Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘No. I didn’t know, Hurtle.’ Rhoda was leaning forward, dangling her legs from the sumptuous seat, chafing her arthritic knuckles. ‘What if I did?’ she began shouting. ‘And some get over it!’

‘Yes. If they’re allowed.’

‘Yesss,’ she hissed, bowing her head.

By the time they arrived the brandy was glittering in them again.

Rhoda said: ‘I couldn’t calculate when I last went to a reception. But I feel as slithery as a snake.’

‘Did you brush up your epigrams?’

Bundling out of the car they enjoyed a little giggle for each other’s wit. A pity the driver was only able to assess their bodies; so intent on dragging them out, he ignored their finely-tempered minds.

‘I never felt better — not, anyway — not since it happened.’

But Rhoda was looking frightened again as they mounted the steps, either because she could hear herself wheeze, or because of the leg he was dragging after them, or perhaps on account of their common and unjustified daring.

Almost nobody had arrived.

Honeysett brayed: ‘Welcome, Miss Courtney, to the Auspicious Occasion!’ and almost clapped her on the back.

Restraining himself in time, he still couldn’t avoid at least touching its unclassified substance.

Rhoda seemed more frightened than ever, not necessarily by Honeysett’s near assault — she might even have enjoyed that — but because the late arrival of the guests made it inevitable that she should be noticed looking at her brother’s paintings.

‘Good God,’ she complained, ‘what an awful lot of them there are! And how rich you must be, Hurtle, to have sold so many enormous paintings. I wonder who you’ll leave it to.’

Grateful to Miss Courtney for ignoring his gaffe, Honeysett brayed worse than ever.

At the same time a young woman, cool as lettuce, but with rather bulbous calves, came up and said: ‘All these for you, Mr Duffield.’ She gave him a fistful of telegrams. She also offered to take their coats, and seemed not a little curious to see what might be hidden underneath.

He delayed opening the telegrams, partly out of perversity, more because it would force him into declaring his hand on a night when it was unusually weak.

‘Aren’t you going to see who they’re from?’ Not that Rhoda was interested: since her birth as a rose out of a balding squirrel, she had stood prinking her petals, moistening her no longer drought-stricken lips. ‘I can’t remember ever receiving a telegram, ’ she murmured as though it were one of her virtues.

He decided to open one or two of the envelopes, but coldly. First he had to lay down the whole wad on a ledge. Alone in her deformity most of her life, Rhoda must have been planning this, though she hid her ploy under a vague grandeur and the rosy dress. Everybody watching was wondering whether to offer help. Rhoda at least joined him in warding them off with a stiff silence.

When he had steadied with his dead hand, and with his live one, torn out a lump of envelope, he read:

ALL PRAISE TO THE DELICIOUS MONSTER

BOO HOLLINGRAKE

‘That’s from Olivia Davenport,’ he told Rhoda. ‘You remember Boo?’

‘Oh dear, will she be here? I never liked her.’

‘But you and she were bosoms as girls.’

‘I didn’t like her. She only liked me because I made her laugh.’

He couldn’t remember ever making Olivia laugh; for that matter he couldn’t remember Olivia Davenport: her jewels, her dresses, her parties, perhaps. Slightly more, he remembered Boo Hollingrake: under the Monstera deliciosa, and in the William Street post office.

Distraction drove him into opening another of the telegrams:

COURAGE FOR TONIGHT LOVE AND THROUGHTS

VOLKOV

‘Why should she send a wire?’ Her ‘thoughts’ made him furious. ‘Isn’t she going to be with us? Besides, I hardly know the woman.’

‘Who?’ asked Rhoda, from a cloud since accepting a cigarette offered by Mr Honeysett.

‘Mrs Volkov.’

‘She sent it out of kindness, I expect. And because she admires you.’

But he didn’t care to be admired by one who had recognized a ‘lost soul.’

‘It’s’—he was panting—‘it’s a waste of money.’ He was conscious that even the good side of his face was going. ‘Since when have you begun to smoke?’

‘Since now.’

‘But it doesn’t — it isn’t like you!’

The way she held the cigarette it was something offensive but inevitable: a cat’s turd, for instance, discovered in the corner of her room.

‘I think I thought it might be bad for me,’ she said, and laughed.

Ostensibly because his little sister was playing up he didn’t open more of the telegrams; while actually he was too intent on frisking Mrs Volkov’s image for her motives.

As they sauntered through the glaring rooms, Rhoda breathed: ‘All of Hurtle’s naked women!’ Her languor was for Honeysett, who enjoyed the unlikeliness of the situation; but Gil, like Mrs Volkov, was kind.

Remember those pale lips in the bus trying to draw you into what could only be an ectoplasmic relationship.

Irritation drove him to shake out the telegram again: it was a cable — no, a rocket, he realized — launched from New York.

Glad he had fallen behind the others, he was still gladder he hadn’t opened the rest of the sheaf. What if Hero? What if Nance— Colthirst? Oh God, senility was the worst threat of all, and here were the ghosts threatening him with it, the poltergeists standing him on end.

But why VOLKOV? Unless to show him she was his equal. It was what he had wanted for his spiritual child, his Kathy: other names could only be adoptive. She was not his equal, however; her ‘love and thoughts’ stroked him with the tails of Maman’s sables. He was their little boy, whose head they were shoving inside the wardrobe, to drug him with scents, to protect themselves from his third eye.

At the first opportunity he detached Rhoda from Honeysett. ‘It wasn’t Mrs Volkov. It was Kathy. In New York,’ he whispered.

Rhoda must have been expecting it. ‘Why not? I believe the child was very fond of you. And you were too self-absorbed to notice.’ His accuser had never looked so ravaged, still holding her cigarette on high, though no longer parallel with the parquet. Suddenly he realized the floors were buckling and groaning as the wheels of the enemy chariots began to grind across them.

‘Boy! We’re for it!’ Honeysett ran forward bellowing, jingling his money, as though to dive headfirst into waves there was no question of stopping.

The Trustees had been at pains to harness society with intellect. There was, in addition, a rabble of nonentities wished on them by the painter, with such ill humour one could only suppose he regretted his own sense of duty. Naturally the sister had to come, and in any case, everybody would want to have a look at the sister; but some of the others lowered the tone: they smelled of failure or modesty.

So, whatever the organizers had intended, the elements of their rout were varied: some arrived, their fashion the blowsier for formal dinners, trailing, along with their stoles and the fringes of their conversation, scents of the liqueurs and cigars from which they had been rudely dragged; others more ascetic, in day clothes, discovered traces of the delicacies they had swallowed in a hurry: aspic from chickens’ breasts, oil dribbled from a dolmas, the last exquisite grain of caviare stuffing a hollow tooth; while a humble few were round-eyed still from their strong cuppa and beans on toast. Almost all had fortified themselves in some way at some early stage of the evening, and were now controlling a resentful scepticism arising out of gas and heartburn. One or two were possessed by a devil of excitement: they hoped for an experience; which nice people and professional intellectuals were for once united in condemning as ignorant and tasteless.