Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘Is Kathy so affluent?’

But Rhoda didn’t hear.

‘Incidentally,’ he remembered, ‘you haven’t told me what’s happening about the fur coat. When will it be ready?’

‘Why, the coat — I brought it home weeks ago!’

‘You didn’t tell me.’

‘I must have told.’

‘Aren’t you going to wear it, then?’

‘In the heat of summer?’

‘I think you might put it on to show me.’

For a moment she looked so ferocious emptying the dregs of her tea, he might have been inviting her, not to dress up, but to strip.

Presently she went out, quickly, precisely, in no more than a mild routine anger, and he heard the wardrobe door banged. In the silence which followed he imagined Rhoda’s hands, their hooked skin, fumbling with sensuous, virgin fur, and closed his eyes automatically, as if he might thus avoid further visions. Then she must have trodden on a cat.

When she returned she was holding her pointed chin aggressively high. There were patches of natural red on her cheekbones, which looked delirious against her otherwise chalky skin.

‘There!’ she announced in her largest voice. ‘You asked for it!’

She gave two or three twirls, punctuated with stamps, in imitation of the mannequins she imagined, or perhaps had seen with Maman. She was, in turn: a little girl; an angry man; the Fairy Carabosse; while always remaining his sister Rhoda. A large fur-covered button growing from her flat bosom had perhaps been given to her to draw attention from the squirrel hump; but it only made her look more grotesque.

‘Are you satisfied?’ she was asking.

He sank his chin. ‘It’s a fine coat.’

‘Frankly, I think it makes me look a fright.’

‘Nobody’s ever perfect.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘some of us are!’

He would ask from time to time: ‘Aren’t you ever going to wear that coat?’

But it was not yet the weather for it; or she might spoil it; or the cats might tear it. Once he came across her dozing in her chair, wearing the squirrel coat, and an expression of such sublime repose he was afraid to advance any farther. He stood rooted in the brazen light which was pouring in through the conservatory.

Rhoda woke up, however, and said: ‘I read somewhere — in a magazine — that if you wrap up well in summer it insulates you against the heat.’ At the same time she was scrubbing the perspiration off her face with a wad of screwed-up handkerchief.

‘I’m sorry I ever suggested that bloody coat,’ he said at last. ‘You never wear it’; not even when a wind from the Antarctic was blasting them out from under the araucaria.

‘There’s never an occasion for it.’

He couldn’t resist answering: ‘I should have thought you might wear it on your winter visits to the Cutbush “salong”.’

Rhoda tittered into the pink tea she was drinking. ‘Poor Bernice — what a wrong idea you’ve got!’

Then he leaned across their kitchen table and asked something he had been wanting to ask for a long time. ‘What is the name of the grocer’s friend who came to Kathy Volkov’s farewell party?’

‘The friend? The farewell party? My God, all that time ago! What do you take me for? I don’t believe I ever knew. Or if I did, I don’t remember. Why — yes, there was a friend — more of an acquaintance — who looked in. I seem to remember his name was Shuard. Yes, a Mr Shuard.’

‘Shuard?’

‘Yes. They say he’s a music critic.’

‘But that’s impossible! How could Shuard be known to Cutbush? ’

‘Well, he was at one time living in Gidley Street, in a furnished room — between wives. I understand he’s had several wives — not that Mr Shuard could be called an immoral man, Mrs Cutbush says; he only let the wrong ones choose him.’

‘But why should they invite Shuard to Kathy Volkov’s party?’

‘What could be more thoughtful? And he wasn’t invited — he was only asked to look in — because, Mrs Cutbush felt, it might be an advantage for Kathy to know a music critic.’

‘To start so early! And with Shuard!’

‘How — so early? And with Shuard? He’s such a well-travelled man. And witty raconteur.’

Yes! Warming himself in Berlin between little girls.

‘I don’t understand you, Hurtle. Some of your remarks are so peculiar.’ She was looking into the bottom of her cup as though reading a fortune.

He got himself out of the way: he felt so sick.

That winter he did fall ill, with pneumonia. Rhoda sent for a strong fellow, the carrier who moved her things in the beginning, to bring down one of the beds from upstairs, and set it up in the living-room. ‘So that I can attend to my brother.’

She made him lie there on his own bed surrounded by geographical features he would have to learn more accurately. Rhoda brought him thin, greasy soups which he drank with forced gratitude. She produced a Spode-looking chamberpot, and would carry it out slip slop, to empty; for some time he was too weak to crawl as far as his sanctuary the dunny.

He asked her: ‘Do you remember St Yves de Trégor?’

‘Never ’eard of ’im.’

‘The place in Brittany where we stayed with Harry and Freda Courtney. There was a full pisspot under the bed.’

She blushed. ‘No — I don’t remember.’

‘Don’t you? I remember everything.’

‘You! You’re peculiar!’

‘It isn’t peculiar. It’s natural. If you’ve lived it.’

‘Oh, I’ve lived it enough! But some of it you like to forget. Surely that’s more normal?’

He couldn’t argue with her.

At one stage he asked her to bring him drawing paper: he wanted to compose a letter to Kathy; though he didn’t tell Rhoda that. He wrote secretly:

My dearest Kathy,

I am

There he stopped, because that, finally, was as much as he knew. In any case, he had never been good with words. It would have been more natural if he could have painted a picture. He did in fact make a drawing to send instead; but that too, he destroyed: a confession of such tenderness might have shocked the wrong person should she have picked it up, perhaps even the one who should have received it.

How dispose of the destroyed drawing, the crumpled failure of a letter? He didn’t trust the furniture in a room which didn’t belong to him. In the meantime, the scraps of paper were always present, as tangible as twisted iron, moving around inside his bed. Eat them by small crumbs? He might have choked. So his guilt remained precariously hidden in the bed.

At the beginning of his illness Rhoda, in spite of her respiratory condition, had insisted on making up the bed, or tugging at the rumpled clothes from the sides. Now he obviously couldn’t let her.

‘But you haven’t the strength!’ she gasped.

Who had, remained to be proved. ‘I can’t let you,’ he hissed. ‘Rhoda!’ He was sweating cold like a boy who must hide the stains of shame.

Finally he planned a journey, out of the house, across the yard, as far as the incinerator. It was on a day of drizzle; he couldn’t wait: Rhoda would be away from home collecting catmeat. The rain was falling softly enough; but traps were set all the way across the yard: shards of glittering blue slate; jags of bottle; puddles of water deceptively dimpled; the soaking curtains of Bignonia venusta hanging from the dunny ballooned out and clung to his gown, the pickets of which were crammed with guilty paper.

Watched by a crouching piebald cat he was slowly advancing on felt feet from one stationary position to the next: when Rhoda tore round the corner of the house. Must have been in the conservatory; she usually stood her Wellingtons there.

Rhoda tore. ‘I caught you out!’ she shrieked. ‘You! When all we do is for your own good!’