Patrick White - The Vivisector

Mumma didn’t answer. She put the money in her old purse, which she did up in the bundle with some slices of a pudding May had allowed for the kids. Then they picked up their things and went.

That holidays he felt even farther from Lena and the little ones. Except Will, who would burrow into his back, in their sleep in the bed they shared in the harness room. Will was so soft and hopeless you couldn’t help feel he was your brother. Not that you were soft. Mrs Sullivan came and complained: That boy that Hurt has bashed our Tommy we didn’t need the stitches but nearly did. Pa got out the strap, but put it away after Mrs Sullivan left, he said she had an Irish grudge.

Poor Pa. Wish you could have felt closer to him.

Mumma kept her word about Courtneys’.

‘Aren’t I gunner go down there before the holidays end?’ Mumma only made sounds, and went on with what she was doing.

‘But didn’t they ask for me?’ he always asked. ‘Didn’t Mr Courtney ask yet?’

Mumma looked down her cheekbones at the ironing or the stove.

So he would climb up into the pepper tree where roosting fowls had whitened the branches. He would sit rubbing off the crust, thinking. Some way some something to show Courtneys what they had forgotten. If he could show what he knew and felt. Their bloody old French painting. Sometimes he looked at his pale thing to help pass the holidays he held up the skin and it shrivelled back he didn’t know what he groaned as the morning stretched out blue as turquoise smelling of chaff and fowl shit.

The term was worse, though. He could never concentrate for looking out of the window. Beetle Boothroyd sent a note. But it was not that which put Mumma against him. She had already turned. She would kiss him, but her breath had tears in it, waiting to break out.

What had he done, then? She couldn’t know he loved Mrs Courtney. Because he didn’t. He was in love with how she looked. Each of her dresses was more than a dress: a moment of light and beauty not yet to be explained. He loved her big, silent house, in which his thoughts might grow into the shapes they chose. Nobody, not his family, not Mrs Courtney, only faintly himself, knew he had inside him his own chandelier. This was what made you at times jangle and want to explode into smithereens.

It wasn’t till next holidays, it was a Courtney Monday, Mumma began combing him.

‘They’ve asked for you,’ she said, ‘so I’ve got to take you, or I wouldn’t.’

He made himself look stupid and unmoved.

‘Remember,’ she said, ‘never draw on the walls. If you spoil the Courtney’s walls like you done the ones at home, I won’t know how to take their money.’ Pa had said Mumma was too honest.

Now you didn’t answer because your heart was being sucked in and out too fast. All this combing and smoothing: was it to do with what Pa and Mumma had been talking about?

That night he had gone across the yard after everyone was put to bed, after Pa had turned out the gas in the kitchen. He had gone across to snitch a slice of bread, a smear of dripping.

Pa and Mumma were in their room, where Septimus also slept.

This was where Pa accused her of being honest, and Mumma shouted back: ‘What are you, Jim, if not honest? That’s what I married yer for. Nothun else that I can think of.’

Then she raised her voice higher still, told him not to shove her. She was crying as they got into the jingling bed. You could imagine their rough skins together.

The house was full of sleeping children. Only the bed with Mumma and Pa continued creaking, sniffling, sighing.

The dripping was the lovely brown kind.

Mumma said: ‘There’s rats again, Jim, I swear. I seen the droppings on the scullery shelf.’

Pa coughed once above the jingle jingle of the loose brass. He let Mumma do the talking.

On she went. ‘Jim? DidnItellyer? There’s rats? We oughter lay the baits. Eh? But nothun is ever. Without I do it. With me own hand.’

It was always safer to cut and run before the bedstead quietened down, but now the voices in the next room wouldn’t let you go.

The bed gave one last ring, like a bicycle almost on top of you. Pa sighing. He had had a hard day’s work.

‘Arr dear,’ Mumma complained, ‘when it comes to pleasure, you men are all the same — the decent ones, or the ones that knock yer teeth in.’

Pa was coughing up some phlegm. ‘Never got nothing out of it yerself?’ Unusual for Pa. ‘Did yer? Now did yer?’

‘I got seven kiddies — that the father forgets when it suits ’im to.’

You could hear the toenails scraping on the sheet.

‘Pity the children — what they’re born to if they’re out of luck! That little girl of Mrs Courtney’s with the funny back, at least she’ll never suffer this part.’

Pa was yawning. He farted once.

‘You know, Jim, I pray — every night — for a better life — for ours.’

There was a rancid bit in the dripping. What if it was true what Mumma said? She had seen the droppings on the shelf.

‘All the children.” Mumma sounded wide awake. ‘Hurtle in particular.’

Pa grunted.

‘Hurtle’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘’S ’air’s a lovely bright.’

‘The boy’s a boy.’

‘A boy can be beautiful too. To anyone with eyes. Mrs Courtney’s taken with Hurtle. Says ’e’s adorable. And clever. Could be some sort of genius. I could’uv told ’er that if I ’adn’t been the mother. Mr Courtney will want to see ’im. You should see Mr Courtney, Jim. Every one of ’is suits made to measure in London — so the girls was telling. Boots too. ’As ’is own last — in the shop — in London.’

Pa snoring.

In the end it wasn’t so interesting: you got what Mrs Courtney would have called ‘bored’, and the dripping lying a bit bilious.

Then Mumma said, very distinct: ‘I would give away any of my children, provided the opportunities were there. Blood is all very well. Money counts. I would give — I would give Hurtle.’

Pa’s snore came roaring back up his throat. ‘Give away yer children?’

Mumma laughed a rattling sort of laugh. ‘Plenty more where they come from.’

‘That’s all very well for the mother. It’s the father they blame. What’ud they say? Can’t support ’is own kids!’

‘The father!’

‘Wouldn’t be ethical, anyway.’

‘Ethical’s a parson’s word.’

‘What if the boy could ’ear ’is mum and dad entertainin’ such an idea!’

Got out after that. Sand between your toes across the yard. The little, sharp, scratchy pebbles. Will was flopping around in the bed like a paralysed fowl. White eyelids. Glad of your brother to stop the shivers. Mothers and fathers, whoever they were, really didn’t matter: it was between you and Death or something.

And now Mumma was combing out the dandruff because Courtneys had asked for him. Well, he would swallow down what he had overheard. His bumping heart would wait and accept whatever was offered or decided.

After they had passed Taylor Square, after they had got far enough on, Mumma walked with scarcely a word. Because of their important business they had left Sep with Mrs Burt, who had her new baby, and would give theirs a suck. Mumma’s black old skirt was picking up the dust very easy: the hem had become unstitched. He tried to imagine her in Mrs Courtney’s hat with the quills, but the tails of her hair hung down behind, where the comb couldn’t hold them up. Her skin was yellow today.

She took his hand in her cracked hand. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘What are you looking at?’

He began walking as he would, he felt, in a London suit, holding hands with Mrs Courtney, and it seemed as though the maid they passed polishing a doctor’s plate was already looking different at him.