The Vivisector by PATRICK WHITE

could see. A toy, or a boy’s gun. Inside his beard and English suit, Mr Courtney—Harry—was acting as excited as a boy who had found it.
    ‘Jove, Hurtle,’ he said, ‘isn’t it a beauty?’
    Rhoda turned away, prepared for them to ignore her. She didn’t look at all put out, as though she wasn’t interested in boys or guns, and knew she could get her own back any time she liked.
    Because it was expected of him, Hurtle followed out to the edge of the lawn. He was still too close to the painting to share Harry’s enthusiasm for a gun, neat and shining though it was.
    As you watched, Harry loaded. There was a pigeon clattering out of a palm. Harry took aim, his shoulder muscle bulging out of proportion. He shot at the curving pigeon, and missed.
    ‘Need to practise,’ he mumbled into his beard, working his shoulders as though to shrug out the rheumatism. Then remembering, he looked down: ‘You’ll soon get the hang of it. In a paddock full of rabbits, you can’t miss.’
    ‘There aren’t any paddocks full of rabbits.’
    ‘Not here. At Mumbelong.’ Mr Courtney’s voice had descended to a man’s serious level; his eyes, too, were serious and moist.
    Hurtle stood kicking with his sound boot at the springy mattress of lawn. He had blown his cheeks out to match Mr Courtney’s seriousness. He wasn’t going to destroy a vision by introducing anything real. He wouldn’t say a word, because he knew from experience that impossibilities can be enjoyed in spite of their impossibility. So they were catching the night train, like the time Mumma left in a hurry to visit someone sick. Tunnels couldn’t get blacker at night. He sat beside his friend, sharing his overcoat.
    ‘Harry?’
    Mrs Courtney’s voice, trying to be natural, sounded coldly from the veranda; it sounded more educated than ever yet. Even Mr Courtney was startled. Rhoda had come out from the study to be with her mother because she expected something to happen.
    Mrs Courtney was staring at the gun. Anger had enamelled her eyes. She could have been going to rush out, not at all ladylike, and grab the thing, and break it in half; when she changed her mind apparently. She started twiddling a little useless handkerchief. The blazing blue died out in her eyes: in their new misty thoughtfulness they looked almost grey. Although they were still fixed on the gun, she was thinking beyond: she seemed to have decided the gun didn’t exist.
    ‘Darling,’ she began, and lowered her eyelids a moment to show how seriously she ought to be taken, ‘we must remember he doesn’t belong to us. Mrs Duffield will start worrying about him.’ She had such a soft pink smile.
    ‘Mrs Duffield? Oh yes, the mother,’ Mr Courtney remembered in a hurried grumpy voice.
    They all bundled into the study, where only Mrs Courtney could have told what was in store for them.
    She glanced once at the gun after Harry had stood it in a corner. Then she opened out in a high clear voice which reminded you of the voices of the older girls, its tone much more expert though, her clothes so much more complicated, and she chose to speak in a code he recognized by now as the French language.
    ‘Il est intelligent, n’est-ce pas? Charmant! Il parle avec un accent atroce, mais on peut le corriger à la maison—lui tout seul avec cette gouvernante que je vais engager—et la petite, naturellement. ’
    Possibly Mr Courtney was less good at French. He went: Wee wee wee; while Mrs Courtney laughed such glossy laughs, she was so pleased the way things were going. Because you had no difficulty in cracking some of the code your eardrums thundered to hear about your atrocious accent. It was no compensation to discover you were also intelligent and charming. In future he would talk extra bookish at them, imitating Mr Olliphant, just as Mrs Courtney was imitating the French.
    He heard Rhoda joining in. ‘It’s always la petite! What about la petite? ’ The sprinkling of moles on her neck showed