The Vivisector by PATRICK WHITE Page B

with Mrs Burt, who had her new baby, and would give theirs a suck. Mumma’s black old skirt was picking up the dust very easy: the hem had become unstitched. He tried to imagine her in Mrs Courtney’s hat with the quills, but the tails of her hair hung down behind, where the comb couldn’t hold them up. Her skin was yellow today.
    She took his hand in her cracked hand. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘What are you looking at?’
    He began walking as he would, he felt, in a London suit, holding hands with Mrs Courtney, and it seemed as though the maid they passed polishing a doctor’s plate was already looking different at him.
    Mumma brightened, though one corner of her mouth was twitching. ‘Are you hungry, love? You’ll feel better for a bite of something.’
    He ought to love poor Mumma for looking at him like that. He did, too: nothing else was real. There was nothing wrong in imagining a thing or two about himself and Courtneys.
    Mumma saw he was having trouble with his boot. ‘If your sole’s coming off, Hurtle, slide your foot along the carpet when you go inside, then nobody’ll notice.’
    Her hand tightened as they began to clatter down the steep asphalt towards the ‘Tradesmen’s Entrance’. Once or twice his sole flapped.
    Half the morning he spent in the yard chucking stones at nothing.
    ‘What are you—you haven’t done anything?’ she called, looking out from the laundry at the bush house where Mr Thompson grew the tuberous begonias.
    ‘Edith will fetch you,’ she came again to the doorway to call, the drops falling from her hands which the water had pleated.
    His throat swelled. It was the strong, steamy smell of pampered plants and tan-bark.
    But Edith didn’t show up: it was Mr Courtney himself who came walking alongside the wall, smoking a square-looking cigar. He blew out the smoke firmly but gently. The rest of him fitted the head and shoulders you had already seen in the photograph. He was a large man.
    They were looking at each other. Without giving anything away. The beard was as well kept as everything else in the garden and house. You wondered how it would have felt. All along the brick wall the geranium flowers were blazing up.
    ‘Hurtle Duffield!’ Mr Courtney said, and it was like you heard your own name for the first time: it sounded so important.
    While Mr Courtney continued blowing smoke, and smiling, he was in search of more to say. His cuff-links, with their tangle of initials, didn’t help him. His ears had large, cushiony lobes, from one of which he hadn’t wiped the shaving soap.
    ‘My wife tells me you’re interested in books and things.’ He put the cigar back in his mouth as though he might have said too much.
    You would have liked to show you weren’t just a boy, and stupid. But the silence stretched and stretched. There was an insect brown as a stick clinging to a geranium leaf. You could only stare at the insect, and wish you had something to offer. If you could at least have come to life: climbed up by Mr Courtney’s trouser leg, grappling his hairy suit, pummelling, punching, not exactly kissing, but plunging your face into the mass of frizzy beard.
    Instead, you were slowly sweating, as still and mindless as the stick insect.
    Again Mr Courtney took the cigar out of his mouth, and put his other hand, firm but fleshy, in the middle of your back. ‘Perhaps you could do with a piddle,’ he suggested, ‘before we go inside. You can pop round behind the bush house.’
    It was a relief to slip away for a minute or two, not that you had much to get rid of, but as you shook off the last drops on the heap of rotting grass clippings, the morning loosened.
    When you went back Mr Courtney told: ‘Round about your age I remember going on a long drive. In the country. At night. With my father and Archdeacon Rutherford.’ He broke up his sentence with short puffs at the cigar, his lips glossy and contented.
    It was strange, though comforting, to hear Mr Courtney’s