Patrick White - The Vivisector

So he continued drawing, and rejecting, and compiling. At one stage he drew the boy of sinewy thighs and starfish breasts with Kathy’s shadow falling across him. Perhaps the boy’s mouth was Kathy’s; the ribs were a boy’s, as primitive as bacon bones. He destroyed the drawing for having no connection; though in some actual sense, it could have been a complement to the wholly feminine girl inclined at the upright piano with its blind candlesticks.

Obsessed all these days, he realized he had forgotten his promise of a fur coat to Rhoda. He decided to pretend he had never made it; or at least he would pretend for the time being. Soon after her arrival he had bought her the promised transistor, which continued tinkling and reverberating amongst her permanently indolent cats even after she had gone out on cat business. Fortunately he was too busy to hear the twangled music except by snatches.

It appeared from these that Rhoda was dedicated to pop. But wasn’t Kathy, his spiritual child, a daughter of the neighbourhood?

While preparing a board for the painting he was almost ready to paint, it occurred to him he hadn’t seen Kathy for days: it might have been weeks. He coughed slightly on finding himself so unmoved: shocking, no doubt, to some busybody of a moralist born without a visual sense. But he had his drawings; he had conceived this painting in which Kathy was present, not the sweaty schoolgirl of vulgar lapses, touchingly tentative aspirations, and at times brutal, because unconscious, sensuality, but the real Katherine Volkov, almost a woman, of studied ice and burning musical passion, who was daring him to transfer his own passion to the primed board. The face he caught sight of in the glass surprised him: haggard and drained for one who was at the point of running over to excess.

Though he would have liked to wait till the following morning early and work through the hours of daylight, he could no longer restrain himself. He began that afternoon. At times he heard his panting, or groaning, or wheezing (a bronchial old age?) as he thrust against the virgin board. There were the other moments after the initial terror, when it became so exquisitely easy he could feel the flesh returning to his face; the sweat tasted deliciously salt, which his tongue lapped from a corner of his mouth. In the same way, his possessed girl was beginning to create in spite of herself. The inclining body was both exhilarated by the music escaping out of it, and tormented by what might escape altogether. Avoiding the accusation of technique and emptiness, he must somehow fill the rectangular board with a volume of music. It was their common problem: the girl appeared to writhe, to one side, as she crouched at her piano.

The piano remained a dead expanse. The candlesticks he could build up with a brilliance of verdigris and icicles of wax; but he couldn’t so far bring the bloody piano to life. Yes, bloody. He drew blood: slashing, and gashing; and retreated from the thing he had so foolishly undertaken.

As the light was failing he went down in search of Rhoda his sister, whom he didn’t exactly want to find, and who would be out, in any case, dispensing her charitable offal. Her own cats, acclimatized by now, were mostly limbering up for the night; he caught glimpses of them, trying out their claws on privet trunks, their voices on the dusk, or lurking amongst the leathery leaves of the conservatory. He found himself beginning to resent Rhoda’s absence, even the exodus of her cats: when he sighted one old matted tom lolling on the mantelpiece against the marble columns of a clock. Immediately the clock pinged the cat opened his yellow eyes, the claws shot out from the sheath of cracked pad, to fight a duel of understanding.

The intruder could have shouted. At once he went clambering back up to his room snatched at paper tried out the wire entanglement the barbs the coiled springs of the cat: or Cat. He could visualize the great barbed pads coiled glimmering inside the scrims of the piano case.

When Rhoda came in she called out triumphantly: ‘Hurtle? I bought a cooked chicken!’

His mouth sagged, but he went down to her wretched chicken. Rhoda was breathless and radiant from her labours. At once they began tearing the chicken apart with their equally exhausted, grubby hands: while cats hovered. The king of the mantelpiece got the parson’s nose, and almost choked on it.

After wiping the grease from her mouth, Rhoda announced: ‘I’m going to bed. I don’t know when I felt so tired.’

He might have echoed her remark if it wouldn’t have been against his principles.

While she was blundering around the kitchen, clapping the used plates together, Rhoda happened to touch him on the arm. ‘My dear boy, I’m so happy for you!’ he couldn’t surely have heard her say; his consummation was such a private matter, it became immoral for Rhoda, who was also his sister, to refer to, let alone feast on it.

So he escaped as quickly as possible from his voyeuse. He stumbled up the stairs, barking one of his shins — lucky not to have fallen on his face — and slept.

In the clear light of morning he scrabbled after clean brushes; he couldn’t have wasted time ridding the dirty ones of their crust: he had to paint.

He painted the coiled tiger just visible inside Katherine Volkov’s piano. The keys under her fingers were yellow and slightly clawed. The gashes in the woodwork would stay. He painted the long thick plait waiting to lash the music out of its glistening tail.

Finishing at what was still an early hour, he felt sleek, jovial and generous. Whether she liked it or not, Rhoda would have to submit to his generosity.

At breakfast he began. ‘Do you know what I’m planning to do this morning?’ He looked out through the kitchen door at the almost amiable cat inhabitants of his yard.

By contrast Rhoda was looking pinched and sour. ‘It can’t be much of a plan if you propose to share it.’

He was so full of kindness he wouldn’t let her reject him. ‘We’re going to get dressed and take the tram to a fur “salong” I investigated some time ago. I’m going to have them fit you out.’

Rhoda was standing on her usual little box to lend her height for the washing-up. The silence sounded made for breaking as she recklessly stirred the crockery in the sink.

Presently she said faintly: ‘I wonder whether you know how cruel you are — to expose me to ridicule.’

‘How more ridiculous in a good coat than looking like something off a dump?’ He sounded the soul of bourgeois reason. ‘You used to be a great one for clothes and dressing up.’

‘Oh, yes!’ She sighed. ‘Then! And “dressing up” is just what it was!’ It might have ended in bitterness if steam from the sink hadn’t made her sneeze.

Suddenly she asked in a different voice: ‘What time should I be ready?’

It was such a volte-face he felt a bit resentful, but mumbled: ‘Give us time to get into our clothes.’

As she flung the water off her hands he recognized her feverish look.

They so seldom went about together, any neighbour seeing them that morning must have been surprised. His stride carried him somewhat ahead. Because it was a cold day he had put on his overcoat. He hid his unemployed hands in the pockets. He couldn’t hide Rhoda, though. She was wearing a cloak in green-tinged, black serge with a large wooden button fastening it under her pointed chin. He had hit the nail on the head mentioning the dump at breakfast: all her clothes looked come-by-chance, when her size and shape must have forced her to have them made for her.

Who, seeing him with Rhoda, would believe in his success? Didn’t believe in it himself: such transparent brilliance only emphasized his deformities.

In desperation he turned round from time to time, and called back over the intervening space. ‘Are you all right? Am I walking too fast?’ and finally: ‘It isn’t far now’; as though she didn’t know the tram stop.