The Vivisector (65 page)

‘Oh,’ she snorted, ‘cats! There are too many of them.’

But because he needed her—he suddenly realized how desperately—he must use every means to trap her.

He was forced to grow cunning. ‘I’ll make us something good to eat. What about a Welsh rabbit?’

Rhoda was as unimpressed as he would have been in a similar situation. Trudging along, they might have been returning from the lower garden of their childhood, if he hadn’t noticed her shoes: the dated strap-shoes of an elderly dowdy woman, but designed for Rhoda’s dwarf existence; he wondered where she got them.

She had neither accepted nor refused his latest proposition when they reached the thoroughfare. All the lights were focused on them; traffic whizzed towards them, and whammed past; here and there, shopkeepers looked up from their evening transactions to take in a pantomime.

Something extraordinary was happening: a man of distinguished head, of fairly youthful, even athletic, body, clothed, it seemed, only in the name of decency, in shirt and pants and a pair of old sandshoes, had started to blubber shamefully. Of course he was old, really; he couldn’t have disguised it. As he walked along blubbering, the bugger kept blowing out his lips and sucking them in and hiccupping—well, it could have been from emotion—while leading a freak of a woman by the hand. It was the cat woman! A sour little puss herself. But what could you expect: her hump and all? As they shuffled and staggered, pulling the blood-stained cart behind them, tears had boiled up in the cat woman’s cold eyes, and were running over the pink rims. So the couple advanced: past the wilting spinach and flabby turnips, the trays of squid and dull-eyed mullet. It was no wonder decent people left the two derelicts plenty room to pass; drunks, or more probably, metho artists, didn’t enter into their substantial, working lives.

 

It was the bunch of keys in his pocket which helped him take hold of himself: the keys to the house in Flint Street.

‘I’ve lived here,’ he calculated roughly, ‘thirty years! Didn’t you know about it? You must have known.’

‘I’d heard, of course. I’d read. I’ve even seen you once or twice. But what good would it have done either of us if I’d come thrusting myself?’

The more clearly he saw, the more cunning he grew. ‘We could be a help to each other, couldn’t we?’

Again he tried taking her hand. It was cold. She withdrew it to back the stinking cart under the araucaria.

‘It’s a comparatively large house,’ he began to explain before remembering: ‘Oh, not compared with Sunningdale!’ He heard their double silence and was glad those hiccups had ended. ‘I want to show you over it.’

As he opened it, the house seemed to stagger under his determination.

‘Wait here,’ he ordered in the hall.

He ran ahead to switch on the lights of all the rooms in his once proud, now suppliant, house. In the scullery he kicked the herring tin Kathy had made him put for the cat; he heard the milk scattering: probably some of it on his pants. By the time he returned, reducing his run to a strut, Rhoda had left the hall and advanced into the living-room, so he could see this grimy old woman, his sister, in clear detail. She was standing with her head, her small triangular white face, poked forward: looking. She was more like an animal than a woman, perhaps as the result of her association with cats.

She spoke, though. ‘I don’t like to imagine what
they
would think of it all.’

‘If you judge it by Courtney standards!’ He tried to ease his irritation by pulling up his slack trousers. ‘But people live differently, on the whole more honestly, now. What were we but a bunch of new-rich vulgarians gorging ourselves and complaining? ’

Rhoda’s expression became so fixed and wooden he had a vision of her perched like a ventriloquist’s doll on Boo Davenport’s knee; the mouth moved: ‘Oh yes,’ she tinkled, ‘but I’m glad to have lived some of my life under a chandelier!’

Again he had to pull up his pants, which had only started slipping since he met her: she irritated him so. ‘I can do without chandeliers—or think up one of my own.’

‘Oh, I agree. There’s very little that is necessary, beyond a crust of bread and a hole to curl up in.’

He must try not to feel so irritated: when she was his sister, whom he loved. Of course the real reason for his irritation, he had to admit, was not her failure to appreciate his home, which he had stopped seeing as an actual house, but her continued un-awareness of its raison d’être—the paintings: all of which, even the most tentative youthful ones, were shimmering tonight, for Rhoda, in their true colours.

Rhoda only nosed past them: not even a cat, more of a rat, a small white one, its pinker charms dulled by age and grime. The pink, moist hair had become a dirty grey-white fuzz. The seams of the little sharp white face were almost pricked out in black.

She did pause once, beside, not in front of, his water-colour of Maman. ‘The yellow dress! Pretty dress—’ her voice trailed as she moved on.

He would have to remember she had probably grown into someone quite different from what he had decided she was. Even if he couldn’t love this, or perhaps any, version of his sister, he was still full of affection for her: just as you can be fond of an old worm-eaten, ugly piece of furniture for its age and associations; the emotion of affection is not less genuine than love.

And he needed Rhoda, he mustn’t forget.

He returned to the cat. ‘I forgot the cat.’

‘Oh, cats! What’s this?’ She was pointing from where they were standing in Miss Gilderthorp’s dust-coloured morning room, or lesser parlour.

‘That’s the conservatory.’ For the first time since bringing Rhoda home he was ready to make excuses. ‘It’s nothing much. There isn’t a light in there, anyway. And it’s a bloody wreck—always has been.’

‘Looks interesting,’ she persisted, peering through the glass door.

‘Only a ruin.’

‘Can’t you shine a light through the door? Oh, go on, Hurtle, do! Don’t be a meanie!’ Her assumed girlishness, with its edge of sarcasm, brought them closer than they had been that night.

So he got up on an unwilling chair and shone the parlour light bulb through the conservatory door.

‘Oh, I like that! It has something. It has a poetry,’ Rhoda calmly said.

Was she daring to appropriate some idea which hadn’t yet suggested itself? He had never seen the conservatory by artificial light. Certainly the blacker shadows and the far more brilliant refractions from broken glass made him share her reaction; but he didn’t want to share: the conservatory was too private. Strange it should appeal to all three of them.

He got down off the creaking chair and the light resettled in its rightful room.

Rhoda sighed. ‘I’m liking your house better; but oh dear, I no longer care for old houses. I’m too old. You’re old, too—older as far as I can remember—but not my kind of old.’

She began shuffling, and he thought he could detect, for the first time, a wheezing.

He remembered: ‘The cat! It’s in the kitchen—the scullery. The kitchen’s pretty grim, but you’d better see everything, Rhoda—where I live.’

Following, she became increasingly fretful. ‘All kitchens are awful,’ she complained. ‘I practically live on bread and cheese. Couldn’t touch meat after cutting up the horse every evening.’

‘The old girl who lived here before, put in this hideous asbestos box of kitchenette to make things easier, you see.’

Rhoda’s head followed his explanations. Something had released the catch which had been holding it: now it could function freely on its spring.

‘This is the scullery. I believe it’s called a “walk-in pantry” nowadays.’ They enjoyed a slight giggle together. ‘This, incidentally, is where my friend left the cat. Puss? Puss?’ he called.

Rhoda seemed definitely to have tired of cats.

‘Out here,’ he continued revealing, ‘is the main part of the big, former kitchen—which is never used now. Isn’t it grim?’

‘Ghastly!’

‘Cool, though, in summer.’

‘I wonder what became of May?’ Her interest in their old cook made Rhoda look as though she were following a scent; she found, almost at once. ‘Why, of course, she must be dead!’ she shrieked.

He hated that damn cat. ‘Puss? Puss?’ he called in an affected, amateurish voice.

‘Might as well save yourself the breath. Cat must have gone,’ Rhoda said. ‘You left the back door open.’

She was right: startled by the apparition of Kathy he must have forgotten to close the door between the main kitchen and the yard.

‘I’ve had no experience of cats,’ he said. ‘I was relying on my friend.’

‘And the friend’s had none either.’

‘There’s still the whole of the upstairs to show.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Is there?’

She began shuffling more noticeably: worse still, wheezing on the stairs. He tried not to feel guilty by remembering that Rhoda was to be employed as a moral force, or booster of his conscience. If only she could have realized how necessary she was; but she mustn’t know about Kathy, or what Kathy could grow into if the powers over which human nature has no control established a dictatorship.

He was doing the honours of the upstairs in a kind of estate-agent voice: ‘. . . bath’s a bit stained. The old-fashioned geyser never lets you down once you’ve learnt its tricks . . . Junk mostly in here—got to have somewhere to store paintings—and I sometimes sleep on the stretcher if I feel like it . . . The two bedrooms are also studios—move about from one to the other—they’re so different in character—the light’s different.’

He was glad the board with the drawing of the nude girl was no longer standing on the easel in the back room, though Rhoda, from her behaviour to date, mightn’t have noticed even that. Circumstances she had experienced had forced her in on herself, and any part left over for active living was probably concentrated on the cats.

So he would have to tread with cat-like delicacy in introducing his proposition.

‘This back room is rather hot and boisterous at times. One doesn’t always feel strong enough for it. Children’s voices can begin to batter down one’s self-defences—and the voice of women defending their rights. I’m afraid Chubb’s Lane is on the slummy side.’

‘I no longer question the conditions of life.’

‘I think, on the whole, you’d probably feel more at home in the seclusion of Flint Street. The room’s larger too—more comfortable. ’

They had gone in. The advanced abstraction of the ‘Pythoness’ was still standing against the wall. She glanced at it with indifference: while her animal nose continued sniffing out the real prospects of the situation.

‘Don’t you think a room like this would suit you, Rhoda?’ he carefully asked. ‘Naturally, a lot would have to be rearranged. I expect you have things of your own.’

‘Of course I have my personal belongings. I have a little room of my own—in the house of a friend. She’s most kind, considering she’s such a meticulous person—to put up with my peculiarities. It’s what I can only describe as Christian charity. She must have suffered herself, but hasn’t been damaged by it. She couldn’t begin to understand your and my compulsion to plumb the depths.’ Rhoda laughed nervously.

‘Then you don’t think you’d like it here?’

‘I didn’t for a moment believe there’d be any question of my liking it here, isn’t this where you live, Hurtle? Lives are too private.’

‘Yes—but dying. Do you feel you want to die, perhaps undiscovered, in a rented room?’ Now that he had invented such a persuasive argument, he almost reached out to clutch at some part of her.

‘I’ve picked too many dead cats out of the gutter: death’s nothing to be afraid of.’ She moistened her pale lips.

It seemed incredible that Rhoda should resist such a practical solution.

She seemed to have read his thoughts, for she murmured: ‘In any case, I couldn’t manage the stairs—in my condition.’

She was certainly looking very pinched and chalky. She sounded as though she was sucking on a comb and paper: while smiling at him.

‘And all these paintings,’ she dared only mumble.

‘What about the paintings?’ he dared her back.

They were possibly coming to it now.

‘Well,’ Rhoda coughed and smiled, ‘I might be vivisected afresh, in the name of truth—or art.’

‘How? How?’ He was so shocked.

‘Don’t you remember that dog we saw with Maman somewhere in London? I shall never forget its varnished tongue.’

How could he forget the smell of their own wet frightened fur as they huddled together escaping in the cab?

‘But what has that to do with art?’ As if he didn’t know the answer.

She was looking at a painting which seemed to illustrate her argument, and which, he realized, with cold resignation, might break down his defence. When and why had he brought the painting out? Could it have been there during Kathy’s visit? Sometimes, he knew, he would get out of bed still half asleep, and rummage after an old work to prove a point he had been trying to make in his late dream, then return to continued sleep. Afterwards he would find this visible evidence of his dream-life standing against the wall, and often fail to remember the circumstances which had called for it.

The painting at which Rhoda was now staring so painfully was an early ‘Pythoness’: judging by the naturalistic treatment, probably one of the first. His own horror at their finding themselves in the present situation couldn’t prevent him experiencing a twinge of appreciation for his forgotten achievement: the thin, transparent arm; the sponge as organic as the human claw clutching it; the delicate but indestructible architecture of the tripod-bidet, beside which the rosy figure was stood up for eternity.

This aesthetic orgasm lasted what seemed only a long second before the moral sponge was squeezed: its icy judgement was trickling in actual sweat down his petrified ribs.