Between My Father and the King

by Janet Frame

  He was yesterday; it was a lesson he had learned. He was repeating it.

  Edgar’s friends watched him in embarrassed dismay. He was a bow-tied courier who had learned the language although he no longer lived in the country. He was conducting them, as tourists, through the territory of his past without apparently realising that it had changed, that all things visible or invisible are only shadows attending shapes of Change under the Sun of Time; they shrivel like shadows of two pawpaws at noon.

  But of course Edgar knew this: Edgar was wise. He continued his lecture, pinning the cone shapes to the wall beneath the Christmas card from Spain which said PAX, PAX.

  Some days later when the silkworms had finished spinning and were settled in their cocoons with doors and windows shut, and had changed to pupae, Edgar unwound the silk from each one onto strips of cardboard, and each time as he reached the boudoir at the end of the maze he was confronted by the naked black-eyed unseemly monster who trembled and shrank from his touch. The sensitivity alarmed him. What was its purpose? A fly might brush his own cheek, rain fall upon his skin, he could walk in rooms, bumping into furniture, enduring the hazards and encounters of the living and the dead, yet not flinch or shrink. By what right was the chrysalis so privileged in sensitivity? Why did it recoil from him?

  Nevertheless, in spite of his envy, very gently he wrapped the cruelly exposed pupae in cotton wool, placed them once again in the chocolate box from which he had cleaned the waste, and left them in peace (was it peace?) until they should emerge as moths. He was relieved not to have to look upon the ugly sensitive creatures while they accomplished their metamorphosis.

  Then one morning when he decided to unwrap one of them from its cottonwool he found that the welted boot polish-brown tough skin had hardened and shrivelled and a moth lay on the soft white bed, its beautifully patterned wings (circles of dark suns) limp, fresh and moist. In all, nine moths had emerged; two of the pupae had kept their original shape, tapering at both ends like coffins, one of which enclosed a dead half-moth; the other, nothing. Tenderly Edgar picked up the nine moths and put them in another box where soon the males crawled towards the females and all were paired except the odd one which stayed in a corner, feebly trying out the wings which it would never use for flight. Hours passed, and still the moths clung together; then as night came each male moth fell from its mate, and died, its wings now sheenless and crumpled. With the slight strength remaining to them the female moths crawled upon the small sheets of cardboard which Edgar provided for each one, and soon the eggs in neat rows, like tiny white running stitches, were laid upon the cardboard, and then one by one the female moths also died, with the glitter dust rubbed from their wings. Had they known that wings are for flying?

  Edgar had stayed by them in their travail of lust and their death. They had no towers in their heads, he was aware of that, nor lighthouses to guide the homing thoughts, nor wrecked thoughts dismantled by the imperative tides coming and going to trade salt and tears in all four corners of breathing feeling and knowing.

  The sordid spectacle depressed him at last. Why had the chrysalis been so responsive and the wings so beautifully patterned? Why had there been wings at all?

  But it was the cycle, it was the completeness.

  Nothing has changed, Edgar said. What new event is written into their history? None. Where is their future? Nowhere. Are they against or for progress?

  It was dark when Edgar took the box outside down to the rubbish heap and sprinkled the dead moths upon the ashes of the diseased pawpaw. Then, carrying the sheets of cardboard with their tiny fertile full stops (ends of chapters, heads beneath the exclamatory swords, tiny marks standing waist high above the embryo semicolon) he went into the garden, dug a hole and buried the eggs.

  When the hot weather comes, he said to himself, I will dig them up and hatch out the new silkworms in the sun . . . get more mulberry leaves . . . another chocolate box . . .

  He went inside the house, and unwinding each thread of silk he began to plait all the threads. Massed, their gold acquired a languor and sheen. He hung the plaited silk rope upon the wall beneath the Spanish Christmas card which said PAX, PAX.

  That’s all, he said. I have stood in the doorway, like God.

  I kept silkworms when I was a child. Nothing has changed. The bushfire still burns and the people cry for the share of it which they see in my face, Where did you get that terrible look on your face? What have you seen?

  Tell us quickly.

  There is no new magic.

  Where’s the goldmine? What are we doing with ourselves, birth copulation and death and no use to make of our wings?

  When Edgar had buried the eggs he went to his bedroom, put on his grey shirt, and got into bed. He slept deeply, without dreams that cared to acknowledge themselves to his waking curiosity. And next morning he woke, sunbathed at the east wall, read the Critique of Pure Reason, propping it against the sugar bowl, and then sat at his table with the leaf-green sheets of paper before him, and his HB pencil, sharpened, in his hand.

  I should be satisfied now, he said, and looked at the mass of plaited silk, burnished by the sun.

  Then the fire raced through the forest and chains swung from the sky. He leaned his head in his hands.

  If only, he thought, I were God looking from my door upon completeness.

  An Electric Blanket

  Since his retirement Peter Limmerton worked four hours a day at the Botanical Gardens, mowing the lawns and clearing up the lolly papers and ice-cream cartons not put in the neat green boxes marked These gardens are your property Deposit rubbish here. He raked leaves too and sometimes fetched hot water for the ladies of the croquet club next door. In short, instead of rightful pottering as an elderly man in the confined spaces of his home, he had expanded and made remunerative his area of potter into the Town Gardens. Ten shillings a day, three days a week, enough for a little more food for his ailing wife Meva, or a bag of gold nuggets and licorice allsorts from Woolworths on Friday night for his own pocket — the little extras that everybody said mattered more than the big things in life.

  He was happy at the Gardens. He would whistle above the chutter-chutter whirr of the motor mower which he threaded between beds of dahlias and pansies and rows of shorn more formal shrubs clipped, he thought, to startle with their smooth sinister green, or to amuse in the shape of rabbits crouched eyeless and green in the soil. And Peter would smile and think, Good Lord, as if there weren’t enough rabbits around without planting them in gardens and on front lawns, why, some people even put them on windowsills — they had one themselves, with a chipped never-to-be-eaten carrot stuck to its quiverless little china nose. Rabbits, Peter would think contemptuously, and steering his mower around the beds he would burst into a protracted reedy whistle of ‘East Side, West Side, all around the town’.

  But all that was before he learned that his wife would soon die. She had been ill though not confined to bed, and Peter had been helping with the housework. At night he would chop the kindling wood and leave it to dry inside the coal oven; then he would rise in the morning, make the fire and prepare breakfast for himself and Meva, who would usually get up after breakfast.

  On Sundays she insisted on making the meal herself, though ‘taking things easy’, she would explain, smilingly and terribly aware. Peter too felt the terrible awareness, which he regarded as a kind of inner hearsay that rippled along the grapevine of his own deep and long love; until the doctor revealed his secret knowledge as truth.

  ‘When, doctor?’ he asked.

  ‘Anytime,’ said the doctor.

  So that the days ahead now became like part of a dark fruit, with wind and flesh being torn apart each day in helpless foreboding search for the bitter seed of moment. Anytime.

  Perhaps it is Sunday morning. Meva has skillied the bacon and eggs in the pan, she is about to pour a cup of tea, no milk, weak and with sugar for Peter, strong, milk and sugar for herself. She lifts the crocheted net cover from the mil
k jug, brushes away an offending opportunist of a housefly, fiddles a while with the glazed blue bead sewn to one corner of the jug cover.

  ‘Is that the time?’ Peter asks.

  Or mid-morning. She insists on poking the fire; she likes the flames. Her face is hot and flushed; the veins on her hands have risen like narrow blue streams laid under her skin; her hair falls over her face as she leans to the fire. Is that the time?

  Anytime.

  ‘The flowers are lovely, Peter,’ she says. ‘It’s such a good idea for you to have this job, it keeps us both young. How do you feel sitting there on top of the mower circling flowers all afternoon, pansies and dahlias sticking in the corner of your eye? You must feel good.’

  ‘Yes, I feel mighty good, Meva. How do you feel?’

  ‘I feel good too, Peter; breathless sometimes but good.’

  ‘Breathless . . . you’d think there’s enough air in the world, counting quite close to the earth and then the sky and then further up, that everyone could have a fair share.’

  ‘It’s not that, Peter, you know what the doctor said.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘I have to take it easy. What did he say to you?’

  ‘Oh, the same.’

  Anytime.

  Perhaps it will be in the night, in sleep; or in broad daylight, here at the window that I cleaned with bits of old newspaper. In the bathroom, without her teeth in, them sitting alien in the mug of water. Or just there where the sun is shining by the fence and that smoke-blue cloud of catmint.

  After the first shock of knowing and the torture of wondering, Peter began to think of death itself, Meva dead. He thought, She makes nice ginger gems, spongy, they are good with butter. What will happen to everything, will she keep her wedding ring on, did my mother when she died? Ah, I’ll be able to smoke in bed.

  But Meva gone. In death you grow cold and are placed cold in the grave. Peter became obsessed with the sensation of cold. He longed for it never to exist, for all the world to be forever warm and sunlit, day and night, the sun having right of sky. His mind said, Cold. Cold, what do they say? as snow as a frog as ice as charity as stone. Little incidents gained significance in his mind. He pulled out his watch one day to see the time, it was a valuable watch that the men at work had given him, with his name engraved on the inside of the case in frilly gold writing. He looked at the glistening face, fifteen minutes to three, then felt the long loop of chain and each hard moulded link seemed like ice on his fingers. He shivered, thrust his watch back into his pocket and sat alone, while the head gardener and his assistant walked over to the summerhouse for afternoon tea. The summerhouse too looked cold, for the sun had sneaked across the sky and where the other two men now sat lay the vast desolate shadow of a Canadian pine with shrouds of needles drooping from its ghostlike form.

  Cold as ice as snow as stone.

  He remembered the little warped house in Lester Street where he had lived as a child, his father’s toolshed and himself sitting watching the bandy-legged spiders glide tiptoe along the rafters, and listening in the heat of noon to the sudden crack as the walls spoke, it was stifling hot he remembered and the masonflies droned and pestered, yet not far away, around the other side of the house, was a spot disdained always by sun where moss grew springy and soaked with ice-like particles of water, and where a flat shape of stone spread itself thinly bearded with the same chill of damp and slime. And he remembered from somewhere a tree whose branches reached to the ground and if one lifted the dark of its covering and crept underneath one smelt the absence of sun in the squashed rank leaves and moss being absorbed into the cold lap of soil.

  Cold as stone as ice.

  As marble. Here, where they lived, in the spare bedroom, an old washstand stood fitted with small squares of milky green and blue marble that felt immobile and dead like slabs lying at the sea bottom, ebbed and flowed on by a mooncold wave. Sometimes in his obsession Peter would sneak into the room, cross to the washstand and torture himself with the touch of the marble. He would close his eyes and feel. Once, Meva came in for the ironing-board blanket and found Peter standing quite still beside the washstand, with his eyes closed.

  ‘Are you sick, Peter?’ she asked.

  He opened his eyes and stared at her. ‘Perhaps the mowing’s too much,’ he said. ‘They don’t expect me tomorrow. I’ll stay around home with you instead.’

  He felt her hand.

  ‘Your hand’s cold,’ he said accusingly.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘my hands are cold. I feel cold all over. It must be winter coming on.’

  He bowed his head and followed her through to the kitchen where she had set the iron ready for the hankies. She liked ironing hankies. They were small and what she called copable, also various and clean. He watched her iron and fold the hankies diamond-wise or square like white and coloured linen sandwiches. There was a shirt, too, which she sprinkled with water and folded determinedly and tightly. He wanted to say Take it easy, and he thought, What will I do with her hankies, the fancy lace and frippery ones. He was sitting on the sofa, his feet in their goblin-like boot slippers stretched out before him, his fingers twirling a tissue with tobacco oozing from each end. He put the smoke in his mouth and struck a match. His mouth moved loosely with the relaxed aimlessness of an old old man.

  The next morning instead of going to work at the Gardens he put on his best suit and walked the mile into town. It had been cold in the night, he had woken and noticed the moon like a frozen yellow eye staring through the window at himself and Meva who had been asleep snoring gently and snuffling, funny, the same noise a hedgehog makes in the dark. She was propped on pillows so that her chin jutted out revealing her jawbone almost scooped of its flesh and the bony nest, hollowed, where flesh had been, of her yellowing throat. He had drawn the curtains to hide the moon, there was no blind, and Meva had wakened suddenly and muttered peevishly, ‘What’s wrong, isn’t it cold, my feet are frozen.’

  So the next morning he went to town to the electrical store and asked to see their ‘electric blankets please’.

  The salesman gushed, ‘Double, single, thermostat, one heat, two heat, three heat, we have three brands.’

  ‘Tell me about them,’ said Peter.

  And the salesman told him and Peter left the shop, carrying under his arm a large deep cardboard box containing an electric blanket. He held it tightly as if within it lay the power to generate and preserve all the warmth in the world, to imitate sun and fire and hot day, all warmth, to dispel ice floes and mounds of snow buried deep in mind and body and land, to kill the shock of stone in the shade, or marble tombed beneath the sea, of frost black and bitter on the pansies and the dahlias furred once crimson in the sun, to alienate forever the gold globular icicle of moon.

  Meva was happy to have the blanket. With Peter, its care became a ritual. It’s guaranteed, he would say to himself, stroking the soft square of magic. Always, before, Meva had made the bed because she liked a little hollow, a den on her side, and he liked his side straight and hard, and only Meva seemed ever to know the correct juggle to produce the plain and valley. But now, with the blanket, Peter would say, leave the bed, I’ll fix it, and every night at six or seven o’clock after assiduously cleaning and straightening the mattress he would spread the blanket under the sheet, connect it to the plug, switch it on, and feel for himself the conjured warmth sliding through the thick pad of cotton. And by the time Meva came to bed the blanket had even warmed the room and lay as a challenge to lurking frost or moon.

  Or death.

  Meva is safe, Peter thought. Or am I mad? What have I made myself believe in? I have made her warm. It is not true what they say about death cold as the grave. Meva is warm, I too am warm.

  It was halfway through winter that Meva died on a night that was moonless and blackened by the worst frost, the invisible dark that grips the beanflower and the skin-pale baby cherries. Peter woke and knew that Meva had grown colder than stone or marble. The blanket ha
s failed, he thought, and wrenched the cord from its socket. I will trust no more guarantees. And he leapt from the bed, felt beneath the sheet and gently rolled his dead wife away from the electric blanket, withdrawing the blanket itself from the bed. Carefully now and without panic he folded it to fit back in the deep cardboard box living under the bed. He had pulled it too hard at one corner and the cotton padding stretched in a soft slab of snow. Then he sat down in the wicker chair by the bed and wept for morning to come quickly and the sun to shine on the kitchen window and the paling fence and the smoke-blue cloud of catmint.

  A Bone in the Throat

  Joe left the bowl of dark blue and bog loneliness — the swampy flaxy tussocky town skewered with telegraph poles and smeared with burned gorse. He climbed from the rut, dusted himself of habit and a few dead years, and took the Limited up north to Auckland.

  ‘The jumping-off place to Sydney,’ he said to himself. ‘Who knows?’

  He was full of hope.

  First, he thought, a place to live for a while, maybe a job, not school teaching, then, Get Out. The country’s a fish and a bone, they say. Who can walk on the back of a fish or tapdance upon bone for the secret of living?

  Yes, well, a place to live, then.

  The front windows of the hotel looked wide into the eyes of the sea. The back windows of frosted glass decently obscured a yard containing — if anyone cared to find out — a pile of wood; a turquoise car; two or three hatted and crammed rubbish tins; a brick building used by the men customers between five and six o’clock. The windows on one side faced a shopping area — a street where a telephone box stood like a stray burning dovecote; an upstairs dancehall; a downstairs milkbar; a decayed wooden wall painted with a faded, once vivid-green plea, BRING us YOUR HOUSEHOLD LINEN. The fourth side of the hotel overlooked another yard, a playground leased from the rats, where after school and at weekends gleeful children cried and quarrelled.