Patrick White - The Vivisector

But Cec had. At mention of his act, jet began encrusting the bosom of his business suit: he was all smirk in the shadow of his ostrich feathers.

‘Incidentally, Hurtle,’ Shuard attempted an even more confidential tone, which remained as audible as brass, ‘I received a letter by this evening’s mail — an air letter from the little lady’—actually digging you in the ribs—‘from Kathy Volkov!’

Peugh! Shuard’s breath stinking of stale underclothes.

‘There’s a message in it she wants me to deliver. She wants me to tell. .’

‘No. No! Not now! Some other time.’ Not Shuard undressing their relationship.

‘She said,’ the man insisted. ‘“Tell my dear old mate, my darling old rooster. .”’

‘No! I don’t believe. I don’t want to — know. Never!’ His pure soul, his spiritual child.

At least the incident gave the mother her cue. Mrs Volkov, so pale, so shy, so unworldly as to be the ghost of a woman — a wonder the Russian ever got it in — sidled up in an impersonation of somebody who had suffered a stroke. Certainly she’d had one herself, but so slight, or so overcome, she could only count as a cryptovictim.

Looking to one side of him, Mrs Volkov said: ‘I’ve never thanked you, Mr Duffield, for the part you played — in — in moulding my little gairl.’

Mrs Volkov had probably never shown a blush: she was too anaemic; but now something was happening to her: she all but gave off pale vapours, together with the innocent perfume from some kind of health soap.

‘ Moulded?’ He shouldn’t have: but what else?

And now the abnormal word, from hanging out of Mrs Volkov’s mouth, was protruding from his also, contoured like a film-star’s breast.

As soon as she could manage his lips again, he assured the mother: ‘I think Kathy was born with a pretty good idea of the shape she must take.’

‘I don’t know, I’m sure,’ Mrs Volkov murmured. ‘I received no education, but came here at sixteen, from Carnoustie. And keep to myself.’ Then she actually did blush, a brilliant satiny rose, as she realized for the first time, it seemed: ‘My daughter is my only extravagance.’

They laughed so easily and happily together, acknowledging the ailment they had in common; he only had to go and spoil it by remembering what he was looking for.

‘Where is Rhoda?’

Mrs Volkov appeared alarmed; her answer was in an intake of breath. ‘Miss Courtney — she’s here, of course, Mr Duffield — at your elbow.’

So he turned, and there was his sister, as Mrs Volkov had predicted.

Rhoda lowered her eyelids, and drew in her teeth, which he suspected had been glistening and laughing the moment before in some piece of by-play with Don Lethbridge. (Don was certainly her spy, as she was probably Olivia’s.)

‘I’ve been looking for you, Rhoda.’

She grew increasingly sullen. ‘I don’t know why you should. With everybody courting you.’ One of the seams of the rose dress, so devotedly machined by Mrs Volkov, had burst right open.

‘Don’t you know I depend on you?’ Draw her out.

‘Are you ill then?’ The drifts of powder still clinging to her face made it look more anxious.

What he saw reassured him; though with Rhoda you could never be absolutely sure.

‘I wanted to ask whether you had noticed Mrs — Mrs Davenport, ’ he tried, and watched.

Rhoda hesitated. Though outwardly still — she might have been carved out of grey pumice — her mind, he saw, was skipping on ahead.

‘Olivia Hollingrake,’ he explained, to help them both in a difficult situation.

Immediately Rhoda’s eyelashes, such as they were, began to sift the guileful possibilities with which her mind had been playing.

‘Oh, Boo!’ It was accompanied by what was intended, no doubt, as a radiant expression. ‘Yes, I’ve noticed Boo several times this evening. What a magnificent figure! How wonderfully preserved!’

‘Olivia? About all Olivia’s been able to preserve are the Hollingrake jewels.’

But Rhoda didn’t seem to hear. ‘That dress — it might have screamed on anyone else — a gold dress. I wasn’t close enough to examine it in detail, but from a distance you had the impression of pure, beaten gold. Imagine! And so few women can afford to display a naked back.’ She had faltered at no point in saying her piece.

‘Olivia? A gold dress? To me she looked more than anything like a scruffy old Italian priest stuck with ill-gotten carbuncles.’

Rhoda sighed. ‘Perhaps I tend to see Olly,’ no one in his memory had referred to Olivia as ‘Olly’, ‘in a golden light. Don’t you remember how the light at Sunningdale was always golden — always morning?’

He did; but the light was beside the point.

‘Why didn’t you approach this vision of gold and nakedness?’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t dare!’ She laughed, and contemplated her burst seam with detached interest rather than concern.

‘She said she loved you very dearly. That you had shared secrets and jokes, which you recorded in a diary. I wonder which secrets and jokes you shared with “Olly”.’

‘I destroyed the diaries while I was still a girl.’

‘Then nobody will tell. And the bath water’s gone down the hole.’

Rhoda flinched only very slightly inside her trance. ‘What astonishes me, Hurtle, is that you should need to ask. With an exceptional memory like yours. I’ve never envied you a bit of it.’

So Rhoda too, was putting on the mask: wasn’t there one they called ‘Megaera’?

‘Oh, memory — memory’s too full in the end. If you could tear it up — like a bloody diary.’

Rhoda dropped her mask: she was the tattered moppet smelling of a cheap face-powder she had put on to spite Maman; spiritually, but only spiritually, she was floating in Maman’s borrowed shoes.

‘Then you are sick!’ Her pronouncement sounded hopeful, if not joyful.

‘Is that what you want?’

‘You can do things for people when they’re sick. Or old.’

Was it — dreadful thought — what they had both always been longing for? To be united, in one senile mind, mumbling over a basin of groats.

‘Not if I’m struck dead!’ he shouted.

Rhoda gave him such a frightened look, she could only be superstitious, in their rational Australian society.

‘I have something to finish,’ he added with less passion, and tried to find consolation in his wristwatch.

But the minutiae of the surroundings were crowding back on him: the white shaft from an overhead lamp turning a painted surface into a sea of molten glass words proliferating I can’t see what it’s meant to be a man is it a woman a very gnarled one a tree then I expect it’s whatever you want it to be like most things gold threads in a brocade coat the jujube colours of the seemingly victorious young the few pale pink hairs tenaciously resigned in a very old neck something something particularly horrendous the Prime Minister’s speech and after.

Speech is surely more brutal than paint because it tends to dictate rather than state.

Here is this foetus, for instance, in a fringe of beard, not in jackboots certainly, elastic sides, who has stood the archangel up. This foetus thing is dictating to the faithful disciple what he must tell the magic wand and black box.

‘Surely, though, if you’re so close to — to the “master”—the painter — Mr Hurtle Duffield — you must have seen these paintings everybody’s so interested to hear about? These so-called God paintings. ’

‘I don’t know. It’s none of my business.’

‘But haven’t you any — any sense of historic importance? You’re his associate, aren’t you?’