Patrick White - The Vivisector

He knew his hand was trembling on the door.

‘I brought this,’ she said. ‘My mother won’t let me keep it. Isn’t it nice?’

She was holding in her arms a skinny, growling, tabby kitten, or half-grown cat, which flattened itself still flatter as he looked it over.

‘I’m not a cat lover,’ he said.

‘Arrh!’ The extra effort to restrain the elastic cat with her arms made her protest vibrate, like a groan. ‘Did you ever have one?’

‘No.’

‘How do you know, then, that you aren’t a cat lover?’

‘No! No!’ He thought he no longer cared for Kathy Volkov.

In his determination to resist, he was trying to look his crankiest, exaggeratedly shaking his uncombed head; the door he was holding swung and creaked as his whole body rejected the unwanted cat.

Kathy’s mouth had taken on the shape of ugly, rubbery desperation. Her nose had grown hot-looking and shiny: she might have been preparing to cry; when the cat, at its flattest, its most tigerish, sprang out of her arms and through the doorway into the house.

Kathy seemed less surprised and startled than he. ‘There!’ she said. ‘That’s an omen! Isn’t it?’

He began to feel furious. ‘An ill omen, if you like! What am I going to do with a cat?’

‘Feed it — and it’ll keep you company.’

‘But I don’t want it! I’ve got my work. I’ve got the wireless.’

‘Anyway we’d better find the thing.’ The cat had aged her, and made her suddenly practical.

She walked very straight, straight past him into the house. Her plait, he noticed, had become two. The two pigtails, although comparatively thin, looked rather guileful, lying limp on the shoulder-blades he had touched on another occasion.

‘Where’s your friend?’ he asked as he followed. ‘The little Italian. Why didn’t you bring her?’

‘Oh, Angela. She’s not all that much of a friend. There’s nothing much in Angela. You wouldn’t find her interesting.’

Not only practical, Kathy was assured today. Now that she had got inside the house she was walking with the short, confident steps of a woman of the prissier kind. He could imagine the mother.

‘As soon as we find this damn cat you’ll have to take it home.’ His bare feet made the decision sound more emphatic.

‘Mother says it’ll eat too much.’

‘Somewhere, then. There are plenty of people for cats.’

‘I do know one other person, but she’s got too many.’

The house was hardly his any longer as Kathy stalked through it on her long, loosely articulated legs.

‘Fancy living in it!’ She stared at the furniture with her borrowed, older woman’s eyes. ‘It’s good, though. I like it. It’s not nearly as bad as they say.’

‘Who says?’ They were standing in the little, suddenly far more precious, derelict conservatory.

‘People.’

‘Who haven’t seen it!’

‘Ooh, I love this! ’ She began turning in the conservatory, not exactly in a waltz, but swinging her thin pigtails. ‘Isn’t it dreamy!’

‘It hasn’t been kept up. It’s nothing — a ruin.’

‘Oh, but I could use this!’

As she continued turning within the conservatory’s narrow limits, she began also to hum. A golden tinsel of light hung around her lithe, mackerel body; while out of the dislodged tiles and shambles of broken glass her shuffling feet produced discordancies, but appropriate ones: Kathy Volkov would probably never teeter over into sweetness. There was a smell of trapped warmth and inward-pressing privet. Once or twice she slapped down the leathery tongue of an aspidistra.

‘Yes,’ she sighed, subsiding.

They found the cat crouching amongst a hoard of cardboard boxes at the far end of the scullery. This was at least convenient. He filled an empty herring tin with milk he had brought from the smallgoods the evening before. Some of the milk, and a smear of tomato sauce, slopped over on the flagging.

‘There!’ said Kathy Volkov. ‘You must shut it in for a few days — and feed it — and talk to it — then it’ll know it belongs.’ She closed the door behind them as they left the kitchen.

‘It’s all very well giving advice when you won’t have to live with it.’

‘No. But I could.’

She plumped down with such force in one of the chairs in the living-room the dust shot out visibly: the motes were suspended in her radiance.

‘I could live here all right!’ She spoke so vehemently, passionately, she was no longer the pretended older woman, but again the little girl who was his ever present spiritual child. ‘I could live here, and practise somewhere at the centre of the house, and nobody would turn nasty.’

‘I might.’

But she didn’t seem to take that seriously. She was sitting with her legs stretched out in front, dreamily looking at the toes of her dusty shoes. After all she had more or less won the battle for the cat’s adoption.

‘What kind of music do you play?’ he asked very carefully.

‘Do you know about music? I don’t believe you’re interested in it.’

‘Well, of course I am! I listen to it regularly on the wireless.’

In the kitchen there was, in fact, a primitive radio in a wormeaten, dulled mahogany case, with a moon of tarnished brocade through which the sound filtered: music edged with tin; foggy oracles of voices. Years ago he had bought it second-hand. There it stood, looking as though it belonged to a wind-raked seaside cottage to which a sea captain had retired. It was corroded; sometimes the knobs would stick; but it continued to give service, and would tune in from force of habit. You couldn’t say he didn’t understand music: though its meanings were probably those his unconscious desired at the moment of listening.

‘Yes,’ said Kathy, sticking her tongue deep down inside one corner of her mouth: she might have had a gumboil; he had forgotten all about them till now, ‘you may listen to music. A lot of people do. But you wouldn’t die without it.’

‘Well, no. I wouldn’t die without it. That’s a bit extravagant, isn’t it? Even if I were a musician.’ At once he heard how insensitive he was to his own youth as well as hers. ‘That is, I’m a painter,’ he added more humbly. ‘I suppose I’d have died — at your age — if I’d been prevented from painting and drawing.’

They were united for a moment in his submerged living-room: never more than a waiting-room of the spirit, in which he had restlessly lounged, or sat rigid on the edge of a chair, grinding his jaws together; till release came with the force of an afternoon southerly, and he would run upstairs, the problems of his real, his creative life, dissolving inside him.

Now it was Kathy Volkov sitting on the edge of the chair. Suddenly he saw how little of the child there was in her: her eyes were terrible as she tortured one of the thin pigtails, untying and retying a crumpled pink bow.

‘You couldn’t understand how I must! I must! How I’ll die! Nobody could ever understand!’

‘But I do! I was young, wasn’t I? Aren’t I an artist?

She was already so much the egotist her eyes were blind to anyone or anything but herself. He wanted to protect her from that situation. At this instant he was prepared to give himself up wholly to the salvation of Kathy Volkov: so he began walking towards her, on his knees, like the beggars he could remember outside European cathedrals; while her eyes continued blazing in a blind fury of desperation.

All at once, just before reaching the island or chair on which she was stranded, his excitement over Kathy, his admiration, his own need for her, melted into an agonizing and helpless love. He almost failed to prevent himself blubbering at her, dragging her down to such a wretched level of reality, he probably would have disgusted her for ever.