Patrick White - The Vivisector

The day of the party the bell began to ring about three, when Edith stalked towards the front door wearing her starchiest cap. The girls arrived, some in chauffeur-driven motor-cars, the poorer ones by cab, with a whiff of chaff still about their clothes. All the girls were dressed in white with touches of differentiating colour. Boo Hollingrake, he saw from a distance, was wearing a sash in what was referred to as ‘old gold’.

Rhoda came out to face her friends. Because of her size and shape her clothes were always made to measure, but today she was wearing a dress which looked as though it must have been adapted, and not very well, from something larger. There were so many tucks. It was gathered up in the wrong places. It was full of little holes, though carefully embroidered, which showed the ugly dress was intended for a party; and her white-kid lace-up boots were obviously new, spotless, with a faint squeak.

The guests began at once to whinny and nuzzle, and offer elaborately wrapped presents. There was a smell of young girl in the hall and what used to be the schoolroom. Although he had brushed his hair, and was wearing his best clothes, he kept far enough out of the way.

He heard, then saw, Maman descending on the girls: it took place under the palms, on the lawn. Maman also was wearing white, but more exquisitely gathered, crisp, with a pale blue sash: after all, it was a girls’ occasion.

She was determined to jolly the children and see that everyone was happy. ‘Nessie, what a sweet dress! Isn’t it sweet, Rhoda? One can see Nessie was born to wear clothes.’

Maman moistened her lips. None of the girls seemed prepared to pay her a compliment. With downcast eyes they stood about, toying with battledore and shuttlecock. There was a dull thump as the feathered cock met the parchment.

‘Rhoda, darling,’ Maman called, ‘don’t forget there’s ping-pong too if anyone feels like it. I must go and give Edith and Lizzie a hand.’

Going towards the house she called back as an afterthought: ‘Where’s that Hurtle?’

He was keeping out of it. He went and had a look at his face. There was one gigantic last spot. He squeezed it: the core hit the glass.

‘Oh, God!’ he moaned, as if he hadn’t discovered there wasn’t one.

When he went down, Rhoda and her friends had disappeared, though their peculiar non-perfume lingered. They were nowhere. The garden was choking with the scents of a humid afternoon. Moisture was gathered in crystal beads on Maman’s Delicious Monster.

He sighted the girls finally in the ruins of the summerhouse. In some way they had all been liberated: perhaps it was the smell of rotting from the drifts of dead leaves which Thompson was by now too arthritic to rake up.

Vi was saying: ‘I’m writing to a soldier in Flanders.’

‘Does your mother know?’ somebody asked.

‘Oh, yes. It’s good for his morale.’

They all snickered and giggled, though Vi herself would have liked to treat the matter seriously.

‘There’s a gorgeous iceman! ’ Nessie spluttered.

‘Where?’ they choked.

‘Ours, of course!’ Nessie was almost strangled by it.

They all began to talk, only Boo didn’t, about Stewart Martin. Everybody had danced with Stewart. Well? They all almost fell on the undulating floor of the half-collapsed summerhouse.

The strange part was: Rhoda acted as though she understood about everything.

Suddenly Boo Hollingrake spoke. ‘I think Stewart Martin’s a misery.’ Her voice sounded surprisingly mature.

Through the latticed light, the other girls looked somewhat stunned. Rhoda was white with shock, or admiration.

Boo was gathering breath, everybody saw, to continue talking. The motions her dress was making seemed to imply experience.

‘There’s a chap,’ she said, ‘one of Daddy’s managers’—she was Q S C—‘a Queenslander’—her breathing had slowed—‘he’s a crude sort of freckled brute — but a man.’

Everyone else was so silent you couldn’t help hearing a thud. The girls peered suspiciously through the lattice of light.

Rhoda said: ‘That was a custard apple falling.’

Nessie Hargreaves giggled high. ‘Have you danced with the Queenslander?’

Boo smiled. ‘He isn’t the sort of man you dance with.’

Rhoda was giggling and jiggling as though she knew all about things. Boo Hollingrake was holding her mascot’s hand.

‘But I have danced with him,’ Boo confessed.

The others shrieked.

Hurtle tried to visualize through the jungle how far Boo had gone with this orang-outang. She remained coolly beautiful; all that was visible outside her dress confirmed what Rhoda had already told: she was of a golden colour. Her golden throat and summery arms were splotched with green where leaves withheld the light. Her nose was of such fragile workmanship it was a wonder the freckled manager hadn’t broken it off as a souvenir.

‘I think it would be awful to have a man messing you about,’ said Mary Challands. ‘I’d rather keep my clothes fresh.’

‘People take them off,’ Rhoda reminded.

The girls rocked, for here was their monkey, their mascot, standing naked for their entertainment while still dressed in her broderie anglaise.

Hurtle gushed sweat the other side of the hydrangea clumps. His tense knuckles were blanched as white as the big loose hydrangea blooms. For the money-mascot, to improve her performance, was pointing her toes and holding out her skirt in a little step-dance.

The girls might have gone on laughing for ever if Boo hadn’t raised her head.

‘. . over there. Over in the bushes. Something moving.’

The silence she got was so enormous her voice came out of it most beautifully: low but distinct.

‘Amongst the hydrangeas,’ she insisted, and they followed the arrow of her finger with their eyes. ‘A man standing.’

‘A man?’

‘Oo-ooh!’

‘Mother! Murder!’

‘There’s a Chinaman jumping on girls out at Watson’s Bay.’

As they ran, shrieking and laughing, Rhoda led them along the paths. They forgot at first, and almost trampled on her. It made them giggle worse than ever, in their breathlessness, and flickering white.

Only Boo Hollingrake wasn’t breathless, because she wasn’t running away. She was walking instead in the direction of the hydrangeas, tearing up a leaf as she came.

‘Declare yourself, you silly coot! Hurtle — Hurtle Courtney?’

They had scarcely spoken to each other. He couldn’t remember her saying his name. He stepped out of the bushes, and a sharp cane, from which a flower must have been amputated, stabbed him in the flies, to make him look more ridiculous, it seemed.

‘What were you doing in there?’ Boo Hollingrake coldly asked; she might have been a governess.

‘Waiting for a chance to jump out and rape one of you girls.’

‘That’s not in very good taste.’ She looked down at the leaf she had been demolishing.

‘Judging by the conversation, I thought you might have found it tasty.’

She had turned, and was slowly, coolly, walking away. ‘Not in good taste at all — and coming from a spotty boy! ’ she called back.

It was the insolence of her hair, looped up loosely above the collar of her dress, which enraged him more than anything.

He had never run so purposefully. He got hold of one of her arms, and pinned it hard behind her back. It must have hurt.

‘You haven’t forgotten all the good old larrikin tricks,’ Boo gasped, to hurt more than she herself could have been.

‘What larrikin?’

‘Don’t pretend!’

When turned round, she was furiously beautiful. Above her upper lip the down glittered.

He kept on mumbling: ‘I’ll show you “larrikin”! I’ll show you “spotty boy”!’