The Vivisector

by WHITE, PATRICK

  Lizzie was their friend.

  Then May put away her paper, and heaved herself up from the head of the table. She buttered the corner of a loaf, and spread it with thickest, purple jam. ‘This is what boys like.’ She gave it to him.

  May seemed like a woman who wouldn’t often speak: she was too important. Now as she went about her business, she was bulging out above her stays, under her brown dress, but no one would have drawn her attention to it.

  ‘Cut some bread and butter for “inside”, and cut it thin, Delia,’ she ordered the bristly woman. ‘Can’t be too thin. They like to blow off their trays.’

  May herself had begun throwing kidneys about by the handful in the kitchen. The kidneys made a soft plop. One or two she squinted at very close, and chucked into a bin.

  Mumma explained, though there wasn’t any need: ‘That lady’s the cook. If you speak to her, you’d better call her Mrs Noble.’

  After the rest of the girls had sat there a while longer, controlling their wind, and grumbling about conditions, they went to their work in other parts of the house, and Mumma took him with her to the laundry, where she lit the copper and filled the tubs. He didn’t know how he would pass the morning. He looked inside the toolshed, and stuck a horsehair from the shoulder of an old coat into a fly’s arse. It was rather a large, striped fly, which flew bumbling up a window-pane. In the bush house he broke a tuberous begonia, and had to scuff it into the bark in which the fleshy plants were growing. Then he threw a stone at a thin tabby in a red collar.

  But he couldn’t think what to do.

  On and off Mumma came out, and pegged wet clothes on the line. On and off he went into the laundry, into the wood-smoke from the copper, and there was Mumma scrabbling at the clothes in the blue water, her skin shrivelled to a whiter white. Although Lizzie and Delia at early tea had spoken about slavery, Mumma looked happier at Courtneys’ than he had ever seen her.

  Some time after eleven o’clock tea, before what the girls referred to as ‘luncheon’, Lizzie came to Mumma and said: ‘Come on, Duffles, I’m going to take you on a private tour of the millioneers’ nest.’

  Mumma kept flicking the water off her wrists back into the tub, she had got so nervous. ‘Oh Lizzie, do you think we ought? She might catch us at it.’ You could see though, Mumma wished for nothing so much as to see the inside of the grand house.

  Lizzie said: ‘She’ll be late back. I know. She’s gone to Madame Deseeray to try on a new gown that’s arrived.’ She took hold of Mumma by the wet wrist, and began to pull.

  Nobody had mentioned him, but he saw to it he wasn’t left: the door covered with green felt, which shut out the noise of the kitchen from the rest of the house, puffed shut behind the three of them.

  Mumma remained so nervous she could only hobble weakly in her old shoes in Lizzie’s tracks. She was further embarrassed at sight of the upright person, whose name was Edith, cleaning silver in her pantry in a pair of gloves.

  Lizzie the housemaid explained everything as they went. Mumma at first hardly dared raise her eyes from the patterned carpets through which they trod, but as he was only a child and supposed not hardly to be there, he was able to look around at what Lizzie was pointing out: at the ‘priceless porcelain’, and naked ladies in gold frames.

  ‘She’s artistic,’ Lizzie explained.

  ‘Oh dear!’ Mumma sniffed, and would have liked to giggle.

  ‘But if you ask me, he’s more interested in the naked titties than any old art work.’

  Mumma made a clucking noise.

  ‘He’s a real man,’ their friend continued. ‘Alfreda knows it wouldn’t do to twist his tail once too often. She dotes on ’er Harry.’

  ‘Isn’t there a portrait of their little girl?’ Mumma asked.

  ‘Not when they’ve got the kid herself. A portrait would be harping on it.’

  Suddenly Lizzie changed her tone: ‘And does Hurtle Duffield fancy the naked ladies?’

  ‘No,’ he said. They were curious, the big bubs, but dead.

  ‘What’s wrong with ’em?’ Lizzie lashed back.

  He hardly knew. ‘Old cold pudding . . .’ was all he could mumble.

  Lizzie nearly split herself, and Mumma had to laugh while blushing.

  ‘What a caution of a boy!’ Lizzie rattled.

  They had come out by now into a round, domed room.

  ‘Bet you never in yer life saw a chandelier,’ Lizzie proudly accused him.

  He didn’t answer. He hadn’t, of course. But as he stood underneath, looking up through the glass fruit and flickering of broken rainbow, he knew all about a chandelier, from perhaps dreaming of it, and only now recognizing his dream.

  They mounted the soft stairs: everywhere soft soft; it was so quiet and clean you wouldn’t have known anyone lived at Sunningdale.

  In the sewing-room the old tortoise from the maids’ hall was going through a bagful of furs. Her superior eyelids obviously disapproved, but she wouldn’t be one to criticize her fellow servants.

  ‘Miss Keep, the lady’s-maid,’ Lizzie told when they had gone past. ‘Herself the lady. Or so she would like to think. An old tartar.’

  Lizzie dared to bounce on the Courtneys’ great big bed, and lie with her hands behind her head, elbows pointing. ‘What’s it like to be married, eh? I can only guess!’

  Mumma could have told her for certain, but only got more embarrassed. ‘Ah, Lizzie, somebody could come in and catch us!’

  But Lizzie was growing dreamier. ‘I could take a tumble meself with Harry Courtney. He’s a lovely man. The lovelist legs. But if I hung on by both ’is whiskers, ’e wouldn’t notice. Maids don’t exist.’

  Mumma was so upset. ‘Now, Lizzie, this isn’t a nice kind of talk! Not in front of the boy.’ As if you didn’t know all about it living at home. ‘It isn’t moral talk at all.’

  Lizzie got up snorting, and Mumma straightened the counterpane.

  ‘Morals!’ said Lizzie. ‘My crikey! I think they was invented by those who’re too cold to need ’em.’

  When she had arranged her cap in the glass they drifted back down the stairs. Mumma’s behaviour was becoming more practised: she followed her friend with long strides almost as dashing as Lizzie’s own.

  ‘I can imagine they go in for great entertainments,’ she said and hoped.

  ‘They can’t sit ’ere listenin’ to each other’s thoughts,’ Lizzie answered rather sharp.

  As Mumma worked it out her eyes were shining: she had a reckless look.

  Downstairs, Lizzie lighted a cigarette, and puffed at it from a stiff hand. ‘This,’ she coughed, ‘is where Madam writes ’er letters, and where you’ll get your dressing-down, if you’ve got it coming to you.’

  It was a smaller, mauve room, the furniture in black, with streaks of pearl in it. The room even had a kind of mauve scent, from a mass of violets, he recognized from the florists’, in a silver bowl. Shelves of coloured books and photographs in posh frames gave the room a used, though at the same time, a special look. There was a hairpin on the carpet, and in a gold cage a white bird with red beak looking at them with cold eye.

  He would have liked to muck around in the room, but saw that Lizzie wouldn’t have allowed it. She was becoming restless, and her fag was giving her trouble. Coughing and breathing smoke, she put it out in a little marble tray.

  ‘And this,’ she coughed, throwing open yet another door, ‘is Harry Courtney’s study. They couldn’t escape very far from each other even if they thought of trying.’

  Mumma moaned: there was such a glare of mahogany, a blaze of crimson leather, and enough stuffed birds in glass cases to frighten the live caged one in Mrs Courtney’s room.

  ‘All those books!’ Mumma gasped. ‘Mr Courtney must be a highly edgercated gentleman.’

  ‘Oh, he doesn’t read them! “Sir” is a collector of Australiana. He has to do something with ’is money—and Alfreda sees he don’t spend it on the ladies.’

  Suddenly Lizzie could hav
e been sick of it all. Going back into Mrs Courtney’s own room, deliberately savaging the soft, mauve-grey carpet with her heels, she could have been wondering why she had been wasting her time on the laundress and her boy.

  She said: ‘In the first situation I was ever in—I was sixteen—the old bloke—ugh!-’e was said to have a touch of the tar-brush—’e tried to break into me room. I done a bunk from there.’

  She was so absorbed in her discontent, and Mumma by all she had seen and was seeing, the sound of motion took them by surprise.

  ‘Who are you?’ the lady asked.

  She didn’t look, except quickly, at a child. She was staring at Mumma, at her damp skirt, at her white wrists, and red hands.

  ‘I am Mrs Duffield,’ Mumma answered.

  ‘Who? Oh—yes—the laundress,’ Mrs Courtney said. ‘We haven’t met, but I remember now.’

  Then she smiled a slow sweetish sort of smile. ‘You are showing the laundress the house. I’m so glad, Lizzie, you thought of being kind to Mrs Duffield.’

  Under her freckles Lizzie became a dark red. ‘Yes, m’m,’ she barely mumbled.

  Mrs Courtney was wearing a veil. She began raising it: to take a better look. The blue with white feathers of her hat slightly stirred with the interest she expressed. ‘I didn’t expect children.’ She looked at Mrs Duffield’s little boy, at Mrs Duffield’s stomach.

  With a sudden expert gesture she hitched back her veil on the brim of her huge hat.

  ‘I congratulate you,’ she said. ‘He’s nice, isn’t he?’ she smiled ‘—a handsome child.’

  Mumma didn’t know when she should answer, or what she should answer, and the experienced Lizzie couldn’t help her any longer.

  It was Mrs Courtney herself who gave them the clue, moving round her mauve room in the sound of her stiff blue dress, smoothing its wine-glass waist, rearranging papers on her desk, the bowl of violets, a cuttlefish stuck between the bars of her bird’s cage. She said, lowering her chin, her voice: ‘I’ve had a very trying morning.’

  So her ‘girls’ knew they should return to the part of the house to which they belonged.

  Although he expected her to speak to him, she didn’t, and he followed the others out.

  At home Mumma left the iron stand while she tried to remember a dream she had had.

  ‘All this big house in which twenty other families could live. It was like walking—wasn’t it, Hurtie?—on mattresses. The china doorknobs all beautiful and clean. And a chandelier. Does any of you know what’s a chandelier?’

  Lena answered: ‘No.’

  Then Mumma took a deep breath. Her face was shining. She was going to try to tell about the chandelier, and he could have run at her to stop her, because the chandelier had blazed up in him again, and he didn’t want the others to share in anything so particularly his: not Mumma, not Lizzie, could have seen or experienced the half of it.

  When Pa called from the table: ‘’Ere, Mother, where’s the pertater? You forgot the pertater.’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ she answered, ‘because here it is.’

  At once she grabbed the iron spoon. She served him out a dollop, and a dollop, from the old battered pot. Tonight the potato looked awful grey, till Pa messed it about with the gravy from the little bit of steak that was only for him. On a different occasion you might have felt hungry.

  And Mother returned to her dream, though she seemed to have forgotten the chandelier.

  ‘And corned beef, and marmalade puddin’ for dinner, only they call it “luncheon”.’

  ‘Did you meet the little girl when you was seeing over the house?’

  ‘No, we didn’t. I expect she was out for exercise with her nurse.’

  Then Mumma cleared her throat, and began smoothing very dreamy with the iron. ‘We did meet Her, though—Mrs Courtney—by mistake.’

  ‘Was she pretty?’

  ‘A real vision. A real lady. Everything about ’er floatin’—sort of.’

  ‘What was the colour of ’er eyes?’

  ‘What was the colour of ’er dress?’

  ‘’Ow can I remember what was the colour of anything? I could’uv fainted.’

  ‘Her eyes were blue. Her dress was blue.’

  ‘There! Hurt remembers. Had ’is wits about ’im. But a child isn’t responsible. Lizzie and me was the ones who’d get the blame. Now, Hurtle, a knife isn’t for jabbing with. Not at the furniture. Ah dear, you kids won’t leave us a stick to live with. Run out all of yez into the yard and let your father finish ’is tea in peace.’

  If you didn’t obey along with everyone else it was because Pa had already finished. He sat belching and grunting for a bit: after a meal he used to say less than ever. He lit his spluttering pipe, and went across the yard to the stable.

  Mumma either didn’t see you were there, or else she was admitting you to her thoughts: you were still so close to the outing you had been together.

  As she came round the table to take the plate Pa had been using, she said like to herself: ‘Fancy remembering the colour of ’er eyes!’ then, out louder: ‘I think you’re right. They was blue eyes.’

  She was laughing, first to herself, then for him. ‘Like yours, Hurt! Blue.’ And instead of clearing the plate from the table, she took his face in her hands, and looked close into it.

  ‘My eyes are grey. Sometimes they’re on the greenish side.’ But he could hardly pronounce it: she was squeezing his cheeks so tight together she was giving him a fish’s mouth.

  ‘Blue! Blue like Mrs Courtney’s!’ She was so glad to have discovered what she wanted to be a likeness, she couldn’t be persuaded it wasn’t the truth.

  So he became ashamed of his shabby, silly mother. He became ashamed of himself for loving, yet not loving her more. Because it was Mumma he loved, not Mrs Courtney. That was different: the vision made him shiver with joy; he wished he had been in a position to touch her.

  He was soon sad and hopeless with all these feelings. He was afraid Mumma, trembling with excitement and pleasure, might begin to cotton on to how he really felt inside, so he dragged his face out of her hands, and ran out to the others in the yard.

  For the next day’s ironing, he didn’t dare expect. But when the following Monday came he had on his cap. He was ready standing at the street gate.

  Lugging her bundle, Mumma was looking thoughtful and anxious. She hadn’t reckoned on him as well.

  ‘How—’ she said, ‘I didn’t mean you to come, Hurtle. Not every time. That wouldn’t be good for you.’

  Because he was determined to win, he didn’t ask in what way it wouldn’t be good. He walked along. Here and there he skipped to lighten the silence.

  ‘I mean it,’ she said.

  But he saw she was weak this morning. The baby was too heavy in her. So he took her hand. And they walked along.

  When they arrived at Courtneys’ it was much the same as the first time, though they made less fuss of him because he was no longer a surprise. Perhaps Miss Keep looked more disgusted than before. Mrs Noble stared moodily through him, and didn’t offer him the thick spread of cherry jam.

  ‘Watch out, Master Clumsy!’ said Lizzie. ‘You just about murdered my favourite corn.’

  As he wore out the morning around the yard he began to feel he had been wrong to come. Mr Thompson the gardener wouldn’t hardly speak. A grey wind was filling the empty clothes on the line.

  He might have started a row with Mumma over a plug he didn’t mean to pull out, if the door hadn’t opened behind their backs and someone come into the laundry.

  ‘I’m looking for my kitten.’ It was a small, though bossy voice.

  You wouldn’t have thought she hadn’t seen him before.

  ‘Well, Rhoda,’ said Mumma, ‘I haven’t noticed your kitten. But don’t expect he’s lost. Cats are independent things.’ She had too many children to take much interest in pets.

  Nor was Rhoda particularly interested, it seemed. She was looking at you, her head trembling on her
thin neck. Her hair was pink rather than red. On one side of her neck she had a large birthmark the colour of milk chocolate.

  ‘What is the kitten’s name, love?’

  But Rhoda wasn’t interested in Mumma’s polite interest. She had buttoned up her mouth tight. Her head no longer trembled, but lolled on her frail neck. She probably hated him on sight. He could have hit Rhoda: except she might have died. She reminded him of the crook-necked pullet at home Mumma hadn’t the heart to kill.

  ‘This is my little boy. This is Hurtle, Rhoda,’ Mrs Duffield the laundress was only vaguely saying as she rubbed a garment back and forth over the ridges of the wash-board. ‘How about taking him outside—have a game—the two of you? But gentle, Hurt.’

  Rhoda said: ‘No.’ All the pinkish curls shook.

  She looked as though she mightn’t have known how to play. She was so clean. None of the snot of Winnie and Flo. So frail, she might have broken. But her thin lips were firm, and probably spiteful.

  Mumma laughed, and said: ‘You’re right, dear. Boys like rough games.’

  She bent to kiss the little thing, who ducked her head, and avoided with the whole of her body. Mumma could only stroke with her hand the white dress she must have laundered recently. It could have been her nails you heard catching in the material.

  ‘O—oohh!’ Rhoda complained aloud.

  She was going outside, not, you felt, in search of her cat, but away. The cat had probably only ever been an excuse.

  As Rhoda left he saw she had more than a crooked neck: her back was humped. It gave him a queer turn to see the hump for the first time. He didn’t mention it to Mumma. And Mumma didn’t mention it. She kept on rubbing the sudsy clothes against the board, on her mouth a tight smile, which he knew had nothing to do with her thoughts.

  The damp stone laundry, smelling of Lysol and yellow soap, began to horrify him. He had heard of prisons in which they tortured men in the old days. Mumma couldn’t have escaped, she had the washing, she was used to it, but he who was cowardly and young, he was still also free. So he went quickly quietly out. It wasn’t altogether cowardly, either, to leave Mumma with the washing and their nightmare thoughts. It was necessary for him to see the Courtneys’ house again. The felted door went pff as he passed through.