Patrick White - The Vivisector

During the afternoon he snivelled a bit in sympathy, but broke off on remembering what he thought of her.

Something was blowing up: the big clouds were piling up like dirty washing. It was going to be a wicked evening. Mrs Burt called over the fence: a gentleman driving through Newtown had seen a roof carried away. Because Mumma was still at work, and Pa out with the cart, collecting, it made the kids feel important, if frightened. Only he didn’t feel frightened: he wrote his name on the wall of the front room.

Pa came in at last, as the clouds, bulging worse, began to purple. There were green, bruised colours in the sky, then veins of white lightning. You pressed your mouth against the windows, first one, then another, drinking in the storm.

Some of them began to cry because Mumma was lost in it. And the house smelled cold. It smelled of cold ash. And dark. Somebody should have lit the gas. Pa wouldn’t: he used to say it was the woman’s job. Lena didn’t, because she felt miserable: she had a cold and a gumboil. And you wouldn’t for watching the storm, from purple, to green, then the white veins like in yellow skin. Once or twice, in a white flash, the roofs of Cox Street seemed to billow up. Now he knew what Mumma felt with a red baby screwing its way out of her guts.

She came in through a burst of thunder, protecting Sep, whose head was bouncing against her shoulder. Mr Courtney — so he was there, he hadn’t gone to the country — had ordered Rowley to harness the horses and drive her home. She was wet, even so.

‘Has no one even lit the bally gas?’ Mumma shrieked.

The darkness was whirling with heavy shapes.

‘Jim? Lena?’

Pa’s hand let the gas flare blue, before it grew white and steady in the mantle.

They got the stove going. It roared too fierce, till Mumma damped it down.

‘Well, I’d like to know!’ she complained. ‘And where is Hurtle?’

Lena was sour because she had been told to change the nappy. ‘In the shed — droring,’ she said.

‘No, I’m not. I’m here.’

‘Well, if you’re here,’ Mumma said, ‘you’re the most unreliable of all.’

She was that unjust, but had to make a quick stew: of a little scrag, and plenty of potato; the mildew had got into the carrot.

As she scuffled in the pan she began a dry snivelling, and this was worse than her anger.

Pa asked: ‘What’s got inter yer, Bessie?’

‘Lord knows how I’ll dry the wash down there.’

At one point she had a proper cry, but settled down after tea to Mrs Ebsworth’s ironing. The storm had passed. It was quiet night, except for claws of rain scratching from time to time at the roof. Although you went back to the kitchen after the light was out, to hear what Courtneys had really said, Mumma and Pa weren’t talking tonight. There was only a short, wordless jingling of the bed.

The sky was a watery white by morning. It wasn’t raining, but it hadn’t stopped, and Mumma, mumbling as if she had a mouthful of pegs, said she wasn’t going down there: nothing to iron, because nothing dry.

‘Lucky school hasn’t commenced.’ She used the word ‘commenced’ instead of ‘begun’ because of her respect for education. ‘Yer boots wouldn’t stand the weather. Now stay inside, all of yer. I don’t want any chesty children.’

After the dishes were washed, and Florrie and Winnie helped on the dunny, Mumma herself went across the yard. Under the pepper tree Pa was harnessing the mare. He was wearing a bag across his shoulders fastened in front with a new nail. The water was dripping from the brim of his hat. The pepper tree dripped.

For some reason Mumma wanted Pa inside the harness room.

‘Where are you going, Hurt?’ bossy Lena had to call.

‘I forgot me pencil. I gotter get me pencil.’

He ran across the yard. Hens didn’t seem to mind rain once it got under their feathers. As he charged amongst them, two or three of their sodden bundles crouched low, combs flopping, prepared to be trod.

He got inside the dark stable. Hay and manure made it warm, safe, except the smell of ammonia shot up his nostrils; the shock of it started him shivering.

Through the door into the harness room he could see Mumma already having something out with Pa.

‘ What about Hurtle?’ Pa didn’t want to know.

‘What we discussed.’

Mumma was making the bed he shared with Will, or at least she was pulling up the horse-rug they used as a cover.

Pa was making out he didn’t understand.

‘You know! Oh, you know all right!’ Mumma was acting as rough as she could, drawing down her mouth and hawking up the words so that she was no longer Mumma, but one of the women outside a public house. ‘About Hurtle’s future. Oh, you know all right!’

She left off shouting and began staring at the wall. It was the wall where you had drawn the chandelier. You had never been able to rub it out, to make room for other things; it was still there, though grubbier. You had drawn over it what Mumma called ‘the Mad Eye’. And now you were staring at each other, eye to eye, through the stable door, only Mumma couldn’t see; she was looking frightened and again like Mumma.

Pa was walking up and down, a scrawny cock, in the wet old sack nailed to his chest. ‘I dunno, Bessie! I dunno what’s got inter yer!’ he stuttered back.

Then Mumma fished inside her front, and brought out a piece of paper. ‘Mr Courtney give me a cheque for five hundred pound.’

Again she hawked the words up rough, so that the shock wouldn’t be too much to bear. If it had been sovereigns she might have chucked them on the floor, and they could have scrambled for them, testing the coins with their teeth, feeling the splinters in their knees.

But here she had only the damp piece of paper to dangle under Pa’s nose.

‘You’re a bloody cow! A bloody mother!’ He might have been going to call her worse, because his usually hollow chest was filled, but he must have remembered he was the father.

‘But what are they gunner say?’ He couldn’t stop trembling; he couldn’t stop looking at the cheque: it might have been a forgery.

He hollered: ‘No!’ once — before putting the cheque in his pocket, an inside pocket.

Pa said: ‘Some of you women never stop to think a man’s responsible for his children.’

Then Mumma let fly, enough to blast the harness-room walls: ‘Oh, the father! The father’s right enough — to get on top — flick flick — then when ’e’s ironed you out, off ’e gets, and there isn’t no more to it, till the congratulations are ’anded out. The father! Does the father know what it is to be a walkin’ pumpkin most of every year? Was ’e ever bloodied, except when ’e cuts ’imself with the razor? Not Dad! Who wipes their little bottoms? Who wipes away the snot? And bears with the bellyaches? I reckon it’s the mother who has the right to decide what is right an’ reasonable for ’er children. That is why I decided what is right for Hurt.’

His name had never sounded so extraordinary as it glugged up through her loose shammy-leather throat.

‘Jim?’

Because Pa had had enough, he was going out.

‘Eh, Jim?’

Pa, who had always been a thin man, seemed to have grown thinner; while Mumma stayed big and flabby even when there wasn’t a baby in her.

‘Only reasonable,’ she called to his back, rounding out the word. ‘Jim? I think I copped another one already.’ Then as Pa unchained the wheel of his cart: ‘I know I ’ave!’

Jim went off snivelling mumbling about his business, leading Bonnie; the rain had turned the brown mare practically black.

Mumma lowered her head against the rain, or the eyes of children burrowing in, as she went back across the yard.