Patrick White - The Vivisector

Rhoda didn’t answer. She touched a flower on the carpet with her toe. Mrs Courtney held her breath watching Rhoda make the flower real.

The mother broke the spell. ‘Did you do your board exercises? Did you? I know it’s unpleasant, but it’s for your own good. Did Nurse see that you lay on the board?’

Rhoda made some watery sounds. Her head trembled on her frail neck.

‘You see,’ Mrs Courtney told the air, ‘it’s time we engaged the governess.’

Again she pulled the bell. Edith came, quicker and thinner.

‘Send Nurse,’ the mistress commanded.

Rhoda started a high crying, exposing through her stretched mouth her rather small, transparent teeth.

‘I’m not the one to blame, darling,’ her mother explained. ‘We must only carry out what Dr Marshall ordered. Oh, dear! Darling! Can you have got it into your head Mummy doesn’t love you! My darling darling Rhoda!’

Mrs Courtney herself had begun to whimper like a little child, her lovely face crumpling into an old rag. She looked as though she was about to creep on all fours, to make herself long and thin like some animal children were tormenting.

It was then that Rhoda spat. It gummed itself to her mother’s face. One end of the spit was swinging.

He would have liked to do something for both of them, but only his mind worked: his limbs were stuck, his heart was pumping.

Nurse came, a stout woman, with a white belt dividing her figure in two. She immediately began mewing for her little girl. The belt had a butterfly for a buckle.

‘Come away, Rhoda!’ mewed the nurse. ‘A rest is what you need. I’ll give you a liquorice-all-sorts, shall I?’

‘The cat! How can you allow the cat?’ Mrs Courtney howled.

‘But she loves it!’ The nurse purpled up.

When Rhoda and the nurse had gone, and Mrs Courtney had wiped her face with her handkerchief, she said: ‘So distressing. What will you think of us? We’re not at all like this, you know.’

She went to her desk, and started rummaging in a little bag made of gold chain. ‘Here!’ she said. ‘I want you to take this, Hurtle, and share it with your brothers and sisters. And remember that nobody is good all the time, however hard they try to be.’

He got such a surprise he almost dropped the sovereign he found she had put in his hand.

‘As if I were an animal!’ She had begun to whimper again. ‘But no animal suffers worse than a human being.’ She blew her nose on the now soggy handkerchief.

Because she was in such a state, sighing, and rumpling the papers on her desk, and looking at her face in the glass, he didn’t think Mrs Courtney would mind if he slipped away. Nor did she. She didn’t seem to notice it.

He hurried back through the house, silent except for the Chinese vases rocking on their black stands, and twittering in the chandelier.

Mumma was ropeable. Some wet sheets she was trying to peg to the line were cracking like whips. First they clung to each other, or Mumma, then they sailed open in the wind.

While she fought, she complained: ‘Arr now, Hurtle, didn’t I tell you to play around the yard? I been all around — round to the stables — and out in front.’ A wet sheet hit her in the face. ‘Where did you get to, you naughty boy?’

‘I went exploring.’ To quieten her, he began helping her nicely with the sheets.

He didn’t think he would mention the sovereign or anything of what had happened.

That night Pa asked, as he pushed the stew around his plate: ‘What sort of a day did you have at the famous Courtneys’?’

‘The same,’ she answered.

She was in low spirits, it seemed. The stew looked grey because probably she had been too tired or too hurried to brown it; while you were still full of the jangle of crystal music and the warm-chocolate scent of Mrs Courtney’s room.

When they decided he should go to school, and he was admitted to the Infants, all his hopes appeared to close.

‘But I’m not an infant!’

‘Poor kid! You can’t help laughing,’ said Mrs Burt over the palings.

At least his parents were too upset to join in their neighbour’s amusement, and Lena too important from several years’ experience. Though it wasn’t far, Pa was driving them to school in the cart, making an occasion of it. The lurching over ruts before they reached the metal threw the three of them against one another.

‘Are you frightened?’ Lena could have been hoping for it.

‘No,’ he said, although he was.

A wind from the right quarter carried the smell of the nearby zoo. He remembered how the keeper had allowed him to ride on the elephant’s head; he remembered the lion with the stream of yellow diarrhoea.

‘I bet you are!’ Lena harped.

He pinched a hold of her skinny arm, so that she squealed unaccountably loud.

‘Hold yer tongue, Lene,’ said Pa, who was in his usual serious mood.

‘But he’s afraid and won’t admit it! He’s pinching me!’

‘Hurtle ain’t afraid. He’s a man,’ said Pa.

It made Hurtle more afraid, not so much of a lot of school-kids he didn’t know, and anyway he was stronger than most: he was afraid of some shapelessness smelling of lions and elephants. Lena sat snivelling and blinking as if herself was going to be the target; whereas you knew that everything large enough, frightening enough, like death for instance, was being saved up for you.

‘Like to hold the reins, son?’

‘No.’

His hands might have trembled. He wondered what would happen if he pissed his pants. And did let go one little spurt. At once his fear took on a shape: if he had had a pencil in his hand he would have drawn Death trumpeting.

He felt better after that. Sometimes he looked at people to see whether they had guessed his more secret thoughts. But Lena was just a thin thing, a girl, while Pa continued driving the cart as though Death had never appeared, trampling alongside of them.

Poor Pa, when he let them down at the school, he sat for a moment with the whip drooping from his hand. Pa never kissed in saying goodbye, but the lines grew deeper, blacker round his mouth. Today you would have liked to touch them. You could often burst with love, but had never found the proper occasion.

The moment they arrived at school Lena became ever so important. She began giggling with some girls of her own age, who looked at the brother distantly, and did not propose to make his acquaintance. Nor was Lena prepared to risk too much on her relationship with Hurtle. She said very bossily: ‘I’ll take you to Miss Adams, then I must go with my own class.’ He had never heard her accent sound so thin and prim.

The Infants were taught in the basement of the school. The light, which was a yellow-green, floated down through barred windows just above ground level. The stone walls were cold to touch. Miss Adams was such a thin woman he began to wonder whether their Lena would become a teacher. He could see her in the same smocked blouse, with the same cold as Miss Adams had.

Now Lena simply handed over her brother, and shook her hair, and hurried away.

‘Hurtle Duffield,’ Miss Adams said. ‘That’s a comical name.’

Of course. He was used to it by now. He even said: ‘It rhymes with turtle.’

The kids who were standing near them laughed.

‘I see you have a sense of humour,’ said Miss Adams. ‘I hope you will keep it till recess, please, and not make jokes in class.’

She was too busy with her cold and commencement of school. She gave him and another boy copybooks to distribute: one where each child would sit.

All the while other kids kept trooping down. He saw a fair few from Cox Street, whom he knew because they had always been there. It made him sick looking at the other children, except a girl with fair, flossy fringe. There was a boy called Ossie Flood said he was going to bring one or two glassies for Hurt. You didn’t want his old marbles, but Ossie seemed to want to hang on.