Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘Rhoda!’ he was spouting, gasping. ‘Rhoda? Rhoda! Rhoda!’

She didn’t join in, though once he thought he caught sight of her uvula waving up at him out of the cavern of her throat.

If he hadn’t sensed the child buried in this old, shabby woman — she looked much older than he, no doubt ageing more quickly as the result of her physical affliction — he would have said she was quite unmoved by their finding each other: whatever the life she had led, it had taught her to control the expression of her face and the behaviour of her deformed body. It was only through his intuition that he could feel her spirit reaching out, in spite of her, to embrace his; while he, as always, fluctuated; half exhilarated to identify the sister of his conscience, half disgusted to know he would always have to overcome a repulsion; he had only ever been able to love Rhoda at moments of leavetaking, or unusual stress, as now in their grotesque and strained reunion.

He heard himself saying: ‘You haven’t changed, Rhoda. D’you think you’ve changed?’ which was only half of what he meant to ask, and did: ‘D’you think I’ ve changed?’

She wiped her hands on the sides of her dress. ‘I couldn’t very well give an opinion. Not yet.’ She laughed her same cold little laugh. ‘Physically, yes. Who hasn’t?’ Her hump hadn’t, and it was for that reason, he could see, she had paused an instant. ‘You were so good-looking as a boy: dashing and dreamy at the same time. But nobody would expect you — by our age — not to look dilapidated.’

While she was speaking she tugged several times at the cord she used for pulling the go-cart; the wheels made a painful, squealing sound, and the few remaining cats made off.

‘The light’—he pleaded reasonably—‘you mustn’t pass judgement by — not even a street lamp — a glimmer down a lane!’ But although his argument was sound enough, he knew it was wasted. ‘Why don’t we go back to where I live, so that we can talk, and get to know about each other? Rhoda?’

He even took her by the hand, and forgot he was repelled by the stickiness of drying horse-flesh. She disengaged herself, not, he felt, on account of any dislike for him — in fact, she appeared completely indifferent — but perhaps because Maman might have considered it a breach of the conventions.

It was not that either. ‘I’ve done my duty by these cats, but the others may be missing me.’

‘Which others?’

‘The cats I have living with me — fourteen of them — no, fifteen since yesterday.’

‘If you’d rather, let’s go to your place.’ She had made him pitch his voice too high: it bounced with a boyish insistence.

‘No.’

This should have been final, but he couldn’t believe it was; although she was walking away, the go-cart sometimes grating, sometimes squealing behind her, the pace suggested indecision.

He ran after her.

‘But Rhoda — after discovering each other! Isn’t it human?’ As he coaxed, he watched obliquely for signs of her giving in: he might have been her young brother; the stone manners of this old woman made him feel gauche.

Then he had a brainwave. ‘I’ve got a cat! Come along to my place. Won’t you? Somebody — a friend — dumped it on me. You can advise me what to do.’ He knew nothing about anything: even by this stage in his experience he was incapable of dealing with the contingencies of life.

‘Oh,’ she snorted, ‘cats! There are too many of them.’

But because he needed her — he suddenly realized how desperately — he must use every means to trap her.

He was forced to grow cunning. ‘I’ll make us something good to eat. What about a Welsh rabbit?’

Rhoda was as unimpressed as he would have been in a similar situation. Trudging along, they might have been returning from the lower garden of their childhood, if he hadn’t noticed her shoes: the dated strap-shoes of an elderly dowdy woman, but designed for Rhoda’s dwarf existence; he wondered where she got them.

She had neither accepted nor refused his latest proposition when they reached the thoroughfare. All the lights were focused on them; traffic whizzed towards them, and whammed past; here and there, shopkeepers looked up from their evening transactions to take in a pantomime.

Something extraordinary was happening: a man of distinguished head, of fairly youthful, even athletic, body, clothed, it seemed, only in the name of decency, in shirt and pants and a pair of old sandshoes, had started to blubber shamefully. Of course he was old, really; he couldn’t have disguised it. As he walked along blubbering, the bugger kept blowing out his lips and sucking them in and hiccupping — well, it could have been from emotion — while leading a freak of a woman by the hand. It was the cat woman! A sour little puss herself. But what could you expect: her hump and all? As they shuffled and staggered, pulling the blood-stained cart behind them, tears had boiled up in the cat woman’s cold eyes, and were running over the pink rims. So the couple advanced: past the wilting spinach and flabby turnips, the trays of squid and dull-eyed mullet. It was no wonder decent people left the two derelicts plenty room to pass; drunks, or more probably, metho artists, didn’t enter into their substantial, working lives.

It was the bunch of keys in his pocket which helped him take hold of himself: the keys to the house in Flint Street.

‘I’ve lived here,’ he calculated roughly, ‘thirty years! Didn’t you know about it? You must have known.’

‘I’d heard, of course. I’d read. I’ve even seen you once or twice. But what good would it have done either of us if I’d come thrusting myself?’

The more clearly he saw, the more cunning he grew. ‘We could be a help to each other, couldn’t we?’

Again he tried taking her hand. It was cold. She withdrew it to back the stinking cart under the araucaria.

‘It’s a comparatively large house,’ he began to explain before remembering: ‘Oh, not compared with Sunningdale!’ He heard their double silence and was glad those hiccups had ended. ‘I want to show you over it.’

As he opened it, the house seemed to stagger under his determination.

‘Wait here,’ he ordered in the hall.

He ran ahead to switch on the lights of all the rooms in his once proud, now suppliant, house. In the scullery he kicked the herring tin Kathy had made him put for the cat; he heard the milk scattering: probably some of it on his pants. By the time he returned, reducing his run to a strut, Rhoda had left the hall and advanced into the living-room, so he could see this grimy old woman, his sister, in clear detail. She was standing with her head, her small triangular white face, poked forward: looking. She was more like an animal than a woman, perhaps as the result of her association with cats.

She spoke, though. ‘I don’t like to imagine what they would think of it all.’

‘If you judge it by Courtney standards!’ He tried to ease his irritation by pulling up his slack trousers. ‘But people live differently, on the whole more honestly, now. What were we but a bunch of new-rich vulgarians gorging ourselves and complaining? ’

Rhoda’s expression became so fixed and wooden he had a vision of her perched like a ventriloquist’s doll on Boo Davenport’s knee; the mouth moved: ‘Oh yes,’ she tinkled, ‘but I’m glad to have lived some of my life under a chandelier!’

Again he had to pull up his pants, which had only started slipping since he met her: she irritated him so. ‘I can do without chandeliers — or think up one of my own.’

‘Oh, I agree. There’s very little that is necessary, beyond a crust of bread and a hole to curl up in.’