Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘Hurtle,’ Rhoda began, ‘I’m going to ask a favour of you. Kathy Volkov is leaving for Vienna in under a fortnight. She would like to pay you a visit, but is too shy to suggest it.’

Was the spring already upon them? From Rhoda’s first intimations he had visualized it as an abstraction in distance, not their actual turbulent fortnight of searing westerlies and brown blossom.

‘Kathy shy? I hadn’t noticed it in the past.’

‘She’s growing up now.’

‘I should have said she sprang out of her mother fully grown.’

‘You’re so brutal at times. And what you have against Kathy I’ll never understand. Not her loving nature, surely? Her beauty? Her brilliance? I know parents sometimes grow to resent their children if they’re in any way transcendent — as much as if they were ugly or stunted. What so many of them really look for is a healthy, normal, biddable child who will flatter their complacency like a glass. But Kathy will never be that. And you, Hurtle, are not a parent.’

He was hardly in a position to modify her statement, and having made it, Rhoda was preparing to leave him; when she remembered: ‘What am I to tell her?’

He felt limp; he mumbled, rubber-tongued: ‘Kathy will come if and when she wants.’

When she didn’t materialize, his subservience forced him to ask: ‘What did you tell her?’

‘Nothing. You gave me nothing to tell.’

He hated Rhoda, the reflection of his complacency: when Rhoda, the reality, not Katherine Volkov, the figment, was what he had been given to love. He did, of course, love her, because she was his sister: or he would learn to, under the dictatorship of the past.

He must, at least, inquire: ‘When is it Kathy leaves?’

Rhoda answered: ‘The day after tomorrow,’ and went on arranging a litter of kittens on the teats of a recumbent mother. She might have been screwing them on, but it appeared logical the way she did it.

It was a Sunday morning, and he stood sizing a couple of canvases recently bought. The soothing servility of the occupation, the broad, effortless strokes, the colourlessness, was helping paint out his mind. He was enjoying himself in a purely negative way: which made it no less delectable, possibly less destructible. As he worked, the Sunday air was treating his skin with lanoline, distant bells lulling the less manageable emotions, one or two shavings of harmless cloud curled in a bland sky, the big snow-green breasts of a viburnum across the street nuzzled by the iron noses of a fence. He remembered seeing — was it ‘The Pretty Baa Lambs’? Was it the Tate? The Ashmolean? On a Sunday. Maman in white, for spring, and because she fancied herself in white. By Ford Madox Brown: he read it out. No, she corrected, it’s Patou.

He was enjoying a laugh at his childish thoughts, drifting, like cotton-woolly baa-lamb clouds, or inflating into green-tinted parasols of stationary guelder rose, when something started cutting in: a canned evangelical hymn, a thundering blur from several streets away — or actual, closer voices.

Perhaps from growing deaf, like Rhoda, he hadn’t at first heard the voices, now in accompaniment to hers down in the kitchen. Rising about the distant hymn, they cut and grated, unpleasantly and unavoidably. He threw away his brush, but stopped to pick it up. His back. He trod size into the boards. Then he was revolving in desperation looking for a hiding-place: though he had nothing to hide.

A door was thrown open now.

Rhoda must have stopped laughing the moment before: her voice was so clear and girlish. ‘Hurtle? Are you there, dear? ’ So unheard of: what was she planning to do to him? ‘Kathy Volkov has come. She would like to say good-bye. Not if you’re busy. Kathy doesn’t want to disturb you. She’s flying tomorrow to Vienna. ’ It might have been Murwillumbah by train. ‘Hurtle?’ Rhoda angrier, less girlish.

He had to answer.

He called back, trying to keep his voice down in case it might sound unnatural. ‘Tell her to come up. If she wants.’

In the meantime he had to occupy himself. He threw the sized canvases against the wall; one of them bounced off something else and showed a black streak across its surface.

Feet were ascending. Could it be Rhoda as well? To spoil his chances on a last, perhaps the very last, occasion. He listened for her wheezing, her little clicketing steps. Instead he heard an outbreak, followed by a quick suppression, of laughter. He failed to separate or to identify the footsteps, except that, as they approached, he realized a man was taking part in the visitation.

Although she didn’t ‘want to disturb’, Kathy strode in; the room was shaking. Nor was her appearance what he would have expected; but perhaps he was too old to keep pace with the evolution of appearances. She had let her hair flow free; or more probably, she had brushed it out to give it that electrified look. Though Rhoda had told him Kathy was growing up, she was dressed in a little girl’s, an Alice-in-Wonderland style. Well, Kathy was cool and cryptic enough for Alice. Her shiftless shift, almost a pregnancy uniform, now that he came to think, ridiculed his memories of her body.

When this should have been a moment of intimate poignancy, its messages addressed only to him, he suspected he was half the purpose of her visit; in fact, the young man who followed her in became too obviously the other half, or worse: the sole reason for her coming.

Arching her eyebrows, lowering her chin, swallowing — which made a dimple come in spite of her apparently sterner intentions — Kathy casually announced: ‘I’d like you to meet my boyfriend — Clif Harbord — Mr Duffield. Perhaps I ought to say Harbord’s a doctor, but not the ordinary kind.’ Nervousness made her giggle.

She might have intended to create a situation jagged with vulgarity; or her jaws could have taken the wrong direction: they were so busy chewing. Out of loyalty to Dr Harbord?

For Clif, too, was gummed up. He was of the leaner, more sinewy type of male animal, with continuous eyebrows, his handshake an encounter with wire.

‘An honour to meet you, Mr Duffield!’

Evidently Clif was one who felt the set forms of human intercourse would never let him down. When he had spoken, he put his hands on his hips, and stood breathing an invigorating air, as he looked around a famous room from under those straight black eyebrows.

‘So this is it!’

Kathy, too, was looking, though not at the room. ‘Clif’s interested to see the paintings. Anyway, that’s what he says.’ At any moment she would have to bludgeon somebody; but which would it be? ‘Of course he doesn’t understand art. He’s a scientist. ’ She glanced an instant at the painter, before her laughter, glugging upward through her throat, got into trouble with her gum; when she had sorted things out, she sighed juicily, and added: ‘A scientist who wants to understand.’

‘Lay off the scientists!’ Clif complained; and the effort of getting it out, over his pellet of gum, made his lips look even juicier than Kathy’s. ‘There’s nothing so esoteric as it looks — or sounds. I understand music, don’t I?’

‘Okay,’ Kathy yelped, gulping on her gum. ‘Music’s a science as well as an art. Don’t you agree, Mr Duffield?’

Although she had hinted, by a glance, that he might be her ally, he was feeling too remote to reply.

Clif had dropped on the bed, where he lolled around, appreciating art. His approach was somewhat physical. He scratched his chest once or twice, and once grabbed at a handful of his flies. His lean shanks, above the socks, seemed pleased to advertise their bristles.

There was a moment when Clif and Kathy exchanged gum. They got the giggles as they mouthed it into each other, swallowing at the same time borrowed saliva and siphoned laughed. He didn’t see their embrace, but sensed it from behind his back. The lean and hairy Clif charged Kathy with vitality: or so the scent and violence of chewed gum conveyed; and straining of the rusty bed; and the ends of Kathy’s frayed-out electric hair.