The Vivisector

by WHITE, PATRICK

  Rhoda let herself be rocked, looking out of the window, and not. She probably hated him deeply for what he had seen, and would never let herself understand what else: the light he would show burning in the cage of her ribs; the belly sloping down from the winkle of a navel towards the flame she couldn’t put out with her sponge. He would do all that he had to do. But not yet. It was too luxurious thinking about it.

  London was very solid after France. Behaviour mattered an awful lot, with the result that you, too, behaved better, even alone in the hotel room. Though Maman and Father had visited London several times before, they were not as confident and experienced as you would have expected. They seemed to be apologizing to the servants, which they never bothered to do at home. Everybody tried to pronounce better. Rhoda learned the language in no time and spoke it in a cold, clear, offensive little voice. It was more difficult for Maman and Father to keep up pretences, because they had always allowed themselves to say more or less what they wanted, and lose their tempers if they felt like it. For Hurtle the controlled tones of the English were no trouble at all, since he already had two other versions of English by heart.

  Father took Hurtle to his tailor, and ordered for his son a suit in the very latest fashion. When the scurfy old tailor knelt and stuck the measure hard up into the crutch of his pants, Hurtle realized from the glass how leggy he had become. He felt touchy, too. Before the tailor rammed the measure home—surely unnecessarily hard—he had never been touched, it seemed, by anyone other than himself. He hated it. He blushed at himself in the glass, and wondered whether Rhoda would have noticed.

  On returning to their hotel (‘not ostentatious, but highly approved’) they found Rhoda seated alone downstairs wearing that prim expression she put on whenever she decided to act the lady. She had crossed her ankles. She was looking at nothing in particular and enjoying her own attitude when Father and Hurtle walked in through the glass and mahogany doors. Immediately Rhoda looked at Hurtle. Still her face expressed nothing: not pleasure; not even recognition; but she made him feel a kid again, and he blushed a second time over that reflection in the tailor’s glass as the old man held the tape measure tightly rammed into the fork of his legs. Naturally Rhoda didn’t know how he had resented being touched, but she might have known.

  Then Rhoda herself blushed, and turned her face away: Father had the tactlessness to try out a joke. ‘Do you suppose she’s expecting a caller? I wonder who he is?’ Hurtle played up to it: ‘Will it be a real live lord, or only a tuppenny honourable?’ He made his voice as raucous and vulgar as he could.

  Quickly Rhoda uncrossed her ankles, then lashed them together again. She ducked her head when Father tried to stroke her hair in passing. ‘It was only a joke, girlie.’ But his apology and the attempt at endearment only made it worse.

  Even Hurtle sympathized. She was no longer of an age to be teased, though strangers mightn’t have believed. Where once she would have screamed back in her own defence, now it sometimes seemed as though she was trying to turn herself into marble to disguise even her visible thoughts; but Rhoda’s marble remained afflicted.

  There were occasions when they all visited the stately London art galleries, in the muted atmosphere of which, lords and ladies directed blue stares out of billowing shrubberies, or proudly reined in their horses before a perspective of park. Maman preferred the English to the French style in painting. Although she lectured the chambermaids on what Australians thought and felt, she dearly loved the lords and ladies she had never met. At least in the picture galleries there was no question of her meeting those of another age, so she was able to concentrate on art. Sometimes the paintings made her misty-wistful, or, particularly in front of sunsets, she behaved as though she was suffering from a stomach-ache.

  Hurtle told himself: I mustn’t feel like this about my mother, not even when I see and hear.

  Father gave less trouble, because men weren’t moved to carry on to the same extent.

  Father said: ‘It would have been a solid investment, Freda, if we’d picked up a Gainsborough at the right moment.’

  Maman was too entranced to answer, in her pretty hat, and Zouave jacket.

  Rhoda was too bored. She followed, picking the skin at the corners of her nails: it was so boring in the galleries.

  Father farted in front of a Sargent, the way old men never seemed to realize what is coming. And in an empty gallery.

  Of course Maman didn’t hear. It was Hurtle and Rhoda who did. Who started rocking. Then hiccupping, it sounded, the other side of a column.

  ‘Shut up!’ Hurtle hadn’t meant to bellow.

  ‘Stop hitting me!’ Rhoda hissed.

  It was like old times, in which they were brother and sister, down by the liquid manure at the bottom of the garden; till an elderly custodian restored them to their present ages, their formal relationship, by severely frowning at them.

  Hurtle announced: ‘I’m off to my fitting. Where do you think they’re going next?’

  ‘Actually I’ve no idea,’ Rhoda answered. ‘I have letters to write.’

  She wrote endless letters to the maids at home, who replied only sometimes and illegibly. Rhoda waited for her mail as though her life depended on it.

  Maman too, had her fittings—it was so important to be dressed—but attended lectures, concerts, as well as matinées, with other Australian ladies. She coaxed Father to thés dansants, and to opera performances at which her shoulders shone. She adored Wagner and the elegant old Queen Alexandra.

  Their stay in London might have remained insignificant and frivolous if its current hadn’t quickened seriously on a certain wet afternoon. Father was away in Scotland inspecting Aberdeen Angus bulls. Maman and Rhoda, both dressed against the cold, and with trimmings of damp fur, Hurtle in his velvet-collared overcoat, carrying the new silver-knobbed malacca cane, had set out shopping for the sake of shopping.

  It was one of the greyest days, pierced by black monuments. Hurtle lost the others for a moment: they had all floated apart in the drizzle, the sound of wheels revolving in wet, the tramping of galoshes; when he found himself staring into a display window of horrible purpose. There was a little, brown, stuffed dog clamped to a kind of operating table. The dog’s exposed teeth were gnashing in a permanent and most realistic agony. Its guts, exposed too, and varnished pink to grey-green, were more realistic still.

  The first wave of shock hadn’t broken in him when Rhoda arrived at his elbow. ‘What is it?’ she gasped from out of the drizzle. ‘Why—oh, poor dog!’ Normally she didn’t care for dogs: they dirtied her clothes, and sometimes knocked her over; but from her anguish now, she herself might have been stretched on the operating table.

  Maman came up. Rain had upset the texture of her furs. Her lips were parted in what had begun as a smile. She stopped in front of the plate-glass. Her teeth looked older than the rest of her.

  ‘There!’ Maman screeched, baring her teeth wider at the stuffed and varnished dog. ‘Ohhhh! That is what I should never forget! But did. The vivisectionists!’

  A crowd was gathering to watch and listen.

  ‘There’s nothing so inhuman as a human being. We must never rest.’ Maman was calling an army into action. ‘Do you understand?’

  The crowd couldn’t very well. Maman couldn’t either, except that she had been guilty of the sin of neglect.

  ‘I wish Daddy were here,’ she whimpered.

  Then she began to gather her fatherless children by the elbows, hustling them towards the kerb; she could rely on nobody; her musquash and velour had become most inadequate.

  Heaped together at last in a cab, they might have enjoyed the comfort of warmth and closeness if Maman’s conscience hadn’t got to work again. ‘I believe that horrifying object was given us as a sign. It’s time we left for home. I’m wasting my life—while so many defenceless creatures are being heartlessly destroyed.’

  It reminded him of the planchette: a drunken and accusing scribble; though Maman wasn’t drunk, on
ly frightened. Rhoda’s face had clamped down white on the thoughts behind it. He, too, felt frightened, and wished they might be given a sign more consoling than the agonizing dog.

  Maman missed dinner because the experience had brought on one of her migraines. Hurtle and Rhoda went down together, to the almost empty, unemotional grill room, where they ordered fried whitebait in little potato baskets, and drank lots of water while waiting. Hurtle could see themselves at a distance in one of the big gold mirrors, their reflections lit by the pink-shaded lamp on their small table. Inside the grotto made by the gilded curlicues of the mirror-frame, they sat looking rich, protected, and overdressed.

  He was so shocked he felt his nerve-ends must be waving inside him like hair.

  He looked away from the reflections, at the actual Rhoda, and deliberately said: ‘What are you supposed to be tonight—a Christmas tree? It doesn’t suit anyone so stunted.’

  Rhoda pretended not to have heard, and went on rolling bread pellets, which came out grey, though her hands appeared clean.

  His own behaviour on top of other things hurt and horrified him to such an extent he took up the pencil the waiter had forgotten, and began drawing in the margin of the menu, as he always did when a situation became unbearable, practically as though playing with himself.

  Then the whitebait were brought. They were delicious, and he gorged himself. Rhoda too, had an appetite. When the fish was finished, they started eating the potato baskets, though perhaps you weren’t supposed to.

  There was Peach Melba after that, which they ordered because they recognized the name. Without the attraction of familiarity they would probably have followed each other in ordering: he and Rhoda, he realized, always did choose the same things. He might have gone into the matter if the syrupy sweet hadn’t begun to make him feel sick. Or the gallons of water they had drunk. Or the memory of their panicky drive in a cab smelling of wet galoshes.

  Rhoda could have been feeling the same: she was holding her handkerchief to her mouth; she was teetering, or tittering, or trying not to throw up across the table, over the big beautifully printed menu.

  ‘You do it on purpose,’ she choked.

  ‘Do what?’

  It was his drawing, in the margin of the menu, of the little tortured dog clamped to the sort of operating table.

  ‘I was trying to work something out,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Oh yes, you’re always trying to work something out—on somebody. I know you!’

  He couldn’t understand why she hated him so.

  ‘Everybody says—all the girls: Edith, Lizzie, Keep—my parents were mad to attempt it. It could only fail—with you. From where you came. You!’

  She took up a fruit-knife, and jabbed it into his thigh. It didn’t enter, but felt as though it nearly did.

  ‘You’re the one who’s mad!’ His voice sounded like that of a boy with the wind up. ‘Somebody ’ull see us.’

  He was shaken by the impression he seemed to make on others; it was so wrong: if he could have shown them.

  But worse was happening: Rhoda had broken out crying, not the sniffly ladylike whimper Maman sometimes used on father, but a big boohoo.

  ‘All right,’ he said several times over.

  The waiter came and asked, in the tone produced by English servants whatever the occasion: would they care for coffee? They wouldn’t.

  On the way up in the lift, a gold cage, carpeted like everywhere else, Rhoda had quietened down. An old man with a hook instead of a right hand stood hauling on a slack soft rope which bumped the lift from side to side.

  Then, leaving the lift, Rhoda flashed the knife again. ‘The way you smarm your hair, Hurtle, reminds me of a Darlinghurst butcher boy.’ He might have been more conscious of the wound if he had felt less exhausted.

  Maman called from the far end of their suite on hearing them blunder through the outer door: ‘Is that my children?’ Her nose must have swelled. ‘Won’t you come and kiss me?’ Through the dark, carpeted, stuffy rooms and a strong smell of eau de Cologne, they went to do it, bumping against cabin trunks.

  The following day Father arrived in response to a wire. He looked both happy and healthy after Scotland and the bulls. Something of a colder, less dangerous climate had freshened his skin. His eyes were clear.

  But Maman wouldn’t leave it at that, and Father’s expression soon became involved with her uneasiness.

  A few days later, he came in and said: ‘Well, Alfreda, I’ve made the reservations, as that’s what you want. We’re leaving on the third. But it’s most unreasonable,’ he added through thicker lips. ‘Before the Dublin Horseshow. Goodwood, too.’

  Maman revived for the first time since the afternoon they came across the martyred dog; when she had kissed everyone she said: ‘Oh, I know I’m right. I have my intuitions. I shan’t feel happy till we’re lying in our own beds.’ Again she made it a mystery: they might have been seated round the planchette; only then, she had been smooth and golden, now her skin was grey and wrinkled as though the fog had got into it.

  Rhoda began a little dance. Where anyone else would have galumphed, she made frail scratching sounds. He decided not to look, but couldn’t help hearing.

  Rhoda said: ‘I don’t know why we ever went away. Wherever you go, you’ve still got to go on being yourself.’

  ‘Oh, but darling, you were getting so much out of it!’ Maman was so put out; she liked to have things both ways.

  Rhoda mumbled: ‘No.’ Then, raising her voice, she accused: ‘Only Hurtle has got something out of it. He’s learnt better ways of being nasty.’

  He turned round. Did she really believe this? Apparently she did. He started to defend himself, but his voice died in a croak. If that was what she believed. But did she? Then nobody would believe in his other, his real intentions.

  3

  They returned, though not to the old life. Something had happened in the meantime. The garden, the house had shrunk. The maids who had been kept on to ward off moth and rust were fatter than before and had lost some of their authority. Most noticeably, the chandelier had dwindled and dulled above the hall. The stone steps leading to the lower garden were, on the other hand, more than ever moss-upholstered, and the collapse of the latticed summerhouse during a storm presented a ruin round which the green lightning of childhood still occasionally played, orange fungus glared, and a smell of rot drifted, often sickening, sometimes thrilling.

  Against this shimmer of sensation, practical arrangements were being made for the children’s education. It was obvious Rhoda couldn’t be exposed to the robust conventions of a school. Maman had visions of her knocked down and trampled on by a throng of normal, thoughtless girls bursting with blood and health after games. Hurtle didn’t say he thought she might survive. Rhoda was so busy locking up her secret self, she hadn’t time to comment. She looked whiter than ever under the pink hair and lashes, and was perhaps secretly powdering. Her diary she kept locked too.

  It was arranged that she should go to the Hollingrakes, who employed a governess, an Englishwoman, for their only daughter Boo and three or four other acceptable girls. The Hollingrakes had made their money out of sugar, and were quick to reject almost everybody in case they themselves shouldn’t be accepted. Maman was almost abject in her gratitude for Mrs Hollingrake’s acceptance.

  Boo was a dark-green, smooth girl, well developed for her age, otherwise refined, because her mother was determined sugar should be. The three or four companion girls were well chosen for attainments and prospects. And now there would be little Rhoda Courtney.

  Hurtle was preparing to start his first term at the only possible school. As the separation from his family approached, he became moodily indifferent rather than sentimental, for Father was preoccupied restocking Sevenoaks with imported Aberdeen Angus, and Maman had her obsessions.

  ‘What is wrong with my mother?’ Hurtle asked. ‘Is she sick?’

  Father frowned at first; then he cleared his throat and said: ‘No. S
he isn’t what you’d call sick; it’s her time of life.’ He would have liked to enjoy with his son the luxury of masculinity, but perhaps the boy wasn’t old enough, in spite of long limbs and a voice beginning to shake off the gravel.

  Whenever he came across it, his parents’ vulnerability embarrassed Hurtle.

  At school they despised him because he spoke English; so he had to relearn their language. Then they respected him for what he had experienced: those Paris prosses!

  ‘Did your old man know about it?’ the boys asked, gathering round.

  ‘Did he know! He took me to the house. All the girls were lined up. We choose whichever we like the look of. I pick the one with the red hair. Don’t know how much they stung him for. There was music while you wait. And a champagne supper afterwards. ’

  Once he began laying it on he couldn’t stop. Each girl, as he saw her, had a Toulouse-Lautrec throat. He could see where the stockings ended and the garters ate into the dollops of flesh.

  It got round the school. A group of older boys sent for him. ‘What’s all this about the French prostitutes?’

  He had to tell it all over again. Some of the boys were lolling thoughtfully, chewing grass. Some of them had already tried a shave; others still glistened with silky down. Several were looking tight about the crutch.

  There was a prefect Hubert Chanfield invited Courtney to walk with him on a Sunday along the creek. Where the yellow banks of dried clay became particularly steep, and the air was no longer circulating, Chanfield started smiling and showing. He asked Courtney to take down his pants. Courtney, when it came to the point, was humiliated by not yet knowing how he wanted to dispose of himself. He was ticking with excitement, though. He scrambled up the bank, clutching at handfuls of white grass, clay still clinging to the roots, and stalked off along the level ground, hands stiff in his trouser pockets.

  School was tedious enough; the games he played to show he was able, the lessons at which he forgot what he had learnt; but the holidays were, if anything, worse, in the diminished house with his parents and sister.