Patrick White - The Vivisector

While Kathy rehearsed for her concert, Rhoda was preparing for the night’s ritual of purple flesh. After taking off her coat and menacing her hair, she began tuning up the knife which time had almost sharpened away.

‘Oh dear, how late I am!’ she complained in her most fretful, little-girl’s voice. ‘If you only knew what goes on!’ As though he didn’t know too well. ‘You imagine parties, when it’s sheer drudging. And nerves. Not only Kathy, poor Mrs Volkov wonders whether she’ll be able to face the night. That’s why I went this afternoon. To sit with her.’

Rhoda’s voice kept slithering along the steel with which she was sharpening her scimitar.

‘There was one party,’ she admitted, ‘if you could call it that.’

This was where he sat forward, if not literally.

‘Because it wasn’t prearranged, Mrs Cutbush was keeping Mrs Volkov company. When Kathy came in from a session with Khrapovitsky. It was already fairly late, and I personally would have preferred to come home to bed. But poor Mrs Volkov made a few dropped scones. Mrs Volkov is famous for her dropped scones. And Kathy, who was tired, revived. That’s how the party began.’

‘All on a few dropped scones.’

‘Well — Mrs Volkov never touches alcohol. And Kathy is still only a child. But Mrs Cutbush had very kindly brought along a bottle of gin, knowing there might be callers in the next few days. Mrs Cutbush has had experience in directions where Mrs Volkov has never been.’

‘And were there any callers? To help Mother Cutbush mop up the gin?’

‘Well — there was Mr Khrapovitsky, naturally: he’s Kathy’s teacher, and it’s unpleasant for a young girl to walk back alone through the streets at night. And there was that Shuard — the music critic.’

‘Not prearranged?’

‘I think they thought,’ Rhoda paused, ‘it might be politic. I heard Khrapovitsky explaining to Mrs Volkov that personal contact is all-important.’

She was cutting into the meat by now.

‘Don’t tell me Cutbush wasn’t there!’

‘No. I think he’s lost interest. He’s not what you’d call musical. The only other person was Kathy’s boyfriend Clif — he spells it with one “f”, so Kathy told me.’

‘What do you mean by “boyfriend”?’

‘Frankly, I don’t know. But that’s the term for it.’ She was cutting the meat into long ribbons, then across, to make careful squares. ‘Anyway, Clif is no longer a boy. He’s a very brilliant physiologist, they say.’

‘What — another one?’

Rhoda wasn’t listening: she was too busy with the horseflesh, or what she had dreamt, or was thinking out. ‘Beautiful and gifted women — Kathy is gifted, and will certainly be beautiful — dazzle men as the moon — the planets dazzle them. That isn’t to say their men mean much more to them than the men on earth do to the stars they’re goggling at. Why should they? Somebody like Kathy has a destiny — a path you don’t expect her to diverge from. You can’t expect more than their art from artists. If you did, you might forget about the art, and die of shame for what they’ve shown you of mankind.’

Rhoda was so deep in concentration, or trance, he was able to escape into the yard. He couldn’t have gone upstairs to the paintings from which she had divorced him. Outside, the night was a tangle of vines and stars. Cold, too: it made the water in him swell. After warding off a cat innocent enough to believe it might merge its entity with his, he began to piss on what he recognized, from the orchestration, as the heap of empty tins.

On the night of the concert he sat waiting in the kitchen through which she would pass, as it was easier to reach the bus via Chubb’s Lane. He began his watch unnecessarily early, it might have seemed, but that way there would be no chance of her eluding him. Rhoda would be too afraid she might miss even a competitor in whom she had no interest; she would start far earlier than she need. He could sense from a smell of gunpowder in the air that the occasion as a whole was the experience of her life. Murders were not out of the question, or suicides, on the night of Rhoda’s Kathy’s triumph.

So he sat and waited.

When she didn’t come, but continued dropping hairbrushes, shoes, scratching at the handles of her chest of drawers, he began to call raucously: ‘Rhoda? You’ll be late! Don’t you realize? Late! Late!’ His voice bounced back.

His nerves were in specially fine tune. He farted once. He rattled the keys and money in his pockets as he disliked hearing others do. And nearly missed Rhoda.

Either because it was a formal occasion, or because she had decided to avoid him, she was going out through the front door. He hadn’t heard her leave her room, or cross the living-room carpet, and only jumped up when she almost brought down the hatstand in the hall.

He ran, bursting in to catch her, calling, his voice teetering as the bamboo hatstand righted itself: ‘Weren’t you going to say good-bye?’ Much too loud.

She, on the other hand, spoke too softly. ‘I didn’t want to distress you by letting you see me leave for the concert.’ He couldn’t tell whether she had meant it.

She had frizzed up her hair into the shape of an urn, choked at the neck by what looked like a gold ribbon off a chocolate box. She had powdered herself almost to death; only the patches of dry rouge on the cheekbones and the unhealed scar of a mouth reminded too vividly of life. She was wearing the squirrel coat, too, the collar buttoned up to her gills. Was she straining after extra height?

Then he remembered he was carrying the bunch of violets. As on the occasion during her illness, when he had bought her one and laid it on the tray of rejected food, he was now offering the bunch of Parma violets; nor had he forgotten the pin.

Rhoda clawed at them, mumbling, and pinned them clumsily to her collar: they made her look more livid.

She had achieved none of the height she had aspired to, and for a moment he feared that, in wanting to express herself in some way, she might be going to kiss his hand. He was almost crying for them. Whatever else they had botched in life, they might have had this child whom they both loved, and who was probably suffering somewhere in a crumpled, department-store dress, crouching over a silent keyboard.

Rhoda said: ‘You should make yourself a cup of cocoa.’

‘ Cocoa! I’ll be all right — listening to the wireless, in the studio. Oh God, yes! None of the coughing and the faces.’

She lowered her head and began sidling out, as though departure through the front door made this obligatory. Again their love for Kathy might have melted him if he hadn’t remembered that Kathy and Rhoda were probably conspiring to finish him off.

So he called: ‘Enjoy yourself!’ and laughed.

He thought he heard Rhoda laughing back, but the noise made by the flap on the letter-box prevented him knowing for certain.

That good tweed overcoat (English) which never wore out, only discoloured, had holes in the corners of the pockets through which he used to stick his thumbs. Tonight the holes tore worse; he not only felt, he could hear them tear as he raced along Chubb’s Lane, up Dolgelly, up Jones, up Lavernock Streets. Impossible at this hour to cajole a taxi anywhere inside the labyrinth.

So, on reaching the kerb, to command or seduce by what remained of his authority and ‘charm’.

He arrived slamming and scrambling, not late, but close enough to it. He hadn’t reserved a seat: they found him one almost too easily. As he flopped, the victim of his clothes, he was at once engulfed: the strings were tuning, knuckles tightening knuckles; the woodwind croaked mustily. He wouldn’t look yet, but it was most unlikely that Rhoda and her claque would be breathing down his streaming neck.