Kneeling beside him, Rhoda was saying: Mrs Cutbush—oh dear no, Mrs Volkov is giving a little party for Katherine her daughter after the concert in the Town Hall, and would like you to be of the company.
Rhoda was choosing words with particular care, and wearing rings Maman must have sold to be able to bribe Julian Boileau.
In the teeth of so much formality and splendour all he could answer was: You’ve torn your good coat, Rhoda—your squirrel coat. You must do up the place with a safety-pin. And what is this?
There was a kind of twisted string hanging out from where the coat opened in front.
That’s unnecessary! Rhoda snapped. A sort of tie-string. I can’t think why Mrs Grünblatt gave it to me. As for tearing, speak for yourself!
She was right. He was wearing a yellow, rubberized overall of the type worn by men who work with acid, or those who test fire extinguishers; how he had acquired it he couldn’t remember, probably from one of the shop windows on Lower George. In any case, his travesty had been slashed to ribbons by the tram.
How can I go, Rhoda, in this?
It doesn’t matter. Everybody will be recognizable.
What sort of a party?
A service. Mrs Cutbush has baked a batch of fairy cakes, and the celebrants will masturbate in turn on the corpse.
But what corpse?
The corpse of Katherine Volkov, who escaped in time, before any of us had possessed her.
Are you joking, Rhoda?
But perhaps she wasn’t. She was too serious for that: white acrylic tears were squeezing out of her rat’s eyes, down her withered cheeks, painting them with a beauty he hadn’t noticed before, though of the stalactite order.
He tried unsuccessfully to put out his hand. What are we doing here? he asked.
It is not yet to know, she mumbled through the mouth of Mrs Volkov; then, painfully making the effort to correct her bungled speech: not not possibly.
His inability to put out a hand, and increasing absence of mind in Rhoda, trussed and knotted him so tightly it put an end to this Dream.
‘What on earth is the matter with you? Are you sick?’ She was screeching up at him, through the sallow daylight, from the hall.
‘Oh no, dear, a dream! Oh, dear!’ he mumbled coughing laughing spluttering back.
‘What?’ From deep down in the house she was laughing too, while at the same time angry. ‘I thought you were sick. I never heard such a rumpus.’
‘A dream!’
Because it was Rhoda she didn’t ask about the dream: she closed the kitchen door, and soon after he smelled the smell of burning fat.
He began to read the papers, watching for an announcement of the Volkov concert. In the meantime dealers were bringing him clients anxious to buy his paintings; but he seldom opened to them. He would look down on the crowns of their heads, but couldn’t make the effort to go downstairs and let them in. After a while the heads would retreat. The dealers would send him letters which he recognized by instinct, and didn’t read because of the polite anger they must contain.
Then one evening Rhoda remarked: ‘Mrs Volkov has given me a couple of complimentary tickets for the concert on Wednesday night. One is for myself, the other, she insists, is for you. She says she met you on a bus. I told her I thought you disliked listening to music in public, and in any case, you probably wouldn’t fancy sitting with me.’
‘But the concert—has She already arrived?’
In the state of shock and alarm in which Rhoda’s announcement left him, he couldn’t bring himself to use the Name. He would feel less vulnerable if She remained an abstraction.
‘It’s all over the papers—which you never bother to read. Didn’t you at least see the photo taken at the party, with Lady ffolliott Morgan helping Her cut the cake?’ Nor could Rhoda bear to use the Name.
He shook his head, like the old shaven goat he must look.
‘It was a party given by the committee in honour of Her arrival. Why a cake I can’t think. As if it were a wedding—or a birthday. Her birthday’s in summer, I seem to remember. I remember Mrs Volkov telling me she’d turned twenty-five.’
He had never stood so close to death. If he could face this, surely then, he might look at the press photograph?
‘Where is it?’ he asked. ‘The paper? I’d like to see.’
Rhoda was watching him. ‘I’m afraid you can’t. I threw it out with the potato peelings. At least, I’m pretty sure I did.’
He was pretty sure that, if he looked when she went out, he’d find a cutting under Rhoda’s handkerchief sachet. He mustn’t be tempted, though: too dangerous—not Rhoda’s catching him, but his first glimpse of the Face.
‘Have you seen Her in the flesh?’
‘Oh no—too busy, what with the receptions, and the press, and rehearsal with the orchestra. Mrs Volkov is a wreck from sitting waiting for a few moments with her own daughter. Their best and almost only time is when she takes in the breakfast tray.’
So much irrelevant chatter helped him partly recover his toppled balance.
During the day which separated them from the concert he was conscious that he hadn’t given Rhoda an answer to her offer of the ticket. He would have liked to think he wouldn’t accept, but knew he would, and that Rhoda took it for granted; otherwise she would have pressed for a definite answer.
‘What is Kathy going to play?’ He was quite pleased with the sound of his planned indifference, at one of those moments when he and Rhoda were crossing like strangers in the yard.
Rhoda, surprisingly, rattled off: ‘Mozart’s K.271’ as though she had been brought up on it; she spoiled things, though, by tripping just afterwards on the hem of her dressing-gown which had come unstitched some months before.
He warned as gently, as genuinely as he could: ‘You’ll fall down and hurt yourself if you insist on wearing that old gown.’
Rhoda clawed at the back door and tore it open.
When he got inside, she was blowing her nose in the scullery. ‘What is it?’ he asked, still gentle, perhaps horribly so.
For she answered: ‘I thought I’d managed to escape pity while we were still children.’
‘Don’t you know—you who read the papers’—he couldn’t resist, ‘we’re living in the age of “compassion, tenderness and warmth”?’
In spite of it, they were most considerate towards each other all that afternoon.
He confessed: ‘I’d like to come with you to the concert,’ but he said it so low he could see she hadn’t heard.
Or hadn’t she wanted to hear?
The night of the concert was filled with a cutting wind, which added a rattling of window sashes to that of furniture handles as they got themselves ready. His stomach was threatened by the boiled haddock they had eaten in a hurry. What if he farted out loud during a subdued passage? Or if, on condescending to embrace, She should smell the haddock juices the pores of his cheeks were exuding? He unearthed a bottle of left-over eau de Cologne, a present from some woman who had expected to get a painting cheap, and soused his breastpocket handkerchief with the stuff. The tonic smell encouraged him: he sprinkled more of the eau de Cologne down the front of his monogrammed shirt, another present from another woman. Perhaps if She smelled the smell She would be reminded of invalids, and treat him kindly. So he dashed eau de Cologne at his armpits.
When he went down Rhoda wasn’t ready, though he caught sight of her moving about her room dressed in the squirrel coat. This time she hadn’t tarted up her hair: it was hanging round her face, giving her the appearance of a grizzled monkey.
Armed with his masculine authority he marched into Rhoda’s camp and said: ‘Next time I sell a painting we must restore the conservatory.’
‘Oh,’ she murmured, ‘should we recognize it afterwards? Wouldn’t it lose its charm?’
As he kicked at the displaced tiles and fragments of glass he was glad they shared this obsession for the conservatory in which Katherine Volkov had performed her dance.
But Rhoda had begun swearing: she said ‘damn’ several times quickly, like a woman imitating Harry Courtney.
‘What is it?’ he asked, returning. ‘You’ve torn your good coat?’
She had: by catching the pocket on a knob; a triangular piece of skin was hanging loose.
‘You must mend it!’ he panted.
‘There isn’t time!’ Her rodent voice had asserted itself.
‘Do it up with a safety-pin.’
The idea seemed to appeal to her: or anyway, she followed his advice.
Although the damage had been patched up, he was disturbed by remembering the torn coat in his recent dream. Was he to be cut down, then, by K.271? The operation promised to be less bland than that of the tram ploughing into his marzipan flesh: music can draw actual blood.
Foreboding must have been at large in Rhoda too: she started gasping; she grabbed his hand with her monkey’s paw. ‘I’m so frightened!’ she whimpered when they were trampling out, pulling the front door shut.
They began to negotiate the never quite familiar labyrinth, looking for non-existent taxis, the wind slashing at them.
‘Have you been using scent?’ Rhoda shrieked against the wind.
‘A drop of eau de Cologne.’
‘The same. I can’t bear scent. It affects my sinuses.’
She tried to produce some soggy sounds, but the wind was from the wrong quarter, and by the time they found a taxi, and were enclosed in its airlessness, she had discovered other fears.
‘Mrs Volkov has developed a bladder complaint. I do hope she can last till the interval.’
Mrs Volkov, he saw immediately, was sitting in the same row several seats away from them. Without the protection of her iron hat, and probably in a state of nerves over her weak bladder and the approaching performance, she looked paler, more monolithic, suggestive of granite veiled in cloud. She was smiling her permanently swivelled smile out of gelatinous lips. It would have fascinated him to calculate how much of herself she had contributed to her daughter, if he hadn’t scented a danger on her far side: he noticed what could have been Cutbush the grocer, skin grown loose on his now shrunken fleshiness, clothes baggy over all. Cutbush was seated on the aisle; between himself and Mrs Volkov sat the lady who must be his wife, visible for the moment only as a swirl of greenish-purple hair.
The start of the evening was unpleasant enough to make you wish you hadn’t come. And the haddock. And the woodwind tuning up.
Nor could he really believe they would be given what they were promised, not even when the first item, printed clearly in the programme as ‘Overture to the Magic Flute’, did in fact turn out to be The Magic Flute. Under the spell of scepticism, he skipped the artist’s photograph, unwilling to discover which persona they might expect: whether the Pamina of his tenderest longings, some vindictive Queen of the Night, or worst of all, the complete Stranger; though from what she had told the radio it would most likely be Little Kathy Volkov from Paddo. ‘I am so happy to be back—so very happy—in Australia . . . No. There is no one. I haven’t any thought of marriage. Not for the moment. Music is my life . . . I have so much to learn . . . Oh yes, truthfully (giggle) . . . Australia is so wonderful. So warm—except when it blows stone cold on you (giggle giggle). But I love it . . . Well, yes, it is short, but I have other engagements . . . Yes, London next, then New York . . . But I adore Australia . . . No. No thought for the moment. Of course, in time. It’s only natural . . . I’d love to have a baby by an Australian . . .’ (Rhoda reported Mrs Volkov had been most provoked by that bit; perhaps understandably, because it hadn’t been for want of trying on the part of Paddo’s Little Kathy.) ‘. . . I adore the sunshine . . . the gum-trees . . . (Had she seen one?) . . . the A.B.C. for giving me such a wonderful start in my musical career . . . So you see, my heart can belong only to Australia . . .’
Little did they know Her Heart Belonged to Daddy, and that she was capable of breaking into a tap routine, a chewed pink bow going flop flop at the end of her floppy plait, in front of the desolated piano.
He shuddered to find somebody walking over his grave.
The orchestra was playing a work by a contemporary. Imprisoned between walls of Mozart, the subscribers were prevented from stampeding out. He wished he could have supported the despised composer, but his hands had been made feeble by the collapse of faith in his ability to sway himself, let alone others. The scattered applause sounded like an old Venetian blind stirred by a feeble breeze.
The trial was imminent. The conductor, a Dutchman, was disappearing, his buttocks too casual for the circumstances, to drag the prisoner from her mahogany cell.
At once it became obvious that precautionary measures were unnecessary: she made her entrance with an eagerness almost too pronounced. Where Kathy had once edged tortuously through the field of musicians, Volkov arrived at the front of the podium with steely, though graceful, skill. Very briefly her fingertips touched those of the conductor, who hadn’t after all led her out: he had been led. She seemed all matt white, of skin, and black, of watered taffeta, an explosion of diamonds on one shoulder. She was wearing her hair in a dangerously heavy, though expert coil, resting in the nape of her proud neck.
She wheeled so smoothly, that, in her faultless, white back reminded of the Königliche Reitschule; so far in her haute école she hadn’t put a hoof wrong.
But as soon as she was seated he recognized the concealed panic which rose in him daily at first touch of the whip. He could almost hear her knuckles cracking as she kneaded them; he could hear her stiff, watered skirt seething with black nerves.
Not for long: she was required to intrude indecently soon; but the violins inclined towards her, in courtship, and the too suave (elderly) Dutch conductor. Then they were all united in the noble charges and intensified caracollings of the music: he too, when at last able to free his throat his locked hand hypnotized by the point of a black silken elbow the throat pulsating white the white the whitest turbulence of bosom as this nameless artist humbly lowered her eyelids at what she had seen reflected in the mirror of perfection.
There were, on the other hand, the moments, the unaccompanied ones, when the unnecessary orchestra of husbands and housewives and raw boys and tired spinsters sat clasping their instruments, while his mistress Katherine Volkov played to delight her lover in a room empty except for themselves; or when his darling Kathy called in her brood, and the golden chicken-notes, in danger of scattering too far, scuttled fluttering for protection under the flounce of her swelling black.
Oh God he was in love with music. He raised his head to it: his Adam’s apple must have stuck out inordinately. He wouldn’t have dared look at Rhoda, whom he had forgotten anyway. He did glance once at Mrs Volkov, who might have been having her child again, there in the Town Hall.
He wondered what part the Russian had played in the making of Katusha, beyond planting his seed in a granite crevice. Perhaps a soul had sensed the rebirth of its own tormented glories, and defected. He had a vision of the recalcitrant creator standing in the middle of a gibber plain tufted with saltbush, dangling a grimy calico bagful of uncut opals. The crumpet-coloured, crumpet-textured face didn’t reveal: but here was Katya in the Andantino polishing the crude stones into an opalescence of music.
He recognized the milky texture, the spurts of black fires as theirs: dark tragedies hinted at resolved themselves in limpid strength. The tragedy was Mrs Volkov’s. And Rhoda’s, from the look of her: she was rocking on her little dried-up-peanut buttocks; though her eyes were closed, her smile exposed her shockingly.
An ambulance clanging down George Street entered through closed doors and reopened a dream he had been hoping healed.
Along the rows the intellectual public servants and unassimilated Europeans were sitting tensed by the Andantino. Lady ffolliott Morgan in pink ostrich feather curyette and enough jewellry to stock a shop (perhaps it did) promised to lay her chin on her navel. The ladies from the right suburbs loved to doze, but on
ly to the right accompaniment. (That Schönberg, that Webern! Oh, Sir Charles! No, Sir Charles!) For the time being at least, the waves on which they were rising and falling wouldn’t suck them down into some horrid abyss, or so they believed; they were riding safe in their own opalescent radiance.
The finale almost woke them up: too brisk. The Volkova might have liked to shed her sleeves, but settled down to business. In the middle she looked up, as though remembering her neglected lover, and began to cosset him back, into the curves of her white flesh, and more intricate spirals of pink shells, only to cast him up again, at the fussy business of life which she couldn’t ignore: after all, she took such pleasure in it.
There she was, standing in front of the piano. The public servants, the awakened ladies, the displaced Europeans, all were clapping. And clapping. While the artist kissed the tips of her fingers. She shook a firm hand with the conductor, a limper one with the leader; she nursed the cellophane bundle of flowers as though they were the baby she wanted to have by an Australian. No practical situation would ever find her at a loss. If she had appeared possessed only a few moments before, the spirit had withdrawn from her. There remained the swathe of watered silk, the explosion of diamonds: also perhaps a trace of diffidence towards the one by whom she had been consummated and her achievement made possible.
Seeing it, he rejoiced in the vision of pure joy they had shared, both then, and tonight. It seemed as though the heart were a cupboard one simply had to open: innocence hides nothing; and perfection bears looking at.
So he sat sunken, misted up, and because he was less than innocent, wondering how he could hide his shame; while Rhoda had started a dry cough, and was rattling a dented bon-bonnière with half-a-dozen lozenges in it, one of which she began to devour, then almost at once another, apparently having no faith in the first.
‘Why’—beating her flat chest—‘does music always make me—cough?’
The Vivisector Page 60