The Vivisector (68 page)

She called up: ‘Hurtle? I bought a pie for luncheon.’

...

She called up: ‘There’s some cheese. You’re not sulking, are you?’

They were listening to their thoughts clashing like pebbles in mid-air.

After a while she left him alone.

During the afternoon he suddenly remembered Loebel had threatened to come, at a precise hour, bringing an American client. He got into some clothes. How would he receive Loebel and the client? Ingenuously? Or by sombre stealth?

He didn’t have time to practise, for noticing that, in spite of the impending visit and Rhoda’s prowling thoughts, his collage had come to life again: he could visualize the crimson heart-form behind an opalescent veil. He was soon busy arranging the gouache in bridal folds; while his own heart, always quick to recognize inevitability in composition, settled back into contentment.

Exactly at four, Loebel came with Propert, the promised American.

‘Ah,
maestro!
’ From the doorstep the dealer was visibly steaming with flattery, the object of which stood sideways, and let it steam past.

‘Faht is ziss? Sommsing hes happened?’ Loebel sniffed, incredulously, jovially.

‘An infiltration of cats.’ It was fortunate Rhoda had left again on business; most afternoons she visited any of the local restaurants sympathetic to her work amongst cats, and carried off what they allowed her: anything too old or too gristly to convince the evening’s clientele.

Propert, it seemed, would have accepted Rhoda, along with the cats, as another agreeable detail in a background of eccentricity.

Skidding down the hall, the American laughed, and explained: ‘My godmother kept cats. The whole of her house in Vermont was given over to them—though she was ruled by one in particular: a Russian blue. I remember the combed-out fur from the Persians blowing in the wind. It was a godsend to nesting birds.’

None of this had been foreseen. Loebel began to draw his client’s attention to paintings in that lowered voice a successful painter’s house demanded.

‘Zese faht you see are all early lyrical veuorks. Zere is greater
Kraft
—depth—later; but
purity—ze lyrical
purity of youss hess its appeal, I sink you vill agree.’ He lowered his voice still lower. ‘I heff one early
fah
bulous Duffield—little—very small—if the maestro isn’t personally interested in selling any zet you here see.’

Propert was sold on cats. ‘My godmother’s Russian blue had a particular yen for sweetbreads. He could detect the smell. He would sulk till she fed him at least the membranes—as an appetizer to the main dish of swordfish steak.’

Propert was also incidentally interested in paintings. He smiled rather inanely whenever his attention was caught. He preferred not to comment, but touched the air in front of the object of his interest, very briefly, with one finger. He was of no particular age, but his chubby form and downy texture reminded one of a ripe quince.

Upstairs, Loebel heaved down to business amongst the ‘important veuorks’; while an opalescent veil persisted, which the dealer perhaps didn’t perceive, or if he did, couldn’t penetrate.

‘What is this, Mr Duffield?’ Propert asked.

‘A collage I’m playing about with. Haven’t finished. It may not develop into anything much.’ Lying on the floor it looked as though it wouldn’t, not beyond its initial stage of haphazard seductiveness: you couldn’t help kicking at it.

Propert, on the other hand, couldn’t resist picking it up. He was smiling. They were both smiling; while Loebel remained holding an important work the other side of the veil.

Propert said: ‘Oh, I like this! Will you let me have it, Mr Hurtle Duffield?’

‘No. I’m working on it.’

‘But when it’s finished—after you’ve gone on from here and done whatever you have to.’

‘No. I can’t think there’ll be too many stages. Doesn’t interest me enough. From the beginning, it’s too indeterminate.’

They still liked each other, however. They continued genuinely smiling; and Loebel couldn’t interpret what was happening.

‘What appeals to me is its tentativeness,’ Propert was saying. ‘I’d like to keep it in a state of becoming’—his chubby, quince face was taking an enormous risk—‘before the music sets into architecture.’

Fortunately Loebel had the window to look out of, into the concrete world: it was he who made the discovery. ‘Maestro, you heff visitors. Are zey unexpected?’

The latch on the back gate had clicked. You could hear the squeal of Rhoda’s little cart as she dragged it into the yard.

‘No. I was expecting her about this time.’

In the upper room, the figures of all three had been transformed into statuary by the unexpectedness of the expected.

Close enough to the window, the chubby Propert had grown uncharacteristically sharp: out of his fixed eyes arrows shot along his line of vision. ‘An unusually pretty girl. Is she your daughter?’

It was too exhausting: it was too cruel.

‘No. My sister.’

‘You haff such a sister? So small?’ Loebel floundered.

A kindly attempt at pity landed like the clumsiest of blows: when lightning struck the third statue into man.

‘Yes, I have a sister.’ He parted the other figures to arrive at the window. ‘The old—the oldish woman. The little girl isn’t—naturally—my sister. She’s a friend—less than that—a neighbourhood acquaintance,’ he heard himself babbling on.

The two visitors had retreated with their shame into the middle of the room leaving him in full possession of the picture of Kathy and Rhoda together in the yard. He was the one who should have felt ashamed: of Rhoda. In fact he felt nothing of the sort; for Rhoda had been drawn into the circle of Kathy’s radiance. Whether two children, or two women, Rhoda and Kathy were equals, it appeared, not to say familiars. Rhoda was recovering her breath after the journey with the laden cart. One of Kathy’s arms was loosely linked to Rhoda’s as they stood chattering and laughing, aimlessly and breathlessly. He couldn’t—in any case he didn’t want to—hear what they were saying to each other, because their loving smiles suggested they would not have wished him to share in their conversation.

Loebel hid his embarrassment in saying: ‘Vee are using your valuable time, maestro.’

Propert had put on silence for the hunchback sister of a great man. Of the two visitors, he was probably the more shocked: Loebel, as a Jew, would have experienced a wider range of humiliation.

Down in the yard Rhoda and Kathy were straining again, dragging the cart with its tins of refuse on the last lap of its journey to the kitchen. Kathy was doing most of the pulling: she was full of the strength of youth and affection; while Rhoda too, appeared fulfilled as she jerked dreamily at the cord in token gestures of exertion.

‘Vee vill pop!’ Loebel’s buzz came from the doorway. ‘It is how long—I did not know—you heff zis relative viz you? In fect, I did not know you heff any relative at all. It goes to show it is so very difficult to completely know.’

‘No. Yes! I’d be obliged if you’ll see yourselves to the door. Yes. I’m a little tired.’

Propert was smiling an unhappy smile for the bright collage of their relationship which, in spite of its early promise, had come visibly unstuck.

‘Good-bye, Hurtle Duffield. Next time we must discuss the paintings.’

His handshake demonstrated all the assurance of middle-aged collegiate manliness: which his smile seemed to deny. Propert’s smile was struggling to get out: you were reminded of the membrane on the sweetbreads his godmother in Vermont used to feed to her Russian blue.

 

When the two visitors had left the house, the only sounds were those of muffled voices in the kitchen, tins jostling each other, a grizzling of awakened cats. Apparently Rhoda had no intention of announcing her return or producing her friend. Instead, she had taken the steel and started what became a long sharpening of her knife.

The two voices laughed together intermittently, their laughter strangely similar in tone. Surely Kathy could only be imitating Rhoda?

Lying on the bed, in the ever more deeply burnished light, he must have looked an inanimate lump of grey; though his mind, fidgeting through possibilities, didn’t allow him any rest. Would Rhoda’s friendship with Kathy lessen the chances of his destruction? Would it, on the other hand, destroy what he hoped to create from Kathy? Rhoda’s presence, planned as his comfort and moral defence, could end, like many a sulky fire, by burning down the whole house.

So he continued brooding, as the sky smouldered over Chubb’s Lane.

In the dusk a door opened and closed below. He knew then that Kathy was coming to him. It could only be Kathy flying up the stairs. The house shuddered. He decided she should find him sick.

‘Duff?’ she called. ‘What—lying in the dark! You’re not sick, are you?’

She was making it easy to that extent.

‘It’s not dark.’ He was too conscious of a last glow of light which her forehead and bare arms were rekindling. ‘But I
am
sick.’

‘What’s wrong? Eh?’ She spoke with a spontaneous warmth, dropping down beside him on the bed, prepared to catch anything infectious.

As for himself, he caught his breath. ‘Nothing exactly
wrong
—nothing you could put your finger on: old age nudging.’

‘But you’re not what anyone would call old!’ She crept further, insinuating herself like one of those damned cats around Rhoda their patroness.

He would have liked to shout: ‘Go away!’ Instead, he murmured, heaving: ‘You’re cutting off the circulation in my legs. You’re heavy, Kathy.’

‘Don’t you like to be comforted when you’re sick?’

‘Comfort’ wasn’t acceptable to anyone on fire: too eider-downy; he couldn’t have explained that.

‘I expect Miss Courtney ’ull bring you up a bowl of broth, won’t she?’

‘You didn’t tell me—neither of you did—that you knew each other.’

‘Oh? No. She had the little room that my mother lets. We didn’t know she was your sister.’

‘She isn’t.’

Kathy had crept closer up. At least the darkness would prevent him watching her skin burn, and the moment when those dangerously inflammable strands at the nape of her neck must catch. If she was still unaware of the fire inside him, she could only be simple, or inhuman.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

His mouth moved, but didn’t succeed in articulating.

‘Oh!’ she sighed. ‘I’d like to fall in love—with somebody appropriate. ’

‘What’s “appropriate”?’

Her downy mouth was drifting over his; she seemed to have abandoned speech for touch.

‘Haven’t you your music?’ He tried to thrust her off with his thighs; but the law of nature engineered his failure: she settled deeper.

‘Yes, my music,’ she breathed. ‘Mr Khrapovitsky says I must study harder.’

She was digging into his maternal, his creative entrails.

‘Old enough to be your grandfather,’ he muttered against her lips.

But she didn’t hear, because fire and sea were roaring through them: if only one could have halted the other.

At least he was, technically, the passive one; he could console himself morally with that: he hadn’t attempted.

In the hot dusk Kathy was devouring him, with sticky kisses at first, then, not with words, but a kind of gobbledegook of jerky passion. The surprising part of it was she took their behaviour completely for granted—excepting his passivity.

‘Don’t you like me?’ she asked between mouthfuls.

From amongst the wreckage of what he had aspired to, he didn’t. He had hoped to love, not possess her.

‘Don’t you?’ she gasped.

‘No, Kathy, I love you.’ That seemed to satisfy her: now she could accept the dry science of his approach.

Anatomically, she was in every detail what he could have desired—or almost. The shock of discovering her only deficiency made him spill out incontinently and without thought for the consequences.

He became as curiously unafraid of Kathy, and finally, unsurprised. She was by now half snoozing, at the same time exploring his stubble; while he listened to Rhoda pulling her charitable cart, across the yard, up the lane, away. Had it occurred to Rhoda at any point that her charity might be needed at home?

‘Kathy,’ he began, swallowing hard, because since she was nothing more than his mistress, whatever he might say must sound embarrassingly trite, ‘I only wonder how it happened that you learned so much so soon.’

‘About what?’

‘About men.’

‘Honestly,’ she said, ‘I’ve never ever been with a man. My mother would have had a fit.’

Honestly, she was becoming intolerable.

‘Boys, though—’ she mumbled in her drowsiness—‘boys won’t always leave you alone: you do it to have peace.’

Suddenly he was free of her weight, by no effort on his part. He could hear and feel her sitting up in the surrounding darkness, reviving her conscience, or brushing off her lethargy, or both: it intrigued him to realize all the sounds she was making were those of a mature woman.

Kathy seemed to be agitated by the first inroads of guilt. ‘Oh, dear!’ she began to mutter, then moan: ‘I’m late! I’m late for practice. How I hate that—to be late.’ The darkness was all movement, the window-pane quivering with artificial lights. ‘Khrapovitsky is right: I must study harder. I was good, though, at the last lesson. Khrap even had to admit it.’

He tried to invoke deafness and did succeed in retreating into himself for a moment; when he was sucked back, he heard: ‘. . . if only I will give all of myself—all of my time—to music. So he says.’

The fireworks of Liszt were coruscating in and over Chubb’s Lane: the cheap bangers, the intoxicated Catherine-wheels, the soaring, feathered rockets.

He heard her scratching after the switch. ‘Don’t turn on the light, Kathy.’