The Vivisector
Page 11
He hesitated. ‘No. Not properly.’
‘I don’t think I was either,’ she said.
Coming in out of the dark into the dazzling house they were practically blinded. Rhoda walked prim and nice as she led him along the passages. They brushed past Edith, then Lizzie, but the girls didn’t recognize them. He must learn when not to recognize. He could easily get the words and tone of a language: the difficult part was to know what you leave out.
Harry Courtney was in what Rhoda called his dressing-room. He was in his stiff shirt and braces, sitting pulling on black silk socks over his neat ankles and swelling calves.
‘Hello,’ he said, in a jolly voice which didn’t prevent you knowing he could have done without you. ‘I bet you’ve been in the garden.’
‘Not exactly,’ said Rhoda. ‘Anyway, not for long.’
‘I thought so,’ said Mr Courtney. ‘You smell like horses.’
There was a long stain of liquid manure, they saw, on Rhoda’s dress.
Harry Courtney had got up. First he began scuffing his hair with the tips of his fingers, to work in the pomade. Then he wiped the palms of his hands on his already glistening beard.
Rhoda tried sticking her head in his groin, but he pulled quickly away.
‘Where are you dining?’ she asked.
She was more interested in the box in which he kept his shirt studs and cuff-links. She took up a jewel and sucked it as though it had been a lolly.
‘With the Egerton-Crawleys,’ her father told her.
Rhoda almost swallowed the ruby in showing her disgust.
Miss Keep the lady’s-maid knocked at the door and asked with awful seriousness: ‘Madam is wondering whether the children are coming to talk to her. She can be seen now.’
At once Rhoda became very tired. She slid into an armchair, and began rubbing her cheek against the cover. She looked frail and pale. The moles on her skin stood out more than ever, and the manure stain looked longer, browner.
‘Ladies don’t cross their legs,’ Miss Keep advised.
Rhoda seemed to prefer her father, though he didn’t encourage it; while Hurtle suddenly experienced a burst of agreeable powerlessness. He was drawn towards the form of the small, withered lady’s-maid, or rather, beyond her. Silly-headed, he followed her out to where Mrs Courtney was expecting him.
She appeared fully dressed, but called: ‘I’m not quite ready, darling. Just putting the finishing touches.’
Because she was so pleased, she spoke in her most accomplished voice. She was holding in her hand a looking-glass, which she cleverly slanted this way and that, so as everyone, herself included, could admire her hair from all angles. Bands of gold, coming together above her forehead in an enormous big blister of a pearl, prevented the hair from falling down. Her dress could have been ice if it had been standing on its own, but long cloudy trailers, fastened to the edges of her nakedness, melted the ice into moonlight instead. She was all in white, the big pearl lolling on her forehead, the diamonds jostling one another.
‘Do you think I’ll pass?’
He was too stupefied to answer her.
Even that made her laugh. ‘Nobody can call you a flirt!’
She was not in kissing form, he could see, because she was afraid of her clothes getting crushed, but she gave him a quick peck with pointed lips.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you. For a treat. Because you might be feeling—lonely.’
She opened two big wardrobes in which her dresses were hanging. They looked surprisingly dead beside the live one she was wearing. But fascinating.
‘Don’t be afraid to touch, darling,’ she coaxed and cooed, ‘if it will give you pleasure.’
She put out a soft hand, the wrist above it rippling with blue-white diamonds, and drew him towards one of the wardrobes. He let himself be guided, doubtingly.
In fact Mrs Courtney did something unexpected and very strange. She suddenly moved her hand to the nape of his neck, and shoved his head in amongst the limp dresses. The sensation was at first one of blinding, then of a delicious suffocation as his face was swallowed by the scented silky darkness, through which Mrs Courtney’s voice continued somewhere rustling.
He pulled out on becoming not exactly frightened, but because he might have overbalanced.
‘Wasn’t it nice?’ She was so amused at what she had done. She kept on looking at him, to see whether she had succeeded in getting him drunk. Her teeth looked as though they were against him.
He felt ashamed, but it was some compensation to know you could see inside the faces of people who fail to get behind your own.
Mrs Courtney looked away.
‘Have you noticed his eyes?’ she asked Keep; and almost at once: ‘Darling, it’s time! Where is Rhoda? Go and find her,’ she ordered, and it grated. ‘I know she doesn’t love her mother. I shan’t force her. But shall continue doing my duty.’
She was twitching and quivering with an injustice in much the same way as Rhoda herself.
As he went out he heard Mrs Courtney—their mother—lower her voice for her maid, and say: ‘Were you surprised at what I did? Children are like puppies, you know. And a new puppy can be attached to his owner by teaching him to recognize the owner’s scent. Or so I’m told.’
Miss Keep didn’t reply, but made a kind of dry noise, or else she was still blowing powder into a pair of madam’s long white gloves.
He ought to have liked Miss Gibbons more, seeing as neither of them belonged to Courtneys, whatever Courtneys themselves might think. Miss Gibbons was so gently pleasant, especially in her grey Sunday dress. Grey, he supposed, was as close as she could get to colourless. He couldn’t forgive her this feeble fear of drunkenness. Everything about Sybil Gibbons was feeble and gentle. She asked to be teased, or downright tortured, not by what you said but what you didn’t say, and most of all in the pleasant but colourless lessons she gave. She taught the subjects like History, Geography, and English—to him and Rhoda. Mr Shewcroft coached him alone in Latin and Mathematics, and Madame Parmentier came for French. On all these occasions he would refresh himself by staring out the window into the garden, or deeper, into himself.
He heard Miss Gibbons tell Mrs Courtney: ‘I should hate to accuse him of laziness. He is what I would call indolent. Or his mind is set on other things.’ Good old Sybil Gibbons: she wasn’t such a bad stick.
Harry Courtney had explained in the beginning: ‘We’ve talked it over, old man—your mother and I—and we think you’d be happiest—at least for a while—doing your lessons at home.’ He sounded so serious and kind. ‘Until you settle down—learn our ways—’ he cleared his throat—‘and the language we speak. Then to some good boarding school. To toughen up,’ he ended with a rasping, bearded laugh.
‘Your mother and I’; you would certainly have to learn the language. In the beginning, in fact, there were expressions which troubled everyone.
It was evening not long after he had come to live there. It was shortly before bedtime, and the three of them—Rhoda had a temperature—were seated in the little mauve octagonal room where Mrs Courtney answered letters and considered the serious problems of life.
‘There’s the question of what you should call us,’ she suddenly began.
It was making her excited, or embarrassed. She popped a chocolate into her mouth. He knew by the shape it must be the lovely liquid kind. If she didn’t take care it would trickle out of the corner of her moth. Or else it was this excitement she was having to control.
‘Father,’ she said, ‘is satisfied you should call him “Father”. “Dad” I don’t like at all. It can sound—not common—but blunt.’
‘“Father” it is,’ Mr Courtney repeated uneasily.
Hurtle couldn’t believe in it, but hoped they wouldn’t read it on his face.
As for Mrs Courtney she had almost finished her chocolate before coming to the difficult part. She looked at the box, but hesitated; perhaps she thought it would spoil her dinner.
Mr Courtney uncrossed his ankles and crossed them again. He pulled his waistcoat down over what wasn’t yet a stomach.
Hurtle sat smiling at his own fingers in his state of not unpleasant disbelief.
‘Well? You don’t say anything.’ Mrs Courtney sounded vexed. ‘But we’ve got to decide. You’ll be living with us. For always. ’
Though realizing how serious the situation was, he continued smiling. Perhaps it was the word ‘always’. From what he had experienced already, he couldn’t believe anything lasted.
‘And we are your father and mother.’
‘As soon as we adopt you legally,’ ‘Father’ threw in, ‘you’ll take the name “Courtney”.’
‘But my name is “Duffield”.’ He liked to visualize it written by a variety of means: in burnt cork, indelible pencil, invisible ink, carved out of stone, even tattooed: DUFFIELD.
‘A man my father knew,’ he said, ‘went about with his name tattooed on his right arm. He could never ever get rid of it.’
‘But yours isn’t tattooed on any part of you!’ Mr Courtney burst out. ‘So you can’t be compared with the cove your—Mr Duffield knew.’
‘No,’ agreed Hurtle dreamily.
When he was at last by document a Courtney, Rhoda said to him: ‘“Hurtle Courtney”. I shan’t call you by it, though.’ She was looking at him to see the effect.
‘Don’t ask you to,’ he said.
Suddenly he saw her as a white ant.
‘What are you looking at?’ she asked.
He had had a dream in which the harness-room wall at home, covered with smudges and pencil drawings, was attacked by white ants, rustling as they trampled, shedding their wings as they crunched the timber under the plaster; it might have been biscuit.
‘What are you looking at?’ she insisted, digging into the palm of his hand with her nails.
‘A dream,’ he said. ‘You had the head, the body, of the biggest ant. A white ant. The face was yours. Looking at me while it ate.’
‘I don’t believe you!’
But she did. She flung away his hand, at the same time kicking him on the ankle.
He laughed. It wasn’t entirely true. But could have been. She had the pinkish glaze of the ants in his dream. So he wouldn’t let on that it was half a lie.
She was closest to him of all his ‘family’. Once he was moved to embrace her, but was just as suddenly repelled by the idea: he saved himself in time. You couldn’t trust her, anyway. Not that he could always trust himself. This, again, made them sort of related.
From now on he answered to ‘Hurtle Courtney’ when addressed by those who visited the house: the loud-voiced rich, and quieter, poorer ones who paid him no end of fussy attentions while looking for recognition from Harry and Alfreda. The maids, who could neither gain nor lose by it, who didn’t care, who had their own more pressing thoughts, called him automatically by his false name. Now that he was turned into this new and glossy person, it sometimes agitated him dreadfully to enter his real and secret life. Even at its most chaotic, he would have liked somebody, not to share it, but to know of its existence and importance. So he began to accept Father and Maman, not for what they were supposed to be, but because he needed them as witnesses.
‘Look, Maman!’ He couldn’t stop himself running that evening into what Miss Keep always called the ‘boodwah’. He was carrying the sheet of paper he might not have wanted to show if, on the spur of the moment, he hadn’t felt the need for praise.
Maman was sitting slack in her stockings at the dressing-table with that same dreamy expression May wore in standing at the kitchen range. He was at first a little dazed by the glare of flesh; but Maman quickly grabbed something to bundle into. She was in such a hurry, the little smoke-tinted bottles with their lattices of silver irises rattled and jostled on the dressing-table, and threatened to topple over.
‘What—Hurtle—you must always—knock!’ She was gasping and frowning: her frowns looked black amongst the powder. ‘But what have you brought to show me, darling?’ In no time she was again offering the part of her she wanted people to see.
He was still so dazed he hesitated to spring his surprise, which remained too private a part of himself, like Maman’s nakedness. Very occasionally she would come into the bathroom and soap and sponge him, but his thing was less private than his drawing.
‘What,’ she said, holding it away from her, ‘is this me?’
He began to feel ashamed, not so much of his own drawing.
‘Oh, darling, how clever of you! But I shouldn’t have taken it for me, exactly. Do you see me like that? You’ve given me a melon chest.’
He let her flow on; any possible answers were enclosed by the lines of his drawing.
‘Have you shown it to Father?’ she asked. ‘Father would be amused. He’s so interested in everything you do.’
He didn’t want to show it to Mr Courtney—Father—he wanted to tear it up, turn the light out.
But Maman was inspired.
They swept along the passage. Father was in his dressing-gown. He smelled of soap. He hadn’t yet begun to dress, though his stiff shirt was laid out with studs and links.
‘Look, Harry, what he’s done!’
The drawing made a wind as she thrust it at him.
Harry said: ‘By Jove, he’s got a talent!’
The hot bath had left him lazy and indulgent. On his calves below the gown the hair was curling, and above, in the V which exposed his chest. He was wearing a pair of new shiny leather slippers. His feet were planted wide apart so that he might give a better opinion.
‘Fancy if our son should turn out to be a genius,’ Alfreda Courtney said. She had put her arm through Harry’s. She was leaning against his side as though only she had a right to, while they looked at the drawing, now slightly crumpled.
‘But is it a likeness? I don’t think so. Though it’s most interesting, ’ she said, ‘as a work of art.’
She was still inspired. She would have to show it. Even if she was the victim, it was in a cause.
When Keep had got her into her dinner frock, and she was fully powdered, Alfreda Courtney descended to the servants’ quarters dragging her boy along with her.
She announced: ‘My son has done a portrait of me.’
The girls all buzzed round, excepting May Noble. They went: ‘Mm mmm isn’t it look a telling likeness fancy little Hurtle.’
They turned him into a real dwarf.
‘Do you really think it’s a likeness?’ she dared them.
She had been basketed up, like the scent bottles, in a latticework of silver.
‘Ooh yairs! Well, no. It depends.’
‘You, May,’ she asked the cook, ‘can’t you spare us a moment? ’
‘The sauce might curdle.’ May went on stirring, like she was doing a drawing. She didn’t look at his, but knew. They understood and respected each other.
But he began to hate the curdled drawing.
‘What is the matter, darling?’ Maman asked.
He couldn’t tell her. She was such a long way off from him. She was left standing, her lips working the lipsalve into each other, in the kitchen, in her blue-and-silver dinner frock; tonight there were only a few friends you didn’t have to trouble about.
As an outcome Father engaged Mr Tyndall to give drawing lessons, and with this addition to the timetable, Mr Shewcroft was sometimes forced to wait in the hall with his Latin and Mathematics.
Mr Tyndall was slow and clean and dedicated to perspective. Nice families commission
ed him to draw portrait heads. He was a silvery old man who wore his tie poked through a ring. Under the skin of his hands he showed up as blue as the legs of skinned chickens. He felt cold and remote if you touched him. If you got him to draw something, for the fun of it, to watch, his drawing was correct and silvery as himself.
‘But that isn’t the way I want to draw,’ said Hurtle.
‘Which way, then?’
‘I want to draw my own way.’
‘They’ll laugh at you if you do. They’ll think you’re either ignorant or pulling their legs.’ Mr Tyndall spoke with conviction as he shaded his own silvery drawing of a hand. ‘Will you mind appearing ridiculous?’
‘No.’ But he could feel himself going red, as he did whenever he told a lie.
He took his pencil, and might have made matters worse by working off his embarrassment on paper, only someone began thumping on the door. It was Mr Shewcroft upholding his rights.
Mr Tyndall looked at his watch. ‘Guilty again!’ he said in his pleasant old man’s voice, which didn’t sound guilty at all.
As for Mr Shewcroft, he never spoke unless he could help it.
Leaving the room, Mr Tyndall seemed to lurch against him with a smile strictly for a colleague; or perhaps it was Mr Shewcroft who lurched against Mr Tyndall. It was almost a collision, with the result that Mr Shewcroft might have lost his balance if he hadn’t found support by attaching himself with three tobacco-stained fingers to the edge of the table; while the guiltless Mr Tyndall cleanly left.
Though a younger man, Mr Shewcroft had retired from being a schoolmaster in favour of coaching private pupils. He was very thin. The skin on his face was large-pored, pock-marked: in some places it looked scarred. Hurtle often wondered whether old Shewcroft knew about the blackheads. He would have liked to give them a squeeze for him. There were mornings when the Latin tutor’s breath smelled like a full ashtray, and worse. He can’t have known and nobody dared tell him about it.
On one occasion Maman had said: ‘He hasn’t disgraced himself. He hasn’t exactly fallen down. But he does look so unsavoury, Harry.’