Patrick White - The Vivisector

When the wheels stopped creaking Rhoda leaned forward, her neck like a pale green bean-shoot, which he never liked to look at — it was so thin it made him sick with fright and worry: what if it should break off from the hump?

Rhoda was reading: ‘What—“wom—”?’ It was such a spidery writing. ‘“Woman”!’

She might have been punched, like he had once punched a kid too low, in his former life.

‘Someone is guiding it!’ Rhoda shrieked.

‘Darling! Darling!’ Maman was trying to comfort her. ‘What could be a nobler fate?’ Even so, she couldn’t help laughing, and that too had a tragic sound.

He remembered Mrs Burt next door: how her womb fell. Mumma had said she didn’t know why wombs didn’t fall more often, considering the punishment they took.

‘But I want to be something!’ Rhoda was mewing like a cat, protesting against her ‘noble fate’.

Then Miss Gibbons came, because it was time for bed, and led away the sopping Rhoda. He was sorry for her after all.

He continued sitting awhile with Maman, like one of the guests who stay on amongst the cigar-ash when everyone is getting sleepy.

‘How does it work?’ he asked. ‘The board?’

Suddenly he knew what it felt like to be a serious-thinking man.

‘Is it electricity?’ he asked.

Maman shrugged, and lowered her eyelids, and smiled a sort of smile.

‘Who knows?’

She didn’t care. She was content to leave it as something mysteriously important they had experienced together.

Then she shuddered. She opened her eyes. She said: ‘It’s time!’ She held out her arms from a great distance and he was wrapped for an instant in the yellow velvet; he was smelling the dry scents of summer; there was a glint of the halcyon amongst the wheat.

After that, he returned into his clumsy body, and she was his mother again.

When he was in his pyjamas, and had brushed his boring old teeth, Miss Gibbons came to him and said: ‘Rhoda wants to say good night. I think she has something to show you.’

More than that he wasn’t told. You couldn’t get anything out of Sybil Gibbons unless you read her diary.

He went into Rhoda’s room, where she was propped up on the pillows like Maman, but wearing a flannel nightie, and on each cheek a dry round patch of something pink. She must have rubbed on some dentifrice. He decided not to notice it.

‘I want to show you something,’ she said, giving him a thin, dark-coral smile.

‘What?’ he asked, pretty sure it was nothing of interest.

She held out her clenched hand at the end of her stiffened arm. At least when she was in bed you didn’t notice the hump, but her arm looked horribly thin.

‘What is it?’ you repeated, like some little kid, while coming closer.

She could have found something. A shell, or something. Or a pebble.

She fanned her hand out wide. All the time it had been full of air.

But by now he was so close she threw her arms round him: to kiss.

There was a light sigh or whimper in all her movements. She smelled of moist flannel, or rubber: the moisture after a bath. And baby powder. Inside it all the steamy scent of Rhoda herself.

When she released him from the kiss she took a deep breath and lay back on the pillows as though she had eaten a satisfying meal.

He was disgusted. In his own room, he had to remind himself Rhoda was his sister. And Mrs Courtney his mother.

Whatever the dreams he dreamed that night they kept on pecking at him, sticking their beaks into his mouth: he woke up next morning feeling shocked he had been so disgustingly disgusted with Rhoda Courtney his sister who had a slight curvature she was going to recover from. He used his fists to rub any remains of disgust out of his gummy eyes.

When he went in for breakfast Rhoda was already messing up her corn and kidneys. They didn’t look at each other, which was more or less their usual habit. After breakfast, before lessons began, they went down the garden together, and that too was usual.

Rhoda said: ‘I had a dream, Hurtle. You were keeping a diary. You had written down what you think of me, and you tried to lock the diary up, but couldn’t find the key. You were furious, because you didn’t want me to read it.’

They were standing by the sooty little guava tree. He began to feel uneasy.

‘But I don’t keep a diary. I don’t have to!’

‘But in the dream. And I didn’t have to look. Because I know without looking. That was what made you so angry.’

He felt more than ever uneasy; even if she didn’t always see, she was a pickaxe on some occasions.

So he changed the subject as hard as he could, and no dreams. ‘One night I couldn’t sleep. I went into their room, and Father was on top of Maman. It was like fowls. Rhoda? You’ve seen fowls?’

His description wasn’t strictly accurate, but out of a sense of — not delicacy — perhaps horror of her hump, he didn’t say: ‘Like men and women in real life.’

‘Fowls,’ he emphasized, ‘without their feathers,’ and laughed to make it sound cruder.

That ought to cure Rhoda. He was breathless from his own brainwave. But she didn’t appear to have understood, or if she had, she wasn’t going to admit. She went on picking at the soot on a guava leaf, and when she spoke she didn’t answer his question.

‘I’m tired,’ she said.

‘But you’ve only just got up.’

Her legs seemed to drag.

‘You’re not sick, are you?’

Her hump looked enormous.

‘I’m just tired.’

After that, they didn’t speak, but dragged back past the Monstera deliciosa, which Maman called the Delicious Monster, and the statues at the top of the steps. He was relieved that his thoughts, and Rhoda’s, were again fully clothed.

By the time he had turned twelve he was growing so fast his knickerbockers soon wouldn’t button at the knees.

Maman said: ‘Only since my children started growing have I realized how immoral it is to be rich: to be in a position to clothe them adequately at every moment of their growth is very immoral.’

Rhoda didn’t grow, or not enough to notice: it was Hurtle her son she saw when she made remarks like that. Sometimes, to help her conscience, she would postpone replacing his outgrown clothes.

‘When am I going to get a new suit?’ he had to ask at last.

‘Think of the poor,’ Maman replied dreamily.

Certainly he had almost forgotten his Duffield existence, but to remember it now didn’t seem particularly virtuous, not with his tight-fitting knickerbockers, and the ends of his coat-belt scarcely meeting.

‘Oh, I know all about the poor!’ He delivered it as cheeky as possible.

But Maman had her own thoughts. ‘You can’t imagine what it’s like washing the separator on frosty mornings. How blunt, red, hideous, fingers can become!’

‘What separator? Where?’

It seemed she was late for some ladies’ luncheon. She began rubbing the lipsalve on, then rubbing it off again so that it shouldn’t be noticed.

It was often suffocating at home. Once he shot a pebble at the chandelier, and the crystal chimed back at him. He drew a cock and balls at the back of the book during the old history lesson. If Sybil Gibbons found it, would she tell her diary? He would have to look. He was sick of the governess and the tutors.

When Mr Tyndall died of an angina pectoris they brought Miss Dora Finzi for the drawing lessons. Miss Finzi liked to arrange herself in positions, but her face had a cutting edge: it was more in the style of a serious man. ‘Whatever I teach you,’ she said, ‘you must reject one day, if you find you’re not being true to yourself.’

Her respect for him made him feel humble. He did a water-colour one hot afternoon: of Mizz Finzi, in position, in a many-coloured dress. They had bought him the water-colours by then. They bought him the oils to humour him. His happiness should have been complete.