Patrick White - The Vivisector

School was tedious enough; the games he played to show he was able, the lessons at which he forgot what he had learnt; but the holidays were, if anything, worse, in the diminished house with his parents and sister.

Maman had returned to a fury of letter-writing and committees, while continuing to harp on the theme of her wasted life. One of several dazzled spinsters usually present would assure her she was belittling herself.

‘Oh, no,’ she insisted, drawing down the corners of her mouth, ‘I’m frivolous, superficial, ignorant, thoughtless. I don’t say I’m altogether without good qualities,’ she added, and the spinsters heard it gratefully, ‘but I have no illusions about myself. ’

Then she would dispatch her satellites on various little missions about the house, at which they were not quite servants, not quite equals; while she returned to her dashing correspondence: her nib could be heard gashing the parchment.

‘Hurtle?’ On one occasion she called him into the octagon, which had been repapered in primrose while they were away. ‘This is something I’d like you to take an interest in — now that you’re coming of a responsible age.’ She clasped her hands as though starting a prayer, her rings shot by candlelight: black candles to match the japanned woodwork. ‘I want very seriously to found our own Australian Society for the Abolition of Vivisection.’

His voice was preparing to croak a protest, not against his involvement in a cause — poor damn dogs — but against his involvement; he could not yet afford the intrusion on his privacy.

‘I shall never forget’, she said, ‘coming across the poor tortured — certainly only stuffed — little dog, that cold wet afternoon. ’ Her rising emotion almost flattened the candle flames.

All right. Hadn’t he too, understood and got the horrors?

‘Heartlessness towards animals’, she said, ‘could be the first sign of cruelty in human beings.’

Actually Maman didn’t care for animals. She had never kept them because she was afraid they might make demands on her time. But in her present emotional state they seemed to have touched her obsession with hurt.

‘What is Rhoda?’ she suddenly asked.

He didn’t know. If he had known, probably by now he wouldn’t have told; the whole situation in the little stuffy familiar room had grown too murky.

To add to it, Maman had started crying. ‘Rhoda—’ she sobbed—‘we must all— all of us —fight against every form of cruelty — resist our passions.’

She could have forgotten he was standing there.

‘At least I shall pray for it,’ she gasped, and blew her nose.

The scene was over, it seemed.

Maman had always encouraged the habit of prayer. When they were young children she would sometimes remember to hear their prayers on her way to dinner, and the words would breathe a perfume, they would start to glitter with the fire of precious stones; while in her absence, the same words remained colourless, disinfected, as in the churches they visited before Sunday dinner when nobody had a cold.

Now Maman, in her crusade against cruelty and her own shortcomings, became more determined in her churchgoing. She had a visiting-card in a slot at the end of the pew: her own personal card, because Father joined them only at Christmas and Easter. Rhoda went. Hurtle went in the holidays. Maman wore dresses certainly more sombre, but no less sumptuous than in her frequently regretted frivolous past.

For church she mostly wore a veil, which she threw back over her hat before kneeling. Hurtle liked to look sideways at her face, at her splendidly proffered expression of remorse. In his preoccupation with the work of art, he would forget she was his mother. She powdered thoughtlessly at times, which increased her headachy look. Her lips were extra pale, for Sundays.

And Rhoda, her sharp chin propped on the woodwork, her eyes shut tight, what did Rhoda pray about? The removal of her hump? Or did she simply shut her eyes and hope that church would soon be over?

At thirteen he had prayed sincerely, persistently, at times with passion: he begged to be allowed to witness some kind of miracle. By fourteen he had lost the faith you were supposed to have in prayer, just as he had lost control of his voice. His face was a dreadful mess, not that other people looked at it except to remind him of his pimples: ‘Don’t, dear, they might turn septic.’ He sat in church stroking his soft, silly shadow of moustache, not so much sulking at God as contemptuous of all the kidding going on around him; till a fragmentation of light, or the illumination of a phrase, or some simple irrelevant image, a table for instance, cropping up in his own mind, started him tingling electrically, afraid he might never be able to pin down his own insights, let alone convey them to others.

The Sunday it occurred to him that God didn’t exist he was his own dynamo, his pride didn’t come to his rescue. With nothing but the sound of his heart to fill the gap, he looked down at last at his flies, to see whether his anxiety might be visible to anyone else.

He was fourteen the year they returned from Europe: not long after, war broke out.

Maman was standing at the top of the stairs nursing a hot-water bottle. ‘Thank God, neither of my darlings will be taken from me,’ she announced in a loud voice. ‘Harry is too old, and Hurtle still a baby.’ An outburst intended for her own relief, it must have been heard by everyone, for the house had the ears of maids and children.

‘Not that I shan’t suffer for the others.’ She clutched the rubber bottle tighter to her bosom. ‘As though they were my own.’ She did want to atone for something. ‘Ohhhh!’ she moaned, holding up her throat to be cut.

Father, who wasn’t all that old, dashed up the stairs like a doctor and took her by the wrists. ‘Come on now, Freda. Control yourself, or they’ll hear you,’ he warned in a low vibrating voice, which everybody did hear.

‘Nobody understands,’ she complained. ‘You don’t! Don’t touch me, Harry! Not after those beastly women.’

‘Which women?’

‘Your mistresses!’

‘Name one.’

Instead, she dropped the hot-water bottle, and Father picked it up, and shoved it back in her arms as though it had been a doll. He was red in the face from stooping. Then they were mumbling kisses at each other before going their separate ways in the subsiding house.

Father was fifty-two by the passport, but grew older by encouragement. He sagged in the leather armchair after dinner, the snores trickling out of his mouth. He had shaved off his beard to meet the fashion. He had a thick neck, with a full vein in the side of it: their father of veins.

Something about him Rhoda must have found repulsive. When he slapped her on the behind as though she had been a little girl, she spat back at him: ‘Don’t ever do that again!’ Like the young ladies in church, she could have fainted and been carried out, but perhaps she wasn’t old enough.

It was a half-world, in which they all saw the guns ejaculating blood.

Maman protested: ‘Why are you looking at me, Hurtle?’

He wasn’t just then, and that was what she resented. She was also perhaps afraid he was no longer her little boy; for safety’s sake, she would have liked to keep him permanently twelve.

Whenever she thought about it Maman was frantically indisposed, nursing the hot-water bottle: the landings and hall smelled of rubber; but between whiles her energy wouldn’t leave her alone. She rushed at the telephone and almost wound the handle off: to organize. She organized Mrs Hollingrake and her circle into making miles of wisteria out of crêpe paper in Mrs Hollingrake’s own garage to decorate the Allied Ball. She sold buttons for Little Belgium from a little tray in Martin Place; she sold flags for Serbia; she represented La Belle France on an evening of tableaux vivants in the Town Hall, and none of those who applauded realized that Maman was so emotionally involved as she sat offering her throat to the knife.