Patrick White - The Vivisector

Mr Courtney uncrossed his ankles and crossed them again. He pulled his waistcoat down over what wasn’t yet a stomach.

Hurtle sat smiling at his own fingers in his state of not unpleasant disbelief.

‘Well? You don’t say anything.’ Mrs Courtney sounded vexed. ‘But we’ve got to decide. You’ll be living with us. For always. ’

Though realizing how serious the situation was, he continued smiling. Perhaps it was the word ‘always’. From what he had experienced already, he couldn’t believe anything lasted.

‘And we are your father and mother.’

‘As soon as we adopt you legally,’ ‘Father’ threw in, ‘you’ll take the name “Courtney”.’

‘But my name is “Duffield”.’ He liked to visualize it written by a variety of means: in burnt cork, indelible pencil, invisible ink, carved out of stone, even tattooed: DUFFIELD.

‘A man my father knew,’ he said, ‘went about with his name tattooed on his right arm. He could never ever get rid of it.’

‘But yours isn’t tattooed on any part of you!’ Mr Courtney burst out. ‘So you can’t be compared with the cove your — Mr Duffield knew.’

‘No,’ agreed Hurtle dreamily.

When he was at last by document a Courtney, Rhoda said to him: ‘“Hurtle Courtney”. I shan’t call you by it, though.’ She was looking at him to see the effect.

‘Don’t ask you to,’ he said.

Suddenly he saw her as a white ant.

‘What are you looking at?’ she asked.

He had had a dream in which the harness-room wall at home, covered with smudges and pencil drawings, was attacked by white ants, rustling as they trampled, shedding their wings as they crunched the timber under the plaster; it might have been biscuit.

‘What are you looking at?’ she insisted, digging into the palm of his hand with her nails.

‘A dream,’ he said. ‘You had the head, the body, of the biggest ant. A white ant. The face was yours. Looking at me while it ate.’

‘I don’t believe you!’

But she did. She flung away his hand, at the same time kicking him on the ankle.

He laughed. It wasn’t entirely true. But could have been. She had the pinkish glaze of the ants in his dream. So he wouldn’t let on that it was half a lie.

She was closest to him of all his ‘family’. Once he was moved to embrace her, but was just as suddenly repelled by the idea: he saved himself in time. You couldn’t trust her, anyway. Not that he could always trust himself. This, again, made them sort of related.

From now on he answered to ‘Hurtle Courtney’ when addressed by those who visited the house: the loud-voiced rich, and quieter, poorer ones who paid him no end of fussy attentions while looking for recognition from Harry and Alfreda. The maids, who could neither gain nor lose by it, who didn’t care, who had their own more pressing thoughts, called him automatically by his false name. Now that he was turned into this new and glossy person, it sometimes agitated him dreadfully to enter his real and secret life. Even at its most chaotic, he would have liked somebody, not to share it, but to know of its existence and importance. So he began to accept Father and Maman, not for what they were supposed to be, but because he needed them as witnesses.

‘Look, Maman!’ He couldn’t stop himself running that evening into what Miss Keep always called the ‘boodwah’. He was carrying the sheet of paper he might not have wanted to show if, on the spur of the moment, he hadn’t felt the need for praise.

Maman was sitting slack in her stockings at the dressing-table with that same dreamy expression May wore in standing at the kitchen range. He was at first a little dazed by the glare of flesh; but Maman quickly grabbed something to bundle into. She was in such a hurry, the little smoke-tinted bottles with their lattices of silver irises rattled and jostled on the dressing-table, and threatened to topple over.

‘What — Hurtle — you must always — knock!’ She was gasping and frowning: her frowns looked black amongst the powder. ‘But what have you brought to show me, darling?’ In no time she was again offering the part of her she wanted people to see.

He was still so dazed he hesitated to spring his surprise, which remained too private a part of himself, like Maman’s nakedness. Very occasionally she would come into the bathroom and soap and sponge him, but his thing was less private than his drawing.

‘What,’ she said, holding it away from her, ‘is this me? ’

He began to feel ashamed, not so much of his own drawing.

‘Oh, darling, how clever of you! But I shouldn’t have taken it for me, exactly. Do you see me like that? You’ve given me a melon chest.’

He let her flow on; any possible answers were enclosed by the lines of his drawing.

‘Have you shown it to Father?’ she asked. ‘Father would be amused. He’s so interested in everything you do.’

He didn’t want to show it to Mr Courtney — Father — he wanted to tear it up, turn the light out.

But Maman was inspired.

They swept along the passage. Father was in his dressing-gown. He smelled of soap. He hadn’t yet begun to dress, though his stiff shirt was laid out with studs and links.

‘Look, Harry, what he’s done!’

The drawing made a wind as she thrust it at him.

Harry said: ‘By Jove, he’s got a talent!’

The hot bath had left him lazy and indulgent. On his calves below the gown the hair was curling, and above, in the V which exposed his chest. He was wearing a pair of new shiny leather slippers. His feet were planted wide apart so that he might give a better opinion.

‘Fancy if our son should turn out to be a genius,’ Alfreda Courtney said. She had put her arm through Harry’s. She was leaning against his side as though only she had a right to, while they looked at the drawing, now slightly crumpled.

‘But is it a likeness? I don’t think so. Though it’s most interesting, ’ she said, ‘as a work of art.’

She was still inspired. She would have to show it. Even if she was the victim, it was in a cause.

When Keep had got her into her dinner frock, and she was fully powdered, Alfreda Courtney descended to the servants’ quarters dragging her boy along with her.

She announced: ‘My son has done a portrait of me.’

The girls all buzzed round, excepting May Noble. They went: ‘Mm mmm isn’t it look a telling likeness fancy little Hurtle.’

They turned him into a real dwarf.

‘Do you really think it’s a likeness?’ she dared them.

She had been basketed up, like the scent bottles, in a latticework of silver.

‘Ooh yairs! Well, no. It depends.’

‘You, May,’ she asked the cook, ‘can’t you spare us a moment? ’

‘The sauce might curdle.’ May went on stirring, like she was doing a drawing. She didn’t look at his, but knew. They understood and respected each other.

But he began to hate the curdled drawing.

‘What is the matter, darling?’ Maman asked.

He couldn’t tell her. She was such a long way off from him. She was left standing, her lips working the lipsalve into each other, in the kitchen, in her blue-and-silver dinner frock; tonight there were only a few friends you didn’t have to trouble about.

As an outcome Father engaged Mr Tyndall to give drawing lessons, and with this addition to the timetable, Mr Shewcroft was sometimes forced to wait in the hall with his Latin and Mathematics.

Mr Tyndall was slow and clean and dedicated to perspective. Nice families commissioned him to draw portrait heads. He was a silvery old man who wore his tie poked through a ring. Under the skin of his hands he showed up as blue as the legs of skinned chickens. He felt cold and remote if you touched him. If you got him to draw something, for the fun of it, to watch, his drawing was correct and silvery as himself.