Patrick White - The Vivisector

By daylight he was still outwardly the cold-eyed elderly gentleman, known or anonymous, for whom other people — Rhoda excepted — put on their sickliest of smiles. He no longer cared for functions in the drawing-rooms of predatory new-rich women, or the intellectual pillories, but liked to meander through familiar streets, nowadays exchanging a Victorian conformity of blistered brown for Sicilian splendours in cassata pink and pistachio green. He would potter up to the thoroughfare, with its piles of lentils and haricot beans, its second-hand vegetables wilting for the poor, and fish mummified for all those who weren’t wise to it. The smell of the streets made him feel alive: warm pockets of female flesh; lamp-posts where dogs had pissed; fumes of buses going places.

He liked to take a bus himself, away from Rhoda, on missions of importance: insurance; or winter socks. In the big pneumatic buses, manners from the age of trams continued to reveal themselves: old men with raised veins on the backs of their hands still felt the need to apologize; elderly women would suddenly attempt to coquet, as though their beige or black might impress itself on minds soaked in garishness.

That winter, on a morning when he was riding down to the Quay, reducing his ticket to crumbs in a somewhat small-beer fit of joie de vivre while mopping up his fellow passengers with his blotting-paper stare, he noticed a person across from him in the corner, her head nodding, nodding, as she gazed out the window, at the street, or beyond it.

In a fairly empty bus, he had chosen a gangway seat, not caring to rub pockets or knees with this gaunt woman, whose formal airs and iron hat he began to enjoy from a distance, while she nodded and smiled at the winter sunshine the other side of the window.

They were approaching Wentworth Avenue when he was surprised to see the woman turn, and hear her address him out of her intractable smile: ‘Excuse me, sir, but I recognize you — naturally — from the papers — and know about you besides — through our connections.’

Here she coughed. She looked embarrassed, in spite of her militant Scots; or perhaps the smile wasn’t all that it ought to be: as though making excuses for it, she was holding her hand in front of her mouth.

He didn’t help her, but waited: it was more important that she should declare herself in her true colours; and out of the essential grey and black, it was Mrs Volkov who gradually emerged.

‘My little girl will be coming home this winter — this season — to perform with the symphony orchestras. It will be a great joy to her mother — and to all music lovers — though she’ll only be with us a wee while on account of her engagements overseas.’ Her Scots had become as piercing as a dagger; then she licked her smile, and said: ‘No doubt Miss Courtney will keep you posted.’

Like hell she would.

The bus rolled, and rollicked them on, past some dying trees set in concrete.

‘I wonder which works she’s chosen?’ he found himself asking his busboard acquaintance, or monolith-relative.

‘I’ve no idea, I’m sure!’ Mrs Volkov recoiled from this unexpected assault on her discretion. ‘It wouldn’t occur to me to inquire. Kathy might jump on me. I’ve learnt to mind my own business, Mr Duffield.’

If only the mother had known how she intimidated him: it was as if she had caught him fucking with Kathy in the hall under Maman’s buhl table. He only prayed Kathy wouldn’t dish out the Liszt, that she would choose something worthy of their not so secret collaboration: the whole bus must be aware of that.

At Foy’s, Mrs Volkov descended still smiling her inevitable smile. Perhaps to uphold her views on discretion, she hadn’t said good-bye; though what was the point in becoming further involved with someone whose deeper reactions would always be reported to her by their common informer?

He forgot why he had come to the city. He roamed instead around the Quay and up Lower George, without seeing the merchandise in the windows he was peering into. On a morning so obviously joyous, he should have felt less depressed, looked less cadaverous. Everyone else had an air of bounced rubber. What would happen, he wondered, if he fell in the street and failed to bounce back into the vertical position of walking automata? If he continued lying on the pavement, how would those professionally charitable amateurs and trained ambulance men be able to identify him? (Remember for next time to write — no, to print, a card with name and address, to outwit unconsciousness.)

When he got in, Rhoda barely acknowledged his return: she went on shredding lettuce, shelling the bruise-coloured eggs for their lunch; but he could tell she sensed something had happened. She began humming in her slightly cracked, girl’s voice, a tune he couldn’t identify, or not at first; then he woke up to the full viciousness of her behaviour: it was one of the juicier tunes from Liszt’s First Piano Concerto.

He decided not to be drawn; nor would he depend on Rhoda for any of the information Mrs Volkov naively presumed she would pass on. This time he would read the papers.

Probably it was what Rhoda feared would happen. As they sat eating the nasty salad, she passed the cruet without his asking. He ignored the cruet, in which the vinegar alone was kept replenished, and which must have started life on some boarding-house table or in a railway refreshment room. Each time she ate one of her own salads. Rhoda seemed to be doing penance for something: for the crinkled jade hearts, exquisitely perfumed with tarragon and lemon, unctuous with oil, which Maman liked to prepare herself, white hands formally poised, in an illumination of sapphires.

‘What’s the matter?’ Rhoda mumbled, as he watched a ribbon of darkened lettuce suspended from her shoebuckle mouth.

That night he dreamed he was the centre of a strangely prearranged accident: he walked out into the street, as though obeying a signal, and lay down in front of one of the trams they had done away with. The brown tram galloped bucking and screaming towards him, bells ringing, sides encrusted with human heads. Additional evidence of prearrangement was provided by Rhoda: she was standing on the kerb, in her squirrel coat, waiting to step off when the tram wheels should tear into his legs.

It happened as planned: the blood gushed; yet he remained unfeeling, as though made of marzipan specially moulded for the occasion. His head began to sprout long-necked crimson flowers, if only the onlookers could have seen.

Kneeling beside him, Rhoda was saying: Mrs Cutbush — oh dear no, Mrs Volkov is giving a little party for Katherine her daughter after the concert in the Town Hall, and would like you to be of the company.

Rhoda was choosing words with particular care, and wearing rings Maman must have sold to be able to bribe Julian Boileau.

In the teeth of so much formality and splendour all he could answer was: You’ve torn your good coat, Rhoda — your squirrel coat. You must do up the place with a safety-pin. And what is this?

There was a kind of twisted string hanging out from where the coat opened in front.

That’s unnecessary! Rhoda snapped. A sort of tie-string. I can’t think why Mrs Grünblatt gave it to me. As for tearing, speak for yourself!

She was right. He was wearing a yellow, rubberized overall of the type worn by men who work with acid, or those who test fire extinguishers; how he had acquired it he couldn’t remember, probably from one of the shop windows on Lower George. In any case, his travesty had been slashed to ribbons by the tram.

How can I go, Rhoda, in this?

It doesn’t matter. Everybody will be recognizable.

What sort of a party?

A service. Mrs Cutbush has baked a batch of fairy cakes, and the celebrants will masturbate in turn on the corpse.