Patrick White - The Vivisector

Reaching the yard he picked up the now motionless ball out of the dregs of yellow light. The felt was still warm. As he explored its form with his hand he was relieved to be able to tell himself the ball belonged to Angela, not to Kathy, and that anything he might say, probably of an uninteresting and mundane nature, would be directed at the owner of the ball. Any exchanges between himself and Kathy would be conveyed by implication and silences.

But nobody came. He waited holding the tingling ball: till he could no longer bear the felted chugging in his side.

The situation was going flat, when a hand appeared, tackling the latch through the cut-out in the gate. Then she was standing in the gateway as she had stood at the door the other morning when she came with the billyful of soup looking for Mrs Angove. She was wearing that slightly cold, expressionless expression some children can put on, and which is the most complete of all disguises.

‘The ball landed in the yard,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you’ve come to fetch it, because I shouldn’t have known where to find you, to return it.’

‘It doesn’t belong to me,’ she replied, accepting it with mysterious concentration. ‘It belongs to Angela Agostino, who I play with sometimes.’

She continued looking strangely at the ball in her hands: it could have been a homed pigeon. At any moment she might start stroking what was neither a pigeon nor hers.

‘To Angela,’ he repeated. ‘What is your name?’ Although he knew, he wanted to make her say it.

‘Kathy.’

‘Yes.’ He was burning to know more, if not everything. ‘But your other — your family name.’

She didn’t want to tell it, it seemed; then she said or mumbled: ‘Volkov.’

‘Kathy Volkov. Are you Russian?’

‘No. Australian.’

‘But your father? Where is he from?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Are there many of you?’

‘There’s my mother. I must go now,’ she said, still looking at the strange ball in her hands. ‘Mother will be wondering where I am.’

‘Is your mother Russian, too?’

‘No.’ She began to sound sulky. ‘She’s Scotch— Scottish! ’

‘And Australian.’

‘No. Mother will never be anything but Scottish.’

Along the lane the light was wilting like the marrow flowers on dusty beds in back yards.

Kathy Volkov said: ‘I must go. I’ve got to practise.’

‘At what?’

‘The piano.’

‘Ah! So you’re a pianist — an artist!’ He spoke gently: he didn’t want to mock, but to test her. ‘Are you going to be a good one?’

She looked at him. ‘Mr Khrapovitsky says I will be.’

‘Yes. But you’re the one it depends on in the end. You’re the artist.’

Her face appeared to grow more opaque. She had blue, but by no means passive eyes.

‘Have you the will?’ he asked.

She was pouting, and wouldn’t answer; so he saw he had gone too far; he said: ‘I hope, Kathy, you’ll come and see me again. It’ll do us good to exchange ideas.’

She could have been glad she had the ball to hold.

‘You don’t agree?’

‘My mother mightn’t let me.’

‘What about this father of yours? Doesn’t he make any decisions? ’

‘He went away.’

‘Then I hope your mother will let you come.’

To encourage everyone concerned he put his hand as kindly as he could on her back: he was conscious of the shoulder-blades, and above them the modest beads of her vertebrae; but she rid herself of the hand by a few quick shrugs.

How could he appease her? In desperation he began looking around: in his yard not even a dusty flower.

‘Aren’t you the painter?’ She spoke with abrupt formality.

‘Yes. I do paint.’

A little smile was creeping on her face. ‘My mother says she would never let a painter paint her, because then you are at their mercy, worse than the mercy of a husband. A husband goes away. But the painter has painted the painting.’

‘Yes, the painting. And you are your father’s child. Hasn’t that occurred to your mother?’

Instead of answering, she was preparing to manage the ramshackle gate.

‘You must feel close to your mother.’

‘I have to help her: she needs me, and then — she’s my mother.’

‘It’s very fortunate if you can feel close to your parents. So often one isn’t really theirs.’

‘What do you mean?’ She was frowning, nostrils twitching: she was clutching the ball so tight she had deformed it.

‘I mean one can be so remote in spirit from one’s actual father — or mother — it’s as though one doesn’t belong to them. Spiritually, ’ he dared, ‘one can be someone else’s child.’

It probably sounded too highflown and muddled for her to understand; though certainly she seemed more tranquil, even drowsily acquiescent.

His own bliss caused him to make a regrettable slip. ‘To be truthful, I don’t believe the artist can belong to anyone.’

She glanced at him quickly as though he had reminded her of something, but looked away again at once. ‘I never felt for long that I belonged properly to anybody — excepting my own room.’

She started blushing: a radiance the last of the light helped fix on a space waiting for it in his visual mind.

‘How old are you?’ he asked irrelevantly.

‘I was thirteen last Friday.’ With equal irrelevance she gave a short snicker.

They parted gravely, politely: the latch continued tinkling in his head.

That night he started work on the flowering rosebush. Each of the big scalloped saucers of single roses was given its tuft of glistening human hairs. It was natural that the face should flower at the centre of the bush, humanly radiant amongst the not dissimilar roses, and not all that unnatural for the bush to be growing at the sea’s edge, under a livid sky.

When morning came he felt surprisingly fresh standing in front of his finished painting: only his eyelids, dry and fragile, might have been segments of ping-pong balls.

After he had rested a little, he began to draw what became during the days which followed a more abstract version of the ‘Flowering Rosebush’: the face at the heart of the bush reduced to an eye, its remote candour undazzled by its setting of rose-jewels; the original seascape dissolved in space by fluctuations of gelatinous light, in which a threat of crimson was still suspended.

At intervals he made other drawings: one of a cool, naked, fairly naturalistic, though sexless, girl, which satisfied him to the extent that he propped it up against the easel in the back room. The drawing was taking possession of him, he felt, as he walked up and down through the house, alternately dazzled and distressed by details of a painting it might become. He lay down finally, nursing a kind of anxiety along with his restless excitement, and fell into a sleep full of opposing influences.

He woke hissing, shuddering, though unable to remember anything of a dream which might have fed the anxiety already latent in him. On another level he was conscious of a delicious sense of voluptuousness.

Then the rattling began: or was, more probably, repeated. He recognized the sound of the loose knob on the back door. From upstairs he couldn’t identify the voice calling on and off.

He looked along his body at the state of erection in which they had as good as discovered him; but his shame was quickly disguised by slopping into a shirt and pants. He went down through the awakened house towards the feverishly rattled doorknob.

Kathy Volkov was standing on the step. He felt genuinely surprised, because sleep had loosened the ties between them, or at least the superficial ones.

He probably looked disagreeable; he certainly sounded that. ‘Good Lord, Kathy, what on earth are you doing here?’ He was even on the verge of adding: ‘again!’ But that mightn’t have convinced either of them: she was too unfamiliar an experience.