Patrick White - The Vivisector

It must have been his lucky day, for he began to hear the gravel, the wheels, the door opening without Edith, the stillness of the house disturbed by certain stiff sounds. Of a skirt? A swishing through their house. A sort of singing.

Then she was standing in the doorway: her hat almost reached across it, prickling and sparkling with quills.

‘Why,’ she called, ‘I know you!’ She laughed. ‘You’re Hurtle Duffield.’

She came on. And stooped. And kissed him. She smelled of scent, and wine, and something more. She was staring at him.

She said, like Mumma: ‘Your hair, your complexion’s a lovely colour.’ She added: ‘Enviable.’

She laughed with pleasure looking at herself in the glass. ‘Do you like my hat?’

‘Yes.’

The hat floated as he had seen the boats on water when Pa took him down to the bay.

‘You’re not very talkative,’ she said. ‘You must learn to pay compliments.’

She didn’t seem in need of them, cocking her head at her own reflection in the glass. But she left off, and went up close, and bared her teeth at it.

‘It was such a very boring luncheon,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you’ve come to distract me, Hurtle.’

Every time she said his name it bonged on his eardrums.

She was taking the pins out of her hat, taking off the hat itself, rooting in her hair where it had got squashed, stirring it up with the points of the big-knobbed hatpins.

‘What’s those?’ he asked, wanting to touch the knobs.

‘Those are turquoise.’ She let him hold one of the pins and look at the gold, turquoise-studded shield. ‘Blue’s my favourite colour. It’s so flattering, don’t you think?’

He’d never thought about it except as a colour.

‘They were given me by my husband.’ She spoke the word as though sucking a lolly. ‘For an anniversary.’

When she caught him looking at her she gave a little cough, and her face came down again to cover her thoughts. Some people, particular those in trams, didn’t like you looking at them.

So he said quickly: ‘This room’s an octagon, isn’t it?’

‘Fancy! How did you know?’

‘It’s got eight sides, hasn’t it?’

Although he was distracting her as she had commanded she seemed only vaguely interested. There was that likeness of Rhoda on her desk. There was a second photo he hadn’t noticed, in a silver frame, of a gentleman with thick whiskers beginning to turn grey. He had a large, rather beefy nose.

‘Is that your husband?’ He touched the nose.

‘Yes. It is.’ She sounded very kind and satisfied.

‘He looks strong for a gentleman.’

She gave, not a bit like her usual laugh, more of a hoot. ‘I’ll tell him that! He’ll enjoy your opinion.’ She had put down the hat, and came at him, her dress sounding like a scythe through grass. ‘I could eat you up!’

And seemed to be going to try. Bending down, she drew him against her so close, so tight, he could feel the bones in her stays, and her own soft body above. He was looking right inside the little pocket, between where the skin was shadowy, or yellower.

She went: ‘Mm! Mmmm! Mphh!’

But he wasn’t in the mood for kissing. ‘Your jewellery’s pricking me,’ he said, and got away.

There was a book lying open on the desk, and to distract her again, he read out the title: ‘ The Sor — rows — of — Sat — an. Is it any good?’

‘Oh, light,’ she answered lightly. ‘Very light.’ She closed it up and put it in a drawer. ‘Did that clergyman teach you to read as well?’

‘I read. But I’m at school now, where they learn you to forget what you know.’

‘Oh, but you must have books!’

She shot at the door of Mr Courtney’s study where you were supposed never to have been before.

‘Look! Books! Some of them are almost too valuable to read. But my husband might break the rule for such a studious boy. If he takes a fancy to you. We’ll have to see.’

There could have been a pendulum swinging inside him. He could have been standing a foot above the crimson carpet as the scent of the leather worked on him.

‘What are they about?’ he asked and made it sound calm.

‘Voyages. Explorations. By men whose appetite for suffering wasn’t satisfied at home. They had to come in search of it in Australia.’

By now he could have done without her. He would have liked to be alone with his thoughts. Through the window there was a small tree whose greenish-white papery flowers were crumbling worlds of light and bees.

There was a painting, too, in a space between the bookcases.

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a painting by a Frenchman called Boudin,’ she explained. ‘We brought it back with us from Europe.’

If she hadn’t been there he could have climbed up to feel the smoothness of the paint.

‘It’s worth a lot of money,’ Mrs Courtney said rather dreamily; while he was advancing, dreamier, towards the group of dressy ladies huddled halfway between the flat sea and the bathing-machines.

‘Do you also know French?’ Mrs Courtney, he heard, was using the teasing voice grown-up people sometimes put on for children.

‘I can tell when I see it,’ he answered. ‘Mr Olliphant had the French Fables. ’

‘Je t’adore, enfant ravissant!’ She made her dress swish. ‘You won’t know that. Which is all to the good. Men grow vain far too quickly.’

‘I’m not so stupid I can’t understand the bits that sound like English.’

If it was cheek, she had other things on her mind. Again she was looking at him as though he was something to eat. Or one of the little dogs ladies kept to pet. Then, not even that: something in the distance at which she had to narrow her eyes.

‘Harry,’ she said, ‘would love to teach you to ride — a sturdy boy like you.’

He didn’t have time to work out what she was getting at, because she asked: ‘Is your mother well? They tell me she’s had the baby.’ She didn’t sound all that interested, but she had been brought up to pretend to be.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Septimus. That means “Seventh”.’

She drew her breath in. From the looks of her, she might have begun fondling him again, only Edith came and said: ‘Mrs Duffield is in a state, Madam, wondering where he is.’

The parlourmaid was ready to share this joke with her mistress. He hated Edith.

‘Then he must go at once,’ Mrs Courtney ordered; she had finished her game and was perhaps annoyed her maid had found her wasting her time.

‘There is so much to do,’ she complained to no one in particular as she led the way back into the mauve octagon. ‘I never seem to catch up.’

She sat down at her desk, scuffling the papers, looking for something she must have mislaid. Whether she had found it or not, she took up a stone pen and began dabbling in a crystal well. She didn’t even say good-bye.

Edith led him stiffly through the house. The room through which he had sailed breathless on the outward voyage looked darker and duller in the changed light. Two of the knobs in the parlourmaid’s backbone stood out between her collar and where the roots of her hair began, below the cap: they were the only points of interest on the journey back, to where Mumma was creating in the laundry.

‘Hurtle, I’ll never bring you — never ever again! Running off and leaving the baby! There might have been an accident.’ Always at the end of a washing day she had that boiled look, of suet crust.

He hadn’t any excuses to make; so he went and looked in the linen basket. ‘Doesn’t he look good!’ he said, paying a compliment as Mrs Courtney had advised.

Mumma only mumbled.

Presently Edith returned with the wages. ‘Madam would like to see the baby. But another time. She’s too busy at the moment.’