Patrick White - The Vivisector

At least he had reached the incinerator. In opening up, the lid showered him with flakes of charred rust. Too much to hope the match would kindle.

He could imagine Rhoda’s white look as she tore across the yard.

Matches breaking. He got a thin little flame going on a shaving of paper, which ought to have blazed up — it was positively incendiary — if his papery hands hadn’t fumbled, and the lid of the incinerator crashed shut.

Rhoda was using language she never used: ‘You bloody fool! You mad evil devil of an old bugger! ’

While the gentle rain taunted them both, she was dragging at his waist, at his dressing-gown cord — slipping; she was away out at last on the acorn at the end of the cord.

Although he was laughing, he was desperate to return to the incinerator; while she wouldn’t let him.

‘What are we to do with you?’ she screamed. ‘Put you in a straitjacket?’

‘The Gestapo should know!’ His shout came out as a whisper; for rain in finest webs was gumming up his lips.

It was so deadly important that he should burn the incriminating evidence: when the incinerator began to roar; and he was led easily back into the house.

Rhoda had exhausted herself.

He put his hand on her wet hump, as he had never done before, and it was solid. ‘Poor Rhoda, I know you are my rock, but I’m so happy to have recovered my independence.’ Since the burning of the papers, he was not so much physically weak as light with joy.

Rhoda subsided. ‘Independence — whatever that means. I’ve just been with Mrs Volkov, who woke up this morning and found her speech was blurred. It gave her such a fright she wants to send for Kathy. If she does, Kathy’s career may be ruined — and perhaps others.’

Rhoda was so hysterical, melodramatic, he decided she ought to be left to recover. Because Mrs Volkov had never emerged from her name and her abstract virtues to become a person, her blurred speech could only remain a matter for his conventional concern, in spite of their secret relationship.

It was the sudden thought of a blighted hand which paralysed him as he floundered into bed. So he lay wondering whether he believed in God the Merciful as well as God the Vivisector; he wondered whether he believed in God as he lay massaging his right hand.

The following summer there was a drought in which he flourished physically, though it did nothing to improve the yellow wastes of his spirit. In all his paintings of that summer the faceless forms floated in search of a reason. Gravitating towards a promise of metamorphosis, his embryos did add up to something if the eye could see; the trouble was: most eyes could not.

When, for instance, he took two or three of his canvases over to the Tank Stream Gallery, the directors descended on him, all smiles, but sideways glances at the paintings, and hints, and murmurs, and jolliness, and grunts: Ailsa Harkness the steel eagle, and her partner Biddy Prickett; there was more of the red ferret in Biddy.

He stood fanning himself with his panama hat, still elegant, but stained, in the tussore suit which never showed its age because it had always been that colour. The timeless is never dated: then why was this pair of ignorant, self-opinionated women shilly-shallying over the paintings?

Miss Harkness smiled, and glanced, and said: ‘Are you well? You look well. You must take care of yourself, you know.’

Miss Prickett was without lashes, or else they were too pink to see. ‘Why don’t you take a trip, Hurtle? There’s no use pretending you aren’t disgustingly rich.’ In spite of Biddy Prickett, he could feel the smirk settle on his face. ‘Or marry some luscious girl. If you haven’t already gone and done it. You were always such an old pretender.’ Biddy’s laugh was meant to jolly you along, but had an utter mirthlessness.

Ailsa Harkness was grasping a painting as though it needed breaking open. ‘So these are the newest. Lovely! There are at least three Americans waiting for you to fill in their cheques. I’d say they’ll be more than excited to find you’ve started a fresh phase.’

Fresh phase: or the end? He could never pass judgement on his work, except in his depths, the way to which is so tortuous.

When he got in, Rhoda was out and a letter had come. He began at once fumbling to read: lucky he still had his eyesight.

Dear Mr Duffield. .

Mustn’t lose heart. He couldn’t. It was for the moment the major part of him.

… How dreadful of me not to write when I promised. But nor did you! It is just that whenever I start a letter in my head I know how insipid I am going to look. When you think of all the time I am made to spend at ghastly school I ought to be more literate.

I am studying day and night now for the State heats of the Concerto Contest. (I shall perform here because, they say, I am residing in Victoria.) I am study the Piano Concerto in E Flat Major of Liszt, which I find more and more of a challenge! I have made some progress, Khrap thinks, though my left hand is still a little weak. O God I’ve got to be good! I wonder if I was a Roman Catholic would that make it any easier? Or Christian Science? Unfortunately I am only me, and nothing or no one will ever change that.

I study so hard I seldom see my friends, of whom I have many by now in Melbourne. Sometimes I take time off to go to the house of my best friend Meredith Thurston. She is my age. Her mother died when she was six, and her father is a physiologist, very brilliant though great fun. Last Sunday Gerry took us to Davy’s Bay. We sat on the sand licking ice-creams without our shoes, it was blissful. On her sixteenth birthday Gerry allowed Meredith to choose a dress at Foy and Gibson’s, and because it was almost my birthday too he gave me the same opportunity. No expense spared! I chose the most fabulous white gown which I shall keep to wear (with alterations) on the platform at my famous ‘debut’!

Don’t think I am not grateful enough to Gerry for his kindness, and any girl would be flattered, he is such a handsome man still, only going a bit round the middle, but I feel his gesture was more than anything charitable, he sees me in much the same position as Merry who has lost her mother, myself with a father who ran away.

Another if smaller reason why I must succeed in what I am doing — to be out of reach of charity!

Well, I shall see you this winter if all goes well, I know it will, in Sydney, because I shall win the State, I shall play in Sydney, I shall win the final, the Commonwealth!

Yours most sincerely

KATHERINE VOLKOV

Oh dear this looks as insipid as I knew it would, and you will think me of no account. I wonder why you intimidate me? Gerry Thurston doesn’t, and he too is a brilliant man. Love and kisses and the best kiss of all.

kathy

The Quasi Adagio is still giving me trouble. I can’t always bring it out clear enough, then at other times it becomes so very easily and naturally pure.

k

He had reached the upper floor by this. He sat down on the edge of the bed, wetting his lips; they had dried right out. He was palpitating. The stairs combined with the letter had made his heart his blood chug. A breeze, clattering through the old lopsided blind, to some extent helped reconstitute the bits of him which had come unstuck.

Presently he reached for paper and let his hand loose. It was a vague but soothing preamble, not yet himself really, but his hand: till his head began to follow. The line flowed out of his head, down through the arteries, through his fingers. He began drawing at last.

Rhoda must have come in and noticed his hat; she called up: ‘Are you there, Hurtle? Are you all right?’ She didn’t mention Kathy’s letter: must have come while she was out; he was glad it was his secret.