The Vivisector (23 page)

Rhoda came out to face her friends. Because of her size and shape her clothes were always made to measure, but today she was wearing a dress which looked as though it must have been adapted, and not very well, from something larger. There were so many tucks. It was gathered up in the wrong places. It was full of little holes, though carefully embroidered, which showed the ugly dress was intended for a party; and her white-kid lace-up boots were obviously new, spotless, with a faint squeak.

The guests began at once to whinny and nuzzle, and offer elaborately wrapped presents. There was a smell of young girl in the hall and what used to be the schoolroom. Although he had brushed his hair, and was wearing his best clothes, he kept far enough out of the way.

He heard, then saw, Maman descending on the girls: it took place under the palms, on the lawn. Maman also was wearing white, but more exquisitely gathered, crisp, with a pale blue sash: after all, it was a girls’ occasion.

She was determined to jolly the children and see that everyone was happy. ‘Nessie, what a sweet dress! Isn’t it sweet, Rhoda? One can see Nessie was born to wear clothes.’

Maman moistened her lips. None of the girls seemed prepared to pay her a compliment. With downcast eyes they stood about, toying with battledore and shuttlecock. There was a dull thump as the feathered cock met the parchment.

‘Rhoda, darling,’ Maman called, ‘don’t forget there’s ping-pong too if anyone feels like it. I must go and give Edith and Lizzie a hand.’

Going towards the house she called back as an afterthought: ‘Where’s that Hurtle?’

He was keeping out of it. He went and had a look at his face. There was one gigantic last spot. He squeezed it: the core hit the glass.

‘Oh, God!’ he moaned, as if he hadn’t discovered there wasn’t one.

When he went down, Rhoda and her friends had disappeared, though their peculiar non-perfume lingered. They were nowhere. The garden was choking with the scents of a humid afternoon. Moisture was gathered in crystal beads on Maman’s Delicious Monster.

He sighted the girls finally in the ruins of the summerhouse. In some way they had all been liberated: perhaps it was the smell of rotting from the drifts of dead leaves which Thompson was by now too arthritic to rake up.

Vi was saying: ‘I’m writing to a soldier in Flanders.’

‘Does your mother know?’ somebody asked.

‘Oh, yes. It’s good for his morale.’

They all snickered and giggled, though Vi herself would have liked to treat the matter seriously.

‘There’s a gorgeous
iceman!
’ Nessie spluttered.

‘Where?’
they choked.

‘Ours, of course!’ Nessie was almost strangled by it.

They all began to talk, only Boo didn’t, about Stewart Martin. Everybody had danced with Stewart. Well? They all almost fell on the undulating floor of the half-collapsed summerhouse.

The strange part was: Rhoda acted as though she understood about everything.

Suddenly Boo Hollingrake spoke. ‘I think Stewart Martin’s a misery.’ Her voice sounded surprisingly mature.

Through the latticed light, the other girls looked somewhat stunned. Rhoda was white with shock, or admiration.

Boo was gathering breath, everybody saw, to continue talking. The motions her dress was making seemed to imply experience.

‘There’s a chap,’ she said, ‘one of Daddy’s managers’—she was Q S C—‘a Queenslander’—her breathing had slowed—‘he’s a crude sort of freckled brute—but a man.’

Everyone else was so silent you couldn’t help hearing a thud. The girls peered suspiciously through the lattice of light.

Rhoda said: ‘That was a custard apple falling.’

Nessie Hargreaves giggled high. ‘Have you danced with the Queenslander?’

Boo smiled. ‘He isn’t the sort of man you dance with.’

Rhoda was giggling and jiggling as though she knew all about things. Boo Hollingrake was holding her mascot’s hand.

‘But I
have
danced with him,’ Boo confessed.

The others shrieked.

Hurtle tried to visualize through the jungle how far Boo had gone with this orang-outang. She remained coolly beautiful; all that was visible outside her dress confirmed what Rhoda had already told: she was of a golden colour. Her golden throat and summery arms were splotched with green where leaves withheld the light. Her nose was of such fragile workmanship it was a wonder the freckled manager hadn’t broken it off as a souvenir.

‘I think it would be awful to have a man messing you about,’ said Mary Challands. ‘I’d rather keep my clothes fresh.’

‘People take them off,’ Rhoda reminded.

The girls rocked, for here was their monkey, their mascot, standing naked for their entertainment while still dressed in her broderie anglaise.

Hurtle gushed sweat the other side of the hydrangea clumps. His tense knuckles were blanched as white as the big loose hydrangea blooms. For the money-mascot, to improve her performance, was pointing her toes and holding out her skirt in a little step-dance.

The girls might have gone on laughing for ever if Boo hadn’t raised her head.

‘. . . over there. Over in the bushes. Something moving.’

The silence she got was so enormous her voice came out of it most beautifully: low but distinct.

‘Amongst the hydrangeas,’ she insisted, and they followed the arrow of her finger with their eyes. ‘A man standing.’

‘A man?’

‘Oo-ooh!’

‘Mother! Murder!’

‘There’s a Chinaman jumping on girls out at Watson’s Bay.’

As they ran, shrieking and laughing, Rhoda led them along the paths. They forgot at first, and almost trampled on her. It made them giggle worse than ever, in their breathlessness, and flickering white.

Only Boo Hollingrake wasn’t breathless, because she wasn’t running away. She was walking instead in the direction of the hydrangeas, tearing up a leaf as she came.

‘Declare yourself, you silly coot! Hurtle—Hurtle Courtney?’

They had scarcely spoken to each other. He couldn’t remember her saying his name. He stepped out of the bushes, and a sharp cane, from which a flower must have been amputated, stabbed him in the flies, to make him look more ridiculous, it seemed.

‘What were you doing in there?’ Boo Hollingrake coldly asked; she might have been a governess.

‘Waiting for a chance to jump out and rape one of you girls.’

‘That’s not in very good taste.’ She looked down at the leaf she had been demolishing.

‘Judging by the conversation, I thought you might have found it tasty.’

She had turned, and was slowly, coolly, walking away. ‘Not in good taste at all—and coming from a spotty
boy!
’ she called back.

It was the insolence of her hair, looped up loosely above the collar of her dress, which enraged him more than anything.

He had never run so purposefully. He got hold of one of her arms, and pinned it hard behind her back. It must have hurt.

‘You haven’t forgotten all the good old larrikin tricks,’ Boo gasped, to hurt more than she herself could have been.

‘What larrikin?’

‘Don’t pretend!’

When turned round, she was furiously beautiful. Above her upper lip the down glittered.

He kept on mumbling: ‘I’ll show you “larrikin”! I’ll show you “spotty boy”!’

Then she began laughing. It wasn’t convincing: the muscles were too taut in her neck.

‘Poor Hurtle, you’re such a tyro!’

‘That’s a word you’ve just learnt. You’re showing it off.’

He let her go, though.

‘Oh, I’ve quite a rich vocabulary,’ she said.

‘A tyro amongst hetaerae, eh? Bet that’s one you haven’t come across.’

‘Of course I have! Anyone can read the dictionary.’

‘A corker of a concubine!’ he brayed.

She allowed herself to giggle slightly. ‘Don’t be funny!’

She was moving away, but drawing him with her, it seemed, in the breeze she made; when he shouldn’t have moved at all if left to himself: he was by now so rigid with excitement.

‘Aren’t the leaves cool,’ she murmured, pressing one against her face.

‘Pretty cool yourself.’ He took her hand as though she had invited him.

‘Oh, I’m not! I’m “perspiring freely”, as they say. Feel!’

Now looking at him, she put his hand just below her throat, above where her dress began.

How it felt was not all that important, because almost immediately after, he was discovering so much more of Boo Hollingrake, on the leaf-mould, at the bottom of the stone steps, behind the
Monstera deliciosa.
She was drooling, sometimes in plain words: ‘. . . yumm not not mm such um beginnerm . . .’ into his mouth. Above and below she was both mobile and contained, but if he closed his eyes he could float with her amongst the fern roots in the porcelain bath, guzzling the golden fruit right down to the crescent moon. He could have.

When Boo said: ‘Hurtle Courtney, you kill me!’ She made her tongue as thin as a cigarette and stuck it between his lips.

It was so unexpected, he was throbbing and spilling inside his clothes, against her struggling thighs.

‘Boo, dear? Boo? We’re waiting for you. Tea-o!’ The voice calling from the upper terrace only half expressed Maman’s feelings; he could tell. He could imagine the smile as she tried to load her words with charm.

While the
Monstera deliciosa,
beginning to resist an afternoon breeze, was scattering old coins through its perforations. The breeze tattered the banana leaves. Clashes of wind and light were occurring all the way up to the lawn, where Maman’s skirt of girls’ white was filling and spiralling. To keep her balance she had to plant her shoes in the mattress of buffalo-grass.

‘Boo!’

‘Oh, drat!’ She threw him off. ‘Old Freda’s on the war path.’

‘Yes, Mrs Courtney,’ she called up, while darting at her hair, her dress. ‘I lost my slide. I’ve been looking for it. My hair-slide.’

Her voice sounded true, whereas Maman’s wasn’t: too dry and monotonous.

‘Oh, how ghastly for you, Boo! You’ll never find it. The garden’s turned into a wilderness. You must become resigned, dear.’

Boo went shooting up a ladder of leaves and light. The soles of her shoes went
tsit tsit tsit
on the stone steps.

‘But I’ve found it, Mrs Courtney.’

She sounded so convincing.

Hurtle might have chosen to remain hidden in the cooling depths, but Maman was beginning to descend; he could hear her shoes grating on the steps. She would be watching her advance toe, her eyes narrowed anxiously, as though she half expected to fall.

At the bend, she looked up and saw him. He must have been waist-deep in greenery.

‘Hurtle,’ she said, ‘I hope you’ll never do anything to make us feel ashamed of you.’

‘What?’ He was completely defenceless except for his Adam’s apple.

At least Maman wasn’t prepared to let herself get carried out of the shallows. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you know—now that you’re a young man.’

As there was no avoiding it, he went up the steps, and she couldn’t resist tidying his hair.

‘You’re such a comfort to me’—she linked an arm to one of his for the return—‘now that all these dreadful things are happening—and Father away from home so much.’

Since the outbreak of war Harry Courtney had felt it his duty to spend more time on his properties. He had stocked them up as part of the ‘war effort’, and with the young men away in France, the most he could do was lend his managers a hand.

‘Always remember you’re a gentleman,’ Maman was saying; she might have learnt it out of a book.

‘But I’m not!’ She, before anybody, must face that.

‘You’ve had every opportunity. You’ve been
taught
everything. I don’t know what else you could be.’

‘I’m an artist.’ He was, in fact, a thundering cart-horse.

‘Oh, yes, yes! We know,’ she said, ‘and it’s wonderful to have a satisfying hobby.’

Maman’s faith in geniuses had failed since the wheels had broken off the planchette.

‘The question of morality is what is important,’ she said,
‘au fond,’
sucking on it like a sweet, for her own comfort.

They ploughed over the endless lawn, up to what had been the schoolroom, where Edith and Lizzie had laid Rhoda’s party feast. There were egg sandwiches, and banana ones, and yummiest of all, those which were filled with squashed chocolate creams. There were meringues, of course. There was rainbow cake, and a choice of iced coffee and fruit cup.

Maman recovered something of her girlishness. ‘Is everybody happy?’ she asked in a jollying voice; her sash flew as she went the rounds.

The girls had turned into heavy, munching women, excepting Rhoda, picking like a bird. You couldn’t say there was anything wrong with the food, only that Maman must have planned it under the impression that Rhoda was still her little girl, which, in fact, she had never been.

Nobody spoke. The guests were probably deciding what they would polish off next. A dimple opened on and off in Nessie Hargreaves’s left cheek. From time to time Rhoda looked around disbelievingly: her dress had got crushed, and she kept tweaking at it; or she would look up at her friend Boo, whose dress also was somewhat crushed.

He wondered how he had ever been impressed by that munching cow. He thought he could see a spot beginning to surface on her chin.

‘Rainbow cake! Nessie? Mary?’ Maman bravely asked.

Without inviting her to take off her clothes he could have painted Boo Hollingrake down to the last frond.

Rhoda was looking at Hurtle.

Something had risen up in Maman. She plumped down. She was not exactly crying, but gasping and frowning. She was working her handkerchief with the palms of her hands.

‘Oh, what is it, Mrs Courtney?’ Vi Learmonth ran: she was the kindest of the girls, and would have liked, if allowed, to join in a cry.