Patrick White - The Vivisector

The patronne was wearing a black crochet shawl with an uneven fringe.

Maman had reached the stage of laugh-crying: ‘In the morning — by the first train!’ she reminded Father even before the patronne had removed herself.

Father’s mouth was full of bacon and hot potato. ‘But it isn’t so bad, Freda. Hurtle and I don’t think it is.’

Hurtle hoped all night that Father would prevail. All night he listened to the sea advancing over mud encroaching on his room a voice the voice of a woman rinsing crashing laughing the bidet must have. Somewhat early the diarrhoea came over him again. He had to get up. As he crouched and shivered on the raised footprints above the hole, a crying of gulls blew in at him. He looked out, and a liquid light had begun to sluice the estuary.

They spent three whole days at St Yves de Trégor. Maman never stopped pointing out how appalling everything was: the beds, the plumbing, the food, the patronne Madame Clémence, the doctor who arrived in bicycle clips and a celluloid collar to prescribe for her. Maman was exhausted by the diarrhoea: she had a deep grey line from each nostril to the corners of her mouth; and because her powers of resistance had temporarily left her, they stayed.

Father unbuttoned his clothes, and sat about the beach, reading stale English newspapers and smoking cheroots. He had taken off his boots and socks, but it was too cold for paddling. Maman brooded over the postcards she hadn’t the strength to write, even without her corsets. Because she wasn’t allowed to go out Rhoda hopped humming from room to room. She discovered a drift of dead flies, which rustled as she gathered them up from the window-sill.

Madame Clémence made a grand gesture with her arm, from under her short thick woollen shawl. ‘Le paysage est magnifique, vous voyez. De grands peintres viennent de loin, de Paris même, pour en profiter.’

‘Mons fils est peintre,’ Maman offered in a weak voice.

Madame Clémence said it wasn’t possible. She said it was a charming occupation.

He did in fact paint a little picture, but secretly, the day before they left St Yves. He didn’t show his painting because it was too unsuccessful, or too private. He painted the silver light sluicing the grey mud as he saw it from his window, and as focus point, the faintest sliver of pink shining in the fork of the estuary. His crude attempt made him whinge. In the end he hid his failure under the bed. He thought he wouldn’t look at it again.

Probably he would never have started the botched thing if it hadn’t been for an incident early that morning. He had decided to go into Rhoda’s room, for no clear reason: he was drawn in that direction. As soon as he began to make the move he tried to stop himself, but couldn’t. The loose knob on Rhoda’s door was already rattling. Like his voice offering unconvincing excuses in advance. Before he positively burst in.

Rhoda was standing beside one of the spindly iron-legged bidets. She was naked down to the soles of her feet. She was trying to protect her privacy from this too sudden invasion of light. She was holding in front of her thighs a sponge which only half hid the shadow of pink hair.

Because he was so shocked he began to point, to grind his foot into the floor, to laugh his crudest and loudest. Before backing out. The rattling door slammed shut but only thin between them.

He ran into his room and squashed his face into a disgusting eiderdown, to try to blot out what had happened.

At midday they met in the dining-room. Rhoda sat staring from under sponged eyelids at the gigot aux haricots. Hurtle had plastered down his watered hair.

Maman looked at them embracingly and couldn’t wait to tell: ‘Tomorrow we are leaving St Yves de Trégor!’

In the train he realized he had left his painting under the bed, amongst the fluff, against the slopping chamber-pot. Rhoda was wearing a bonnet and a kind of long travelling cape, but would never again look fully clothed. As the train ran lurching through the fields, he saw her very vividly: the ribs of her pale body beside the iron framework of the collapsible bidet, her naked face, and the tuft of pink in the shadow of her thighs. Courage was taking hold of him again. He began to try her out in his mind in several different attitudes and lights. Invaded by his vision of flesh, he forgot the botched estuary.

‘I do believe they intend to break every bone we possess!’ Maman had discovered something fresh to protest against; it made her happy, even though her hat had been pushed over one ear when the lurching threw her into father’s lap.

While you let yourself gently flow with the motion of the train, soothed by the beauty of the forms disguised in Rhoda’s deformed body, even in the old chamber-pot under the bed at St Yves de Trégor.

Rhoda let herself be rocked, looking out of the window, and not. She probably hated him deeply for what he had seen, and would never let herself understand what else: the light he would show burning in the cage of her ribs; the belly sloping down from the winkle of a navel towards the flame she couldn’t put out with her sponge. He would do all that he had to do. But not yet. It was too luxurious thinking about it.

London was very solid after France. Behaviour mattered an awful lot, with the result that you, too, behaved better, even alone in the hotel room. Though Maman and Father had visited London several times before, they were not as confident and experienced as you would have expected. They seemed to be apologizing to the servants, which they never bothered to do at home. Everybody tried to pronounce better. Rhoda learned the language in no time and spoke it in a cold, clear, offensive little voice. It was more difficult for Maman and Father to keep up pretences, because they had always allowed themselves to say more or less what they wanted, and lose their tempers if they felt like it. For Hurtle the controlled tones of the English were no trouble at all, since he already had two other versions of English by heart.

Father took Hurtle to his tailor, and ordered for his son a suit in the very latest fashion. When the scurfy old tailor knelt and stuck the measure hard up into the crutch of his pants, Hurtle realized from the glass how leggy he had become. He felt touchy, too. Before the tailor rammed the measure home — surely unnecessarily hard — he had never been touched, it seemed, by anyone other than himself. He hated it. He blushed at himself in the glass, and wondered whether Rhoda would have noticed.

On returning to their hotel (‘not ostentatious, but highly approved’) they found Rhoda seated alone downstairs wearing that prim expression she put on whenever she decided to act the lady. She had crossed her ankles. She was looking at nothing in particular and enjoying her own attitude when Father and Hurtle walked in through the glass and mahogany doors. Immediately Rhoda looked at Hurtle. Still her face expressed nothing: not pleasure; not even recognition; but she made him feel a kid again, and he blushed a second time over that reflection in the tailor’s glass as the old man held the tape measure tightly rammed into the fork of his legs. Naturally Rhoda didn’t know how he had resented being touched, but she might have known.

Then Rhoda herself blushed, and turned her face away: Father had the tactlessness to try out a joke. ‘Do you suppose she’s expecting a caller? I wonder who he is?’ Hurtle played up to it: ‘Will it be a real live lord, or only a tuppenny honourable?’ He made his voice as raucous and vulgar as he could.

Quickly Rhoda uncrossed her ankles, then lashed them together again. She ducked her head when Father tried to stroke her hair in passing. ‘It was only a joke, girlie.’ But his apology and the attempt at endearment only made it worse.