Patrick White - The Vivisector

Mumma brightened, though one corner of her mouth was twitching. ‘Are you hungry, love? You’ll feel better for a bite of something.’

He ought to love poor Mumma for looking at him like that. He did, too: nothing else was real. There was nothing wrong in imagining a thing or two about himself and Courtneys.

Mumma saw he was having trouble with his boot. ‘If your sole’s coming off, Hurtle, slide your foot along the carpet when you go inside, then nobody’ll notice.’

Her hand tightened as they began to clatter down the steep asphalt towards the ‘Tradesmen’s Entrance’. Once or twice his sole flapped.

Half the morning he spent in the yard chucking stones at nothing.

‘What are you — you haven’t done anything?’ she called, looking out from the laundry at the bush house where Mr Thompson grew the tuberous begonias.

‘Edith will fetch you,’ she came again to the doorway to call, the drops falling from her hands which the water had pleated.

His throat swelled. It was the strong, steamy smell of pampered plants and tan-bark.

But Edith didn’t show up: it was Mr Courtney himself who came walking alongside the wall, smoking a square-looking cigar. He blew out the smoke firmly but gently. The rest of him fitted the head and shoulders you had already seen in the photograph. He was a large man.

They were looking at each other. Without giving anything away. The beard was as well kept as everything else in the garden and house. You wondered how it would have felt. All along the brick wall the geranium flowers were blazing up.

‘Hurtle Duffield!’ Mr Courtney said, and it was like you heard your own name for the first time: it sounded so important.

While Mr Courtney continued blowing smoke, and smiling, he was in search of more to say. His cuff-links, with their tangle of initials, didn’t help him. His ears had large, cushiony lobes, from one of which he hadn’t wiped the shaving soap.

‘My wife tells me you’re interested in books and things.’ He put the cigar back in his mouth as though he might have said too much.

You would have liked to show you weren’t just a boy, and stupid. But the silence stretched and stretched. There was an insect brown as a stick clinging to a geranium leaf. You could only stare at the insect, and wish you had something to offer. If you could at least have come to life: climbed up by Mr Courtney’s trouser leg, grappling his hairy suit, pummelling, punching, not exactly kissing, but plunging your face into the mass of frizzy beard.

Instead, you were slowly sweating, as still and mindless as the stick insect.

Again Mr Courtney took the cigar out of his mouth, and put his other hand, firm but fleshy, in the middle of your back. ‘Perhaps you could do with a piddle,’ he suggested, ‘before we go inside. You can pop round behind the bush house.’

It was a relief to slip away for a minute or two, not that you had much to get rid of, but as you shook off the last drops on the heap of rotting grass clippings, the morning loosened.

When you went back Mr Courtney told: ‘Round about your age I remember going on a long drive. In the country. At night. With my father and Archdeacon Rutherford.’ He broke up his sentence with short puffs at the cigar, his lips glossy and contented.

It was strange, though comforting, to hear Mr Courtney’s smoky voice mention his father’s friend by name, as though taking it for granted that you too had known Archdeacon Rutherford.

‘I would have given anything to stop the buggy. But didn’t know how. In front of the archdeacon. He was a very thin old man. I used to picture his guts resting flat against his backbone.’

The smoke from the cigar made the remembered scene look more dreamlike.

‘I could have burst,’ Mr Courtney said, ‘I wanted so badly to pump ship.’

You sniggered a bit to show you sympathized. But he didn’t seem to care. He was looking inward at himself trying not to burst in the buggy at night. You had never seen an archdeacon, but you could imagine the old man’s cold-looking hands.

As they came round the corner of the house, away from that part of it where maids’ voices were clanging, the lawn stretched plunging in front of them, with the clump of tall palms, pigeons rising blue as cigar smoke, and Mrs. Courtney coming towards them holding a sunshade over her head.

They seemed to have surprised her.

‘What have you two been up to?’ she asked laughing.

‘Having a talk,’ Mr Courtney said, then drew hard on his cigar.

The green lining of Mrs Courtney’s sunshade flooded her skin with leafy light. You could have gone on staring up at her. From beneath sunshade her blue eyes were less evident, although you felt they were poking around.

Suddenly she altered the angle of the sunshade, and started addressing, not her husband, but her morning caller Hurtle Duffield. ‘I can only apologize for the roses,’ she said with some force. ‘The whole lot should be pulled out. They’re miserable— miserable. If only I had time to see to everything. But I haven’t.’

As a visitor, you felt you ought to ask: ‘Doesn’t Mr Thompson? ’

‘Oh, Thompson! He has his own ideas.’

Then Mrs Courtney, as though she had done her duty, and to do more would have been boring for everybody, took her husband by the arm, inclining towards him from out of the sunshade. The tips of her teeth showed transparent. Although there was someone else present, it didn’t prevent her giving her husband a deep look. Her friend the boy was too young to need excluding.

At last it seemed perfectly natural to grab Mr Courtney’s other sleeve, and he didn’t try to prevent it. The sleeve you were hanging on by was very dry, coarse, and shaggy, but new and rich, and as you walked, or occasionally hopped, or kicked out at the terra-cotta tiles edging a flower bed, till you remembered the loose sole, the Courtneys were strolling in step with each other, discussing some flat, unimportant matter. The three of them together were like a family.

So they went into the house, into the room with the books which was referred to as ‘the Study’. Edith, all lowered eyelids and knowing smiles, brought a silver tray with morning tea and extra-dainty, oozing scones.

As soon as you had licked the last of the butter off your fingers Mr Courtney got down to business.

‘Let’s see how he can read.’

He was anxious to confirm what he had been told about the laundress’ boy. His clean, rather hairy hands were grasping for a book. Sitting upright, waiting to perform, you might have been wearing the paper frill you had seen round the monkey’s neck.

Mr Courtney dragged out the book he had been looking for; he opened it and said: ‘Now, Hurtle!’

The mottled pages of the damp old book made you feel something like religious. The Courtneys, waiting, looked religious too: they could have been expecting to hear something they had never heard before, as you lowered your head and read from where your eyes picked up the print.

This afternoon a little hawk came aboard and one of the men caught it, found it belonged to somebody on board the Scarborough who had let it fly away for its dirtiness, the man that caught it let it fly away again, and the poor little thing, in endeavouring to reach the Alexander, it fell in the water, I suppose it was drowned. .

There was an interruption from Mrs Courtney, who had begun to gasp and make sucking noises with her tongue. ‘Really, Harry,’ she said very loud, ‘what a piece to try him out on!’

‘That’s where the book opened, Birdie — by pure accident.’ Mr Courtney answered; the pet name seemed to make things worse.

She sat looking down at her locked hands, then up at the ceiling, the way Mumma did when trying not to cough in church.