The Vivisector (73 page)

Out of these drawings he finally painted ‘The Lopsided Blind’ and ‘Spiral’. He worked on them alternately because each originated in Kathy’s letter, and though different in their moral climate and aesthetic treatment, they also complemented each other. In the painting of the looped, tatty old Venetian, the girl’s face was visible in the corner the blind revealed. Her incised shells of eyes contained kernels of vision not yet germinated. Most of the body, except for the rather square hands, was cut off at the windowsill. The girl’s face was as rapacious and tragic as a young sun-blinded eagle sensing nourishment in an interplay of colour it couldn’t see. He aimed his barrage at this one corner not obscured by the dusty blind or oppressed by the sun-blistered sash.

The second painting appeared less clearly defined, though on second thought, and examination, the architecture of the spiral was unequivocal. The girl-figure was not at the mercy of this whirlwind of music or fatality. Her feet were firmly placed; the ambiguous, half-veiled expression of the face ultimately revealed conscious will, whether also sensibility, he bitterly wondered during a series of wet afternoons, remembering Kathy as a vulgar little schoolgirl-tart. How her mac would have smelt of rubber; her sodden plait, with its stringy pink ribbon, would have tasted of rain.

But again, on the first day of sun and redemption, he saw the painting as originally conceived, or as close as you can ever get. If he had never achieved what he was aiming at, he strewed such bloody gobbets of himself along the way, those similarly involved had recognized their own half-realized intentions; the ignorant gushers and sceptics didn’t matter.

 

This winter it was Rhoda who went down with pneumonia. Lying in the iron cot she looked not unlike the little pink-haired girl who had tried to smother him in a disgusting kiss smelling of talcum powder and hot flannel. His resistance then made him genuinely humble now.

“Rhoda—what can I do for you?’

‘Nothing.’ She didn’t even open her eyes.

Anything positive that had ever existed between them was entombed in one word and her small, suddenly marble, features.

He couldn’t stop looking at her.

Out of his memories of May Noble he cooked dishes for her: fish, of the most delicate, transparent flesh, with oysters nestling round the fillets; breasts of chicken suave with cream and mushrooms. Once he bought a bunch of violets and laid them on the tray, on the corner of an admittedly grey cloth.

But Rhoda said: ‘Can’t you leave me alone? Food nauseates me. It’s the drugs that doctor prescribes, I suppose,’ always speaking with her eyes closed; at least it eased out her frown.

‘Shall I fetch another doctor?’

‘No.’ The oracle began to stir. ‘What use is a doctor? Everything depends on yourself. Didn’t you know?’

His humility was wearing thin. ‘What about Mrs Volkov? And God’s kindness? Which let her off with a
little
stroke!’ He allowed himself to indulge in a laugh.

Rhoda snorted through her marble nostrils. ‘Mrs. Volkov is a very simple woman—though she did have Kathy. Parents and children, I think, are only accidentally related.’

After that he took the tray out. He took the violets and threw them into the garbage bin.

Rhoda would cough: sometimes her phlegm was marked with threads of blood.

Suspecting he had noticed, she said: ‘I shall be up in a fortnight. ’ She opened her eyes. ‘To hear Kathy play in the final at the Town Hall.’

‘But we don’t know that she’ll reach the final.’

‘Oh, but you don’t keep up! You’re always painting. She won her State. I heard it on my little transistor. She played the Liszt—exquisitely.’ Rhoda spoke with Maman’s voice, apparently unaware of it, and closed her eyes again.

 

She was up before the fortnight, feeling her way about in a pair of quilted slippers, and coughing drier. Not long after, although the weather was viciously inclined, she started, more slowly, dragging the go-cart down the closer streets loaded with offal for neglected cats. In a mackintosh cape, she looked like a tent hastily erected in wet and darkness.

One evening he saw an opportunity. ‘Surely Kathy’s concert will be an occasion to try out the coat? After an illness, too. In winter.’

Rhoda began slinging the dishes around. ‘If it will give you any satisfaction, Hurtle, to watch other people recognize your generosity.’

He must get it out quick, but his tongue was swollen. ‘Not at all. I shan’t be there.’

‘Not at Kathy’s concert?’

He shook his head. ‘Not to wallow in Liszt. And Tchaikovsky. And Rachmaninov. By a pack of students. For another pack.’

‘I’m not surprised, Hurtle. You were always an intellectual snob.
I
can’t help loving
all
lovely music.’

She was too virtuous to argue with.

Instead he nursed his hatred of Kathy Volkov for her failure to tell him of her success, while bitterly accusing his own self-absorbed nature which prevented him reading newspapers. He would make sure not to miss the announcement of the final, so that he could study Rhoda’s, probably secret, preparations for the night: to catch her not wearing the fur coat, or better still, wearing it. The hurt he would inflict on himself by not watching Katherine Volkov walk out across the platform, raked by applause from students, relatives, and elderly men, was not his least luxurious thought.

So he read the
Herald,
sometimes twice, in case his mind, diverted by some other detail, related to his own work for instance, had missed half a dozen lines crammed slyly into a corner.

Actually he needn’t have bothered: it was enough to watch Rhoda, who looked more and more as though on the point of joining a church. She grew silenter, her eyes larger; her normally delicate features were still further refined by a transparency and tautening of the skin, till she was all eyes, forehead, obsessed mouth. What if Rhoda, too, were in love with Kathy? He started by thinking of them practising some unvisualized, but diabolical perversion, though it tortured him worse to suspect Kathy and Rhoda of meeting on a spiritual level he should never have considered either of them able to attain.

Finally, there were all the signs of physical preparation: wardrobe doors opening and closing; handles rattling; smells of naphthalene and face powder; unexplained sorties at unorthodox hours.

He lost control of himself on hearing her arrive back late for cats yet again. ‘Great shivoos, I expect, in the Cutbush salong to celebrate the return of their star.’

‘I don’t believe either Cutbush has set eyes on Kathy since her return. In fact, her own mother hardly sees her: she’s so busy preparing for her concert. Mr Khrapovitsky, who came up from Melbourne to be with her, has rented a studio so that she can work under the best possible conditions.’

While Kathy rehearsed for her concert, Rhoda was preparing for the night’s ritual of purple flesh. After taking off her coat and menacing her hair, she began tuning up the knife which time had almost sharpened away.

‘Oh dear, how late I am!’ she complained in her most fretful, little-girl’s voice. ‘If you only knew what goes on!’ As though he didn’t know too well. ‘You imagine parties, when it’s sheer drudging. And nerves. Not only Kathy, poor Mrs Volkov wonders whether she’ll be able to face the night. That’s why I went this afternoon. To sit with her.’

Rhoda’s voice kept slithering along the steel with which she was sharpening her scimitar.

‘There was one party,’ she admitted, ‘if you could call it that.’

This was where he sat forward, if not literally.

‘Because it wasn’t prearranged, Mrs Cutbush was keeping Mrs Volkov company. When Kathy came in from a session with Khrapovitsky. It was already fairly late, and I personally would have preferred to come home to bed. But poor Mrs Volkov made a few dropped scones. Mrs Volkov is famous for her dropped scones. And Kathy, who was tired, revived. That’s how the party began.’

‘All on a few dropped scones.’

‘Well—Mrs Volkov never touches alcohol. And Kathy is still only a child. But Mrs Cutbush had very kindly brought along a bottle of gin, knowing there might be callers in the next few days. Mrs Cutbush has had experience in directions where Mrs Volkov has never been.’

‘And were there any callers? To help Mother Cutbush mop up the gin?’

‘Well—there was Mr Khrapovitsky, naturally: he’s Kathy’s teacher, and it’s unpleasant for a young girl to walk back alone through the streets at night. And there was that Shuard—the music critic.’

‘Not prearranged?’

‘I think they thought,’ Rhoda paused, ‘it might be politic. I heard Khrapovitsky explaining to Mrs Volkov that personal contact is all-important.’

She was cutting into the meat by now.

‘Don’t tell me Cutbush wasn’t there!’

‘No. I think he’s lost interest. He’s not what you’d call musical. The only other person was Kathy’s boyfriend Clif—he spells it with one “f”, so Kathy told me.’

‘What do you mean by “boyfriend”?’

‘Frankly, I don’t know. But that’s the term for it.’ She was cutting the meat into long ribbons, then across, to make careful squares. ‘Anyway, Clif is no longer a boy. He’s a very brilliant physiologist, they say.’

‘What—another one?’

Rhoda wasn’t listening: she was too busy with the horseflesh, or what she had dreamt, or was thinking out. ‘Beautiful and gifted women—Kathy is gifted, and will certainly be beautiful—dazzle men as the moon—the planets dazzle them. That isn’t to say their men mean much more to them than the men on earth do to the stars they’re goggling at. Why should they? Somebody like Kathy has a destiny—a path you don’t expect her to diverge from. You can’t expect more than their art from artists. If you did, you might forget about the art, and die of shame for what they’ve shown you of mankind.’

Rhoda was so deep in concentration, or trance, he was able to escape into the yard. He couldn’t have gone upstairs to the paintings from which she had divorced him. Outside, the night was a tangle of vines and stars. Cold, too: it made the water in him swell. After warding off a cat innocent enough to believe it might merge its entity with his, he began to piss on what he recognized, from the orchestration, as the heap of empty tins.

 

On the night of the concert he sat waiting in the kitchen through which she would pass, as it was easier to reach the bus via Chubb’s Lane. He began his watch unnecessarily early, it might have seemed, but that way there would be no chance of her eluding him. Rhoda would be too afraid she might miss even a competitor in whom she had no interest; she would start far earlier than she need. He could sense from a smell of gunpowder in the air that the occasion as a whole was the experience of her life. Murders were not out of the question, or suicides, on the night of Rhoda’s Kathy’s triumph.

So he sat and waited.

When she didn’t come, but continued dropping hairbrushes, shoes, scratching at the handles of her chest of drawers, he began to call raucously: ‘Rhoda? You’ll be late! Don’t you realize? Late! Late!’ His voice bounced back.

His nerves were in specially fine tune. He farted once. He rattled the keys and money in his pockets as he disliked hearing others do. And nearly missed Rhoda.

Either because it was a formal occasion, or because she had decided to avoid him, she was going out through the front door. He hadn’t heard her leave her room, or cross the living-room carpet, and only jumped up when she almost brought down the hatstand in the hall.

He ran, bursting in to catch her, calling, his voice teetering as the bamboo hatstand righted itself: ‘Weren’t you going to say good-bye?’ Much too loud.

She, on the other hand, spoke too softly. ‘I didn’t want to distress you by letting you see me leave for the concert.’ He couldn’t tell whether she had meant it.

She had frizzed up her hair into the shape of an urn, choked at the neck by what looked like a gold ribbon off a chocolate box. She had powdered herself almost to death; only the patches of dry rouge on the cheekbones and the unhealed scar of a mouth reminded too vividly of life. She was wearing the squirrel coat, too, the collar buttoned up to her gills. Was she straining after extra height?

Then he remembered he was carrying the bunch of violets. As on the occasion during her illness, when he had bought her one and laid it on the tray of rejected food, he was now offering the bunch of Parma violets; nor had he forgotten the pin.

Rhoda clawed at them, mumbling, and pinned them clumsily to her collar: they made her look more livid.

She had achieved none of the height she had aspired to, and for a moment he feared that, in wanting to express herself in some way, she might be going to kiss his hand. He was almost crying for them. Whatever else they had botched in life, they might have had this child whom they both loved, and who was probably suffering somewhere in a crumpled, department-store dress, crouching over a silent keyboard.

Rhoda said: ‘You should make yourself a cup of cocoa.’

‘
Cocoa!
I’ll be all right—listening to the wireless, in the studio. Oh God, yes! None of the coughing and the faces.’

She lowered her head and began sidling out, as though departure through the front door made this obligatory. Again their love for Kathy might have melted him if he hadn’t remembered that Kathy and Rhoda were probably conspiring to finish him off.

So he called: ‘Enjoy yourself!’ and laughed.

He thought he heard Rhoda laughing back, but the noise made by the flap on the letter-box prevented him knowing for certain.

 

That good tweed overcoat (English) which never wore out, only discoloured, had holes in the corners of the pockets through which he used to stick his thumbs. Tonight the holes tore worse; he not only felt, he could hear them tear as he raced along Chubb’s Lane, up Dolgelly, up Jones, up Lavernock Streets. Impossible at this hour to cajole a taxi anywhere inside the labyrinth.