Patrick White - The Vivisector

He got up and started clambering out, past stubborn knees, trailing his overcoat across the laps of resentful strangers. Here and there he trod on the spongy insteps of seemingly dropsical women, who didn’t scream, but moaned in harmony with his own painfully throbbing silence.

What mattered was to escape the trauma of Kathy’s performance, and more particularly this new Kathy, herself escaping in the direction she had chosen.

Once he thought he caught sight of Rhoda peering from under powdered lids.

Because he had to forestall Rhoda he continued trampling pushing through the human walls obstructing him. Night and the neon-lit streets promised relief, until he found that every taxi had flitted from them. In the end he walked over half the way home, his anxiety subsiding as he imagined Rhoda at sea in worse difficulties: keeping her nose above the tide, rejected by already overloaded buses. He would be sitting high and dry at Flint Street long before she could possibly make it.

He was crossing the hall when she sprang out of her room at him: each might have been surprising a thief.

‘Why — Hurtle — how very unexpected!’

‘I took a stroll.’ As she exhaled, he explained that he had felt the need for air.

‘Walking at night can be agreeable, if one is in a happy frame of mind.’

She had had time to change into an old grey gown, and a flannel nightie gathered at the neck like a Christmas cracker. She was holding a comb which had belonged to Maman, and as the tension eased, she resumed combing at the dusty-looking wisps of her hair, the powder and rouge gone from her cheeks, absorbed, no doubt, by the evening’s emotions.

‘Did you enjoy your concert?’ he asked.

She closed her eyes and composed her mouth in a girlish smirk. ‘It was altogether divine.’

It was a word he had never heard her use: probably picked it up from Kathy.

Rhoda opened her eyes; looking at him with the utmost seriousness, she dared him to contradict her. ‘Kathy played magnificently, as of course you’ll know from listening to the wireless.’

He grunted taking off his coat, while Rhoda continued combing her hair: if she wasn’t careful, there wouldn’t be any of it left.

Irritated by the action of the comb, the dull hair, and the unexpected turn of events, he sharpened his tongue on her. ‘I’m surprised you got back so early — perhaps by levitation.’

‘Mr Cutbush very kindly gave me a lift each way in their car — Mrs Volkov and myself.’

‘And Kathy? And Khrapovitsky? And Shuard? And Clif? All squeezed in, thigh to thigh! Kathy,’ he laughed, ‘sitting in somebody’s fat lap?’

She ignored the tone of this. ‘What the young people do is their own business. Mr Shuard, I believe, went straight off to write his review.’

It was time he turned round: he had been arranging his coat far too long on the bamboo stand. Because the knobs were too large, he couldn’t hang the coat by its loop, but had to drape it: which gave the back an obvious hump.

‘And what were the results?’ He wheezed it at her: when he almost never wheezed.

‘You mean to say you didn’t listen in for the results?’ Rhoda’s scorn rose between them; she looked as though she might be going to hit him with Maman’s old ivory comb. ‘They always announce the results on the wireless.’

‘No. I’d gone out.’ He felt so genuinely tired, he no longer expected his voice to convince; there was nothing he could do about it, though.

‘It’s extraordinary,’ she said, ‘what a self-centred man you are. Of course you have a right to be, but it’s still extraordinary — on some occasions.’

Although she was withdrawing, it was he who had been dismissed, not by his sister Rhoda whom he had engaged as a conscience, but by Maman; and again, as Rhoda reached the door, it was Maman with a vengeance, translated into terms of Rhoda through an inherited comb, smiling with discoloured, conspiratorial, at the same time vindictive, teeth. ‘What did you think of the young lady who sang the Weber? Didn’t you find her dress a little outré? In the higher bits we were waiting for her to burst out.’ Comb poised, Rhoda was not only listening, she was also watching for his reply.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It didn’t worry me — the dress. In fact, I scarcely noticed.’

He was too tired: or too fascinated by that comb; he couldn’t make the effort to disguise his blunder. He saw how he might paint the comb, with the drift of dead hair in its teeth: he was already groping his way towards placing it as a formal link between their present and their past.

Rhoda’s eyes, surprisingly, filled with a brilliant tenderness. ‘You’re fagged out. You should take a hot bath, Hurtle. Make yourself a cup of cocoa.’ He was relieved she was compassionate enough not to offer to make the stuff for him.

She had gone, but called back a warning: ‘That thing — the geyser — will blow up in your face one day if you don’t have something done about it.’

He couldn’t care: the geyser was one of the minor volcanoes in his life.

Next morning he didn’t go down, though Rhoda, he sensed, was anxious that he should.

‘No,’ he called in answer to her question.

‘Would you at least like the paper?’

No, he wouldn’t: whether Kathy had won or not. That she had won, he knew; Rhoda’s voice would otherwise have conveyed failure. As far as he was concerned, Kathy’s success had exorcized her.

The whole morning he could feel Rhoda brooding over his indifference, except when she was gone with her cart to fetch the evening’s supply of horse. About lunchtime he went down to her. He felt delightfully comfortable sloppy in his loose old gown. And cocky. How dreadfully boyish old men could become; but he understood what made them so: it was the unimportant victories.

Rhoda had arranged the still apparently untouched morning paper like an antimacassar over the back of his chair.

He clapped his hands together in jolly explosion, and asked: ‘When does the little Volkov propose to leave us?’ So hearty pompous: he could see himself as he acted it.

Rhoda hesitated: she was wearing the apron which normally proclaimed her authority, establishing her as cook, as opposed to mere mistress of the house. ‘You did know, then, that Kathy won.’

Squeezing off a corner of cheese, he ignored the accusation. ‘What are her plans? Has she decided where to study?’

Rhoda’s decision to abandon subterfuge had the effect of a blind going up too quickly. ‘Mr Khrapovitsky favours Vienna.’ A name was mentioned, which conveyed nothing. ‘She’s leaving in the spring— our spring.’ ‘Our spring’ in Maman’s accent gave Kathy’s departure a high glaze.

‘Good luck to her,’ he said.

He could feel the cheese already turning his stomach sour, and belched in an attempt to rid himself of some of his gloom. Rhoda didn’t hear: she had her own loss to bear. She brought him a slice of fried bread, left over from breakfast, with a limp rasher of bacon on it: he pushed away the lot.

If the image of the yellow comb which had flared up in his imagination died away almost at once, it was perhaps something to do with his being physically run down, or mentally depressed, or because his work as a painter was finished: not that he hadn’t plenty still to say; he’d only lost the desire to say it. He wondered whom he had been addressing all these years. No artist can endure devoted misinterpretation indefinitely, any more than he can survive in a vacuum of public contempt; or was he the self-centred monster Rhoda accused him of being? God knew, he had multiplied, if not through his loins; he was no frivolous masturbator tossing his seed on to wasteland. He had sympathized with the passionate illusions of several women, and could hardly be held responsible for their impulse to destroy themselves through what they misunderstood as love; until finally: had he himself been destroyed by a little egotistical girl whom he valued above his vocation? On an occasion of desultory doodling, the cowled phallus wore Kathy’s face. In the end he bought a bottle of mixed vitamins from the chemist to save the fuss of consulting doctors.