Newspapers are stale by the time they reach us, but don’t read any the better for it.
Give my love to your mother and sister. I have heard from an old acquaintance of a herbal treatment by which his invalid wife was considerably strengthened, and at once thought Rhoda might benefit from some such regimen. I shall write about this in detail to Maman.
I think often of my dear ones
yr affectionate
Father
P.S. The black polls are flourishing on the nearest thing to Scottish pasture.
P.P.S. Do you remember young Forster the jackaroo at Mumbelong? He is killed. Have started negotiations with Shearing for sale of the Leichhardt manuscript letters and will donate the proceeds to the Red Cross.—DAD
Harry Courtney, so far distant, so concerned for his dear ones, might have been at the front himself. He returned on leave from time to time, hands hardened, eyes clear. His English suits when he wore them again apologized for their elegance; his cigars must have turned against him.
His wife Alfreda said: ‘It’s so gratifying to have reached the comfortable stage of life,’ all the while unpicking the socks she was knitting for unknown soldiers.
She had taken to wearing aprons to emphasize the seriousness of her intentions: she couldn’t resist pretty aprons.
On his son’s sixteenth birthday Harry Courtney bought him a set of ivory brushes inlaid with gold monograms; he bought him a set of cuff-links studded with chunks of sapphire; they stood together looking at the presents.
‘Go on, say—if you don’t like them,’ Harry protested, while somewhere about him some of his bones clicked.
Hurtle was unable to express either his love or his misery. Harry shambled off, himself a slightly grizzled black-polled Angus.
The maids were flying with aired sheets which made a stiff, scraping sound.
‘Darling? Harry?’ Alfreda Courtney called. ‘They’re making up the bed in the dressing-room. In my old age I’m such a terribly light sleeper.’
She had unpacked his valise herself: the crumpled pyjamas smelling of dentifrice, and woodsmoke, and what was it? Apples?
Listening to them call to each other from their separate rooms, Hurtle was surprised his parents could survive the daylight shallows, let alone the dangers of sleep.
He had gone into the William Street post office to buy stamps for Maman. ‘You don’t mind, darling, do you? Say if you mind.’ She was clever enough to know he would be made to feel ridiculous by admitting it; but he did mind. He saw she was using him as her little boy—or her tame black-polled Angus bull. So he resented it. It was raining too.
But on going into the post office, full of the smell of wet raincoats and galoshes, he realized at once that this was a significant occasion.
A young woman or girl was licking a stamp. You could see she didn’t like the taste, but had to put up with it, her tongue flat and ugly in this commonplace employment. He wondered why somebody so obviously disdainful hadn’t simply wet her finger, and minimized her disgust.
It was Boo Hollingrake, but changed, he saw, and of course older.
Since the party Maman had organized for Rhoda, Boo had gone out of their lives. Mrs Hollingrake had told Maman in confidence the poor child was desolated by the death of the splendid young man to whom she would have become engaged. Whatever Boo may have felt, she was packed off to visit relations in Tasmania. Her education was, pardonably, interrupted. When she returned, Mrs Hollingrake decided to send her daughter to boarding school: ‘to take her out of herself’. In the emergency which arose, Mrs Challands, the mother of Mary, had engaged a governess and reorganized the depleted group. Maman was relieved to find that Rhoda, at least for the moment, wasn’t becoming a greater problem.
‘That Boo,’ Hurtle once inquired of Rhoda, ‘do you ever hear from her?’
‘Oh yes, I told you—at the time I got the letter from her. She’s staying near Launceston. She’s making a collection of Tasmanian bush-flowers—pressed.’
He couldn’t imagine it.
And now, here was Boo in the William Street post office, licking a stamp for another letter. He would have liked to read the address on it.
Because it was a wet morning she was wearing a raincoat, which she had unbelted for greater ease. Under her coat she was dressed, you couldn’t have said in mourning, because she was a young girl, but with a hint of it in her long black skirt and the big black bow flattened on the back of her hair. Her skin was whiter, as though in mourning, or it could have been from the weather. The skin of her eyelids looked thicker, heavier. The bridge of her nose seemed to have broadened, or coarsened, or she had a cold. But her white blouse was crisp, almost transparent, unostentatiously fashionable. She had that air of girls who don’t look after their own clothes: they drop them on the floor and somebody else picks them up.
When she first noticed him she looked a bit put out: she might have been going to cut him.
Then she changed her mind, and said in the automatic voice of women of her class coming across one another in the shops: ‘Oh hello, Hurtle—isn’t it a foul day?’
Though having nothing in particular to discuss, he spread himself to prevent her escaping before he was ready.
She told him about her stay in Tasmania. ‘They were very kind,’ she said in her mother’s voice. ‘Actually they’re related to Mummy. It’s so cold the girls all wear woollen vests,’ she informed him—seriously, he realized.
He found himself looking through her blouse, at the just visible tones of her shoulders. He became conscious of the warmth of their bodies mingling spontaneously through their open raincoats.
But Boo Hollingrake remained mentally cool.
‘How is Rhoda?’ she asked, though probably she didn’t want to hear. ‘I believe I owe her a letter. Or perhaps she’s the one who owes.’ She giggled faintly. ‘Rhoda’s so sweet. And Mr and Mrs Courtney—are they well?’
She hadn’t said ‘your father and mother’, because she was looking now with interest, at an adopted son.
‘They tell me,’ she said, ‘you’re becoming an artist. Do you paint from the life?’ It was a term she had picked up.
She didn’t wait for an answer, but looked at her wristlet watch. ‘I’m late for my appointment. What a horrible, horrible day!’
And for a moment Boo Hollingrake shrank inside her clothes, as though the rain had got inside them, and the mud were creeping up on her: she might have been treading on dead, suppurating faces.
Then she remembered: ‘It’s been so nice seeing you again—Hurtle. I must tell Mummy.’
At once her brown, and temporarily shrivelled mouth, swelled into a pale hibiscus delicately crinkled. She went down the steps into the street, where the car waited, together with an elderly, respectful, or over-paid chauffeur.
‘Boo Hollingrake,’ said Maman, with the surprising directness she adopted when she wasn’t the one threatened, ‘did you care for her, Hurtle?’
‘I don’t think I knew her.’
‘But of course you did! She was one of Rhoda’s set. She was here at the house several times.’
Maman ‘knew’ those she had met only once, at bridge parties, or between the races. All her acquaintances were ‘friends’: she remembered them by their pedigrees and hats.
‘You must know her! The tall dark handsome girl. Rhoda shared her governess.’
‘I know the one you mean. But I didn’t know her.’
‘If you must split hairs! What a funny old thing you’re becoming. You’re the one nobody knows. Not even his own mother,’ she added in a tone of satisfaction.
What had become of Mumma? He wondered. Though it wasn’t in the contract to see her, her cracked hands would return, sometimes as a source of shame, sometimes of agonizing tenderness; but mostly he didn’t think about her: a laundress was incredible.
‘If there’s no frankness between parents and children,’ Maman said, ‘I consider the parents have failed.’
With Father awa
y, it was the hour she enjoyed most: she enjoyed the failures and the accusations as they sat alone in the octagon; Rhoda grew exhausted early, and would go to bed after dinner.
‘Oh, I know I bore you, Hurtle,’ Maman used to say, ‘but may I enjoy your company?’
She would bribe him with a cigarette. ‘Your father would be furious. But just one—since you’re a man.’
He sat in her now suffocating room smoking the one prescribed cigarette, feeling long-legged, large-knuckled, amateurish: he the professional chain-smoker behind the latrines at school.
Maman sewed—she was proud of her needlework—or talked, or wrote letters—talking—or read, again talking about it.
‘Do you think Thomas Hardy shocking? I don’t. I think the shock is over-rated. He’d like to shock. But I shan’t let him. What do you think?’
He didn’t. He thought he must bore Maman, though in a way she appeared to enjoy his physical presence in the octagon, just as he enjoyed secretly the stuffy luxury of their hours together after dinner.
‘Boo Hollingrake’—she returned to the attack—‘there was an occasion when I thought, Hurtle, you were distinctly interested in her—at a party for Rhoda.’
Maman bit off a thread, for she had taken up the sewing all her friends remembered to admire: Mrs Hollingrake considered it ‘exquisite work’.
Hurtle was watching the smoke from his cigarette. ‘Mmm. Boo. I’m not all that interested in nice girls. They’re too—’ he coughed—‘insipid.’
Maman had discovered a brand of cigarette wrapped in brown paper—Russian—which made him feel so much older.
‘That’s your age,’ she said, striking him down. ‘Boys are often timid of young girls. It’s quite natural.’
She had been looking closely at her sewing: now she raised her head. ‘Won’t you give me one—darling—Hurtle? A cigarette? ’
She watched him strike the match. She held her hand to the cigarette as though they were lighting something as important as a bonfire. The match lit up her face. It was becoming almost transparent with light.
‘Don’t burn my eyelashes off!’ She giggled smokily.
Then she settled down to devouring the cigarette. There wasn’t anybody else in the room, least of all her son.
She began to talk, like people did when drunk or entranced: ‘Actually girls don’t change, I think, from generation to generation. They’re like moths blundering about in search of their fate. You know how moths hit you in the face—soft, velvety things—and are sometimes killed.’ She shuddered drawing on her cigarette. ‘Nor do I think girls grow up into anything very different from what they were. They’re still blundering about after they’ve promised to honour and obey. Oh, I don’t mean they’re dishonest—not all of them—but they’re still quivering and preparing to discover something they haven’t experienced yet.’
She ground out her cigarette too soon. ‘Perhaps that’s why women take French lessons.’ She still had that dimple he could remember seeing for the first time in the same room.
Maman continued sewing. ‘I remember when I was a girl I used to walk down the road—there were pines along the south side—walk, for something to do—in desperation. I had a muff. I used to clench my hands inside the muff. I wore serviceable boots, but dreaded meeting anybody in them. That was how I met your father.’
It was incredibly dreamy: perhaps Maman was drunk; she wasn’t, though.
‘He sat his horse wonderfully. He looked wonderful. Men of that complexion do, in cold weather.’
She threw up her head as though drinking down the image, the icy chill of which made her throat tauten: her breasts became as small as Boo Hollingrake’s.
Then she laughed, and stuck her needle in the stuff she had been embroidering. ‘How did this begin? The Hollingrake girl. You must forgive me, darling. Isn’t it time for bed?’
The house was so warm, so suffocating, smelling of dust in spite of a team of maids, he could have choked on the way to his room. The half darkness through which he was climbing seemed to be developing an inescapable form: of a great padded dome, or quilted egg, or womb, such as he had seen in that da Vinci drawing. He continued dragging round the spiral, always without arriving, while outside the meticulous womb, men were fighting, killing, to live to fuck to live.
He looked round, half expecting to see the womb had been split by his thought; but the darkness held.
In the most distant fuzz of light, the dining-room, he could see and hear Maman locking up the decanters; it wasn’t fair, she used to say, ‘to tempt the girls’.
Outside the room he had outgrown, the night was rocking back and forth. A wind sounded like rain in the glittering trees. On their way across the sky mounds of intestinal cloud began to uncoil, to knot again, to swallow one another up. A fistful of leaves flung in his face as he leant out had the stench of men, of some men at least, who have overexerted themselves, of Pa Duffield, who was his actual father, in an old grey flannel vest, counting the empties as he piled them under the pepper tree.
He might have continued composing Pa for the unexpected pleasure it gave, if the room behind him hadn’t begun to stir the silence growing silky above the dry rain of streaming leaves.
She didn’t wait for him to turn, but said in a congested voice: ‘Tell me what it is that makes you unhappy, Hurtle. I have a right to know.’
She tried to keep it low in pitch, but his eardrums whammed as though she had boxed them.
She had put on a gown she sometimes rested in, and to which she would refer as ‘that old frightful idiosyncracy of mine’: a field of fading rose, its seed-pearl flowerets unravelling from their tarnished stalks. She had done her hair sleeker than he had ever seen it, which made her head look smaller, almost school-girlish. Of course her eyes were older than any girl’s. But not old. They seemed to have been refreshed: he saw them as unset jewels in shallows of clear water.
‘Tell me what it is,’ she ordered him for the second time. ‘Try to forget I’m your mother.’
She was obviously disturbed. Alfreda Courtney tended to avoid matters of importance, unless a ‘cause’, like anti-vivisection or fallen girls; somebody’s personal distress could drag you out of your depth.
Till here she was: taking the plunge.
‘But you’re not my mother.’ He didn’t know which of them he was rescuing.
‘Oh, you needn’t tell me! I didn’t make you! I made Rhoda. I blotched Rhoda. Like everything. Perhaps if I’d carried you inside me, a strong and beautiful child, Harry wouldn’t blame me now. Harry can never forgive me Rhoda.’ It sounded as though she had somehow to dismiss poor old Decent Harry Courtney.
‘I never noticed him blame you.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘How could you? It’s something only I could notice.’
In spite of its expression of bitterness her mouth was more brilliant than he remembered: the lips half open like those of a person half asleep.
She closed her eyes to prevent him looking into them.
‘You’re right,’ she said, frowning, or twitching. ‘You’re not my son. If you had been, I wonder whether you would have loved me more—or less.’
Whiffs of perfume reached him out of his childhood, from dressing-tables, and the clothes in wardrobes: if only he could have smothered in it; but the perfume was drawing him back to the present.
Her fingers, ‘still quivering and preparing to discover’, were plying on the skin of his arm.
‘Give me—’ she said, ‘let me hold your head.’
She didn’t wait for a reply, but took it in her hands, as though it were a fruit or goblet. She began gulping at his mouth: they were devouring with their two mouths a swelling, over-ripened, suddenly sickening—pulp.
He spat her out.
‘You’re drunk, aren’t you?’ He sounded horrible even to himself: himself too recently drunk of the same short sharp slugs from the decanter which might have ‘tempted the girls’.
She turned round, hunching up her
back, and went out coughing, crying, almost vomiting, it seemed, leaving him with the guilt of half remembered dreams: of being received.
He began quickly to undress his hatefully immaculate body, and should afterwards have strapped himself down on his novice’s bed. Instead, propping himself on an elbow, he began to draw with a detached voluptuousness the mouth, the eyes. The lips were hatched with little lines, or slashed with wounds, the brilliantly cut eyeballs sometimes glaring sometimes fainting in their display of light. He only couldn’t convey the perfume of bruised mignonette and brandy: these remained confused in his hand.
He tore all of it quickly up. She was knocking at the door. ‘Hurtle?’ She was so tired, or ill.
She had put on an old flannel nightgown she liked to wear in winter whenever she was feeling indisposed; though now it wasn’t winter.
She explained: ‘I have a neuralgia.’ The water in the half-filled rubber bottle, which she planted on herself for warmth, mumbled to and fro, her hair hanging loose: she had brushed it out for the night.
‘Hurtle,’ she said, ‘your father will be coming home at the end of the month. I want nothing to distress him—in these times.’
The hot-water bottle made a slucking sound as she shifted it from the angle of her neck. Her breasts looked baggy inside the flannel. She was old and yellow, his mother, her face seamed.
‘Darling,’ she said, pushing back the quiff of hair from her boy’s forehead, ‘I know you’ll understand and help me.’ Her voice died away because of her sickness, her veined hand imploring him to recognize her helplessness.
Now it was he who could have vomited: he could have gone down retching howling holding on to the set folds of her old flannel disguise which didn’t; but at least if he was going to destroy her, it wouldn’t be in the way she expected.
The Vivisector Page 19