The Vivisector

by WHITE, PATRICK

  The audience was going out for the interval. Eyes suggested theirs had been the subtlest experience, though in some cases, the unsavoury-looking pair of eccentrics in their midst spoiled the pleasures of self-congratulation; to rub up against anything so deplorable might have haunted them for ever after.

  The Mozart still inside him would have curdled if Rhoda hadn’t twitched round suddenly and hissed in liquorice gusts: ‘I didn’t tell you, but Mrs Volkov expects us to look in at the artists’ room. She expects you, that is. Naturally the poor woman is out of her water.’

  ‘What a relief—for everybody!’ He laughed heartlessly, and kept it up.

  ‘Out of her depth, I mean.’ Rhoda blushed and frowned. ‘What I mean to say is,’ she battered away, ‘it’s rather a burden for Mrs Volkov, and she’d like some friend of a different level to help her out.’

  The prospect hardly appealed; but he saw that he was commandeered. ‘I thought of slipping away. Don’t feel like any more,’ he was muttering pitifully while keeping the top of Rhoda’s head in sight.

  A more studiously charitable crowd parted to allow a hunchback to pass, and they entered the mahogany canyon at the end of which was the artists’ room. A guard in mufti hovered round the open door. Inside, Katherine Volkov, looking pale, stood glancing out spasmodically through a cluster of admirers.

  Seated in a far corner, smiling her stroked smile, the mother mumbled and beckoned. The new arrivals were admitted.

  While haunting the outskirts of the carpet, he thought he recognized the one-f-ed physiologist inside the tom-cat cheeks which come with regular steak and bed. Plastered against him was a young woman of delicate bones and enormous pregnancy possessive enough to be a wife. Ignored by the object of their visit, the couple was staring in sulky admiration at the signs of her achievement.

  Lady ffolliott Morgan and a trio of satellites were congratulating Katherine Volkov on her dress.

  ‘By a little person in Vienna. I shan’t tell you her name, because she’s nameless.’ The Volkova remained silent a moment while admiring the fall of her own watered skirt. ‘Of course I influenced her!’

  The ladies all laughed in appreciation.

  Accepting that her time was up, Lady ffolliott Morgan looked wistful as she asked. ‘We shall see you on Sunday?’ It was tentative, but hopeful.

  ‘I have it tattooed on my mind—a quarter to one, punctually.’

  The ladies laughed again because she made it sound so amusing.

  The Dutchman dug a forefinger into her shoulder where the skin took over from the taffeta. ‘Vee vill even so make sure: I vill bring you.’ Then he went off to conduct the Brahms.

  At last Kathy was free to rub cheeks. ‘Clif! And this is Trish? When is it expected? Isn’t that beaut! I’m so happy for you.’ She glittered the more for her descent into suburbia.

  ‘And darling Miss Courtney!’ She descended lower still to embrace this quaint dwarf.

  Her back bent, the Volkova might have been helping pull the go-cart full of stinking offal for cats. On straightening up, she drew a deep breath—the room was smelling of tuberoses enough to deaden a corpse—and gave Rhoda her healthiest smile. ‘I’m terribly grateful to you. Mum does depend on your support.’

  Mrs Volkov nodded and prepared words which wouldn’t form.

  Kathy all the while was flickering her eyelids in the right direction, just about to—she’d have to say something soon surely to God.

  He couldn’t help trying to carve into the tended skin, through the technical smiles, to the vision they had created together; but instead of helping him revive it, she was growing hobbledehoy; she clasped her hands in a tight ball at her waist: there was nowhere about that severe dress in which to hide them.

  What made the situation more embarrassing, Rhoda seemed to understand it; she whispered loudly: ‘Hurtle was tremendously impressed.’ (Her dolt brother.) ‘We must go now,’ she whispered louder still. ‘They make such demands on you.’

  As he followed Rhoda out of the room Kathy blundered after them, and was apparently speaking to him. ‘Thank you for coming to hear me play.’ Her face was pursed up in a gross vegetable shape; she was so hesitant she almost tottered. ‘I do appreciate it,’ she managed to blurt before planting on his cheek a kiss which immediately bounced off: it was so clumsily done.

  Ignoring Mrs Volkov, a grey blur waving vaguely from her mahogany corner, he ran snorting down the now deserted corridor to catch up with Rhoda. He hoped she hadn’t seen anything of what had just happened between Kathy and himself: the two geniuses.

  Rhoda almost certainly hadn’t, because of an encounter which was putting her on her mettle. Without any difficulty, alas, he recognized Shuard.

  Shuard didn’t age like other people: always only a little plumper than the time before, the steel wool only a shade more silvery, the whole man so smooth and preserved, no doubt at the expense of the several wives on whom he had battened. He was aided and abetted, of course, by the banality of his mind: nothing like an empty head for keeping the wrinkles at bay.

  Rhoda was playing up to a man, who bent down in a caricature of gallantry.

  ‘Didn’t you enjoy it, Mr Shuard?’ She had launched into her best imitation of Maman. ‘Such a charming—an exquisite performance! ’

  Because he couldn’t reach down as far as her elbow, Shuard tapped her on the shoulder, which made it look less gallant than he might have intended, but more in keeping with his patronizing nature.

  ‘Stylish, yes. But not Mozart. Not yet. Perhaps if she works at it. And Kathy is a determined young lady.’

  Rhoda made the laughing sounds, half protest, half agreement, Maman would have made in the circumstances, but drier because of her own little wizened throat. She wasn’t exactly betraying Kathy, only obeying a convention.

  ‘You understand?’ Shuard gargled from behind his perfectly false teeth.

  ‘Oh, work—yes—I agree—so necessary—and rewarding!’ Rhoda gurgled.

  Shuard was standing so firmly on his own ground he looked in no particular direction while greeting Duffield. His handshake felt warm and cushioned. Whatever else, the man was an adept.

  You glanced back irresistibly to watch the enemy’s continued progress down the corridor: the intolerable saunter, shortening a leg every few paces, as in the lavatory when buttoning up his flies, here in the corridor still easing his fat crutch. And Katherine Volkov appearing at the door of the artists’ room with her moistest smile: she must have livened it up in the meantime. She had put on a pair of long black gloves, which made her arms look more experienced, her hands more predatory, as Shuard, the slippery bugger, whirled her round, their mouths attaching themselves with the sure suction of roused sea-anemones.

  To one side, in the hall, Brahms was beating his chest while the waves broke around him. Rhoda had already done such duty by music she mightn’t have heard if an attendant hadn’t approached and silently hushed her clatter.

  She continued to whisper while performing an elaborate tiptoe across the tiles. ‘Mr Shuard enjoys living, whatever one may think of his way of life.’ She giggled in what sounded like sympathy.

  ‘But isn’t he a critic? What’s he doing ambling off during a concert? Or perhaps he knows enough already.’

  Rhoda looked over her shoulder. ‘Between ourselves, I believe the paper sacked him. Now he’s just enjoying himself—living off his last wife’s bribe-money.’

  Their footsteps teetered away, while the souped-up Brahms surged in browner, more turgid waves.

  Rhoda whispered: ‘He’s really a very kind man. He’s promised to deliver Mrs Volkov home. Then, I’m told, he’s taking Kathy to supper at the house of some Viennese—of the musical world. I don’t believe musicians ever want to leave that world; they certainly never admit outsiders, though sometimes they may pretend to.’

  They went out into the darkness. Rhoda started clawing up at his arm: she who had so recently and lightly betrayed Kathy in chitchat with Shuard after
the convention of the class she believed she had repudiated, was looking for protection from a crueller truth, he presently realized.

  ‘There was a man staring at me during the concert,’ she told him. ‘At first I thought it was because I’m the sister of a famous man. Then I came to the conclusion, from the way he couldn’t stop eyeing me, he was admiring my fur coat. Squirrel isn’t too common now.’

  ‘He must have been on your good side—the side away from the safety-pin.’

  The wind had started to cut again.

  ‘Did you notice,’ he asked, ‘Shuard is full of false teeth?’

  ‘Is he? Most people are. On the whole I think false are more presentable than our own discoloured, crooked ones. Yours and mine, anyway. Kathy’s teeth are splendid, but she’s in the flower of her womanhood, and we’re a couple of old crocks hanging on to what we’ve got—out of stinginess and pride.’

  It was an unimportant hour of night, too late for one crowd, too early for another: it made the giggling more personal, and turned glances into guided missiles.

  Katherine Volkov’s successful tour was over quicker by the calendar than his private suffering would have shown. On account of her engagements in other parts of the world, it was actually very brief: after the orchestral concerts in Sydney, there were those in Melbourne—with the First Physiologist thrown in—then the return to Sydney and her farewell recital.

  He refused to go to the recital, and knew Rhoda was relieved because she would be able to live it in her own way. She could go round afterwards, uninhibited by his presence, and rub cheeks, and be snubbed along with the whole Cutbush gang; while the chosen sycophants, the ffolliott Morgan set and Shuard, wearing their invisible rose-petal masks and gold-leaf leotards, waited to carry off the artist, not to debauch her, but to learn from her. After the recital, none of the tumult of Brahms to deaden departure, only single, lingering notes aimed with deadly accuracy.

  Since Kathy had finally exorcized herself, this time he needn’t even listen in.

  The weather had turned warm enough for Rhoda to dispense with her fur coat. In any case, it was hardly wearable by now: the safety-pin too visible in the unmended tear; signs of horse-flesh gumming up the maltreated squirrel. In the absence of the coat she proposed to present herself in a lilac creation, or more accurately, confection. Somehow the material was too rough, its nutty basis too liberally treated with fondant for anybody as delicate as Rhoda (he wouldn’t label her as ‘subtle’). Draped over the hump, there was a little pleated, frosted cape, and down the front a lovingly worked out-of-proportion corsage of orchids in pink gauze. She looked awful, particularly the patches of rouge, and the strings where her calves should have been; but she was determined her camouflage should make her feel beautiful.

  ‘Where did you get the new dress?’ It was his duty to ask.

  ‘Mrs Volkov made it for me. She always has. For any important occasion.’ She stood ruffling up the spray of artificial orchids. ‘Less since her attack. But recently it’s done her nerves good to occupy herself.’

  He had heard Mrs Volkov was known to the neighbourhood for her dressmaking; she had brought up Kathy on the proceeds from it, augmented by the money she earned from child-minding, washing up and letting her spare room. If he couldn’t remember any other dresses, Rhoda’s important occasions had probably occurred before she came to live with him.

  ‘I’m glad you like this,’ she told herself with prim pleasure; her kiss—for the occasion—felt as dry as chalk.

  When she came home he could see that a headache or something was raging in his lilac clown.

  ‘How was it?’ he asked.

  He was positively languid from feeling free of Kathy at last; while Rhoda’s chalky brows were as pleated as her cape.

  She seemed unwilling to goad her sensibility further by discussing the recital, but screwed up the pleats in her forehead tighter still, and answered from behind closed lids: ‘Her Scriabin was exceptional. Even Mr Shuard had to admit it.’

  ‘Scriabin? Don’t think I’ve ever heard a note of him. Tell me about the Scriabin.’

  But she wouldn’t. Her clown’s face shuddered and cracked under its chalky silt.

  ‘And did they carry her off to the flesh-pots afterwards? To round off her Scriabin?’

  ‘Oh, no. Mrs Volkov is too unwell. It’s the thought of parting. Kathy is off early in the morning.’

  Then she was as good as gone, he realized. She had gone out of his life without a murmur from either of them. Of course it wouldn’t have occurred to Kathy, and since she had killed by her vulgarity and vice anything he had created in her, there was nothing left for him to regret. He would learn to live with nothing, as his deformed sister advocated.

  But Rhoda, he saw, had begun to cry: it was trickling down through the remnants of her powder.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ he shouted, ‘what’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she sobbed. ‘Everything,’ she corrected herself with increasing sogginess. ‘This dress, for instance!’ She dashed the back of her open claw against her friend’s handiwork.

  Shortly after, she went to bed, no doubt deciding she might lose more sympathy than she would gain by prolonged sniffles; while he sat on with his guilt for company: for withholding his affection. Probably he had given her the squirrel coat in its place, and to pay him out, Rhoda had caught the disease from which he suffered. By the time they were both riddled with it, when each had become the same exotic fungus, would it greatly matter who possessed whom?

  Anyway, Kathy was gone, trailing rococo clouds and the worst screamers of radio advertisements. Her slogans streamed across the air: ‘My boomerang will always come back . . . Even if I’m sort of married to Mozart and Beethoven, I’ll find the time to love all you bloomin’ Australians . . .’

  For days afterwards, he was back and forth between the upper floor and the incinerator, destroying a whole pile of drawings. (Nothing of any value, however: it was his latterday trash, his senility going up in smoke.) He hacked less effectually at several masonite boards. He could feel Rhoda listening; he could feel her watching, unable to do anything about the smoke which was rising through the slits in the scaly incinerator. He burned letters too, remembering a tussle which had taken place during another holocaust.

  Now it was Rhoda who brought him the letter when it came. She carried it impersonally on her flat palm, as Edith might have offered it on a salver with the Courtney monogram. Rhoda didn’t comment, perhaps because she didn’t recognize what was certainly a changed writing: large and dashing.

  The envelope was tough, because expensive; he waited till Rhoda had gone before starting the struggle with it.

  My dear friend . . .

  (not the expected suburban clanger ‘Dear Mr Duffield’, though a stiff translation from the German was no more appropriate.)

  ... our trouble is you intimidate me still. I’m as nervous as a little girl wondering whether she will find the words to express herself, or a thought in her head worth expressing. And that is how I was changed into a lump of suet as you were leaving the concert, why I started stupidly kissing when I hadn’t meant to, only it is what they do on such occasions—people of Hal Shuard’s kind!

  I had planned to embrace you with my eyes, in gratitude. Or would that have given a wrong impression—too much like a prostitute’s invitation? Oh, I am that too, I know! I must experience all there is to experience. I’m a glutton of the senses. I shall end up fat, perhaps bloated, probably destroyed, but I hope that on the way I shall contribute something of value. That is possible, even out of the worst. I am too pliable, not only physically. I say things they want to hear, because it’s easy after what had been hellishly difficult. After trying to praise great men in their own accents, adulation from the nongs (for what they think they love but don’t really) is like mutual seduction under a warm shower. Then I promise them I’ll come back some day and play them Chopin and Gershwin and the lot, and that their Little Kathy from P
addo will always love them. If I were a polio victim as well, I’d be seven times more their idol, but I hope they will never get the chance to take advantage of me to that extent.

  I didn’t mean to bitch when I started. This was to have been a letter about us, full of the things we haven’t said. I realize the dangers I may run into, but because I was brought up close to the gutter I’ll take the risk.

  If I’ve learnt anything of importance, it was you who taught me, and I thank you for it. Yes, I know there was Khrapovitsky whipping me along to perfect my technique—important certainly—but I’ve come across several machines put together by Khrap alone—impressive except that they were never anything more than machines. It was you who taught me how to see, to be, to know instinctively. When I used to come to your house in Flint Street, melting with excitement and terror, wondering whether I would dare go through with it again, or whether I would turn to wood, or dough, or say something so stupid and tactless you would chuck me out into the street, it wasn’t simply thought of the delicious kisses and all the other lovely play which forced the courage in me. It was the paintings I used to look at sideways whenever I got a chance. I wouldn’t have let on, because I was afraid you might have been amused, and made me talk about them, and been even more amused when I couldn’t discuss them at your level. But I was drinking them in through the pores of my skin. There was an occasion when I even dared touch one or two of the paintings as I left, because I had to know what they felt like, and however close and exciting it had been to embrace with our bodies, it was a more truly consummating love-shock to touch those stony surfaces and suddenly glide with my straying fingers into what seemed like endless still water.

  Of course my approach and reactions were childish, personal, egotistical—let’s face it, aren’t we appalling egotists?—but I think this was how I began to feel I could reach the truth, if I filtered these sensations through my true self, however limited that area might be. And that is how I have always gone about it, my darling—I can’t call you ‘lover’, although I suppose that, technically, is what you have been—or ‘dirty seducer’! If I hadn’t wanted, had to be seduced—still I prefer to think of you as the father of anything praiseworthy that will ever come out of me.