by Gee, Maurice
I showed them into the den and got rid of the gin bottle and glasses. Andrew watched me bitterly. He too seemed to be suffering from a sense of injustice. He must have been looking forward to this visit. It was the first he had paid me with his son.
“Come away from those,” he ordered as the boy began to drift towards my books.
I went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. Marlene had stopped crying. I heard her open the bedroom door and run to the bathroom. Voices came from the den.
“Put it down.”
“Sorry.”
“How often have I told you not to touch things in other people’s houses?”
“Sorry.”
I began to feel surrounded and was glad of the gin I’d drunk. I took the tea into the den.
“Sugar and milk, Jonathan?” He was thirteen: it was time his father started to see him as more than an infant.
“Thanks,” he said, looking surprised. He was at the mantelpiece, admiring Henry Bear.
“You can take it down if you like.”
He threw a grin at his father and lifted the carving over to the table. I gave him his tea and took a cup to Andrew. “Well, brother,” I said, “it’s nice to see you.”
He sipped his tea and winced as it burnt his lips. “Penny sends her regards.” He waited for me to entrust him with mine for her. I couldn’t go through with the ritual. Instead I turned to Jonathan. He was nose to nose with the bear, engaged in some private dialogue.
“That belonged to your grandfather. You never met him.”
“No.”
“He found it in a second-hand shop. That’s where he got a lot of these books.”
“Put it back now,” Andrew said.
Jonathan obeyed. “I wish he’d left it to us.”
“I’ll leave it to you. I’ll put a special clause in my will.”
“Honest?”
We drank our tea. At that moment Marlene pulled the chain in the lavatory. The cistern sounds like a traction engine. I’d kept it as an antique. Andrew went red. Like Swift, he’s never got used to the fact that women shit. For a moment he forgot the boy was there.
“How long are you going to go on like this, Paul?”
“Women, you mean?” I shrugged. “It’s a way of keeping pure in thought.” Unconsciously I had used one of Mother’s phrases. I picked it up almost as quickly as he. But Jonathan chose that moment to rattle his saucer. Andrew changed course.
“This. A room full of books. You’re wasting your time.”
The echo of Charlie astonished me. I waited for him to go on, but under Jonathan’s eye he could not settle. Irritably he said, “When are you going to cut that hair off your face?”
I touched my sideburns. “Don’t you like them?”
“They make you look absurd.”
“I’m sorry. They give me something to play with in bed.” At once I was sorry I’d said this. Jonathan turned quickly away from his father. There was a faint grin on the hidden side of his face. Andrew put down his cup. He began to stand up. “You really go too far, Paul.”
But Marlene too chose this moment to leave. She was suddenly in the doorway, with her overnight bag in her hand.
“I’m leaving, Paul.” Marlene was a heavy user of make-up —especially lipstick and eye make-up. The bedroom sometimes seemed ankle-deep in tissues smeared with all the colours of the rainbow. Now her face was washed clean. Her lips and eyes were swollen and pale freckles showed on her cheeks. She was more attractive to me than she had been for months. I felt a deep regret at losing her.
“All right,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“I made the bed.” Tears burst from her eyes.
“Thank you.”
“You’ll never see me again.” She turned and ran out of the house. The Volkswagen roared like a truck and the sound of it died away.
Andrew’s face was pinched and yellow. The boy’s though seemed to glow. He was looking at me with admiration. We spent the next hour driving about Wadesville in Andrew’s car, showing him Cascade Park, the Webber’s old house, the place where the orchard had been. Jonathan was polite. His eye still gleamed with a hidden excitement.
Back at my house, Andrew came to the gate. “I’m not coming out this way again. If you want to visit us that’s a different matter.”
“All right. I’m sorry.”
He went back to the car.
“Good-bye Jonathan,” I called.
“Good-bye, Uncle. Don’t forget to put the bear in your will.”
I saw his father rebuke him. The car drove away. I went inside and sat in the den. For the next hour I thought with regret about Marlene. Before going to bed that night I changed the sheets and pillow slips to get rid of the smell of her.
In the time between the end of examinations and the end of term Celia discovered the poetry of Yeats. She came to me full of ideas about the location of Byzantium and what the rough beast might be. I brought books from home and let her read them in class time. We knew she had done well in School Certificate. There was no fear now of her father taking her from school. Even so, I was careful not to let her take my books home.
In the last week she came to my room with a volume of Ben Jonson’s poetry. Holding it open with her finger on the page, she said, “Please, Mr. Prior, is this the poem my mother took my name from?”
1968–1969
The steps by which it became accepted that Celia might visit me are too minute to be properly recorded. The excuse we made was that I gave her coaching in English. Celia was sixteen. She had won her first real fight with her father and she seemed now to possess his hardness and cunning. Although Charlie still prowled his shop like a tiger there was something caged and flabby about him. He no longer gave the impression of being about to pounce. In the street we looked at each other with caution and dislike. His threat of the year before I saw now as a piece of melodrama—something to share admiration of with his daughter.
She usually visited me on a Sunday. Often we did talk about books. Her English teacher in the lower sixth was John Edgar, a crusty old sweetness-and-light man for whom English poetry had died with Robert Bridges. I tried to guide her to Eliot and Auden. She would not be guided. She jumped aimlessly, like a click-beetle: Faulkner, Pinter, Camus, Dylan Thomas, Patrick White. New Zealand poetry. Dante. Chinese poetry. She woke in me a puritanism I had not known I possessed.
“I’m sampling,” she said.
To me it was more like an orgy. My own introduction to books, in Father’s den, was vegetarian compared with this. I made out lists: the English novel between the wars, etc. But when I asked how she was getting on with Virginia Woolf she was likely to cry, “Oh, but I’m reading Confessions of Zeno. It’s marvellous.” With music it was the same. She skipped from Bach to Sibelius to Flamenco guitar. For three months she was in love with Mozart (man and music—an entity I refused to recognize) the way other girls were in love with Ringo Starr. A life of Mozart was the first book I let her take home to read. Even Charlie could hardly object to this. A month or two later when I found I had two copies of Persuasion there seemed no reason not to give her one. Again no objection from Charlie. Books, his opinion now stood, were something she’d grow out of the way Ralph had grown out of motor-bikes.
Celia laughed. “He really is wonderful. So tough and sure of himself. I mean, he’s there, you can never overlook him, even when he’s against things all the time. Other people shift about, you seem to be able to put your hand right through them. But not Daddy.”
I was “other people”. She had not been tactless, I was hypersensitive. I had come to need her affection. It seemed to run in a clear stream, the way Father’s had. The slightest eddy in the current troubled me. But I kept this trouble to myself. My sight of the danger was good; as of other dangers —from her father, the town, and her impulsiveness. “You’re an adult, Prior,” I said, “you can keep this clean.”
She asked me about her mother. “Do I look much like her at my age? It’s hard to te
ll from photographs.”
“Not much.” I thought for a moment. “She was pretty. You’re a jolie laide.”
She laughed. “What a marvellous term.” She repeated it with the accent that sent her French teacher into raptures. “I was scared of being pretty. I thought I was for a while. You know, insipid. But my mouth stopped it. I’ve got an ugly mouth, haven’t I?”
I looked judicious. Her mouth was wide, faintly simian, but full rather than thin. “It reminds me of Lydia Lensky’s in The Rainbow. An ugly beautiful muzzle.” She laughed with pleasure again, but also, I thought, with a touch of derision at my turning the conversation to books. I saw her trying words under her breath. Jolie laide. It was going to be a defining term.
“And my poor old Mum was just pretty?”
“Not just pretty. Very pretty. In a scared sort of way. You’ve got the same eyes.”
“Scared?”
“Without that. With a bit of your old man’s glitter.”
I told her how I had first seen Joyce Poole in her tennis skirt, walking down past the vineyard, a kind of temperance nymph in bacchic setting, and how she had stopped on the bridge to scratch her behind; how in my stall made of coal-sacks, from behind mounds of apples and plums, I had watched and begun to fall in love. A pretty picture, not spoiled by my satiric tone. I described the innocent progress of our affair. Celia listened in a kind of childish delight, as though to a fairy-tale. “It’s like something out of a silent movie. Didn’t you ever try to go to bed with her?”
“Oh yes,” I said, “in the end,” trying to pretend I wasn’t shocked.
“What happened?”
“Nothing. We were both too inexperienced.”
“Was that when you quoted Jonson at her?”
I nodded.
“Cunning old Paul.”
I was offended. For a moment I thought her coarse. “Nothing of the kind. I was completely sincere. It was a very pure occasion.”
Her eyes sparkled with delight. I’d become aware that my pompous turn was her favourite. Usually I could laugh at it myself. Now I got up to make a cup of tea.
“I’ve offended you.”
“I’m all right.” I went to the door. “You young people always have to cheapen things.” I’d been thrown a little off balance at finding the puppets in my story no puppets at all: they lived. I felt an ache, however slight. “Anyway, I shouldn’t talk about your mother with you.”
When I came back with tea she had Jonson’s poems down.
“Come my Celia, let us prove,
While we may the sports of love…
I can see how it must have impressed her.”
“It was the next two lines she liked.”
“Time will not be ours for ever:
He too soon our goods will sever.
I don’t think you could use this sort of thing for seducing girls today.”
“There was some kind of magic,” I said defensively. “The orchard—the sun. It seemed to make it appropriate.” I felt closer to Joyce Poole than I had in twenty years.
Celia smiled. “I’m not cheapening it. I’m a bit envious, that’s all. The last boy who wanted to sleep with me said I owed it to myself.”
“Who was that?”
“The Captain of the School, no less.”
I felt concern rather than jealousy. “You don’t see anything in him, do you?”
“He’s got nice muscles. And lots of nice teeth. Tell me about my father.”
“Well, he was tough. I heard when he went into the shop with your grandfather he closed off accounts that had been allowed to stay overdue for years.”
“I know all about the shop. That’s where all his stories start. ‘When I took over the shop from my father….’ He doesn’t seem to have had any childhood.”
So I talked about Charlie: the playground fight, the orchard raiding, the tin canoes. It was my childhood too I described. But it was at once living and dead, with a kind of sepia tint; the past tense had an iron quality. I began to feel, as I had not when talking about Joyce, that I was mourning something.
“My mother didn’t like your father. She thought he was leading me astray. But I was astray long before I ever met Charlie. I got rid of God when I was ten or eleven, by my own efforts. It should have been like chopping off an arm. With my brother it would have been, it would have been like tearing something out. With me—it was like clipping my finger-nails. But ever since then—I’ve been incomplete. I’ve got this sense of being hollow. I keep shifting from thing to thing. That’s why I have to have a den. To stop me being completely slippery. Lightweight.”
I listened to this confession with dismay. I had never questioned my identity; but nor had I made any attempt to recognize it. Why should I do it now? And in such dispirited tones? Where was that saving irony, that element that gave me weight? Celia’s smile was adult. She was disappointed in me.
I grinned. “You see what indoctrination does. You’re lucky your old man’s an atheist.”
“That means I’ve got nothing to reject. I’ve been cheated.”
“Reject lack of belief. Go Roman Catholic. You’d tone in well with incense and confession.”
I described a Presbyterian upbringing. Its straitness was something I had managed to forget; so now I was awed by the number of my secular choices that echoed lessons taken in those first ten years. My libertarian habits, it seemed, were Presbyterian after all, by simple inversion. Everything took its tone from Mother.
“Don’t talk about it if you don’t want to,” Celia said.
“She knew her job.”
To get away from that time I talked about Joyce Poole. My boyhood might appear in sepia tones, but the orchard and Joyce (one thing) was red and green and golden. I turned it over like an old possession.
“How did Daddy pinch her from you?”
“Is that how he describes it?”
“ ‘I pinched your mother from my best friend. Just moved in. Bam! Neither of them knew what had hit them.’ He’s so proud of himself.”
“What does your mother say?”
“Just smiles. You know, dissociates herself.”
“She’s never told you how it happened?”
“All she says is, she was young.”
“Well—it happened at the Fruitgrowers’ Ball.”
Celia smiled with delight. “It’s another world.”
“It was the day I quoted Jonson to her. She had a Spanish shawl that used to belong to her grandmother.”
“I know. It’s mine now.”
“The hall was decorated with saddles and chain harrows and bales of hay. The band was like a sawmill.” Celia laughed. “We came in—a real entrance. Paul Prior and the prettiest girl in town. Charlie had never seen her before. I was all primed up to watch him go green—no, black with envy. When he saw her it was like that.” I snapped my fingers. “He came straight up the hall. Like a cannon-ball. Clean through a dance. Pushing people out of the way. And that was it. He got her. She was his.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
Celia laughed again. She was puzzled. “You let him take her?”
“I had no choice.”
“Didn’t you fight?”
“They were a force of nature.”
“Oh Paul, you’re pulling my leg.”
“I’m not. They were made for each other. It was plain. There was nothing for me to do but stand aside.”
She was still puzzled, but saw a compliment to herself: these elemental folk were her parents. Her good sense failed for a moment; she said gently, “Were you very sad?”
“Oh, I’d already decided my role was spectator. This just brought it home.”
She went away with an armful of books. I had a whisky and approved of myself. Strong and silent: I would protect her from the past. Later, after another whisky, I admitted that what had moved me was an unwillingness to let Celia know I’d had a mongoloid brother.
Through that year an
d the beginning of the next I saw Celia almost every Sunday. We talked about Joyce and Charlie several times. These conversations in particular made me aware of the rules I was breaking. I imagined disapproval all around me. How was I getting away with it? Why didn’t somebody make a move?
“It’s hard to say what Mum thinks,” Celia said. “She knows it’s helping my schoolwork, but she knows we talk about more than that. I think she wants me to get something she missed. As for Daddy, he’s decided you’re too insignificant to be noticed. It’s an act of will. If he stops concentrating I don’t know what will happen.”
My role was mixed: teacher, father, husband. I never let her see the last. Nor would I define it for myself. Books, examinations: yes, I was teacher. Ambitions: I was father, hamming the part a little for both our sakes. But in awareness of her, penetration of her (though I never more than tapped her on the hand), I was lover. It was absurd, because she was a child; yet it was understandable—she was a woman. Unlike me she was playing no role, but like me she slipped from one course to another. My awareness of her never faltered. Though she never complained I knew when her ankles were sore (she had her mother’s ankles—aristocratic and treacherous). While wishing to soothe them with hands as cold as ice, I offered embrocation and quipped about the smell of the football shed. I knew her eyestrain and headaches and anger at each new spot that might turn into a pimple. A faint mustiness in her breath told me when she was having her period. I knew the nights she was out with boys and believed I could tell next day how far she had let them go. All this went on behind a smiling exterior, and within a style of life I still believed cool, satiric, detached. Control, after all, was in my hands. Nothing was given or taken or lost.
Celia had her University Entrance accredited. To celebrate I risked taking her for a drive. She had lived in Wadesville all her life but had never been to a West Coast beach. I drove her out to Muriwai, where I had taken Joyce Poole twenty years earlier. She wore dark glasses and a scarf round her hair, but on that cold spring day the beach was deserted. We walked to the top of the cliffs at the south end. The view up the beach was clearer than usual. Even so the grey strip of sand dissolved at last into haze. Long green breakers slid in, a quarter of a mile apart. The scruffy sand hills, the golf course and pine plantations, seemed lower than the sea—seemed to hold it back by a kind of confidence trick.