In My Father's Den

by Gee, Maurice

  “Can we drive along?” Celia said.

  The car wheels on the wet sand made a powerful racing-car hum. We went twenty miles in just over twenty minutes, then I pulled in towards the sandhills. We walked down to the water. The world was now a saucer with us on its rim: sandhills behind, with here and there a wall of logs or wired grass to hold back the sea; in front broken water, long cold breakers, trailing spray; the strip of sand on either side, fading and vanishing. The little green car was incongruous, yet it seemed to me an emblem of courage. We walked with our legs in the water and felt it pull us seawards like something living. I began to worry about the tides. It would be a twenty mile race back to the road. I turned Celia towards the car. She had been quiet all afternoon. I asked what was worrying her.

  “Nothing.”

  In the car she said, “You know this can never come to anything?”

  I stopped with my hand on the ignition. “I like it the way it is.” I waited. “Has something gone wrong?”

  She was suddenly very much a child. She had no language for what she wanted to say. When she spoke her voice had a whining tone. “It’s Daddy. He keeps on hanging round me.”

  At first I didn’t understand—it was difficult to get myself out of the picture. Then I said, “How does it happen? Can you tell me?”

  “I don’t know. I thought I was crazy at first—it was so—slimy. But it’s not my imagination. He’s always—breathing on me, and looking at me, and touching me when he doesn’t have to.”

  “Does your mother know?”

  “I think so. She sees. She just gets cold and—remote.”

  “With you?”

  “With him. With me she’s kind of apologetic. But still withdrawn. It’s all really her fault. She’s cut herself off from him—I mean, more than just sex. She sleeps in the sunroom, but it’s more than that. She thinks her life is wasted. It’s so stupid—to marry a man like Daddy and expect anything more than what she got.”

  “So he turns to you.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “He won’t even know he’s doing it.”

  “That doesn’t make it easier.”

  “It might even be part of this competition he’s having with me. But it won’t last. You’ll see. He’ll find a woman. It always happens. Do you think you can put up with that?”

  “If it makes him happy.”

  “It will. And this other thing—with you. It’s nothing to worry about. It’s funny really. All men want to sleep with their daughters. It’s natural. It’s one of the reasons families are so comic. All this stuff going on under the lid.”

  “It doesn’t make me laugh.” But she was more cheerful.

  “Read Casanova.” I quoted from memory. “How can a father truly love his daughter unless he has slept with her at least once.”

  “You could get fired for telling me stuff like this.”

  “I’m in your hands.” I had shown her a stance she could take, but I wondered if there were some other. I doubted that it would work as well as mine.

  We raced the tide back to the road.

  “What made you say we could never come to anything?”

  “I’m sorry. I was being stupid.”

  “No. I’d like to know.”

  “Well—I thought if Daddy was like that you probably would be too.”

  “The thought’s never crossed my mind. Scout’s honour.”

  She smiled, nodding. “We’re friends.”

  “Friends,” I agreed, feeling hollow.

  “I wish my mother could be happy.”

  I let her out before we got into Wadesville. I saw plainly that I had been warned. Slimy, she had said. I shivered. Now I was simply teacher and friend, even in my thoughts. I promised myself. She would never have cause to use that word of me.

  In January the Inveraritys stayed for three weeks at Orewa. Ralph taught Celia how to ride a surfboard. On their first Sunday at home she came to visit me, returning an armful of books. Glumly she said, “You were right about Daddy. He’s got himself a girl-friend.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He’s got all manly all of a sudden. And very considerate. Holds the door open for Mum. That sort of thing. He kept saying he had to get back to see how the shop was going, and then he’d ring and say he’d stayed too late to come back.” She giggled. “It’s awful. I have to watch his handkerchiefs for lipstick. Not that it really matters. Mum knows.”

  “How’s she taking it?”

  “Oh, pleased and hurt. Sometimes I hate parents.”

  The school year started and at once she was in trouble. “That bloody Inverarity girl,” said Price. “She’s refused to be a prefect.”

  “What’s her reason?”

  “Some nonsense. Not wanting to be a policeman.” He turned to me sitting in my corner of the staffroom. “I blame you for this, Paul. Putting ideas in the girl’s head.”

  “It’s news to me,” I said. “But she’s right, of course. It’s a lousy system.”

  Price threw up his hands. “See what I mean? How can I run a school…? You listen, Paul, you tell that girl from me, there are going to be no special rules for her. If she won’t be a prefect she’ll be treated just like any other pupil. And if that means detentions with a lot of third-formers she’ll just have to put up with it. I’ve no patience with nonconformists.”

  “It’s time that girl was brought into line,” Betty Selwyn said. “Her hair looks like a hippie’s. Just because she’s clever she thinks she can do as she likes.”

  But Celia (and the school’s one or two other rebels) had support from half a dozen of us. We made a buffer between her and the staff’s old guard and managed to prevent all but occasional skirmishes. Celia’s hair was a shining cascade that fell to the middle of her back. At other times it was so heavy and still it seemed carved from brown wood. The reasons for Miss Selwyn’s hatred of it were plain. Poor mannish career-girl Betty had convinced herself that intelligence and good looks excluded each other. Double gifts were against nature. But Celia survived the term unclipped. She came each day in her grey summer uniform, hair loose, hat perched on top. She was in my English class again and was reading and working with a ferocity that alarmed me. Our friendship was cooler and more relaxed. My teaching her daily in a class of twenty-five had formalized it. I told myself this was fortunate: in this style we could go on for years, even after she’d left Wadesville College. Then she would be in her twenties and I would be only forty-five…. I was ruthless with that thought. See a middle-aged man in a young girl’s way: gum in the eyes, body and breath stink, withered belly and stringy cock. Paul Prior in the autumn of his life lusting after spring. Slimy.

  I managed to see the figure as comic.

  All the same I was disappointed when Celia chose to work the May holidays in her father’s shop. I had looked forward to week-day visits, and found myself thinking sourly that I hadn’t learned my place.

  On Sunday I read on the porch so I might see her as she came up from the hollow. The book held me. By the time her clacking sandals roused me she was almost at the gate. I jumped to my feet and cried hallo. She was carrying books as usual, and a bunch of shivery grass. Her hair was done in a plait as thick as a pick-handle. I started down the path to open the gate but she lifted the catch with her wrist and came inside.

  She raised her arms and spun around. “Like it?” She was wearing an ash-grey mini-dress with long sleeves and a white Quaker collar. “I bought it with the money I’m going to earn.” I thought I had never seen her looking more beautiful.

  “It’s marvellous. It really suits you.” But I gave an inward groan.

  “I wore it to please Mum. She thinks it’s Sundayish.”

  “She’s wrong.”

  “Shall we go inside?”

  In the den she gave me the shivery grass. I thanked her and put it in a vase. It’s a grass that reminds me of my mother. I used to carry bunches of it to her as a child, competing with Andrew’s flowers, which a mas
culine sense of fitness forbade me to be seen with. “My mother was fond of this. ‘God’s handiwork.’ ” It occurred to me too that I had classified Celia’s frock from Mother’s chart: ash-grey. (Eggshell-blue, rust-red, clover-pink.) The naming of colours had been her one attempt at secular lyricism. “I used to pick bunches for her. And listen to little sermons on the beauty God hides away in quiet corners. Where did you get it?”

  “In the hollow. It’s growing at the side of the road. You don’t know what you’re missing, going everywhere by car. I found this too.” She unfolded her handkerchief and showed me a dozen or so small greyish leaves. “I think it’s some sort of herb. Not sage, but something like it. It was in the garden of the haunted house.” She crushed a leaf cautiously between her teeth. “It could be something for a witches brew.” Suddenly she crossed her eyes, gripped her throat. “Augh.”

  “What is it?”

  “There are things crawling in my blood. Little snaky evil things. Augh.”

  “I’ll get you a cup of tea.” She had no histrionic talent. I was moved to see her less than perfect.

  When I came back she had the leaves spread on the coffee table and was trying to identify them from Plants of New Zealand. “I don’t think it can be a native.” We searched other books and drank our tea. Then she asked for music. Instead, I put on Lorca’s monologue on duende—and watched as she straightened in her chair, recognition moving in her. When the record finished she said nothing.

  “Would you like to have that record?”

  “I’d rather listen to it here. It wouldn’t go with home.” She sighed. “I’m going to Spain one day. I’m going to learn Spanish.”

  “There’s a town called Lorca. It’s hot and white and dusty.” I read her several of Lorca’s poems. Then she asked for flute music—something primitive. While she listened she undid her plait and shook her hair loose. She combed it with her fingers. I reflected that I had broken the first rule of den-living. I had allowed the spirit of an outsider into the room. It was haunted now, I could no longer curl up in it, foetus in womb.

  The afternoon had a strange quality—as if it were shaped in an art form: reality transformed through the power of my will and imagination. It seemed to be outside time, and outside place (Wadesville); and full of conventions. Yet it was anchored to reality by the girl, who gave the impression of being able to break out of my construction whenever she should choose. She asked me what Whitmanesque meant. I took Leaves of Grass from the shelves and started to read Song of Myself. Whitman I had always considered a windbag. Now I found his rhetoric moving; the occasion betrayed me.

  “Do I contradict myself?

  Very well then, I contradict myself.

  (I am large. I contain multitudes.)”

  Celia laughed. “What a marvellous licence to have. It makes him a sort of monster.”

  My sense of revelation darkened; became more accurate. This was myself, this multitude—horde of slippery pygmies, striking poses. If my life could be broken down it would slither away in a thousand separate directions. I closed Leaves of Grass and smiled at Celia. She was whole, she was bright, she glittered. A single beam, one direction. I thought foolishly that I might worship her.

  “This was one of my father’s favourite books.” He had bought the copy I owned several weeks after my mother had burned the first one. Much of Song of Myself was heavily underlined. Bravos and Fines abounded. I showed Celia.

  “Tell me about the poison-shed.” The idea of a hoard of books in that unlikely place fascinated her. I described it again: the wind coming up through the floor, Charlie in sodden clothes, wrapping himself in sacks, then Father opening the door—Aladdin’s cave. I described myself sitting there on winter afternoons reading Dickens.

  “And your brother never found it?”

  “He did in the end. He and my mother both knew. It gave them something else to be righteous about. Poor Andrew. There is a man with constipation.”

  She blushed. “Mum told me she met him. He looked as if he’d been wrestling with the devil.”

  “That’s him.”

  “She told me about your other brother too. The mongoloid one.”

  I said nothing.

  “How Daddy told her about him at the dance. And how she ran away and wouldn’t see you again. It’s different from the story you told me.”

  “It wasn’t any of your business.”

  “It wasn’t till years later she found out that sort of thing didn’t run in families. By then Ralph and I were born. And you were in England.”

  “She had no right.”

  “Your story was nicer. Love at first sight. It really was sweet of you to make it up. But as soon as I started thinking about it I knew it couldn’t be true. So I told it to Mum. You should have seen her face.”

  “She’s a fool.”

  “Don’t you dare talk about her like that.”

  I had not escaped from my shame at my loony brother. All I could think was that Celia knew—she would draw away from me.

  “Anyway, if it’s having a brother like that you’re worried about, I already knew. Dad told me when I started coming here.” She was looking at me angrily. After arguments of this sort I had found women come easily to bed. Anger tips over into desire. Relief at one surrender leads to the next. But this time I was the victim; taken by a lust so pure it gave the illusion of not being carnal. Instead of moving towards her I turned away. I took a bottle of Dry Sack from the liquor cabinet and filled two glasses. Desire passed and left me feeling as though I’d been sniffing ether. I carried one glass carefully to her across the room.

  “Here you are. Produce of Spain. We’ll drink to Lorca.”

  She took up the new tone without a pause. The brief quarrel had shaken her and her hand trembled as she reached for the glass. But she smiled and said, “Real sherry. I’ve never tasted it.” It pleased me to see how eagerness for something new, greed even, pushed out her other emotions. She sipped. “It tastes like raisins.”

  “To the memory of Lorca.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “He disappeared in the civil war. Franco’s boys probably got him.”

  Her eyes filled with tears—the surrender, I could not help thinking, that in an older woman would have taken us to the bedroom. We drank our sherry and after a while she said, “Thank you for trying to make it romantic for me.”

  I did not understand.

  “Dad and Mum. But I like the true story best.” She smiled. “It’s in character.”

  We talked for another half hour. Then it was time for her to go. She asked to borrow Whitman; and picked up a copy of Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner I’d bought a few days earlier.

  “What’s this like?”

  “Good. Take it if you like. It’s got a Wadesville flavour.”

  Going down the path, I said, “You’d better buy some chewing-gum in town. Get that sherry off your breath.”

  “Who cares what people think?”

  “Charlie Inverarity isn’t people.”

  “I can handle him.”

  I wondered if the sherry had made her a little drunk. “Are you all right? I can run you home.”

  “No. I want to walk.”

  I opened the gate and let her out.

  “Have fun in the shop.”

  “Ugh.” But her mood had changed again. She kept her hand on the gate, then suddenly leaned over it and kissed my cheek. “Thank you for being so nice to me.”

  She walked off down the road towards the hollow.

  May 16, 1969

  I arrived in Takapuna with no idea how to fill the afternoon. The last thing I wanted was to be caught by Penny, who would break the week into pieces and put it together again like a jigsaw puzzle. I drove to the furniture factory, a long low fibrolite building grafted on to an older brick and plaster one. Andrew’s office is on a mezzanine floor. It had always struck me as being like something offered on a tray, under a glass dish. He sits behind glass, cut off by glass
from his secretary, and looks out over the upholstery room (a “room” as large as a school assembly hall). I climbed the stairs and stopped outside the office. The secretary saw me and beckoned me in. “He won’t be long. He’s on the phone.” Andrew was talking earnestly, but his eyes stopped on me with a questioning look. I shook my head—nothing serious —and turned to watch the men working. Priors makes ugly furniture. Sofas were on the near end of the floor, like quilted sarcophagi, and pink porky chairs on the far end. I thought I’d almost as soon be in munitions.

  “Come in, Paul.”

  He had a plain brown desk with a wooden chair behind it. The customer’s chair was upholstered. I sat down. Andrew was without his usual calm.

  “I’ve been looking into this question of a retail shop. It’s a tricky business.”

  I nodded.

  “I’d like to get your views some time.”

  “I’ve got no views. It just surprises me that stuff out there sells at all.”

  “Of course it sells. You don’t know the market.”

  “I don’t want to know the market.”

  So, in ten seconds, we were glaring at each other. My glare was weak—a thing of habit only. I closed my eyes. “But I didn’t come to talk about that.”

  “What did you come to talk about?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t you go down home and have a rest? Penny’ll make you a cup of tea.”

  “I will soon.”

  He pushed some papers to one side, then brought them back again. “Have the police been bothering you?”

  “Not much. No more than they have to.”

  “Are they any closer to catching the man?”

  “I suppose they must be. They’ve got enough people working on it.”

  “What line are they taking? Any likely suspects?” Normally he would be stuffy about a thing like this: the “seamy side” was best ignored.