The Vivisector (15 page)

‘What—Hurtle—you must always—knock!’ She was gasping and frowning: her frowns looked black amongst the powder. ‘But what have you brought to show me, darling?’ In no time she was again offering the part of her she wanted people to see.

He was still so dazed he hesitated to spring his surprise, which remained too private a part of himself, like Maman’s nakedness. Very occasionally she would come into the bathroom and soap and sponge him, but his thing was less private than his drawing.

‘What,’ she said, holding it away from her, ‘is this
me?
’

He began to feel ashamed, not so much of his own drawing.

‘Oh, darling, how clever of you! But I shouldn’t have taken it for me, exactly. Do you see me like that? You’ve given me a melon chest.’

He let her flow on; any possible answers were enclosed by the lines of his drawing.

‘Have you shown it to Father?’ she asked. ‘Father would be amused. He’s so interested in everything you do.’

He didn’t want to show it to Mr Courtney—Father—he wanted to tear it up, turn the light out.

But Maman was inspired.

They swept along the passage. Father was in his dressing-gown. He smelled of soap. He hadn’t yet begun to dress, though his stiff shirt was laid out with studs and links.

‘Look, Harry, what he’s done!’

The drawing made a wind as she thrust it at him.

Harry said: ‘By Jove, he’s got a talent!’

The hot bath had left him lazy and indulgent. On his calves below the gown the hair was curling, and above, in the V which exposed his chest. He was wearing a pair of new shiny leather slippers. His feet were planted wide apart so that he might give a better opinion.

‘Fancy if our son should turn out to be a genius,’ Alfreda Courtney said. She had put her arm through Harry’s. She was leaning against his side as though only she had a right to, while they looked at the drawing, now slightly crumpled.

‘But is it a likeness? I don’t think so. Though it’s most interesting, ’ she said, ‘as a work of art.’

She was still inspired. She would have to show it. Even if she was the victim, it was in a cause.

When Keep had got her into her dinner frock, and she was fully powdered, Alfreda Courtney descended to the servants’ quarters dragging her boy along with her.

She announced: ‘My son has done a portrait of me.’

The girls all buzzed round, excepting May Noble. They went: ‘Mm
mmm
isn’t it look a telling likeness fancy little Hurtle.’

They turned him into a real dwarf.

‘Do you
really
think it’s a likeness?’ she dared them.

She had been basketed up, like the scent bottles, in a latticework of silver.

‘Ooh
yairs!
Well, no. It depends.’

‘You, May,’ she asked the cook, ‘can’t you spare us a moment? ’

‘The sauce might curdle.’ May went on stirring, like she was doing a drawing. She didn’t look at his, but knew. They understood and respected each other.

But he began to hate the curdled drawing.

‘What is the matter, darling?’ Maman asked.

He couldn’t tell her. She was such a long way off from him. She was left standing, her lips working the lipsalve into each other, in the kitchen, in her blue-and-silver dinner frock; tonight there were only a few friends you didn’t have to trouble about.

 

As an outcome Father engaged Mr Tyndall to give drawing lessons, and with this addition to the timetable, Mr Shewcroft was sometimes forced to wait in the hall with his Latin and Mathematics.

Mr Tyndall was slow and clean and dedicated to perspective. Nice families commissioned him to draw portrait heads. He was a silvery old man who wore his tie poked through a ring. Under the skin of his hands he showed up as blue as the legs of skinned chickens. He felt cold and remote if you touched him. If you got him to draw something, for the fun of it, to watch, his drawing was correct and silvery as himself.

‘But that isn’t the way I want to draw,’ said Hurtle.

‘Which way, then?’

‘I want to draw my own way.’

‘They’ll laugh at you if you do. They’ll think you’re either ignorant or pulling their legs.’ Mr Tyndall spoke with conviction as he shaded his own silvery drawing of a hand. ‘Will you mind appearing ridiculous?’

‘No.’ But he could feel himself going red, as he did whenever he told a lie.

He took his pencil, and might have made matters worse by working off his embarrassment on paper, only someone began thumping on the door. It was Mr Shewcroft upholding his rights.

Mr Tyndall looked at his watch. ‘Guilty again!’ he said in his pleasant old man’s voice, which didn’t sound guilty at all.

As for Mr Shewcroft, he never spoke unless he could help it.

Leaving the room, Mr Tyndall seemed to lurch against him with a smile strictly for a colleague; or perhaps it was Mr Shewcroft who lurched against Mr Tyndall. It was almost a collision, with the result that Mr Shewcroft might have lost his balance if he hadn’t found support by attaching himself with three tobacco-stained fingers to the edge of the table; while the guiltless Mr Tyndall cleanly left.

Though a younger man, Mr Shewcroft had retired from being a schoolmaster in favour of coaching private pupils. He was very thin. The skin on his face was large-pored, pock-marked: in some places it looked scarred. Hurtle often wondered whether old Shewcroft knew about the blackheads. He would have liked to give them a squeeze for him. There were mornings when the Latin tutor’s breath smelled like a full ashtray, and worse. He can’t have known and nobody dared tell him about it.

On one occasion Maman had said: ‘He hasn’t
disgraced
himself. He hasn’t exactly
fallen down.
But he does look so unsavoury, Harry.’

‘Poor devil!’

‘Yes, we mustn’t be uncharitable.’ Maman immediately altered her voice, because their boy had come into the room, and she was at her letter-writing.

Now this morning Mr Shewcroft looked his most unsavoury for Latin Unseen. His breath came in fiery gusts. Hurtle decided he might succeed better with the blackheads by digging them out with a little watch key; while Mr Shewcroft remained absorbed, not in the Latin Unseen, but in his own thoughts, some of them so painful they were visibly rising to the surface of his bilious eyes.

Hurtle wondered what would happen if his own mumbling voice, stumbling after Caesar, came to a stop. It did. There was the peaceful sound of doves murmuring or digesting.

‘What is the use of Caesar, Mr Shewcroft?’ he dared ask, though very low.

Mr Shewcroft was chewing on something, like a lump of gristle so big and unmanageable it couldn’t be swallowed; nor could it be spat out, though it was only a boy who would see: so his eyes seemed to imply as they bulged to bursting point, the veins in his neck swelling above the yellow rim of his collar.

When at last Mr Shewcroft spoke, his words were the gristle of words. He sort of groaned: ‘For that matter, what’s the use of anything?’

He began to show his brown teeth, to clasp his always clammy fingers with their bitten nails, till you could hear the bones cracking, and the hands were drained white.

‘You’re a boy. You can’t know. Not about injustice. Probably won’t ever.’ He ground it out, while his terrible eyes looked the furniture over. ‘Always be too flush. You won’t need to listen to what they’re saying about you in the next room. They won’t say it, anyway. They’ll be too respectful of your cash. Well, good luck to you!’

He laughed, only his throat had grown too tight to let more than half of it out.

‘If you’re of no importance, even your bootlaces are against you!’

Hurtle looked down, and one of the twisted old bootlaces had been joined in an untidy knot on Mr Shewcroft’s dusty instep.

You were so embarrassed you didn’t know whether to show him the new penknife the present from Father or tell him something or tell him—what? Till you remembered the heart going
chuff chuff
how you behaved to those who were sick or broke or in any way bashed about you remembered at least how it began in Mumma’s words.

‘Don’t you believe in God, Mr Shewcroft?’

‘Good
God!
’

Mr Shewcroft laughed. His face turned green. Then he grew very quiet. He got up and, walking on a curve, his curved body left the room: probably gone to the lavatory.

Hurtle put in time drawing. It was a comfort to watch the drawing grow. Of the great eye. It wasn’t Mr Shewcroft’s eye; it wasn’t his own: or perhaps it was his own, from looking at it so often in the glass. Anyway, there was the Eye. It might have started accusing him if he hadn’t looked over his shoulder to find Lizzie had stuck her head in, looking very pretty in her crisp cap and freckles.

‘Your teacher’s gone,’ she said. ‘Left the front door open. Shickered worse than usual.’

Lizzie’s mouth showed such contempt in the way it formed the word, he could only share her attitude. He laughed back uglily, to let her see he was in the know.

But he kept remembering the knitted, twisted bootlace. He grew troubled, and finally afraid: because Mr Shewcroft didn’t come again to give the lessons.

Maman said: ‘Oh yes, poor man, he won’t come; he’s sick.’

‘But what’s he got?’

It was an afternoon of rain. The windows were plastered with skeins of rain; beyond them in the dark-green garden long wet bending wands were tangling with one another.

‘He won’t come,’ Maman repeated.

He noticed her hair had grey in it, though her face was young, her lips moist. She touched her hair.

‘Shall we play a game?’ she asked. ‘Where’s Rhoda? Find Rhoda. Get out the cards and we’ll play a game of grab. I don’t know where that Miss Gibbons
hides
poor little Rhoda. I never set eyes on her.’

When Rhoda was found they played, and the reds had never looked so brilliant as now, with rainlight touching them up. He was winning. Rhoda cheated. Nobody cared: it was too wet and Maman soggy in the nose.

Herself a humpbacked queen, Rhoda shot out a card, and asked: ‘Does Mr Shewcroft have a wife?’

‘He was a single man,’ Maman said, looking closely at the cards.

Hurtle almost always won. Cold behind the knees and feeble at the wrists since Maman put Mr Shewcroft in the past, he was full of shame. He dreaded something. Someone would notice his goose-flesh if he didn’t distract their attention.

He laughed, his teeth chattering; he said: ‘Old Shewcroft was too ugly—all those pocks—blackheads. And breath! No one would want to be cuddled by Shewcroft.’

Rhoda shrieked, and made the most of it to cheat.

‘Don’t be vulgar, Hurtle,’ said Maman, though on a sunlit day, and in a pretty dress, she might have enjoyed his funny remarks. ‘It isn’t kind, darling.’ She sniffed at the cards; she said her cold made her look an awful sight.

‘If I was to draw old Shewcroft I’d draw him as a sort of Jack of Clubs. A thin Jack. Jumping off the roof.’

Rhoda giggled very high. ‘Why jumping off the roof?’

‘Because he was a bit
mad!
’ He shouted it.

He was winning as usual. It was fortunate at this point, because Maman could pretend not to have heard. Probably only he had heard. Rhoda was grizzling because she had lost.

‘Why does Hurtle always win?’

‘There are more worthwhile ways of succeeding, Rhoda.’ Maman was trying to console her.

While he could only think of escaping from the room. He must.

‘There was a man I knew,’ he began.

To be truthful, there was a man Pa had known, a coalheaver in Foveaux Street, who had cut his own throat for some forgotten reason. There was blood all amongst the coal dust.

‘Where are you going, Hurtle?’ Maman called.

But he wasn’t prepared to answer, and nobody would prevent him going.

After collecting what he needed he went upstairs to his own room. It took him not much above an hour to do what he had to. Then he switched off the light and lay in the dark shivering with exhaustion, excitement, fright.

She came, of course, as he expected, dreaded.

‘What are you doing, darling? You’re not unhappy, are you? Not thinking morbid thoughts, I hope? I don’t want my boy to grow up morbid.’

‘I’m not your boy.’ He made it sound as cold as he could.

She was feeling round the darkness for him.

‘Hurtle?’

He punched out, and hit something soft.

‘Then I shan’t feel sorry for you! Not a bit,’ she said very dry and angry. ‘You’re a cold, cruel, nasty little boy at heart.’

As though to illustrate her change of mind she went and wrenched at the switch beside the door. They were both wincing in the sudden light. Then he watched her get the horrors.

‘You abominable child!’ she almost screamed. ‘Where did you get the paint?’

‘In the toolshed.’

Still lying on the bed, he couldn’t resist taking a look at what he had done.

‘And
red
paint! If we had paint in the toolshed, I can’t think why it was red. Black—yes, I can remember. But what use can we have had for red? I wonder if your father knew. Nobody,’ she said, ‘ever knows or cares. I am the one who has to think—to bear the brunt. We shall have to get the wall repapered.’

She was so vexed she flung out her arm and knocked off the silver lustre jug. Against the carpet it looked like so many pieces of looking-glass. At least the jug had been empty: no flowers since the day of his arrival.

But he was too far off from Maman’s rage. As he lay looking at the wall he almost wasn’t listening to her. It was as though he lay at one end of a tunnel looking at his painting-drawing at the other: its brilliance was increased by distance.

Until now, there hadn’t been time to appreciate what his desire had driven him to do: his body, his thoughts had been too much worked upon. Now he wondered why he had done it as he had, when he meant to show poor black ‘Jack’ Shewcroft jumping off the roof, and here he was sprawling in the coal dust, like the coalheaver from Foveaux Street, the blood running out of his cut throat, through his veins, and from his heart, which was like a little fountain squirting from his chest. That was the way the idea had worked out.