of chewing-gum. From the window he watched her cross the yard, entwining an arm with one of Dr Harbord’s: the two arms might have been wire; and in spite of Kathy’s confidences, he would have liked to take a pair of pliers, and snip the arms off at the shoulder, and watch the blood spurting from the wire snakes after they had tinkled on the asphalt. His spirit was not yet strong enough to forgive the flesh.