In My Father's Den

by Gee, Maurice

  “You pamper him,” Andrew said.

  We drank tea again, then Penny set herself to mend the evening. Bright, formal chatter: she had the gift. I had only to nod and smile. Later Andrew fetched his satchel and laid papers on the coffee table: the rough plans of a retail shop. I looked at my watch and saw it was half-past eight.

  “Not now, Andrew. Come across to my place in the morning.”

  “I can’t do that.” He looked as if I’d insulted him. “It’s a working day. What’s wrong with now?”

  “A social occasion.” I managed to smile at Penny. “Besides, I’ve got to go. There’s someone I’ve got to see.”

  “Well, I’m not coming to Wadesville. You’re on holiday. You come and see me.” He pointed his finger at my chest. “It’s your money I’m working for.”

  “I’m taking my money out.”

  “What?”

  “I’m taking my money. Out of the business.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Why not? It’s mine.”

  “It’s not yours. It’s the company’s.”

  “All right. I’ll sell.” I had the deception going nicely now. “But I’m not talking about it tonight. Not in front of Penny. You come to my place. Tomorrow morning. Early.”

  “Listen, Paul—”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Do you mind if I use the bathroom?”

  I threw water on my face; wondering if my talent for improvisation would be adequate for the morning. It would be too much to expect. Plans were needed. A plan. The plan. The large and immovable thing I could push Andrew behind so no one need ever see him again.

  Back in the hall, I opened Jonathan’s bedroom door. A movement came from the bed.

  “All right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m going now.”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s coming in the morning. He thinks it’s about business.”

  The boy said nothing.

  “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  “Try to sleep.”

  “I will.”

  I had the feeling I was deserting him. “He won’t come in here. Your mother told him you were sick.”

  “Yes.” His voice was remote—he had begun to ride some fantasy; escape. I hoped it would last until he was asleep. I closed the door and went back to the living-room.

  “Paul,” Penny said firmly, “I think you should sit down and talk this out now. It’s always best that way.” She stood up. “I’ll leave you men together.”

  “No, Penny. I’m going home.” I moved to the door. “Tomorrow morning, Andrew.” His face had taken a strained, embittered look—as in our mother anger made him yellow. I felt a kind of forlorn pleasure.

  “Paul, I’ve worked like a slave for you….”

  I drove across the harbour bridge and nosed out through Herne Bay, Avondale, New Lynn, blindly as a mole. I drove past Waikumete cemetery and the crematorium into a territory I had learned through the soles of my feet. Wadesville—winy, puritan. The words moved calmly across my mind as though fellowship between them could not be more natural. I stopped the car at the roadside and looked down at the town. The lights were a luminous skeleton. The flesh I saw was that of Wadesville thirty years ago. My Wadesville. Andrew’s? How had Andrew been made? I could no more explain him than I could the town. Nor could I think about him. I could only watch what my mind supplied: the boy in the kitchen, blacking Mother’s stove; in the orchard, search- ing for eggs; behind the teller’s grille; running with the jar of pears. The boy crying without shame, turning in the circle as the caps flicked out. The man, running. There was no change in the working of my mind as it moved into the future. It seemed that memory supplied these images too: Andrew running, hands held out; Andrew dead, face down in the bracken; Andrew sinking, weighted with stones, his face withdrawing like a fish into the dark green water. An event floated up, ready-made, with a shape I could not question. I handled it, opened it like a book. It filled me with dread, yet, as had my losing Joyce Poole, it gave me pleasure.

  The plan. It was done. I sat there longer, until my mind was able to work on it. And longer still.

  Lights were going out in the town as I started the car and drove down the hill towards home. I turned along Farm Road. To Celia I said, “Leave it to me.” And to Jonathan sleeping on the North Shore, “Leave it to Uncle Paul.”

  Then, inside the house, I saw that Charlie had paid another visit. I looked at the wreck of the den with a sense of déjà vu. In the middle of the floor books with their covers ripped off were heaped as though for a bonfire. The pictures lay on top of them, kicked full of holes or bent like pieces of tin. The record-player was chopped in pieces and the records smashed. There was no whole piece of glass or pottery in the room. Celia’s shivery grass was emptied on top of the pile of books. Henry Bear lay beside it, split down the middle. His insides were the colour of butter.

  A sack flapped in the window Charlie had climbed through. The tomahawk lay in my chair. I lifted it out and sat down.

  “Fair enough, Charlie,” I said.

  May 17, 1969

  It was seven o’clock when I woke in my chair. The sacks breathed heavily. In time with them the light increased and faded. The ruined den seemed ancient, fallen into natural decay, and I an intruder with a curiosity merely scientific. These broken artefacts, torn books, spoke of a past whose connection with myself could not be traced. This was the day of the plan. I had come out of the world I’d locked myself in as my idiot brother died, into the world where my brother Andrew’s death was taking place. This I must attend.

  The tomahawk had lain across my thighs all night. I stood up and dropped it on the heap of books. I crossed the room to the calendar—the only thing Charlie had not torn down. Egmont, touched with sunlight, stood above a dark sea and dark land. “At 5 a.m. saw for a few Minutes the Top of the peaked Mountain above the Clowds … it is of a prodigious height and its top is covered with everlasting snow….” I pulled the calendar down and tore it across, halving the mountain and eighteenth-century map. Past and future were irrelevant.

  But the word “prodigious” echoed in my mind. She had used it of Mozart, her father, George Eliot; of a weta, a tree, the heat of the sun: like me at sixteen, tasting words, careless of meaning, liking above meaning the shape of them and the feel of them on the tongue. I was desperate to feel grief for her, but all I could feel was anger at the waste of a life so full of promise. Victim of a madman—my second loony brother. Better if she had been struck by lightning. One could at least have understood the laws involved. Andrew was outside the universe of laws, in some place where blood was water. His life too was destroyed, he was victim as much as she—but I had no conviction of this, I could feel nothing for him, not even mild pity. I simply knew my job: to “carry” him again a little way.

  I knew I had an hour. He started work at eight o’clock and would make a point of reaching my place at that time. I showered and had a shave. For the first time in years I took little notice of my face in the mirror.

  Then I had a breakfast of coffee and toast. There were twenty minutes left. I went outside and walked in the wilderness behind the house. My ewes jumped at the sight of me and hurried into an angle of the fence. They watched me sidelong with their yellow eyes. It was another cold morning. The wind flapped my shirts and underclothes on the line. They had been there since Sunday morning. I looked at the briefs with distaste. Sexy. So one of my girl-friends had told me. Also, she insisted, that tight little pouch killed sperm at first base, by overheating. I was, she had said, a spermicidal maniac. I frowned and averted my eyes.

  The ewes went deeper into the corner. Their grey wool snagged on the barbs of the fence. I supposed they would find grazing on the section if by some chance that part of the plan failed that had me survive. Someone would come to take them away. They were so elderly it would probably be to the works. I told them not to worry—swimming
was one of the half dozen things I did well. On the farm the Herefords were grazing by the water trough. Their breath steamed lightly and their flanks shone in the weak morning sunlight. Their days were definitely numbered, but that could not be laid at my door—unless as an eater of meat I must take responsibility. For ten minutes I found refuge in trivialities. Then I could not keep from looking every moment at my watch.

  At a minute to eight Andrew’s black Rover came into sight and cruised down into the hollow. I heard a gear-change at the tight corner. A moment later the car came up and rolled in its English way along to my house. Andrew sat like a chauffeur: straight back, two hands on the wheel. He turned the car to face the way it had come. I had thought once, with my usual cleverness where he was concerned, that the noises of the Rover suited him perfectly: the murmuring of the well-bred engine, the discreet cough of the closing door. Standing on the small concrete yard outside the kitchen, with my shirts clapping in a friendly way at my back, I heard the sounds again. They found no point of reference in my mind. The gate gave a secretive squeak. Footsteps sounded on the path with the measure of good-mannered chewing. I tried to cling to an apprehension of him—the man of no appetites, man of disapprovals. I tried to imagine him eyeing my unweeded path. But his feet on the porch, his knuckles on the door, set me drifting again. With hysteric levity I thought, who’s that knocking on my door?

  I gave myself a moment. Why not? A last self-indulgence. I gave myself until he should knock again.

  “Paul,” he yelled in an angry voice. He thought I was still in bed. In a moment he banged heavily on the frame of my bedroom window.

  All right, I said, here we go.

  I went through the house and pulled back the heavy front door. He was immediately in front of me, with his hand raised to strike the door with its heel.

  “Hello, Andrew,” I said.

  “What’s been going on here?” He stepped back to glare at sacks on the windows. “Didn’t you hear me knocking?”

  “I was in the back yard.” I left him to close the door and led the way to the den. “Sit down if you can find a place.”

  He looked at the ruined room with an expression of outrage.

  “What happened here?”

  “I had a visit from Charlie Inverarity.”

  “He did this? You let him?”

  “It happened while I was out.”

  “But this is—criminal. This is valuable property.” His eyes were on the record-player. “Have you called the police?”

  “No.”

  “But why not? You can’t let him get away with a thing like this.”

  “He was upset about his daughter.”

  “That’s preposterous. What’s his daughter got to do with it? This is—criminal.”

  “Sit down, Andrew.”

  “I’ll do no such thing. Not until you’ve telephoned the police.”

  “Sit down.” I put my hand on his chest and pushed. He went back into my chair so hard that he bounced a little way forward off its back. Before he could get up I said, “If I call the police it’s you they’ll arrest, not Charlie.”

  “What?” There was an unnatural quickness in the forward dart of his head. He understood. Before I was properly aware of having taken the first step, he had gone the whole way and seen what he must do. “You’d better explain that remark.”

  “All right.” I sat down facing him. For a moment I suffered a kind of thinning of consciousness so that my brother seemed to have no substance—a flat shape on a flat surface. “You killed Celia Inverarity.”

  He looked at me steadily; and now he was solid again: Andrew the deskman, Presbyterian elder. I wondered if I were mad. He said, “You’re mad, Paul. You’ve finally—” he gave a small laugh, “—flipped.” The word brought me to myself. Andrew using slang? This wasn’t Andrew, this was somebody else.

  “Tell me how you did it.”

  He stood up. “That stuff about taking your money out—that was a trick to get me over here.”

  I nodded.

  “A lie.” He began to walk to the door. “See a doctor, Paul.” He stopped and waved disgustedly at the room. “It’s the sort of life you lead. But I wash my hands of it. You’re on your own now. Heaven knows, I tried.”

  “Sit down, Andrew.”

  “I’m going to work.”

  “You’ll find the police waiting if you do.”

  “Meaning what? You’ll ring them?”

  “As soon as you go out the door.”

  “And what will you say?”

  “I’ll tell them about your neighbour’s car. Did you wipe it, Andrew? Did you wipe Celia’s finger-prints off?”

  “All right.” He came back from the door and sat in the chair. He looked at me with dislike. “What do you propose to do?”

  That’s it, I thought, the confession. As simple as that. I almost broke down. I must have hoped until that moment, secretly from myself, that he would be able to prove himself innocent—bring out some humourless Andrewism. Smile his condescending smile. The hope was lost in the instant I became aware of it. I began to shout. Why? For God’s sake why? What had made him do it? He sat impassive under this, with a stony, inviolate expression that enraged me.

  “I know,” I cried, “I can read you. You saw her coming up the road and your cock started to twitch. You’ve never had a girl, have you? Not a real one. Only that frigid bag of a wife.”

  He straightened in the chair. “How dare you?”

  “What did you do, Andrew? Get her in the car and ask her to feel how big it was? And strangle her when she wouldn’t? Or maybe you had to kill her to make yourself feel clean again after all those dirty thoughts.” I went on for some time, past the point at which he might have answered with a similar kind f raving. He drew back from this, far back to the outer reaches of his ground, and made himself inviolate again. Unshakeable.

  Quietly he said, “You’re rotten, Paul. Absolutely rotten. You poison everything you touch. There’s not a single thing that’s good and decent—and holy, that you haven’t tried to pour filth on. You corrupt everything. Even my son. You’ve tried to corrupt even him. You’re not coming into my house again. I’m going to see to that. I’m not having you anywhere near my family. Or Mother. I’m the one who loves her. I’m the one who keeps her alive.”

  It was no trouble to get him to talk after that. The trouble would have been to make him stop. He showed me his childhood; and his adolescence—a kind of torture chamber where his human nature racked him and our mother stood Christ-like, with blessing and forgiveness, if he could only reach her.

  “I had to make up for you, did you know that? And Father. And John. I had to be all of you. There were times when I was so—unworthy, I felt if I went near her and she touched me she’d get sick and die.”

  That was his education. The other things in the long run never counted. I was listening with an awe that was close to fear; a knowledge forming in me that I would be asked to pay for hearing these things. He was talking easily, in a way that was mildly humorous, even critical. The central truths were not in question.

  I asked about the factory, money.

  “The factory was my reward.”

  A diagram of his universe might be made of two overlapping circles, the perimeter of each enclosing the centre of the other. In one circle things of the spirit: a stern God, a merciful Christ, and Mother, combining these attributes (a kind of Holy Ghost). In the other: bank account, house, car —Paul Prior squeaking at the outer rim, so distant his certain damnation could be ignored. Andrew lived in the common ground, untroubled, until I came back.

  I forced a battle on him. When we were face to face he found his certainties shaken. And as I brought weapons from one rim, so he was forced to seek his at the other. He left his safe middle ground for the haunted territory, and there, at last, a call reached him for blood. (These are my words. I reject their apocalyptic tone. He believed he was chosen, but the truth is much less simple. The whole of his life overflo
wed into the killing.)

  “How did you kill her?” I asked.

  Sunday the twelfth of May was a Sunday like any other. Visiting the sick gave Andrew pleasure only as a duty accomplished. He borrowed the car key from Mrs. Tillotson and set off for Birkenhead, where his upholstery foreman nursed a case of stomach flu. He did not expect to be welcome, or to stay long.

  The foreman’s wife took him at first for a doorstep evangelist. Then, flustered, confessed that her husband was out playing golf. His flu had got better overnight—it was almost a miracle. Andrew drove away angrily. If it had not been Sunday he would have gone straight to the office and worked. Instead he drove north. As was usual when he met dishonesty, he called our mother to his side. At the top of the Albany hill he (they) stopped in a parking-bay and looked across the upper harbour to the Wadesville valley. It appeared to lie under a brown industrial smog. (Things, on that day, had a way of confirming his view; isolating him.)

  “Look what they’ve done to our home, Mother.”

  The drive that followed, around the top of the harbour, through Riverhead and down the motorway, was a kind of Orphean descent. The Wadesville of his imagination was changeless: old wooden house, orchard, garden, kitchen with roaring stove and singing kettle; mother, Goddess of the Hearth—Andrew, wise child, acolyte. He came down that day into a town of hoardings, shops, traffic lights, where Sunday motor-bike gangs clustered outside milkbars and girls in jeans and leather mini-skirts stood on the corners with jaws moving on cuds of gum. This was no longer Wadesville. This was the town of Paul Prior. He drove through it and turned into Farm Road. At the top of the hill he stopped and looked across the valley. In place of the house and orchard stood giant fibrolite storage sheds. Beside them the dead creek ran. He walked from the car to the edge of the hill and looked down at my house; and me on the sunny porch, reading a book. He watched me turn one page; two; dig in my ear for wax and wipe my finger on the leg of my trousers.

  A girl went by, carrying books. He saw her instantly as mine. A law began to operate. The three of us, and Mother, were in a valley outside common nature, where other beings were insubstantial as ghosts. Only we were real. He watched the girl walk down the hill. Everything brought a shock of recognition. Books, plaited hair, bare legs, religious collar. The girl went out of sight. He glimpsed her a little while later moving in the scrub, where she seemed to be picking something. On the veranda I moved my book out of the sun. The girl came on to the road again and set off along its edge, carrying a bunch of grass. He watched our meeting on the path and saw her spin like a dancer to show off her dress. We went inside.