The Vivisector (18 page)

‘If you’re impertinent, Rhoda,’ Father warned, ‘you’ll go to bed before the strawberries.’

‘What’s impertinent? I only said!’ Rhoda was crying; she could cry when she wanted.

‘Jove, my calves are stiff,’ Father groaned.

Maman advised him to rub some liniment in before bed, and she would massage them herself to show what a loving wife he had.

Love was never far distant that night in the dining-room. Only Edith didn’t seem to know about it, as she changed the plates and handed the strawberries and ice-cream.

Rhoda had recovered: she was licking her lips over more than strawberries. ‘May we work the board before we go to bed?’ she was asking Maman while looking at Hurtle.

‘What’s this “board”?’ Something had happened while he was away.

‘It’s far too late tonight,’ said Maman.

Again Rhoda might have shown she was peeved if she hadn’t shared this secret with Maman. They were both looking mysterious.

‘Yes,’ sighed Rhoda, ‘it’s late.’

‘But what
board?
’

They wouldn’t tell: nor would silly Sybil Gibbons when he asked her on the quiet; she was afraid of what they might do to her.

He dreamed a dream Maman was massaging Father’s hairy calves Father began choking Maman she laughed because she loved when you tried to share their love they threw you off they wanted to make the bed squeak. He woke. He could have sworn he had heard it; but beds didn’t squeak at Sunningdale.

It was not until the following evening when they were sent in to say good night that he found out about the board. Rhoda had known all along it would be tonight. She was glittering with sweat where her hair began. She was jumping around inside her dress.

In the mauve-papered octagon Maman was waiting for them. She had arranged a card-table in the centre of the room, on it a kind of little polished board. It had two wheels and a pencil stuck through it. Maman was looking rather limp and far away. She was wearing velvet: it made him shiver when he brushed against it.

‘Now, as I have explained to Rhoda already, there are foolish people who take the planchette too seriously. For us, it’s only a game—an amusing pastime—which can’t possibly cause any harm.’

‘But what’s the planchette?’ That he alone didn’t know was terribly humiliating.

‘Let me ask it the first question!’ Rhoda’s spit flew.

She spread her hand open like a claw, the tips of her fingers resting on the board.

‘Something simple to begin with,’ Maman suggested. She too rested her fingertips on the board: particularly graceful Maman looked, and vague.

‘Come on, Hurtle,’ she ordered. ‘But lightly, lightly! Don’t
press!
The wheels won’t run if anyone’s heavy-handed. We must concentrate, but very, very delicately, through our fingertips.’

Maman was sounding more serious than she had advised. She even closed her eyes.

Rhoda asked quickly, breathlessly in an artificial voice: ‘Will it be fine tomorrow?’

It seemed a waste of a question; but, as they breathed, the little wheels, the board itself, began to quiver and sidle about. The pencil wrote on a sheet of paper Maman had spread on the table.

‘There!’ shrieked Rhoda.

‘Quietly, quietly, dearest!’ Maman shuddered, and held her ears. ‘Planchette may refuse to work if she doesn’t find a sympathetic atmosphere.’

Planchette had certainly written, he saw, what could be read as a spidery ‘yes’.

‘Now Hurtle,’ said Maman, ‘what do you think you’d like to ask?’

He couldn’t think: he felt so idiotic.

Then he asked: ‘What
sort of day
is it going to be?’ Stupid. His jaw felt as though shaped like a turnip. He had only mumbled his dull question, but the board was drawing his tingling fingers along with it.

‘Windy,’ it wrote.

‘Oh, horrible! I can’t bear wind.’ Already Maman could feel it disarranging her hair.

‘Your turn,’ Rhoda told her.

‘What can I possibly ask it?’ Maman wondered.

He didn’t believe that one.

She was settling herself, so as to become completely tranquil, so that she might compose her question. She was wearing yellow, yellow velvet. From closing her eyes, she opened them. She wasn’t Maman: she was again Mrs Courtney, a fantastic stranger, as in the beginning. He thought of the halcyon, of which he had read, and fields of wheat he had seen as a painting in one of Father’s books. She was so beautiful thinking of her question, sitting with her fingers poised extra lightly on the board.

‘Tell me, Planchette,’ she said, through rather a prim mouth, and as though no one was present, not even children, ‘tell me,’ she asked, ‘is there
anyone else?
’

‘“Anyone
else
”?’ Rhoda repeated; because the question didn’t make sense.

It did to him; he couldn’t have explained, but was on the verge of drawing back a curtain.

While the board moved—slowly at first—then violently: bucking and turning corners squealing; their wrists got twisted keeping up with it.

When it had stopped, Rhoda looked. ‘It’s just a lot of scribble!’ Maman didn’t laugh: she hissed. ‘That’s because I was dishonest! ’

‘How—dishonest?’ Rhoda sounded furious and scornful.

He knew Maman wouldn’t tell: she was too relieved not to have been told what she no longer wanted to know.

Afterwards they asked a lot of silly but amusing questions. Seated round the table, their spread fingers touching on the board, they were a family laughing back at one another. Rhoda had a few gaps in her teeth. Maman’s throat rippled under pearls.

Suddenly Hurtle knew that he would ask the question. He hoped the others wouldn’t notice he was bursting trembling with it.

When he had shouted them down, he very quietly asked: ‘What am I going to be, Planchette?’ He added: ‘Please.’

It was the most awful moment of his life, more awful than finding out what the Duffields and the Courtneys had arranged. They must all believe if they saw it written.

The board was wobbling hopelessly. Trundling heavily.

It groaned. But wrote.

Though he was leaning forward to watch and read, Rhoda was so furiously concentrated, she got there before him and shouted in his face: ‘“Painter”, it’s written! What—a house painter?’ exactly as the jackaroo at Mumbelong had said, to be funny; but in Rhoda’s case, she could only be jealous: he would have killed her, but was never able to think of words deadly enough.

Maman said in her calmest voice: ‘Well, then, let us ask, “What
kind
of painter will Hurtle be?”’

The board joggled worse than ever.

Because greedy and jealous, Rhoda was always the first to read. ‘“An oil-painter”!’ she yelled. ‘Somebody must be guiding it.’

‘Why should they be guiding it?’ He fairly blasted her.

‘Because it’s what you want to be.’

‘Children!
Children!
’ Maman pretended she might almost faint. ‘If you insult the planchette, how can you expect another answer?’

That calmed Rhoda, or at least she acted calm. She said in a voice which sounded as though she had a cold: ‘I want to ask it what I’m going to be.’

She did. For a long time the board remained motionless. Serve her right. He thought he might begin to laugh. At Rhoda. The name meant ‘a rose’, too!

The board started some long sweeping runs. Rhoda had closed her eyes tight. She could have been praying, or anyway getting through her prayers.

The planchette was writing all right. Maman looked away, as though the answer might be too private for a second person to read. Nobody dared look yet. He wondered what would happen if they spelled out one of the words you could see written on street walls.

When the wheels stopped creaking Rhoda leaned forward, her neck like a pale green bean-shoot, which he never liked to look at—it was so thin it made him sick with fright and worry: what if it should break off from the hump?

Rhoda was reading: ‘What—“wom—”?’ It was such a spidery writing.
‘“Woman”!’

She might have been punched, like he had once punched a kid too low, in his former life.

‘Someone is guiding it!’ Rhoda shrieked.

‘Darling! Darling!’ Maman was trying to comfort her. ‘What could be a nobler fate?’ Even so, she couldn’t help laughing, and that too had a tragic sound.

He remembered Mrs Burt next door: how her womb fell. Mumma had said she didn’t know why wombs didn’t fall more often, considering the punishment they took.

‘But I want to
be
something!’ Rhoda was mewing like a cat, protesting against her ‘noble fate’.

Then Miss Gibbons came, because it was time for bed, and led away the sopping Rhoda. He was sorry for her after all.

He continued sitting awhile with Maman, like one of the guests who stay on amongst the cigar-ash when everyone is getting sleepy.

‘How does it work?’ he asked. ‘The board?’

Suddenly he knew what it felt like to be a serious-thinking man.

‘Is it electricity?’ he asked.

Maman shrugged, and lowered her eyelids, and smiled a sort of smile.

‘Who knows?’

She didn’t care. She was content to leave it as something mysteriously important they had experienced together.

Then she shuddered. She opened her eyes. She said: ‘It’s time!’ She held out her arms from a great distance and he was wrapped for an instant in the yellow velvet; he was smelling the dry scents of summer; there was a glint of the halcyon amongst the wheat.

After that, he returned into his clumsy body, and she was his mother again.

When he was in his pyjamas, and had brushed his boring old teeth, Miss Gibbons came to him and said: ‘Rhoda wants to say good night. I think she has something to show you.’

More than that he wasn’t told. You couldn’t get anything out of Sybil Gibbons unless you read her diary.

He went into Rhoda’s room, where she was propped up on the pillows like Maman, but wearing a flannel nightie, and on each cheek a dry round patch of something pink. She must have rubbed on some dentifrice. He decided not to notice it.

‘I want to show you something,’ she said, giving him a thin, dark-coral smile.

‘What?’ he asked, pretty sure it was nothing of interest.

She held out her clenched hand at the end of her stiffened arm. At least when she was in bed you didn’t notice the hump, but her arm looked horribly thin.

‘What is it?’ you repeated, like some little kid, while coming closer.

She could have found something. A shell, or something. Or a pebble.

She fanned her hand out wide. All the time it had been full of air.

But by now he was so close she threw her arms round him: to kiss.

There was a light sigh or whimper in all her movements. She smelled of moist flannel, or rubber: the moisture after a bath. And baby powder. Inside it all the steamy scent of Rhoda herself.

When she released him from the kiss she took a deep breath and lay back on the pillows as though she had eaten a satisfying meal.

He was disgusted. In his own room, he had to remind himself Rhoda was his sister. And Mrs Courtney his mother.

Whatever the dreams he dreamed that night they kept on pecking at him, sticking their beaks into his mouth: he woke up next morning feeling shocked he had been so disgustingly disgusted with Rhoda Courtney his sister who had a slight curvature she was going to recover from. He used his fists to rub any remains of disgust out of his gummy eyes.

When he went in for breakfast Rhoda was already messing up her corn and kidneys. They didn’t look at each other, which was more or less their usual habit. After breakfast, before lessons began, they went down the garden together, and that too was usual.

Rhoda said: ‘I had a dream, Hurtle. You were keeping a diary. You had written down what you think of me, and you tried to lock the diary up, but couldn’t find the key. You were furious, because you didn’t want me to read it.’

They were standing by the sooty little guava tree. He began to feel uneasy.

‘But I don’t keep a diary. I don’t have to!’

‘But in the dream. And I didn’t have to look. Because I know without looking. That was what made you so angry.’

He felt more than ever uneasy; even if she didn’t always see, she was a pickaxe on some occasions.

So he changed the subject as hard as he could, and no dreams. ‘One night I couldn’t sleep. I went into their room, and Father was on top of Maman. It was like fowls. Rhoda? You’ve seen fowls?’

His description wasn’t strictly accurate, but out of a sense of—not delicacy—perhaps horror of her hump, he didn’t say: ‘Like men and women in real life.’

‘Fowls,’ he emphasized, ‘without their feathers,’ and laughed to make it sound cruder.

That ought to cure Rhoda. He was breathless from his own brainwave. But she didn’t appear to have understood, or if she had, she wasn’t going to admit. She went on picking at the soot on a guava leaf, and when she spoke she didn’t answer his question.

‘I’m tired,’ she said.

‘But you’ve only just got up.’

Her legs seemed to drag.

‘You’re not sick, are you?’

Her hump looked enormous.

‘I’m just tired.’

After that, they didn’t speak, but dragged back past the
Monstera deliciosa,
which Maman called the Delicious Monster, and the statues at the top of the steps. He was relieved that his thoughts, and Rhoda’s, were again fully clothed.

 

By the time he had turned twelve he was growing so fast his knickerbockers soon wouldn’t button at the knees.

Maman said: ‘Only since my children started growing have I realized how immoral it is to be rich: to be in a position to clothe them adequately at every moment of their growth is very immoral.’

Rhoda didn’t grow, or not enough to notice: it was Hurtle her son she saw when she made remarks like that. Sometimes, to help her conscience, she would postpone replacing his outgrown clothes.