The Vivisector (24 page)

‘It’s nothing, Vi,’ Maman said. ‘No, that’s untrue. It’s bad news—some—somebody—a friend—killed at the war,’ she was able to gasp. ‘We heard this morning. Nowadays,’ she said, ‘news is nearly always bad.’

Rhoda ran after Vi with little, imitative steps; but she hadn’t learnt what else to do.

‘This detestable war!’ Boo sighed professionally, and looking down her front, brushed the crumbs off.

‘Hurtle,’ said Maman, ‘bring me a glass of soda water.’ She was still accusing him, not of something, but of everything.

The cars and cabs were sent for earlier than first arranged. Out of respect for Mrs Courtney’s sorrow the girls remained subdued. Saying goodbye they looked soft and juicy, like plump, white, folded moths.

As soon as they were gone Rhoda pounced. ‘Who was it?’

‘Who was it what?’

‘Got killed at the war.’

‘A boy called Andrew Macfarlane. Mrs Hollingrake discussed it with me on the telephone. We decided Boo shouldn’t be told before the party. Boo was very fond of Andrew. They were childhood sweethearts: you might say they were half engaged.’

Half an engagement so cruelly broken was too much for Maman. ‘Oh, my darlings,’ she burst out, ‘how fortunate I am! There’s still your lives to look forward to!’ Carried away by her emotion she clutched at whoever was nearest.

Rhoda looked comparatively dry wedged under one of Maman’s arms; or perhaps she had experienced worse than the death of Boo Hollingrake’s Scot: all young men must have appeared rather hazy to Rhoda.

While Hurtle remembered the black knees, the square hands, the live hair of an older boy, in the bony cheeks signs of the blood which would run, which was still running, under the
Monstera deliciosa.
Boo laughing for the blood-bath.
Hurtle Courtney, you kill me!
They hadn’t, but might have, killed Andrew Macfarlane between them. The sloshed blood looked glitteringly fresh on Boo’s throat, on her lashing thighs.

Though it wasn’t Maman he was looking at, she began again accusing him: ‘You never forgive—Hurtle—anybody else’s weakness. ’ And as she continued sobbing: ‘Everybody, in the end, is weak.’

Himself the weakest, if he could have convinced her.

Rhoda cried a little to pacify her mother, then returned to her own dry grief of griefs, whether experienced already, or still to be.

So far distant from the killing, the war years weren’t so very different from those which had gone before. Boys at school pummelled one another’s bodies, muddled through algebra and Virgil, groaned, cheated, masturbated, waiting for an end to the prison term. Most of them took a ferocious interest in war. Some of those who left, immediately enlisted, looking like exalted novices entering a religious order. Those who remained yearned for the boredom of the holidays, which were only boring on the surface. During the war, the secret ways had become more devious, behaviour more disguised, the coded messages more difficult to crack. The maids, even, seemed no longer to know what made sense. May said: ‘Dunno what I’m doin’ ’ere; I’m gunner get out’; while there was no sign that she had the power to withdraw her face from above the pan which was steaming it open.

To have scalded her wrist and to be wearing a bandage soaked in oil was, in the circumstances, some kind of compensation. Her skin looked browner, more liverly than before. She burped a lot, and didn’t fancy anything above a biscuit. In the second year of the war she taught Hurtle the secret of spun sugar, and how to transform dull roundels of potato into the gold balloons of
pommes soufflées.

‘Now you know,’ she whispered as the little golden eggs bobbed swelling in the bubbling fat.

He was not only the neophyte, he might have been her lover.

‘You’ve got good hands, love,’ she told him. ‘When I was a girl I worked in a surgeon’s house. His was the same sort of hands.’

She dared ask, only once, and very quickly: ‘Have you been paintin’ any of those paintin’s lately, dear?’

Her skin flooding with maroon, she lowered her eyelids and slip-slopped into the scullery. He was relieved when she had decided not to expect an answer. Her sympathy moved him, and he respected her art.

He had taken to locking his door as soon as he got inside his room. He read a great deal, possibly to ignore the fact that he was still incapable of acting; he could only be acted upon. He read
Ziska: the Problem of a Wicked Soul, Lives of the Painters, Wilhelm Meister’s Wanderyears, Pensées de Pascal, The Forest Lovers,
the dictionary. He drew, too. He did a series of drawings of the war which was being fought in France, but tore them up on recognizing Goya. The thought that he might never be able to convey something that was his and nobody else’s brought on such an intense despair he masturbated on the quilt, and was at once afraid they might find out however hard he rubbed it with a towel. He wrote his name compulsively in margins, on the backs of drawing-blocks, once, guiltily, on a wall. Sometimes the name was ‘Hurtle Courtney,’ sometimes more simply: ‘Duffield’. He painted a painting in which the golden flesh of two bodies was interlocked on a compost of leaves under a glittering rain of blood. The light—he couldn’t manage the light: it remained as solid as human flesh. He would get up and walk round his room, which had been large enough till now. His sufferings, which had seemed intense, were as superficial as his painting. He destroyed the painting.

At night he lay rehearsing his entrance on a battlefield under coruscations of gunfire. A leader of men, he excelled at killing, endured unendurable hardships, and almost underwent an amputation. His wounds, of the most gangrenous kind, were deliciously healed by Boo Hollingrake’s tongue.

 

In his continued absence, helping the war effort by occupying himself with his properties, Father wrote letters from which you suspected he too was living in his dreams:

 

Harry Courtney, so far distant, so concerned for his dear ones, might have been at the front himself. He returned on leave from time to time, hands hardened, eyes clear. His English suits when he wore them again apologized for their elegance; his cigars must have turned against him.

His wife Alfreda said: ‘It’s so gratifying to have reached the
comfortable
stage of life,’ all the while unpicking the socks she was knitting for unknown soldiers.

She had taken to wearing aprons to emphasize the seriousness of her intentions: she couldn’t resist pretty aprons.

On his son’s sixteenth birthday Harry Courtney bought him a set of ivory brushes inlaid with gold monograms; he bought him a set of cuff-links studded with chunks of sapphire; they stood together looking at the presents.

‘Go on,
say
—if you don’t
like
them,’ Harry protested, while somewhere about him some of his bones clicked.

Hurtle was unable to express either his love or his misery. Harry shambled off, himself a slightly grizzled black-polled Angus.

The maids were flying with aired sheets which made a stiff, scraping sound.

‘Darling? Harry?’ Alfreda Courtney called. ‘They’re making up the bed in the dressing-room. In my old age I’m such a terribly light sleeper.’

She had unpacked his valise herself: the crumpled pyjamas smelling of dentifrice, and woodsmoke, and what was it? Apples?

Listening to them call to each other from their separate rooms, Hurtle was surprised his parents could survive the daylight shallows, let alone the dangers of sleep.

 

He had gone into the William Street post office to buy stamps for Maman. ‘You don’t mind, darling, do you? Say if you mind.’ She was clever enough to know he would be made to feel ridiculous by admitting it; but he did mind. He saw she was using him as her little boy—or her tame black-polled Angus bull. So he resented it. It was raining too.

But on going into the post office, full of the smell of wet raincoats and galoshes, he realized at once that this was a significant occasion.

A young woman or girl was licking a stamp. You could see she didn’t like the taste, but had to put up with it, her tongue flat and ugly in this commonplace employment. He wondered why somebody so obviously disdainful hadn’t simply wet her finger, and minimized her disgust.

It was Boo Hollingrake, but changed, he saw, and of course older.

Since the party Maman had organized for Rhoda, Boo had gone out of their lives. Mrs Hollingrake had told Maman in confidence the poor child was desolated by the death of the splendid young man to whom she would have become engaged. Whatever Boo may have felt, she was packed off to visit relations in Tasmania. Her education was, pardonably, interrupted. When she returned, Mrs Hollingrake decided to send her daughter to boarding school: ‘to take her out of herself’. In the emergency which arose, Mrs Challands, the mother of Mary, had engaged a governess and reorganized the depleted group. Maman was relieved to find that Rhoda, at least for the moment, wasn’t becoming a greater problem.

‘That Boo,’ Hurtle once inquired of Rhoda, ‘do you ever hear from her?’

‘Oh yes, I told you—at the time I got the letter from her. She’s staying near Launceston. She’s making a collection of Tasmanian bush-flowers—pressed.’

He couldn’t imagine it.

And now, here was Boo in the William Street post office, licking a stamp for another letter. He would have liked to read the address on it.

Because it was a wet morning she was wearing a raincoat, which she had unbelted for greater ease. Under her coat she was dressed, you couldn’t have said in mourning, because she was a young girl, but with a hint of it in her long black skirt and the big black bow flattened on the back of her hair. Her skin was whiter, as though in mourning, or it could have been from the weather. The skin of her eyelids looked thicker, heavier. The bridge of her nose seemed to have broadened, or coarsened, or she had a cold. But her white blouse was crisp, almost transparent, unostentatiously fashionable. She had that air of girls who don’t look after their own clothes: they drop them on the floor and somebody else picks them up.

When she first noticed him she looked a bit put out: she might have been going to cut him.

Then she changed her mind, and said in the automatic voice of women of her class coming across one another in the shops: ‘Oh hello, Hurtle—isn’t it a foul day?’

Though having nothing in particular to discuss, he spread himself to prevent her escaping before he was ready.

She told him about her stay in Tasmania. ‘They were very kind,’ she said in her mother’s voice. ‘Actually they’re related to Mummy. It’s so cold the girls all wear woollen vests,’ she informed him—seriously, he realized.

He found himself looking through her blouse, at the just visible tones of her shoulders. He became conscious of the warmth of their bodies mingling spontaneously through their open raincoats.

But Boo Hollingrake remained mentally cool.

‘How is Rhoda?’ she asked, though probably she didn’t want to hear. ‘I believe I owe her a letter. Or perhaps she’s the one who owes.’ She giggled faintly. ‘Rhoda’s so sweet. And Mr and Mrs Courtney—are they well?’

She hadn’t said ‘your father and mother’, because she was looking now with interest, at an adopted son.

‘They tell me,’ she said, ‘you’re becoming an artist. Do you paint from the life?’ It was a term she had picked up.

She didn’t wait for an answer, but looked at her wristlet watch. ‘I’m late for my appointment. What a horrible, horrible day!’

And for a moment Boo Hollingrake shrank inside her clothes, as though the rain had got inside them, and the mud were creeping up on her: she might have been treading on dead, suppurating faces.

Then she remembered: ‘It’s been so nice seeing you again—Hurtle. I must tell Mummy.’

At once her brown, and temporarily shrivelled mouth, swelled into a pale hibiscus delicately crinkled. She went down the steps into the street, where the car waited, together with an elderly, respectful, or over-paid chauffeur.

 

‘Boo Hollingrake,’ said Maman, with the surprising directness she adopted when she wasn’t the one threatened, ‘did you care for her, Hurtle?’

‘I don’t think I knew her.’