Patrick White - The Vivisector

Instead, when he reached her, in this wholly ridiculous kneeling position, he managed to get possession of her head. ‘I’m the one who could help you — if only you could see!’ He was holding her head against his, making a virtue of the awkwardness. ‘I haven’t had a child — I know — but I know what it is to have been one — in much the same situation. Can’t that be a consolation, Kathy? To both of us? To me, it almost makes you my child.’

Still holding her head, he could see her eyeballs beginning to grind around in their sockets. She wrenched herself away from him.

‘But I’m not a child!’ How it echoed!

She had got up, and was standing over him, menacingly, it appeared for the moment.

Then she altered her voice and said very quietly: ‘Can’t we see the rest of the house?’ She slid her fingers along the backs of his fingers; she said: ‘It’s interesting.’

His bones started to creak and click: only now he realized how rheumaticky he was becoming; but she had taken him by the hand, and was helping him up as a matter of course. He looked along her long, skinny arm, and saw the potential strength already exerting itself, partly muscular, partly as reflections of sinewy light.

He heard his feeble dust-coloured voice trying to disguise the sounds of age: ‘I’ve read about copper bracelets and rings to draw it off — arthritis I mean — in some way, apparently, they absorb the inflammation.’

Because none of it had any connection with herself, she only made a grunting sound, and he was ashamed of having told her something so uninteresting and irrelevant.

She was looking vaguely here and there. ‘Did you paint all these paintings?’ She still didn’t sound interested, though.

‘Yes.’ He was content to let his ‘child’ lead him through his own house by the hand.

‘They’re so different from one another,’ she commented languidly. ‘Not all by the same person.’ With her far hand she had got hold of one of the pigtails, and was sucking the end.

‘Well, of course! These down here are mostly early paintings. I hadn’t yet found my style. But I like to think there are already signs of it.’

She made a sucking sound, in no way committed, through a mouthful of wet hair. He felt repelled, and had to remind himself that sucking a pigtail was a childish habit.

‘Isn’t it the same with composers? Aren’t they derivative at first? And what about interpretative musicians? I bet your tastes and style as a musician won’t remain fixed — not if you’re any good.’

The narrow stairs were forcing them gravely together as they mounted. Here too, there were paintings on the wall, and he could tell by the twitching of her fingers, the angle of her head, that she was glad they were there: you can escape from arguments by looking absently out of windows, he knew from his own experience.

As they continued their precise ascent, he tried again to winkle her out. ‘Who is your favourite composer?’ He would have frowned on any such question put to him as a boy.

She sighed, then mumbled quickly: ‘Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Liszt. Liszt’s my favourite. He’s so difficult. And brilliant.’

‘Good Lord!’ It was dishonest, because none of them, till now, had been of great importance to him. ‘What about Bach, Mozart, Beethoven?’

‘Oh, yes! They’re wonderful, aren’t they?’ she murmured sententiously, like a lady at a reception.

They had reached the top landing. In the front room they stood looking out through the araucaria-coloured light, over the roofs, at a slow sea.

‘But you can’t understand about Liszt!’ She was smiling convinced out of the window. ‘Mr Khrapovitsky says I must start studying the First Concerto now. It doesn’t matter how many years I take.’ She was swaying slightly: at the end of the unspecified period, the chandeliers would crash about her shoulders, and her shining head rise untouched.

‘What’s that?’ She dropped his hand to point.

It was one of the later, almost completely abstracted versions of his ‘Pythoness at Tripod’; something he mightn’t have shown Kathy if he had given the matter consideration in advance.

‘It’s an abstract painting.’ He tried to make it sound discouraging.

Why had he never grown a mustache? An uneven fringe of hair above the mouth might have been a great help in not explaining things.

Kathy was saying: ‘I know a hunchback, a friend of my mother’s. I thought it was horrible at first. Now I no longer think about it.’ Her eyes suddenly took aim at him. ‘Why did you paint the hunchback?’ She was prepared to wait for his answer; then she couldn’t. ‘Because it was more difficult! Do you see? Like Liszt!’

‘No,’ he said, trying to remember. ‘I had my purely painterly reasons: those come first, of course. Then I think I wanted to make amends — in the only way I’ve ever known how — for some of my own enormities.’

She brooded over the painted board; or perhaps she was looking inward at the difficulties of Liszt.

‘Don’t you pity your mother’s friend?’

‘Mmm.’

She hadn’t suffered enough: because pity was not yet one of her personal needs, she hadn’t bothered to understand, let alone confer it.

She was again leading him, no longer by the hand, but stalking ahead on her cool, proppy legs.

She glanced inside the junk-room. ‘There’s a smell of rats in there,’ she said.

‘You can’t escape from rats in any of these old houses.’

‘There’s none in ours. My mother’s too afraid of rats breathing on the food: that’s what gives you hepatitis. Every month she takes the lino up, and scrubs the boards underneath.’

‘Perhaps that’s why your father ran away.’ It may have been a dirty one, but it made her smile. ‘Was he an artist of some kind?’

‘He was a seaman — but left his ship. He married my mother while he was in hiding. He did marry her, whatever they tell you.’

‘I’ve heard nothing.’

The story of her father, which had halted them between the upper rooms, had also emphasized the shape and intensified the colour of her eyes: they were mercilessly blue and clear-cut.

‘Do you remember him?’ he asked.

‘Not much. I can remember — once. It was very early. The light was funny, damp grey. He had a smell I’d never smelt before. I remember that because it was so different from what I was used to — the smell of my mother.’

Her eyes had faded. The old floorboards were audibly ticking.

‘And after he left — was that the last you heard of him?’

‘We heard from somebody that he’d been seen on the opalfields. ’

‘From sea to opalfields! He could have had something of the artist in him, even if he didn’t know it.’

‘Yes!’ She was so pleased she bared her teeth; her hand began burning, crushing his; her eyes would have stared wider open if their shape had allowed.

She began trembling violently. ‘That’s what I see in this concerto I’ve begun studying with old Khrap: the colours of opals! That’s what I want to try to give it when I know how.’

But at once she grew embarrassed. ‘What else?’ she mumbled. ‘Isn’t there anything else to look at?’

They dragged on automatically, again bound together at the hands, and stumbled into the back room, from which he hadn’t thought of moving the drawing of the nude girl, simply because it hadn’t occurred to him Kathy Volkov might worm her way so deep into his house and life.

Now he was horrified at this climax.

‘Is that supposed to be me?’

‘Not consciously. It’s the figure of a girl.’

She ignored his reply. ‘But you haven’t seen me. My navel isn’t that shape.’ Her hand fell apart from his, only too easily now. ‘And I’m different there.’ She went and touched the dark smudge at the meeting of the thighs. ‘Otherwise it’s not a bad likeness.’ Her use of a word peculiar to unexceptional women paying morning calls long ago made her judgement sound uncannier.