Patrick White - The Vivisector

They began to wade through the Paganini-Rachmaninovs, Tchaikovsky and Tchaikovsky. A girl in what her mother would have described as ‘sea-green’ chiffon wafted daringly into ‘Ocean thou Mighty Monster’. A young man, the paler for his black, sank his teeth in Boris and couldn’t get them out again, chin stuck alarmingly, your own chin straining with his; because by now every agony was yours.

While the basso bowed his frustrated head under the massive, the decent-hearted applause, an elderly lady sitting at a tangent shouted at her companion: ‘That is Mr Hurtle Duffield. The one in the check coat. I can recognize him from his photos in the papers.’

The friend looked as though she had been taken in: through the subsiding applause he could hear her sucking her teeth. ‘He’s a different colour to what I would’uv expected. And sort of — unsuccessful-looking.’

He looked away.

He realized the interval had come. He hadn’t bought a programme, not from stinginess, but because he hadn’t wanted to know too much: to know when Katherine Volkov could be expected to walk through the sombre field of musicians might have become too acute a torment. And now that danger zone, the interval, in which Rhoda might parade herself, cynically, accusingly, flanked no doubt by members of the Volkov-Cutbush set. At least in the motley of students, many of them still little girls and in fancy dress, she wouldn’t look such a glaring exotic. He was the freak: he couldn’t narrow himself in his chair to hid enough of his freakishness.

His bladder was forcing him out. He stood peeing in the row of anonymous men: the relief of a good fart, and the anonymity of it.

‘Didn’t know you were interested in music, Duffield.’

A shorter, pursier, superficially younger, too glossy, aggressively dapper male.

‘Shuard,’ Shuard explained.

Possibly for ethical reasons the critic seemed determined to make no further reference to music. They talked about their friend Mrs Davenport; neither of them had seen her for years, but as they depended on her now, she shone like lacquer in their conversation; memory treated her with an exaggerated kindness.

After getting down from the step which edged the urinal, Shuard began to do up his flies, cocking a leg in the manner favoured by short, pursy men: his thighs, not to mention what lolled between them, revealed themselves to the imagination the more obscenely for being clothed.

Going out the frosted door, Shuard pulled at his companion’s arm, dragging his shoulder to a lower level before whispering: ‘What price the little Volkov?’

The throaty intimacy of it might have gummed them together for ever if the critic hadn’t started to amble off still easing his fat crutch. Spiritually Shuard belonged to the age of private supper-rooms and button boots.

In the second half, renewed orgies of the Paganini- Rachmaninovs: the hired dinner-jackets, the dream-dresses run up by Mother’s love and the old treadle-it-yourself, embraced their sticky ecstasies.

Snooze a little.

Then something pushed him; it was not a hand: it was Katherine Volkov walking half-drugged half-horrified, as he had never seen her, through the field of black-and-white musicians, the menacing crop of their instruments ready to be harvested by anyone who dared pretend to sufficient skill.

He wanted to break his nightmare by calling out: ‘No, Kathy — don’t — wait — I’ll save you!’ though what had he to offer instead?

She came on. At one point she was forced to turn sideways, because the path was too narrow and her dress too wide. (The elderly physiologist’s birthday present?) A loutish Second Violin leered up out of meaty lips. (Was the Second Physiologist, Clif One-f, leering also, more thinly because assuaged, somewhere in the audience?)

Kathy continued advancing, because, it seemed, she couldn’t think of an alternative. Anyway, by now, her fate wouldn’t have let her escape. He was brought so close to her he might have seen the golden down along her long strong arms and the line of her jaw: but knew it by heart. He knew the long legs propping inside the sculpture of the frozen dress.

He closed his eyes for a second.

When he opened them, she had sat down and was having the conventional trouble with the stool: she, and the mahogany knobs she was twisting, contended against each other. She won, though. She was breathing rather too fast. She sat clasping her hands, it could have been in not-too-hopeful prayer. Mrs Volkov, recovered from the stroke which had barely stroked her, only blurred her speech, must have moulded the golden plait into the golden crown. He could see where some of the more tender hairs at the nape of the neck were still resisting.

Suddenly Katherine Volkov bowed her head. Although she had closed her eyes, it was she, not the vegetable conductor, who was in control. Because she willed it, from her quivering shoulders to the toe of her arrogant shoe, they were carried away on the wave of violins. And Katherine Volkov was parting the music with her long strong arms. Her entranced eyes were at times as fixed as electric light bulbs, as she mounted, and mounted, the flood, at times closed, while she flowed with the stream of overscented dreamed-up music: or curled, an archetypal figure he could no longer recognize, in the troughs between certain waves.

Once she dashed her hand against her skirt, with impatience, it seemed, then clawed at the thigh beneath the tulle. Some of the elderly-relative members of the audience glanced at one another: they could have been shocked by too unrestrained a display of ‘artistic temperament’ in a hitherto normal, young Australian girl.

Others sat, moist-eyed, to watch this creature they could feel drawing away from them. Himself dry: never drier. He was grinding from buttock to razor-edged buttock. As he ground his teeth together he wondered whether anybody could hear.

Katherine Volkov had raised her head to compete with the ‘pure’ bits of the ‘Quasi adagio’. Her wobbling chin reminded him of that weakness in her left hand. Poor little Kathy: tears almost dropping from the blue eyes, for the lovely music, for the orgasm she can’t have experienced with the elderly Melbourne physiologist, the music critic Shuard, the grocer-perv Cutbush, or Clif One-f. (He wasn’t going to include Himself.)

After what seemed like several hours of jealousy, remorse, suppliant love, hectic passion, to say nothing of coughing, programme dropping, and a halitosis to the left, he watched Katherine Volkov emerge, her serene shoulders, the majestic mother-plaited crown, rising above a vulgar situation. She gave one last shudder: of thankfulness. She had arrived in more than safety: she was received into the world of light. Realization nearly jerked her head off her neck.

They were all clapping and clap clapping vindicated fulfilled drenched by their part in this voyage to Cythera, at the end of which they had positively laid eyes on the goddess.

Yet Katherine Volkov might eventually disappoint. Although she was showing them the palms of her hands, and her smile conveyed joy, youth, health, all of which they approved, her attitude was hardly grateful enough. While she was going through the repertoire of gestures the audience expected and wanted, she was holding something back from them: he could tell she had discovered in herself that extra sense which is the source of all creative strength. Anyone unable to recognize nobility might have condemned her as proud, as she stood bowing in her department-store dress and disintegrating hair-do. When the crown actually fell, she caught the plait, easily, laughingly — hadn’t she survived ordeal by music? — and casually waved her hair at them while turning to leave the platform.

Still too drunk to feel consciously displeased at anything about her, the audience roared.