Patrick White - The Vivisector

Even Hurtle sympathized. She was no longer of an age to be teased, though strangers mightn’t have believed. Where once she would have screamed back in her own defence, now it sometimes seemed as though she was trying to turn herself into marble to disguise even her visible thoughts; but Rhoda’s marble remained afflicted.

There were occasions when they all visited the stately London art galleries, in the muted atmosphere of which, lords and ladies directed blue stares out of billowing shrubberies, or proudly reined in their horses before a perspective of park. Maman preferred the English to the French style in painting. Although she lectured the chambermaids on what Australians thought and felt, she dearly loved the lords and ladies she had never met. At least in the picture galleries there was no question of her meeting those of another age, so she was able to concentrate on art. Sometimes the paintings made her misty-wistful, or, particularly in front of sunsets, she behaved as though she was suffering from a stomach-ache.

Hurtle told himself: I mustn’t feel like this about my mother, not even when I see and hear.

Father gave less trouble, because men weren’t moved to carry on to the same extent.

Father said: ‘It would have been a solid investment, Freda, if we’d picked up a Gainsborough at the right moment.’

Maman was too entranced to answer, in her pretty hat, and Zouave jacket.

Rhoda was too bored. She followed, picking the skin at the corners of her nails: it was so boring in the galleries.

Father farted in front of a Sargent, the way old men never seemed to realize what is coming. And in an empty gallery.

Of course Maman didn’t hear. It was Hurtle and Rhoda who did. Who started rocking. Then hiccupping, it sounded, the other side of a column.

‘Shut up!’ Hurtle hadn’t meant to bellow.

‘Stop hitting me!’ Rhoda hissed.

It was like old times, in which they were brother and sister, down by the liquid manure at the bottom of the garden; till an elderly custodian restored them to their present ages, their formal relationship, by severely frowning at them.

Hurtle announced: ‘I’m off to my fitting. Where do you think they’re going next?’

‘Actually I’ve no idea,’ Rhoda answered. ‘I have letters to write.’

She wrote endless letters to the maids at home, who replied only sometimes and illegibly. Rhoda waited for her mail as though her life depended on it.

Maman too, had her fittings — it was so important to be dressed — but attended lectures, concerts, as well as matinées, with other Australian ladies. She coaxed Father to thés dansants, and to opera performances at which her shoulders shone. She adored Wagner and the elegant old Queen Alexandra.

Their stay in London might have remained insignificant and frivolous if its current hadn’t quickened seriously on a certain wet afternoon. Father was away in Scotland inspecting Aberdeen Angus bulls. Maman and Rhoda, both dressed against the cold, and with trimmings of damp fur, Hurtle in his velvet-collared overcoat, carrying the new silver-knobbed malacca cane, had set out shopping for the sake of shopping.

It was one of the greyest days, pierced by black monuments. Hurtle lost the others for a moment: they had all floated apart in the drizzle, the sound of wheels revolving in wet, the tramping of galoshes; when he found himself staring into a display window of horrible purpose. There was a little, brown, stuffed dog clamped to a kind of operating table. The dog’s exposed teeth were gnashing in a permanent and most realistic agony. Its guts, exposed too, and varnished pink to grey-green, were more realistic still.

The first wave of shock hadn’t broken in him when Rhoda arrived at his elbow. ‘What is it?’ she gasped from out of the drizzle. ‘Why — oh, poor dog! ’ Normally she didn’t care for dogs: they dirtied her clothes, and sometimes knocked her over; but from her anguish now, she herself might have been stretched on the operating table.

Maman came up. Rain had upset the texture of her furs. Her lips were parted in what had begun as a smile. She stopped in front of the plate-glass. Her teeth looked older than the rest of her.

‘There!’ Maman screeched, baring her teeth wider at the stuffed and varnished dog. ‘Ohhhh! That is what I should never forget! But did. The vivisectionists!’

A crowd was gathering to watch and listen.

‘There’s nothing so inhuman as a human being. We must never rest.’ Maman was calling an army into action. ‘Do you understand?’

The crowd couldn’t very well. Maman couldn’t either, except that she had been guilty of the sin of neglect.

‘I wish Daddy were here,’ she whimpered.

Then she began to gather her fatherless children by the elbows, hustling them towards the kerb; she could rely on nobody; her musquash and velour had become most inadequate.

Heaped together at last in a cab, they might have enjoyed the comfort of warmth and closeness if Maman’s conscience hadn’t got to work again. ‘I believe that horrifying object was given us as a sign. It’s time we left for home. I’m wasting my life — while so many defenceless creatures are being heartlessly destroyed.’

It reminded him of the planchette: a drunken and accusing scribble; though Maman wasn’t drunk, only frightened. Rhoda’s face had clamped down white on the thoughts behind it. He, too, felt frightened, and wished they might be given a sign more consoling than the agonizing dog.

Maman missed dinner because the experience had brought on one of her migraines. Hurtle and Rhoda went down together, to the almost empty, unemotional grill room, where they ordered fried whitebait in little potato baskets, and drank lots of water while waiting. Hurtle could see themselves at a distance in one of the big gold mirrors, their reflections lit by the pink-shaded lamp on their small table. Inside the grotto made by the gilded curlicues of the mirror-frame, they sat looking rich, protected, and overdressed.

He was so shocked he felt his nerve-ends must be waving inside him like hair.

He looked away from the reflections, at the actual Rhoda, and deliberately said: ‘What are you supposed to be tonight — a Christmas tree? It doesn’t suit anyone so stunted.’

Rhoda pretended not to have heard, and went on rolling bread pellets, which came out grey, though her hands appeared clean.

His own behaviour on top of other things hurt and horrified him to such an extent he took up the pencil the waiter had forgotten, and began drawing in the margin of the menu, as he always did when a situation became unbearable, practically as though playing with himself.

Then the whitebait were brought. They were delicious, and he gorged himself. Rhoda too, had an appetite. When the fish was finished, they started eating the potato baskets, though perhaps you weren’t supposed to.

There was Peach Melba after that, which they ordered because they recognized the name. Without the attraction of familiarity they would probably have followed each other in ordering: he and Rhoda, he realized, always did choose the same things. He might have gone into the matter if the syrupy sweet hadn’t begun to make him feel sick. Or the gallons of water they had drunk. Or the memory of their panicky drive in a cab smelling of wet galoshes.

Rhoda could have been feeling the same: she was holding her handkerchief to her mouth; she was teetering, or tittering, or trying not to throw up across the table, over the big beautifully printed menu.

‘You do it on purpose,’ she choked.

‘Do what?’

It was his drawing, in the margin of the menu, of the little tortured dog clamped to the sort of operating table.

‘I was trying to work something out,’ he mumbled.