Patrick White - The Vivisector

They began to negotiate the never quite familiar labyrinth, looking for non-existent taxis, the wind slashing at them.

‘Have you been using scent?’ Rhoda shrieked against the wind.

‘A drop of eau de Cologne.’

‘The same. I can’t bear scent. It affects my sinuses.’

She tried to produce some soggy sounds, but the wind was from the wrong quarter, and by the time they found a taxi, and were enclosed in its airlessness, she had discovered other fears.

‘Mrs Volkov has developed a bladder complaint. I do hope she can last till the interval.’

Mrs Volkov, he saw immediately, was sitting in the same row several seats away from them. Without the protection of her iron hat, and probably in a state of nerves over her weak bladder and the approaching performance, she looked paler, more monolithic, suggestive of granite veiled in cloud. She was smiling her permanently swivelled smile out of gelatinous lips. It would have fascinated him to calculate how much of herself she had contributed to her daughter, if he hadn’t scented a danger on her far side: he noticed what could have been Cutbush the grocer, skin grown loose on his now shrunken fleshiness, clothes baggy over all. Cutbush was seated on the aisle; between himself and Mrs Volkov sat the lady who must be his wife, visible for the moment only as a swirl of greenish-purple hair.

The start of the evening was unpleasant enough to make you wish you hadn’t come. And the haddock. And the woodwind tuning up.

Nor could he really believe they would be given what they were promised, not even when the first item, printed clearly in the programme as ‘Overture to the Magic Flute’, did in fact turn out to be The Magic Flute. Under the spell of scepticism, he skipped the artist’s photograph, unwilling to discover which persona they might expect: whether the Pamina of his tenderest longings, some vindictive Queen of the Night, or worst of all, the complete Stranger; though from what she had told the radio it would most likely be Little Kathy Volkov from Paddo. ‘I am so happy to be back — so very happy — in Australia. . No. There is no one. I haven’t any thought of marriage. Not for the moment. Music is my life. . I have so much to learn. . Oh yes, truthfully (giggle) . . Australia is so wonderful. So warm —except when it blows stone cold on you (giggle giggle). But I love it. . Well, yes, it is short, but I have other engagements. . Yes, London next, then New York. . But I adore Australia. . No. No thought for the moment. Of course, in time. It’s only natural. . I’d love to have a baby by an Australian. .’ (Rhoda reported Mrs Volkov had been most provoked by that bit; perhaps understandably, because it hadn’t been for want of trying on the part of Paddo’s Little Kathy.) ‘. . I adore the sunshine. . the gum-trees. . (Had she seen one?) . . the A.B.C. for giving me such a wonderful start in my musical career. . So you see, my heart can belong only to Australia. .’

Little did they know Her Heart Belonged to Daddy, and that she was capable of breaking into a tap routine, a chewed pink bow going flop flop at the end of her floppy plait, in front of the desolated piano.

He shuddered to find somebody walking over his grave.

The orchestra was playing a work by a contemporary. Imprisoned between walls of Mozart, the subscribers were prevented from stampeding out. He wished he could have supported the despised composer, but his hands had been made feeble by the collapse of faith in his ability to sway himself, let alone others. The scattered applause sounded like an old Venetian blind stirred by a feeble breeze.

The trial was imminent. The conductor, a Dutchman, was disappearing, his buttocks too casual for the circumstances, to drag the prisoner from her mahogany cell.

At once it became obvious that precautionary measures were unnecessary: she made her entrance with an eagerness almost too pronounced. Where Kathy had once edged tortuously through the field of musicians, Volkov arrived at the front of the podium with steely, though graceful, skill. Very briefly her fingertips touched those of the conductor, who hadn’t after all led her out: he had been led. She seemed all matt white, of skin, and black, of watered taffeta, an explosion of diamonds on one shoulder. She was wearing her hair in a dangerously heavy, though expert coil, resting in the nape of her proud neck.

She wheeled so smoothly, that, in her faultless, white back reminded of the Königliche Reitschule; so far in her haute école she hadn’t put a hoof wrong.

But as soon as she was seated he recognized the concealed panic which rose in him daily at first touch of the whip. He could almost hear her knuckles cracking as she kneaded them; he could hear her stiff, watered skirt seething with black nerves.

Not for long: she was required to intrude indecently soon; but the violins inclined towards her, in courtship, and the too suave (elderly) Dutch conductor. Then they were all united in the noble charges and intensified caracollings of the music: he too, when at last able to free his throat his locked hand hypnotized by the point of a black silken elbow the throat pulsating white the white the whitest turbulence of bosom as this nameless artist humbly lowered her eyelids at what she had seen reflected in the mirror of perfection.

There were, on the other hand, the moments, the unaccompanied ones, when the unnecessary orchestra of husbands and housewives and raw boys and tired spinsters sat clasping their instruments, while his mistress Katherine Volkov played to delight her lover in a room empty except for themselves; or when his darling Kathy called in her brood, and the golden chicken-notes, in danger of scattering too far, scuttled fluttering for protection under the flounce of her swelling black.

Oh God he was in love with music. He raised his head to it: his Adam’s apple must have stuck out inordinately. He wouldn’t have dared look at Rhoda, whom he had forgotten anyway. He did glance once at Mrs Volkov, who might have been having her child again, there in the Town Hall.

He wondered what part the Russian had played in the making of Katusha, beyond planting his seed in a granite crevice. Perhaps a soul had sensed the rebirth of its own tormented glories, and defected. He had a vision of the recalcitrant creator standing in the middle of a gibber plain tufted with saltbush, dangling a grimy calico bagful of uncut opals. The crumpet-coloured, crumpet-textured face didn’t reveal: but here was Katya in the Andantino polishing the crude stones into an opalescence of music.

He recognized the milky texture, the spurts of black fires as theirs: dark tragedies hinted at resolved themselves in limpid strength. The tragedy was Mrs Volkov’s. And Rhoda’s, from the look of her: she was rocking on her little dried-up-peanut buttocks; though her eyes were closed, her smile exposed her shockingly.

An ambulance clanging down George Street entered through closed doors and reopened a dream he had been hoping healed.

Along the rows the intellectual public servants and unassimilated Europeans were sitting tensed by the Andantino. Lady ffolliott Morgan in pink ostrich feather curyette and enough jewellry to stock a shop (perhaps it did) promised to lay her chin on her navel. The ladies from the right suburbs loved to doze, but only to the right accompaniment. (That Schönberg, that Webern! Oh, Sir Charles! No, Sir Charles!) For the time being at least, the waves on which they were rising and falling wouldn’t suck them down into some horrid abyss, or so they believed; they were riding safe in their own opalescent radiance.

The finale almost woke them up: too brisk. The Volkova might have liked to shed her sleeves, but settled down to business. In the middle she looked up, as though remembering her neglected lover, and began to cosset him back, into the curves of her white flesh, and more intricate spirals of pink shells, only to cast him up again, at the fussy business of life which she couldn’t ignore: after all, she took such pleasure in it.