Patrick White - The Vivisector

For instance, she threw in: ‘Mrs Grünblatt used to be acquainted with a painter — his name, I think, was Groze — or something like it.’

‘Grosz?’ He snorted; if Mrs Grünblatt was of the school of Grosz, he could visualize her mental drawings of Rhoda.

One evening she returned wearing a dab of dry rouge on each cheekbone and an unmistakable thread of lipstick. He restrained himself from telling her she had been to the ‘little afternoon party’ given by Mrs Cutbush for Kathy and Mrs Volkov; nor did Rhoda confess.

As the deadline approached, he looked regularly in the letter-box for the tattooed message. He bound one of the boy-girl’s ankles, in spite of which, the sores continued escaping through the bandage.

By now he might have dispensed entirely with the original Kathy, if, on a steamy morning, he hadn’t believed he recognized her at a street crossing. Realizing at once that Katherine Volkov, actual or fictitious, was his overwhelming belief, he began scurrying bumping painting retching almost it was such a short green and all his fellow pedestrians equally determined or desperate: while Kathy sailed on, away.

She appeared leggier than before: long, burnished legs. As she ran, and propped, and ran, her eyes, of the same blazing blue, flashed a white warning from their corners; and what had been her starfish breasts were jolted into flesh.

He ran after. Might have been caught in mid-stream by the red. Collided with a vast soft woman the impact made surprisingly hard. It stopped him calling out to Kathy. Fractured the intention at chest level. Almost winded. The woman was a laugher.

He scuttled on freakishly and caught up in a quiet street beside a church under some scorched planes.

‘Aren’t you Katherine Volkov?’ He heard his own, stupid giggle.

‘Yes — Mr Duffield.’ She waited with a resigned politeness: he might have been a friend of her mother’s.

‘So you’re leaving,’ he blathered. ‘Perhaps we’ll see you at Flint Street before you go.’

Was his hat set too rakishly? She was looking embarrassed, perhaps sulking, at the pavement, a bundle of sheet music curving under her arm.

She said: ‘Yes, Mr Duffield,’ and smiled a rather thin smile.

‘You’ve altered, Kathy. You’ve grown. I almost didn’t recognize you.’ As silly as that: an old coot embarrassing children with obvious remarks; his hands looked scabby and freckled.

‘I’m fourteen in nine days’ time.’

A whole year.

Then a shower of music burst from under her arm, and he helped her gather up the sheets from the pavement. It saved them further embarrassment.

‘I must go now,’ she said; she had the music to return.

There was no reason why she shouldn’t look composed: their meeting had been an accident, not an assignation.

He took a street in an inconvenient direction, while remembering Sid Cupples, an old bloke from his boyhood who knew most of the reasons and answers. Sid had been thrown from a horse, and walked for ever after with a bent leg; it gave him a curious wishbone look: frail but resilient.

When he could bear it no longer, he didn’t ask, but told Rhoda: ‘The little Volkov must have left by now.’

‘Oh, no.’ Rhoda was smoothing a grey-white garment with an iron. ‘She’s leaving tomorrow evening. Pity it’s the evening. I shan’t be able to see her off.’ The act of ironing always seemed to soothe Rhoda. ‘I can’t very well abandon the cats again.’ Kathy, as self-sufficient as a cat, would barely notice. ‘A long journey for a young girl — on her own — at night.’ Rhoda’s iron felt its way tentatively.

He realized she was ironing a little nightgown of such antiquity she might have worn it as a young girl. It was trimmed with scallops of torn lace, grubby with age, or night journeys.

‘Mrs. Volkov is going to speak to the guard.’ She soothed her girl-woman’s gown. ‘She’s going to ask him to take Kathy under his wing.’

Oh, worse, worse! Some randy old brute easing his serge in between the sheets.

Rhoda was so absorbed in Kathy’s abstract journey she didn’t notice the details of it. She didn’t notice she had singed her gown.

Soon afterwards he got away unobserved. It was most fortunate; because this was the evening Kathy must come — or not.

In fact, she didn’t; nor had he expected it, except in fantasies. It was now far too late. She wouldn’t, couldn’t possibly — unless reckoning on Rhoda asleep. So he lay listening, counted out by the distant clocks, remembering how Kathy had each time come at sunset. This evening’s sunset had ratified her defection and his doom.

About dawn he creaked up from his iron rack, intending to work, or at least hoping some creative mechanism might take over. All his brushes were filthy. Must clean them first: honest, sober work, if it hadn’t been for his drunken condition, his one and only desire. A mild, Quakerish light failed to cool his fever; though to some extent the fumes from the turps cauterized his nostrils, his skull’s burning labyrinth.

She climbed so smoothly, quietly, he didn’t hear her till the last stages, then recognized the sound the only possible murderer could make: who glided in with silent, sure, positively fatal steps, while remaining soft, gentle, above all practical, no doubt because of Rhoda downstairs. He must never forget Kathy’s divided soul was part Scottish, if also Russian. Her Russian brow was bursting with an obsession, and it must have been the Russian in her who failed to notice his nakedness as she flung herself between his blind breasts, beating her head against the miserable scrabble of grizzled hair.

Himself babbling: ‘But you didn’t come! You didn’t come!’

‘No!’ She blurted crying against him. ‘I was too frightened! I am frightened!’

‘What am I to be frightened at?’

‘No.’ She stopped then. ‘Not you. But everything. Everything that’s happening. Going away. My mother’s so stubborn she drives me ratty at times, but I’m used to her! I know nothing. Not really. Not even in my music. I muck up some of the simplest scales — over and over.’

From being angry, she started crying again, and the need to comfort her melted the last of his vanity. He drew her back against himself with such care he could have been negotiating a difficult passage in paint; while at the same time he heard the sounds he was uttering: amorphous, thick-lipped, instinctively tender — cow sounds, he who was nothing of a mother, her erect lover no less, as Kathy was his love, though altered.

Whereas she had been a hot, blubber-mouthed schoolgirl on that other, now unbelievable occasion, bashing up, more or less raping with her lust an old, resisting man, she had become his passive complement. After taking off her incidental dress, she lay so trustfully, so long-legged cool, barely smiling, her breasts asking, as she waited for him to enter her silver-lidded dream. He could have yanked her plait, to express his joy in peals of bells.

O God he loved his Katherine Volkov gliding together through never smoother water.

It was the electric daylight which finally made her sit up.

Mending the end of her frayed plait, Kathy said: ‘You must think I look awful.’

‘How — awful?’ Her nipples were the prettiest.

‘I’ve started a spot on the end of my nose. Haven’t you noticed? ’

When he had squinted he did actually see. ‘What’s in a pimple or two?’

‘Oh, it’s horrible!’ She sighed. ‘And you can’t do anything about it.’

It was at its most inflamed and luminous: it wouldn’t yet submit to torture; it could only torture.

When she had finished her plait, she suffered a fresh outbreak of woe. ‘What am I going to do?’ she moaned. ‘In Melbourne!’