The Vivisector (11 page)

‘Darling,’ she began, and lowered her eyelids a moment to show how seriously she ought to be taken, ‘we must remember he doesn’t belong to us. Mrs Duffield will start worrying about him.’ She had such a soft pink smile.

‘Mrs Duffield? Oh yes, the mother,’ Mr Courtney remembered in a hurried grumpy voice.

They all bundled into the study, where only Mrs Courtney could have told what was in store for them.

She glanced once at the gun after Harry had stood it in a corner. Then she opened out in a high clear voice which reminded you of the voices of the older girls, its tone much more expert though, her clothes so much more complicated, and she chose to speak in a code he recognized by now as the French language.

Possibly Mr Courtney was less good at French. He went:
Wee wee wee;
while Mrs Courtney laughed such glossy laughs, she was so pleased the way things were going. Because you had no difficulty in cracking some of the code your eardrums thundered to hear about your atrocious accent. It was no compensation to discover you were also intelligent and charming. In future he would talk extra bookish at them, imitating Mr Olliphant, just as Mrs Courtney was imitating the French.

He heard Rhoda joining in. ‘It’s always
la petite!
What about
la petite?
’ The sprinkling of moles on her neck showed up like shot when rage or injustice made her pale, while the big leaf-shaped birthmark seemed to flutter.

‘Take him, Rhoda, to the laundry,’ her mother ordered, trying to push them together.

But
la petite
had got the sulks. She wouldn’t, and he was glad: it would have been humiliating to pretend you needed the sour ugly thing.

Finally, it was Mrs Courtney herself who accompanied him, at least as far as the green door. There she stopped, and as she kissed him he seemed to be swallowed up in an envelope of scented flesh. He was only brought round by her jewellery pricking and hitting him.

‘We shall meet again,’ she said.

‘When?’

‘Very soon, I hope. We must organize it!’

Then the green door puffed open, and he smelled the smells of ordinary life.

 

The following day, ironing day at Sunningdale, he was again ready to leave with Mumma although she had paid no attention to his hair.

‘Oh no. Not on yer life. A treat is a treat,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what the Courtneys would think.’

‘But they’re interested in me. I know they’ll be expecting me.’

Mumma looked so ugly in her old braided shapeless black. She smelled of soap and beeswax. She said he was suffering from what was called delusions. He knew he would never make her see the truth.

When next Monday came round, it was his last chance before school began. So he grew cunning. He didn’t take extra trouble with himself, not because he hadn’t hope, it was because he might catch her off her guard, at the last moment slip past her opposition with rough haste and in his ordinary clothes. He was, in fact, full of hope. In his mind he revived the words and silences of Mumma’s own hopes for him. His memory glittered with the moods of Courtneys’ chandelier.

That morning, after the others had run off, he sat dawdling over the last grey slime of his porridge. She was preparing her bundle, with a few of those cachous, the headache powders, the old leather purse, odds and ends she would take with her and never use.

When he couldn’t put it off any longer he said: ‘I bet they asked for me yesterday, and you didn’t tell.’

She laughed in an ugly way he didn’t recognize. ‘Why should they ask?’

‘Because they told me of things we was gunner do together.’ There was no use wasting grammar or accents on Mumma: you had to speak the way she understood.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘ladies and gentlemen
talk!
It’s what they call “being charming”. But what they say isn’t what they mean. Otherwise they wouldn’t get through all they’ve got to do—balls, and dinner parties, and all that. I
know!
’

‘But Mr Courtney showed me a gun. We was going to the country.’

‘I believe ’e’s gone—to one of the properties ’e owns. That’s where ’is interests lie—where the money comes from. A little boy like you would only get in the way.’

She picked the baby up, and began easing up the bundle with the help of her knee. When she was ready, she stooped and kissed you to show her love, but it was a level helping, like she doled out porridge or potato, to keep everybody quiet. If ladies and gentlemen didn’t mean what they said, no more did Mumma.

‘Oh, whoo-aahy?’ he shouted after her when she had gone out the gate.

It sounded as feeble as it was, his voice shining back like that of a little blubbering kid. He couldn’t have done better, though.

She went on, sometimes pausing to easy the baby’s weight. Sep was growing too fast, too heavy, too greedy: the way he would grab hold of her by now she might have been a pudding he meant to guzzle whole.

Mumma didn’t look back from the bottom of the street, only paused to hoist the baby higher.

Then the grey descended inside you.

He wished Mumma and the baby dead. Them all.
Courtneys!
Himself—himself most of all. The chandelier had gone out in him.

The day, beginning grey, spurted a drop or two, sprinkled at last, and settled into an afternoon of colourless rain. In all the time he had to spend there was nothing he could do, except remember the all-over grey street, with himself and Mumma a black stroke at either end: nothing between, unless he could have put a spitting bonfire. He imagined the yard at Sunningdale, with Mumma bringing in the wetter sheets, wet clothes lashing from the lines, looking naked. When she couldn’t get the wash dried on the day when it ought to have been dried, Mumma would start crying and creating; she had to take the headache powders.

During the afternoon he snivelled a bit in sympathy, but broke off on remembering what he thought of her.

Something was blowing up: the big clouds were piling up like dirty washing. It was going to be a wicked evening. Mrs Burt called over the fence: a gentleman driving through Newtown had seen a roof carried away. Because Mumma was still at work, and Pa out with the cart, collecting, it made the kids feel important, if frightened. Only he didn’t feel frightened: he wrote his name on the wall of the front room.

Pa came in at last, as the clouds, bulging worse, began to purple. There were green, bruised colours in the sky, then veins of white lightning. You pressed your mouth against the windows, first one, then another, drinking in the storm.

Some of them began to cry because Mumma was lost in it. And the house smelled cold. It smelled of cold ash. And dark. Somebody should have lit the gas. Pa wouldn’t: he used to say it was the woman’s job. Lena didn’t, because she felt miserable: she had a cold and a gumboil. And you wouldn’t for watching the storm, from purple, to green, then the white veins like in yellow skin. Once or twice, in a white flash, the roofs of Cox Street seemed to billow up. Now he knew what Mumma felt with a red baby screwing its way out of her guts.

She came in through a burst of thunder, protecting Sep, whose head was bouncing against her shoulder. Mr Courtney—so he was there, he hadn’t gone to the country—had ordered Rowley to harness the horses and drive her home. She was wet, even so.

‘Has no one even lit the bally gas?’ Mumma shrieked.

The darkness was whirling with heavy shapes.

‘Jim? Lena?’

Pa’s hand let the gas flare blue, before it grew white and steady in the mantle.

They got the stove going. It roared too fierce, till Mumma damped it down.

‘Well, I’d like to know!’ she complained. ‘And where is Hurtle?’

Lena was sour because she had been told to change the nappy. ‘In the shed—droring,’ she said.

‘No, I’m not. I’m here.’

‘Well, if you’re here,’ Mumma said, ‘you’re the most unreliable of all.’

She was that unjust, but had to make a quick stew: of a little scrag, and plenty of potato; the mildew had got into the carrot.

As she scuffled in the pan she began a dry snivelling, and this was worse than her anger.

Pa asked: ‘What’s got inter yer, Bessie?’

‘Lord knows how I’ll dry the wash down there.’

At one point she had a proper cry, but settled down after tea to Mrs Ebsworth’s ironing. The storm had passed. It was quiet night, except for claws of rain scratching from time to time at the roof. Although you went back to the kitchen after the light was out, to hear what Courtneys had really said, Mumma and Pa weren’t talking tonight. There was only a short, wordless jingling of the bed.

The sky was a watery white by morning. It wasn’t raining, but it hadn’t stopped, and Mumma, mumbling as if she had a mouthful of pegs, said she wasn’t going down there: nothing to iron, because nothing dry.

‘Lucky school hasn’t commenced.’ She used the word ‘commenced’ instead of ‘begun’ because of her respect for education. ‘Yer boots wouldn’t stand the weather. Now stay inside, all of yer. I don’t want any chesty children.’

After the dishes were washed, and Florrie and Winnie helped on the dunny, Mumma herself went across the yard. Under the pepper tree Pa was harnessing the mare. He was wearing a bag across his shoulders fastened in front with a new nail. The water was dripping from the brim of his hat. The pepper tree dripped.

For some reason Mumma wanted Pa inside the harness room.

‘Where are you going, Hurt?’ bossy Lena had to call.

‘I forgot me pencil. I gotter get me pencil.’

He ran across the yard. Hens didn’t seem to mind rain once it got under their feathers. As he charged amongst them, two or three of their sodden bundles crouched low, combs flopping, prepared to be trod.

He got inside the dark stable. Hay and manure made it warm, safe, except the smell of ammonia shot up his nostrils; the shock of it started him shivering.

Through the door into the harness room he could see Mumma already having something out with Pa.

‘
What
about Hurtle?’ Pa didn’t want to know.

‘What we discussed.’

Mumma was making the bed he shared with Will, or at least she was pulling up the horse-rug they used as a cover.

Pa was making out he didn’t understand.

‘You know! Oh, you know all right!’ Mumma was acting as rough as she could, drawing down her mouth and hawking up the words so that she was no longer Mumma, but one of the women outside a public house. ‘About Hurtle’s future. Oh, you know all right!’

She left off shouting and began staring at the wall. It was the wall where you had drawn the chandelier. You had never been able to rub it out, to make room for other things; it was still there, though grubbier. You had drawn over it what Mumma called ‘the Mad Eye’. And now you were staring at each other, eye to eye, through the stable door, only Mumma couldn’t see; she was looking frightened and again like Mumma.

Pa was walking up and down, a scrawny cock, in the wet old sack nailed to his chest. ‘I dunno, Bessie! I dunno what’s got inter yer!’ he stuttered back.

Then Mumma fished inside her front, and brought out a piece of paper. ‘Mr Courtney give me a cheque for five hundred pound.’

Again she hawked the words up rough, so that the shock wouldn’t be too much to bear. If it had been sovereigns she might have chucked them on the floor, and they could have scrambled for them, testing the coins with their teeth, feeling the splinters in their knees.

But here she had only the damp piece of paper to dangle under Pa’s nose.

‘You’re a bloody cow! A bloody mother!’ He might have been going to call her worse, because his usually hollow chest was filled, but he must have remembered he was the father.

‘But what are they gunner say?’ He couldn’t stop trembling; he couldn’t stop looking at the cheque: it might have been a forgery.

He hollered:
‘No!’
once—before putting the cheque in his pocket, an inside pocket.

Pa said: ‘Some of you women never stop to think a man’s responsible for his children.’

Then Mumma let fly, enough to blast the harness-room walls: ‘Oh, the father! The father’s right enough—to get on top—flick flick—then when ’e’s ironed you out, off ’e gets, and there isn’t no more to it, till the congratulations are ’anded out. The father! Does the father know what it is to be a walkin’ pumpkin most of every year? Was ’e ever bloodied, except when ’e cuts ’imself with the razor? Not Dad! Who wipes their little bottoms? Who wipes away the snot? And bears with the bellyaches? I reckon it’s the mother who has the right to decide what is right an’ reasonable for ’er children. That is why I decided what is right for Hurt.’

His name had never sounded so extraordinary as it glugged up through her loose shammy-leather throat.

‘Jim?’

Because Pa had had enough, he was going out.

‘Eh, Jim?’

Pa, who had always been a thin man, seemed to have grown thinner; while Mumma stayed big and flabby even when there wasn’t a baby in her.

‘Only reasonable,’ she called to his back, rounding out the word. ‘Jim? I think I copped another one already.’ Then as Pa unchained the wheel of his cart: ‘I know I ’ave!’

Jim went off snivelling mumbling about his business, leading Bonnie; the rain had turned the brown mare practically black.

Mumma lowered her head against the rain, or the eyes of children burrowing in, as she went back across the yard.

 

Round about five the mare came dawdling down Cox Street. Unaccompanied, reins trailing, she was able to roam from side to side, pulling at the weeds and blades of pale grass which showed through the mud at the edges, or leaves over a garden fence. There was a fair few empties in the cart, though not what you would call a load, so that they slid and clashed, at times almost chimed. The mare knew her way, and was taking it easy, till a gatepost braked one of the wheels as she turned in at her home yard, and gave her a scare.