The Vivisector (25 page)

‘But of
course
you did! She was one of Rhoda’s set. She was here at the house several times.’

Maman ‘knew’ those she had met only once, at bridge parties, or between the races. All her acquaintances were ‘friends’: she remembered them by their pedigrees and hats.

‘You
must
know her! The tall dark handsome girl. Rhoda shared her governess.’

‘I know the one you mean. But I didn’t know her.’

‘If you must split hairs! What a funny old thing you’re becoming. You’re the one nobody knows. Not even his own mother,’ she added in a tone of satisfaction.

What had become of Mumma? He wondered. Though it wasn’t in the contract to see her, her cracked hands would return, sometimes as a source of shame, sometimes of agonizing tenderness; but mostly he didn’t think about her: a laundress was incredible.

‘If there’s no frankness between parents and children,’ Maman said, ‘I consider the parents have failed.’

With Father away, it was the hour she enjoyed most: she enjoyed the failures and the accusations as they sat alone in the octagon; Rhoda grew exhausted early, and would go to bed after dinner.

‘Oh, I know I bore you, Hurtle,’ Maman used to say, ‘but may I enjoy your company?’

She would bribe him with a cigarette. ‘Your father would be furious. But just one—since you’re a man.’

He sat in her now suffocating room smoking the one prescribed cigarette, feeling long-legged, large-knuckled, amateurish: he the professional chain-smoker behind the latrines at school.

Maman sewed—she was proud of her needlework—or talked, or wrote letters—talking—or read, again talking about it.

‘Do you think Thomas Hardy shocking? I don’t. I think the shock is over-rated. He’d like to shock. But I shan’t let him. What do you think?’

He didn’t. He thought he must bore Maman, though in a way she appeared to enjoy his physical presence in the octagon, just as he enjoyed secretly the stuffy luxury of their hours together after dinner.

‘Boo Hollingrake’—she returned to the attack—‘there was an occasion when I thought, Hurtle, you were distinctly interested in her—at a party for Rhoda.’

Maman bit off a thread, for she had taken up the sewing all her friends remembered to admire: Mrs Hollingrake considered it ‘exquisite work’.

Hurtle was watching the smoke from his cigarette. ‘Mmm. Boo. I’m not all that interested in nice girls. They’re too—’ he coughed—‘insipid.’

Maman had discovered a brand of cigarette wrapped in brown paper—Russian—which made him feel so much older.

‘That’s your age,’ she said, striking him down. ‘Boys are often timid of young girls. It’s quite natural.’

She had been looking closely at her sewing: now she raised her head. ‘Won’t you give me one—darling—Hurtle? A cigarette? ’

She watched him strike the match. She held her hand to the cigarette as though they were lighting something as important as a bonfire. The match lit up her face. It was becoming almost transparent with light.

‘Don’t burn my eyelashes off!’ She giggled smokily.

Then she settled down to devouring the cigarette. There wasn’t anybody else in the room, least of all her son.

She began to talk, like people did when drunk or entranced: ‘Actually girls don’t change, I think, from generation to generation. They’re like moths blundering about in search of their fate. You know how moths hit you in the face—soft, velvety things—and are sometimes killed.’ She shuddered drawing on her cigarette. ‘Nor do I think girls grow up into anything very different from what they were. They’re still blundering about after they’ve promised to honour and obey. Oh, I don’t mean they’re dishonest—not all of them—but they’re still quivering and preparing to discover something they haven’t experienced yet.’

She ground out her cigarette too soon. ‘Perhaps that’s why women take French lessons.’ She still had that dimple he could remember seeing for the first time in the same room.

Maman continued sewing. ‘I remember when I was a girl I used to walk down the road—there were pines along the south side—walk, for something to do—in desperation. I had a muff. I used to clench my hands inside the muff. I wore serviceable boots, but dreaded meeting anybody in them. That was how I met your father.’

It was incredibly dreamy: perhaps Maman
was
drunk; she wasn’t, though.

‘He sat his horse wonderfully. He looked wonderful. Men of that complexion do, in cold weather.’

She threw up her head as though drinking down the image, the icy chill of which made her throat tauten: her breasts became as small as Boo Hollingrake’s.

Then she laughed, and stuck her needle in the stuff she had been embroidering. ‘How did this begin? The Hollingrake girl. You must forgive me, darling. Isn’t it time for bed?’

The house was so warm, so suffocating, smelling of dust in spite of a team of maids, he could have choked on the way to his room. The half darkness through which he was climbing seemed to be developing an inescapable form: of a great padded dome, or quilted egg, or womb, such as he had seen in that da Vinci drawing. He continued dragging round the spiral, always without arriving, while outside the meticulous womb, men were fighting, killing, to live to fuck to live.

He looked round, half expecting to see the womb had been split by his thought; but the darkness held.

In the most distant fuzz of light, the dining-room, he could see and hear Maman locking up the decanters; it wasn’t fair, she used to say, ‘to tempt the girls’.

Outside the room he had outgrown, the night was rocking back and forth. A wind sounded like rain in the glittering trees. On their way across the sky mounds of intestinal cloud began to uncoil, to knot again, to swallow one another up. A fistful of leaves flung in his face as he leant out had the stench of men, of some men at least, who have overexerted themselves, of Pa Duffield, who was his actual father, in an old grey flannel vest, counting the empties as he piled them under the pepper tree.

He might have continued composing Pa for the unexpected pleasure it gave, if the room behind him hadn’t begun to stir the silence growing silky above the dry rain of streaming leaves.

She didn’t wait for him to turn, but said in a congested voice: ‘Tell me what it is that makes you unhappy, Hurtle. I have a right to know.’

She tried to keep it low in pitch, but his eardrums whammed as though she had boxed them.

She had put on a gown she sometimes rested in, and to which she would refer as ‘that old frightful idiosyncracy of mine’: a field of fading rose, its seed-pearl flowerets unravelling from their tarnished stalks. She had done her hair sleeker than he had ever seen it, which made her head look smaller, almost school-girlish. Of course her eyes were older than any girl’s. But not old. They seemed to have been refreshed: he saw them as unset jewels in shallows of clear water.

‘Tell me what it is,’ she ordered him for the second time. ‘Try to forget I’m your mother.’

She was obviously disturbed. Alfreda Courtney tended to avoid matters of importance, unless a ‘cause’, like anti-vivisection or fallen girls; somebody’s personal distress could drag you out of your depth.

Till here she was: taking the plunge.

‘But you’re
not
my mother.’ He didn’t know which of them he was rescuing.

‘Oh, you needn’t tell me! I didn’t
make
you! I made Rhoda. I blotched Rhoda. Like everything. Perhaps if I’d carried you inside me, a strong and beautiful child, Harry wouldn’t blame me now. Harry can never forgive me Rhoda.’ It sounded as though she had somehow to dismiss poor old Decent Harry Courtney.

‘I never noticed him blame you.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘How could you? It’s something only I could notice.’

In spite of its expression of bitterness her mouth was more brilliant than he remembered: the lips half open like those of a person half asleep.

She closed her eyes to prevent him looking into them.

‘You’re right,’ she said, frowning, or twitching. ‘You’re not my son. If you had been, I wonder whether you would have loved me more—or less.’

Whiffs of perfume reached him out of his childhood, from dressing-tables, and the clothes in wardrobes: if only he could have smothered in it; but the perfume was drawing him back to the present.

Her fingers, ‘still quivering and preparing to discover’, were plying on the skin of his arm.

‘Give me—’ she said, ‘let me hold your head.’

She didn’t wait for a reply, but took it in her hands, as though it were a fruit or goblet. She began gulping at his mouth: they were devouring with their two mouths a swelling, over-ripened, suddenly sickening—pulp.

He spat her out.

‘You’re drunk, aren’t you?’ He sounded horrible even to himself: himself too recently drunk of the same short sharp slugs from the decanter which might have ‘tempted the girls’.

She turned round, hunching up her back, and went out coughing, crying, almost vomiting, it seemed, leaving him with the guilt of half remembered dreams: of being received.

He began quickly to undress his hatefully immaculate body, and should afterwards have strapped himself down on his novice’s bed. Instead, propping himself on an elbow, he began to draw with a detached voluptuousness the mouth, the eyes. The lips were hatched with little lines, or slashed with wounds, the brilliantly cut eyeballs sometimes glaring sometimes fainting in their display of light. He only couldn’t convey the perfume of bruised mignonette and brandy: these remained confused in his hand.

He tore all of it quickly up. She was knocking at the door. ‘Hurtle?’ She was so tired, or ill.

She had put on an old flannel nightgown she liked to wear in winter whenever she was feeling indisposed; though now it wasn’t winter.

She explained: ‘I have a neuralgia.’ The water in the half-filled rubber bottle, which she planted on herself for warmth, mumbled to and fro, her hair hanging loose: she had brushed it out for the night.

‘Hurtle,’ she said, ‘your father will be coming home at the end of the month. I want nothing to distress him—in these times.’

The hot-water bottle made a slucking sound as she shifted it from the angle of her neck. Her breasts looked baggy inside the flannel. She was old and yellow, his mother, her face seamed.

‘Darling,’ she said, pushing back the quiff of hair from her boy’s forehead, ‘I know you’ll understand and help me.’ Her voice died away because of her sickness, her veined hand imploring him to recognize her helplessness.

Now it was he who could have vomited: he could have gone down retching howling holding on to the set folds of her old flannel disguise which didn’t; but at least if he was going to destroy her, it wouldn’t be in the way she expected.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘all right,’ like the mug he was, ‘I won’t say anything. I won’t be here.’

‘You—won’t—be?’

‘I joined up.’

‘Joined what?’

‘Enlisted.’

It was a lie he would have to live up to.

‘I’m leaving for camp. Perhaps this week. I’ll know tomorrow.’

‘I can’t believe it!’ She flung away the hot-water bottle, which cannoned off a corner of the chest of drawers. ‘After all we’ve done for you! All the thought! The love!’

The expense, too, went hurtling through his mind.

‘But something must—I’ll telephone—’ she never lost her faith in the telephone—‘somebody with influence. Because your father would never forgive me. At your age! You’re only a boy!’

‘I’m sixteen. Lots of them have gone at sixteen.’ He only couldn’t believe in himself.

‘You’re doing it to kill me.’

‘If you’re not killed in one way, you are in another.’

‘Ohhhh!’ Her voice mounted as she went out warming up her slack arms.

Well, he had broken the caul: it lay all sticky gelatinous around him; he was panting from the effort.

Rhoda was sleeping—what would she say?

 

The days which remained were out of season: they belonged to a state of timeless suspension, very still, very clear. Phrases of speech launched from a distance floated towards him like sound-bubbles. Doves’ plumage had the look of armour. When fright wasn’t tunnelling its way through his guts, he rose buoyantly on the thought that all his shortcomings would lie behind him in a few days; the derivative drawings, his share in Maman’s dishonesty, the goose-flesh which came when Rhoda touched him.

He said: ‘Thank God, I’ll soon be doing something.’

Rhoda and he were standing in the angle of the stone steps, looking down through the muzzy green of hydrangea scrub and custard-apple trees.

Rhoda mumped her doubts; then she said: ‘I wonder if you’ll be tough enough.’

‘You can be anything if you’ve got the will.’

His own daring made him shiver. He saw more clearly than ever how small Rhoda had remained, how downright deformed she was beside his swaying tower.

‘I would have been tough enough,’ she said. ‘They could saw both my legs off.’

‘It’s all very well to skite. They haven’t sawn off any part of you. You don’t
know!
’ Because she might possibly have experienced something far more intense than he could guess, he tried to drag her with him to the surface.

But she began to cry quite openly. She took his hand, and seemed to be trying to work the skin off with her fingers.

‘Will you write to me, Hurt?’ she was asking and crying. ‘Will you? From the front?’

‘Oh,
yairs!
’ he said to pacify her.

The word ‘front’ sounded so real he was scared stiff.

The young man beside the sea-wall stuffed into his mouth handfuls of the limp chips and encrusted fish he had bundled up in newspaper behind the management’s back. In the mild, light-smeared night, eating this greasy food became a delicious orgy: himself drifting; rubbing up against the stone wall; staring. The slow sea and the long tongues of oily light made half the feast: the silence too, after the clatter and yammer of the place where he worked. Languages you can’t understand give you a headache finally, and the chitter of knives and forks in grey water, in a greasy sink. At the caff-eye.