In My Father's Den

by Gee, Maurice

  Insult had given place to a sense of defilement. He waited. At the end of an hour he drove to Cascade Park. Here he had picnicked with mother, and swung on swings while she watched to see that he didn’t go too high. Bracken and scrub covered the playing ground now. The sound of the falls was thinner than it had been in his childhood. He walked down to the creek and came back on a path through the scrub. He was inspecting the place, like a man in an empty house. The tiny universe peopled by Mother, himself, the girl, me, widened to include it.

  He drove back to the hill. It never occurred to him that Celia might have left. He watched the house. He had the sense of being about to perform some important action, some cleansing action, but no knowledge yet of what it might be. It touched Mother, he knew. And me. With wonder he found that his love for her included me.

  Celia came on to the veranda. She put up a hand to shield her eyes from the sun. He saw that her hair was unplaited. At the gate she kissed my cheek. He looked at me sadly, with forgiveness. The girl was evil: an agent. She walked along the road towards the hollow. (A car went by in a world governed by other laws.) He saw her wave, me wave in return, and she went out of sight into the hollow. Andrew ran his car to the edge of the road and faced it the way the girl was walking. She came up between the banks of dusty scrub, shielding her eyes again. She was smiling and her face was flushed. He noticed that a button of her collar was undone.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “Can I give you a ride?”

  “Oh.” She was startled. He, for her, had been in another world. “No. No thank you. I like walking.” She kept on.

  “I’m Paul Prior’s brother.”

  She stopped and faced him.

  “I was on my way to see Paul. But it’s a bit late now. Can I give you a lift back down the road?”

  “Well….” There was no way out. “As far as town would help. I’ll walk from there.” She went round to the passenger’s side and got in the car. “How did you know I was a friend of his?”

  “I stopped to have a look at the view. I saw you come out.”

  She blushed. He had a sense of having begun her defeat. He waited to start the car until she had settled herself. She had to prop herself up a little, bracing her back on the back of the seat, to pull her skirt under her thighs. Then she smoothed it on top and held the books in her lap.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Celia Inverarity.”

  Everything had a place in the pattern: her loose hair, dress, naked legs. Now her name.

  “Are you any relation of Charlie Inverarity?”

  “He’s my father.” She looked suddenly at him. “Do you know him?” He smelled wine on her breath.

  “I knew him when we were boys. He was Paul’s friend.”

  “Yes. Paul coaches me English. I go to the school he teaches at.”

  Andrew started the car and drove towards Wadesville. He felt no pity for the girl.

  “I see he lends you books.”

  “Yes.”

  “What are they?”

  “The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. That’s by James Hogg. Paul says it’s good.”

  “What’s the other one?”

  It was lying on top. She flicked the cover open. “Leaves of Grass. It’s poetry.”

  Andrew saw Father’s name on the fly-leaf. This was the book he had picked up from the sideboard when he was seven years old. Laboriously he had read out the name. “Let me see that,” said Mother. For several minutes she had turned pages. Then she opened the door of the stove and pushed it into the flames. “That’s the only way to deal with filth.”

  The same book, with Father’s name. It was a sign, and Mother an example. He turned the car into the road to Cascade Park.

  “That’s the wrong way,” Celia said.

  “It’s all right. I want to show you something.”

  “Please. Let me out.”

  “Paul and I used to play down here when we were boys.”

  He went through the gate fast and ran the car along to the mouth of the track through the scrub. He was filled with joy. He felt himself exalted, chosen, advanced upon a path where each step was ordained.

  He stopped the car and faced Celia. For a moment—ten seconds or more—they stared at each other. In that time Celia must have passed from simple fright to a knowledge that she was dying. She turned, like some animal from a predator, half hypnotized, and fumbled with the door.

  Anger moved my brother at the end. She dared inhabit the same world as our mother. As she got the door open he drew back his arm and struck her on the neck with the edge of his hand. (When we were boys we called this the rabbit punch.) She fell forward, half-way out the door. He got out and ran round to her side. She was speaking in a thin childish voice; an admonition, almost casual in sound. “Stop it. Don’t.” She put out a hand to hold him off. The slowness of the movement seemed inhuman to him. He caught her hair in both hands and jerked her out of the car and swung her away from it towards the scrub. She stayed on her feet. Her mouth was open and her head lowered. She put a hand to her forehead and brought it away marked with blood. Andrew had strands of hair in his hands. Her hair enraged him. He ran at Celia and struck her on the face; struck her again; and a third time. She fell to the ground and he started to kick her, chest, belly, ribs, with a kind of method. When he stopped she was making bubbling sounds. Her eyes were open. He knelt beside her and put his hands round her throat. His fingers met at the back. He squeezed as hard as he could and felt something in her throat collapse. He kept the pressure up until he was sure she was dead. It was no surprise to him that as she was dying she became ugly.

  Andrew stood up. He pulled his fingers straight. He had no fear of being found, but knew he should look about him. Along the low ridge over the creek the houses showed blank faces. Windows were lit by the last rays of the sun. Smoke from a back-yard incinerator hung like mist in a hedge. Only a cat moved, threading delicately through cabbage stumps in a garden.

  Andrew knelt down again. He put one arm under Celia’s knees and the other under her shoulders. He lifted her up and walked as fast as he could along the path. Ten yards in it narrowed. Her head and feet jammed against stiff manuka twigs. He turned side-on, careful to keep the bloody side of her face away from his jacket. In the clearing he found a gap in the wall large enough to take her. He went down on his knees again and pushed her in. She was very loose and her limbs were difficult to arrange. He put her hands across her chest, then changed them to her sides. He smoothed her skirt, pulled small trees across her, and left without looking back.

  At the car Andrew closed the passenger’s door, went round to his side, and drove away. He remembered the books falling on the ground. Now they were on the seat. But nothing had to be explained. His part was done. The rest was out of his hands, he could not be responsible. If somebody had come by and put the books on the seat, that must be in the order of things.

  He drove at an even pace, filled with a warm and happy lassitude.

  He told it in other words, of course. Why should I let him speak?

  When he had finished he sat with an earnest expression on his face, as though he had wound up a piece of business. I wondered if he would offer to shake hands. There was no word I could utter. No expression of grief or rage or pity. That could only have been a gift to myself.

  “What are you going to do?”

  He looked surprised. “Nothing.”

  “The police are going to catch you.”

  “I don’t see how.” He had no interest in this.

  “The car,” I said. “They’re checking registrations. They’ll go through every Mini in Auckland.”

  “Oh.”

  “They’ll get to Mrs. Tillotson.”

  He made a complete mental retreat; went far away. I kept on talking, though I knew it was useless—my turn now to get through a piece of business. I explained about finger-prints, search, identification. “They’ll find the books, wherever you’ve hidden them
. Even if they’re burnt they’ll find the ashes.” Not a flicker of interest from him. I could not believe that during the past week he had not been troubled, back in the territory where the circles overlapped. Now he was safe, at the outer rim.

  “What about Jonathan? What about Penny? How do you think they’re going to feel?”

  He smiled faintly. “You’re making a great deal out of nothing.”

  “Nothing—”

  “You don’t understand, all that’s in the past. Things are different now.”

  The plan I had made (or grasped) the night before, that mature and final stratagem, came back to me now—a piece of childish wishing. It’s hardly surprising that as I’d gone to my pre-den life, to the time of loony John, to pick up my load of responsibility, the solution I’d found should have a boy-scoutish flavour. I seized it now with a passion wholly childish.

  “Listen, Andrew. I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to go out in that cabin cruiser of yours. This afternoon. We’ll say we’re going fishing. We’ll go out past Rangitoto, right out into the gulf. And then we’ll rig up an accident. Those old inboard engines are always exploding. There was a case in the paper only a couple of weeks ago.” We’ll start a fire. The whole thing will sink. There won’t be anything left. We’ll both go down together,” I lied. “It’ll be quick. It’s the best we can do, Andrew. Just you and me together. The police will stop after that. They won’t go any further. They can’t charge a dead man. It’ll be best for Jonathan and Penny…. It’s the way Mother would have liked it.”

  He let me go on, watching in the same blank way; simply recording. The last refinement brought a narrowing to his eyes.

  “You’re quite mad.”

  “Andrew, please listen.”

  “I find it hard to believe you’re Mother’s son.”

  “Please—”

  “You can’t come to arrangements with evil. That’s what you’ve done all your life.” Another dialogue was going on. “I was wrong to think I could save you.” He was way out on the rim now; the position he had killed Celia from.

  I stood up. “I’m ringing the police.”

  “No, Paul.” His voice had a gentle firmness. With a feeling of relief I saw he meant to kill me: he put me back in the world of the sane.

  I started for the door. The grief for Celia I had not been able to work up earlier in the morning found an entrance. “You fool,” I said, “you bloody maniac. Don’t you understand, that girl you killed was worth a dozen times our mother.” I stopped at the door. There was something else I had to say. He was on his feet, with the tomahawk in his hand. I knew I could outrun him. Out the back door, over the paddocks. Andrew would never catch me. “Our mother was a stupid bitch,” I said.

  But at the last his invention outran mine. He threw the tomahawk. I had time only to turn and duck. It struck me on the back, cracking ribs (a wet sound), ploughed a furrow up to my shoulder, and carried on across the side of my head, slicing my ear. I have the impression it then bounced off the door and fell into the broken insides of the record player. I fell down and lay still. Andrew came and stood over me. The wound he had made must have been messy enough to convince him I was dead. He went out of the room and out of the house.

  I knew I was badly hurt. There was no feeling in the right side of my back. My face and ear burned as though splashed with acid. At least you tried, I thought—a hysterical response, not the calm one it can sometimes seem to me now. I wondered if I was going to bleed to death. Hurry, I cried, without knowing whom the plea was made to. But there was also an overriding instruction whose source I still do not know: Lie still.

  It wasn’t over yet.

  Andrew came back. He paused to look at me. Then he went to the pile of books in the middle of the room. I heard a grating sound : a tin cap turning. Then the gurgle and splash of liquid. Petrol. Even while I quivered with an increase of terror I was grateful for its sharp reviving smell. The sound went on. It must have been a two-gallon tin. He shifted to the furniture—a soggy sound—then splashed the walls. He should have poured some on me, and put me in my chair to burn. But for this part of the murder I doubt that he had instruction. He screwed the cap back on. Then he came to the door. I heard the rattle of a box of matches.

  He struck, threw, ran; never looked back. The room seemed to explode. On my knees, I looked with childish recognition at the yellow viscous liquid that filled it from the windows to the pile of books. A lake of fire. Then I was out of the room, and running down the hall the way a chimpanzee runs, one hand touching the floor; gibbering too like a chimpanzee. I fell into the yard. The pain from my broken ribs made me scream—or perhaps that’s imagination. I do remember the idiot clapping of my bone-dry shirts as I went on my simian run under the clothes-line; and my idiot sheep cowering in their corner. It’s possible that I saw Andrew’s car moving along the road at a speed within the limit, sedate, well bred, away from the burning house, down to the hollow. Certainly I remember it.

  I fell on the cold grass and stayed there. I thought with pleasure of my blood seeping into the earth. I have no memory of the firemen coming, or of being carried to the ambulance. But there I remember Farnon; and the relief with which I told him all I knew.

  Epilogue

  The police arrested Andrew in his office. He was working on specifications for a retail shop. At the hearing he was found unfit to plead. I don’t know where he is now, or in what condition, but it’s certain that he’ll never be released.

  Jonathan wrote me a letter while I was in hospital.

  Dear Uncle Paul,

  Thank you for trying to help. I’m sorry you got hurt. We are going to live in Australia after the trial. Mum says we’ll change our name. She says we’re going to forget about the past so I think it will be best if you don’t try to find us.

  Love and best wishes,

  Jonathan

  I live in a house by the sea in Nelson Province. It’s here I’ve written this story—cultivating my garden, so to speak. It does not surprise me that what began as the story of Celia’s death should have become the story of my life. What could be more natural?

  I mourn Celia now and then. But what I really mourn is my books. My poor, burned books. I have orders placed all over the country. The postman curses me.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Faber and Faber, 1972

  This edition first published by Penguin Group (NZ), 2004

  Copyright © Maurice Gee, 1972

  The right of Maurice Gee to be identified as the author of this work in terms of section 96 of the Copyright Act 1994 is hereby asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  www.pe
nguin.co.nz

  ISBN: 978-1-74-228789-8