The Vivisector (66 page)

He heard Rhoda’s voice. ‘I was born vivisected. I couldn’t bear to be strapped to the table again.’

‘I can’t help it,’ he apologized, ‘if I turned out to be an artist.’

There was little else he could say.

‘Shall I fry you some eggs?’ he asked as he led the way downstairs. ‘There’s some bacon, but it may be rancid.’

Rhoda laughed her high little laugh; breathlessness seemed relieved by a descent. ‘Eggs and bacon were always scrumptuous at night! Oh yes, do, Hurtle, do! The bacon might be the kind which tastes rancid from the beginning. I adore bacon when somebody else cooks it for me.’

It was delicious to discover that, on this level, they were still brother and sister: it was the triumph of their education by Maman in superficial intercourse, and they were probably both grateful to have had it.

‘Maman used to cook eggs for us in the bedroom when the money was almost blown. She loved to put on a pretty apron. We’d moved to Battersea by then. Mr Boileau was very bored. He was trying to meet somebody richer.’

As he got out the pan, he asked: ‘How did Maman die, Rhoda?’

‘I think she died because she felt it wasn’t worth living without the inessentials.’

‘Poor thing!’

‘Yes.’ Rhoda sighed. ‘Poor thing!’

Their affection and regret were of the superficial, nostalgic kind Maman herself would have approved, although, enclosed by the asbestos box which passed for a kitchen, it seemed incredible ever to have been children, or that Maman had been any kind of mother.

As the fat began to spit, and the eggs to shrivel, Rhoda was telling him about her life: ‘. . . various rich, elderly women. I was officially a companion. But it never really worked. They only felt they had a duty towards me—because of my curvature. At least that worked well enough on the conscience of one of them. She left me a nice little pittance.’

He knew by the tone of voice, she would have liked to draw him into a conspiracy of confidences; but he was concentrated on the eggs.

‘Something to live on modestly,’ Rhoda said; then she raised her voice, and giggled. ‘And I’ve got a pension—an invalid pension! Doesn’t it kill you? I’d never have had the nerve, but a friend said I should apply. She herself was born poor. I think poor people have more nerve when it comes to self-humiliation.’

He was fascinated by the freckled eggs. The ruff of one was ballooning to such proportions he hoped he wouldn’t ruin it. He knew exactly how he would have painted the lacy, freckled egg.

‘Are you rich, Hurtle? They say you’ve made a packet. I suppose one can’t help it once one begins. I read about a sale of paintings to the United States.’

It made him squint more closely at the eggs. ‘I can’t say I’m poor,’ he mumbled.

There was a soft spatter of rain on the window. He was feeling depressed again. He had ruined his best egg while practising self-indulgence.

‘Those are the best,’ he said, pushing a couple on to her plate; one of them burst, and spread, like a joke egg.

‘This one got burnt. I wasn’t concentrating enough.’ Actually both the eggs he gave himself were burnt, not through lack of concentration, but because he had been so fascinated by the gold to deeper-golden, and finally the burning, ruffs.

‘Mmmm!’
Rhoda was chewing on the frizzled bacon.

A brittle rind stuck out of her little, pointed mouth. She helped it in with a finger: not altogether clean, he noticed. He couldn’t criticize his sister because his own nails were on the grubby side.

Hunger they had in common, and a childhood, and probably a respect for the basic acts and values.

So it didn’t occur to him to offer her any of the loaf from which he tore off an occasional handful, to mop up the egg smears and congealing fat; she would help herself. He was right: whenever necessary, Rhoda prised out little clawfuls of bread, to screw around the terrain of her plate. In an awful way, and as Maman’s true child, she was more delicate than he.

‘Lovely!’ Rhoda sighed, and popped her fingers into her mouth to suck up the last of goodness; on her sharp chin there was a dribble of egg it was impossible for her to know about.

He would have liked to enjoy a fart now that they were finished, but supposed he shouldn’t even though she was his sister.

‘When I first heard about you, Hurtle, after I’d come back—God knows why we do—to Australia—except that a cat prefers to die in the gutter it belongs to spiritually—this was after I’d inherited from Mrs Huxtable, the one in Warwick Gardens.’ Rhoda was weaving her story over some brandy he had remembered in a cupboard. ‘When I first got back I was living over by the part they call The Gash. Do you know it?’ He knew so well he didn’t feel he had to answer; it was from there that his ‘Lantana Lovers’ had come to him; he knew it so intimately he could feel the dew from the moonlit bench working into the seat of his pants. ‘Well, that was where I was living, and it was my friend Mrs Cutbush who told me about you. She reads the newspapers as a compensation.’

‘Cutbush?’

‘Yes. The grocer’s wife.’

‘But you can’t know
Cutbush?
’

‘Him too. Why shouldn’t I? Though he’s not my favourite person. Incidentally, Cutbush once suggested you were an intimate friend. I didn’t let on I was your sister. Nor did I believe in the relationship he claimed. He had the kind of fertile imagination in which acquaintanceship grows, tropically, into a friendship. ’

‘But Cutbush!’ He was nauseated by the smears of egg and congealing fat still left to mop up from his plate. ‘Is Mrs Cutbush the friend you mentioned living with?’

‘Oh dear, no! Mrs Cutbush, poor thing, is too highly strung: she mightn’t be able to endure the extra strain. In any case, I lived only a few years in Gidley Street before moving to these parts.’

He was in no way comforted by Rhoda’s break with the Cutbush couple. The handfuls of soft-sounding rain flung at the window, and increasing threats from a bellyful of bacon fat, contributed to his great unease.

‘As a matter of fact, the Cutbushes moved too, a short time ago, and opened a shop a few streets away from here,’ Rhoda continued.

‘Why?’

‘I suppose they thought this was where life and business are. I never asked them.’

He got up to scrape the dishes; while Rhoda continued loving her brandy. She drank it by such neat sips she would probably hoard it half the night: a cheap drunk at least; or was she temperate out of cunning? He would have liked to force open her little mouth, and pour half the bottle in, then wait for his sister to illuminate a world he found he didn’t know, while living in it. But Rhoda continued sipping her brandy; while he, as he scraped and stacked, could only feel his depression growing. To counteract it, he took a good swig himself, straight out of the bottle. Hadn’t she turned down his plan to protect an innocent soul?

The night was full of an evil she didn’t seem aware of, and he had failed to exorcize. Sometimes Kathy’s breasts developed with the purity and logic of flowers, sometimes they had the wholesome stodginess of suet dumplings, but a wholesomeness which threatened to explode. He could see how rotten they might become, like persimmons lying in long damp grass. Whenever he heard Kathy, it was on the stairs: afterwards, a silence of maidenhair.

Rhoda cut the silence with something like a burp. ‘Actually, I don’t think you realize the influence you have on people. I’ve heard of several who came to live round here because of “Hurtle Duffield the painter”.’

‘Balls and crap! Balls and crap!’ he shouted.

He who could not yet influence himself, didn’t want to hear about his influence on others.

Rhoda lowered her eyes, ignoring words, as Maman and her governesses had taught her. ‘It’s true, though.’ She smiled. ‘Lots of normally undemonstrative, unimaginative people like to cluster round a name. I remember I was cutting up the meat for my cats when some of them burst in. “Is it true that this painter—this Mr Duffield—is your brother?” I replied: “No. It isn’t true.” Because it wasn’t!’ She sniggered. ‘Not physically, anyway, and that seems to be the part which matters. I had to drive them out after that. People don’t notice the attraction meat has for flies.’

‘Balls!’

‘They’re looking for somebody to exalt.’

‘Or kill.’

Rhoda laughed and swallowed. ‘There was one young girl said to me: “I’d die if I ever met him.”’

‘Rhoda,’ he said, leaning forward, getting hold of the bottle, taking another swig, ‘we still have a lot of life to live—why do you dismiss the possibility of our being a help to each other—just because of the stairs?’

‘Oh—stairs!’ She snickered, and helped herself to another tot. ‘Would it have been fair not to explain you might have a corpse on your hands because of my physical condition?’

He couldn’t believe it: she was too tough.

‘Rhoda,’ he said, ‘it’s hard to put—but I’d like to tie the end of my life to the beginning. I think, in that way—rounded—it might be possible to convey what I have to.’

He was too fuddled: while her lip protruded like a small shoebuckle above the Woolworth glass.

‘I don’t say it couldn’t be arranged,’ Rhoda said. ‘I could move my few things into that room—that rather small room—what is it? this side of the conservatory. I’ve taken a fancy to the conservatory. And the cats could move in and out, freely—through the conservatory?’

‘The cats?’

‘Yes. My own fifteen. You haven’t met them. Street cats are something different: a duty. But one’s own cats!’

‘All right, Rhoda.’ Dutifully he bowed his head.

He could feel her hand, her laughter running over his hair like birds or mice. He heard: ‘Hurtle hurtle’ out of the throats of early-morning doves.

At least by his sister’s presence Kathy Volkov would be protected from debauch and himself from destruction.

When they went out to manoeuvre the deal go-cart, the rain had crystallized on the fringes of the araucaria. ‘Good night, brother,’ she said, and a few of the drops fell down in accompaniment to her still clear, while drunken, voice.

The brother should have bent down to embrace his sister, or easier conscience, but it was far too far, and would have looked grotesque even in an empty street.

 

The following morning he woke later than usual, and at once recognized a malaise, less the result of brandy and the undertones of his reunion with Rhoda, than of rain falling, steady and grey. He got up to look at it. His shanks were thin, his veins prominent, his testicles hanging low. A greater cause for gloom was his suspicion, no, the knowledge, that he hadn’t written the address for Rhoda, nor heard her promise to move in on a specific day: not even at a vaguely future date.

As his main defence against Kathy Volkov, Rhoda was to have been quickly installed, if not most suitably in the room next to his own, at least in Miss Gilderthorp’s morning room. She had her hearing and her hump. No woman who had carried a hump through life would surely be able to resist snarling at a man’s last attempt to enter an earthly paradise, particularly if that paradise were in any way perverse, as well as under her nose. But circumstances were threatening his plan. What if Rhoda thought better of her promise? Or, equally disastrous, though not so drastic: if continued rain made her postpone the move? It sometimes poured for weeks; and Kathy might come bursting in, raincoat running with light and water, hair clinging, her skin a rosy delusion, while actually as cold and firm as freshly caught fish.

Moving across the room, back to the crush of tepid blankets waiting for him in his bed, he knew the real source of his gloom was the probability that Kathy would not come before Rhoda was installed. The rain was dousing all his hopes: what child, even the kindest, or most inquisitive, or romantic, or bored, or depraved, would think of visiting a scruffy elderly recluse in a downpour?

He lay half the morning behind his eyelids, a prey to visions of electric flowers flickering with girls’ faces, of such banality he grew ashamed. All the time he told himself he only had to catch sight of Kathy from a window and he would be able to reinvest her with the perfection and purity of his original spiritual child.

During the day, as the rain continued falling in heavy, transparent ropes, he mightn’t have been invented, except to paint the paintings, the ones he could see, opaque and muddy by the prevailing light and any standards of truth. His paintings deserved to become investments. If that cat hadn’t run away he might have tried taming it; or if Rhoda had come, at least they could have exchanged symptoms of their physical crack-ups: or quarrelled.

Towards dark he went out. The rain was slanted now: as thin as wire, and tougher than before. Walking the streets, looking for signs of cat life, he was rewarded only by this cutting lash. In the lane where he had come across Rhoda the evening before, he hung around for some time, accompanied by the sound, the slash of rain. He noticed on a ledge a gobbet of horse-flesh which had been bled white by its prolonged punishment.

Back in the main street, he felt so morally emotionally creatively bankrupt he almost masturbated through his pocket outside a butcher’s. Nobody would have guessed; the passers-by were too busy cosseting their own bedraggled souls to suspect, let alone pounce on, a vice so reprehensible because so solitary. He alone was disgusted with himself.

Next morning it was still raining, but the rain of resignation by now: out of which he received, when he opened the box, two rain-blurred letters.

He almost swallowed them he gasped so deep and fast tearing the damp blotting-paper envelope of the first.

Kathy had written in purple ink, which gave her letter the look of a tattoo: