The Vivisector (10 page)

The smoke from the cigar made the remembered scene look more dreamlike.

‘I could have burst,’ Mr Courtney said, ‘I wanted so badly to pump ship.’

You sniggered a bit to show you sympathized. But he didn’t seem to care. He was looking inward at himself trying not to burst in the buggy at night. You had never seen an archdeacon, but you could imagine the old man’s cold-looking hands.

As they came round the corner of the house, away from that part of it where maids’ voices were clanging, the lawn stretched plunging in front of them, with the clump of tall palms, pigeons rising blue as cigar smoke, and Mrs. Courtney coming towards them holding a sunshade over her head.

They seemed to have surprised her.

‘What have you two been up to?’ she asked laughing.

‘Having a talk,’ Mr Courtney said, then drew hard on his cigar.

The green lining of Mrs Courtney’s sunshade flooded her skin with leafy light. You could have gone on staring up at her. From beneath sunshade her blue eyes were less evident, although you felt they were poking around.

Suddenly she altered the angle of the sunshade, and started addressing, not her husband, but her morning caller Hurtle Duffield. ‘I can only apologize for the roses,’ she said with some force. ‘The whole lot should be pulled out. They’re miserable—
miserable.
If only I had time to see to everything. But I haven’t.’

As a visitor, you felt you ought to ask: ‘Doesn’t Mr Thompson? ’

‘Oh,
Thompson!
He has his own ideas.’

Then Mrs Courtney, as though she had done her duty, and to do more would have been boring for everybody, took her husband by the arm, inclining towards him from out of the sunshade. The tips of her teeth showed transparent. Although there was someone else present, it didn’t prevent her giving her husband a deep look. Her friend the boy was too young to need excluding.

At last it seemed perfectly natural to grab Mr Courtney’s other sleeve, and he didn’t try to prevent it. The sleeve you were hanging on by was very dry, coarse, and shaggy, but new and rich, and as you walked, or occasionally hopped, or kicked out at the terra-cotta tiles edging a flower bed, till you remembered the loose sole, the Courtneys were strolling in step with each other, discussing some flat, unimportant matter. The three of them together were like a family.

So they went into the house, into the room with the books which was referred to as ‘the Study’. Edith, all lowered eyelids and knowing smiles, brought a silver tray with morning tea and extra-dainty, oozing scones.

As soon as you had licked the last of the butter off your fingers Mr Courtney got down to business.

‘Let’s see how he can read.’

He was anxious to confirm what he had been told about the laundress’ boy. His clean, rather hairy hands were grasping for a book. Sitting upright, waiting to perform, you might have been wearing the paper frill you had seen round the monkey’s neck.

Mr Courtney dragged out the book he had been looking for; he opened it and said: ‘Now, Hurtle!’

The mottled pages of the damp old book made you feel something like religious. The Courtneys, waiting, looked religious too: they could have been expecting to hear something they had never heard before, as you lowered your head and read from where your eyes picked up the print.

There was an interruption from Mrs Courtney, who had begun to gasp and make sucking noises with her tongue. ‘Really, Harry,’ she said very loud, ‘what a piece to try him out on!’

‘That’s where the book opened, Birdie—by pure accident.’ Mr Courtney answered; the pet name seemed to make things worse.

She sat looking down at her locked hands, then up at the ceiling, the way Mumma did when trying not to cough in church.

Mr Courtney stirred up the pages of the book. ‘There! Try again. I’m surprised at the way you read.’ And again you felt the firm but fleshy hand encouraging the middle of your back.

Birdie said nothing. The mood of religiousness had passed. Although the Courtneys were so well dressed, you could imagine them, like Mumma and Pa, without their clothes, talking it over on the rattling bed.

They were waiting for you to read, though. Or at least Mr Courtney was. He wore a smile as he trimmed a fresh cigar.

So you read the words you found:

 

‘Oh, this is too much!’

Though you realized Mrs Courtney was fidgeting all through this second bit, you didn’t leave off till she called out. She had jumped up and was looking feverish and beautiful. Perhaps it was her anger which prevented the tears from spilling.

‘Sorry, Alfreda,’ Mr Courtney apologized jokingly. ‘An accident again! We’re magnets for the worst parts.’

‘Books don’t open by accident,’ Mrs Courtney said. ‘They open where they’ve been read most. I’ll never forgive myself,’ she continued very quickly, ‘if we’ve damaged this poor innocent—by accident.’

At this moment you could have truthfully fallen in love with Alfreda Courtney, though you didn’t need her pity. Grown-up people were more innocent than they thought themselves.

‘Half of cruelty,’ she was telling herself, ‘is thoughtless.’

He tingled wonderfully as she ruffled his hair, till he realized she might have been stroking air, her eyes vague with other thoughts.

Suddenly she compressed her lips and announced: ‘I must find Rhoda.’

That made Mr Courtney angry. ‘Jove’s sake, she isn’t lost—or not yet! She’s out with Nurse.’

But Mrs Courtney was already fussing across the room, her clothes creating their particular sound and scent. You could only hate the hump-backed girl who was taking her mother away from you.

Mrs Courtney was breathing hard. ‘Nurse, indeed! Dorrie Fox has told me about a young person—a governess—of respectable family—who is most unhappy—lonely with some horrid people at Muswellbrook. This Miss Gibbons could be the answer,’ Mrs Courtney decided as she floated out.

Mr Courtney was much angrier by now, but smiled at you through his beard. ‘The damn book,’ he said, and shoved it back hard in its place on the shelf.

You remembered: ‘I was flogged once at school, but not as bad as that.’

Mr Courtney was interested. ‘What did you do to earn it?’

Because you didn’t want to tell you tried to look sort of frightened.

Mr Courtney put an arm around your shoulders. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’

‘What?’

If your voice didn’t sound interested, it was because, on turning your cheek, partly to avoid the pricking of the hairy coat sleeve, you saw on Mr Courtney’s little finger, a ring. It was of the same kind as the family ring Pa kept in the cigar box. So you had this in common. You couldn’t have told Mr Courtney, because he wouldn’t have believed. You rubbed your cheek instead, just a little, against the coat, because you had been brought that much closer. You could fall in love with both the Courtneys.

Mr Courtney was explaining: ‘Something that might interest you, Hurtle. See if I can find it.’

 

Hurtle was now alone, and glad. He couldn’t understand all that about loneliness and the governess at Muswellbrook. He had wanted to be alone more than anything so that he could explore the Frenchman’s oil painting. So he got a chair, and stood on it. His heart was knocking, more than it had for Mrs Courtney. To touch the smooth, touchable paint.

By reaching up, his fingers slithered over the ladies’ full, old-fashioned skirts, trembled on the bathing-machines, and plunged towards the sea. He was sweating as his fingers arrived at the wet sand and pale water. He would have liked to lick the tempting paint, but the picture was hung beyond reach of his tongue. He could only stand on the leather-bottomed chair pulling his tongue in and out in an imitation of licking.

He heard a tittering behind his back. He turned round. He must certainly have looked a fool.

Her thin mouth was twitching and spitting as she laughed: her hair pink rather than red. She had that little, thin flower-stalk of a neck, its absolute whiteness becoming greenish where the shadow fell, and all over, a sprinkling of tiny moles, with the big birthmark the colour of milk chocolate on one side. He couldn’t see the hump as he remembered: it was turned from him. She looked only a sickly girl, probably not much younger than himself. The worst part was: she had seen him giving himself away in front of the painting.

If she had been a girl at school he would have shown her a good smack in the face, but in the Courtneys’ house, he sensed, you fought with words and moods. Because his instincts for this weren’t yet strong enough, he was still at a serious disadvantage as Rhoda went
hee-hee-hee,
and rocked on the toes of her little thin-skinned pumps.

She stopped laughing. ‘I knew you were coming today.’

‘How?’

‘They were getting ready for you.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you’re a boy. And Mummy thinks you’re so delightful. You can read better for your age than most grown-up educated people. You’re a prodigy. Mummy wants to discover a genius.’

Rhoda tried to make all her accusations sing, and did. ‘Your mother is the laundress. That makes you all the more of a genius. ’ She almost hiccupped with success.

She made him feel sick sad. Worse still, as he was putting back the chair in the first place from which it had come, the loose sole of his boot doubled up between his foot and the carpet, and she noticed him stumble.

‘Fancy letting you go out in a pair of boots that need mending!’

She made him remember that his clothes were darned, and that he had a patch on the seat of his pants. But he was stronger than Rhoda Humpback Courtney. He was the stronger by his mother’s tubs of blued water and her mauve, white-crinkled hands.

‘You’re a little turd,’ he said.

She couldn’t think of better than that: she could only come very close to him, her small face swelling with hate.

‘Does your mother like you?’ he asked as coldly as he was able.

‘Of course she does!’ she said with a grand conviction; but added in her own voice: ‘She whipped me with the riding crop. With the bone handle.’

‘What for?’

‘Because I didn’t lie on the board. Dr Marshall says it’s going to improve my back. But I can’t lie there all the time.’

They were united for a moment by truth and silence. Outside the big windows the blue bay curved, the big soot-dark trees were pressing in on them. He would have liked to draw Rhoda. He knew how he would paint her, if only he had the paints. He could feel in his fingers the sticky pink which would convey her frizzed-out, girl’s hair.

But Mr Courtney came back with a little gun. It was brand-new, you could see. A toy, or a boy’s gun. Inside his beard and English suit, Mr Courtney—Harry—was acting as excited as a boy who had found it.

‘Jove, Hurtle,’ he said, ‘isn’t it a beauty?’

Rhoda turned away, prepared for them to ignore her. She didn’t look at all put out, as though she wasn’t interested in boys or guns, and knew she could get her own back any time she liked.

Because it was expected of him, Hurtle followed out to the edge of the lawn. He was still too close to the painting to share Harry’s enthusiasm for a gun, neat and shining though it was.

As you watched, Harry loaded. There was a pigeon clattering out of a palm. Harry took aim, his shoulder muscle bulging out of proportion. He shot at the curving pigeon, and missed.

‘Need to practise,’ he mumbled into his beard, working his shoulders as though to shrug out the rheumatism. Then remembering, he looked down: ‘You’ll soon get the hang of it. In a paddock full of rabbits, you can’t miss.’

‘There aren’t any paddocks full of rabbits.’

‘Not here. At Mumbelong.’ Mr Courtney’s voice had descended to a man’s serious level; his eyes, too, were serious and moist.

Hurtle stood kicking with his sound boot at the springy mattress of lawn. He had blown his cheeks out to match Mr Courtney’s seriousness. He wasn’t going to destroy a vision by introducing anything real. He wouldn’t say a word, because he knew from experience that impossibilities can be enjoyed in spite of their impossibility. So they were catching the night train, like the time Mumma left in a hurry to visit someone sick. Tunnels couldn’t get blacker at night. He sat beside his friend, sharing his overcoat.

‘Harry?’

Mrs Courtney’s voice, trying to be natural, sounded coldly from the veranda; it sounded more educated than ever yet. Even Mr Courtney was startled. Rhoda had come out from the study to be with her mother because she expected something to happen.

Mrs Courtney was staring at the gun. Anger had enamelled her eyes. She could have been going to rush out, not at all ladylike, and grab the thing, and break it in half; when she changed her mind apparently. She started twiddling a little useless handkerchief. The blazing blue died out in her eyes: in their new misty thoughtfulness they looked almost grey. Although they were still fixed on the gun, she was thinking beyond: she seemed to have decided the gun didn’t exist.