Patrick White - The Vivisector

Lizzie the housemaid explained everything as they went. Mumma at first hardly dared raise her eyes from the patterned carpets through which they trod, but as he was only a child and supposed not hardly to be there, he was able to look around at what Lizzie was pointing out: at the ‘priceless porcelain’, and naked ladies in gold frames.

‘She’s artistic,’ Lizzie explained.

‘Oh dear!’ Mumma sniffed, and would have liked to giggle.

‘But if you ask me, he’s more interested in the naked titties than any old art work.’

Mumma made a clucking noise.

‘He’s a real man,’ their friend continued. ‘Alfreda knows it wouldn’t do to twist his tail once too often. She dotes on ’er Harry.’

‘Isn’t there a portrait of their little girl?’ Mumma asked.

‘Not when they’ve got the kid herself. A portrait would be harping on it.’

Suddenly Lizzie changed her tone: ‘And does Hurtle Duffield fancy the naked ladies?’

‘No,’ he said. They were curious, the big bubs, but dead.

‘What’s wrong with ’em?’ Lizzie lashed back.

He hardly knew. ‘Old cold pudding. .’ was all he could mumble.

Lizzie nearly split herself, and Mumma had to laugh while blushing.

‘What a caution of a boy!’ Lizzie rattled.

They had come out by now into a round, domed room.

‘Bet you never in yer life saw a chandelier,’ Lizzie proudly accused him.

He didn’t answer. He hadn’t, of course. But as he stood underneath, looking up through the glass fruit and flickering of broken rainbow, he knew all about a chandelier, from perhaps dreaming of it, and only now recognizing his dream.

They mounted the soft stairs: everywhere soft soft; it was so quiet and clean you wouldn’t have known anyone lived at Sunningdale.

In the sewing-room the old tortoise from the maids’ hall was going through a bagful of furs. Her superior eyelids obviously disapproved, but she wouldn’t be one to criticize her fellow servants.

‘Miss Keep, the lady’s-maid,’ Lizzie told when they had gone past. ‘Herself the lady. Or so she would like to think. An old tartar.’

Lizzie dared to bounce on the Courtneys’ great big bed, and lie with her hands behind her head, elbows pointing. ‘What’s it like to be married, eh? I can only guess!’

Mumma could have told her for certain, but only got more embarrassed. ‘Ah, Lizzie, somebody could come in and catch us!’

But Lizzie was growing dreamier. ‘I could take a tumble meself with Harry Courtney. He’s a lovely man. The lovelist legs. But if I hung on by both ’is whiskers, ’e wouldn’t notice. Maids don’t exist.’

Mumma was so upset. ‘Now, Lizzie, this isn’t a nice kind of talk! Not in front of the boy.’ As if you didn’t know all about it living at home. ‘It isn’t moral talk at all.’

Lizzie got up snorting, and Mumma straightened the counterpane.

‘Morals!’ said Lizzie. ‘My crikey! I think they was invented by those who’re too cold to need ’em.’

When she had arranged her cap in the glass they drifted back down the stairs. Mumma’s behaviour was becoming more practised: she followed her friend with long strides almost as dashing as Lizzie’s own.

‘I can imagine they go in for great entertainments,’ she said and hoped.

‘They can’t sit ’ere listenin’ to each other’s thoughts,’ Lizzie answered rather sharp.

As Mumma worked it out her eyes were shining: she had a reckless look.

Downstairs, Lizzie lighted a cigarette, and puffed at it from a stiff hand. ‘This,’ she coughed, ‘is where Madam writes ’er letters, and where you’ll get your dressing-down, if you’ve got it coming to you.’

It was a smaller, mauve room, the furniture in black, with streaks of pearl in it. The room even had a kind of mauve scent, from a mass of violets, he recognized from the florists’, in a silver bowl. Shelves of coloured books and photographs in posh frames gave the room a used, though at the same time, a special look. There was a hairpin on the carpet, and in a gold cage a white bird with red beak looking at them with cold eye.

He would have liked to muck around in the room, but saw that Lizzie wouldn’t have allowed it. She was becoming restless, and her fag was giving her trouble. Coughing and breathing smoke, she put it out in a little marble tray.

‘And this,’ she coughed, throwing open yet another door, ‘is Harry Courtney’s study. They couldn’t escape very far from each other even if they thought of trying.’

Mumma moaned: there was such a glare of mahogany, a blaze of crimson leather, and enough stuffed birds in glass cases to frighten the live caged one in Mrs Courtney’s room.

‘All those books!’ Mumma gasped. ‘Mr Courtney must be a highly edgercated gentleman.’

‘Oh, he doesn’t read them! “Sir” is a collector of Australiana. He has to do something with ’is money — and Alfreda sees he don’t spend it on the ladies.’

Suddenly Lizzie could have been sick of it all. Going back into Mrs Courtney’s own room, deliberately savaging the soft, mauve-grey carpet with her heels, she could have been wondering why she had been wasting her time on the laundress and her boy.

She said: ‘In the first situation I was ever in — I was sixteen — the old bloke — ugh! — ’e was said to have a touch of the tar-brush—’e tried to break into me room. I done a bunk from there.’

She was so absorbed in her discontent, and Mumma by all she had seen and was seeing, the sound of motion took them by surprise.

‘Who are you? ’ the lady asked.

She didn’t look, except quickly, at a child. She was staring at Mumma, at her damp skirt, at her white wrists, and red hands.

‘I am Mrs Duffield,’ Mumma answered.

‘Who? Oh — yes — the laundress,’ Mrs Courtney said. ‘We haven’t met, but I remember now.’

Then she smiled a slow sweetish sort of smile. ‘You are showing the laundress the house. I’m so glad, Lizzie, you thought of being kind to Mrs Duffield.’

Under her freckles Lizzie became a dark red. ‘Yes, m’m,’ she barely mumbled.

Mrs Courtney was wearing a veil. She began raising it: to take a better look. The blue with white feathers of her hat slightly stirred with the interest she expressed. ‘I didn’t expect children.’ She looked at Mrs Duffield’s little boy, at Mrs Duffield’s stomach.

With a sudden expert gesture she hitched back her veil on the brim of her huge hat.

‘I congratulate you,’ she said. ‘He’s nice, isn’t he?’ she smiled ‘—a handsome child.’

Mumma didn’t know when she should answer, or what she should answer, and the experienced Lizzie couldn’t help her any longer.

It was Mrs Courtney herself who gave them the clue, moving round her mauve room in the sound of her stiff blue dress, smoothing its wine-glass waist, rearranging papers on her desk, the bowl of violets, a cuttlefish stuck between the bars of her bird’s cage. She said, lowering her chin, her voice: ‘I’ve had a very trying morning.’

So her ‘girls’ knew they should return to the part of the house to which they belonged.

Although he expected her to speak to him, she didn’t, and he followed the others out.

At home Mumma left the iron stand while she tried to remember a dream she had had.

‘All this big house in which twenty other families could live. It was like walking — wasn’t it, Hurtie? — on mattresses. The china doorknobs all beautiful and clean. And a chandelier. Does any of you know what’s a chandelier?’

Lena answered: ‘No.’

Then Mumma took a deep breath. Her face was shining. She was going to try to tell about the chandelier, and he could have run at her to stop her, because the chandelier had blazed up in him again, and he didn’t want the others to share in anything so particularly his: not Mumma, not Lizzie, could have seen or experienced the half of it.