Patrick White - The Vivisector

Hurtle said: ‘I’m going to be a painter.’ He was certain of it for the first time; or it had been decided for him.

Col Forster laughed: he had widely spaced, blunt teeth. ‘What sort?’ he asked between gulps of laughter. ‘A house painter?’

‘An artist. That paints paintings.’ Then you were tempted: ‘I’m going to be a great painter.’

‘Fancy yourself, don’t you?’ Col Forster couldn’t laugh enough. ‘Well, good luck to you, kid! I’m going to write the Great Australian Novel.’

Hurtle thought it couldn’t be a very interesting book: poor Col had such a thick-looking skin, and those blunt teeth, and the kind fingers holding his chewed pen.

That night Hurtle Duffield didn’t dream a dream. He got up early. He wanted to look at things he might never see again, not in their present shape: the moon, for instance; and the sun rising.

When they got home the wall had been repapered. Maman never mentioned it, but he was only half glad. He picked at a join in the new paper to see whether his painting still existed underneath. But he had to stop because just then Rhoda came in.

She told at once: ‘One of the men who papered the wall said a boy who painted a thing like that must have been born a shingle short. Or some kind of criminal.’

‘Bet he didn’t.’

‘I swear!’

Since his visit to Mumbelong Rhoda looked even sicklier. You could see the veins in her white skin. The thin straight line of her mouth was the same colour as the thin necklace of corals they had given her to wear. Her head always trembling. Perhaps she would die, and he wouldn’t be sorry.

‘What did you tell the man?’ he asked as he brushed his hair.

‘I told him to mind his own business, and you were my brother.’

He saw in the glass she had tightened her mouth like she did after she had told a lie, her head trembling more than ever on its green stalk of a neck. Rhoda wouldn’t die, though: her rages made her tough.

‘I liked the painting, Hurtle,’ she said.

‘You couldn’t have understood it.’

‘Why couldn’t I?’ she shouted.

He didn’t bother to answer.

‘All right then,’ she said. ‘I didn’t like it. I only said it to be nice.’

She might have said or done worse if Miss Gibbons hadn’t come and told them: ‘You’re both having dinner in the dining-room as a treat.’

‘I know that,’ babbled Rhoda. ‘There’s sweetbreads roast-chicken freshstrawberries with icecream. I know! ’

‘You’re hysterical,’ he said.

But instead of being angry, she shrieked laughter, started spinning round and round, and rushed out of the room.

‘Father’s in the nude!’ she shrieked. ‘He’s under the shower!’

Miss Gibbons was so embarrassed she forgot to tell Rhoda off. She said in her tightest voice: ‘Did you enjoy your visit, Hurtle, to Mumbelong?’

He had forgotten all about Sybil Gibbons. She was a sort of forgettable person. Even living in the same house she mightn’t have been there. Like junket. Suddenly he saw her as white against white, except for the dark skin round her blurry eyes, two targets, and her belt buckle.

He was so pleased by his discovery he said in the most bookish voice he could imitate: ‘It was quite enjoyable,’ but in case that wasn’t enough, he got hold of her hand and rubbed it slightly against his cheek.

Sybil Gibbons took such a deep breath she might just have touched the stove. She bolted out to attend to something, perhaps at the same time to have a cry. For very little reason her eyes would start watering. She was always mooning over that bloke instead of tearing the photograph up.

He went down, dawdling on the stairs, to feel each drop of crystal light trickle through him from the chandelier.

To welcome them, Maman had been wearing an apron over her dress as though she had come from cooking the dinner herself, which of course she hadn’t.

‘Oh, Harry,’ she said, and when she came up for breath: ‘It’s been so lonely! ’ In a house full of maids, and Rhoda, and Miss Gibbons.

She looked as if she could eat Father, who actually said: ‘Got something good for dinner, Freda?’

‘And darling darling Hurtle!’ she remembered.

She made him feel as shy as though they were kissing for the first time.

Rhoda had the sulks in the beginning. She didn’t want to notice. Except Father. When he bent down to make it easy for her to kiss, she closed her eyes: you could see her lips reaching up like a blind pup searching for the tit.

Maman took off her apron. She twirled round, so that all the gauze of her skirt filled ballooning out. She told them: ‘All my family round me again — now at last I’m deliriously happy!’

Father smacked her on the bottom.

At dinner it was Rhoda who appeared, if not delirious, genuinely feverish, if you hadn’t known: almost everything about Rhoda was put on.

She told them all, while looking at him: ‘I’m probably going to write a poem.’

‘That’s interesting.’ Maman was only humouring her. ‘What will your poem be about?’

Rhoda at first pursed up her mouth; then she said: ‘About love.’

It made you blow down your nose. Father couldn’t laugh properly because his mouth was full of sweetbread; he usually stuffed it rather full. Miss Gibbons, on the other hand, was messing at her food very daintily. One of her shoulders used to droop as she ate. She could never afford to stuff her mouth because she was the governess. Now Rhoda’s announcement had turned her as white as a plate.

Maman said: ‘Do you think you know enough about the subject, Rhoda darling, to be able to write about it?’

‘Yes,’ Rhoda simply said.

It sounded so ridiculous. When suddenly you saw she was serious. She had a fuzzy, frightened look.

‘You can imagine it,’ she said.

‘Then perhaps you’ll succeed,’ Maman said very coolly. ‘And we shall have another genius in the family.’

He looked at Rhoda and dared her to be one.

‘Who’s the other?’ she asked.

Maman looked mysterious. She was trying to turn it into a joke, but she badly wanted a genius.

‘Who’s the other?’ Rhoda kept harping in a tinny voice, smacking her food with her fork.

Maman pretended the children weren’t there, and began asking Father a lot of boring questions about the management of Mumbelong, to show she was interested, though she wasn’t.

‘Eat up your sweetbread, dear,’ Miss Gibbons coaxed Rhoda, who wouldn’t.

After the chicken had been served she kept on stabbing at one of the little pastry hearts May had sent in to decorate the dish.

There was fruit cup which made you feel sick, or perhaps it was the thyme and stuff in the stuffing.

Rhoda said: ‘I’m going to start a diary. I’m going to write in it everything I do. And thoughts and things.’ She was becoming feverish again. ‘And secret things.’

Father said: ‘That’s risky. You’re too untidy. You’ll leave your secrets lying about. Then other people’ll read ’em.’

‘Secrets are more interesting if they’re not all that secret,’ Rhoda said.

‘I can see your point.’ Again Maman was humouring her: there was a point at which Maman was no longer amused by children.

A silence hung. Then the sound of Father licking his fingers after the bones. Everyone but Sybil Gibbons always enjoyed picking their bones.

‘Miss Gibbons keeps a diary,’ Rhoda said at the height of the silence.

‘Oh, Rhoda!’ Miss Gibbons protested.

Rhoda looked at Hurtle. He was pretty sure she had looked at Miss Gibbons’s diary, but he wouldn’t let her see he had looked at it too.

Poor Sybil Gibbons was trapped: she had blotches all up her white neck like red ink on blotting-paper.