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Authors: PATRICK WHITE

BOOK: The Vivisector

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Again she pulled the bell. Edith came, quicker and thinner.

‘Send Nurse,’ the mistress commanded.

Rhoda started a high crying, exposing through her stretched mouth her rather small, transparent teeth.

‘I’m not the one to blame, darling,’ her mother explained. ‘We must only carry out what Dr Marshall ordered. Oh, dear!
Darling!
Can you have got it into your head Mummy doesn’t love you! My darling darling Rhoda!’

Mrs Courtney herself had begun to whimper like a little child, her lovely face crumpling into an old rag. She looked as though she was about to creep on all fours, to make herself long and thin like some animal children were tormenting.

It was then that Rhoda spat. It gummed itself to her mother’s face. One end of the spit was swinging.

He would have liked to do something for both of them, but only his mind worked: his limbs were stuck, his heart was pumping.

Nurse came, a stout woman, with a white belt dividing her figure in two. She immediately began mewing for her little girl. The belt had a butterfly for a buckle.

‘Come away, Rhoda!’ mewed the nurse. ‘A rest is what you need. I’ll give you a liquorice-all-sorts, shall I?’

‘The cat! How can you allow the cat?’ Mrs Courtney howled.

‘But she loves it!’ The nurse purpled up.

When Rhoda and the nurse had gone, and Mrs Courtney had wiped her face with her handkerchief, she said: ‘So distressing. What will you think of us? We’re not at all like this, you know.’

She went to her desk, and started rummaging in a little bag made of gold chain. ‘Here!’ she said. ‘I want you to take this, Hurtle, and share it with your brothers and sisters. And remember that nobody is good all the time, however hard they try to be.’

He got such a surprise he almost dropped the sovereign he found she had put in his hand.

‘As if I were an animal!’ She had begun to whimper again. ‘But no animal suffers worse than a human being.’ She blew her nose on the now soggy handkerchief.

Because she was in such a state, sighing, and rumpling the papers on her desk, and looking at her face in the glass, he didn’t think Mrs Courtney would mind if he slipped away. Nor did she. She didn’t seem to notice it.

He hurried back through the house, silent except for the Chinese vases rocking on their black stands, and twittering in the chandelier.

Mumma was ropeable. Some wet sheets she was trying to peg to the line were cracking like whips. First they clung to each other, or Mumma, then they sailed open in the wind.

While she fought, she complained: ‘Arr now, Hurtle, didn’t I tell you to play around the yard? I been all around—round to the stables—and out in front.’ A wet sheet hit her in the face. ‘Where did you get to, you naughty boy?’

‘I went exploring.’ To quieten her, he began helping her nicely with the sheets.

He didn’t think he would mention the sovereign or anything of what had happened.

That night Pa asked, as he pushed the stew around his plate: ‘What sort of a day did you have at the famous Courtneys’?’

‘The same,’ she answered.

She was in low spirits, it seemed. The stew looked grey because probably she had been too tired or too hurried to brown it; while you were still full of the jangle of crystal music and the warm-chocolate scent of Mrs Courtney’s room.

When they decided he should go to school, and he was admitted to the Infants, all his hopes appeared to close.

‘But I’m not an infant!’

‘Poor kid! You can’t help laughing,’ said Mrs Burt over the palings.

At least his parents were too upset to join in their neighbour’s amusement, and Lena too important from several years’ experience. Though it wasn’t far, Pa was driving them to school in the cart, making an occasion of it. The lurching over ruts before they reached the metal threw the three of them against one another.

‘Are you frightened?’ Lena could have been hoping for it.

‘No,’ he said, although he was.

A wind from the right quarter carried the smell of the nearby zoo. He remembered how the keeper had allowed him to ride on the elephant’s head; he remembered the lion with the stream of yellow diarrhoea.

‘I bet you are!’ Lena harped.

He pinched a hold of her skinny arm, so that she squealed unaccountably loud.

‘Hold yer tongue, Lene,’ said Pa, who was in his usual serious mood.

‘But he’s afraid and won’t admit it! He’s pinching me!’

‘Hurtle ain’t afraid. He’s a man,’ said Pa.

It made Hurtle more afraid, not so much of a lot of school-kids he didn’t know, and anyway he was stronger than most: he was afraid of some shapelessness smelling of lions and elephants. Lena sat snivelling and blinking as if herself was going to be the target; whereas you knew that everything large enough, frightening enough, like death for instance, was being saved up for you.

‘Like to hold the reins, son?’

‘No.’

His hands might have trembled. He wondered what would happen if he pissed his pants. And did let go one little spurt. At once his fear took on a shape: if he had had a pencil in his hand he would have drawn Death trumpeting.

He felt better after that. Sometimes he looked at people to see whether they had guessed his more secret thoughts. But Lena was just a thin thing, a girl, while Pa continued driving the cart as though Death had never appeared, trampling alongside of them.

Poor Pa, when he let them down at the school, he sat for a moment with the whip drooping from his hand. Pa never kissed in saying goodbye, but the lines grew deeper, blacker round his mouth. Today you would have liked to touch them. You could often burst with love, but had never found the proper occasion.

The moment they arrived at school Lena became ever so important. She began giggling with some girls of her own age, who looked at the brother distantly, and did not propose to make his acquaintance. Nor was Lena prepared to risk too much on her relationship with Hurtle. She said very bossily: ‘I’ll take you to Miss Adams, then I must go with my own class.’ He had never heard her accent sound so thin and prim.

The Infants were taught in the basement of the school. The light, which was a yellow-green, floated down through barred windows just above ground level. The stone walls were cold to touch. Miss Adams was such a thin woman he began to wonder whether their Lena would become a teacher. He could see her in the same smocked blouse, with the same cold as Miss Adams had.

Now Lena simply handed over her brother, and shook her hair, and hurried away.

‘Hurtle Duffield,’ Miss Adams said. ‘That’s a comical name.’

Of course. He was used to it by now. He even said: ‘It rhymes with turtle.’

The kids who were standing near them laughed.

‘I see you have a sense of humour,’ said Miss Adams. ‘I hope you will keep it till recess, please, and not make jokes in class.’

She was too busy with her cold and commencement of school. She gave him and another boy copybooks to distribute: one where each child would sit.

All the while other kids kept trooping down. He saw a fair few from Cox Street, whom he knew because they had always been there. It made him sick looking at the other children, except a girl with fair, flossy fringe. There was a boy called Ossie Flood said he was going to bring one or two glassies for Hurt. You didn’t want his old marbles, but Ossie seemed to want to hang on.

During break Tom Sullivan from Cox Street started making up to Ossie, whispering and laughing behind his hand. Ossie would have liked to laugh back if his long dopy face had dared.

‘What was Tommo telling you?’

‘Nothing,’ said Os.

‘It was too long to be nothing. Go on, what was it?’

Ossie Flood’s skin turned green.

‘Tell, or I’ll kick you in the guts.’

This had always worked in Cox Street. And Ossie Flood began to tell. His biggest teeth were grooved and green. He told spitting excited frightened he said how Tommo Sullivan said Hurt Duffield was the son of a no-hope pommy bottle-o down their street, who carried around in an old cigar box a pedigree like he was a racehorse.

Going down the steps after break Hurtle got up against Tommo Sullivan to tell him he was the biggest turd ever dropped from an Irish arse. He banged Tommo’s head once or twice against the wall. Though Tommo was bigger, it came easy. Tommo actually began to cry. The stone walls made it sound worse, and you wondered whether you had caught the nits off Tommo’s head, though they kept his hair shorn off close.

Miss Adams told her class she was going to start them on pothooks already that first day. Some of the kids could hardly hold the pencil: it wobbled in their hands. One girl’s cheek was so full of tongue she looked as though she had a boil. Then Miss Adams encouraged them to join the pothooks by imagining they were making a little hooped fence. Hurtle was so shocked by her old pothooks he couldn’t make anything at all.

He would have sunk pretty low if he hadn’t suddenly remembered, and taken the pencil, and lost himself.

‘What are you doing, Hurtle Duffield?’ Miss Adams had smelt a rat.

Everyone looking.

‘Droring,’ he confessed, though it pained him to do so.

It pained Miss Adams equally. He had to take it up to her. The girl with the flossy fringe giggled.

‘What is it supposed to be?’ Miss Adams squinted and asked through her cold.

‘Death,’ he said, and heard his own voice.

‘Death?’ Miss Adams was frowning. ‘Looks like a kind of elephant to me. An elephant with hair instead of hide.’

‘It is,’ he said. ‘An elephant in a lion’s skin.’

‘But Death? An elephant is such a gentle creature. Large, but gentle.’

‘Not always it isn’t,’ he corrected. ‘It can trample its keeper, without any warning, and rip with its tusks.’

All the kids were interested. Some of them pretended to be afraid. Perhaps some of them were.

Miss Adams made a noise through her blocked nose. ‘You were supposed to be forming pothooks.’

‘Pothooks! I can write!’

‘You sound like a vain boy. At your age. I don’t like know-alls. Who was your teacher?’

‘I learned myself, I suppose. At first. Then Mr Olliphant showed me some of the finer points.’

Nobody else was making a sound.

‘Mr Olliphant?’ She was so ignorant she hadn’t even heard of the rector.

‘Seeing that you can write,’ Miss Adams said, ‘you will write me something, Hurtle. Something about yourself. Your home. Your life. A composition, in fact. If, as you claim, you are so advanced. ’

She made a sour thin smile as she screwed up the drawing of Death and lobbed it into the basket.

He was glad to return to his bench. He would never write if he could draw, but he was so sick of school, it would be a relief to tell about himself.

He wrote and wrote to get through the time:

I am Hurtle Duffield age 6 though I often feel older than that. I don’t think age has always to do with what you feel because my father and mother who are old never have the same feelings or thoughts as me. They do not understand what I tell them so I have just about had to give up telling. And I did not tell Mr Olliphant our parson (he has died) though he could read Latin and French, that is nothing to do with it. I get a lot of ideas sitting up the pepper tree in the yard. I like to watch the sky till the circles wirl, these are white, or shut my eyes and squeeze them till there are a lot of coloured spots. Mumma goes crook if I draw on the wall, only the wall in the shed where I sleep with Will at the end of the yard where Pa keeps the harness that wall does not matter, I can draw there, and I am droring a picture which will be a shandeleer with the wind through it when it is finished, I would like to draw everything I know. There is drawing. There is bread. I like if I can to get hold of a new loaf and tear the end of crust off of it and eat it. I love the smell of bread but the bread at home is always stale because you get it cheap. Once I drew a loaf of bread with all those little bubbles

School was over before he had shown much. Miss Adams told them they could go. She looked as though she had a headache.

‘Not you, Hurtle,’ she called down. ‘I’m waiting to see your composition.’

As she read it, her head moved along the lines.

‘You’re a funny boy. What is a “shandeleer”?’

But he couldn’t go into that: it was his secret thing; and even if he had tried to explain, she wouldn’t have understood.

So he puffed out his mouth as if he was sulking.

Miss Adams said: ‘You can go now. But remember that people will dislike you if you pretend to know more than you do.’

Nothing of further interest happened that first day, except that the girl with the fringe let him smell her hankie. Because she was starting school her mother had given her a sprinkle of scent, which was why she kept on smelling the screwed-up ball of her handkerchief. Her name was Dolly Burgess, she said.

Lena and Hurtle Duffield continued going to school. They always started off together, because relationship made it unavoidable. Out of Cox Street, Lena usually broke away and joined up with some of her friends, unless she was feeling down in the mouth.

One morning after she had broke the chamber Mumma sent her to empty in the yard, they were still together walking past the shops. Lena said, to get her own back on somebody: ‘I hope you’re behaving yourself in class. I hope you don’t make a fool of us with a lot of your old show-off.’

‘I don’t behave any way at all. I act natural.’

‘Pigs act natural.’

He kicked her shin. She gave him a push.

That was when he dropped it.

‘Hey! Nao!’

It rolled down a grating, and he couldn’t even see it for the muck and darkness down below.

‘Serve you right—whatever it was!’ Lena screeched, rubbing her shin on her other leg.