Patrick White - The Vivisector

Propert was smiling an unhappy smile for the bright collage of their relationship which, in spite of its early promise, had come visibly unstuck.

‘Good-bye, Hurtle Duffield. Next time we must discuss the paintings.’

His handshake demonstrated all the assurance of middle-aged collegiate manliness: which his smile seemed to deny. Propert’s smile was struggling to get out: you were reminded of the membrane on the sweetbreads his godmother in Vermont used to feed to her Russian blue.

When the two visitors had left the house, the only sounds were those of muffled voices in the kitchen, tins jostling each other, a grizzling of awakened cats. Apparently Rhoda had no intention of announcing her return or producing her friend. Instead, she had taken the steel and started what became a long sharpening of her knife.

The two voices laughed together intermittently, their laughter strangely similar in tone. Surely Kathy could only be imitating Rhoda?

Lying on the bed, in the ever more deeply burnished light, he must have looked an inanimate lump of grey; though his mind, fidgeting through possibilities, didn’t allow him any rest. Would Rhoda’s friendship with Kathy lessen the chances of his destruction? Would it, on the other hand, destroy what he hoped to create from Kathy? Rhoda’s presence, planned as his comfort and moral defence, could end, like many a sulky fire, by burning down the whole house.

So he continued brooding, as the sky smouldered over Chubb’s Lane.

In the dusk a door opened and closed below. He knew then that Kathy was coming to him. It could only be Kathy flying up the stairs. The house shuddered. He decided she should find him sick.

‘Duff?’ she called. ‘What — lying in the dark! You’re not sick, are you?’

She was making it easy to that extent.

‘It’s not dark.’ He was too conscious of a last glow of light which her forehead and bare arms were rekindling. ‘But I am sick.’

‘What’s wrong? Eh?’ She spoke with a spontaneous warmth, dropping down beside him on the bed, prepared to catch anything infectious.

As for himself, he caught his breath. ‘Nothing exactly wrong —nothing you could put your finger on: old age nudging.’

‘But you’re not what anyone would call old!’ She crept further, insinuating herself like one of those damned cats around Rhoda their patroness.

He would have liked to shout: ‘Go away!’ Instead, he murmured, heaving: ‘You’re cutting off the circulation in my legs. You’re heavy, Kathy.’

‘Don’t you like to be comforted when you’re sick?’

‘Comfort’ wasn’t acceptable to anyone on fire: too eider-downy; he couldn’t have explained that.

‘I expect Miss Courtney ’ull bring you up a bowl of broth, won’t she?’

‘You didn’t tell me — neither of you did — that you knew each other.’

‘Oh? No. She had the little room that my mother lets. We didn’t know she was your sister.’

‘She isn’t.’

Kathy had crept closer up. At least the darkness would prevent him watching her skin burn, and the moment when those dangerously inflammable strands at the nape of her neck must catch. If she was still unaware of the fire inside him, she could only be simple, or inhuman.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

His mouth moved, but didn’t succeed in articulating.

‘Oh!’ she sighed. ‘I’d like to fall in love — with somebody appropriate. ’

‘What’s “appropriate”?’

Her downy mouth was drifting over his; she seemed to have abandoned speech for touch.

‘Haven’t you your music?’ He tried to thrust her off with his thighs; but the law of nature engineered his failure: she settled deeper.

‘Yes, my music,’ she breathed. ‘Mr Khrapovitsky says I must study harder.’

She was digging into his maternal, his creative entrails.

‘Old enough to be your grandfather,’ he muttered against her lips.

But she didn’t hear, because fire and sea were roaring through them: if only one could have halted the other.

At least he was, technically, the passive one; he could console himself morally with that: he hadn’t attempted.

In the hot dusk Kathy was devouring him, with sticky kisses at first, then, not with words, but a kind of gobbledegook of jerky passion. The surprising part of it was she took their behaviour completely for granted — excepting his passivity.

‘Don’t you like me?’ she asked between mouthfuls.

From amongst the wreckage of what he had aspired to, he didn’t. He had hoped to love, not possess her.

‘Don’t you?’ she gasped.

‘No, Kathy, I love you.’ That seemed to satisfy her: now she could accept the dry science of his approach.

Anatomically, she was in every detail what he could have desired — or almost. The shock of discovering her only deficiency made him spill out incontinently and without thought for the consequences.

He became as curiously unafraid of Kathy, and finally, unsurprised. She was by now half snoozing, at the same time exploring his stubble; while he listened to Rhoda pulling her charitable cart, across the yard, up the lane, away. Had it occurred to Rhoda at any point that her charity might be needed at home?

‘Kathy,’ he began, swallowing hard, because since she was nothing more than his mistress, whatever he might say must sound embarrassingly trite, ‘I only wonder how it happened that you learned so much so soon.’

‘About what?’

‘About men.’

‘Honestly,’ she said, ‘I’ve never ever been with a man. My mother would have had a fit.’

Honestly, she was becoming intolerable.

‘Boys, though—’ she mumbled in her drowsiness—‘boys won’t always leave you alone: you do it to have peace.’

Suddenly he was free of her weight, by no effort on his part. He could hear and feel her sitting up in the surrounding darkness, reviving her conscience, or brushing off her lethargy, or both: it intrigued him to realize all the sounds she was making were those of a mature woman.

Kathy seemed to be agitated by the first inroads of guilt. ‘Oh, dear!’ she began to mutter, then moan: ‘I’m late! I’m late for practice. How I hate that — to be late.’ The darkness was all movement, the window-pane quivering with artificial lights. ‘Khrapovitsky is right: I must study harder. I was good, though, at the last lesson. Khrap even had to admit it.’

He tried to invoke deafness and did succeed in retreating into himself for a moment; when he was sucked back, he heard: ‘. . if only I will give all of myself — all of my time — to music. So he says.’

The fireworks of Liszt were coruscating in and over Chubb’s Lane: the cheap bangers, the intoxicated Catherine-wheels, the soaring, feathered rockets.

He heard her scratching after the switch. ‘Don’t turn on the light, Kathy.’

‘Good night, Duffle,’ she said, feeling with her lips, giving him a cool wet kiss.

He listened to her blundering down the stairs: his aborted spiritual child.

Incredible to think it was still that night: he was going down, after hearing Rhoda return with her empty cart. He would have liked to give her fairer warning than the sound of his slippers or a cough before opening the kitchen door; though he was wearing a shirt and trousers he was afraid he might look naked. Appeased sensuality helped him temporarily not to mind. He put on a slight swagger, to show he didn’t. But Rhoda kept her eyelids lowered.

From behind these she was preparing a meal: of cold sliced luncheon sausage, which would taste of nothing, not even sawdust; some lettuce she had shredded into thin ribbons; hard-boiled eggs, blue as bruises where the white met the yellow. She was brewing tea, but he got out the brandy bottle and had him a good slug, still without Rhoda choosing to notice. One day, he promised himself, he would bring home a plump chicken, and stuff it with truffles, and lace it with fine champagne —didn’t they accuse him of being rich? — and nurse it gently, gently, on a bed of spitting butter: a meal for an elderly sensualist, and, of course, his sister, or lapsed conscience.