Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘That’s your age,’ she said, striking him down. ‘Boys are often timid of young girls. It’s quite natural.’

She had been looking closely at her sewing: now she raised her head. ‘Won’t you give me one — darling — Hurtle? A cigarette? ’

She watched him strike the match. She held her hand to the cigarette as though they were lighting something as important as a bonfire. The match lit up her face. It was becoming almost transparent with light.

‘Don’t burn my eyelashes off!’ She giggled smokily.

Then she settled down to devouring the cigarette. There wasn’t anybody else in the room, least of all her son.

She began to talk, like people did when drunk or entranced: ‘Actually girls don’t change, I think, from generation to generation. They’re like moths blundering about in search of their fate. You know how moths hit you in the face — soft, velvety things — and are sometimes killed.’ She shuddered drawing on her cigarette. ‘Nor do I think girls grow up into anything very different from what they were. They’re still blundering about after they’ve promised to honour and obey. Oh, I don’t mean they’re dishonest — not all of them — but they’re still quivering and preparing to discover something they haven’t experienced yet.’

She ground out her cigarette too soon. ‘Perhaps that’s why women take French lessons.’ She still had that dimple he could remember seeing for the first time in the same room.

Maman continued sewing. ‘I remember when I was a girl I used to walk down the road — there were pines along the south side — walk, for something to do — in desperation. I had a muff. I used to clench my hands inside the muff. I wore serviceable boots, but dreaded meeting anybody in them. That was how I met your father.’

It was incredibly dreamy: perhaps Maman was drunk; she wasn’t, though.

‘He sat his horse wonderfully. He looked wonderful. Men of that complexion do, in cold weather.’

She threw up her head as though drinking down the image, the icy chill of which made her throat tauten: her breasts became as small as Boo Hollingrake’s.

Then she laughed, and stuck her needle in the stuff she had been embroidering. ‘How did this begin? The Hollingrake girl. You must forgive me, darling. Isn’t it time for bed?’

The house was so warm, so suffocating, smelling of dust in spite of a team of maids, he could have choked on the way to his room. The half darkness through which he was climbing seemed to be developing an inescapable form: of a great padded dome, or quilted egg, or womb, such as he had seen in that da Vinci drawing. He continued dragging round the spiral, always without arriving, while outside the meticulous womb, men were fighting, killing, to live to fuck to live.

He looked round, half expecting to see the womb had been split by his thought; but the darkness held.

In the most distant fuzz of light, the dining-room, he could see and hear Maman locking up the decanters; it wasn’t fair, she used to say, ‘to tempt the girls’.

Outside the room he had outgrown, the night was rocking back and forth. A wind sounded like rain in the glittering trees. On their way across the sky mounds of intestinal cloud began to uncoil, to knot again, to swallow one another up. A fistful of leaves flung in his face as he leant out had the stench of men, of some men at least, who have overexerted themselves, of Pa Duffield, who was his actual father, in an old grey flannel vest, counting the empties as he piled them under the pepper tree.

He might have continued composing Pa for the unexpected pleasure it gave, if the room behind him hadn’t begun to stir the silence growing silky above the dry rain of streaming leaves.

She didn’t wait for him to turn, but said in a congested voice: ‘Tell me what it is that makes you unhappy, Hurtle. I have a right to know.’

She tried to keep it low in pitch, but his eardrums whammed as though she had boxed them.

She had put on a gown she sometimes rested in, and to which she would refer as ‘that old frightful idiosyncracy of mine’: a field of fading rose, its seed-pearl flowerets unravelling from their tarnished stalks. She had done her hair sleeker than he had ever seen it, which made her head look smaller, almost school-girlish. Of course her eyes were older than any girl’s. But not old. They seemed to have been refreshed: he saw them as unset jewels in shallows of clear water.

‘Tell me what it is,’ she ordered him for the second time. ‘Try to forget I’m your mother.’

She was obviously disturbed. Alfreda Courtney tended to avoid matters of importance, unless a ‘cause’, like anti-vivisection or fallen girls; somebody’s personal distress could drag you out of your depth.

Till here she was: taking the plunge.

‘But you’re not my mother.’ He didn’t know which of them he was rescuing.

‘Oh, you needn’t tell me! I didn’t make you! I made Rhoda. I blotched Rhoda. Like everything. Perhaps if I’d carried you inside me, a strong and beautiful child, Harry wouldn’t blame me now. Harry can never forgive me Rhoda.’ It sounded as though she had somehow to dismiss poor old Decent Harry Courtney.

‘I never noticed him blame you.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘How could you? It’s something only I could notice.’

In spite of its expression of bitterness her mouth was more brilliant than he remembered: the lips half open like those of a person half asleep.

She closed her eyes to prevent him looking into them.

‘You’re right,’ she said, frowning, or twitching. ‘You’re not my son. If you had been, I wonder whether you would have loved me more — or less.’

Whiffs of perfume reached him out of his childhood, from dressing-tables, and the clothes in wardrobes: if only he could have smothered in it; but the perfume was drawing him back to the present.

Her fingers, ‘still quivering and preparing to discover’, were plying on the skin of his arm.

‘Give me—’ she said, ‘let me hold your head.’

She didn’t wait for a reply, but took it in her hands, as though it were a fruit or goblet. She began gulping at his mouth: they were devouring with their two mouths a swelling, over-ripened, suddenly sickening — pulp.

He spat her out.

‘You’re drunk, aren’t you?’ He sounded horrible even to himself: himself too recently drunk of the same short sharp slugs from the decanter which might have ‘tempted the girls’.

She turned round, hunching up her back, and went out coughing, crying, almost vomiting, it seemed, leaving him with the guilt of half remembered dreams: of being received.

He began quickly to undress his hatefully immaculate body, and should afterwards have strapped himself down on his novice’s bed. Instead, propping himself on an elbow, he began to draw with a detached voluptuousness the mouth, the eyes. The lips were hatched with little lines, or slashed with wounds, the brilliantly cut eyeballs sometimes glaring sometimes fainting in their display of light. He only couldn’t convey the perfume of bruised mignonette and brandy: these remained confused in his hand.

He tore all of it quickly up. She was knocking at the door. ‘Hurtle?’ She was so tired, or ill.

She had put on an old flannel nightgown she liked to wear in winter whenever she was feeling indisposed; though now it wasn’t winter.

She explained: ‘I have a neuralgia.’ The water in the half-filled rubber bottle, which she planted on herself for warmth, mumbled to and fro, her hair hanging loose: she had brushed it out for the night.

‘Hurtle,’ she said, ‘your father will be coming home at the end of the month. I want nothing to distress him — in these times.’