The Vivisector by PATRICK WHITE

which he had sailed breathless on the outward voyage looked darker and duller in the changed light. Two of the knobs in the parlourmaid’s backbone stood out between her collar and where the roots of her hair began, below the cap: they were the only points of interest on the journey back, to where Mumma was creating in the laundry.
    ‘Hurtle, I’ll never bring you—never ever again! Running off and leaving the baby! There might have been an accident.’ Always at the end of a washing day she had that boiled look, of suet crust.
    He hadn’t any excuses to make; so he went and looked in the linen basket. ‘Doesn’t he look good!’ he said, paying a compliment as Mrs Courtney had advised.
    Mumma only mumbled.
    Presently Edith returned with the wages. ‘Madam would like to see the baby. But another time. She’s too busy at the moment.’
    Mumma didn’t answer. She put the money in her old purse, which she did up in the bundle with some slices of a pudding May had allowed for the kids. Then they picked up their things and went.
     
    That holidays he felt even farther from Lena and the little ones. Except Will, who would burrow into his back, in their sleep in the bed they shared in the harness room. Will was so soft and hopeless you couldn’t help feel he was your brother. Not that you were soft. Mrs Sullivan came and complained: That boy that Hurt has bashed our Tommy we didn’t need the stitches but nearly did. Pa got out the strap, but put it away after Mrs Sullivan left, he said she had an Irish grudge.
    Poor Pa. Wish you could have felt closer to him.
    Mumma kept her word about Courtneys’.
    ‘Aren’t I gunner go down there before the holidays end?’ Mumma only made sounds, and went on with what she was doing.
    ‘But didn’t they ask for me?’ he always asked. ‘Didn’t Mr Courtney ask yet?’
    Mumma looked down her cheekbones at the ironing or the stove.
    So he would climb up into the pepper tree where roosting fowls had whitened the branches. He would sit rubbing off the crust, thinking. Some way some something to show Courtneys what they had forgotten. If he could show what he knew and felt. Their bloody old French painting. Sometimes he looked at his pale thing to help pass the holidays he held up the skin and it shrivelled back he didn’t know what he groaned as the morning stretched out blue as turquoise smelling of chaff and fowl shit.
     
    The term was worse, though. He could never concentrate for looking out of the window. Beetle Boothroyd sent a note. But it was not that which put Mumma against him. She had already turned. She would kiss him, but her breath had tears in it, waiting to break out.
    What had he done, then? She couldn’t know he loved Mrs Courtney. Because he didn’t. He was in love with how she looked. Each of her dresses was more than a dress: a moment of light and beauty not yet to be explained. He loved her big, silent house, in which his thoughts might grow into the shapes they chose. Nobody, not his family, not Mrs Courtney, only faintly himself, knew he had inside him his own chandelier. This was what made you at times jangle and want to explode into smithereens.
     
    It wasn’t till next holidays, it was a Courtney Monday, Mumma began combing him.
    ‘They’ve asked for you,’ she said, ‘so I’ve got to take you, or I wouldn’t.’
    He made himself look stupid and unmoved.
    ‘Remember,’ she said, ‘never draw on the walls. If you spoil the Courtney’s walls like you done the ones at home, I won’t know how to take their money.’ Pa had said Mumma was too honest.
    Now you didn’t answer because your heart was being sucked in and out too fast. All this combing and smoothing: was it to do with what Pa and Mumma had been talking about?
    That night he had gone across the yard after everyone was put to bed, after Pa had turned out the gas in the kitchen. He had gone across to snitch a slice of bread, a smear of dripping.
    Pa and Mumma were in their room, where