Patrick White - The Vivisector

Then she began laughing. It wasn’t convincing: the muscles were too taut in her neck.

‘Poor Hurtle, you’re such a tyro!’

‘That’s a word you’ve just learnt. You’re showing it off.’

He let her go, though.

‘Oh, I’ve quite a rich vocabulary,’ she said.

‘A tyro amongst hetaerae, eh? Bet that’s one you haven’t come across.’

‘Of course I have! Anyone can read the dictionary.’

‘A corker of a concubine!’ he brayed.

She allowed herself to giggle slightly. ‘Don’t be funny!’

She was moving away, but drawing him with her, it seemed, in the breeze she made; when he shouldn’t have moved at all if left to himself: he was by now so rigid with excitement.

‘Aren’t the leaves cool,’ she murmured, pressing one against her face.

‘Pretty cool yourself.’ He took her hand as though she had invited him.

‘Oh, I’m not! I’m “perspiring freely”, as they say. Feel!’

Now looking at him, she put his hand just below her throat, above where her dress began.

How it felt was not all that important, because almost immediately after, he was discovering so much more of Boo Hollingrake, on the leaf-mould, at the bottom of the stone steps, behind the Monstera deliciosa. She was drooling, sometimes in plain words: ‘. . yumm not not mm such um beginnerm. .’ into his mouth. Above and below she was both mobile and contained, but if he closed his eyes he could float with her amongst the fern roots in the porcelain bath, guzzling the golden fruit right down to the crescent moon. He could have.

When Boo said: ‘Hurtle Courtney, you kill me!’ She made her tongue as thin as a cigarette and stuck it between his lips.

It was so unexpected, he was throbbing and spilling inside his clothes, against her struggling thighs.

‘Boo, dear? Boo? We’re waiting for you. Tea-o!’ The voice calling from the upper terrace only half expressed Maman’s feelings; he could tell. He could imagine the smile as she tried to load her words with charm.

While the Monstera deliciosa, beginning to resist an afternoon breeze, was scattering old coins through its perforations. The breeze tattered the banana leaves. Clashes of wind and light were occurring all the way up to the lawn, where Maman’s skirt of girls’ white was filling and spiralling. To keep her balance she had to plant her shoes in the mattress of buffalo-grass.

‘Boo!’

‘Oh, drat!’ She threw him off. ‘Old Freda’s on the war path.’

‘Yes, Mrs Courtney,’ she called up, while darting at her hair, her dress. ‘I lost my slide. I’ve been looking for it. My hair-slide.’

Her voice sounded true, whereas Maman’s wasn’t: too dry and monotonous.

‘Oh, how ghastly for you, Boo! You’ll never find it. The garden’s turned into a wilderness. You must become resigned, dear.’

Boo went shooting up a ladder of leaves and light. The soles of her shoes went tsit tsit tsit on the stone steps.

‘But I’ve found it, Mrs Courtney.’

She sounded so convincing.

Hurtle might have chosen to remain hidden in the cooling depths, but Maman was beginning to descend; he could hear her shoes grating on the steps. She would be watching her advance toe, her eyes narrowed anxiously, as though she half expected to fall.

At the bend, she looked up and saw him. He must have been waist-deep in greenery.

‘Hurtle,’ she said, ‘I hope you’ll never do anything to make us feel ashamed of you.’

‘What?’ He was completely defenceless except for his Adam’s apple.

At least Maman wasn’t prepared to let herself get carried out of the shallows. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you know — now that you’re a young man.’

As there was no avoiding it, he went up the steps, and she couldn’t resist tidying his hair.

‘You’re such a comfort to me’—she linked an arm to one of his for the return—‘now that all these dreadful things are happening — and Father away from home so much.’

Since the outbreak of war Harry Courtney had felt it his duty to spend more time on his properties. He had stocked them up as part of the ‘war effort’, and with the young men away in France, the most he could do was lend his managers a hand.

‘Always remember you’re a gentleman,’ Maman was saying; she might have learnt it out of a book.

‘But I’m not!’ She, before anybody, must face that.

‘You’ve had every opportunity. You’ve been taught everything. I don’t know what else you could be.’

‘I’m an artist.’ He was, in fact, a thundering cart-horse.

‘Oh, yes, yes! We know,’ she said, ‘and it’s wonderful to have a satisfying hobby.’

Maman’s faith in geniuses had failed since the wheels had broken off the planchette.

‘The question of morality is what is important,’ she said, ‘au fond,’ sucking on it like a sweet, for her own comfort.

They ploughed over the endless lawn, up to what had been the schoolroom, where Edith and Lizzie had laid Rhoda’s party feast. There were egg sandwiches, and banana ones, and yummiest of all, those which were filled with squashed chocolate creams. There were meringues, of course. There was rainbow cake, and a choice of iced coffee and fruit cup.

Maman recovered something of her girlishness. ‘Is everybody happy?’ she asked in a jollying voice; her sash flew as she went the rounds.

The girls had turned into heavy, munching women, excepting Rhoda, picking like a bird. You couldn’t say there was anything wrong with the food, only that Maman must have planned it under the impression that Rhoda was still her little girl, which, in fact, she had never been.

Nobody spoke. The guests were probably deciding what they would polish off next. A dimple opened on and off in Nessie Hargreaves’s left cheek. From time to time Rhoda looked around disbelievingly: her dress had got crushed, and she kept tweaking at it; or she would look up at her friend Boo, whose dress also was somewhat crushed.

He wondered how he had ever been impressed by that munching cow. He thought he could see a spot beginning to surface on her chin.

‘Rainbow cake! Nessie? Mary?’ Maman bravely asked.

Without inviting her to take off her clothes he could have painted Boo Hollingrake down to the last frond.

Rhoda was looking at Hurtle.

Something had risen up in Maman. She plumped down. She was not exactly crying, but gasping and frowning. She was working her handkerchief with the palms of her hands.

‘Oh, what is it, Mrs Courtney?’ Vi Learmonth ran: she was the kindest of the girls, and would have liked, if allowed, to join in a cry.

‘It’s nothing, Vi,’ Maman said. ‘No, that’s untrue. It’s bad news — some — somebody — a friend — killed at the war,’ she was able to gasp. ‘We heard this morning. Nowadays,’ she said, ‘news is nearly always bad.’

Rhoda ran after Vi with little, imitative steps; but she hadn’t learnt what else to do.

‘This detestable war!’ Boo sighed professionally, and looking down her front, brushed the crumbs off.

‘Hurtle,’ said Maman, ‘bring me a glass of soda water.’ She was still accusing him, not of something, but of everything.

The cars and cabs were sent for earlier than first arranged. Out of respect for Mrs Courtney’s sorrow the girls remained subdued. Saying goodbye they looked soft and juicy, like plump, white, folded moths.

As soon as they were gone Rhoda pounced. ‘Who was it?’

‘Who was it what?’

‘Got killed at the war.’

‘A boy called Andrew Macfarlane. Mrs Hollingrake discussed it with me on the telephone. We decided Boo shouldn’t be told before the party. Boo was very fond of Andrew. They were childhood sweethearts: you might say they were half engaged.’