The Vivisector (64 page)

She brooded over the painted board; or perhaps she was looking inward at the difficulties of Liszt.

‘Don’t you pity your mother’s friend?’

‘Mmm.’

She hadn’t suffered enough: because pity was not yet one of her personal needs, she hadn’t bothered to understand, let alone confer it.

She was again leading him, no longer by the hand, but stalking ahead on her cool, proppy legs.

She glanced inside the junk-room. ‘There’s a smell of rats in there,’ she said.

‘You can’t escape from rats in any of these old houses.’

‘There’s none in ours. My mother’s too afraid of rats breathing on the food: that’s what gives you hepatitis. Every month she takes the lino up, and scrubs the boards underneath.’

‘Perhaps that’s why your father ran away.’ It may have been a dirty one, but it made her smile. ‘Was he an artist of some kind?’

‘He was a seaman—but left his ship. He married my mother while he was in hiding. He did marry her, whatever they tell you.’

‘I’ve heard nothing.’

The story of her father, which had halted them between the upper rooms, had also emphasized the shape and intensified the colour of her eyes: they were mercilessly blue and clear-cut.

‘Do you remember him?’ he asked.

‘Not much. I can remember—once. It was very early. The light was funny, damp grey. He had a smell I’d never smelt before. I remember that because it was so different from what I was used to—the smell of my mother.’

Her eyes had faded. The old floorboards were audibly ticking.

‘And after he left—was that the last you heard of him?’

‘We heard from somebody that he’d been seen on the opalfields. ’

‘From sea to opalfields! He could have had something of the artist in him, even if he didn’t know it.’

‘Yes!’ She was so pleased she bared her teeth; her hand began burning, crushing his; her eyes would have stared wider open if their shape had allowed.

She began trembling violently. ‘That’s what I see in this concerto I’ve begun studying with old Khrap: the colours of opals! That’s what I want to try to give it when I know how.’

But at once she grew embarrassed. ‘What else?’ she mumbled. ‘Isn’t there anything else to look at?’

They dragged on automatically, again bound together at the hands, and stumbled into the back room, from which he hadn’t thought of moving the drawing of the nude girl, simply because it hadn’t occurred to him Kathy Volkov might worm her way so deep into his house and life.

Now he was horrified at this climax.

‘Is that supposed to be me?’

‘Not consciously. It’s the figure of a girl.’

She ignored his reply. ‘But you haven’t seen me. My navel isn’t that shape.’ Her hand fell apart from his, only too easily now. ‘And I’m different there.’ She went and touched the dark smudge at the meeting of the thighs. ‘Otherwise it’s not a bad likeness.’ Her use of a word peculiar to unexceptional women paying morning calls long ago made her judgement sound uncannier.

He would have liked to take the drawing-board down, or at least turn its blank back to them; but his ingenuity had dwindled, like his strength. He flopped down on the old plangent bed, where the state of its rucked-up grey blankets and grubby sheets was immediately emphasized by his presence.

Fortunately an inner distraction seemed to prevent Kathy noticing as much as she might have noticed, or else the objects which attracted her attention were closer to her own interests. After taking up and reorganizing one or two things on the chest: chunks of quartz and agate, a dried-up pomander which she sniffed at briefly, a pewter mug full of buttons, pins, and the melted ends of sealing wax, she began to talk to him in disconnected snatches, while showing no sign of expecting answers.

‘D’you really use sealing wax? I’ve always wanted to. I use coloured inks according to how I feel. Shall we write to each other, Mr Duffield?’

The formal address destroyed the enormous headway he felt they had made in their relationship.

He answered bleakly tentative: ‘There won’t be much point in writing, will there? If we continue to see each other?’

She became more nervously excited, twitching as she talked and moved. She looked out of the window, eyes unflinching, at the now blindingly yellow light.

‘Of course there’ll be a point!’ She was forced to close her blinded eyes; she was smiling slightly: she had a rather thin mouth. ‘Don’t you think we’ll put in the letters the things we don’t say to each other? I mean—you couldn’t
say
the things you paint, could you?’

She was swaying in the blaze of evening. His head felt as though it were reduced to skull, with the thoughts feverishly rattling in it.

‘My dear child’—it sounded unbearably gauche—‘will you let me hold your head—as we did—before? I want to remember the shape of it.’

He did long—yes, to drink it down—swallow it whole—its beauty.

She opened her eyes, and grinned rather heartily, like a girl in a newspaper photograph. ‘What a funny thing! I’ve got to go and practise. This is the time.’ If she had been older, she might have been warding him off with appointments at her dress-maker’s or hairdresser’s.

But she did in fact come towards him, over the endless, intervening floor.

Now that he had what he wanted, love and terror were flapping inside him in opposition. He must smell terrible, too: an old, unsavoury man. That, certainly, and their uncomfortable attitude, not to say his silliness as he laid her head against his, must ensure purity.

He closed his eyes, feeling he had achieved a definite stage in relationship with his spiritual child.

But she began to resist. ‘It makes me nervous if I’m late for practice,’ she breathed close to his ear. ‘I’ve got to sit down always at the same time.’ Her cheek, fidgeting to escape, must have been grated by his more abrasive one; but she didn’t shed her kindness. ‘Here’s a surprise for you!’

She popped into his mouth what began as a smooth jewel, but which melted abruptly into all that was soft and sweet-succulent. At the same time she seemed to crest over on him, breathing or crying, enveloping him like a wave.

‘What is it—Kathy—darling?’ he rattled as he was sucked under.

‘It’s like he smelled when he kissed me! My father! That only time I can remember.’

He despaired more and more for the delicate relationship he had conceived: because her own innocent natural scent and distress over her lost father were cancelled out by the skill with which she had planted kisses in his mouth. That too could be innocent, of course: pure innocence, or ignorance. If he had not begun to suspect the innocence of his own desires he could have better accepted such an interpretation of Kathy Volkov’s behaviour.

Then, when they were growing together like two insidious vines, she tore herself away with a force which should have reassured him.

‘Good-bye for now!’ she said, and giggled.

If he didn’t wince, it was because his normal reactions had been sent too far astray.

‘Can you let yourself out?’ he feebly asked. ‘I don’t want to come down,’ he added, even feebler, and something about work.

‘Sure!’

He might have hated her for that, but was prevented by some of the silent expressions she had used, and for the shape of her unconsciously noble head.

She began leaping down the stairs, practically tearing the banisters down: so it sounded.

‘I’ll come tomorrow,’ she called back. ‘No—not tomorrow—but soon—to see how the kitten’s doing.’

He had forgotten the wretched growling cat.

‘If I don’t come,’ she shouted up. ‘I’ll write you a letter like we arranged.’

He was almost composing his.

After some other semi-intelligible and not particularly relevant information, she shrieked: ‘Gee. I almost broke me neck!’

She went out banging and clattering. The silence continued vibrating some time afterwards; while he huddled in a corner of the bed, already sensing the agonies of an empty letter-box, or worse still, her clear voice as it rocketed up the stairs on arrival, accurately aimed at his vulnerable core.

 

About dusk he got up and went out. There was laughter in the darkening streets; a window opened, and shut; a breeze was blowing through dusty lace. Up at the thoroughfare a spawn of artificial light had begun to hatch and pulsate. The drunks were spewing. On a corner a big patent-leather mouth, boiling bust, and acquisitive eyes might have been for hire if he had brought the cash with him; but he hadn’t: no conventional defences could now protect him from the attacks to which he was being subjected.

He walked around, past the wide bright shops, down the stale side streets, over hacked-off vegetable stalks and slivers of dog shit. Up a lane, where the last of an apocalyptic sky was burning the top of a paling fence, a figure had bent over a little go-cart, dispensing meat to cats. The cats lurked, mewed; some of them advanced when coaxed; in the shadows others growled and coughed over the charitable offal with which they were being fed. There was little love lost: the cats were gorging themselves on what was their due. Perhaps the voluntary martyr was rewarded by not being accepted; as the food was doled out, claws occasionally reached up to slash, and once a pair of growling jaws seemed to fasten in the charitable hand. The cat person continued bending over the improvised cart. The stench had become predominantly horse-flesh; while the cat lover’s sex remained indeterminate: a small person, however. (For God’s sake, not another child!)

The voice offered no immediate clues while ringing clearly enough in the narrow deserted lane. ‘Prrh! Prrh! Puss? puss! You big devil, I know
you!
You
cat!
Claw me! Well,
claw
me! What good did it ever do
any
body?’

As she withdrew her clawed hand the cat person became a woman: ‘Big Swollen Cheeks!’ she spat at the mangy, chewed cat: while throwing him another gobbet of dark flesh.

She straightened up, or would have done so: coming level with her in the wasted light, the intruder saw that she was a hunchback. And more. He had hardly recovered from the other attack when here was this fresh one.

‘Not—Rhoda?’

‘Yes, Hurtle.’ Raising her face on its thin little neck, she bared her teeth: in the half-dark, they appeared fine and curved, spaced like a cat’s.

The smell of horse-flesh was overpoweringly rich.

‘Yes!’ she confirmed her identity in what sounded like a long hiss; while he began to crush, not her cat’s paws, her bird’s claws, the once delicate made coarse and stiff and knobbed.

He no longer minded the smell of horse.

‘Rhoda!’ he was spouting, gasping. ‘Rhoda? Rhoda! Rhoda!’

She didn’t join in, though once he thought he caught sight of her uvula waving up at him out of the cavern of her throat.

If he hadn’t sensed the child buried in this old, shabby woman—she looked much older than he, no doubt ageing more quickly as the result of her physical affliction—he would have said she was quite unmoved by their finding each other: whatever the life she had led, it had taught her to control the expression of her face and the behaviour of her deformed body. It was only through his intuition that he could feel her spirit reaching out, in spite of her, to embrace his; while he, as always, fluctuated; half exhilarated to identify the sister of his conscience, half disgusted to know he would always have to overcome a repulsion; he had only ever been able to love Rhoda at moments of leavetaking, or unusual stress, as now in their grotesque and strained reunion.

He heard himself saying: ‘You haven’t changed, Rhoda. D’you think you’ve changed?’ which was only half of what he meant to ask, and did: ‘D’you think
I’
ve changed?’

She wiped her hands on the sides of her dress. ‘I couldn’t very well give an opinion. Not yet.’ She laughed her same cold little laugh. ‘Physically, yes. Who hasn’t?’ Her hump hadn’t, and it was for that reason, he could see, she had paused an instant. ‘You were so good-looking as a boy: dashing and dreamy at the same time. But nobody would expect you—by our age—not to look dilapidated.’

While she was speaking she tugged several times at the cord she used for pulling the go-cart; the wheels made a painful, squealing sound, and the few remaining cats made off.

‘The light’—he pleaded reasonably—‘you mustn’t pass judgement by—not even a street lamp—a glimmer down a lane!’ But although his argument was sound enough, he knew it was wasted. ‘Why don’t we go back to where I live, so that we can talk, and get to know about each other? Rhoda?’

He even took her by the hand, and forgot he was repelled by the stickiness of drying horse-flesh. She disengaged herself, not, he felt, on account of any dislike for him—in fact, she appeared completely indifferent—but perhaps because Maman might have considered it a breach of the conventions.

It was not that either. ‘I’ve done my duty by
these
cats, but the others may be missing me.’

‘Which others?’

‘The cats I have living with me—fourteen of them—no, fifteen since yesterday.’

‘If you’d rather, let’s go to your place.’ She had made him pitch his voice too high: it bounced with a boyish insistence.

‘No.’

This should have been final, but he couldn’t believe it was; although she was walking away, the go-cart sometimes grating, sometimes squealing behind her, the pace suggested indecision.

He ran after her.

‘But Rhoda—after discovering each other! Isn’t it human?’ As he coaxed, he watched obliquely for signs of her giving in: he might have been her young brother; the stone manners of this old woman made him feel gauche.

Then he had a brainwave. ‘I’ve got a cat! Come along to my place. Won’t you? Somebody—a friend—dumped it on me. You can advise me what to do.’ He knew nothing about anything: even by this stage in his experience he was incapable of dealing with the contingencies of life.