Patrick White - The Vivisector

There she was, standing in front of the piano. The public servants, the awakened ladies, the displaced Europeans, all were clapping. And clapping. While the artist kissed the tips of her fingers. She shook a firm hand with the conductor, a limper one with the leader; she nursed the cellophane bundle of flowers as though they were the baby she wanted to have by an Australian. No practical situation would ever find her at a loss. If she had appeared possessed only a few moments before, the spirit had withdrawn from her. There remained the swathe of watered silk, the explosion of diamonds: also perhaps a trace of diffidence towards the one by whom she had been consummated and her achievement made possible.

Seeing it, he rejoiced in the vision of pure joy they had shared, both then, and tonight. It seemed as though the heart were a cupboard one simply had to open: innocence hides nothing; and perfection bears looking at.

So he sat sunken, misted up, and because he was less than innocent, wondering how he could hide his shame; while Rhoda had started a dry cough, and was rattling a dented bon-bonnière with half-a-dozen lozenges in it, one of which she began to devour, then almost at once another, apparently having no faith in the first.

‘Why’—beating her flat chest—‘does music always make me— cough? ’

The audience was going out for the interval. Eyes suggested theirs had been the subtlest experience, though in some cases, the unsavoury-looking pair of eccentrics in their midst spoiled the pleasures of self-congratulation; to rub up against anything so deplorable might have haunted them for ever after.

The Mozart still inside him would have curdled if Rhoda hadn’t twitched round suddenly and hissed in liquorice gusts: ‘I didn’t tell you, but Mrs Volkov expects us to look in at the artists’ room. She expects you, that is. Naturally the poor woman is out of her water.’

‘What a relief — for everybody!’ He laughed heartlessly, and kept it up.

‘Out of her depth, I mean.’ Rhoda blushed and frowned. ‘What I mean to say is,’ she battered away, ‘it’s rather a burden for Mrs Volkov, and she’d like some friend of a different level to help her out.’

The prospect hardly appealed; but he saw that he was commandeered. ‘I thought of slipping away. Don’t feel like any more,’ he was muttering pitifully while keeping the top of Rhoda’s head in sight.

A more studiously charitable crowd parted to allow a hunchback to pass, and they entered the mahogany canyon at the end of which was the artists’ room. A guard in mufti hovered round the open door. Inside, Katherine Volkov, looking pale, stood glancing out spasmodically through a cluster of admirers.

Seated in a far corner, smiling her stroked smile, the mother mumbled and beckoned. The new arrivals were admitted.

While haunting the outskirts of the carpet, he thought he recognized the one-f-ed physiologist inside the tom-cat cheeks which come with regular steak and bed. Plastered against him was a young woman of delicate bones and enormous pregnancy possessive enough to be a wife. Ignored by the object of their visit, the couple was staring in sulky admiration at the signs of her achievement.

Lady ffolliott Morgan and a trio of satellites were congratulating Katherine Volkov on her dress.

‘By a little person in Vienna. I shan’t tell you her name, because she’s nameless.’ The Volkova remained silent a moment while admiring the fall of her own watered skirt. ‘Of course I influenced her!’

The ladies all laughed in appreciation.

Accepting that her time was up, Lady ffolliott Morgan looked wistful as she asked. ‘We shall see you on Sunday?’ It was tentative, but hopeful.

‘I have it tattooed on my mind — a quarter to one, punctually.’

The ladies laughed again because she made it sound so amusing.

The Dutchman dug a forefinger into her shoulder where the skin took over from the taffeta. ‘Vee vill even so make sure: I vill bring you.’ Then he went off to conduct the Brahms.

At last Kathy was free to rub cheeks. ‘Clif! And this is Trish? When is it expected? Isn’t that beaut! I’m so happy for you.’ She glittered the more for her descent into suburbia.

‘And darling Miss Courtney!’ She descended lower still to embrace this quaint dwarf.

Her back bent, the Volkova might have been helping pull the go-cart full of stinking offal for cats. On straightening up, she drew a deep breath — the room was smelling of tuberoses enough to deaden a corpse — and gave Rhoda her healthiest smile. ‘I’m terribly grateful to you. Mum does depend on your support.’

Mrs Volkov nodded and prepared words which wouldn’t form.

Kathy all the while was flickering her eyelids in the right direction, just about to — she’d have to say something soon surely to God.

He couldn’t help trying to carve into the tended skin, through the technical smiles, to the vision they had created together; but instead of helping him revive it, she was growing hobbledehoy; she clasped her hands in a tight ball at her waist: there was nowhere about that severe dress in which to hide them.

What made the situation more embarrassing, Rhoda seemed to understand it; she whispered loudly: ‘Hurtle was tremendously impressed.’ (Her dolt brother.) ‘We must go now,’ she whispered louder still. ‘They make such demands on you.’

As he followed Rhoda out of the room Kathy blundered after them, and was apparently speaking to him. ‘Thank you for coming to hear me play.’ Her face was pursed up in a gross vegetable shape; she was so hesitant she almost tottered. ‘I do appreciate it,’ she managed to blurt before planting on his cheek a kiss which immediately bounced off: it was so clumsily done.

Ignoring Mrs Volkov, a grey blur waving vaguely from her mahogany corner, he ran snorting down the now deserted corridor to catch up with Rhoda. He hoped she hadn’t seen anything of what had just happened between Kathy and himself: the two geniuses.

Rhoda almost certainly hadn’t, because of an encounter which was putting her on her mettle. Without any difficulty, alas, he recognized Shuard.

Shuard didn’t age like other people: always only a little plumper than the time before, the steel wool only a shade more silvery, the whole man so smooth and preserved, no doubt at the expense of the several wives on whom he had battened. He was aided and abetted, of course, by the banality of his mind: nothing like an empty head for keeping the wrinkles at bay.

Rhoda was playing up to a man, who bent down in a caricature of gallantry.

‘Didn’t you enjoy it, Mr Shuard?’ She had launched into her best imitation of Maman. ‘Such a charming — an exquisite performance! ’

Because he couldn’t reach down as far as her elbow, Shuard tapped her on the shoulder, which made it look less gallant than he might have intended, but more in keeping with his patronizing nature.

‘Stylish, yes. But not Mozart. Not yet. Perhaps if she works at it. And Kathy is a determined young lady.’

Rhoda made the laughing sounds, half protest, half agreement, Maman would have made in the circumstances, but drier because of her own little wizened throat. She wasn’t exactly betraying Kathy, only obeying a convention.

‘You understand?’ Shuard gargled from behind his perfectly false teeth.

‘Oh, work — yes — I agree — so necessary — and rewarding!’ Rhoda gurgled.

Shuard was standing so firmly on his own ground he looked in no particular direction while greeting Duffield. His handshake felt warm and cushioned. Whatever else, the man was an adept.

You glanced back irresistibly to watch the enemy’s continued progress down the corridor: the intolerable saunter, shortening a leg every few paces, as in the lavatory when buttoning up his flies, here in the corridor still easing his fat crutch. And Katherine Volkov appearing at the door of the artists’ room with her moistest smile: she must have livened it up in the meantime. She had put on a pair of long black gloves, which made her arms look more experienced, her hands more predatory, as Shuard, the slippery bugger, whirled her round, their mouths attaching themselves with the sure suction of roused sea-anemones.