Patrick White - The Vivisector

Half an engagement so cruelly broken was too much for Maman. ‘Oh, my darlings,’ she burst out, ‘how fortunate I am! There’s still your lives to look forward to!’ Carried away by her emotion she clutched at whoever was nearest.

Rhoda looked comparatively dry wedged under one of Maman’s arms; or perhaps she had experienced worse than the death of Boo Hollingrake’s Scot: all young men must have appeared rather hazy to Rhoda.

While Hurtle remembered the black knees, the square hands, the live hair of an older boy, in the bony cheeks signs of the blood which would run, which was still running, under the Monstera deliciosa. Boo laughing for the blood-bath. Hurtle Courtney, you kill me! They hadn’t, but might have, killed Andrew Macfarlane between them. The sloshed blood looked glitteringly fresh on Boo’s throat, on her lashing thighs.

Though it wasn’t Maman he was looking at, she began again accusing him: ‘You never forgive — Hurtle — anybody else’s weakness. ’ And as she continued sobbing: ‘Everybody, in the end, is weak.’

Himself the weakest, if he could have convinced her.

Rhoda cried a little to pacify her mother, then returned to her own dry grief of griefs, whether experienced already, or still to be.

So far distant from the killing, the war years weren’t so very different from those which had gone before. Boys at school pummelled one another’s bodies, muddled through algebra and Virgil, groaned, cheated, masturbated, waiting for an end to the prison term. Most of them took a ferocious interest in war. Some of those who left, immediately enlisted, looking like exalted novices entering a religious order. Those who remained yearned for the boredom of the holidays, which were only boring on the surface. During the war, the secret ways had become more devious, behaviour more disguised, the coded messages more difficult to crack. The maids, even, seemed no longer to know what made sense. May said: ‘Dunno what I’m doin’ ’ere; I’m gunner get out’; while there was no sign that she had the power to withdraw her face from above the pan which was steaming it open.

To have scalded her wrist and to be wearing a bandage soaked in oil was, in the circumstances, some kind of compensation. Her skin looked browner, more liverly than before. She burped a lot, and didn’t fancy anything above a biscuit. In the second year of the war she taught Hurtle the secret of spun sugar, and how to transform dull roundels of potato into the gold balloons of pommes soufflées.

‘Now you know,’ she whispered as the little golden eggs bobbed swelling in the bubbling fat.

He was not only the neophyte, he might have been her lover.

‘You’ve got good hands, love,’ she told him. ‘When I was a girl I worked in a surgeon’s house. His was the same sort of hands.’

She dared ask, only once, and very quickly: ‘Have you been paintin’ any of those paintin’s lately, dear?’

Her skin flooding with maroon, she lowered her eyelids and slip-slopped into the scullery. He was relieved when she had decided not to expect an answer. Her sympathy moved him, and he respected her art.

He had taken to locking his door as soon as he got inside his room. He read a great deal, possibly to ignore the fact that he was still incapable of acting; he could only be acted upon. He read Ziska: the Problem of a Wicked Soul, Lives of the Painters, Wilhelm Meister’s Wanderyears, Pensées de Pascal, The Forest Lovers, the dictionary. He drew, too. He did a series of drawings of the war which was being fought in France, but tore them up on recognizing Goya. The thought that he might never be able to convey something that was his and nobody else’s brought on such an intense despair he masturbated on the quilt, and was at once afraid they might find out however hard he rubbed it with a towel. He wrote his name compulsively in margins, on the backs of drawing-blocks, once, guiltily, on a wall. Sometimes the name was ‘Hurtle Courtney,’ sometimes more simply: ‘Duffield’. He painted a painting in which the golden flesh of two bodies was interlocked on a compost of leaves under a glittering rain of blood. The light — he couldn’t manage the light: it remained as solid as human flesh. He would get up and walk round his room, which had been large enough till now. His sufferings, which had seemed intense, were as superficial as his painting. He destroyed the painting.

At night he lay rehearsing his entrance on a battlefield under coruscations of gunfire. A leader of men, he excelled at killing, endured unendurable hardships, and almost underwent an amputation. His wounds, of the most gangrenous kind, were deliciously healed by Boo Hollingrake’s tongue.

In his continued absence, helping the war effort by occupying himself with his properties, Father wrote letters from which you suspected he too was living in his dreams:

Dear son,

Next holidays I mean to bring you up to Sevenoaks. Art and literature are all very well (civilization demands that we cultivate them) but I am inclined to think — in fact, I know at last that life as I am living it now is the ‘real thing’. Every morning as I stand cleaning my teeth on the veranda, I catch sight of the distant hills heaped like. . (difficult to read) . . uncut sapphires. . (was it) . . the dew shining like. . (?) . . diamonds. . (?) in the luxuriant grass, and I ask myself what painting could possibly equal this actual picture. The few hands left on the place are not less competent for being elderly. They are all good men and true. After a hard day’s work we mess together, and if our feeding arrangements are on the primitive side, our own mutton and beef inexpertly cooked, with no elaborate sauces to titillate the palate, our appetites are fully satisfied — after which, complete, perfect rest!

Newspapers are stale by the time they reach us, but don’t read any the better for it.

Give my love to your mother and sister. I have heard from an old acquaintance of a herbal treatment by which his invalid wife was considerably strengthened, and at once thought Rhoda might benefit from some such regimen. I shall write about this in detail to Maman.

I think often of my dear ones

yr affectionate

Father

P.S. The black polls are flourishing on the nearest thing to Scottish pasture.

P.P.S. Do you remember young Forster the jackaroo at Mumbelong? He is killed. Have started negotiations with Shearing for sale of the Leichhardt manuscript letters and will donate the proceeds to the Red Cross. — DAD

Harry Courtney, so far distant, so concerned for his dear ones, might have been at the front himself. He returned on leave from time to time, hands hardened, eyes clear. His English suits when he wore them again apologized for their elegance; his cigars must have turned against him.

His wife Alfreda said: ‘It’s so gratifying to have reached the comfortable stage of life,’ all the while unpicking the socks she was knitting for unknown soldiers.

She had taken to wearing aprons to emphasize the seriousness of her intentions: she couldn’t resist pretty aprons.

On his son’s sixteenth birthday Harry Courtney bought him a set of ivory brushes inlaid with gold monograms; he bought him a set of cuff-links studded with chunks of sapphire; they stood together looking at the presents.

‘Go on, say —if you don’t like them,’ Harry protested, while somewhere about him some of his bones clicked.

Hurtle was unable to express either his love or his misery. Harry shambled off, himself a slightly grizzled black-polled Angus.

The maids were flying with aired sheets which made a stiff, scraping sound.

‘Darling? Harry?’ Alfreda Courtney called. ‘They’re making up the bed in the dressing-room. In my old age I’m such a terribly light sleeper.’