The Vivisector by PATRICK WHITE Page A

up like shot when rage or injustice made her pale, while the big leaf-shaped birthmark seemed to flutter.
    ‘Take him, Rhoda, to the laundry,’ her mother ordered, trying to push them together.
    But la petite had got the sulks. She wouldn’t, and he was glad: it would have been humiliating to pretend you needed the sour ugly thing.
    Finally, it was Mrs Courtney herself who accompanied him, at least as far as the green door. There she stopped, and as she kissed him he seemed to be swallowed up in an envelope of scented flesh. He was only brought round by her jewellery pricking and hitting him.
    ‘We shall meet again,’ she said.
    ‘When?’
    ‘Very soon, I hope. We must organize it!’
    Then the green door puffed open, and he smelled the smells of ordinary life.
     
    The following day, ironing day at Sunningdale, he was again ready to leave with Mumma although she had paid no attention to his hair.
    ‘Oh no. Not on yer life. A treat is a treat,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what the Courtneys would think.’
    ‘But they’re interested in me. I know they’ll be expecting me.’
    Mumma looked so ugly in her old braided shapeless black. She smelled of soap and beeswax. She said he was suffering from what was called delusions. He knew he would never make her see the truth.
    When next Monday came round, it was his last chance before school began. So he grew cunning. He didn’t take extra trouble with himself, not because he hadn’t hope, it was because he might catch her off her guard, at the last moment slip past her opposition with rough haste and in his ordinary clothes. He was, in fact, full of hope. In his mind he revived the words and silences of Mumma’s own hopes for him. His memory glittered with the moods of Courtneys’ chandelier.
    That morning, after the others had run off, he sat dawdling over the last grey slime of his porridge. She was preparing her bundle, with a few of those cachous, the headache powders, the old leather purse, odds and ends she would take with her and never use.
    When he couldn’t put it off any longer he said: ‘I bet they asked for me yesterday, and you didn’t tell.’
    She laughed in an ugly way he didn’t recognize. ‘Why should they ask?’
    ‘Because they told me of things we was gunner do together.’ There was no use wasting grammar or accents on Mumma: you had to speak the way she understood.
    ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘ladies and gentlemen talk! It’s what they call “being charming”. But what they say isn’t what they mean. Otherwise they wouldn’t get through all they’ve got to do—balls, and dinner parties, and all that. I know! ’
    ‘But Mr Courtney showed me a gun. We was going to the country.’
    ‘I believe ’e’s gone—to one of the properties ’e owns. That’s where ’is interests lie—where the money comes from. A little boy like you would only get in the way.’
    She picked the baby up, and began easing up the bundle with the help of her knee. When she was ready, she stooped and kissed you to show her love, but it was a level helping, like she doled out porridge or potato, to keep everybody quiet. If ladies and gentlemen didn’t mean what they said, no more did Mumma.
    ‘Oh, whoo-aahy?’ he shouted after her when she had gone out the gate.
    It sounded as feeble as it was, his voice shining back like that of a little blubbering kid. He couldn’t have done better, though.
    She went on, sometimes pausing to easy the baby’s weight. Sep was growing too fast, too heavy, too greedy: the way he would grab hold of her by now she might have been a pudding he meant to guzzle whole.
    Mumma didn’t look back from the bottom of the street, only paused to hoist the baby higher.
    Then the grey descended inside you.
    He wished Mumma and the baby dead. Them all. Courtneys! Himself—himself most of all. The chandelier had gone out in him.
    The day, beginning grey, spurted a drop or two, sprinkled at last, and settled into an afternoon of colourless