The Vivisector (67 page)

 

Before he read the second note he walked to the top of the house: he hadn’t room for more immediately after Katherine Volkov’s letter. He continued seeing her name: a grave name engraved, which still only half-fitted its owner; while her words came back in gusts, and died out in breathlessness. (What was her dream, though? The dream might undo them. He must prevent her telling it if she remembered to try.)

People have heard attacks walking upstairs, people of a certain age. Not yourself, though. How could you? Kathy’s letter, he noticed only now, hadn’t a stamp. Then she must have passed, and stuck it in the box, and the falling rain had prevented him hearing the clatter of the brass flap. Her footsteps retreated so coldly through him, he was able to contemplate the second note, which he knew before opening, was from his sister Rhoda; it was smaller in format, its purpose declared: a note, in fact, in a formed hand.

 

Rhoda’s letter too, was without a stamp, he noticed somewhat morosely. But he would be happy to receive his sister, with all the disadvantages. In fact, he was resigned enough to wonder whether their relationship wasn’t the only logical solution: to sit beside the hearth, spooning up milk puddings, and listening to each other’s stomachs. In the creative end, blood couldn’t race music, only trickle like tepid milk. He couldn’t see the milk-string swinging from his own lip, but visualized it on Rhoda’s little, intensely preoccupied mouth.

Yet, on Thursday morning, he flung open the door in anger on the gently muscular, uncommunicative young man who had brought Rhoda’s things in his truck. At least it had stopped raining, if nobody had recovered yet.

‘I’ll give you a hand,’ he told the carrier in a jolly voice which certainly didn’t convince himself.

He had never been good at this sort of thing, and he would soon have lost patience if it hadn’t been Rhoda’s furniture they were carrying in. His curiosity was appeased by a low-built, no, a sawn-off, sideboard, atrociously carved with harpies and other unnecessary protuberances; a grandmother chair (minus a caster); a wardrobe of the kind found in a child’s bedroom, its fly-speckled pale pink ornamented with wreaths of washed-out forget-menots; an iron cot acting as bedstead. There were pots and pans beside—a minimum of these—together with the utensils of her obsession, including a chopping board still moist from the evening before. Several pieces of battered luggage, of a Bond Street elegance he had forgotten, were stamped with the initials A.C., from which the gold had almost completely flaked off.

‘You can leave the things standing as they are.’ The carrier showed no sign of noticing his surliness. ‘No doubt she’ll want me to juggle them around.’ If he had given it a chance, emotion might have made a fool of him. ‘When does my—when should I expect Miss Courtney herself?’

‘Next trip. Now. With the cats,’ answered the immovable young man.

Rhoda appeared in the early part of the afternoon, thus giving her arrival a moral tone. In his opinion there was no bleaker stretch of the twenty-four hours. Obviously his sister didn’t approve of daylight sleep.

She was also in a brisk temper, her lips whiter than he remembered, the stockings wrinkled in distraught veins on her spaghetti legs.

‘My God, Hurtle, whatever possessed me!’

She would have liked to curse the carrier handling her crates of glaring cats, if she hadn’t, it appeared, fallen a little in love with him.

‘Gently, Dick!’ she mumbled instead, and actually stroked a beefy arm. ‘They do hate it! My poor darling! My Possum!’

Her attempts at tenderness were made in a mezzo voice, as opposed to the soprano knife she kept for human intercourse; but it didn’t work with the cats. They were carried growling, moaning, into the little morning-room: the other side of the wire mesh their flat-eared, pale-eyed hatred continued to consume the darkness in which they crouched.

‘Shouldn’t think they’ll ever like it here;’ any more than he could develop an affection for Rhoda’s cats.

‘Of course. In time. You get used to anything in time,’ their owner had decided.

If she had sounded at all exhausted or discouraged, she revived when he paid off the carrier.

She began to shout and command as though she also kept a dog. ‘Hurtle? Windows, please! All windows and outer doors must be kept shut for the first week. That way the poor things will accustom themselves.’

‘And we shall die of cat—or each other.’

She decided not to hear, and he helped her shut the windows, most of which were pretty stiff.

Rhoda began unfastening the hateful wire for the cats to squeeze out of their prisons. Some of the beasts slunk away in search of a refuge in which to nurse their neuroses; others sat, fairly bland, licking their pads, or shaking themselves with frilly motions of the shoulders to restore their outraged fur. One big, one-eyed, one-eared tom eased himself backwards and sprayed the sofa without his mistress appearing to notice.

For the moment she was suffering from anti-climax. She had flopped into her three-castered chair, her nostrils deathly delicate, her body so placed, because of the omnipresent hump, you were reminded of someone prepared to vomit into the basin the steward had arranged beside them on the deck.

Rhoda gasped: ‘Give us time, dear boy, and we shall show our gratitude.’ It was a great effort for her, he realized, to express any kind of tender emotion. (How fortunate it was for him to have his art!) Then she recovered her knife-edged soprano, and hawked up: ‘I shall also get you to help me arrange my bits and pieces.’

Because he too was exhausted and outraged he made off upstairs, and didn’t work. He switched on the wireless he had been cunning enough to move from the kitchen before Rhoda’s arrival; but the wireless didn’t work either, except by fits of politics and agricultural instruction: all the music had been wrung out of the evening air.

Later that night when he went down to share their despondency in the kitchen, she was sharpening a knife over a nausea of horse-flesh.

She said: ‘I’ve failed in my duty tonight. I’ve failed my extramural cats. I simply wasn’t up to it.’

‘I expect they have their ways and means,’ he consoled, though he couldn’t care. ‘What did they do before you came?’

‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘But I have failed.’

He had made them a stew, of some subtlety, if she had realized. She dabbled in it listlessly after the cats had been satisfied.

‘Purple ink,’ she murmured, fingering a letter lying on the dresser. ‘Remember the diaries we kept when we were children, in green and purple inks? Oh no, you didn’t: you were a boy. I don’t think boys need to colour their lives before they’ve begun to live them—not the way little girls do, writing novels about themselves in their diaries. One day I might write a proper novel.’

‘For heaven’s sake! What kind?’ He put the letter in his pocket, for safety.

‘Ho!’ She laughed. ‘You’d be surprised. You might be shocked.’

After they had squeezed her few pieces of furniture in amongst Miss Gilderthorp’s, she announced she was going to get ready for bed.

He went back once, and found her arranged for death, it looked rather than sleep: her eyelids so definitely closed; or perhaps she was a person who said prayers, and was angry and deceitful on being discovered.

When, out of pity, he made the formal gesture of kissing, she screeched out: ‘No! No! I can’t bear being touched! Not even by a cat, Hurtle;’ though several of the fetid animals were crouched around her on the Indian counterpane.

He went upstairs, and lay for a long time in the dark listening to his eyelids close and open. His sense of emptiness suggested that Kathy Volkov had been exorcised: equally, that creative impotence might at last have come to him.

 

Morning was all jollity in Chubb’s Lane: little stubble-headed boys pummelling and shouting; the heavy sails of wet sheets filling with a breeze; motors ripping and purring individually before settling down into the mass monotone of traffic. He sat on the bed cutting out forms from coloured papers, letting them fall to the floor, to settle freely on the white sheet on his drawing-board. All the discordant forms, the coloured notes of street life, hitherto only arbitrarily related, were moving into plan or focus. All his joy in morning sang as he helped the less resolved cut-outs into position with a finger. He fetched gum. Some of the paper, superficially more frivolous, he was ready to stick. You could always be certain of some shapes: like old familiar furniture, they will become invisible, while remaining necessary. He stuck it. And smoothed it with the flat of his hand. All the little joy-notes of children’s voices still eddied delectably unpredictable around it in yellow splinters and arrows, and green, ballooning clover leaves. The big crimson heart-shape, he could be certain of that, like furniture, or at least for the moment: he stuck it carefully in position for life. The doubtful quantities he continued pushing around, helping them settle.

‘Hurtle?’ That was Rhoda—of course—calling up. ‘What do we do in the morning I’d like to know?’

‘What we bloody well like!’ Women like Rhoda never heard what they didn’t want to.

He had intended to develop his paean of colour further. He did bring out gouache, and dabbled a little; but presently he put on his gown, and went down to face his awful duty.

Since the evening before there was a smell of cat everywhere. Rhoda, in a surprisingly clean apron, was actress playing a part larger than it appeared at first.

He skidded once or twice.

‘I’ve cleaned it up,’ she told him in a languid voice, ‘but there are always places which escape one’s notice.’

She got him a breakfast of grey, leathery liver.

‘When I was here before,’ she said, ‘I thought I noticed a wireless in the kitchen.’

‘There was an old wireless. I took it up to my room. I like to listen to music while I work. I’ll buy you a transistor, Rhoda.’ He added: ‘I’m also thinking of buying you a fur coat,’ though it hadn’t occurred to him till now.

‘I don’t want a fur coat.’ She composed her lips over her teeth, and at the same time, blushed.

‘We’ll talk about it.’

‘I was looking forward to that wireless I saw.’

She stood scraping off the veins of liver he had left on his plate, and as they fell, four or five of her depressed cats came to life, clawing and spitting.

‘As a matter of fact, I never thought you cared for music or understood it,’ Rhoda said.

‘It’s very close to painting. I don’t “understand” painting—not all the theories talked about it. That doesn’t mean painting isn’t my life.’

‘Yes, but music!’ Her voice whined: it seemed to annoy Rhoda that he didn’t fit into the category to which she had decided he belonged.

He went back upstairs to his own country.

During the morning she announced she would be going out to fetch the evening’s ration of horse. He heard the door bang, the flap on the letter-box clatter, then the squeal of go-cart trailing behind her. From considering the awfulness of Rhoda’s reign, he had clean forgotten to look in the box, till reminded by the sound of its flap. He went swooping down, the panels of his gown flying open on his bare legs, sinewy in their sudden compulsion.

The letter-box was empty, though.

He tried to ignore his disappointment by converting the mission into a reconnaissance of Rhoda’s quarters. Cats stared at him: some with an empty insolence; some with suspicion; others were so shrunken by his coming, their skulls expressed pure hatred. Two matted monsters were stretched along the mantelpiece. One of these raised his head and yawned while scarcely opening his eyes, then dangled a leg, a pad with a glimmering of claws, from the marble ledge. Nobody actively defended the fortress against his invasion: they ringed it round instead with psychic dragon’s teeth and cynical rejection of such a contemptible enemy.

As for the furniture of Rhoda’s life: the photographs of Harry and Maman in tarnished Asprey frames; the three-castered chair now propped on a child’s alphabet block: and the iron cot with the pseudo-child’s form of its owner almost visible under the Indian counterpane; these were the more articulate guardians of Rhoda’s spiritual demesne, or opponents of his will to create in his old age children of unprecedented beauty. His incestuous foster mother and crooked sister would hardly have understood a work of art like Kathy Volkov. As for Harry Courtney, he should have been the brutal minotaur concocted by legend; whereas he was, in fact, the gentle bullman who submits to his women’s darts, and even dies of them, out of respect for the rules of the sport. Harry would have understood as much of Kathy as the bull understands the motives behind the pole-axe. But Harry could no more be conjured up from his ‘telling likeness’, than Kathy would materialize out of her first promises.

Going upstairs, the sole of one of his slippers monotonously slapped the bare boards. This pantaloon found himself almost wishing for Rhoda to return.

She did, and at once he resented it: the sound of her little squeaking cart; the dead noises as she dragged the sacks of horse-flesh over the kitchen floor; her own divorced, scratching movements; and the expiring expectations of cats.

He wouldn’t go downstairs; he wouldn’t hear if she called him: in any case, he had never existed on food.