Patrick White - The Vivisector

Back in the main street, he felt so morally emotionally creatively bankrupt he almost masturbated through his pocket outside a butcher’s. Nobody would have guessed; the passers-by were too busy cosseting their own bedraggled souls to suspect, let alone pounce on, a vice so reprehensible because so solitary. He alone was disgusted with himself.

Next morning it was still raining, but the rain of resignation by now: out of which he received, when he opened the box, two rain-blurred letters.

He almost swallowed them he gasped so deep and fast tearing the damp blotting-paper envelope of the first.

Kathy had written in purple ink, which gave her letter the look of a tattoo:

Dear Mr Duffield,

I intended to come and visit you this afternoon after school to see how the cat got on, but started to practise when I came in. I ate a cheese sandwich first, and drank some milk. The day has been so dreadful, it is what my mother calls a Day of Retrebution. It could be, though I don’t altogether believe in all that. I only believe in music, and would like to fall in love I think. Well, I had two good hours’ practice. I am studying the No. 1 Concerto (E flat major) of Liszt which Mr Khrapovitsky says I should play eventually in the competition. I am having trouble with the Quasi adagio. I think I am too anxious, and my left hand isn’t strong enough yet. But I shall be good. I feel it in my veins.

Well, I might have worked some more because this is what I love, and it is wet tonight, only my friend Angela Agostino came just now and wants me to go with her so I must cut this short. Angela is a silly kid. I don’t know why I bother with her, except I know her. She says she has some boys Italians from Temora who are here in a bomb they bought, they want to take us for a ride, but her Father mustn’t know, he would kill her. I think boys are silly. When you really look at them they look away.

Last night I dreamed about you (may I call you Duff? that is how I call you in my mind) it was such a beautiful dream I must tell you about it when we meet, tomorrow or the next I hope.

Angela is pulling my elbow. I must sign off.

Yours very sincerely

KATHERINE VOLKOV

P.S. I send you a hundred kisses, one of them the special kind you seem to like.

Before he read the second note he walked to the top of the house: he hadn’t room for more immediately after Katherine Volkov’s letter. He continued seeing her name: a grave name engraved, which still only half-fitted its owner; while her words came back in gusts, and died out in breathlessness. (What was her dream, though? The dream might undo them. He must prevent her telling it if she remembered to try.)

People have heard attacks walking upstairs, people of a certain age. Not yourself, though. How could you? Kathy’s letter, he noticed only now, hadn’t a stamp. Then she must have passed, and stuck it in the box, and the falling rain had prevented him hearing the clatter of the brass flap. Her footsteps retreated so coldly through him, he was able to contemplate the second note, which he knew before opening, was from his sister Rhoda; it was smaller in format, its purpose declared: a note, in fact, in a formed hand.

Expect to be with you Thursday if the weather permits. Have engaged a lad to move my few belongings in his utility truck. He will have to make a second trip for the cats, the transport of which is causing me considerable outlay: packing cases, wire, etc. Dear Hurtle, I must admit our reunion was a great joy. But I warn you I am not at all a compatible person. I am too old — and they tell me I am hard. I have had to be. However, you who are Buddha Himself, I am informed, should understand the soul’s condition. Looking forward to being the sister to my brother. Affectly — r.c.

Rhoda’s letter too, was without a stamp, he noticed somewhat morosely. But he would be happy to receive his sister, with all the disadvantages. In fact, he was resigned enough to wonder whether their relationship wasn’t the only logical solution: to sit beside the hearth, spooning up milk puddings, and listening to each other’s stomachs. In the creative end, blood couldn’t race music, only trickle like tepid milk. He couldn’t see the milk-string swinging from his own lip, but visualized it on Rhoda’s little, intensely preoccupied mouth.

Yet, on Thursday morning, he flung open the door in anger on the gently muscular, uncommunicative young man who had brought Rhoda’s things in his truck. At least it had stopped raining, if nobody had recovered yet.

‘I’ll give you a hand,’ he told the carrier in a jolly voice which certainly didn’t convince himself.

He had never been good at this sort of thing, and he would soon have lost patience if it hadn’t been Rhoda’s furniture they were carrying in. His curiosity was appeased by a low-built, no, a sawn-off, sideboard, atrociously carved with harpies and other unnecessary protuberances; a grandmother chair (minus a caster); a wardrobe of the kind found in a child’s bedroom, its fly-speckled pale pink ornamented with wreaths of washed-out forget-menots; an iron cot acting as bedstead. There were pots and pans beside — a minimum of these — together with the utensils of her obsession, including a chopping board still moist from the evening before. Several pieces of battered luggage, of a Bond Street elegance he had forgotten, were stamped with the initials A.C., from which the gold had almost completely flaked off.

‘You can leave the things standing as they are.’ The carrier showed no sign of noticing his surliness. ‘No doubt she’ll want me to juggle them around.’ If he had given it a chance, emotion might have made a fool of him. ‘When does my — when should I expect Miss Courtney herself?’

‘Next trip. Now. With the cats,’ answered the immovable young man.

Rhoda appeared in the early part of the afternoon, thus giving her arrival a moral tone. In his opinion there was no bleaker stretch of the twenty-four hours. Obviously his sister didn’t approve of daylight sleep.

She was also in a brisk temper, her lips whiter than he remembered, the stockings wrinkled in distraught veins on her spaghetti legs.

‘My God, Hurtle, whatever possessed me!’

She would have liked to curse the carrier handling her crates of glaring cats, if she hadn’t, it appeared, fallen a little in love with him.

‘Gently, Dick!’ she mumbled instead, and actually stroked a beefy arm. ‘They do hate it! My poor darling! My Possum!’

Her attempts at tenderness were made in a mezzo voice, as opposed to the soprano knife she kept for human intercourse; but it didn’t work with the cats. They were carried growling, moaning, into the little morning-room: the other side of the wire mesh their flat-eared, pale-eyed hatred continued to consume the darkness in which they crouched.

‘Shouldn’t think they’ll ever like it here;’ any more than he could develop an affection for Rhoda’s cats.

‘Of course. In time. You get used to anything in time,’ their owner had decided.

If she had sounded at all exhausted or discouraged, she revived when he paid off the carrier.

She began to shout and command as though she also kept a dog. ‘Hurtle? Windows, please! All windows and outer doors must be kept shut for the first week. That way the poor things will accustom themselves.’

‘And we shall die of cat — or each other.’

She decided not to hear, and he helped her shut the windows, most of which were pretty stiff.

Rhoda began unfastening the hateful wire for the cats to squeeze out of their prisons. Some of the beasts slunk away in search of a refuge in which to nurse their neuroses; others sat, fairly bland, licking their pads, or shaking themselves with frilly motions of the shoulders to restore their outraged fur. One big, one-eyed, one-eared tom eased himself backwards and sprayed the sofa without his mistress appearing to notice.