Patrick White - The Vivisector

She had unpacked his valise herself: the crumpled pyjamas smelling of dentifrice, and woodsmoke, and what was it? Apples?

Listening to them call to each other from their separate rooms, Hurtle was surprised his parents could survive the daylight shallows, let alone the dangers of sleep.

He had gone into the William Street post office to buy stamps for Maman. ‘You don’t mind, darling, do you? Say if you mind.’ She was clever enough to know he would be made to feel ridiculous by admitting it; but he did mind. He saw she was using him as her little boy — or her tame black-polled Angus bull. So he resented it. It was raining too.

But on going into the post office, full of the smell of wet raincoats and galoshes, he realized at once that this was a significant occasion.

A young woman or girl was licking a stamp. You could see she didn’t like the taste, but had to put up with it, her tongue flat and ugly in this commonplace employment. He wondered why somebody so obviously disdainful hadn’t simply wet her finger, and minimized her disgust.

It was Boo Hollingrake, but changed, he saw, and of course older.

Since the party Maman had organized for Rhoda, Boo had gone out of their lives. Mrs Hollingrake had told Maman in confidence the poor child was desolated by the death of the splendid young man to whom she would have become engaged. Whatever Boo may have felt, she was packed off to visit relations in Tasmania. Her education was, pardonably, interrupted. When she returned, Mrs Hollingrake decided to send her daughter to boarding school: ‘to take her out of herself’. In the emergency which arose, Mrs Challands, the mother of Mary, had engaged a governess and reorganized the depleted group. Maman was relieved to find that Rhoda, at least for the moment, wasn’t becoming a greater problem.

‘That Boo,’ Hurtle once inquired of Rhoda, ‘do you ever hear from her?’

‘Oh yes, I told you — at the time I got the letter from her. She’s staying near Launceston. She’s making a collection of Tasmanian bush-flowers — pressed.’

He couldn’t imagine it.

And now, here was Boo in the William Street post office, licking a stamp for another letter. He would have liked to read the address on it.

Because it was a wet morning she was wearing a raincoat, which she had unbelted for greater ease. Under her coat she was dressed, you couldn’t have said in mourning, because she was a young girl, but with a hint of it in her long black skirt and the big black bow flattened on the back of her hair. Her skin was whiter, as though in mourning, or it could have been from the weather. The skin of her eyelids looked thicker, heavier. The bridge of her nose seemed to have broadened, or coarsened, or she had a cold. But her white blouse was crisp, almost transparent, unostentatiously fashionable. She had that air of girls who don’t look after their own clothes: they drop them on the floor and somebody else picks them up.

When she first noticed him she looked a bit put out: she might have been going to cut him.

Then she changed her mind, and said in the automatic voice of women of her class coming across one another in the shops: ‘Oh hello, Hurtle — isn’t it a foul day?’

Though having nothing in particular to discuss, he spread himself to prevent her escaping before he was ready.

She told him about her stay in Tasmania. ‘They were very kind,’ she said in her mother’s voice. ‘Actually they’re related to Mummy. It’s so cold the girls all wear woollen vests,’ she informed him — seriously, he realized.

He found himself looking through her blouse, at the just visible tones of her shoulders. He became conscious of the warmth of their bodies mingling spontaneously through their open raincoats.

But Boo Hollingrake remained mentally cool.

‘How is Rhoda?’ she asked, though probably she didn’t want to hear. ‘I believe I owe her a letter. Or perhaps she’s the one who owes.’ She giggled faintly. ‘Rhoda’s so sweet. And Mr and Mrs Courtney — are they well?’

She hadn’t said ‘your father and mother’, because she was looking now with interest, at an adopted son.

‘They tell me,’ she said, ‘you’re becoming an artist. Do you paint from the life?’ It was a term she had picked up.

She didn’t wait for an answer, but looked at her wristlet watch. ‘I’m late for my appointment. What a horrible, horrible day!’

And for a moment Boo Hollingrake shrank inside her clothes, as though the rain had got inside them, and the mud were creeping up on her: she might have been treading on dead, suppurating faces.

Then she remembered: ‘It’s been so nice seeing you again — Hurtle. I must tell Mummy.’

At once her brown, and temporarily shrivelled mouth, swelled into a pale hibiscus delicately crinkled. She went down the steps into the street, where the car waited, together with an elderly, respectful, or over-paid chauffeur.

‘Boo Hollingrake,’ said Maman, with the surprising directness she adopted when she wasn’t the one threatened, ‘did you care for her, Hurtle?’

‘I don’t think I knew her.’

‘But of course you did! She was one of Rhoda’s set. She was here at the house several times.’

Maman ‘knew’ those she had met only once, at bridge parties, or between the races. All her acquaintances were ‘friends’: she remembered them by their pedigrees and hats.

‘You must know her! The tall dark handsome girl. Rhoda shared her governess.’

‘I know the one you mean. But I didn’t know her.’

‘If you must split hairs! What a funny old thing you’re becoming. You’re the one nobody knows. Not even his own mother,’ she added in a tone of satisfaction.

What had become of Mumma? He wondered. Though it wasn’t in the contract to see her, her cracked hands would return, sometimes as a source of shame, sometimes of agonizing tenderness; but mostly he didn’t think about her: a laundress was incredible.

‘If there’s no frankness between parents and children,’ Maman said, ‘I consider the parents have failed.’

With Father away, it was the hour she enjoyed most: she enjoyed the failures and the accusations as they sat alone in the octagon; Rhoda grew exhausted early, and would go to bed after dinner.

‘Oh, I know I bore you, Hurtle,’ Maman used to say, ‘but may I enjoy your company?’

She would bribe him with a cigarette. ‘Your father would be furious. But just one — since you’re a man.’

He sat in her now suffocating room smoking the one prescribed cigarette, feeling long-legged, large-knuckled, amateurish: he the professional chain-smoker behind the latrines at school.

Maman sewed — she was proud of her needlework — or talked, or wrote letters — talking — or read, again talking about it.

‘Do you think Thomas Hardy shocking? I don’t. I think the shock is over-rated. He’d like to shock. But I shan’t let him. What do you think?’

He didn’t. He thought he must bore Maman, though in a way she appeared to enjoy his physical presence in the octagon, just as he enjoyed secretly the stuffy luxury of their hours together after dinner.

‘Boo Hollingrake’—she returned to the attack—‘there was an occasion when I thought, Hurtle, you were distinctly interested in her — at a party for Rhoda.’

Maman bit off a thread, for she had taken up the sewing all her friends remembered to admire: Mrs Hollingrake considered it ‘exquisite work’.

Hurtle was watching the smoke from his cigarette. ‘Mmm. Boo. I’m not all that interested in nice girls. They’re too—’ he coughed—‘insipid.’

Maman had discovered a brand of cigarette wrapped in brown paper — Russian — which made him feel so much older.