The Vivisector (22 page)

Actually Maman didn’t care for animals. She had never kept them because she was afraid they might make demands on her time. But in her present emotional state they seemed to have touched her obsession with hurt.

‘What is Rhoda?’ she suddenly asked.

He didn’t know. If he had known, probably by now he wouldn’t have told; the whole situation in the little stuffy familiar room had grown too murky.

To add to it, Maman had started crying. ‘Rhoda—’ she sobbed—‘we must all—
all of us
—fight against every
form
of cruelty—resist our passions.’

She could have forgotten he was standing there.

‘At least I shall pray for it,’ she gasped, and blew her nose.

The scene was over, it seemed.

 

Maman had always encouraged the habit of prayer. When they were young children she would sometimes remember to hear their prayers on her way to dinner, and the words would breathe a perfume, they would start to glitter with the fire of precious stones; while in her absence, the same words remained colourless, disinfected, as in the churches they visited before Sunday dinner when nobody had a cold.

Now Maman, in her crusade against cruelty and her own shortcomings, became more determined in her churchgoing. She had a visiting-card in a slot at the end of the pew: her own personal card, because Father joined them only at Christmas and Easter. Rhoda went. Hurtle went in the holidays. Maman wore dresses certainly more sombre, but no less sumptuous than in her frequently regretted frivolous past.

For church she mostly wore a veil, which she threw back over her hat before kneeling. Hurtle liked to look sideways at her face, at her splendidly proffered expression of remorse. In his preoccupation with the work of art, he would forget she was his mother. She powdered thoughtlessly at times, which increased her headachy look. Her lips were extra pale, for Sundays.

And Rhoda, her sharp chin propped on the woodwork, her eyes shut tight, what did Rhoda pray about? The removal of her hump? Or did she simply shut her eyes and hope that church would soon be over?

At thirteen he had prayed sincerely, persistently, at times with passion: he begged to be allowed to witness some kind of miracle. By fourteen he had lost the faith you were supposed to have in prayer, just as he had lost control of his voice. His face was a dreadful mess, not that other people looked at it except to remind him of his pimples: ‘Don’t, dear, they might turn septic.’ He sat in church stroking his soft, silly shadow of moustache, not so much sulking at God as contemptuous of all the kidding going on around him; till a fragmentation of light, or the illumination of a phrase, or some simple irrelevant image, a table for instance, cropping up in his own mind, started him tingling electrically, afraid he might never be able to pin down his own insights, let alone convey them to others.

The Sunday it occurred to him that God didn’t exist he was his own dynamo, his pride didn’t come to his rescue. With nothing but the sound of his heart to fill the gap, he looked down at last at his flies, to see whether his anxiety might be visible to anyone else.

He was fourteen the year they returned from Europe: not long after, war broke out.

Maman was standing at the top of the stairs nursing a hot-water bottle. ‘Thank God, neither of my darlings will be taken from me,’ she announced in a loud voice. ‘Harry is too old, and Hurtle still a baby.’ An outburst intended for her own relief, it must have been heard by everyone, for the house had the ears of maids and children.

‘Not that I shan’t suffer for the others.’ She clutched the rubber bottle tighter to her bosom. ‘As though they were my own.’ She did want to atone for something. ‘Ohhhh!’ she moaned, holding up her throat to be cut.

Father, who wasn’t all that old, dashed up the stairs like a doctor and took her by the wrists. ‘Come on now, Freda. Control yourself, or they’ll hear you,’ he warned in a low vibrating voice, which everybody did hear.

‘Nobody understands,’ she complained. ‘You don’t! Don’t touch me, Harry! Not after those beastly women.’

‘Which women?’

‘Your mistresses!’

‘Name one.’

Instead, she dropped the hot-water bottle, and Father picked it up, and shoved it back in her arms as though it had been a doll. He was red in the face from stooping. Then they were mumbling kisses at each other before going their separate ways in the subsiding house.

Father was fifty-two by the passport, but grew older by encouragement. He sagged in the leather armchair after dinner, the snores trickling out of his mouth. He had shaved off his beard to meet the fashion. He had a thick neck, with a full vein in the side of it: their father of veins.

Something about him Rhoda must have found repulsive. When he slapped her on the behind as though she had been a little girl, she spat back at him: ‘Don’t ever do that again!’ Like the young ladies in church, she could have fainted and been carried out, but perhaps she wasn’t old enough.

It was a half-world, in which they all saw the guns ejaculating blood.

Maman protested: ‘Why are you looking at me, Hurtle?’

He wasn’t just then, and that was what she resented. She was also perhaps afraid he was no longer her little boy; for safety’s sake, she would have liked to keep him permanently twelve.

Whenever she thought about it Maman was frantically indisposed, nursing the hot-water bottle: the landings and hall smelled of rubber; but between whiles her energy wouldn’t leave her alone. She rushed at the telephone and almost wound the handle off: to organize. She organized Mrs Hollingrake and her circle into making miles of wisteria out of crêpe paper in Mrs Hollingrake’s own garage to decorate the Allied Ball. She sold buttons for Little Belgium from a little tray in Martin Place; she sold flags for Serbia; she represented La Belle France on an evening of
tableaux vivants
in the Town Hall, and none of those who applauded realized that Maman was so emotionally involved as she sat offering her throat to the knife.

When the performance was over, and everybody paying compliments, her still tricoloured face recognized him, and anxiously asked: ‘Was I all right, Hurtle?’ Did I convince you, darling?’ As if he were a grown man.

Though this was what he had wanted, he wanted it less now that it was happening. He was barely sixteen. He wanted to be accepted by the anonymous faces in a crowd; to be singled out was embarrassing, not to say shocking.

So he put on his surliest voice to answer.
‘Mmm.
Nobody kept properly still. You could see them swaying. You were too made-up.’

‘That is the theatre.’ She couldn’t bear to take her make-up off: it made her feel so professional. ‘The whole object is to heighten life—rouse the emotions. Actually,’ she lowered her voice impressively, ‘I believe the response has been enormous—financially, I mean.’

During the war she fished out an old shawl from somewhere, comforting in texture, ugly in colour—brown; it made her skin look livery. She wore the shawl for quiet evenings at home. She was reading the
Pensées
of Pascal in English, in French too, though more off than on: ‘to get the authentic flavour’.

She preferred to huddle in the chair after putting her book aside, and remember aloud for herself and an intimate audience. ‘There were all those pines round the house. The deadening needles. They only couldn’t deaden the wind sound. Always blowing. The lovely old pines. We used to collect the cones, and shake out the little kernels, and roast them, and eat them. We burned the cones on the hearth. Or in the bath-heater.’

Her face would flush with happiness.

‘We didn’t have many luxuries. Louie used to brush my hair for me, as a treat. Nothing so agonizing as a wind from the south, on frosty mornings, as we washed the parts of the separator. The water was always too hot, and our hands too cold. Poor old Louie! She was a brick. She had to go, after the second mortgage.’

Maman huddled in the brown shawl.

‘I heard she died. Everyone at all close to me died.’

In fact, she had no relatives but Uncle Fred, who visited Sunningdale once or twice, showing his collar-stud, of a glass ruby in a brass claw. At intervals he said: ‘You was always gone on the gingerbread, Freda.’ He drank his tea out of the saucer.

Maman never mentioned her uncle when she reminisced in the comfortable shawl. Perhaps he too had died by now.

She said: ‘Oh, I’m not afraid! Not of death!’

On that occasion she was nursing the hot-water bottle; she looked slightly feverish. ‘You can’t prevent the slaughter,’ she said. ‘Men will always treat one another like animals.’

He was so drowsy he wasn’t prepared for a real claw; when she said, looking at him: ‘You, Hurtle—you were born with a knife in your hand. No,’ she corrected herself, ‘in your eye.’

‘What do you know about what I am?’ If his voice had risen too raucous for the octagon, a sense of injustice prevented him caring.

‘No,’ she suddenly almost soundlessly agreed, lowering her eyelids.

She lit herself a cigarette, which she did very awkwardly. She preferred the men to do it for her, and her boorish son wouldn’t learn.

 

But the holidays were not all oracles and smoke.

‘Rhoda must have a party.’

Rhoda made a sharp face. ‘Why must I have a party?’

‘Why? Because it brings people together. It would be selfish to live only for ourselves.’

It was difficult to counteract the truth, but Rhoda sometimes attempted it. ‘Hermits don’t live for themselves, although they live
by
themselves. I think perhaps I’m going to be a hermit.’

Maman laughed at the quaintness of it. ‘But darling, hermits aren’t little girls!’

She wasn’t, either, you could see.

‘Not in my soul!’ Rhoda was quivering white with her own daring.

Maman moistened her lips. Although in her serious, her more indisposed moments, she liked to talk about the soul, she seemed afraid when others did.

So she decided not to have heard: ‘But you
like
Boo—Nessie—Mary—Vi. They’re your friends, aren’t they?’

Rhoda couldn’t say she didn’t, or that they weren’t.

These were the girls with whom she did her lessons, companions trained to ignore anything that might seem odd or repulsive; they wouldn’t drop their cake, and stare from the other side of the table. Boo, Nessie, Vi, Mary even performed acts of kindness: they offered Rhoda Courtney the expensive presents their mothers had bought for them to give; reaching down, as though they too had developed humps, they put their arms around her; sometimes they shared with her the secrets of their lives.

Hurtle suspected Rhoda didn’t return the compliment.

‘Well, then,’ said Maman, ‘there’s nothing to be upset about. And Hurtle will join in.’

‘Go on! He
won’t!
’

‘Oh, go
on!
’ She liked to think she could imitate a young man’s voice. ‘When the girls are so pretty. And you so nice. I wish my hair was the colour of yours.’ She rumpled him.

His fury made him tremble. He dashed his hair back with his hand. Without her telling him, it didn’t look all that bad, and had been some consolation during the pimples, which he noticed in the glass were gone, if not completely, then almost.

From her other level Rhoda was gravely looking at him. Maman had gone to make arrangements.

Rhoda said, and now they were neither brother and sister, young nor old, male nor female, they were not the dolls parents play with, or rats reared for experiment: ‘I didn’t tell her, but there are some places where you can’t let others come barging in.’

Whatever their souls were, and he was inclined to see them as paper kites, they soared for a brief moment, twining and twanging together, in the pure joy of recognition.

‘But the girls are your friends, aren’t they?’ he interrupted, in a flat imitation of their mother.

At once Rhoda helped him snap the string that had been joining them: she sounded only too pleased to do so. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, raising her chin, ‘Boo Hollingrake’s my particular friend. She’s got the most beautiful figure. Her hair reaches down below her waist. She wants to cut it off, though, and stuff a pillow with it, to send to a soldier at the front.’ Then, still speaking in her trance, still remembering, Rhoda pressed together the tips of the fingers of her left hand, planting them on her hollow chest, under what should have been her left breast: ‘Just here she has something like a crescent moon in moles.’

Rhoda’s own shotgun moles along her chaps looked sadly repulsive in the white skin.

‘Have you seen it?’ he asked hoarsely.

‘She showed me when she was having a bath. She let me touch it, though there’s nothing to exactly feel. Boo,’ she said, still remembering, still entranced, ‘is gold—a sort of golden colour.’

So that he too was drawn into Rhoda’s trance: he saw Boo Hollingrake floating golden in the porcelain bath, and as she floated, ferns stirred in the tepid water, minute bubbles drifted out of crevices; the tropic fruit he had never tasted lolled beneath the circling water, under one of them, just visible, the crescent moon in moles.

Rhoda’s little chalky, pointed face suddenly became frantic. ‘I shouldn’t have told you,’ she gibbered. ‘Boo is my friend. It’s like telling a secret. How do I know you won’t tell Boo?’

She began tearing her handkerchief; a wheezing started in her hollow chest.

‘Not likely,’ he said. ‘How am I going to tell? I’ll never know her well enough.’

But she wasn’t convinced. She went off biting her thin lips. Later, when he passed her room, he saw her writing in her diary.

The day of the party the bell began to ring about three, when Edith stalked towards the front door wearing her starchiest cap. The girls arrived, some in chauffeur-driven motor-cars, the poorer ones by cab, with a whiff of chaff still about their clothes. All the girls were dressed in white with touches of differentiating colour. Boo Hollingrake, he saw from a distance, was wearing a sash in what was referred to as ‘old gold’.