Patrick White - The Vivisector

Round about five the mare came dawdling down Cox Street. Unaccompanied, reins trailing, she was able to roam from side to side, pulling at the weeds and blades of pale grass which showed through the mud at the edges, or leaves over a garden fence. There was a fair few empties in the cart, though not what you would call a load, so that they slid and clashed, at times almost chimed. The mare knew her way, and was taking it easy, till a gatepost braked one of the wheels as she turned in at her home yard, and gave her a scare.

Some of the kids got windy seeing the pink insides of her nostrils as she threw her head up: to hear her whinge as though someone had jabbed her with a knee in her belly.

Mumma ran out. She didn’t appear frightened. Perhaps she had already been through the worst. The rain had plastered her hair, and was showing up her body. It made her look younger. Serious, though. She had to remain active: too much depended on her. She grabbed Bonnie by the wet mane, then the head-stall. At once the beast stopped prancing on her heavy legs, and tossing her head. She seemed relieved to find her freedom ended.

‘’Ere! Youse! Hurtle! Lena!’ Mrs Duffield strained her voice, trying to make it sound like a man’s, because that way she would be obeyed.

They came scuttling. They were all three unbuckling. The familiar sound comforted: of cold chains swinging and clinking.

He was surprised to find how quick and skilful he was with the stiff buckles and rain-sodden leather. He would have loved to linger over jobs he usually avoided.

While Lena began a girl’s thin moan: ‘What’s happened to Pa?’

It was lucky Mrs Duffield didn’t have to answer. Mrs Burt stuck her head over the palings wearing a bag and her husband’s hat. ‘’E’s up at the corner, Lene, dear — Mrs Duffield — with three or four other gentlemen. I’d say ’e’ll be back as soon as they put ’im out.’ Mrs Burt might have been going to say ‘throw’.

Usually the neighbour was on for a laugh at human nature. But this evening her big face was solemn. She was heavy with rain and sympathy. She knew too much.

‘Leave the bottles for yer father,’ Mumma decided. ‘Pa’ull unload the bottles.’

Mrs Burt might have been tittering, only then, the other side of the palings, or it could have been the sound of mild rain on iron.

Jim Duffield who never touched a drop came home after most of them had put themselves to bed. She had kept his tea, if not hot, not cold neither. He wasn’t real shickered, she was glad to see. Though bad enough. He was black-wet, and muddy up the legs, soles squelching.

‘Take yer boots off, Jim.’ She tried to make it sound like an order.

With no experience of drunkenness she didn’t know what line to take.

He sat down in his wet old boots and ate a little of the potato. Very dainty. Looking at it along his nose.

Then she asked: ‘D’you think you’ve got enough, dear? There wasn’t that much meat, and it seems to’uv melted on the bones.’ She had never been good at soft voices, but tried.

He stopped eating. He felt his pockets, and began slowly dragging out the money he had shoved into them. He seemed full of it: the Courtneys’ money. It fell, or fluttered, on to the table. It lay singly, buckled up, or in wads. Some of it landed in the plateful of cold stew.

It was so quiet after the rain they might have dropped to you looking at them from behind the lace in the outer kitchen.

Pa was picking one of the notes out of the gravy. He began wiping the grease off. With one finger. Looking at the finger, at the note. Like a person without their spectacles.

‘Plenty of money!’ He cocked his head at it. ‘Couldn’t persuade enough of ’em to drink it up. There was one or two paralytics, of course. An’ Josh Porter an’ Horrie Jackson. You know about Josh and Horrie?’

‘Yes.’

He knew she knew, but that was beside the point.

‘Josh and Horrie are “in” more often than they’re “out”.’ He meant to draw it out slow. ‘Josh, they say, did in old Mrs McCarthy. But they’ll never prove it — so they say.’

She stood looking down at the money.

He stirred it up. ‘No money’s too black to buy grog for lags.’

He began hitting at the money, which made some of it fly up. She was forced to chase after it, clapping with her hands at the mould-coloured butterflies, herself sometimes drunkenly smiling, as she fell on her knees to grab at the money; when she should have stood, straight and solid, wife and mother.

‘But we did it for the best!’ She repeated a lesson they must have taught her in Mrs Courtney’s pretty room.

‘We sold ’im like a horse!’ Although Pa included himself in the deal, she began to receive the blows with which he was punishing the money.

He was hitting out at her, not punching, didn’t seem able to close his fists, but thwack thwack with straight arms. As she knelt on the floor they thumped against her neck, her head; while she raked in the fallen money, smiling with white lips, like a guilty girl who has to hide a lie, or a belly.

‘We did it for love!’ Her blubbering lips were having difficulty with the words.

‘Or money!’ He belted it out.

That finished them both: instead of the money, they began catching at each other, sobbing, rummaging in each other’s clothes and hair, as if they were only now finding out about each other.

The bedstead might have disjointed itself, to which they had staggered out, but together.

When the brass had come to a standstill, Mumma was left dry-sighing. ‘Good job the children was asleep.’

Pa didn’t answer.

Mumma said: ‘Better shut yer mouth, Jim. Otherwise you might wake up and find a nasty taste.’

She came out after that, back into the kitchen, herself and her other half: her belly. Her feet slopping. Her hair looked undone of itself. She was so tired she could scarcely have clapped her hands at a rat.

There was the money, though. The crumpled stuff she began smoothing out. Some of it had been damaged, but Mumma was a great one for mending things with glue.

All the money she put in a rusty tin she had kept for some future purpose. The hard wads of unseparated notes thudded into the old tin. Then she shoved it on a high shelf, where nothing could get at it, except only fire or a thunderbolt.

The room had never seemed so full of children, some of them still playing, others fallen in a heap of sleep. Somebody crunched across the pegs one of them had scattered. Pa half spoke the sum he was doing with a pencil, on a piece of crumpled paper, on his knee; while Mumma kept time with her head as she ironed other people’s washed clothes, smoothing, sometimes stamping with the iron. The wedding ring was broad and brassy on Mumma’s pudding-coloured finger. As she tried out a fresh iron, holding it some way off her cheek, she could have loved what she mistrusted.

This was his family. He should have loved them. He did of course: riding with Pa on the cartload of slippery bottles; Mumma’s smell of warm ironing; the exasperating hands of younger, sticky children; in bed with Will; Lena giving him a suck of a bull’s-eye, hot and wet from her own mouth. All this was family, a terrible muddle, which he loved, but should have loved better. Perhaps he was ‘too proud’, as Beetle Boothroyd wrote in one of those notes. Didn’t love himself, though. No. If he loved something he had inside him, that was different.

He wasn’t going to cry, in spite of nearly pissing himself with fright at times. Courtneys were sending for him in the morning. He would show that Edith he hadn’t been bought. But how would he wake up the morning after, looking at what sort of empty wall?

So he was frightened.

Mumma stamped with the iron. ‘Nuisances of frilly things! I’d never ever go in for frills, not if I was the nobbiest of nobs.’