Patrick White - The Vivisector

But what corpse?

The corpse of Katherine Volkov, who escaped in time, before any of us had possessed her.

Are you joking, Rhoda?

But perhaps she wasn’t. She was too serious for that: white acrylic tears were squeezing out of her rat’s eyes, down her withered cheeks, painting them with a beauty he hadn’t noticed before, though of the stalactite order.

He tried unsuccessfully to put out his hand. What are we doing here? he asked.

It is not yet to know, she mumbled through the mouth of Mrs Volkov; then, painfully making the effort to correct her bungled speech: not not possibly.

His inability to put out a hand, and increasing absence of mind in Rhoda, trussed and knotted him so tightly it put an end to this Dream.

‘What on earth is the matter with you? Are you sick?’ She was screeching up at him, through the sallow daylight, from the hall.

‘Oh no, dear, a dream! Oh, dear!’ he mumbled coughing laughing spluttering back.

‘What?’ From deep down in the house she was laughing too, while at the same time angry. ‘I thought you were sick. I never heard such a rumpus.’

‘A dream!’

Because it was Rhoda she didn’t ask about the dream: she closed the kitchen door, and soon after he smelled the smell of burning fat.

He began to read the papers, watching for an announcement of the Volkov concert. In the meantime dealers were bringing him clients anxious to buy his paintings; but he seldom opened to them. He would look down on the crowns of their heads, but couldn’t make the effort to go downstairs and let them in. After a while the heads would retreat. The dealers would send him letters which he recognized by instinct, and didn’t read because of the polite anger they must contain.

Then one evening Rhoda remarked: ‘Mrs Volkov has given me a couple of complimentary tickets for the concert on Wednesday night. One is for myself, the other, she insists, is for you. She says she met you on a bus. I told her I thought you disliked listening to music in public, and in any case, you probably wouldn’t fancy sitting with me.’

‘But the concert — has She already arrived?’

In the state of shock and alarm in which Rhoda’s announcement left him, he couldn’t bring himself to use the Name. He would feel less vulnerable if She remained an abstraction.

‘It’s all over the papers — which you never bother to read. Didn’t you at least see the photo taken at the party, with Lady ffolliott Morgan helping Her cut the cake?’ Nor could Rhoda bear to use the Name.

He shook his head, like the old shaven goat he must look.

‘It was a party given by the committee in honour of Her arrival. Why a cake I can’t think. As if it were a wedding — or a birthday. Her birthday’s in summer, I seem to remember. I remember Mrs Volkov telling me she’d turned twenty-five.’

He had never stood so close to death. If he could face this, surely then, he might look at the press photograph?

‘Where is it?’ he asked. ‘The paper? I’d like to see.’

Rhoda was watching him. ‘I’m afraid you can’t. I threw it out with the potato peelings. At least, I’m pretty sure I did.’

He was pretty sure that, if he looked when she went out, he’d find a cutting under Rhoda’s handkerchief sachet. He mustn’t be tempted, though: too dangerous — not Rhoda’s catching him, but his first glimpse of the Face.

‘Have you seen Her in the flesh?’

‘Oh no — too busy, what with the receptions, and the press, and rehearsal with the orchestra. Mrs Volkov is a wreck from sitting waiting for a few moments with her own daughter. Their best and almost only time is when she takes in the breakfast tray.’

So much irrelevant chatter helped him partly recover his toppled balance.

During the day which separated them from the concert he was conscious that he hadn’t given Rhoda an answer to her offer of the ticket. He would have liked to think he wouldn’t accept, but knew he would, and that Rhoda took it for granted; otherwise she would have pressed for a definite answer.

‘What is Kathy going to play?’ He was quite pleased with the sound of his planned indifference, at one of those moments when he and Rhoda were crossing like strangers in the yard.

Rhoda, surprisingly, rattled off: ‘Mozart’s K.271’ as though she had been brought up on it; she spoiled things, though, by tripping just afterwards on the hem of her dressing-gown which had come unstitched some months before.

He warned as gently, as genuinely as he could: ‘You’ll fall down and hurt yourself if you insist on wearing that old gown.’

Rhoda clawed at the back door and tore it open.

When he got inside, she was blowing her nose in the scullery. ‘What is it?’ he asked, still gentle, perhaps horribly so.

For she answered: ‘I thought I’d managed to escape pity while we were still children.’

‘Don’t you know — you who read the papers’—he couldn’t resist, ‘we’re living in the age of “compassion, tenderness and warmth”?’

In spite of it, they were most considerate towards each other all that afternoon.

He confessed: ‘I’d like to come with you to the concert,’ but he said it so low he could see she hadn’t heard.

Or hadn’t she wanted to hear?

The night of the concert was filled with a cutting wind, which added a rattling of window sashes to that of furniture handles as they got themselves ready. His stomach was threatened by the boiled haddock they had eaten in a hurry. What if he farted out loud during a subdued passage? Or if, on condescending to embrace, She should smell the haddock juices the pores of his cheeks were exuding? He unearthed a bottle of left-over eau de Cologne, a present from some woman who had expected to get a painting cheap, and soused his breastpocket handkerchief with the stuff. The tonic smell encouraged him: he sprinkled more of the eau de Cologne down the front of his monogrammed shirt, another present from another woman. Perhaps if She smelled the smell She would be reminded of invalids, and treat him kindly. So he dashed eau de Cologne at his armpits.

When he went down Rhoda wasn’t ready, though he caught sight of her moving about her room dressed in the squirrel coat. This time she hadn’t tarted up her hair: it was hanging round her face, giving her the appearance of a grizzled monkey.

Armed with his masculine authority he marched into Rhoda’s camp and said: ‘Next time I sell a painting we must restore the conservatory.’

‘Oh,’ she murmured, ‘should we recognize it afterwards? Wouldn’t it lose its charm?’

As he kicked at the displaced tiles and fragments of glass he was glad they shared this obsession for the conservatory in which Katherine Volkov had performed her dance.

But Rhoda had begun swearing: she said ‘damn’ several times quickly, like a woman imitating Harry Courtney.

‘What is it?’ he asked, returning. ‘You’ve torn your good coat?’

She had: by catching the pocket on a knob; a triangular piece of skin was hanging loose.

‘You must mend it!’ he panted.

‘There isn’t time! ’ Her rodent voice had asserted itself.

‘Do it up with a safety-pin.’

The idea seemed to appeal to her: or anyway, she followed his advice.

Although the damage had been patched up, he was disturbed by remembering the torn coat in his recent dream. Was he to be cut down, then, by K.271? The operation promised to be less bland than that of the tram ploughing into his marzipan flesh: music can draw actual blood.

Foreboding must have been at large in Rhoda too: she started gasping; she grabbed his hand with her monkey’s paw. ‘I’m so frightened!’ she whimpered when they were trampling out, pulling the front door shut.