The Vivisector (71 page)

‘Mrs. Volkov is going to speak to the guard.’ She soothed her girl-woman’s gown. ‘She’s going to ask him to take Kathy under his wing.’

Oh, worse, worse! Some randy old brute easing his serge in between the sheets.

Rhoda was so absorbed in Kathy’s abstract journey she didn’t notice the details of it. She didn’t notice she had singed her gown.

Soon afterwards he got away unobserved. It was most fortunate; because this was the evening Kathy must come—or not.

In fact, she didn’t; nor had he expected it, except in fantasies. It was now far too late. She wouldn’t, couldn’t possibly—unless reckoning on Rhoda asleep. So he lay listening, counted out by the distant clocks, remembering how Kathy had each time come at sunset. This evening’s sunset had ratified her defection and his doom.

About dawn he creaked up from his iron rack, intending to work, or at least hoping some creative mechanism might take over. All his brushes were filthy. Must clean them first: honest, sober work, if it hadn’t been for his drunken condition, his one and only desire. A mild, Quakerish light failed to cool his fever; though to some extent the fumes from the turps cauterized his nostrils, his skull’s burning labyrinth.

She climbed so smoothly, quietly, he didn’t hear her till the last stages, then recognized the sound the only possible murderer could make: who glided in with silent, sure, positively fatal steps, while remaining soft, gentle, above all practical, no doubt because of Rhoda downstairs. He must never forget Kathy’s divided soul was part Scottish, if also Russian. Her Russian brow was bursting with an obsession, and it must have been the Russian in her who failed to notice his nakedness as she flung herself between his blind breasts, beating her head against the miserable scrabble of grizzled hair.

Himself babbling: ‘But you didn’t come! You didn’t come!’

‘No!’ She blurted crying against him. ‘I was too frightened! I
am
frightened!’

‘What am I to be frightened at?’

‘No.’ She stopped then. ‘Not you. But everything. Everything that’s happening. Going away. My mother’s so stubborn she drives me ratty at times, but I’m
used
to her! I know nothing. Not really. Not even in my music. I muck up some of the simplest scales—over and over.’

From being angry, she started crying again, and the need to comfort her melted the last of his vanity. He drew her back against himself with such care he could have been negotiating a difficult passage in paint; while at the same time he heard the sounds he was uttering: amorphous, thick-lipped, instinctively tender—cow sounds, he who was nothing of a mother, her erect lover no less, as Kathy was his love, though altered.

Whereas she had been a hot, blubber-mouthed schoolgirl on that other, now unbelievable occasion, bashing up, more or less raping with her lust an old, resisting man, she had become his passive complement. After taking off her incidental dress, she lay so trustfully, so long-legged cool, barely smiling, her breasts asking, as she waited for him to enter her silver-lidded dream. He could have yanked her plait, to express his joy in peals of bells.

O God he loved his Katherine Volkov gliding together through never smoother water.

It was the electric daylight which finally made her sit up.

Mending the end of her frayed plait, Kathy said: ‘You must think I look awful.’

‘How—awful?’ Her nipples were the prettiest.

‘I’ve started a spot on the end of my nose. Haven’t you noticed? ’

When he had squinted he did actually see. ‘What’s in a pimple or two?’

‘Oh, it’s horrible!’ She sighed. ‘And you can’t do anything about it.’

It was at its most inflamed and luminous: it wouldn’t yet submit to torture; it could only torture.

When she had finished her plait, she suffered a fresh outbreak of woe. ‘What am I going to do?’ she moaned. ‘In Melbourne!’

‘We’ll write to each other’—he tried to caress her back to him—‘darling Kathy.’ It would never sound professional.

She sat looking at her face in the distant glass, its reflections still too dark to be altogether reliable.

‘D’you think,’ she asked, paddling the end of the plait in her cheek, ‘I’ll ever get a lover?’

He put away his hands. ‘You have your music.’ He bared his teeth: not a false one amongst them.

‘Yes, my music. I’ll become a pianist—if I want to.’ She was reciting something learnt by heart; if she didn’t add the word ‘great’, the carriage of her head implied, and the glance at the mirror confirmed it. ‘Oh, I must! I
must!
’

Though she had already left him, she might have sat there indefinitely, appalled by future battles between her will and her weaknesses, if they hadn’t heard what put an end to any misery of his: the sound of a saucepan crash-bounding on the kitchen floor.

Kathy said with Scottish calm: ‘That is Miss Courtney getting herself a bit of breakfast.’

‘For God’s sake, what will you tell her?’

‘Nothing. She won’t come out.’ It practically established that Rhoda had procured his destruction.

‘But won’t you want to say good-bye?’

‘We’ve said it—at the ghastly Cutbush party.’

‘Was the grocer there?’

‘Oh yes! Creepy Cecil!’ Because her head was at present inside her dress, he could only guess at the expression on her face.

‘Who else?’ He had to flog himself some more.

‘Nobody. Us. Miss Courtney. Oh, there was a friend of Mr Cutbush looked in just as we were leaving.’

‘Which friend? What was his name?’

Kathy had tugged her dress down; under the influence of early morning, she was looking serious, almost religious. She might have submitted to his inquisition if Rhoda hadn’t been throwing things about in the kitchen. Rhoda couldn’t have slept, and had got up in a bad temper: she was actually screaming at one of her cats.

‘What was his name?’ he repeated. ‘The grocer’s friend?’

Kathy had come, and was sitting beside him, warm and superior in her dress; but it was the warmth of railway stations: the trains were hooting their woolly, false-material assurances.

‘It won’t be long. Two years at most, Khrapovitsky says. Then I’ll be back for the final. So you see, there isn’t any need for either of us to be sad. Only two years. And complimentary seats for relatives. You’ll come, won’t you? as a relative—to hear me play in the competition.’

And probably win. Wallowing in Liszt. She had those determined-looking teeth.

‘Mr Duffield?’

And little, hard, pushing bubs.

‘Yes, Kathy.’ He kissed at a mouth which had already withdrawn: he kissed the air.

Then she went from him altogether, lowering her practically veiled, her virginal, her dedicated head. If she didn’t run, it was because of this dedication, or because she had to pass their Cerberus.

He listened, but Kathy moved so smoothly Rhoda didn’t come out. No doubt they had made an agreement; or Rhoda was deaf: this was what he really hoped, though he had never noticed deafness in Rhoda. Anyway, she didn’t come out.

He still listened, and when he heard the yard gate, its loose, unmistakable latch, he began a dry whimpering. There was nobody to listen to the great man he was supposed to be: not even Rhoda his sister.

 

Those years when he stolidly worked—and some of his paintings of this period did look stolid, though only himself and his enemies noticed—Rhoda was his remaining prop. Her presence made itself as strongly felt at Kathy’s absence. Unrelentingly, Rhoda chopped up the purple horse-flesh to feed all spawned and spawning cats.

Sometimes he wondered, if Kathy were to have a baby, would he be more, or less, distressed to discover he wasn’t its father? Of course she wouldn’t have one.
Girls don’t have babies nowadays; they’re too sophisticated:
that was Rhoda’s opinion, how pertinent he couldn’t be sure. Babies (clumsy word) blunder out of ignorant wombs; children no longer bear children: old men have them instead, fully clothed, and in the best classical tradition. Nobody, probably not even Kathy, need ever be aware of his spiritual child Katherine Volkov; unless some tittuping archivist picked up a scent on a scholarly ramble and thought to enliven scholarship with muck.

Till then, he had his secret, and his work, and his work was his secret. Throughout this phase of his painting life the colours he used were noticeably clear, which made some of the earlier stuff look over-sombre, congested, muddy. He was conscious of wanting to exclude from this new world of transparent lyricism any of the old threats and tensions; yet there was scarcely a canvas where a presence wasn’t felt, beyond the frame, armed in some cases with a bludgeon, in others, a bladder. (This was the period when he couldn’t resist painting that enormous bladder, inside it the Old Fool Himself, which so confused and irritated public opinion when first shown.) Most of the paintings of his late, some said ‘retarded’, lyrical phase, sold very well, because at one level they were considered ‘charming’. According to another view they were ‘too sweet’, and those who held it would make a face as though they had a nasty taste in their mouths, before smiling their relief at his ‘going off’. And there was the lady so disgusted she hit the ‘Old Fool Having Bladder Trouble’; she walloped the canvas with her umbrella, and was taken to court by the Misses Ailsa Harkness and Biddy Prickett, in whose gallery the scandal occurred.

This episode and others made him unwilling to exhibit, but he allowed himself to be persuaded, if only to prove he was still alive. One painting he hadn’t shown was the ‘Flowering Rosebush’, in which the concept of Katherine Volkov originated. He would never show it. He disliked public ceremonies, and was almost never present at them now; their life at Flint Street was too full.

 

Rhoda complained: ‘Oh dear! These cats! I sometimes feel guilty, Hurtle, not seeing to things upstairs. You do realize, don’t you? I’m strong enough on the level. But doctors have warned me against stairs. Don’t want to aggravate my respiratory trouble.’ She would wheeze and pant in support of the doctors.

‘Don’t worry. I sometimes do a sweep-out; it’s all that’s necessary. ’

Rhoda was at her most abstract, her most conscienceful, over a cup of strong tea. ‘I’m not one of those in favour of making a Full Declaration—but have nothing to hide—I’ve nothing to be ashamed of. Anyone interested—or inquisitive—is at liberty any time to ask.’ She was prepared to be so truthful he wondered whether she wasn’t in possession of a secret.

He nursed his own the more closely for that; though he did, once, tentatively inquire: ‘Has anyone heard—is there, perhaps, news of the little Volkov?’

‘Why, of course. Her mother hears regularly. Naturally she writes less regularly to me: only an elderly friend of the family.’ When the steam from the tea she was drinking allowed her to open her eyes, Rhoda added: ‘I had a letter from Kathy on Wednesday.’

He prepared to speak, but hesitated. Was Rhoda playing him? ‘You never told me.’

‘Didn’t I? One never knows. Or one forgets, rather. You live so much to yourself, Hurtle, up there—always painting. Perhaps I thought you wouldn’t be interested.’

‘Did she mention, at least, whether she’s making any progress?’

‘Oh, not to me! And I wouldn’t expect it. She tells me about her underclothes—the trouble she’s having with her “auntie”, who insists on her wearing wool next to the skin because of the treacherous Melbourne climate. She has her own normal sets, and the false, woollen ones for the aunt to wash.’

‘Is Kathy so affluent?’

But Rhoda didn’t hear.

‘Incidentally,’ he remembered, ‘you haven’t told me what’s happening about the fur coat. When will it be ready?’

‘Why, the coat—I brought it home weeks ago!’

‘You didn’t tell me.’

‘I must have told.’

‘Aren’t you going to wear it, then?’

‘In the heat of summer?’

‘I think you might put it on to show me.’

For a moment she looked so ferocious emptying the dregs of her tea, he might have been inviting her, not to dress up, but to strip.

Presently she went out, quickly, precisely, in no more than a mild routine anger, and he heard the wardrobe door banged. In the silence which followed he imagined Rhoda’s hands, their hooked skin, fumbling with sensuous, virgin fur, and closed his eyes automatically, as if he might thus avoid further visions. Then she must have trodden on a cat.

When she returned she was holding her pointed chin aggressively high. There were patches of natural red on her cheekbones, which looked delirious against her otherwise chalky skin.

‘There!’ she announced in her largest voice. ‘You asked for it!’

She gave two or three twirls, punctuated with stamps, in imitation of the mannequins she imagined, or perhaps had seen with Maman. She was, in turn: a little girl; an angry man; the Fairy Carabosse; while always remaining his sister Rhoda. A large fur-covered button growing from her flat bosom had perhaps been given to her to draw attention from the squirrel hump; but it only made her look more grotesque.

‘Are you satisfied?’ she was asking.

He sank his chin. ‘It’s a fine coat.’

‘Frankly, I think it makes me look a fright.’

‘Nobody’s ever perfect.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘some of us are!’

He would ask from time to time: ‘Aren’t you ever going to wear that coat?’

But it was not yet the weather for it; or she might spoil it; or the cats might tear it. Once he came across her dozing in her chair, wearing the squirrel coat, and an expression of such sublime repose he was afraid to advance any farther. He stood rooted in the brazen light which was pouring in through the conservatory.

Rhoda woke up, however, and said: ‘I read somewhere—in a magazine—that if you wrap up well in summer it insulates you against the heat.’ At the same time she was scrubbing the perspiration off her face with a wad of screwed-up handkerchief.