The Vivisector (21 page)

It was one of the greyest days, pierced by black monuments. Hurtle lost the others for a moment: they had all floated apart in the drizzle, the sound of wheels revolving in wet, the tramping of galoshes; when he found himself staring into a display window of horrible purpose. There was a little, brown, stuffed dog clamped to a kind of operating table. The dog’s exposed teeth were gnashing in a permanent and most realistic agony. Its guts, exposed too, and varnished pink to grey-green, were more realistic still.

The first wave of shock hadn’t broken in him when Rhoda arrived at his elbow. ‘What is it?’ she gasped from out of the drizzle. ‘Why—oh, poor
dog!
’ Normally she didn’t care for dogs: they dirtied her clothes, and sometimes knocked her over; but from her anguish now, she herself might have been stretched on the operating table.

Maman came up. Rain had upset the texture of her furs. Her lips were parted in what had begun as a smile. She stopped in front of the plate-glass. Her teeth looked older than the rest of her.

‘There!’ Maman screeched, baring her teeth wider at the stuffed and varnished dog. ‘Ohhhh! That is what I should never forget! But did. The vivisectionists!’

A crowd was gathering to watch and listen.

‘There’s nothing so inhuman as a human being. We must never rest.’ Maman was calling an army into action. ‘Do you understand?’

The crowd couldn’t very well. Maman couldn’t either, except that she had been guilty of the sin of neglect.

‘I wish Daddy were here,’ she whimpered.

Then she began to gather her fatherless children by the elbows, hustling them towards the kerb; she could rely on nobody; her musquash and velour had become most inadequate.

Heaped together at last in a cab, they might have enjoyed the comfort of warmth and closeness if Maman’s conscience hadn’t got to work again. ‘I believe that horrifying object was given us as a sign. It’s time we left for home. I’m wasting my life—while so many defenceless creatures are being heartlessly destroyed.’

It reminded him of the planchette: a drunken and accusing scribble; though Maman wasn’t drunk, only frightened. Rhoda’s face had clamped down white on the thoughts behind it. He, too, felt frightened, and wished they might be given a sign more consoling than the agonizing dog.

Maman missed dinner because the experience had brought on one of her migraines. Hurtle and Rhoda went down together, to the almost empty, unemotional grill room, where they ordered fried whitebait in little potato baskets, and drank lots of water while waiting. Hurtle could see themselves at a distance in one of the big gold mirrors, their reflections lit by the pink-shaded lamp on their small table. Inside the grotto made by the gilded curlicues of the mirror-frame, they sat looking rich, protected, and overdressed.

He was so shocked he felt his nerve-ends must be waving inside him like hair.

He looked away from the reflections, at the actual Rhoda, and deliberately said: ‘What are you supposed to be tonight—a Christmas tree? It doesn’t suit anyone so stunted.’

Rhoda pretended not to have heard, and went on rolling bread pellets, which came out grey, though her hands appeared clean.

His own behaviour on top of other things hurt and horrified him to such an extent he took up the pencil the waiter had forgotten, and began drawing in the margin of the menu, as he always did when a situation became unbearable, practically as though playing with himself.

Then the whitebait were brought. They were delicious, and he gorged himself. Rhoda too, had an appetite. When the fish was finished, they started eating the potato baskets, though perhaps you weren’t supposed to.

There was Peach Melba after that, which they ordered because they recognized the name. Without the attraction of familiarity they would probably have followed each other in ordering: he and Rhoda, he realized, always did choose the same things. He might have gone into the matter if the syrupy sweet hadn’t begun to make him feel sick. Or the gallons of water they had drunk. Or the memory of their panicky drive in a cab smelling of wet galoshes.

Rhoda could have been feeling the same: she was holding her handkerchief to her mouth; she was teetering, or tittering, or trying not to throw up across the table, over the big beautifully printed menu.

‘You do it on purpose,’ she choked.

‘Do what?’

It was his drawing, in the margin of the menu, of the little tortured dog clamped to the sort of operating table.

‘I was trying to work something out,’ he mumbled.

‘Oh yes, you’re always trying to work something out—on somebody. I know
you!
’

He couldn’t understand why she hated him so.

‘Everybody says—all the girls: Edith, Lizzie, Keep—my parents were mad to attempt it. It could only fail—with you. From where you came.
You!
’

She took up a fruit-knife, and jabbed it into his thigh. It didn’t enter, but felt as though it nearly did.

‘You’re the one who’s mad!’ His voice sounded like that of a boy with the wind up. ‘Somebody ’ull see us.’

He was shaken by the impression he seemed to make on others; it was so wrong: if he could have shown them.

But worse was happening: Rhoda had broken out crying, not the sniffly ladylike whimper Maman sometimes used on father, but a big boohoo.

‘All right,’ he said several times over.

The waiter came and asked, in the tone produced by English servants whatever the occasion: would they care for coffee? They wouldn’t.

On the way up in the lift, a gold cage, carpeted like everywhere else, Rhoda had quietened down. An old man with a hook instead of a right hand stood hauling on a slack soft rope which bumped the lift from side to side.

Then, leaving the lift, Rhoda flashed the knife again. ‘The way you smarm your hair, Hurtle, reminds me of a Darlinghurst butcher boy.’ He might have been more conscious of the wound if he had felt less exhausted.

Maman called from the far end of their suite on hearing them blunder through the outer door: ‘Is that my children?’ Her nose must have swelled. ‘Won’t you come and kiss me?’ Through the dark, carpeted, stuffy rooms and a strong smell of eau de Cologne, they went to do it, bumping against cabin trunks.

The following day Father arrived in response to a wire. He looked both happy and healthy after Scotland and the bulls. Something of a colder, less dangerous climate had freshened his skin. His eyes were clear.

But Maman wouldn’t leave it at that, and Father’s expression soon became involved with her uneasiness.

A few days later, he came in and said: ‘Well, Alfreda, I’ve made the reservations, as that’s what you want. We’re leaving on the third. But it’s most unreasonable,’ he added through thicker lips. ‘Before the Dublin Horseshow. Goodwood, too.’

Maman revived for the first time since the afternoon they came across the martyred dog; when she had kissed everyone she said: ‘Oh, I know I’m right. I have my intuitions. I shan’t feel happy till we’re lying in our own beds.’ Again she made it a mystery: they might have been seated round the planchette; only then, she had been smooth and golden, now her skin was grey and wrinkled as though the fog had got into it.

Rhoda began a little dance. Where anyone else would have galumphed, she made frail scratching sounds. He decided not to look, but couldn’t help hearing.

Rhoda said: ‘I don’t know why we ever went away. Wherever you go, you’ve still got to go on being yourself.’

‘Oh, but darling, you were getting so much out of it!’ Maman was so put out; she liked to have things both ways.

Rhoda mumbled: ‘No.’ Then, raising her voice, she accused: ‘Only Hurtle has got something out of it. He’s learnt better ways of being nasty.’

He turned round. Did she really believe this? Apparently she did. He started to defend himself, but his voice died in a croak. If that was what she believed. But did she? Then nobody would believe in his other, his real intentions.

They returned, though not to the old life. Something had happened in the meantime. The garden, the house had shrunk. The maids who had been kept on to ward off moth and rust were fatter than before and had lost some of their authority. Most noticeably, the chandelier had dwindled and dulled above the hall. The stone steps leading to the lower garden were, on the other hand, more than ever moss-upholstered, and the collapse of the latticed summerhouse during a storm presented a ruin round which the green lightning of childhood still occasionally played, orange fungus glared, and a smell of rot drifted, often sickening, sometimes thrilling.

Against this shimmer of sensation, practical arrangements were being made for the children’s education. It was obvious Rhoda couldn’t be exposed to the robust conventions of a school. Maman had visions of her knocked down and trampled on by a throng of normal, thoughtless girls bursting with blood and health after games. Hurtle didn’t say he thought she might survive. Rhoda was so busy locking up her secret self, she hadn’t time to comment. She looked whiter than ever under the pink hair and lashes, and was perhaps secretly powdering. Her diary she kept locked too.

It was arranged that she should go to the Hollingrakes, who employed a governess, an Englishwoman, for their only daughter Boo and three or four other acceptable girls. The Hollingrakes had made their money out of sugar, and were quick to reject almost everybody in case they themselves shouldn’t be accepted. Maman was almost abject in her gratitude for Mrs Hollingrake’s acceptance.

Boo was a dark-green, smooth girl, well developed for her age, otherwise refined, because her mother was determined sugar should be. The three or four companion girls were well chosen for attainments and prospects. And now there would be little Rhoda Courtney.

Hurtle was preparing to start his first term at the only possible school. As the separation from his family approached, he became moodily indifferent rather than sentimental, for Father was preoccupied restocking Sevenoaks with imported Aberdeen Angus, and Maman had her obsessions.

‘What is wrong with my mother?’ Hurtle asked. ‘Is she sick?’

Father frowned at first; then he cleared his throat and said: ‘No. She isn’t what you’d call sick; it’s her time of life.’ He would have liked to enjoy with his son the luxury of masculinity, but perhaps the boy wasn’t old enough, in spite of long limbs and a voice beginning to shake off the gravel.

Whenever he came across it, his parents’ vulnerability embarrassed Hurtle.

At school they despised him because he spoke English; so he had to relearn their language. Then they respected him for what he had experienced: those Paris prosses!

‘Did your old man know about it?’ the boys asked, gathering round.

‘Did he
know!
He took me to the house. All the girls were lined up. We choose whichever we like the look of. I pick the one with the red hair. Don’t know how much they stung him for. There was music while you wait. And a champagne supper afterwards. ’

Once he began laying it on he couldn’t stop. Each girl, as he saw her, had a Toulouse-Lautrec throat. He could see where the stockings ended and the garters ate into the dollops of flesh.

It got round the school. A group of older boys sent for him. ‘What’s all this about the French prostitutes?’

He had to tell it all over again. Some of the boys were lolling thoughtfully, chewing grass. Some of them had already tried a shave; others still glistened with silky down. Several were looking tight about the crutch.

There was a prefect Hubert Chanfield invited Courtney to walk with him on a Sunday along the creek. Where the yellow banks of dried clay became particularly steep, and the air was no longer circulating, Chanfield started smiling and showing. He asked Courtney to take down his pants. Courtney, when it came to the point, was humiliated by not yet knowing how he wanted to dispose of himself. He was ticking with excitement, though. He scrambled up the bank, clutching at handfuls of white grass, clay still clinging to the roots, and stalked off along the level ground, hands stiff in his trouser pockets.

School was tedious enough; the games he played to show he was able, the lessons at which he forgot what he had learnt; but the holidays were, if anything, worse, in the diminished house with his parents and sister.

Maman had returned to a fury of letter-writing and committees, while continuing to harp on the theme of her wasted life. One of several dazzled spinsters usually present would assure her she was belittling herself.

‘Oh, no,’ she insisted, drawing down the corners of her mouth, ‘I’m frivolous, superficial, ignorant, thoughtless. I don’t say I’m
altogether
without good qualities,’ she added, and the spinsters heard it gratefully, ‘but I have no illusions about myself. ’

Then she would dispatch her satellites on various little missions about the house, at which they were not quite servants, not quite equals; while she returned to her dashing correspondence: her nib could be heard gashing the parchment.

‘Hurtle?’ On one occasion she called him into the octagon, which had been repapered in primrose while they were away. ‘This is something I’d like you to take an interest in—now that you’re coming of a responsible age.’ She clasped her hands as though starting a prayer, her rings shot by candlelight: black candles to match the japanned woodwork. ‘I want very seriously to found our own Australian Society for the Abolition of Vivisection.’

His voice was preparing to croak a protest, not against his involvement in a cause—poor damn dogs—but against his involvement; he could not yet afford the intrusion on his privacy.

‘I shall never forget’, she said, ‘coming across the poor tortured—certainly only stuffed—little dog, that cold wet afternoon. ’ Her rising emotion almost flattened the candle flames.

All right. Hadn’t he too, understood and got the horrors?

‘Heartlessness towards animals’, she said, ‘could be the first sign of cruelty in human beings.’