Patrick White - The Vivisector

He said to Father: ‘When am I going to school — Dad?’

The children were still let in to say good morning while the parents were lying in bed; it was perhaps their closest, their most agreeable hour together. In the smell of recent sleep, with the sound of doves around the palms on the lawn, Maman could believe that she loved Rhoda. Father, on his back, made the newspaper crackle, its print so fresh it came off on your hands as you lay beside him.

‘Eh, Dad? When?’

‘Don’t say “eh”,’ said Maman. ‘It sounds common.’

She had a greasy look by that butter-coloured light.

‘My darling, darling Mummy,’ Rhoda smoodged, snuggling up, ‘let’s play at my being your little baby.’

Father was thrashing the paper about. Even nowadays, he would turn aside from the Herald, and throw off a kiss, or try to, as if you were still a kid. It was horrible. His beard pricked: the beard of a fusty old man you almost no longer knew.

‘Well, then, when am I going to this school?’ The lessons in Rhoda’s schoolroom were so much rot.

Father said: ‘Next year.’ Sometimes he went as far as: ‘Next term.’ Or, on one occasion: ‘You’re ready for it. We only didn’t want to throw you to the lions before you learnt the same roar.’

Then Father laughed, or heaved, or wheezed, as he thrashed the paper about, the nightshirt open on his chest, on the grey-black hair. You couldn’t be sure whether Maman ever noticed it; you could never be sure what older people saw. But a lot of blooming repulsive hair.

On one occasion Maman said: ‘You’re not so big, Hurtle, that you can’t get into bed with your poor old mother.’

He couldn’t say the idea made him sick. He wouldn’t have done what she wanted if they hadn’t been on their own: not let Rhoda watch him make a fool of himself.

Actually it wasn’t so bad against Maman’s silky side, and the hair, all around her on the pillow, smelling of washed hair. He closed his eyes and put his face in it.

‘There!’ she said. ‘You’re still my treasure. You know you are.’

In this darkness, of overflowing hair and pillows which softly gave, he had never been so close to what they probably meant by bliss.

When he opened his eyes, Maman, who resisted chocolates now on account of her figure, was scratching in a box on the bedside table. She soon heaved back into their former soft position; she stuck the chocolate in her own mouth, and warmed it up till she had it ready to offer: or so he understood, from the bird-noises she began to make. They were like two birds together, feeding on the same food, as they worked the chocolate, neither soft nor hard, neither his nor hers: the chocolate trickled blissfully.

Suddenly Maman went: ‘Mm — mm— hmmm! ’ rising to a high note.

She sucked in the chocolate so quickly his tongue almost followed it.

She sat up in bed. ‘Oh dear, what silly things we do! Childish things!’ When she was the childish one: he wouldn’t have thought of the silly trick with the chocolate.

Gathering up her hair by handfuls, she was smiling; but it was not for him: more for herself, it looked.

He got out of bed and began feeling for his slippers. He might have been treading on glass instead of the soft carpet. He straightened up, after spreading his hands to hide what he had to hide.

Hurtle Courtney liked to escape after lessons, shaking them off, together with Rhoda, go down alone through the dark-leaved garden, down the plunging, moss-cushioned steps, to the tree. It had a prickly trunk he learned to climb. He learned to lie along a prickly branch, over the street. Sometimes when people were passing he would make a funnel of his mouth, and let down the spit, sticky and silver, as of the tree itself, hanging, swinging in a string, and finally falling. Sometimes they looked up and threatened him, but more often the people hurried away pretending nothing had happened.

Once a mob of larries happened to pass underneath, and he spat from the branch in quick spurts. Through the tears in their clothes he could see their sunburnt nakedness; he could almost smell their gunpowder flesh. At once his former life began boiling up in him.

The others looked up and began pulling faces of hate. One of them had a catapult. Their voices went to work on him.

‘Come on down, fuckun little silvertail! We’ll put a frill around yer!’ the hoarsest of them called up.

A stone numbed a place in his shoulder.

‘Wait till I git down,’ he shouted back in a voice to match, ‘I’ll drive the teeth into yer gob quicker than yer bargain for.’

In fact he slithered out of the tree quicker than he himself had expected; the soles of his boots were thudding on the hot asphalt; to a sound of bone on bone he began rubbing out their faces, their hard flesh turning to ripe tomato as he let them have it. Blood was a taste he had forgotten: liquid pencils.

Then when they streaked off, he ran after them in his burst Norfolk jacket and unbuttonable knickerbockers. ‘’Ere! Hey! Wait a mo! I got somethun ter tell yez,’ he called in the remembered language.

Unconvinced, the pack ran on, and as it became an increasing blur, there flickered through his mind the possum with the bell round its neck Sid Cupples had told about: the freak tinkling after them driving the ‘sane buggers’ always farther away.

So Hurtle Courtney Duffield gave up at last. He stood in the street, the two languages he knew fighting for possession of him. At the worst, though brief moment, when it seemed unlikely he would ever succeed in communicating through either tongue, he heard himself blubbering.

Not long after, he was due to start at a proper school. They had driven out to visit the Head, who spoke English, but wasn’t. They walked through the old buildings, and the established boys in their uniforms looked at them with curiosity and disguised contempt, not only the long-legged, shaven men, but also the ink-stained bits of kids.

‘You won’t feel nervous, will you? You’re too sensible.’ The Head’s wife answered her own question.

She was a woman whose mouth couldn’t contain all its teeth: some of them were permanently on view, with a fascinating tinge of grey-green; as if this wasn’t enough, she kept wetting them with her lips to make them glisten more.

Of course Maman had to put in her word. ‘Oh, he’s never nervous; Hurtle Courtney’s a very cool customer indeed!’

He blushed for her, for borrowing an expression like ‘cool customer’ which he had only heard men use. A group of older boys at the corner of one of the old stone buildings had obviously overheard: the boys were laughing at slang out of the wrong mouth. They were laughing at his own extraordinary name, and at Maman’s hat, which was making her family look ridiculous. At least the boys could not have heard about Rhoda and her hump; Rhoda was stored up for the future.

His escape from the schoolroom at home might have turned out less a triumph of emancipation than an initiation into tribal horrors if there hadn’t been a sudden change of plan. They were leaving for Europe — like that — because Maman couldn’t bear to put it off any longer. Originally their party was to have consisted of themselves, Keep, and Sybil Gibbons. Then Maman decided she would do without her maid; besides being a grumpy old thing, Keep would never stand the foreign food. Then they lopped Miss Gibbons off. Travel was an education in itself, said Maman, and you could always engage people on the spot to teach any of the languages.

Miss Gibbons left a week before they were to sail. As they kissed good-bye her hat got pushed to the back of her head and she looked as though she had been in some kind of accident. Her nose, gone red, sounded blocked as she spluttered: ‘I am so grateful. . ’ It sounded silly in the circumstances, like a phrase out of a copybook, though certainly Father had handed her an envelope. Father believed you could make everything good with a cheque, but wasn’t always let off lightly, as when Miss Gibbons spurted tears.