Patrick White - The Vivisector

At one point he was forced to turn. He stared so hard he would remember for ever these two young human animals wordlessly involved: it was a matter of skin, claws, and the fascinated retina.

He stared so long, Clif looked at his wrist. ‘Ought to be going, Kathy — keep to the schedule. And Mr Duffield will ’uv had us.’ Not that he was prepared to consider Mr Duffield as a physical fact: he was concentrated between the shining hair on his own polished shinbone, and Kathy, who wasn’t bothering.

Till she burst out loudly: ‘Okay — yes! We must have bored him by now.’ She stuck out her tongue, with it a veil of gum through which she sniggered: ‘We’re so horribly infantile! ’

At once she began pummelling her lover out of the room, denying him any opportunity to say good-bye, because, in her own case, she didn’t want to expose herself to that.

So there was a scrimmage on the stairs, a dangerous creaking of match-stick banisters, before Kathy, surprisingly, returned.

She must have got rid of the gum, for her mouth was still and resolute. Her eyes had something of the explosive violence of splintering ice. Her electric hair was floating: if it hadn’t been rooted in her scalp, it might have flown.

‘You know, don’t you, Mr-Hur- Hurtle —I didn’t mean it to be like this.’ She bit on the words ballooning inside her blistering lips.

Having reached him, she slid her arms up under his, till the palms of her rigid hands were resting on his shoulder-blades, and he recognized the woman Rhoda had tried to tell him Kathy was becoming. At the same time she thrust herself up and under him, till they fitted more perfectly than in any sexual hold. In fact, there appeared to be nothing sexual in Kathy’s present motives; her eyes alone would have beaten off any attempt.

Instead, he realized, as the eyes swam closer, larger, he was merging with her in an empathy such as can only be acknowledged at the moment and discarded afterwards as an impossible illusion.

‘Did you hear me play at the concert?’ she asked with a moodiness, or diffidence, in a voice which suggested catarrh.

He confessed to being at the concert.

‘I was awful— awful! ’ She rested her head against his cheek; but even though she had closed her eyes and dropped her defences, he knew he shouldn’t offer a caress: collaborators can only be sceptical lovers.

‘They gave you the prize.’ Now it was the way parents comfort little girls: when she wasn’t one any longer.

‘Khrapovitsky told me I was technically atrocious. He won’t forgive me. I know it wasn’t what I wanted — what I should have done — but felt it was what they expected. Otherwise, how could I have ever escaped — begun to live?’ Kathy Volkov was still the little girl, trickling warm against his shoulder.

Then she opened her splintered eyes.

‘That’s all!’ she shouted with such force it racked his shoulder-blades. ‘When I come back I’ll play for you and show you!’ Her conviction bit into his cheek with a fury of actual teeth; only they weren’t lovers: they were the dedicated collaborators. ‘I’ll play!’

Then the physical part of Kathy disentangled itself from their pact and he heard her going down the stairs.

Again an old man, he hoped he hadn’t smelt musty to a young girl, who for her part, had smelt too eager, and of chewing-gum. From the window he watched her cross the yard, entwining an arm with one of Dr Harbord’s: the two arms might have been wire; and in spite of Kathy’s confidences, he would have liked to take a pair of pliers, and snip the arms off at the shoulder, and watch the blood spurting from the wire snakes after they had tinkled on the asphalt. His spirit was not yet strong enough to forgive the flesh.

When the gate was closed between them, and he could no longer see her, he went and twisted the wireless on, and an edifying music came out, because it was Sunday.

Rhoda didn’t comment on Kathy’s final departure, but he knew she had gone, from a photograph in a newspaper: of ‘Katherine Volkov the young Australian pianist leaving to further her studies in Vienna.’ The airport had worked disastrously on the Kathy he wished to remember. A gale along the tarmac had inflated her unbound hair till there was far too much of it tugging at its moorings around her face. This was peculiarly expressionless considering the grin she had put on for the cameras, or perhaps to hide her true feelings behind the glare from her smile and the contorted planes of her cheeks. She was carrying a souvenir koala and a presentation bunch of carnations from which a couple of ribbons were suspended. Attached to one of these was a fleshy (middle-aged) official of the A.B.C., practised in joviality and the appropriate gestures, while a tall coarse-boned woman, who could only have been the Scot her mother, cautiously fingered the tail of the second ribbon, which they must have ordered her to hold. Mrs Volkov was cast in a hat and clothes which in combination with herself reminded of a work of iron sculpture. She might have looked a gloomy person if it hadn’t been for the smile; or no, it wasn’t a smile: it was the mark of the ‘little stroke’ reported by Rhoda, which had ruffled Mrs Volkov’s lips, casting these two in iron.

At least the Cutbush clique — with Shuard? — and of course Clif Harbord, had been thwarted at the gate, so that after the traveller had detached herself from the avuncular official and her mother, and entered the steel capsule waiting to fly her away, the purity of line, almost his creation, must have been restored to her face, under the influence of those allied states of mind: sleep, flight and music.

He didn’t hear from Kathy, but hadn’t expected to; it was as though they were agreed that a further attempt at correspondence could only be as ineffectual as the others.

He grew accustomed to remember events not by works finished, but whether they had taken place before or after Kathy left. If he remembered other relationships in his life, considerable ones like Nance Lightfoot, for instance, or Hero Pavloussi, it was with irritation, shame and disgust, that they should have fallen so far short of his masterpiece Katherine Volkov: a flawed masterpiece certainly, but one in which the artist most nearly conveyed his desires and faith, however frustrated and imperfect these might be.

Then there was also Rhoda; but Rhoda was scarcely a relationship, let alone a creation: his ‘sister’ was a growth he had learnt to live with.

Rhoda remarked: ‘I’ve often wondered, Hurtle, why you continue keeping me under the same roof. I’m willing to leave, you know. You only have to say the word. I realize I’m aesthetically offensive, and that my cats are squalid and smelly. So please tell me, won’t you? Mrs Volkov is willing to have me back, any time I like, to keep her company. She’s lonely now that Kathy has gone.’

He was surprised to surprise a sweetness, even a temptation, in Rhoda’s voice. Though her eyes were daring him, boring in, they had a beautiful lucidity he didn’t always achieve in his painting.

‘Why,’ he said, dry as toast, ‘why you should begin, at this stage to imagine things, I don’t know. This is your home, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t want to appeal to your sense of duty, my dear.’

Her rather prominent teeth were involved with the toast she had just burnt under the gas griller. (He really must get one of those pop-up electric contraptions.)

‘Aren’t we,’ he mumbled on the black toast, ‘what is left of a family?’

Rhoda smiled a faintly yellow smile. ‘I think you’re an artist, aren’t you?’

‘But not the monster you’d like to make me out.’

‘What I meant was sans famille. ’ Here was his brute-sister trying to prise out of his hands the painted toy he wanted to hang on to.