Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘But Cutbush!’ He was nauseated by the smears of egg and congealing fat still left to mop up from his plate. ‘Is Mrs Cutbush the friend you mentioned living with?’

‘Oh dear, no! Mrs Cutbush, poor thing, is too highly strung: she mightn’t be able to endure the extra strain. In any case, I lived only a few years in Gidley Street before moving to these parts.’

He was in no way comforted by Rhoda’s break with the Cutbush couple. The handfuls of soft-sounding rain flung at the window, and increasing threats from a bellyful of bacon fat, contributed to his great unease.

‘As a matter of fact, the Cutbushes moved too, a short time ago, and opened a shop a few streets away from here,’ Rhoda continued.

‘Why?’

‘I suppose they thought this was where life and business are. I never asked them.’

He got up to scrape the dishes; while Rhoda continued loving her brandy. She drank it by such neat sips she would probably hoard it half the night: a cheap drunk at least; or was she temperate out of cunning? He would have liked to force open her little mouth, and pour half the bottle in, then wait for his sister to illuminate a world he found he didn’t know, while living in it. But Rhoda continued sipping her brandy; while he, as he scraped and stacked, could only feel his depression growing. To counteract it, he took a good swig himself, straight out of the bottle. Hadn’t she turned down his plan to protect an innocent soul?

The night was full of an evil she didn’t seem aware of, and he had failed to exorcize. Sometimes Kathy’s breasts developed with the purity and logic of flowers, sometimes they had the wholesome stodginess of suet dumplings, but a wholesomeness which threatened to explode. He could see how rotten they might become, like persimmons lying in long damp grass. Whenever he heard Kathy, it was on the stairs: afterwards, a silence of maidenhair.

Rhoda cut the silence with something like a burp. ‘Actually, I don’t think you realize the influence you have on people. I’ve heard of several who came to live round here because of “Hurtle Duffield the painter”.’

‘Balls and crap! Balls and crap!’ he shouted.

He who could not yet influence himself, didn’t want to hear about his influence on others.

Rhoda lowered her eyes, ignoring words, as Maman and her governesses had taught her. ‘It’s true, though.’ She smiled. ‘Lots of normally undemonstrative, unimaginative people like to cluster round a name. I remember I was cutting up the meat for my cats when some of them burst in. “Is it true that this painter — this Mr Duffield — is your brother?” I replied: “No. It isn’t true.” Because it wasn’t!’ She sniggered. ‘Not physically, anyway, and that seems to be the part which matters. I had to drive them out after that. People don’t notice the attraction meat has for flies.’

‘Balls!’

‘They’re looking for somebody to exalt.’

‘Or kill.’

Rhoda laughed and swallowed. ‘There was one young girl said to me: “I’d die if I ever met him.”’

‘Rhoda,’ he said, leaning forward, getting hold of the bottle, taking another swig, ‘we still have a lot of life to live — why do you dismiss the possibility of our being a help to each other — just because of the stairs?’

‘Oh — stairs!’ She snickered, and helped herself to another tot. ‘Would it have been fair not to explain you might have a corpse on your hands because of my physical condition?’

He couldn’t believe it: she was too tough.

‘Rhoda,’ he said, ‘it’s hard to put — but I’d like to tie the end of my life to the beginning. I think, in that way — rounded — it might be possible to convey what I have to.’

He was too fuddled: while her lip protruded like a small shoebuckle above the Woolworth glass.

‘I don’t say it couldn’t be arranged,’ Rhoda said. ‘I could move my few things into that room — that rather small room — what is it? this side of the conservatory. I’ve taken a fancy to the conservatory. And the cats could move in and out, freely — through the conservatory?’

‘The cats?’

‘Yes. My own fifteen. You haven’t met them. Street cats are something different: a duty. But one’s own cats!’

‘All right, Rhoda.’ Dutifully he bowed his head.

He could feel her hand, her laughter running over his hair like birds or mice. He heard: ‘Hurtle hurtle’ out of the throats of early-morning doves.

At least by his sister’s presence Kathy Volkov would be protected from debauch and himself from destruction.

When they went out to manoeuvre the deal go-cart, the rain had crystallized on the fringes of the araucaria. ‘Good night, brother,’ she said, and a few of the drops fell down in accompaniment to her still clear, while drunken, voice.

The brother should have bent down to embrace his sister, or easier conscience, but it was far too far, and would have looked grotesque even in an empty street.

The following morning he woke later than usual, and at once recognized a malaise, less the result of brandy and the undertones of his reunion with Rhoda, than of rain falling, steady and grey. He got up to look at it. His shanks were thin, his veins prominent, his testicles hanging low. A greater cause for gloom was his suspicion, no, the knowledge, that he hadn’t written the address for Rhoda, nor heard her promise to move in on a specific day: not even at a vaguely future date.

As his main defence against Kathy Volkov, Rhoda was to have been quickly installed, if not most suitably in the room next to his own, at least in Miss Gilderthorp’s morning room. She had her hearing and her hump. No woman who had carried a hump through life would surely be able to resist snarling at a man’s last attempt to enter an earthly paradise, particularly if that paradise were in any way perverse, as well as under her nose. But circumstances were threatening his plan. What if Rhoda thought better of her promise? Or, equally disastrous, though not so drastic: if continued rain made her postpone the move? It sometimes poured for weeks; and Kathy might come bursting in, raincoat running with light and water, hair clinging, her skin a rosy delusion, while actually as cold and firm as freshly caught fish.

Moving across the room, back to the crush of tepid blankets waiting for him in his bed, he knew the real source of his gloom was the probability that Kathy would not come before Rhoda was installed. The rain was dousing all his hopes: what child, even the kindest, or most inquisitive, or romantic, or bored, or depraved, would think of visiting a scruffy elderly recluse in a downpour?

He lay half the morning behind his eyelids, a prey to visions of electric flowers flickering with girls’ faces, of such banality he grew ashamed. All the time he told himself he only had to catch sight of Kathy from a window and he would be able to reinvest her with the perfection and purity of his original spiritual child.

During the day, as the rain continued falling in heavy, transparent ropes, he mightn’t have been invented, except to paint the paintings, the ones he could see, opaque and muddy by the prevailing light and any standards of truth. His paintings deserved to become investments. If that cat hadn’t run away he might have tried taming it; or if Rhoda had come, at least they could have exchanged symptoms of their physical crack-ups: or quarrelled.

Towards dark he went out. The rain was slanted now: as thin as wire, and tougher than before. Walking the streets, looking for signs of cat life, he was rewarded only by this cutting lash. In the lane where he had come across Rhoda the evening before, he hung around for some time, accompanied by the sound, the slash of rain. He noticed on a ledge a gobbet of horse-flesh which had been bled white by its prolonged punishment.