Patrick White - The Vivisector

From the porch they watched Rowley drive her away. Poor old Sybil Gibbons would remain a pale thing: except in her diary. In one place in the diary he had found: ‘There are nights when I lie in bed and wonder whether I shall be able to prevent myself beating out my brains against the wall. I shall be thirty next January. .’ If he ever painted Sybil Gibbons he would show her pale-green, vegetable flesh tortured by moonlight and hot sheets, her lips slightly open as he saw they would have to be.

Actually he soon forgot Miss Gibbons: there were the bony Frenchwomen, their tricolour faces, and wicked bums in spite of corsets. There was the French language, which hadn’t come alive till now, in spite of Maman, and Madame Parmentier, and the books through which he had tediously ground. Most important of all were the paintings, which showed him a reality more intense than the life he had so far experienced. He was all the time drawing in secret, and destroying, and on several occasions he painted something. The inadequacy and necessity of his efforts drained him as despairingly as an orgasm in the bath.

Rhoda’s life too, seemed to become more secret the more they travelled, the longer they lived in foreign hotels. Though she wasn’t growing all that much — Dr Mosbacher confirmed that in such cases, the period of physical growth was brief — he could sense that she had grown away from him inside. All right, he didn’t in any way depend on Rhoda; but there were times when he would have liked to be certain of what was going on.

At Wiesbaden, for instance, she announced without encouragement: ‘Hurtle, I’m going to show you something.’ Hadn’t he heard it before? ‘I’m going to show you a poem I’ve written. Probably tomorrow. By then I shall have polished it enough.’

He could hardly believe she had written the poem: she was looking too mysterious; and in fact she never showed it to him.

Rhoda was thriving on the mysteries she made in a succession of hotels, in the plush-upholstered nooks, to the tune of unexplained gusts of laughter, in the smells of dumpling and Rehbraten, and soil gone sour round potted palms; while something was happening inside her blouse, to what Maman continued calling ‘poor Rhoda’s chest’, and Rhoda herself had begun referring to her ‘strawberry’ hair.

Because he might buy a sapphire in the morning, Father ordained that they were to economize over baths at night in the locked bathrooms of the foreign hotels. Behind the back of the Kammermädchen (or femme de chambre ), the clean Australians replaced one another virtuously, but secretly. In the steep baths of the steamed-up bathrooms of Belgium, Germany and France, there were strands of strawberry mingling with the darker hairs. The rough bathrobes had grown heavy with damp by the time you inherited them. Even a dry robe must have flattened Rhoda, who had never taken a bath without a nurse or a governess at her elbow. But she loved to lie in hot baths. She lay so long, sometimes he would have to knock. (What if she had died?)

Always on taking over, he would feel guilty, lying in the bath where Rhoda had lain, surrounded by her watermark and a few strands of pinkish hair. He would jump out, skidding on the tiles, and rub himself down frantically. Once, for certain, she pieced together a torn-up drawing while he lay thinking in the bath.

They were all of them more or less obsessed by Rhoda.

In Brussels and Paris they bought her clothes to make her forget about herself. They bought her a hat which was like a Frenchwoman’s hat on a little girl. Her head trembled in the old way while she walked, but there was a new swinging motion of the body, as though she had discovered importance in her hips, or she might perhaps throw the load off her back. She looked at him and dared him to see, but knew that he did.

On coming out of the bedroom in Brussels Maman told him: ‘Poor Rhoda isn’t by any means well. We must ask them to send for a doctor.’

‘Oh, I’m well,’ Rhoda called from the room behind. ‘I’m always well. Only the doctors say I’m not. Behind my back! ’ She burst out laughing, or possibly crying, but Maman went in again, and closed the door.

Again, Maman and Rhoda were arguing: it was the same bedroom above the glass wintergarden. ‘But the board, or the floor — it’s the same. You torture me!’ Rhoda screamed.

Maman was sobbing. ‘I was given my cross, and shall bear it to the end.’

Dr Marquet said, on coming out: ‘Elle est quand même un petit peu hystérique.’

Should you go in?

He couldn’t resist it at last. Rhoda was alone in the darkening room. She demanded from her bed: ‘Where is my father?’ But he couldn’t tell her.

They could hear a thin violin at work under the roof of the wintergarden, which the management had netted with wire to stop people jumping through the glass. Rhoda tried to get hold of his hand. She did in the end, and he sat joined to her at the thumb, while the dirty light from the well closed down on them gradually.

And Rhoda said in the dark: ‘Don’t think I’m going to die. I’ll live longer than everyone.’

Looking back over their travels, the memories clotted most thickly round St Yves de Trégor and London.

St Yves de Trégor was a small resort on the Breton coast, in the depths of a bay, on an estuary. It had a mournfulness of mud and gulls, of wind blowing across stony fields out of the Atlantic. All its colours were water-colours. The most pretentious hotel was without even a locked bathroom, but the bedrooms were equipped with bidets on collapsible iron stands.

Why they stopped at St Yves de Trégor nobody could ever remember, except probably they were exhausted by diarrhoea. Nobody knew what had caused it, perhaps the shellfish, but every traveller in Brittany was suffering from the diarrhoea. It was the topic discussed most frequently in trains, that is, by tourists with other tourists, though Maman and Father refused to be classified as such.

On arrival at St Yves they were driven through the dusk, down narrow lanes between roughly piled stone walls.

Their way was strewn with stones, from which the horses’ hoofs struck sparks. One of the horses had a cough.

Some kind of embarrassment arose over the hotel rooms; the patronne considered the problem in her register through unusually thick glasses. In the end they were ushered to rooms which must have been occupied the night before: the beds were still unmade. Maman turned away from the sheets on the big wooden bed in the chambre à deux personnes.

Anger made Father’s French more fluent. ‘Mais c’est la nuit, et les lits sont pas encore faites.’ It made no difference. The patronne and the femme de chambre couldn’t disguise the sheets they were bundling up; and under one of the beds Rhoda discovered an unemptied chamber-pot. Maman was too upset to correct Father’s French grammar.

When the clean sheets were brought she began to whisper: ‘Are they damp? I’m sure they are. They feel like it.’ They weren’t though: only cold, sticky from salt air, and rough.

Rhoda was beginning to droop as she did when ready to fall asleep.

Maman said, taking out her hatpins: ‘We shall leave in the morning — by the first train.’

But you hoped against it; everything you saw was of importance: a small ball of combed-out hair lying in a corner.

And in the dining-room, though Maman commanded soggy rice for Rhoda and herself, there was a big comforting soup, with lumps of bacon, and chunks of potato and cabbage stalk, which the patronne herself ladled out from a huge cracked tureen.

The patronne said: ‘Sont gentils, les p’tits, mais fatigués.’ She smiled at them, showing short teeth and pale gums, and you smiled back sickly to match the situation.