Patrick White - The Vivisector

To one side, in the hall, Brahms was beating his chest while the waves broke around him. Rhoda had already done such duty by music she mightn’t have heard if an attendant hadn’t approached and silently hushed her clatter.

She continued to whisper while performing an elaborate tiptoe across the tiles. ‘Mr Shuard enjoys living, whatever one may think of his way of life.’ She giggled in what sounded like sympathy.

‘But isn’t he a critic? What’s he doing ambling off during a concert? Or perhaps he knows enough already.’

Rhoda looked over her shoulder. ‘Between ourselves, I believe the paper sacked him. Now he’s just enjoying himself — living off his last wife’s bribe-money.’

Their footsteps teetered away, while the souped-up Brahms surged in browner, more turgid waves.

Rhoda whispered: ‘He’s really a very kind man. He’s promised to deliver Mrs Volkov home. Then, I’m told, he’s taking Kathy to supper at the house of some Viennese — of the musical world. I don’t believe musicians ever want to leave that world; they certainly never admit outsiders, though sometimes they may pretend to.’

They went out into the darkness. Rhoda started clawing up at his arm: she who had so recently and lightly betrayed Kathy in chitchat with Shuard after the convention of the class she believed she had repudiated, was looking for protection from a crueller truth, he presently realized.

‘There was a man staring at me during the concert,’ she told him. ‘At first I thought it was because I’m the sister of a famous man. Then I came to the conclusion, from the way he couldn’t stop eyeing me, he was admiring my fur coat. Squirrel isn’t too common now.’

‘He must have been on your good side — the side away from the safety-pin.’

The wind had started to cut again.

‘Did you notice,’ he asked, ‘Shuard is full of false teeth?’

‘Is he? Most people are. On the whole I think false are more presentable than our own discoloured, crooked ones. Yours and mine, anyway. Kathy’s teeth are splendid, but she’s in the flower of her womanhood, and we’re a couple of old crocks hanging on to what we’ve got — out of stinginess and pride.’

It was an unimportant hour of night, too late for one crowd, too early for another: it made the giggling more personal, and turned glances into guided missiles.

Katherine Volkov’s successful tour was over quicker by the calendar than his private suffering would have shown. On account of her engagements in other parts of the world, it was actually very brief: after the orchestral concerts in Sydney, there were those in Melbourne — with the First Physiologist thrown in — then the return to Sydney and her farewell recital.

He refused to go to the recital, and knew Rhoda was relieved because she would be able to live it in her own way. She could go round afterwards, uninhibited by his presence, and rub cheeks, and be snubbed along with the whole Cutbush gang; while the chosen sycophants, the ffolliott Morgan set and Shuard, wearing their invisible rose-petal masks and gold-leaf leotards, waited to carry off the artist, not to debauch her, but to learn from her. After the recital, none of the tumult of Brahms to deaden departure, only single, lingering notes aimed with deadly accuracy.

Since Kathy had finally exorcized herself, this time he needn’t even listen in.

The weather had turned warm enough for Rhoda to dispense with her fur coat. In any case, it was hardly wearable by now: the safety-pin too visible in the unmended tear; signs of horse-flesh gumming up the maltreated squirrel. In the absence of the coat she proposed to present herself in a lilac creation, or more accurately, confection. Somehow the material was too rough, its nutty basis too liberally treated with fondant for anybody as delicate as Rhoda (he wouldn’t label her as ‘subtle’). Draped over the hump, there was a little pleated, frosted cape, and down the front a lovingly worked out-of-proportion corsage of orchids in pink gauze. She looked awful, particularly the patches of rouge, and the strings where her calves should have been; but she was determined her camouflage should make her feel beautiful.

‘Where did you get the new dress?’ It was his duty to ask.

‘Mrs Volkov made it for me. She always has. For any important occasion.’ She stood ruffling up the spray of artificial orchids. ‘Less since her attack. But recently it’s done her nerves good to occupy herself.’

He had heard Mrs Volkov was known to the neighbourhood for her dressmaking; she had brought up Kathy on the proceeds from it, augmented by the money she earned from child-minding, washing up and letting her spare room. If he couldn’t remember any other dresses, Rhoda’s important occasions had probably occurred before she came to live with him.

‘I’m glad you like this,’ she told herself with prim pleasure; her kiss — for the occasion — felt as dry as chalk.

When she came home he could see that a headache or something was raging in his lilac clown.

‘How was it?’ he asked.

He was positively languid from feeling free of Kathy at last; while Rhoda’s chalky brows were as pleated as her cape.

She seemed unwilling to goad her sensibility further by discussing the recital, but screwed up the pleats in her forehead tighter still, and answered from behind closed lids: ‘Her Scriabin was exceptional. Even Mr Shuard had to admit it.’

‘Scriabin? Don’t think I’ve ever heard a note of him. Tell me about the Scriabin.’

But she wouldn’t. Her clown’s face shuddered and cracked under its chalky silt.

‘And did they carry her off to the flesh-pots afterwards? To round off her Scriabin?’

‘Oh, no. Mrs Volkov is too unwell. It’s the thought of parting. Kathy is off early in the morning.’

Then she was as good as gone, he realized. She had gone out of his life without a murmur from either of them. Of course it wouldn’t have occurred to Kathy, and since she had killed by her vulgarity and vice anything he had created in her, there was nothing left for him to regret. He would learn to live with nothing, as his deformed sister advocated.

But Rhoda, he saw, had begun to cry: it was trickling down through the remnants of her powder.

‘For God’s sake,’ he shouted, ‘what’s the matter with you?’

‘Nothing,’ she sobbed. ‘Everything,’ she corrected herself with increasing sogginess. ‘This dress, for instance!’ She dashed the back of her open claw against her friend’s handiwork.

Shortly after, she went to bed, no doubt deciding she might lose more sympathy than she would gain by prolonged sniffles; while he sat on with his guilt for company: for withholding his affection. Probably he had given her the squirrel coat in its place, and to pay him out, Rhoda had caught the disease from which he suffered. By the time they were both riddled with it, when each had become the same exotic fungus, would it greatly matter who possessed whom?

Anyway, Kathy was gone, trailing rococo clouds and the worst screamers of radio advertisements. Her slogans streamed across the air: ‘My boomerang will always come back. . Even if I’m sort of married to Mozart and Beethoven, I’ll find the time to love all you bloomin’ Australians. .’

For days afterwards, he was back and forth between the upper floor and the incinerator, destroying a whole pile of drawings. (Nothing of any value, however: it was his latterday trash, his senility going up in smoke.) He hacked less effectually at several masonite boards. He could feel Rhoda listening; he could feel her watching, unable to do anything about the smoke which was rising through the slits in the scaly incinerator. He burned letters too, remembering a tussle which had taken place during another holocaust.