The Vivisector (13 page)

At once she suggested: ‘Come and we’ll look at your room.’

Mr Thompson had gone ahead carrying the box on his shoulder. The shirt, rucked up under his braces, looked rather dirty for so grand a house. Mr Courtney, your father who wasn’t, slipped away as though he really was.

The room to which Mrs Courtney led, if not exactly large, was very large for one person. The walls, so solid, so white and untouched, had something suspicious-looking about them.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ she asked.

‘Feeling the walls.’ If he had been free he would have liked to cover them with great curves of bird-flight.

‘What an idea!’

She began to laugh as though she wouldn’t get over it, staring at him in such a way he felt he must be looking very odd, in this foreign room which would never be his.

At home in Cox Street there was too much noise, too many children, for anyone to try guessing at your private thoughts. If he spoke to Mrs Courtney now, it was only to protect these thoughts. ‘Who is that?’ he asked, though he wasn’t particularly interested in knowing.

‘That is the portrait of an officer who came here, I believe, with the First Fleet.’

‘Was he a relative?’

‘Oh, no,’ she said, and the more vaguely, sighingly: ‘No.’

Almost at once she changed her tune and asked lightly, prettily: ‘I hope the room’s masculine enough?’

She was moving a little jug full of flowers backwards and forwards on the chest of drawers. The reflection on the polished surface of the chest was a bright ball following the little silvery jug.

‘What is it?’ he asked, fascinated by the jug.

‘Silver lustre. It’s rather rare and valuable, so you mustn’t be rough with it. I’m only leaving it here because I want you to like beautiful things.’

The skin round her eyes was darker than he had noticed it before, her smile more wrinkled, because of course she was old, as well as rare and valuable.

‘You’re not very talkative today,’ she complained. She was looking at herself in the mirror, making a mouth like a pullet’s arse the moment before it drops the egg.

If he was not talkative, it was because she asked things he felt stupid in answering.

‘Now I expect you’d like to unpack your belongings, while I have one or two duties to attend to.’ She rattled away very smoothly, and he wasn’t convinced by any of it. ‘Then we must show you the nursery, and the schoolroom where Miss Gibbons will give you your lessons—you and Rhoda.’

She patted him before she left, and he could tell that, now she had got him, she didn’t know what to do with him, but hoped the nursery, the schoolroom and Miss Gibbons would take care of him, or if all these failed, then Rhoda might solve the problem.

When she had gone he began, as she had suggested, to unpack his things, and found they no longer belonged to him. They were, in fact, taken away from him very soon. It would have been ridiculous, he saw, to mourn them, and in any case, there remained what they could never take away, whether he would have liked it or not.

 

He discovered there were periods when the Courtneys who had bought him would not expect his company, when it was like living in a different house, almost in a different part of the town. At mealtimes, for instance. In the centre of the nursery, a large, white, light, but rather cold room in spite of a fire behind the high fender, a round mahogany table of massive legs had been laid with the cleanest cloth he had ever seen. An ammoniac sensation spread from his nose up to his eyes as he remembered that Mumma must have laundered the cloth. He had no time for more than this sensation, for seeing Rhoda standing the other side of the table, fiddling with the laid cutlery and wondering what else she might do. It was the first time they had met since his coming to the house to live. Mrs Courtney had been too busy explaining all the rules, which were so many he hadn’t listened after a bit. Mr Courtney had shown him the lavatories he might use, and those were frightening: all that china and gurgling water; you hoped you wouldn’t shit on the seat.

While remaining silent, Rhoda began jabbing the cloth with a fork as though to draw attention to herself.

‘Guess what!’ he said, because she made him sick.

‘What?’ She was unable to resist the moves of the game.

‘You’re my sister.’

‘Urchhh! I’m
not!
’ She flung down the fork, which bounced and clattered against a plate.

‘You must be,’ he said, ‘if they’re my father and mother.’

‘I’m not! They’re not!’

Her white skin had turned so red. Her pale blue eyes hated him.

Then she said: ‘You’re common.’

He had never heard such a zinging in his ears. He went round the flaming table. He had meant to punch her in the teeth, but she frightened his fist into a hand, which landed rubbery, though hard rubber, about where the birthmark the colour of milk chocolate was plastered on her neck.

Rhoda opened her mouth to scream, but no sounds came out. She was pale with rage, pain, fright; it was impossible to tell which; but he knew that he was frightened. The sickly little mole-covered thing might have died of the blow: she was so delicate, they said.

When suddenly her teeth had got hold of one of his hands. He was too shocked and pained to remember what to do.

‘You mustn’t bully me,’ she said, looking at him with those pale, swimming eyes. ‘I’m a sick girl.’

What he might have said done next he only half imagined she might have stuck the fork into him he was weak at moments.

Fortunately the door opened and Lizzie came in with a tray.

He would have liked to pour out on Lizzie how he had left Cox Street, and everything that had happened since, but he saw she was going to ignore the part of him she already knew.

‘Well, you children, I expect you’re feeling rather peckish,’ she said, lowering her eyelids, looking down her nose, and speaking with Mrs Courtney’s voice.

So he decided to play some of Lizzie’s game. ‘What’s those long green things?’ he asked; because they looked no more like real food than Lizzie’s voice was a real voice.

‘Why, that’s sparagus!’ His ignorance made her even more superior. ‘Some of what the ladies didn’t finish at madam’s luncheon yesterday.’

Rhoda was showing no signs of their recent shemozzle. ‘I’m not the least bit hungry,’ she said. ‘But Hurtle,’ she said, giving him one of her mother’s looks, ‘has been on a long drive.’

‘He’ll be able to satisfy his appetite,’ said Lizzie, ‘with all these good things ’ere.’

‘But
She’s
late! She’s always late, except when you want her to be.’

‘Don’t matter,’ Lizzie said. ‘That’s what the hot-dish’s for.’

She had unloaded a leaden-coloured, heavy-looking dish with a very noticeable underneath.

‘What is there?’ Rhoda dragged the cover off the dish; she had to know. ‘Brains?
Brains!
I hate old boiled brains!’

‘Miss Gibbons will decide about that,’ Lizzie said, and left.

It was very still.

When Rhoda looked at him it was almost an invitation to be her brother: she so much disliked brains and Miss Gibbons.

‘She came on Tuesday,’ she said. ‘She’s silly.’ Then she remembered, tightened her lips on the laughter her thought had roused, and came hurrying, skipping, or however it was she moved; he didn’t like to look too hard because Rhoda was a deformed person.

When she had arrived close to him, she told: ‘She had a photo on the dressing-table which makes her cry. I knocked it over.’

‘Did the glass break?’

‘No. But it made her cry.’

He was more interested in Rhoda: her face reminded him of the little quivering springs and things inside a clock he had once opened.

‘He’s a man,’ said Rhoda, ‘from somewhere—Cobar.’ She ducked her head, and giggled. ‘She’s so
silly!
She wears a big floppy bow on her blouse. A green bow!’

Suddenly she paused, and put on a religious face. ‘My mother says she’s terribly well educated. Her father’s a clergyman. They sent her to one of the best schools, and must have skimped to do it—or someone helped. Her name is Sybil. I saw it written in a book.’

He was tired of the governess: he was too hungry, and at the same time the brains looked so unpromising. He kept on remembering their white, boiled look with the network of pinkish-brown veins when Rhoda tore the lid off the dish. Sinking your teeth in Rhoda might very well feel like biting into soft white brains.

So although he continued looking at her, he was not particularly listening to what she had to tell.

Presently someone came in.

‘You are Hurtle,’ the person said. ‘I hope you will be happy. Are you hungry?’

It could only be Miss Gibbons, because she was wearing the green bow. She had a smile which flickered on and off, thin and trembling.

‘It’s old brains!’ Rhoda bawled.

‘Very nourishing, too, Rhoda,’ Miss Gibbons said with a conviction that didn’t convince.

In fact she was in such a twangle she started something in himself. Rhoda was at least boiling so hard she didn’t notice.

The governess called for grace: ‘... for what we are about to receive . . .’ She got through it quite professionally, no doubt because she was the daughter of a clergyman.

When they looked up there was a map in water spread across the tablecloth. Rhoda must have unscrewed the cap from the hot-dish.

‘Why do you do it?’ Miss Gibbons was panting. ‘What have you got against me?’

Rhoda looked down at her plate.

You could hear Miss Gibbons palpitating.

Hurtle loved her, and she wouldn’t know. She couldn’t know he was going to draw her sooner or later. He loved the hair at the nape of her neck: it was so faint it was only a dark smudge on her skin.

Rhoda said the brains would stick in her throat. ‘You’ve got to feed my animals first. Nursie always fed the animals.’

Miss Gibbons hung her head over her clasped hands. Though grace was over she continued to behave as though she was praying.

‘Go on! Like I told you!’

Then Miss Gibbons got up and offered a spoonful of brain to each of the toy animals arranged in the compartments of the nursery overmantel.

Rhoda watched to see whether any of her toys would be overlooked: in concentration her head drooped, her eyes looked drowsy.

‘Go on!’ she said. ‘The camel! You missed out the camel on the other side.’

Hurtle thought Miss Gibbons was a fool to put up with any of it. On the whole he despised, he didn’t love, the tall young woman. Then again he pitied her. He pitied himself at the great white nursery table opposite the strawberry-coloured Rhoda. He remembered Mumma, pale as brains from the strain of laundering the nursery cloth. He bit into the inner tenderness of his lips.

‘What is it, Hurtle?’ Miss Gibbons roused herself to ask.

 

That evening at dusk a wind from the south threatened the suffocating warmth from the fire they kept stoked behind the nursery fender. The wind blowing through the grander rooms drove the cigar smoke ahead of it and thinned out Mrs Courtney’s perfume. Edith and Lizzie, scuttling to fasten windows and doors, looked as though they only half believed they would prevent whatever they were expected to. As the long wads of ink-blotted cloud passed overhead, unravelled, then matted thicker than ever, the garden, though stationary, was slowly being poured into fresh, coldly boiling forms. It was not yet raining, but the wind in the leaves made them look a liquid black.

Rhoda said with the moist breathlessness he had begun to recognize as hers: ‘Let’s go into the garden. I’m not supposed to. Because of the damp.’ In her feverish revolt she was almost jerking the doorknob off.

He followed her out. The wind hit them. He filled his lungs, excited by his own expanding body, his almost power over flying cloud.

Rhoda, on the other hand, he saw, was gasping. She was advancing sideways. Her hair was being lifted in little pink, steamy streamers. The birthmark looked porous on her asparagus-coloured neck.

‘This is
my
garden,’ she shouted.

She sounded so shrill and electric he realized she too had some important part in what was happening: in tortured trees and ink-stained cloud.

At the same time, what Pa called ‘common sense’ made him shout back: ‘It isn’t! It can’t be yours! It’s the Courtneys’ garden, isn’t it?’

It sounded as though Mr and Mrs Courtney were nothing to do with either of them.

‘No.’ She grabbed his hand; the wind was almost blowing her away. ‘They don’t know half of it. They’re never here.’

Rhoda led him deeper into the darkening garden. There were stone steps, the moss so thick in places his feet felt they were trampling flesh. It disgusted him, but she couldn’t see it. She was interested only in what she had to show him. Each time she spoke he could feel her moist little fingers twitching on his hand.

‘Those are guavas.’ She tried to make it sound like a secret.

He picked one from out of the sooty leaves, but it made his mouth shrivel up.

She was enjoying it all so much, she didn’t notice.

‘And custard apples. They’re too green to steal. The boys can’t see them amongst the leaves.’

‘What boys?’ he asked.

‘Larrikins.’

Was she trying to show him he had changed sides? He felt uncomfortably guilty, and tried to get rid of her hand; but again she didn’t seem to notice, or didn’t want to. She clung on. She was leading him. They were walking over fallen custard apples, through a scent of crushed insects, or sickly fruit.

‘All these custard apples,’ his surprise moved him to remark, ‘you didn’t pick them, and they fell off. They’re rotting.’

‘We didn’t pick them because we didn’t want them.’

‘Then it wouldn’t matter if somebody else took them, would it?’