Patrick White - The Vivisector

It could only be Miss Gibbons, because she was wearing the green bow. She had a smile which flickered on and off, thin and trembling.

‘It’s old brains!’ Rhoda bawled.

‘Very nourishing, too, Rhoda,’ Miss Gibbons said with a conviction that didn’t convince.

In fact she was in such a twangle she started something in himself. Rhoda was at least boiling so hard she didn’t notice.

The governess called for grace: ‘… for what we are about to receive. .’ She got through it quite professionally, no doubt because she was the daughter of a clergyman.

When they looked up there was a map in water spread across the tablecloth. Rhoda must have unscrewed the cap from the hot-dish.

‘Why do you do it?’ Miss Gibbons was panting. ‘What have you got against me?’

Rhoda looked down at her plate.

You could hear Miss Gibbons palpitating.

Hurtle loved her, and she wouldn’t know. She couldn’t know he was going to draw her sooner or later. He loved the hair at the nape of her neck: it was so faint it was only a dark smudge on her skin.

Rhoda said the brains would stick in her throat. ‘You’ve got to feed my animals first. Nursie always fed the animals.’

Miss Gibbons hung her head over her clasped hands. Though grace was over she continued to behave as though she was praying.

‘Go on! Like I told you!’

Then Miss Gibbons got up and offered a spoonful of brain to each of the toy animals arranged in the compartments of the nursery overmantel.

Rhoda watched to see whether any of her toys would be overlooked: in concentration her head drooped, her eyes looked drowsy.

‘Go on!’ she said. ‘The camel! You missed out the camel on the other side.’

Hurtle thought Miss Gibbons was a fool to put up with any of it. On the whole he despised, he didn’t love, the tall young woman. Then again he pitied her. He pitied himself at the great white nursery table opposite the strawberry-coloured Rhoda. He remembered Mumma, pale as brains from the strain of laundering the nursery cloth. He bit into the inner tenderness of his lips.

‘What is it, Hurtle?’ Miss Gibbons roused herself to ask.

That evening at dusk a wind from the south threatened the suffocating warmth from the fire they kept stoked behind the nursery fender. The wind blowing through the grander rooms drove the cigar smoke ahead of it and thinned out Mrs Courtney’s perfume. Edith and Lizzie, scuttling to fasten windows and doors, looked as though they only half believed they would prevent whatever they were expected to. As the long wads of ink-blotted cloud passed overhead, unravelled, then matted thicker than ever, the garden, though stationary, was slowly being poured into fresh, coldly boiling forms. It was not yet raining, but the wind in the leaves made them look a liquid black.

Rhoda said with the moist breathlessness he had begun to recognize as hers: ‘Let’s go into the garden. I’m not supposed to. Because of the damp.’ In her feverish revolt she was almost jerking the doorknob off.

He followed her out. The wind hit them. He filled his lungs, excited by his own expanding body, his almost power over flying cloud.

Rhoda, on the other hand, he saw, was gasping. She was advancing sideways. Her hair was being lifted in little pink, steamy streamers. The birthmark looked porous on her asparagus-coloured neck.

‘This is my garden,’ she shouted.

She sounded so shrill and electric he realized she too had some important part in what was happening: in tortured trees and ink-stained cloud.

At the same time, what Pa called ‘common sense’ made him shout back: ‘It isn’t! It can’t be yours! It’s the Courtneys’ garden, isn’t it?’

It sounded as though Mr and Mrs Courtney were nothing to do with either of them.

‘No.’ She grabbed his hand; the wind was almost blowing her away. ‘They don’t know half of it. They’re never here.’

Rhoda led him deeper into the darkening garden. There were stone steps, the moss so thick in places his feet felt they were trampling flesh. It disgusted him, but she couldn’t see it. She was interested only in what she had to show him. Each time she spoke he could feel her moist little fingers twitching on his hand.

‘Those are guavas.’ She tried to make it sound like a secret.

He picked one from out of the sooty leaves, but it made his mouth shrivel up.

She was enjoying it all so much, she didn’t notice.

‘And custard apples. They’re too green to steal. The boys can’t see them amongst the leaves.’

‘What boys?’ he asked.

‘Larrikins.’

Was she trying to show him he had changed sides? He felt uncomfortably guilty, and tried to get rid of her hand; but again she didn’t seem to notice, or didn’t want to. She clung on. She was leading him. They were walking over fallen custard apples, through a scent of crushed insects, or sickly fruit.

‘All these custard apples,’ his surprise moved him to remark, ‘you didn’t pick them, and they fell off. They’re rotting.’

‘We didn’t pick them because we didn’t want them.’

‘Then it wouldn’t matter if somebody else took them, would it?’

‘Don’t be silly! They’re ours!’

They were standing stirring a tub of liquid manure.

‘Do you think you’ll like me?’ she asked.

‘I dunno.’ He felt stupefied: his clothes hung in larrikin rags.

‘I don’t know either,’ she said, ‘whether I’m going to like you. “Hurtle” is a name nobody else ever had.’

The old broomstick fell back with a plop into the tub of liquid manure.

He mumbled: ‘I don’t want to be like anybody else.’

‘I’d like to be like other people.’ He couldn’t see her so clearly now; she sounded like some old woman. ‘They like you better,’ she added.

And suddenly something of the same fear got into him. He would have liked to find himself running with the mob of kids down Cox Street, away from everything to do with Courtneys’. In the street where he belonged. If he belonged. He didn’t belong anywhere: that was what frightened; although he had wanted it that way.

The big house looked by now like a ship of lights. Someone, a blur, was walking calling through the darkness in a would-be pleasant voice.

‘That’s Miss Gibbons. “Lovesick Syb”: that’s what Lizzie calls her.’

‘Oughtn’t we to let her know we’re here?’ He could have rubbed up against the Lovesick Syb.

‘No!’ Rhoda despised him. ‘I know what to do without being told. We’re supposed to go in and talk to them while they finish dressing.’

‘Who?’

‘Don’t be silly!’ She was dragging him along unknown paths. ‘Harry and Alfreda.’

He wondered whether he would ever learn to play the Courtneys’ game convincingly. Good thing people never really dropped to what was going on behind your face.

Rhoda was panting from the steep climb. ‘Have you ever been in love?’

He hesitated. ‘No. Not properly.’

‘I don’t think I was either,’ she said.

Coming in out of the dark into the dazzling house they were practically blinded. Rhoda walked prim and nice as she led him along the passages. They brushed past Edith, then Lizzie, but the girls didn’t recognize them. He must learn when not to recognize. He could easily get the words and tone of a language: the difficult part was to know what you leave out.

Harry Courtney was in what Rhoda called his dressing-room. He was in his stiff shirt and braces, sitting pulling on black silk socks over his neat ankles and swelling calves.

‘Hello,’ he said, in a jolly voice which didn’t prevent you knowing he could have done without you. ‘I bet you’ve been in the garden.’

‘Not exactly,’ said Rhoda. ‘Anyway, not for long.’