Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘Hurtle?’

He got up, suddenly enraged; he stamped out on the landing, and would have shouted if his throat hadn’t been so dry: ‘For God’s sake, can’t you leave me alone?’ He found himself baring his teeth.

Rhoda shouted back: ‘All right! Keep your hair on! I only wondered.’

‘Why the hell can’t you leave me alone?’ he rattled huskily back.

‘I wondered whether you’d had a stroke. That’s all. That’s what Mrs Volkov had, if we’d care to admit it. Only a very little one. She says God was kind.’

If she hadn’t slammed the kitchen door Rhoda would have heard him laugh: before he went back to his drawing. Mrs Volkov could bloody well have died of her stroke for all he cared. His hand had to reconnect with his intention before they re-entered the maze together; but it came about with merciful ease. He was again drawing purposefully. He visualized Katherine Volkov carried away by the strong swirl of music, over her mother’s dead body.

Out of these drawings he finally painted ‘The Lopsided Blind’ and ‘Spiral’. He worked on them alternately because each originated in Kathy’s letter, and though different in their moral climate and aesthetic treatment, they also complemented each other. In the painting of the looped, tatty old Venetian, the girl’s face was visible in the corner the blind revealed. Her incised shells of eyes contained kernels of vision not yet germinated. Most of the body, except for the rather square hands, was cut off at the windowsill. The girl’s face was as rapacious and tragic as a young sun-blinded eagle sensing nourishment in an interplay of colour it couldn’t see. He aimed his barrage at this one corner not obscured by the dusty blind or oppressed by the sun-blistered sash.

The second painting appeared less clearly defined, though on second thought, and examination, the architecture of the spiral was unequivocal. The girl-figure was not at the mercy of this whirlwind of music or fatality. Her feet were firmly placed; the ambiguous, half-veiled expression of the face ultimately revealed conscious will, whether also sensibility, he bitterly wondered during a series of wet afternoons, remembering Kathy as a vulgar little schoolgirl-tart. How her mac would have smelt of rubber; her sodden plait, with its stringy pink ribbon, would have tasted of rain.

But again, on the first day of sun and redemption, he saw the painting as originally conceived, or as close as you can ever get. If he had never achieved what he was aiming at, he strewed such bloody gobbets of himself along the way, those similarly involved had recognized their own half-realized intentions; the ignorant gushers and sceptics didn’t matter.

This winter it was Rhoda who went down with pneumonia. Lying in the iron cot she looked not unlike the little pink-haired girl who had tried to smother him in a disgusting kiss smelling of talcum powder and hot flannel. His resistance then made him genuinely humble now.

“Rhoda — what can I do for you?’

‘Nothing.’ She didn’t even open her eyes.

Anything positive that had ever existed between them was entombed in one word and her small, suddenly marble, features.

He couldn’t stop looking at her.

Out of his memories of May Noble he cooked dishes for her: fish, of the most delicate, transparent flesh, with oysters nestling round the fillets; breasts of chicken suave with cream and mushrooms. Once he bought a bunch of violets and laid them on the tray, on the corner of an admittedly grey cloth.

But Rhoda said: ‘Can’t you leave me alone? Food nauseates me. It’s the drugs that doctor prescribes, I suppose,’ always speaking with her eyes closed; at least it eased out her frown.

‘Shall I fetch another doctor?’

‘No.’ The oracle began to stir. ‘What use is a doctor? Everything depends on yourself. Didn’t you know?’

His humility was wearing thin. ‘What about Mrs Volkov? And God’s kindness? Which let her off with a little stroke!’ He allowed himself to indulge in a laugh.

Rhoda snorted through her marble nostrils. ‘Mrs. Volkov is a very simple woman — though she did have Kathy. Parents and children, I think, are only accidentally related.’

After that he took the tray out. He took the violets and threw them into the garbage bin.

Rhoda would cough: sometimes her phlegm was marked with threads of blood.

Suspecting he had noticed, she said: ‘I shall be up in a fortnight. ’ She opened her eyes. ‘To hear Kathy play in the final at the Town Hall.’

‘But we don’t know that she’ll reach the final.’

‘Oh, but you don’t keep up! You’re always painting. She won her State. I heard it on my little transistor. She played the Liszt — exquisitely.’ Rhoda spoke with Maman’s voice, apparently unaware of it, and closed her eyes again.

She was up before the fortnight, feeling her way about in a pair of quilted slippers, and coughing drier. Not long after, although the weather was viciously inclined, she started, more slowly, dragging the go-cart down the closer streets loaded with offal for neglected cats. In a mackintosh cape, she looked like a tent hastily erected in wet and darkness.

One evening he saw an opportunity. ‘Surely Kathy’s concert will be an occasion to try out the coat? After an illness, too. In winter.’

Rhoda began slinging the dishes around. ‘If it will give you any satisfaction, Hurtle, to watch other people recognize your generosity.’

He must get it out quick, but his tongue was swollen. ‘Not at all. I shan’t be there.’

‘Not at Kathy’s concert?’

He shook his head. ‘Not to wallow in Liszt. And Tchaikovsky. And Rachmaninov. By a pack of students. For another pack.’

‘I’m not surprised, Hurtle. You were always an intellectual snob. I can’t help loving all lovely music.’

She was too virtuous to argue with.

Instead he nursed his hatred of Kathy Volkov for her failure to tell him of her success, while bitterly accusing his own self-absorbed nature which prevented him reading newspapers. He would make sure not to miss the announcement of the final, so that he could study Rhoda’s, probably secret, preparations for the night: to catch her not wearing the fur coat, or better still, wearing it. The hurt he would inflict on himself by not watching Katherine Volkov walk out across the platform, raked by applause from students, relatives, and elderly men, was not his least luxurious thought.

So he read the Herald, sometimes twice, in case his mind, diverted by some other detail, related to his own work for instance, had missed half a dozen lines crammed slyly into a corner.

Actually he needn’t have bothered: it was enough to watch Rhoda, who looked more and more as though on the point of joining a church. She grew silenter, her eyes larger; her normally delicate features were still further refined by a transparency and tautening of the skin, till she was all eyes, forehead, obsessed mouth. What if Rhoda, too, were in love with Kathy? He started by thinking of them practising some unvisualized, but diabolical perversion, though it tortured him worse to suspect Kathy and Rhoda of meeting on a spiritual level he should never have considered either of them able to attain.

Finally, there were all the signs of physical preparation: wardrobe doors opening and closing; handles rattling; smells of naphthalene and face powder; unexplained sorties at unorthodox hours.

He lost control of himself on hearing her arrive back late for cats yet again. ‘Great shivoos, I expect, in the Cutbush salong to celebrate the return of their star.’

‘I don’t believe either Cutbush has set eyes on Kathy since her return. In fact, her own mother hardly sees her: she’s so busy preparing for her concert. Mr Khrapovitsky, who came up from Melbourne to be with her, has rented a studio so that she can work under the best possible conditions.’