Patrick White - The Vivisector

He must try not to feel so irritated: when she was his sister, whom he loved. Of course the real reason for his irritation, he had to admit, was not her failure to appreciate his home, which he had stopped seeing as an actual house, but her continued un-awareness of its raison d’être — the paintings: all of which, even the most tentative youthful ones, were shimmering tonight, for Rhoda, in their true colours.

Rhoda only nosed past them: not even a cat, more of a rat, a small white one, its pinker charms dulled by age and grime. The pink, moist hair had become a dirty grey-white fuzz. The seams of the little sharp white face were almost pricked out in black.

She did pause once, beside, not in front of, his water-colour of Maman. ‘The yellow dress! Pretty dress—’ her voice trailed as she moved on.

He would have to remember she had probably grown into someone quite different from what he had decided she was. Even if he couldn’t love this, or perhaps any, version of his sister, he was still full of affection for her: just as you can be fond of an old worm-eaten, ugly piece of furniture for its age and associations; the emotion of affection is not less genuine than love.

And he needed Rhoda, he mustn’t forget.

He returned to the cat. ‘I forgot the cat.’

‘Oh, cats! What’s this?’ She was pointing from where they were standing in Miss Gilderthorp’s dust-coloured morning room, or lesser parlour.

‘That’s the conservatory.’ For the first time since bringing Rhoda home he was ready to make excuses. ‘It’s nothing much. There isn’t a light in there, anyway. And it’s a bloody wreck — always has been.’

‘Looks interesting,’ she persisted, peering through the glass door.

‘Only a ruin.’

‘Can’t you shine a light through the door? Oh, go on, Hurtle, do! Don’t be a meanie!’ Her assumed girlishness, with its edge of sarcasm, brought them closer than they had been that night.

So he got up on an unwilling chair and shone the parlour light bulb through the conservatory door.

‘Oh, I like that! It has something. It has a poetry,’ Rhoda calmly said.

Was she daring to appropriate some idea which hadn’t yet suggested itself? He had never seen the conservatory by artificial light. Certainly the blacker shadows and the far more brilliant refractions from broken glass made him share her reaction; but he didn’t want to share: the conservatory was too private. Strange it should appeal to all three of them.

He got down off the creaking chair and the light resettled in its rightful room.

Rhoda sighed. ‘I’m liking your house better; but oh dear, I no longer care for old houses. I’m too old. You’re old, too — older as far as I can remember — but not my kind of old.’

She began shuffling, and he thought he could detect, for the first time, a wheezing.

He remembered: ‘The cat! It’s in the kitchen — the scullery. The kitchen’s pretty grim, but you’d better see everything, Rhoda — where I live.’

Following, she became increasingly fretful. ‘All kitchens are awful,’ she complained. ‘I practically live on bread and cheese. Couldn’t touch meat after cutting up the horse every evening.’

‘The old girl who lived here before, put in this hideous asbestos box of kitchenette to make things easier, you see.’

Rhoda’s head followed his explanations. Something had released the catch which had been holding it: now it could function freely on its spring.

‘This is the scullery. I believe it’s called a “walk-in pantry” nowadays.’ They enjoyed a slight giggle together. ‘This, incidentally, is where my friend left the cat. Puss? Puss?’ he called.

Rhoda seemed definitely to have tired of cats.

‘Out here,’ he continued revealing, ‘is the main part of the big, former kitchen — which is never used now. Isn’t it grim?’

‘Ghastly!’

‘Cool, though, in summer.’

‘I wonder what became of May?’ Her interest in their old cook made Rhoda look as though she were following a scent; she found, almost at once. ‘Why, of course, she must be dead!’ she shrieked.

He hated that damn cat. ‘Puss? Puss?’ he called in an affected, amateurish voice.

‘Might as well save yourself the breath. Cat must have gone,’ Rhoda said. ‘You left the back door open.’

She was right: startled by the apparition of Kathy he must have forgotten to close the door between the main kitchen and the yard.

‘I’ve had no experience of cats,’ he said. ‘I was relying on my friend.’

‘And the friend’s had none either.’

‘There’s still the whole of the upstairs to show.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Is there?’

She began shuffling more noticeably: worse still, wheezing on the stairs. He tried not to feel guilty by remembering that Rhoda was to be employed as a moral force, or booster of his conscience. If only she could have realized how necessary she was; but she mustn’t know about Kathy, or what Kathy could grow into if the powers over which human nature has no control established a dictatorship.

He was doing the honours of the upstairs in a kind of estate-agent voice: ‘. . bath’s a bit stained. The old-fashioned geyser never lets you down once you’ve learnt its tricks. . Junk mostly in here — got to have somewhere to store paintings — and I sometimes sleep on the stretcher if I feel like it. . The two bedrooms are also studios — move about from one to the other — they’re so different in character — the light’s different.’

He was glad the board with the drawing of the nude girl was no longer standing on the easel in the back room, though Rhoda, from her behaviour to date, mightn’t have noticed even that. Circumstances she had experienced had forced her in on herself, and any part left over for active living was probably concentrated on the cats.

So he would have to tread with cat-like delicacy in introducing his proposition.

‘This back room is rather hot and boisterous at times. One doesn’t always feel strong enough for it. Children’s voices can begin to batter down one’s self-defences — and the voice of women defending their rights. I’m afraid Chubb’s Lane is on the slummy side.’

‘I no longer question the conditions of life.’

‘I think, on the whole, you’d probably feel more at home in the seclusion of Flint Street. The room’s larger too — more comfortable. ’

They had gone in. The advanced abstraction of the ‘Pythoness’ was still standing against the wall. She glanced at it with indifference: while her animal nose continued sniffing out the real prospects of the situation.

‘Don’t you think a room like this would suit you, Rhoda?’ he carefully asked. ‘Naturally, a lot would have to be rearranged. I expect you have things of your own.’

‘Of course I have my personal belongings. I have a little room of my own — in the house of a friend. She’s most kind, considering she’s such a meticulous person — to put up with my peculiarities. It’s what I can only describe as Christian charity. She must have suffered herself, but hasn’t been damaged by it. She couldn’t begin to understand your and my compulsion to plumb the depths.’ Rhoda laughed nervously.

‘Then you don’t think you’d like it here?’

‘I didn’t for a moment believe there’d be any question of my liking it here, isn’t this where you live, Hurtle? Lives are too private.’

‘Yes — but dying. Do you feel you want to die, perhaps undiscovered, in a rented room?’ Now that he had invented such a persuasive argument, he almost reached out to clutch at some part of her.

‘I’ve picked too many dead cats out of the gutter: death’s nothing to be afraid of.’ She moistened her pale lips.