Patrick White - The Vivisector

Several of the houses in Cox Street had neat pretty gardens, the houses themselves painted up. Not like our old place, he once complained to Mumma. With its once painted, now weather-beaten, weatherboard, and straggly self-sown sunflowers. But Mumma said they were lucky to find a place at that rental, and who would paint a rented home, even if they had the time, which she and Pa didn’t, for the laundries she took in, and the empty bottles Pa went round collecting to sell. So that was that, and it didn’t matter really, not with the two yellows of the sun and the sunflowers playing together, and the sticky green of the wilted leaves.

He began to smoodge around Mumma. ‘Oh I’m exhausted, Hurt dear!’ She sighed, but laughed, and took him on her lap in spite of the next baby inside. ‘You’re too big.’ She wasn’t complaining.

She liked him best, he hoped. But he wasn’t a sook. He could run, shout, play, fight, had scabs on his knees and twice split Billy Abrams’s lip, who was two years older and a few months.

Now when he had arranged himself, and it was the time of dreamy, smoodging questions, he asked of Mumma: ‘What did Granpa Duffield do that was wrong?’

‘I dunno as you could say he did anything wrong. ’E was too much a gentleman.’

‘Is Pa a gentleman?’

‘Pa is different. Pa is a gentleman inside. Oh yes, Pa’s a gentleman! ’

‘Then he can’t be so different from Granpa Duffield.’

‘Well — Pa had no edgercation. Poor Pa was put to lumping bags of potatoes and onions for Cartwrights down in Sussex Street, to earn a crust for ’is own dad. Granpa liked to talk. He was so pleasant. He had a beautiful handwritin’. ’E could copy real lovely. And did earn a shillun here and there. But blew ’is cash as quick as ’e got it. And the remittance too.’

The remittance was one of the mysteries you shared with Mumma. You would have liked to ask more about it, and how Granpa blew it, but you didn’t dare.

Mumma was the one who dared, on a heavy Sunday evening. ‘Granpa loved ’is spirits. That was ’is downfall. That is why yer father never touched a drop.’

She hung her head. Because of the laundries she was always doing, her skin stayed white and sort of steamy.

‘Stop, Hurtle! Oh, my neck! You’re hurting, dear!’ Then when they had rearranged themselves: ‘Your grandfather was a handsome man.’ She sighed.

‘Was Pa handsome?’

After a pause, she said: ‘No.’

‘Were you pretty?’

He could feel Mumma and the next baby kicking together. ‘Oh dear, I’m not the one to answer that!’ When they had settled down she said: ‘No. I think yer father married me because of a pair of earrins. They was corneelun. Mrs Apps give them to me when I worked a dress for her little boy. The staff used to say: “’Ere comes that young feller. Better put on your earrins, Bessie.” I lost one after we married.’

‘Did Granpa Duffield like the earrins?’

‘No, Oh, I don’t know. Granpa Duffield couldn’t forgive ’is Jim for marryin’ Bessie Tozer. At that time I was working at The Locomotive. Not in the saloon. Peugh! No, thank you! I was chambermaid. And help in the dinin’-room.’

It was so beautiful on the grey splintery old veranda towards sunset.

‘Will I be a gentleman?’

‘That’s up to you.’

‘And handsome?’

‘I hope not,’ Mumma shouted. ‘You’re bold enough. Anythun more would be too much.’

After they had fought and kissed together, she sighed and said: ‘It’s the edgercation that counts.’

It sounded solemn, but he didn’t altogether understand what it meant, nor want to. Not as the sun and the sunflowers were melting together, and he lay against Mumma’s white, soapy neck.

There was so much of him that didn’t belong to his family. He could see them watching him, wanting to ask him questions. Sometimes they did, and he answered, but the answers weren’t the ones they wanted. They looked puzzled, even hurt.

He would play hard with the other kids in the street — Billy Abrams, Bill Cornish, William White, Terry O’Brien — then pull away, and start mooning about by himself. Out of desperation he began to read. He read Pears Cyclopaedia, the newspaper, Mrs Burt’s ‘books’, Eustace Burt had a dictionary (Eustace was a teacher), and Granma Duffield’s Bible. The Bible was the hardest. He didn’t understand not all of the words. It was the stories he went for: the blood and thunder. He drew too, in the dust of the yard, and on the walls. Perhaps he liked drawing best.

‘You and yer scribbles, Hurtle! A big boy like you! I’ll have Pa take the belt to yer if it ever happens again.’

As if Pa would.

So while Mumma scrubbed the wall — she only made it worse grey — he sunk his head and concentrated.

‘What’s that you’re up to now?’

Seeing as she had the suds made, she was spreading them on the floorboards, and had almost reached the island of his chair, pushing the suds ahead of her.

‘Eh?’ she asked. ‘Are you deaf then?’

‘Reading,’ he said, when he couldn’t avoid it any longer, but he made it sound very low.

Though Mumma was on all fours he could tell the shock she got. ‘Readin? You haven’t ever learnt. You’re still too young to read, love.’

He didn’t answer, but ground his boots on the rail of the chair. She ought to have known he had been reading all this while, but Mumma was often too busy to notice.

As she went on scrubbing and puffing, she asked in a tone of voice to please her little boy: ‘Whatever are you readin’, Hurt?’

‘The Bible,’ he had to admit.

Mumma too, read the Bible, or liked to sit with it when she was tired.

‘Well, well,’ she disbelieved, scratching at the board with the brush which was almost bald. ‘There’s a lot of the Bible. I wonder what’s taken your fancy.’

He said, even lower than before: ‘I’m reading how she smote him with the tent peg.’

‘I never ever read that! ’ It made the handle of her pail clank.

Her joints were what she called ‘set’ as she clambered up.

‘’Ere,’ she said, ‘run along out inter the fresh air. Play with the others.’

He looked up, and saw she was afraid of something.

‘Eh?’ she almost whimpered.

He put down the book and went outside, in case she started touching him with those wet, swollen hands, when he didn’t want to be drawn into any grown-up person’s whimpery mood.

Not long after that she came to an arrangement with Mr Olliphant. Mumma already cleaned the church. Now she agreed to scrub out the hall in return for the lessons Mr Olliphant would give her boy until it was time for him to go to school. Mrs Burt and other ladies in their street kept quiet, but breathed heavy.

It was certainly most unusual, not to say peculiar, the treatment young Hurtie Duffield was getting. ‘But don’t you see, he’s an unusual child?’ Mumma called over the pailings.

No one but Pa dared criticize to Mumma’s face. ‘Let’s hope “unusual” don’t mean “useless”.’ Because Pa had experienced Granpa Duffield.

Anyway, the visits to the rectory began, and if they didn’t always result in lessons, Mr Olliphant offered books between attending to his parish duties. You could sit in the parson’s study and read, without anyone suggesting you were unhealthy, or mad. The rector himself was a regular dry biscuit of a man, who seemed, for that matter, to live mostly on biscuits, him and Mrs Olliphant. They had had a baby, but it soon died.

Sometimes on dashing in, and before dashing out on further parish business, Mr Olliphant would mumble a biscuit over arithmetic. Arithmetic was too dry; you couldn’t care much about that. Amo, amas, amat: that was better. It seemed to make Mr Olliphant laugh, the way you said it. And Maître corbeau, sur un arbre perché: that was from the Fables. The Fables were best, because of the pictures. He made a copy of the fox, with a tail like on a lady’s fur. But Mr Olliphant came in and said he hoped you weren’t going to develop a frivolous nature. You had to learn to be conscientious and not do things behind your master’s back.