The Vivisector

by WHITE, PATRICK

‘Poor devil!’

  ‘Yes, we mustn’t be uncharitable.’ Maman immediately altered her voice, because their boy had come into the room, and she was at her letter-writing.

  Now this morning Mr Shewcroft looked his most unsavoury for Latin Unseen. His breath came in fiery gusts. Hurtle decided he might succeed better with the blackheads by digging them out with a little watch key; while Mr Shewcroft remained absorbed, not in the Latin Unseen, but in his own thoughts, some of them so painful they were visibly rising to the surface of his bilious eyes.

  Hurtle wondered what would happen if his own mumbling voice, stumbling after Caesar, came to a stop. It did. There was the peaceful sound of doves murmuring or digesting.

  ‘What is the use of Caesar, Mr Shewcroft?’ he dared ask, though very low.

  Mr Shewcroft was chewing on something, like a lump of gristle so big and unmanageable it couldn’t be swallowed; nor could it be spat out, though it was only a boy who would see: so his eyes seemed to imply as they bulged to bursting point, the veins in his neck swelling above the yellow rim of his collar.

  When at last Mr Shewcroft spoke, his words were the gristle of words. He sort of groaned: ‘For that matter, what’s the use of anything?’

  He began to show his brown teeth, to clasp his always clammy fingers with their bitten nails, till you could hear the bones cracking, and the hands were drained white.

  ‘You’re a boy. You can’t know. Not about injustice. Probably won’t ever.’ He ground it out, while his terrible eyes looked the furniture over. ‘Always be too flush. You won’t need to listen to what they’re saying about you in the next room. They won’t say it, anyway. They’ll be too respectful of your cash. Well, good luck to you!’

  He laughed, only his throat had grown too tight to let more than half of it out.

  ‘If you’re of no importance, even your bootlaces are against you!’

  Hurtle looked down, and one of the twisted old bootlaces had been joined in an untidy knot on Mr Shewcroft’s dusty instep.

  You were so embarrassed you didn’t know whether to show him the new penknife the present from Father or tell him something or tell him—what? Till you remembered the heart going chuff chuff how you behaved to those who were sick or broke or in any way bashed about you remembered at least how it began in Mumma’s words.

  ‘Don’t you believe in God, Mr Shewcroft?’

  ‘Good God!’

  Mr Shewcroft laughed. His face turned green. Then he grew very quiet. He got up and, walking on a curve, his curved body left the room: probably gone to the lavatory.

  Hurtle put in time drawing. It was a comfort to watch the drawing grow. Of the great eye. It wasn’t Mr Shewcroft’s eye; it wasn’t his own: or perhaps it was his own, from looking at it so often in the glass. Anyway, there was the Eye. It might have started accusing him if he hadn’t looked over his shoulder to find Lizzie had stuck her head in, looking very pretty in her crisp cap and freckles.

  ‘Your teacher’s gone,’ she said. ‘Left the front door open. Shickered worse than usual.’

  Lizzie’s mouth showed such contempt in the way it formed the word, he could only share her attitude. He laughed back uglily, to let her see he was in the know.

  But he kept remembering the knitted, twisted bootlace. He grew troubled, and finally afraid: because Mr Shewcroft didn’t come again to give the lessons.

  Maman said: ‘Oh yes, poor man, he won’t come; he’s sick.’

  ‘But what’s he got?’

  It was an afternoon of rain. The windows were plastered with skeins of rain; beyond them in the dark-green garden long wet bending wands were tangling with one another.

  ‘He won’t come,’ Maman repeated.

  He noticed her hair had grey in it, though her face was young, her lips moist. She touched her hair.

  ‘Shall we play a game?’ she asked. ‘Where’s Rhoda? Find Rhoda. Get out the cards and we’ll play a game of grab. I don’t know where that Miss Gibbons hides poor little Rhoda. I never set eyes on her.’

  When Rhoda was found they played, and the reds had never looked so brilliant as now, with rainlight touching them up. He was winning. Rhoda cheated. Nobody cared: it was too wet and Maman soggy in the nose.

  Herself a humpbacked queen, Rhoda shot out a card, and asked: ‘Does Mr Shewcroft have a wife?’

  ‘He was a single man,’ Maman said, looking closely at the cards.

  Hurtle almost always won. Cold behind the knees and feeble at the wrists since Maman put Mr Shewcroft in the past, he was full of shame. He dreaded something. Someone would notice his goose-flesh if he didn’t distract their attention.

  He laughed, his teeth chattering; he said: ‘Old Shewcroft was too ugly—all those pocks—blackheads. And breath! No one would want to be cuddled by Shewcroft.’

  Rhoda shrieked, and made the most of it to cheat.

  ‘Don’t be vulgar, Hurtle,’ said Maman, though on a sunlit day, and in a pretty dress, she might have enjoyed his funny remarks. ‘It isn’t kind, darling.’ She sniffed at the cards; she said her cold made her look an awful sight.

  ‘If I was to draw old Shewcroft I’d draw him as a sort of Jack of Clubs. A thin Jack. Jumping off the roof.’

  Rhoda giggled very high. ‘Why jumping off the roof?’

  ‘Because he was a bit mad!’ He shouted it.

  He was winning as usual. It was fortunate at this point, because Maman could pretend not to have heard. Probably only he had heard. Rhoda was grizzling because she had lost.

  ‘Why does Hurtle always win?’

  ‘There are more worthwhile ways of succeeding, Rhoda.’ Maman was trying to console her.

  While he could only think of escaping from the room. He must.

  ‘There was a man I knew,’ he began.

  To be truthful, there was a man Pa had known, a coalheaver in Foveaux Street, who had cut his own throat for some forgotten reason. There was blood all amongst the coal dust.

  ‘Where are you going, Hurtle?’ Maman called.

  But he wasn’t prepared to answer, and nobody would prevent him going.

  After collecting what he needed he went upstairs to his own room. It took him not much above an hour to do what he had to. Then he switched off the light and lay in the dark shivering with exhaustion, excitement, fright.

  She came, of course, as he expected, dreaded.

  ‘What are you doing, darling? You’re not unhappy, are you? Not thinking morbid thoughts, I hope? I don’t want my boy to grow up morbid.’

  ‘I’m not your boy.’ He made it sound as cold as he could.

  She was feeling round the darkness for him.

  ‘Hurtle?’

  He punched out, and hit something soft.

  ‘Then I shan’t feel sorry for you! Not a bit,’ she said very dry and angry. ‘You’re a cold, cruel, nasty little boy at heart.’

  As though to illustrate her change of mind she went and wrenched at the switch beside the door. They were both wincing in the sudden light. Then he watched her get the horrors.

  ‘You abominable child!’ she almost screamed. ‘Where did you get the paint?’

  ‘In the toolshed.’

  Still lying on the bed, he couldn’t resist taking a look at what he had done.

  ‘And red paint! If we had paint in the toolshed, I can’t think why it was red. Black—yes, I can remember. But what use can we have had for red? I wonder if your father knew. Nobody,’ she said, ‘ever knows or cares. I am the one who has to think—to bear the brunt. We shall have to get the wall repapered.’

  She was so vexed she flung out her arm and knocked off the silver lustre jug. Against the carpet it looked like so many pieces of looking-glass. At least the jug had been empty: no flowers since the day of his arrival.

  But he was too far off from Maman’s rage. As he lay looking at the wall he almost wasn’t listening to her. It was as though he lay at one end of a tunnel looking at his painting-drawing at the other: its brilliance was increased by distance.


  Until now, there hadn’t been time to appreciate what his desire had driven him to do: his body, his thoughts had been too much worked upon. Now he wondered why he had done it as he had, when he meant to show poor black ‘Jack’ Shewcroft jumping off the roof, and here he was sprawling in the coal dust, like the coalheaver from Foveaux Street, the blood running out of his cut throat, through his veins, and from his heart, which was like a little fountain squirting from his chest. That was the way the idea had worked out.

  Maman must have calmed down. ‘You knew, then,’ she said, ‘all the time—that Mr Shewcroft had taken his life.’

  No, he only guessed—but because he knew. If she only knew, what he had painted on the wall was the least of what he knew.

  ‘I could do another,’ he said, ‘in another few days—a better one.’

  He was still shivering with the horror of it. He hadn’t had the courage to remember too closely ‘Jack’ Shewcroft’s face with the blackheads and scarred skin.

  ‘I don’t know what your father will say. He’ll probably give you a sound beating.’

  He listened to her swishing, crying, but angrily, down the passage. He really didn’t care whether Harry Courtney obeyed her orders and came to beat him. For the moment at least, he wasn’t frightened. He was still too exhausted by what had turned out to be, not a game of his own imagination, but a wrestling match with someone stronger; so he lay drowsily looking at the painting on the wall, particularly those places where he could see he had gone wrong. He had been led astray by the brilliance of the live red; whereas ‘Jack’ Shewcroft’s suicide should have been black black.

  Presently he heard Harry Courtney let himself in. He heard her go quickly and talk to him fairly loudly, though not yet loud enough, in the hall.

  Then he heard her raise her voice, practically shout: ‘Oh, but you must! As a discipline. For his own good.’

  When Harry, his father who wasn’t, came into the room, he was looking stern but apologetic, and carrying that riding crop. Harry hardly dared look at the painting on the wall for remembering what she had sent him to do.

  ‘They—your mother—’ he began. ‘I can see for myself,’ he tried again, ‘how destructive you’ve been—Hurtle—and when boys are destructive, there’s only one—one cure—they have to be punished pretty severely.’

  He was looking very big and bulgy. He no longer belonged to his English suit. The sleeve had rucked up along one of the arms, leaving a hairy wrist. Hurtle was fascinated by the twitching of the leather loop at the end of the bone-handled crop.

  ‘Get up, Hurtle.’

  Hurtle didn’t, couldn’t. Legs wouldn’t work. Of course he was afraid, too, while hypnotized by Harry Courtney’s face.

  For Harry had raised the crop. Like a big heavy old hairy woman, he slashed. Beard and all, his cheeks were flopping with fright. Hurtle felt the painful cuts, while Harry, you could tell from his eyes and mouth, was suffering them.

  After he had slashed how many times he dropped the crop. He sat down trembling on the edge of the bed, looking at his large, clasped hands. What if you began to blubber? That might finish Harry. So you continued staring at him as hard as you could. Perhaps that was worse.

  Outside, the rain had stopped. The swollen shapes of trees, hardly the same which could lash themselves to heights of spectacular fury, stood glooming in the half-light before moonrise.

  In their own bright electric world he would have liked to crawl closer to his pretended father, at least to get the feel of his sleeve: or better, to be alone and cry, looking out at the darkness from which the moon would presently create a garden.

  Harry said: ‘Next Thursday, Hurtle, I’ve got to go to Mumbelong. I promised to take you, I think. Well, it’s time I kept my promise, isn’t it?’ Towards the end he raised his voice, and showed his teeth, which were very good; they never had anything wrong with them.

  Hurtle made a few noises. Father was looking at him. Father made those little noises in his throat to signify that nothing unpleasant had happened, had it? There is a certain sensation of barely melted chocolate, and this was it.

  That night Maman gave him a real chocolate before he went to bed, before she had her dinner. She was sitting in the mauve octagonal room where she wrote the letters: ‘to salve my conscience’. She was wearing what she called a simple dinner frock, with a frosting of beads which rustled on her upper arms.

  ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘you don’t know how much you hurt me—in doing what you did.’

  He was seriously interested. He saw there were real tears in her eyes.

  That was when she gave him the chocolate.

  Maman said, because tonight she felt the need to explain away: ‘I have been writing to a number of influential people asking them to support the movement for prevention of cruelty to animals. That is, in the wider sense. Because my particular interest is the prevention of vivisection. I wonder if you can understand, darling. Because hardly anyone in this country seems aware of what is going on. I’ve heard the most hair-raising, heart-rending stories of animals being sacrificed to science—living animals cut up—in experiments.’

  She was looking at him, or beyond him, or again, at him.

  ‘Shrieking, tortured dogs. I’ve heard they punch them in the vocal chords to silence them.’

  He was looking at Maman. She was so moved, he could smell the scent of her emotion above the scent. He could hear the rustling of the bead frosting on her sleeves.

  ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘my children—you and Rhoda—will never grow up cruel—if I can help it.’

  A lopsided moon, he saw, was balancing on the blurred and dripping trees. Father came in dressed for dinner. They kissed good night. Then Maman leaned against Father. He saw how beautifully they fitted together. He had never fitted together with anyone in such a way. He wondered whether he ever would.

  Father kept his promise about the visit to Mumbelong. He had these three properties: Mumbelong, Yalladookdook and Sevenoaks, where managers were in charge, though as a young man Harry Courtney himself had lived and worked on the land. When he was particularly what Maman called ‘boring’ he used to tell about the blisters he had got digging holes for fence-posts, and dagging sheep Edith said Mr Courtney had made a fortune several times over from sheep and cattle. At his best there wasn’t any sign of it, like when cleaning his teeth in his underclothes in the swaying train, while the slimy water went sip slop inside the big, railways’ water-bottle. Hurtle lay on the other bunk watching his father. In the dark, afterwards, he listened to his snoring. He had not felt happier since becoming his father’s son.

  They had to get up more than early so as not to miss the siding where the manager would meet them. Hurtle was so sleepy he couldn’t find his boots: Father had to help him into them. Before they got down, Father put on an oilskin, not the overcoat of Hurtle’s former imagining. To touch the oilskin made you shiver: it was so stiff and cold; but it made Father look real, more as though he worked. You were the one who was soft, in namby-pamby new clothes, face ghostly green in the glass if you looked: only your thoughts were real.

  When they got down at the siding, with their valises, and the rifle father had told him to bring, there were lights in the darkness from what seemed to be a sulky. There was an old man’s voice explaining to them the manager Mr Spargo had strained his back and was laid up. The old man’s name was Sid Cupples.

  ‘This is the boy,’ Father explained to Sid, making you sound more like a thing the Courtneys owned than their legally adopted son.

  The old man made some noises from between his gums. ‘Fine little bloke,’ he gobbled. ‘A chip off the old block, eh?’ As if he didn’t know: perhaps he didn’t.

  They were entering a new world for which Father used a different voice. He seemed to be speaking the language old man Cupples would understand. Some way back Hurtle too had known how to speak it, or a version of it, but he no longer particularly wanted to remember. Driving in the sulky, with the
lamps focused on the stones along the road and a few white thistles growing at the side, he remembered instead that other journey with the archdeacon and Harry’s father, when Harry was a boy. He wondered what he would have said to the archdeacon in the new language he had learnt, and which Father for the moment didn’t want to use.

  As they jogged, Sid began to grumble: ‘Wethers in the Five Mile aren’t doin’ all they could. I told ’im. I told ’im ’e oughter shift the wethers. Give it a spell.’

  Father was turning away from Sid, because he was the owner, who ought to be in league with the manager.

  ‘I told ’im,’ said Sid, whose hands were scaly on the reins, ‘I told ’im ’e oughter bluestone the crick. There’s worm in them wethers.’

  Father’s oilskin was making a noise like sheets of metal. ‘Spargo’s sick,’ he reminded Sid.

  ‘I dunno if ’e’s sick. Spargo ’imself ain’t too sure. ’E oughter shift the wethers. I’m tellin’ yer, Mr Courtney, now yer’ve come. Spargo says ’e ain’t sick, or no more than a woman couldn’t fix.’

  The two men were laughing together in the lamplit darkness for something they had both experienced. Although you were out of it, for once it didn’t matter; there was too much else. Sometimes the thistles at the edges of the road looked like cut-out paper when the lamplight showed them up.

  And then waking: because you must have fallen asleep, you were suddenly so lumpish and gummy; the darkness had turned into silver paddocks. The silver light was trickling down out of the trees, down the hillside; the rocks themselves were for a second liquid. There were rabbits humped in the white grass, then scuttering away.

  Father and Sid were still talking their different language. They seemed to have forgotten you existed, though you joined them together, fitted tightly between Father’s oilskin and Sid’s smelly old overcoat.

  Then Father remembered and said: ‘Fine sheep country, son. You wanter keep yer eyes open, and you’ll pick up a wrinkle or two.’

  He was speaking as though Maman didn’t exist, nor the painting by Boudin, nor the shelves of leatherbound books: when you knew all about them. Nor did he realize all the wrinkles you were picking up, not from the boring old sheep country, but from the world of light as the sun rose pale out of the hills, and the streams of liquid light were splashed across the white paddocks: from the sheep too, the wrinkled sheep huddling or trudging, coughing something that wouldn’t come up; there were some so close to the road you could look right into their grey, clotted wool.