‘There!’ she said. ‘You’re still my treasure. You know you are.’
In this darkness, of overflowing hair and pillows which softly gave, he had never been so close to what they probably meant by bliss.
When he opened his eyes, Maman, who resisted chocolates now on account of her figure, was scratching in a box on the bedside table. She soon heaved back into their former soft position; she stuck the chocolate in her own mouth, and warmed it up till she had it ready to offer: or so he understood, from the bird-noises she began to make. They were like two birds together, feeding on the same food, as they worked the chocolate, neither soft nor hard, neither his nor hers: the chocolate trickled blissfully.
Suddenly Maman went: ‘Mm—mm—hmmm!’ rising to a high note.
She sucked in the chocolate so quickly his tongue almost followed it.
She sat up in bed. ‘Oh dear, what silly things we do! Childish things!’ When she was the childish one: he wouldn’t have thought of the silly trick with the chocolate.
Gathering up her hair by handfuls, she was smiling; but it was not for him: more for herself, it looked.
He got out of bed and began feeling for his slippers. He might have been treading on glass instead of the soft carpet. He straightened up, after spreading his hands to hide what he had to hide.
Hurtle Courtney liked to escape after lessons, shaking them off, together with Rhoda, go down alone through the dark-leaved garden, down the plunging, moss-cushioned steps, to the tree. It had a prickly trunk he learned to climb. He learned to lie along a prickly branch, over the street. Sometimes when people were passing he would make a funnel of his mouth, and let down the spit, sticky and silver, as of the tree itself, hanging, swinging in a string, and finally falling. Sometimes they looked up and threatened him, but more often the people hurried away pretending nothing had happened.
Once a mob of larries happened to pass underneath, and he spat from the branch in quick spurts. Through the tears in their clothes he could see their sunburnt nakedness; he could almost smell their gunpowder flesh. At once his former life began boiling up in him.
The others looked up and began pulling faces of hate. One of them had a catapult. Their voices went to work on him.
‘Come on down, fuckun little silvertail! We’ll put a frill around yer!’ the hoarsest of them called up.
A stone numbed a place in his shoulder.
‘Wait till I git down,’ he shouted back in a voice to match, ‘I’ll drive the teeth into yer gob quicker than yer bargain for.’
In fact he slithered out of the tree quicker than he himself had expected; the soles of his boots were thudding on the hot asphalt; to a sound of bone on bone he began rubbing out their faces, their hard flesh turning to ripe tomato as he let them have it. Blood was a taste he had forgotten: liquid pencils.
Then when they streaked off, he ran after them in his burst Norfolk jacket and unbuttonable knickerbockers. ‘’Ere! Hey! Wait a mo! I got somethun ter tell yez,’ he called in the remembered language.
Unconvinced, the pack ran on, and as it became an increasing blur, there flickered through his mind the possum with the bell round its neck Sid Cupples had told about: the freak tinkling after them driving the ‘sane buggers’ always farther away.
So Hurtle Courtney Duffield gave up at last. He stood in the street, the two languages he knew fighting for possession of him. At the worst, though brief moment, when it seemed unlikely he would ever succeed in communicating through either tongue, he heard himself blubbering.
Not long after, he was due to start at a proper school. They had driven out to visit the Head, who spoke English, but wasn’t. They walked through the old buildings, and the established boys in their uniforms looked at them with curiosity and disguised contempt, not only the long-legged, shaven men, but also the ink-stained bits of kids.
‘You won’t feel nervous, will you? You’re too sensible.’ The Head’s wife answered her own question.
She was a woman whose mouth couldn’t contain all its teeth: some of them were permanently on view, with a fascinating tinge of grey-green; as if this wasn’t enough, she kept wetting them with her lips to make them glisten more.
Of course Maman had to put in her word. ‘Oh, he’s never nervous; Hurtle Courtney’s a very cool customer indeed!’
He blushed for her, for borrowing an expression like ‘cool customer’ which he had only heard men use. A group of older boys at the corner of one of the old stone buildings had obviously overheard: the boys were laughing at slang out of the wrong mouth. They were laughing at his own extraordinary name, and at Maman’s hat, which was making her family look ridiculous. At least the boys could not have heard about Rhoda and her hump; Rhoda was stored up for the future.
His escape from the schoolroom at home might have turned out less a triumph of emancipation than an initiation into tribal horrors if there hadn’t been a sudden change of plan. They were leaving for Europe—like that—because Maman couldn’t bear to put it off any longer. Originally their party was to have consisted of themselves, Keep, and Sybil Gibbons. Then Maman decided she would do without her maid; besides being a grumpy old thing, Keep would never stand the foreign food. Then they lopped Miss Gibbons off. Travel was an education in itself, said Maman, and you could always engage people on the spot to teach any of the languages.
Miss Gibbons left a week before they were to sail. As they kissed good-bye her hat got pushed to the back of her head and she looked as though she had been in some kind of accident. Her nose, gone red, sounded blocked as she spluttered: ‘I am so grateful . . .’ It sounded silly in the circumstances, like a phrase out of a copybook, though certainly Father had handed her an envelope. Father believed you could make everything good with a cheque, but wasn’t always let off lightly, as when Miss Gibbons spurted tears.
From the porch they watched Rowley drive her away. Poor old Sybil Gibbons would remain a pale thing: except in her diary. In one place in the diary he had found: ‘There are nights when I lie in bed and wonder whether I shall be able to prevent myself beating out my brains against the wall. I shall be thirty next January . . .’ If he ever painted Sybil Gibbons he would show her pale-green, vegetable flesh tortured by moonlight and hot sheets, her lips slightly open as he saw they would have to be.
Actually he soon forgot Miss Gibbons: there were the bony Frenchwomen, their tricolour faces, and wicked bums in spite of corsets. There was the French language, which hadn’t come alive till now, in spite of Maman, and Madame Parmentier, and the books through which he had tediously ground. Most important of all were the paintings, which showed him a reality more intense than the life he had so far experienced. He was all the time drawing in secret, and destroying, and on several occasions he painted something. The inadequacy and necessity of his efforts drained him as despairingly as an orgasm in the bath.
Rhoda’s life too, seemed to become more secret the more they travelled, the longer they lived in foreign hotels. Though she wasn’t growing all that much—Dr Mosbacher confirmed that in such cases, the period of physical growth was brief—he could sense that she had grown away from him inside. All right, he didn’t in any way depend on Rhoda; but there were times when he would have liked to be certain of what was going on.
At Wiesbaden, for instance, she announced without encouragement: ‘Hurtle, I’m going to show you something.’ Hadn’t he heard it before? ‘I’m going to show you a poem I’ve written. Probably tomorrow. By then I shall have polished it enough.’
He could hardly believe she had written the poem: she was looking too mysterious; and in fact she never showed it to him.
Rhoda was thriving on the mysteries she made in a succession of hotels, in the plush-upholstered nooks, to the tune of unexplained gusts of laughter, in the smells of dumpling and Rehbraten, and soil gone sour round potted palms; while something was happening inside her blouse, to what Maman continued calling ‘poor Rhoda’s chest’, and Rhoda herself had begun referring to her ‘strawberr
y’ hair.
Because he might buy a sapphire in the morning, Father ordained that they were to economize over baths at night in the locked bathrooms of the foreign hotels. Behind the back of the Kammermädchen (or femme de chambre), the clean Australians replaced one another virtuously, but secretly. In the steep baths of the steamed-up bathrooms of Belgium, Germany and France, there were strands of strawberry mingling with the darker hairs. The rough bathrobes had grown heavy with damp by the time you inherited them. Even a dry robe must have flattened Rhoda, who had never taken a bath without a nurse or a governess at her elbow. But she loved to lie in hot baths. She lay so long, sometimes he would have to knock. (What if she had died?)
Always on taking over, he would feel guilty, lying in the bath where Rhoda had lain, surrounded by her watermark and a few strands of pinkish hair. He would jump out, skidding on the tiles, and rub himself down frantically. Once, for certain, she pieced together a torn-up drawing while he lay thinking in the bath.
They were all of them more or less obsessed by Rhoda.
In Brussels and Paris they bought her clothes to make her forget about herself. They bought her a hat which was like a Frenchwoman’s hat on a little girl. Her head trembled in the old way while she walked, but there was a new swinging motion of the body, as though she had discovered importance in her hips, or she might perhaps throw the load off her back. She looked at him and dared him to see, but knew that he did.
On coming out of the bedroom in Brussels Maman told him: ‘Poor Rhoda isn’t by any means well. We must ask them to send for a doctor.’
‘Oh, I’m well,’ Rhoda called from the room behind. ‘I’m always well. Only the doctors say I’m not. Behind my back!’ She burst out laughing, or possibly crying, but Maman went in again, and closed the door.
Again, Maman and Rhoda were arguing: it was the same bedroom above the glass wintergarden. ‘But the board, or the floor—it’s the same. You torture me!’ Rhoda screamed.
Maman was sobbing. ‘I was given my cross, and shall bear it to the end.’
Dr Marquet said, on coming out: ‘Elle est quand même un petit peu hystérique.’
Should you go in?
He couldn’t resist it at last. Rhoda was alone in the darkening room. She demanded from her bed: ‘Where is my father?’ But he couldn’t tell her.
They could hear a thin violin at work under the roof of the wintergarden, which the management had netted with wire to stop people jumping through the glass. Rhoda tried to get hold of his hand. She did in the end, and he sat joined to her at the thumb, while the dirty light from the well closed down on them gradually.
And Rhoda said in the dark: ‘Don’t think I’m going to die. I’ll live longer than everyone.’
Looking back over their travels, the memories clotted most thickly round St Yves de Trégor and London.
St Yves de Trégor was a small resort on the Breton coast, in the depths of a bay, on an estuary. It had a mournfulness of mud and gulls, of wind blowing across stony fields out of the Atlantic. All its colours were water-colours. The most pretentious hotel was without even a locked bathroom, but the bedrooms were equipped with bidets on collapsible iron stands.
Why they stopped at St Yves de Trégor nobody could ever remember, except probably they were exhausted by diarrhoea. Nobody knew what had caused it, perhaps the shellfish, but every traveller in Brittany was suffering from the diarrhoea. It was the topic discussed most frequently in trains, that is, by tourists with other tourists, though Maman and Father refused to be classified as such.
On arrival at St Yves they were driven through the dusk, down narrow lanes between roughly piled stone walls.
Their way was strewn with stones, from which the horses’ hoofs struck sparks. One of the horses had a cough.
Some kind of embarrassment arose over the hotel rooms; the patronne considered the problem in her register through unusually thick glasses. In the end they were ushered to rooms which must have been occupied the night before: the beds were still unmade. Maman turned away from the sheets on the big wooden bed in the chambre à deux personnes.
Anger made Father’s French more fluent. ‘Mais c’est la nuit, et les lits sont pas encore faites.’ It made no difference. The patronne and the femme de chambre couldn’t disguise the sheets they were bundling up; and under one of the beds Rhoda discovered an unemptied chamber-pot. Maman was too upset to correct Father’s French grammar.
When the clean sheets were brought she began to whisper: ‘Are they damp? I’m sure they are. They feel like it.’ They weren’t though: only cold, sticky from salt air, and rough.
Rhoda was beginning to droop as she did when ready to fall asleep.
Maman said, taking out her hatpins: ‘We shall leave in the morning—by the first train.’
But you hoped against it; everything you saw was of importance: a small ball of combed-out hair lying in a corner.
And in the dining-room, though Maman commanded soggy rice for Rhoda and herself, there was a big comforting soup, with lumps of bacon, and chunks of potato and cabbage stalk, which the patronne herself ladled out from a huge cracked tureen.
The patronne said: ‘Sont gentils, les p’tits, mais fatigués.’ She smiled at them, showing short teeth and pale gums, and you smiled back sickly to match the situation.
The patronne was wearing a black crochet shawl with an uneven fringe.
Maman had reached the stage of laugh-crying: ‘In the morning—by the first train!’ she reminded Father even before the patronne had removed herself.
Father’s mouth was full of bacon and hot potato. ‘But it isn’t so bad, Freda. Hurtle and I don’t think it is.’
Hurtle hoped all night that Father would prevail. All night he listened to the sea advancing over mud encroaching on his room a voice the voice of a woman rinsing crashing laughing the bidet must have. Somewhat early the diarrhoea came over him again. He had to get up. As he crouched and shivered on the raised footprints above the hole, a crying of gulls blew in at him. He looked out, and a liquid light had begun to sluice the estuary.
They spent three whole days at St Yves de Trégor. Maman never stopped pointing out how appalling everything was: the beds, the plumbing, the food, the patronne Madame Clémence, the doctor who arrived in bicycle clips and a celluloid collar to prescribe for her. Maman was exhausted by the diarrhoea: she had a deep grey line from each nostril to the corners of her mouth; and because her powers of resistance had temporarily left her, they stayed.
Father unbuttoned his clothes, and sat about the beach, reading stale English newspapers and smoking cheroots. He had taken off his boots and socks, but it was too cold for paddling. Maman brooded over the postcards she hadn’t the strength to write, even without her corsets. Because she wasn’t allowed to go out Rhoda hopped humming from room to room. She discovered a drift of dead flies, which rustled as she gathered them up from the window-sill.
Madame Clémence made a grand gesture with her arm, from under her short thick woollen shawl. ‘Le paysage est magnifique, vous voyez. De grands peintres viennent de loin, de Paris même, pour en profiter.’
‘Mons fils est peintre,’ Maman offered in a weak voice.
Madame Clémence said it wasn’t possible. She said it was a charming occupation.
He did in fact paint a little picture, but secretly, the day before they left St Yves. He didn’t show his painting because it was too unsuccessful, or too private. He painted the silver light sluicing the grey mud as he saw it from his window, and as focus point, the faintest sliver of pink shining in the fork of the estuary. His crude attempt made him whinge. In the end he hid his failure under the bed. He thought he wouldn’t look at it again.
Probably he would never have started the botched thing if it hadn’t been for an incident early that morning. He had decided to go into Rhoda’s room, for no clear reason: he was drawn in that direction. As soon as he began to make the move he tried to stop himself, but couldn’t. The loose knob on Rhoda’s door w
as already rattling. Like his voice offering unconvincing excuses in advance. Before he positively burst in.
Rhoda was standing beside one of the spindly iron-legged bidets. She was naked down to the soles of her feet. She was trying to protect her privacy from this too sudden invasion of light. She was holding in front of her thighs a sponge which only half hid the shadow of pink hair.
Because he was so shocked he began to point, to grind his foot into the floor, to laugh his crudest and loudest. Before backing out. The rattling door slammed shut but only thin between them.
He ran into his room and squashed his face into a disgusting eiderdown, to try to blot out what had happened.
At midday they met in the dining-room. Rhoda sat staring from under sponged eyelids at the gigot aux haricots. Hurtle had plastered down his watered hair.
Maman looked at them embracingly and couldn’t wait to tell: ‘Tomorrow we are leaving St Yves de Trégor!’
In the train he realized he had left his painting under the bed, amongst the fluff, against the slopping chamber-pot. Rhoda was wearing a bonnet and a kind of long travelling cape, but would never again look fully clothed. As the train ran lurching through the fields, he saw her very vividly: the ribs of her pale body beside the iron framework of the collapsible bidet, her naked face, and the tuft of pink in the shadow of her thighs. Courage was taking hold of him again. He began to try her out in his mind in several different attitudes and lights. Invaded by his vision of flesh, he forgot the botched estuary.
‘I do believe they intend to break every bone we possess!’ Maman had discovered something fresh to protest against; it made her happy, even though her hat had been pushed over one ear when the lurching threw her into father’s lap.
While you let yourself gently flow with the motion of the train, soothed by the beauty of the forms disguised in Rhoda’s deformed body, even in the old chamber-pot under the bed at St Yves de Trégor.
The Vivisector Page 15