Between My Father and the King

by Janet Frame

  But with a car, he thought one day, and a crayfish net and helluva lonely.

  He too had fought in the First World War where his fellows had lost eyes and limbs and he had for a time lost pity and faith, but again, that was a long time ago, more of a dream now the trenches and the fat white lice sitting like spies in the seams of his underclothing and also in the torn and sewn places of his mind; and the Frenchwomen, a violet lace handkerchief and Mademoiselle from Armentières — Parlez-vous?

  His friendship with Alf had been born suddenly from their first meeting when Ewart had been in the saddler’s buying a crayfish net — the only shop in town where they were sold — and found Alf Reder sitting in a wheelchair bargaining with the saddler for the sale of such nets, each one exquisitely made.

  ‘Are they nylon?’ Ewart asked. He had heard of them coming in with nylon.

  ‘No, waxed thread. But I have made nylon ones.’ Alf spoke slowly, with some hesitation at the beginning of each phrase.

  Ewart thought and looked, headlong, Poor blighter. The man dropped one of his nets and Ewart stooped instantly to retrieve it. ‘Here, let me.’

  The man in the chair regarded him coolly. ‘I have hands,’ he said. Then he smiled at the stranger standing there looking ashamed of himself, and Ewart smiled back, eager and sympathetic.

  Alf extended his hand; it seemed he would have liked to have offered both to prove again that he possessed hands, five digits on each, a palm with a lifeline and a heartline, a line of fortune and fate.

  ‘My name’s Alf Reder,’ he said.

  ‘And mine’s Ewart Cuttle.’ (Widower with a car and a crayfish net and helluva lonely.)

  And the two were friends.

  ‘Cigarette?’

  ‘I can’t bear tailormades. I like to make them myself.’

  I like to make them myself. And the way he fingered the tissue and tobacco told why. He was using his hands. He was proud of them. That evening Alf invited Ewart home to tea. Ewart drove them in the car.

  ‘I’m frightened to buy a new one,’ he explained. ‘I can’t understand all the gadgets on new ones.’

  They spent a happy evening, like two schoolboys, or even lovers, middle-aged, discovering each other. They liked gardening, Alf grew dwarf trees in pots, he had a weeping willow, a dwarf one, from China.

  ‘My beans are better this year,’ said Ewart, expanding. ‘I got the blackfly in time.’

  ‘You fish?’

  ‘I know every spot in the river.’

  Suggested Alf, ‘I could supply the ingredients, nets and spoons polished to sparkle in any salmon’s eye, even pick around for worms, while you catch the fish that never get away.’

  One evening Daphne Reder drew Ewart aside in the kitchen. ‘Ewart,’ she said, ‘you’ve made such a difference to Alf. He’s happier somehow. You ought to see him cutting the spoons and shining them up, like — like fire.’ She smiled sadly, ‘I never made him happy like that. It was always his legs, his legs. Come, you must have a hot scone.’

  So they sat in the kitchen, Ewart who had gone to get the book of flies he had bought, and some he had made, Alf and Daphne, eating scones. And after that,

  ‘Why, how about the crayfish,’ Alf suggested.

  Ewart had caught them a bag of crayfish. He tipped them from the bag onto the table.

  Daphne looked startled, ‘Why, they’re the wrong colour,’ she said, ‘they’re brown. The ones you buy are red.’

  Ewart laughed. ‘That’s because they’re cooked. These are alive. Where’s the pot?’

  Mrs Reder found a big iron pot which she filled with cold water ready to plunge the crayfish in.

  ‘Oh no,’ Ewart said, ‘hot water, not cold, it’s cruelty to animals, if it’s cold water they feel themselves cooking all the way. It has to be boiling.’

  Mrs Reder looked from Ewart to her husband. ‘Ewart,’ she said, ‘you have the heart of a child.’

  She prepared to tip out the cold water and replace it with boiling when suddenly Alf called out, bitterly, ‘Leave it, Daff. They’re not like us, them with all their legs, they can’t feel.’

  Mrs Reder drew from her store of resigned smiles. With a loyal, ‘Of course I’ll leave it, Alf,’ she lifted into the cold water the struggling crayfish that for an hour felt themselves cooking and then were eaten and enjoyed, Alf insisting on picking off their legs and counting them. Then Daphne went away to bed. ‘You men,’ she said tiredly, ‘always burning the candle.’

  After she had gone and Ewart was folding up his bag ready to leave, Alf spoke quietly, ‘I’m sorry about the crayfish, all them legs waving in the air and none to spare for me, it’s a long time ago but I still feel it because Daphne, well, Daphne has never loved me, Ewart. She’s loyal, she’d keep any promise and make others keep any, but there’s never been any love, and me with my legs or without my legs, it’s been hell. Oh forget it, I’m not feeling so good tonight, need a dose of Kruschens or little liver pills or something.’ He stroked back his hair. ‘Remember, I want my hair cut.’

  That was a few days after the pact was made and the hood had been sewn. As Ewart bid his friend goodnight he remarked jokingly, ‘Don’t forget, I’ll be around on Friday, morning noon or night, with a home perm, some butterfly curlers and a pretty little scarf for you to tie around your hair.’

  But on Friday morning of that same week Alf Reder was dead. He had died early in the morning. As Ewart drove up to the house he noticed the blinds had been drawn in both front rooms. Sleepyheads, he thought. He tooted his horn three times, as usual, but no one came out. Alf ought to have been sitting in the sun by now, like a globular spider making his nets. Feeling in his pocket for his scissors and the packet of hairpins he had bought for fun from a shop, Ewart knocked on the door.

  He heard footsteps in the passage and Daphne opened the door and peered out. She had been crying.

  ‘He’s dead,’ she whispered, ‘the doctor said a clot of blood or something.’ She made as if to shut the door then, remembering, said automatically, ‘Come in, I suppose you’ve come to cut his hair.’ She smiled.

  ‘A pact is a pact,’ she said suddenly with the same stolid meaninglessness that a desperate statesman mutters, War is war. ‘Will you cut his hair now, please?’

  Ewart fingered the hairclips and scissors in his pocket. He experienced a feeling of revulsion. ‘I’m not really good at cutting hair at all,’ he said, in the same dead tone that one uses to a salesman, Nothing today thank you.

  She persisted, ‘Will you cut his hair?’ It was all she could say, ‘Will you cut his hair?’

  So he entered the darkened room where the body lay and she turned on the little plastic bedlight and he leant over his friend and snuffle snuffle whisper with the scissors he snipped off some of the thick silver hair. Some strands fell on the mat beneath him, and clung there. He stood helplessly holding the rest of the clippings in his hand. They felt not soft anymore but like wire, small silver needles.

  Daphne appeared in the doorway. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Now I will burn them. Come into the kitchen.’

  He followed her into the kitchen and sat down in the corner chair, the one with the waterlily worked on the cushion, while Daphne opened the grate and thrust the hair inside. There was a smell through the room, of burning. She opened the window. ‘Don’t you feel happier now,’ she said, ‘that you have kept your pact. I had a pact to keep. I married a man whom I did not know, who went away to a war and came back a stranger with no legs. I had a pact with him and kept it. Will you have a scone?’

  The scones were freshly baked and covered with a clean cloth. Ewart sat eating hot scones, he ate three of them, one was burnt, the other two golden and just right, and there was a blind cord by the window which kept flapping and flapping, a cord like a shawl tassel.

  The Atomiser

  Like Solomon Grundy in the nursery rhyme, Old Charlie Beecham died on Saturday and was to be buried on Sunday, though his birth, christening, marriage and the onse
t of his illness happened too long ago to be remembered here by days of the week. He had died in the early morning, his wife had phoned the doctor, the doctor had phoned the undertaker, and with the smooth precision of messenger to messenger attentive in the disposal of the dead, before the morning blackbirds began to sing in the three apple trees in the back garden Charlie had been taken for the funeral to his widowed daughter’s home one hundred and fifty miles south.

  Alone in the house his wife Sadie was preparing to make the same journey by the twelve o’clock Limited. She had declined a neighbour’s offer of help, for she who had used the homes and lives of others as legal tender in the currency of gossip trade was aware that rival gossips would find her home stocked with bargains; and more than she could understand or explain she felt that no one else should see, try, buy or exchange, test or price the death that penetrated every corner of the house, even outside up the narrow concrete path by the clothesline to the washhouse and the dumpy with its weathered heaps of newspapers where old scandals of indiscretions of violence and lust lay week burdened upon week, their details flickering nightly as black-headlined food tempting in the cheese-coloured candlelight.

  Sympathetic neighbours, Sadie felt, would rob her. They’ll see everything I’ve got, she thought. Mrs Next Door has eyes like a hawk.

  She knew they would take more than the colour and material of her curtains, the age of her three-piece suite, the proud shine of her green and cream enamelled range; the details of knickknacks on the mantelpiece — the old general whose pot belly changed from pink to burgundy when fair weather became foul; the small wooden house with the two front doors from one of which at the approach of a storm a tiny woman with rolling pin raised swung slowly outside to match her brand of domestic thunder with that of the gods in the sky; the pine cone, varnished, with buttons for eyes, to resemble an owl; the miniature ship’s wheel and motor tyre that were ashtrays.

  If neighbours intruded, Sadie felt, Charlie’s death, the house, the furniture, would be handed round at the Bridge or Institute teas as casually as if they were butterfly cakes, or fudge cake that does not need cooking before it is eaten. As an inveterate bargain-hunter, ready reckoner of months at christenings, of guests and presents at weddings, of wreaths and lines in the obituary column at deaths, of signs of good heart and grief in the people (and the furniture) of a bereaved home, Sadie, with a lifetime’s experience, knew.

  Her centre of concern, though she could scarcely understand why, was the atomiser. It lay on the kitchen table. It had been in Charlie’s hand when he died. Sadie wondered if she should take it with her — then might she not just as well take the bottles of pills, the raspberry-coloured medicine sticky in its square-shouldered bottle? And what use would these be? Charlie had had such relief from the atomiser, and even now the death that filled the house could not quite overpower this last defence. Yet the atomiser was nothing but a half-collapsed little bulb on the end of a rubber cord that had sucked a breath-giving drug from a small bottle. It had been a novelty present among the weather-vanes, kitchen knickknacks, quilted handkerchief sachets, calendars, exchanged between Charlie and Sadie and their old friends Rolly and Joan. At first Charlie had scoffed at it, made jokes about its name, frightening the grandchildren by referring to it as a deadly weapon.

  ‘One puff of this and you’re out like a light. The whole world’s out. It’s an atomiser, see?’

  ‘But Mummy’s got a squeezy one with powder in it and a nice smell.’

  ‘Powder? What’s powder? Nothing but dust swept up. This is an atomiser, see?’

  The children had not been at home with their grandfather, for often just as they were enjoying Old Maid, Strip Jack Naked, Sevens, he would frown, advising them seriously,

  ‘Cheat fair. Always cheat fair. Do others before they do you. The quickness of the hand blackens the eye.’

  Their grandmother’s suggestion that they take their grandfather’s words ‘with a grain of salt’ had increased their puzzlement. Atomiser, talcum powder, dust, grains of salt, the grains of time, too, in the calendar gold-printed beneath the hollyhocks of a country garden: One by one the grains of time fall and are lost. What was the connection between these and their Australian grandfather who told tales of his father, Ned Kelly, his grandfather Old Nick, and himself, born up a gum tree among the koala bears? The children were fascinated by the wart, the size of a gum nut, on the side of his nose; and his long legs that stretched when he stood up and half-folded when he sat down, like the twilight shadows of the blades of pocket knives.

  Charlie and Sadie had been married almost fifty years, with more words of sarcasm than of love exchanged between them; and though others not in on the secret might have said, and did say, ‘What a life, bicker bicker!’, both knew that what each said to the other was of little consequence: their lives belonged one to the other as footsteps belong to the same feet, whatever shoes are worn.

  On a more practical level, it was a different sound but the same feet walking when Sadie tap-tapped in high heels (costume, white gloves, petalled hat) to the morning teas or mudged and murgled in galoshes to pick up the apples. It used to be Charlie who picked up the apples, filled the coal buckets, dug and planted the garden. Then, his asthma growing worse, all he could manage was a row of potatoes and cabbages, a morning bucket of coal, a small basket of windfalls. Finally, he spent his days sitting at the front door overlooking the town and the people coming and going in the street at the foot of the valley and the late-afternoon sea mists floating in to strangle and obscure the southern headland.

  In the weeks before his death he had tried to sit motionless; he put as much effort into his breathing as the Olympic athletes put into their four-minute mile. And night after night while Sadie slept an old woman’s deep sleep (a lemon crocheted cap over her pinned curls), Charlie knew only the humiliation of defeat when he was forced to get up, to sit at the kitchen table, his breath rasping, choking, one hand trying to hold the cup of tea made from the water in the kettle always on the boil, the other pumping away at the atomiser.

  Sadie looked with horror at the atomiser. Oh, it was wicked, she thought, to be dependent in your old age upon stuff sprayed like deodorant or weedkiller into your lungs! It had been no use listening to the argument — intended to comfort — that other people had been worse off, had even less to rely on; for it wasn’t a question of other people, it had been Charlie, squeezing away at the little bladder with the warlike name. Atoms. Everyone knew how deadly atoms were! It was not right that something as hideous as an atomiser should take control of one’s last breath!

  ‘My friend,’ Charlie had often said, pointing to it. ‘The only friend I’ve got.’

  Then he would smile slyly at Sadie, who looked indignant, then pert, proud of her sharp nature — she belonged in a Doyley Age when sharpness and toughness were inventive, with lacy patterns and peepholes mixed with the considered unselfishness of giving to others the things that, cricking the joints of her fingers, poring over intricate spider-printed patterns, she had toiled hours to make. She could deal, too, as deftly and inventively with the patterns of Charlie’s taunts. The only friend he had, indeed!

  She touched the atomiser. She felt that she should get rid of it. She did not want to be reminded. She wanted to start afresh — that was the phrase her daughter and son and neighbours would use. Yet when you were old and stale and most of your friends were ill or dead and you’d begun to think of your own death and to pray that when it came you wouldn’t be squeezing the wicked little bulb of an atomiser to help you draw your last breath, you did not find it so simple to turn towards anything new or fresh; there was a stale crust of your life that sheltered you and could not be torn away or softened.

  Picking up the atomiser as if it were a repulsive creature that yet must be respected, Sadie carried it to the medicine cupboard. It belongs here, she thought, as she stowed it behind the long-unused brick-coloured enema and the bottle of camphorated oil. A flush of guilt came over her,
as if the atomiser or Charlie were reproaching her, as if the thing should have been put elsewhere; but where? Then she smiled sadly at her anxiety. Charlie’s reproaches had always been two a penny, cheaper than none except her own when the two edges of her tongue were sharpened on her temper and her pride. The atomiser was useless now and its bulb was filled as much with anxious unhappy memories as with a drug to ease breathing; a squirt of the spray might stop the breath rather than ease it. It belonged, surely, in the medicine cupboard out of sight.

  She banged the door shut, turning her eyes from the door-mirror and the face that looked from it as if it too had been shut inside the cupboard and could not get out. Her face. Dry eyes reflecting not ordinary dryness but a drought of tears. Eyebags, shrunken mouth, yellowing skin; frizzed dyed hair that for over fifty years had been set, patted, coaxed, laboured over as if each strand had been cotton or wool in Sadie’s quickly tatting, knitting fingers.

  She turned her face away, separating herself — as people do — from her dismaying image in a mirror, and went to finish packing. Then she toured the house to make sure everything was switched off, shut, locked. How tired she felt! She had been expecting Charlie’s death, yet when it came it had surprised, like weather. Like a whirlwind in and out of the house in a few seconds.

  She secured the back window and ran her finger along the sill as Charlie, teasingly, had often done. Her finger was covered with an unpleasant grey dust. From the quarry, she thought, trying not to heed the sense of strangeness as she remembered that the day was Saturday, and calm. It must be from the quarry, she told herself. Some days when there was blasting the lime dust came blowing over the hill and inside the house, settling on everything. But the lime dust was white: this was dirty grey.