There was an interruption from Mrs Courtney, who had begun to gasp and make sucking noises with her tongue. ‘Really, Harry,’ she said very loud, ‘what a piece to try him out on!’
‘That’s where the book opened, Birdie—by pure accident.’ Mr Courtney answered; the pet name seemed to make things worse.
She sat looking down at her locked hands, then up at the ceiling, the way Mumma did when trying not to cough in church.
Mr Courtney stirred up the pages of the book. ‘There! Try again. I’m surprised at the way you read.’ And again you felt the firm but fleshy hand encouraging the middle of your back.
Birdie said nothing. The mood of religiousness had passed. Although the Courtneys were so well dressed, you could imagine them, like Mumma and Pa, without their clothes, talking it over on the rattling bed.
They were waiting for you to read, though. Or at least Mr Courtney was. He wore a smile as he trimmed a fresh cigar.
So you read the words you found:
Captain Walton has given me a puppy, have called it—Efford . . . ? after the dear sweet place where first I came acquainted with my Alicia, my virtuous wife. Captain Meredith ordered one of the corporals to flog with a rope Elizabeth Dudgeon for being impertinent to Captain Meredith, the corporal did not play with her, but laid it home, which I was very glad to see, then ordered her to be tied to the pump, she had been long fishing for it, which she has at last got, until her heart’s content . . .
‘Oh, this is too much!’
Though you realized Mrs Courtney was fidgeting all through this second bit, you didn’t leave off till she called out. She had jumped up and was looking feverish and beautiful. Perhaps it was her anger which prevented the tears from spilling.
‘Sorry, Alfreda,’ Mr Courtney apologized jokingly. ‘An accident again! We’re magnets for the worst parts.’
‘Books don’t open by accident,’ Mrs Courtney said. ‘They open where they’ve been read most. I’ll never forgive myself,’ she continued very quickly, ‘if we’ve damaged this poor innocent—by accident.’
At this moment you could have truthfully fallen in love with Alfreda Courtney, though you didn’t need her pity. Grown-up people were more innocent than they thought themselves.
‘Half of cruelty,’ she was telling herself, ‘is thoughtless.’
He tingled wonderfully as she ruffled his hair, till he realized she might have been stroking air, her eyes vague with other thoughts.
Suddenly she compressed her lips and announced: ‘I must find Rhoda.’
That made Mr Courtney angry. ‘Jove’s sake, she isn’t lost—or not yet! She’s out with Nurse.’
But Mrs Courtney was already fussing across the room, her clothes creating their particular sound and scent. You could only hate the hump-backed girl who was taking her mother away from you.
Mrs Courtney was breathing hard. ‘Nurse, indeed! Dorrie Fox has told me about a young person—a governess—of respectable family—who is most unhappy—lonely with some horrid people at Muswellbrook. This Miss Gibbons could be the answer,’ Mrs Courtney decided as she floated out.
Mr Courtney was much angrier by now, but smiled at you through his beard. ‘The damn book,’ he said, and shoved it back hard in its place on the shelf.
You remembered: ‘I was flogged once at school, but not as bad as that.’
Mr Courtney was interested. ‘What did you do to earn it?’
Because you didn’t want to tell you tried to look sort of frightened.
Mr Courtney put an arm around your shoulders. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’
‘What?’
If your voice didn’t sound interested, it was because, on turning your cheek, partly to avoid the pricking of the hairy coat sleeve, you saw on Mr Courtney’s little finger, a ring. It was of the same kind as the family ring Pa kept in the cigar box. So you had this in common. You couldn’t have told Mr Courtney, because he wouldn’t have believed. You rubbed your cheek instead, just a little, against the coat, because you had been brought that much closer. You could fall in love with both the Courtneys.
Mr Courtney was explaining: ‘Something that might interest you, Hurtle. See if I can find it.’
Hurtle was now alone, and glad. He couldn’t understand all that about loneliness and the governess at Muswellbrook. He had wanted to be alone more than anything so that he could explore the Frenchman’s oil painting. So he got a chair, and stood on it. His heart was knocking, more than it had for Mrs Courtney. To touch the smooth, touchable paint.
By reaching up, his fingers slithered over the ladies’ full, old-fashioned skirts, trembled on the bathing-machines, and plunged towards the sea. He was sweating as his fingers arrived at the wet sand and pale water. He would have liked to lick the tempting paint, but the picture was hung beyond reach of his tongue. He could only stand on the leather-bottomed chair pulling his tongue in and out in an imitation of licking.
He heard a tittering behind his back. He turned round. He must certainly have looked a fool.
Her thin mouth was twitching and spitting as she laughed: her hair pink rather than red. She had that little, thin flower-stalk of a neck, its absolute whiteness becoming greenish where the shadow fell, and all over, a sprinkling of tiny moles, with the big birthmark the colour of milk chocolate on one side. He couldn’t see the hump as he remembered: it was turned from him. She looked only a sickly girl, probably not much younger than himself. The worst part was: she had seen him giving himself away in front of the painting.
If she had been a girl at school he would have shown her a good smack in the face, but in the Courtneys’ house, he sensed, you fought with words and moods. Because his instincts for this weren’t yet strong enough, he was still at a serious disadvantage as Rhoda went hee-hee-hee, and rocked on the toes of her little thin-skinned pumps.
She stopped laughing. ‘I knew you were coming today.’
‘How?’
‘They were getting ready for you.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re a boy. And Mummy thinks you’re so delightful. You can read better for your age than most grown-up educated people. You’re a prodigy. Mummy wants to discover a genius.’
Rhoda tried to make all her accusations sing, and did. ‘Your mother is the laundress. That makes you all the more of a genius. ’ She almost hiccupped with success.
She made him feel sick sad. Worse still, as he was putting back the chair in the first place from which it had come, the loose sole of his boot doubled up between his foot and the carpet, and she noticed him stumble.
‘Fancy letting you go out in a pair of boots that need mending!’
She made him remember that his clothes were darned, and that he had a patch on the seat of his pants. But he was stronger than Rhoda Humpback Courtney. He was the stronger by his mother’s tubs of blued water and her mauve, white-crinkled hands.
‘You’re a little turd,’ he said.
She couldn’t think of better than that: she could only come very close to him, her small face swelling with hate.
‘Does your mother like you?’ he asked as coldly as he was able.
‘Of course she does!’ she said with a grand conviction; but added in her own voice: ‘She whipped me with the riding crop. With the bone handle.’
‘What for?’
‘Because I didn’t lie on the board. Dr Marshall says it’s going to improve my back. But I can’t lie there all the time.’
They were united for a moment by truth and silence. Outside the big windows the blue bay curved, the big soot-dark trees were pressing in on them. He would have liked to draw Rhoda. He knew how he would paint her, if only he had the paints. He could feel in his fingers the sticky pink which would convey her frizzed-out, girl’s hair.
But Mr Courtney came back with a little gun. It was brand-new, you could see. A toy, or a boy’s gun. Inside his beard and English suit, Mr Courtney—Harry—was acting as excited as a boy who had found it.
�
�Jove, Hurtle,’ he said, ‘isn’t it a beauty?’
Rhoda turned away, prepared for them to ignore her. She didn’t look at all put out, as though she wasn’t interested in boys or guns, and knew she could get her own back any time she liked.
Because it was expected of him, Hurtle followed out to the edge of the lawn. He was still too close to the painting to share Harry’s enthusiasm for a gun, neat and shining though it was.
As you watched, Harry loaded. There was a pigeon clattering out of a palm. Harry took aim, his shoulder muscle bulging out of proportion. He shot at the curving pigeon, and missed.
‘Need to practise,’ he mumbled into his beard, working his shoulders as though to shrug out the rheumatism. Then remembering, he looked down: ‘You’ll soon get the hang of it. In a paddock full of rabbits, you can’t miss.’
‘There aren’t any paddocks full of rabbits.’
‘Not here. At Mumbelong.’ Mr Courtney’s voice had descended to a man’s serious level; his eyes, too, were serious and moist.
Hurtle stood kicking with his sound boot at the springy mattress of lawn. He had blown his cheeks out to match Mr Courtney’s seriousness. He wasn’t going to destroy a vision by introducing anything real. He wouldn’t say a word, because he knew from experience that impossibilities can be enjoyed in spite of their impossibility. So they were catching the night train, like the time Mumma left in a hurry to visit someone sick. Tunnels couldn’t get blacker at night. He sat beside his friend, sharing his overcoat.
‘Harry?’
Mrs Courtney’s voice, trying to be natural, sounded coldly from the veranda; it sounded more educated than ever yet. Even Mr Courtney was startled. Rhoda had come out from the study to be with her mother because she expected something to happen.
Mrs Courtney was staring at the gun. Anger had enamelled her eyes. She could have been going to rush out, not at all ladylike, and grab the thing, and break it in half; when she changed her mind apparently. She started twiddling a little useless handkerchief. The blazing blue died out in her eyes: in their new misty thoughtfulness they looked almost grey. Although they were still fixed on the gun, she was thinking beyond: she seemed to have decided the gun didn’t exist.
‘Darling,’ she began, and lowered her eyelids a moment to show how seriously she ought to be taken, ‘we must remember he doesn’t belong to us. Mrs Duffield will start worrying about him.’ She had such a soft pink smile.
‘Mrs Duffield? Oh yes, the mother,’ Mr Courtney remembered in a hurried grumpy voice.
They all bundled into the study, where only Mrs Courtney could have told what was in store for them.
She glanced once at the gun after Harry had stood it in a corner. Then she opened out in a high clear voice which reminded you of the voices of the older girls, its tone much more expert though, her clothes so much more complicated, and she chose to speak in a code he recognized by now as the French language.
‘Il est intelligent, n’est-ce pas? Charmant! Il parle avec un accent atroce, mais on peut le corriger à la maison—lui tout seul avec cette gouvernante que je vais engager—et la petite, naturellement. ’
Possibly Mr Courtney was less good at French. He went: Wee wee wee; while Mrs Courtney laughed such glossy laughs, she was so pleased the way things were going. Because you had no difficulty in cracking some of the code your eardrums thundered to hear about your atrocious accent. It was no compensation to discover you were also intelligent and charming. In future he would talk extra bookish at them, imitating Mr Olliphant, just as Mrs Courtney was imitating the French.
He heard Rhoda joining in. ‘It’s always la petite! What about la petite?’ The sprinkling of moles on her neck showed up like shot when rage or injustice made her pale, while the big leaf-shaped birthmark seemed to flutter.
‘Take him, Rhoda, to the laundry,’ her mother ordered, trying to push them together.
But la petite had got the sulks. She wouldn’t, and he was glad: it would have been humiliating to pretend you needed the sour ugly thing.
Finally, it was Mrs Courtney herself who accompanied him, at least as far as the green door. There she stopped, and as she kissed him he seemed to be swallowed up in an envelope of scented flesh. He was only brought round by her jewellery pricking and hitting him.
‘We shall meet again,’ she said.
‘When?’
‘Very soon, I hope. We must organize it!’
Then the green door puffed open, and he smelled the smells of ordinary life.
The following day, ironing day at Sunningdale, he was again ready to leave with Mumma although she had paid no attention to his hair.
‘Oh no. Not on yer life. A treat is a treat,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what the Courtneys would think.’
‘But they’re interested in me. I know they’ll be expecting me.’
Mumma looked so ugly in her old braided shapeless black. She smelled of soap and beeswax. She said he was suffering from what was called delusions. He knew he would never make her see the truth.
When next Monday came round, it was his last chance before school began. So he grew cunning. He didn’t take extra trouble with himself, not because he hadn’t hope, it was because he might catch her off her guard, at the last moment slip past her opposition with rough haste and in his ordinary clothes. He was, in fact, full of hope. In his mind he revived the words and silences of Mumma’s own hopes for him. His memory glittered with the moods of Courtneys’ chandelier.
That morning, after the others had run off, he sat dawdling over the last grey slime of his porridge. She was preparing her bundle, with a few of those cachous, the headache powders, the old leather purse, odds and ends she would take with her and never use.
When he couldn’t put it off any longer he said: ‘I bet they asked for me yesterday, and you didn’t tell.’
She laughed in an ugly way he didn’t recognize. ‘Why should they ask?’
‘Because they told me of things we was gunner do together.’ There was no use wasting grammar or accents on Mumma: you had to speak the way she understood.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘ladies and gentlemen talk! It’s what they call “being charming”. But what they say isn’t what they mean. Otherwise they wouldn’t get through all they’ve got to do—balls, and dinner parties, and all that. I know!’
‘But Mr Courtney showed me a gun. We was going to the country.’
‘I believe ’e’s gone—to one of the properties ’e owns. That’s where ’is interests lie—where the money comes from. A little boy like you would only get in the way.’
She picked the baby up, and began easing up the bundle with the help of her knee. When she was ready, she stooped and kissed you to show her love, but it was a level helping, like she doled out porridge or potato, to keep everybody quiet. If ladies and gentlemen didn’t mean what they said, no more did Mumma.
‘Oh, whoo-aahy?’ he shouted after her when she had gone out the gate.
It sounded as feeble as it was, his voice shining back like that of a little blubbering kid. He couldn’t have done better, though.
She went on, sometimes pausing to easy the baby’s weight. Sep was growing too fast, too heavy, too greedy: the way he would grab hold of her by now she might have been a pudding he meant to guzzle whole.
Mumma didn’t look back from the bottom of the street, only paused to hoist the baby higher.
Then the grey descended inside you.
He wished Mumma and the baby dead. Them all. Courtneys! Himself—himself most of all. The chandelier had gone out in him.
The day, beginning grey, spurted a drop or two, sprinkled at last, and settled into an afternoon of colourless rain. In all the time he had to spend there was nothing he could do, except remember the all-over grey street, with himself and Mumma a black stroke at either end: nothing between, unless he could have put a spitting bonfire. He imagined the yard at Sunningdale, with Mumma bringing in the wetter sheets, wet clothes lashing from the lines, looking naked. When
she couldn’t get the wash dried on the day when it ought to have been dried, Mumma would start crying and creating; she had to take the headache powders.
During the afternoon he snivelled a bit in sympathy, but broke off on remembering what he thought of her.
Something was blowing up: the big clouds were piling up like dirty washing. It was going to be a wicked evening. Mrs Burt called over the fence: a gentleman driving through Newtown had seen a roof carried away. Because Mumma was still at work, and Pa out with the cart, collecting, it made the kids feel important, if frightened. Only he didn’t feel frightened: he wrote his name on the wall of the front room.
Pa came in at last, as the clouds, bulging worse, began to purple. There were green, bruised colours in the sky, then veins of white lightning. You pressed your mouth against the windows, first one, then another, drinking in the storm.
Some of them began to cry because Mumma was lost in it. And the house smelled cold. It smelled of cold ash. And dark. Somebody should have lit the gas. Pa wouldn’t: he used to say it was the woman’s job. Lena didn’t, because she felt miserable: she had a cold and a gumboil. And you wouldn’t for watching the storm, from purple, to green, then the white veins like in yellow skin. Once or twice, in a white flash, the roofs of Cox Street seemed to billow up. Now he knew what Mumma felt with a red baby screwing its way out of her guts.
She came in through a burst of thunder, protecting Sep, whose head was bouncing against her shoulder. Mr Courtney—so he was there, he hadn’t gone to the country—had ordered Rowley to harness the horses and drive her home. She was wet, even so.
‘Has no one even lit the bally gas?’ Mumma shrieked.
The darkness was whirling with heavy shapes.
‘Jim? Lena?’
Pa’s hand let the gas flare blue, before it grew white and steady in the mantle.
The Vivisector Page 8