The Vivisector (77 page)

Like hell she would.

The bus rolled, and rollicked them on, past some dying trees set in concrete.

‘I wonder which works she’s chosen?’ he found himself asking his busboard acquaintance, or monolith-relative.

‘I’ve no idea, I’m sure!’ Mrs Volkov recoiled from this unexpected assault on her discretion. ‘It wouldn’t occur to me to inquire. Kathy might jump on me. I’ve learnt to mind my own business, Mr Duffield.’

If only the mother had known how she intimidated him: it was as if she had caught him fucking with Kathy in the hall under Maman’s buhl table. He only prayed Kathy wouldn’t dish out the Liszt, that she would choose something worthy of their not so secret collaboration: the whole bus must be aware of that.

At Foy’s, Mrs Volkov descended still smiling her inevitable smile. Perhaps to uphold her views on discretion, she hadn’t said good-bye; though what was the point in becoming further involved with someone whose deeper reactions would always be reported to her by their common informer?

He forgot why he had come to the city. He roamed instead around the Quay and up Lower George, without seeing the merchandise in the windows he was peering into. On a morning so obviously joyous, he should have felt less depressed, looked less cadaverous. Everyone else had an air of bounced rubber. What would happen, he wondered, if he fell in the street and failed to bounce back into the vertical position of walking automata? If he continued lying on the pavement, how would those professionally charitable amateurs and trained ambulance men be able to identify him? (Remember for next time to write—no, to print, a card with name and address, to outwit unconsciousness.)

When he got in, Rhoda barely acknowledged his return: she went on shredding lettuce, shelling the bruise-coloured eggs for their lunch; but he could tell she sensed something had happened. She began humming in her slightly cracked, girl’s voice, a tune he couldn’t identify, or not at first; then he woke up to the full viciousness of her behaviour: it was one of the juicier tunes from Liszt’s First Piano Concerto.

He decided not to be drawn; nor would he depend on Rhoda for any of the information Mrs Volkov naively presumed she would pass on. This time he would read the papers.

Probably it was what Rhoda feared would happen. As they sat eating the nasty salad, she passed the cruet without his asking. He ignored the cruet, in which the vinegar alone was kept replenished, and which must have started life on some boarding-house table or in a railway refreshment room. Each time she ate one of her own salads. Rhoda seemed to be doing penance for something: for the crinkled jade hearts, exquisitely perfumed with tarragon and lemon, unctuous with oil, which Maman liked to prepare herself, white hands formally poised, in an illumination of sapphires.

‘What’s the matter?’ Rhoda mumbled, as he watched a ribbon of darkened lettuce suspended from her shoebuckle mouth.

That night he dreamed he was the centre of a strangely prearranged accident: he walked out into the street, as though obeying a signal, and lay down in front of one of the trams they had done away with. The brown tram galloped bucking and screaming towards him, bells ringing, sides encrusted with human heads. Additional evidence of prearrangement was provided by Rhoda: she was standing on the kerb, in her squirrel coat, waiting to step off when the tram wheels should tear into his legs.

It happened as planned: the blood gushed; yet he remained unfeeling, as though made of marzipan specially moulded for the occasion. His head began to sprout long-necked crimson flowers, if only the onlookers could have seen.

Kneeling beside him, Rhoda was saying:
Mrs Cutbush—oh dear no, Mrs Volkov is giving a little party for Katherine her daughter after the concert in the Town Hall, and would like you to be of the company.

Rhoda was choosing words with particular care, and wearing rings Maman must have sold to be able to bribe Julian Boileau.

In the teeth of so much formality and splendour all he could answer was: You’ve torn your good coat, Rhoda—your squirrel coat. You must do up the place with a safety-pin. And what is this?

There was a kind of twisted string hanging out from where the coat opened in front.

That’s unnecessary!
Rhoda snapped.
A sort of tie-string. I can’t think why Mrs Grünblatt gave it to me. As for tearing, speak for yourself!

She was right. He was wearing a yellow, rubberized overall of the type worn by men who work with acid, or those who test fire extinguishers; how he had acquired it he couldn’t remember, probably from one of the shop windows on Lower George. In any case, his travesty had been slashed to ribbons by the tram.

How can I go, Rhoda, in this?

What sort of a party?

But what corpse?

Are you joking, Rhoda?

But perhaps she wasn’t. She was too serious for that: white acrylic tears were squeezing out of her rat’s eyes, down her withered cheeks, painting them with a beauty he hadn’t noticed before, though of the stalactite order.

He tried unsuccessfully to put out his hand. What are we doing here? he asked.

It is not yet to know,
she mumbled through the mouth of Mrs Volkov; then, painfully making the effort to correct her bungled speech:
not not possibly.

His inability to put out a hand, and increasing absence of mind in Rhoda, trussed and knotted him so tightly it put an end to this Dream.

‘What on earth is the matter with you? Are you sick?’ She was screeching up at him, through the sallow daylight, from the hall.

‘Oh no, dear, a dream! Oh, dear!’ he mumbled coughing laughing spluttering back.

‘What?’ From deep down in the house she was laughing too, while at the same time angry. ‘I thought you were sick. I never heard such a rumpus.’

‘A dream!’

Because it was Rhoda she didn’t ask about the dream: she closed the kitchen door, and soon after he smelled the smell of burning fat.

 

He began to read the papers, watching for an announcement of the Volkov concert. In the meantime dealers were bringing him clients anxious to buy his paintings; but he seldom opened to them. He would look down on the crowns of their heads, but couldn’t make the effort to go downstairs and let them in. After a while the heads would retreat. The dealers would send him letters which he recognized by instinct, and didn’t read because of the polite anger they must contain.

Then one evening Rhoda remarked: ‘Mrs Volkov has given me a couple of complimentary tickets for the concert on Wednesday night. One is for myself, the other, she insists, is for you. She says she met you on a bus. I told her I thought you disliked listening to music in public, and in any case, you probably wouldn’t fancy sitting with me.’

‘But the concert—has She already arrived?’

In the state of shock and alarm in which Rhoda’s announcement left him, he couldn’t bring himself to use the Name. He would feel less vulnerable if She remained an abstraction.

‘It’s all over the papers—which you never bother to read. Didn’t you at least see the photo taken at the party, with Lady ffolliott Morgan helping Her cut the cake?’ Nor could Rhoda bear to use the Name.

He shook his head, like the old shaven goat he must look.

‘It was a party given by the committee in honour of Her arrival. Why a cake I can’t think. As if it were a wedding—or a birthday. Her birthday’s in summer, I seem to remember. I remember Mrs Volkov telling me she’d turned twenty-five.’

He had never stood so close to death. If he could face this, surely then, he might look at the press photograph?

‘Where is it?’ he asked. ‘The paper? I’d like to see.’

Rhoda was watching him. ‘I’m afraid you can’t. I threw it out with the potato peelings. At least, I’m pretty sure I did.’

He was pretty sure that, if he looked when she went out, he’d find a cutting under Rhoda’s handkerchief sachet. He mustn’t be tempted, though: too dangerous—not Rhoda’s catching him, but his first glimpse of the Face.

‘Have you seen Her in the flesh?’

‘Oh no—too busy, what with the receptions, and the press, and rehearsal with the orchestra. Mrs Volkov is a wreck from sitting waiting for a few moments with her own daughter. Their best and almost only time is when she takes in the breakfast tray.’

So much irrelevant chatter helped him partly recover his toppled balance.

During the day which separated them from the concert he was conscious that he hadn’t given Rhoda an answer to her offer of the ticket. He would have liked to think he wouldn’t accept, but knew he would, and that Rhoda took it for granted; otherwise she would have pressed for a definite answer.

‘What is Kathy going to play?’ He was quite pleased with the sound of his planned indifference, at one of those moments when he and Rhoda were crossing like strangers in the yard.

Rhoda, surprisingly, rattled off: ‘Mozart’s K.271’ as though she had been brought up on it; she spoiled things, though, by tripping just afterwards on the hem of her dressing-gown which had come unstitched some months before.

He warned as gently, as genuinely as he could: ‘You’ll fall down and hurt yourself if you insist on wearing that old gown.’

Rhoda clawed at the back door and tore it open.

When he got inside, she was blowing her nose in the scullery. ‘What is it?’ he asked, still gentle, perhaps horribly so.

For she answered: ‘I thought I’d managed to escape pity while we were still children.’

‘Don’t you know—you who read the papers’—he couldn’t resist, ‘we’re living in the age of “compassion, tenderness and warmth”?’

In spite of it, they were most considerate towards each other all that afternoon.

He confessed: ‘I’d like to come with you to the concert,’ but he said it so low he could see she hadn’t heard.

Or hadn’t she wanted to hear?

 

The night of the concert was filled with a cutting wind, which added a rattling of window sashes to that of furniture handles as they got themselves ready. His stomach was threatened by the boiled haddock they had eaten in a hurry. What if he farted out loud during a subdued passage? Or if, on condescending to embrace, She should smell the haddock juices the pores of his cheeks were exuding? He unearthed a bottle of left-over eau de Cologne, a present from some woman who had expected to get a painting cheap, and soused his breastpocket handkerchief with the stuff. The tonic smell encouraged him: he sprinkled more of the eau de Cologne down the front of his monogrammed shirt, another present from another woman. Perhaps if She smelled the smell She would be reminded of invalids, and treat him kindly. So he dashed eau de Cologne at his armpits.

When he went down Rhoda wasn’t ready, though he caught sight of her moving about her room dressed in the squirrel coat. This time she hadn’t tarted up her hair: it was hanging round her face, giving her the appearance of a grizzled monkey.

Armed with his masculine authority he marched into Rhoda’s camp and said: ‘Next time I sell a painting we must restore the conservatory.’

‘Oh,’ she murmured, ‘should we recognize it afterwards? Wouldn’t it lose its charm?’

As he kicked at the displaced tiles and fragments of glass he was glad they shared this obsession for the conservatory in which Katherine Volkov had performed her dance.

But Rhoda had begun swearing: she said ‘damn’ several times quickly, like a woman imitating Harry Courtney.

‘What is it?’ he asked, returning. ‘You’ve torn your good coat?’

She had: by catching the pocket on a knob; a triangular piece of skin was hanging loose.

‘You must mend it!’ he panted.

‘There isn’t
time!
’ Her rodent voice had asserted itself.

‘Do it up with a safety-pin.’

The idea seemed to appeal to her: or anyway, she followed his advice.

Although the damage had been patched up, he was disturbed by remembering the torn coat in his recent dream. Was he to be cut down, then, by K.271? The operation promised to be less bland than that of the tram ploughing into his marzipan flesh: music can draw actual blood.

Foreboding must have been at large in Rhoda too: she started gasping; she grabbed his hand with her monkey’s paw. ‘I’m so frightened!’ she whimpered when they were trampling out, pulling the front door shut.

They began to negotiate the never quite familiar labyrinth, looking for non-existent taxis, the wind slashing at them.

‘Have you been using scent?’ Rhoda shrieked against the wind.

‘A drop of eau de Cologne.’

‘The same. I can’t bear scent. It affects my sinuses.’

She tried to produce some soggy sounds, but the wind was from the wrong quarter, and by the time they found a taxi, and were enclosed in its airlessness, she had discovered other fears.

‘Mrs Volkov has developed a bladder complaint. I do hope she can last till the interval.’

Mrs Volkov, he saw immediately, was sitting in the same row several seats away from them. Without the protection of her iron hat, and probably in a state of nerves over her weak bladder and the approaching performance, she looked paler, more monolithic, suggestive of granite veiled in cloud. She was smiling her permanently swivelled smile out of gelatinous lips. It would have fascinated him to calculate how much of herself she had contributed to her daughter, if he hadn’t scented a danger on her far side: he noticed what could have been Cutbush the grocer, skin grown loose on his now shrunken fleshiness, clothes baggy over all. Cutbush was seated on the aisle; between himself and Mrs Volkov sat the lady who must be his wife, visible for the moment only as a swirl of greenish-purple hair.