Summary
After some time has passed, Duffield sits by the port and chats to a man called Mothersole. Duffield says he is a painter and he tells Mothersole about his former mistress, Hero, and how he had been told she went mad and died because of him but actually – he found out later in a letter – she died of cancer. The conversation revives him, and reminds him of a previous conversation which similarly “rebirthed” him: the conversation with Cutbush, at night under the moon.
Duffield considers why he has never painted children, other than Rhoda, who is “ageless” (402). Around this time a local girl, around thirteen years old, knocks on his door inquiring after one of his neighbors. They talk briefly and he reflects on how throughout his life he has not known any children but himself and young Rhoda. Boo Hollingrake shows up at a party Duffield attends and the two have a strange, noticeable tension. While the other guests seem to think the two have sexual history, they are in fact both thinking about Hero. Duffield wonders more about the circumstances of her death; Boo says that Hero loved her all along, that she gave Hero to Duffield to try to save, and that he ended up killing her.
A group of local children play ball near Duffield’s house and he can hear them talking about him. When a ball gets loose in his yard, Kathy Volkov, the girl who previously knocked on his door, comes asking for it. Duffield asks after the origin of her name – whether she’s Russian – and she says her mother is Scottish. She tells him she is a piano player and he asks if she will be a good one; she answers that her piano teacher says she will be. Duffield says it is up to her if she wants to be great and says he hopes she’ll come back soon to exchange ideas with him.
Kathy comes back the next morning with a cat that her mother will not let her keep. Duffield protests, not wanting it either, but Kathy lets the cat into the house anyway, and then follows after her. She peers around the house and says she would like to live in a place like that, where she could play music all the time. Liszt is her favorite. She looks at Duffield’s paintings, asking why he painted some things and not other things, and Duffield grows concerned that she might somehow permanently hole her way into his home and life. When she sees the nude painting he had just made of her and asks if it is meant to be her, he only says that he has not seen her, so some parts are not accurate. She kisses him before she leaves for her piano lesson.
Outside at dusk, Duffield encounters a woman pushing a cart and shouting after cats; on closer look, he realizes the woman is his long-lost sister, Rhoda. Duffield is so excited to run into her and is surprised by her lack of shock; it turns out she knew he was living in Sydney, and had even seen him around town a few times. He invites her back to his house, desperate to tell her about his life. Over the course of the night, he realizes that Rhoda could be a real force of good for him, especially regarding to Kathy Volkov: “by his sister’s presence Kathy Volkov would be protected from debauch and himself from destruction” (447).
Rhoda moves in with Hurtle. When he discovers that she already knows Kathy, having been renting the spare room in her house, he worries that their familiarity will make Rhoda’s presence a less effective barrier. Kathy continues to visit Hurtle and while their relationship is billed as one of an artistic and aesthetic bond, they do have a sexual encounter. Rhoda for the most part takes over management of the house and calendar, allowing Duffield even more time to paint. Kathy Volkov, piano prodigy, moves away to Melbourne, then Vienna, and Duffield begins to remember things as happening before or after Kathy’s departure.
In the years after Kathy left, Duffield allows a few showings of his work at major museums and galleries. He refuses a knighthood, feeling like a fraud and also knowing that Rhoda would not let him live it down. He is old, and yet has no desire to stop painting. As his final act, he wants to paint something as close to the truth as possible, essentially his vision of God. While on tour, Kathy writes a letter to Duffield saying that seeing his paintings as a child is what opened her up to beauty and the possibility of reaching a greater and more grand truth.
Analysis
The figure of Mothersole, the lone stranger at night, hearkens back to the earlier meeting with Cutbush even before Duffield invokes him by name. It is another of White’s patterns: a meeting with a stranger at night that reinvigorates him, gets him back to the canvas. Unlike the female characters who guide him along the way, and have more tormented relationships with Duffield, both Cutbush and Mothersole consider it an honor to meet a great painter. Without knowing it, they too are instruments for Duffield’s achievements.
The pattern of repeating characters occurs twice in this section: first with Kathy Volkov, a miniaturized loop in which she coincidentally knocks on his door as a stranger and returns to his door looking for a lost ball, now as an object of interest to Duffield. This pattern of absence and reemergence reaches its apex with the discovery of Rhoda, whom he has thought about often; in fact he has thought of her so much, and Boo Hollingrake has insisted so many times that they try to locate her, that by the time he finds her and her cats on the street outside his house it comes as little surprise.
While he is in part genuinely happy to see Rhoda again, a significant part of his motivation is to use her as a buffer between him and Kathy Volkov. He has enough awareness to know that embarking on an erotic relationship with a thirteen-year-old girl is not a good thing, and yet the manner in which he tries to prevent anything from happening – leveraging his lost half-sister as buffer – and the way the events ultimately unfold – he and Kathy do have sex – is one of the primary examples of his artistic selfishness. Everyone is a pawn to him, playing some role in his artistic journey; even when he knows he is acting unethically, he operates as though he has no control over those impulses.
That Rhoda moves in and immediately takes up as his pseudo-wife, keeping house and managing his food and calendar so that he can get more work done, can be read as an expected outcome within the chauvinistic society of the novel. Though Rhoda came from a wealthy family, she has lived most of her life in poverty, renting small rooms in strangers’ homes and keeping the company of feral cats; now, as Hurtle’s caretaker, she has sealed her fate that was predicted by the Planchette when they were children. It is interesting to note that she truly came from the upper class family, and yet it is Duffield – who joined them, then left them – who, if he chooses, could have a nicer life, living well off the money from his paintings. And yet he continues to live in squalor, thinking it will bring him closer to God.
Despite her wealthy upbringing, Rhoda has been left to the fringes of society because of her physical deformity. Duffield continues to pity her, the pinnacle of which comes when he insists on buying her a fur coat she does not want, knowing that the tailor will be pitying her physical form. And yet with Rhoda’s narrative return we also see an emboldened, triumphant part of her that, in her age, is fully aware that moving in with Hurtle might cause her to be “‘vivisected afresh, in the name of truth – or art” (441).
